‘New Medium, New Historiography: Re-Narrating Islamic Pasts in India through VCDs’ by Ronie Parciack

28th December 2019 / Event, Sociological Research Colloquium

Ronie Parciack presented his research entitled ‘New Medium, New Historiography: Re-Narrating Islamic Pasts in India through VCDs’ at the Sociological Research Colloquium.

When: Friday, 19th January 2018 at 3:00 p.m.

Where: Seminar Room (First Floor), Department of Sociology, University of Delhi 

Abstract

The formulation of history in late colonial India and the crystallization of Hindu Nationhood are deeply enmeshed. Indian historiography was rewritten at that time to advance a widely acclaimed standard of a Hindu nation which excluded non-Hindus and in particular the large Muslim minority in the subcontinent, from the nation’s ethos and past. In sovereign India, this historiography was articulated by the visual mainstream media that generally emphasized the Hinduised past and present and defined Indian Muslims’ past through narratives of historical and genealogical estrangement. These narratives contributed to the formation of what Dipesh Chakravarty termed a “historical wound”. This presentation addresses yet another historiography to remedy this “wound” through a new medium that targets the Muslim niche market in India: the under-regulated arena of Video Compact Discs (VCDs). This decade-old medium re-writes Indo-Islamic history and challenges the ways the Islamic past is habitually portrayed and visually imagined, as well as the discipline of modern historiography itself.  

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