The English and Foreign Languages University www.efluniversity.ac.in PhD in Cultural Studies : Model Question Paper

[hemalathaijt]

The English and Foreign Languages University
Admissions 2009-2010
Ph.D in Cultural Studies
(Model Question Paper)

Time: 3 hours Max. Marks: 100

http://www.efluniversity.ac.in/
http://www.efluniversity.ac.in/model...aper_model.doc

Instructions

1. Write your Admit pass no. in the boxes provided in the answer book. Do not write your name anywhere in the answer book.
2. There are three sections in this paper (A, B and C).
3. Write all answers in the answer book provided.

SECTION A

I. Write an essay in about 1000 words on any ONE of the following topics. (1x 30= 30 marks)

1. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham
2. The cultural turn
3. Orientalism
4. Queer theory

Section B

II. Read the passage below and answer ALL the questions that follow in not more than 150 words each. (5x6=30)

What were the distinctive and original traits of the Indian model, of the ‘idea of India’ which defined the shape of independent India? The foundational bedrock on which this idea rested was recognition of the primacy of politics: of the centrality of human agency in the face of the potential constraints of economics or culture. This recognition was given form in two striking ways. First, it was the decision taken by the nationalist elites who came into possession of the independent Indian state in 1947 to commit that state to the pursuit of multiple goals. Thus, from its inception the independent Indian state refused the often-posed dilemma between economic development and political democracy — and refused too the argument that one had to sequence these two goals, that economic development had to be achieved first, with the hope that democracy might follow later. Rather, the Indian leadership chose to pursue several goals simultaneously: democracy, economic development and a measure of social justice. It recognised that such a choice might impede the rapid fulfilment of any one of these goals, but affirmed that it was more important to recognise the plurality of values, and to commit the state to this plural vision.

The second way that the primacy of politics was manifested was in the content and shape of Indian nationalism, in the definition of Indian selfhood — which was affirmed in opposition to two types of sceptical objections about India’s diversity and its implications for the possibility of an Indian nation state. British imperialists and European commentators more generally, had commonly dismissed the possibility of any internal principle of unity. Given India’s diversity, they argued, it could only be held together as a single unit through the harsh favour of external rule: through colonial domination or some analogue to that. Some Indians, on the other hand, came to the view that this diversity had to be smoothened out and purged: if nationhood were to be a possibility for the subjects of British India, they claimed, Indians would have to acknowledge some singular defining feature of their identity. Thus, a single religion, or language, or ethnicity would have to provide the substance of any future viable nation state. In this view, becoming a nation state meant replicating or imitating what was understood to have been the homogenising strategies that drove the making of European nation states. Such a view was advocated by those who demanded the state of Pakistan, a state defined by religious belonging. It had counterparts too among Hindu nationalists, who wished to define the rump India — left after the Partition of British India in 1947 into Pakistan and India — as a ‘Hindu state’.

It is crucial to recall both that this view of a nation state based on a singular identity did not prevail in India after 1947, and to understand the reasoning behind the definition of Indian nationalism that was actually chosen: one that affirmed a conception of a plural India. This choice was not merely a practical acknowledgement of the depth of India’s religious and other diversities. It was also a principled intellectual argument against the replication of the model of the Western nation state, and a self-conscious affirmation of a distinctively Indian model. This argument was enunciated powerfully by the great intellectual figures of Indian nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Each held the view that India had to open itself to modernity, and to the critical scrutiny prompted by the principles and ideas of modernity. But the creation of a specific Indian modernity required the tempering and revision of European modernity, through its encounter with the powerfully formed world of traditional social understandings that already existed in India. Many aspects of Western modernity needed to be subjected to critique, and were rejected or reformulated.

Tagore’s literary explorations and Gandhi’s invention of an individual moral life were particular instances of this creation of a distinctive Indian modernity: they can be seen as metaphors for the definition of a larger idea of Indianness. Nehru’s innovation was to take these particular examples or metaphors, to seize the intentions behind them and endow them with tangible and institutional form and life — to transform them into a political architecture that could shape India’s collective, public life. He argued and acted against the imposition of a homogenising Western model that sought to make uniform the identity of the nation state. Political pluralism was enshrined in the institutions of democratic politics; the presence of cultural pluralism was upheld in the federal structure of the Indian state, which created regional states with considerable legislative powers; and religious pluralism was guaranteed by the invention of Indian secularism, which recognised the right of different religious communities to regulate their civil life by their own customary codes and did not try to impose a common code of citizenship that regulated all domains. Finally, the attempt was made to expand the domain of economic and social pluralism by means of planned economic development and policies of caste ‘reservation’, affirmative action or positive discrimination in favour of the lowest in the caste order.

The idea of India that was given a practical institutional shape in the years after 1947 thus rested on recognition that diversity, far from being a weakening or inconveniencing feature for the state, was in fact a source of strength. Thus, for instance, a diverse economy which included both public and private sectors, was more likely to be self-reliant, and even regional and technological differences could have some advantages. Likewise, cultural diversity was a source of innovation and creativity; and a national identity that was layered and multiple — one which acknowledged regional belonging to be as significant as national belonging, which saw Indianness as an identity alongside being Tamil, or Bengali, or Punjabi — was actually more robust than an exclusive, thin Indianness. In Nehru’s hands, what emerged was a complex imagination and configuration of what a nation state could and should be — it was an act of self-conscious political creativity, rather than merely the acceptance of historical fate, in the form of the constraints set by culture or economic backwardness.

[Extract from Sunil Khilnani’s essay]

1.What does Khilnani mean when he says that the Indian state is committed to “plural vision?”

2.According to Khilnani, the view that a nation state should be based on a singular identity is a Eurocentric view. Can you explain why Khilnani calls it Eurocentric?

3.How did Gandhi and Tagore redefine the idea of “Indianness”?

4.What, according to Khilnani, is the contribution of Nehru in the creation of Indian nation state?

5.Critically comment on the concept of “a distinctive Indian modernity.”