Ravi Sriramachandran
Graduate Student
Department of Anthropology
Columbia University
E/ rs699@columbia.edu
States of Transgression:
Strategies of Domination, Accommodation, and Resistance Across Asia
Saturday, June 2nd
| 9:30 - 11:30 AM
The question of identity has assumed a degree of
significance in liberal democratic polities as never before. In India,
in particular, the increasing prominence of this question in the
political landscape is matched only by the recentness of the
postcolonial nation state itself. My research concerns the multiple
encounters of the ‘Indian’ plantation labor repatriated from Sri Lanka
to India (and ‘settled’ in the plantation areas of South India), with
Tamilnadu and Tamils as returning ‘sons of the soil’, and with the
Indian State as political subjects. In this paper I confine myself to
attempt to write an ethnography of the state as ‘embedded in practices,
places, and languages considered to be at the margins of the
nation-state.’ (Das and Poole 2004), and how these practices in the
margins force us to rethink the boundaries between center and periphery,
legal and illegal and public and private. Margins, here does not refer
to peripheral spaces, but affects of panic and a sense of ‘not
belonging’ that is produced through certain power/knowledge practices. I
contend that these marginalized populations do not submit passively to
these conditions but through a certain exercise of Metis or cunning (Detienne
and Vernant 1988) deal with the state and their own imperatives. Through
a number of instances I intend to explore how the repatriate through his
practices of everyday resistance extends and remakes the conceptual
boundaries of the state to secure survival and seeking justice in the
everyday. The larger focus of my paper is to see how the state is
experienced, reconfigured, and function through exceptions and margins
of the nation-state.
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Mr. Sriramachandran's doctoral thesis is on repatriated
'Plantation workers' from Sri Lanka, titled ' Life is where we are not:
making and managing the Tamil Plantation Repatriate.' His research
interests are Making of the Tamil self, Tamil (Indian) intellectual
history, Cinema and Performance and Tamil literature. His publications
include "Suvadugal - A Review" Subamangala (1994); "A Telugu
folk epic in Western Tamilnadu" PILC Journal of Dravidian
Studies; and Pachhamannu (translation).