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.
Other Research Colloquiums
- FRIDAY RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM: 3:00 PM 19 April 2024. Ravi Kant: ‘Beyond the Screen: Film History from an Intermedia Archive’
- FRIDAY RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM: 3:00 PM 12 April 2024. Subrata Kundu: ‘Society in the Age of Artificial Intelligence’
- FRIDAY RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM: 3:00 PM 5 April 2024. Maitrayee Deka: ‘Bazaars as an Economic Category’
- FRIDAY RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM: 3:00 PM 8 March 2024. Sujata Patel: ‘The Promise of Global Social Theory: The Contributions of Anti-Colonial Perspectives’
- FRIDAY RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM: 3:00 PM 23 February 2024. Harish Naraindas: ‘Epigenetics, Metabolic Reversals, Resurrections: Toward an Epistemic and Ontological Democracy’