Decolonial Keywords

This volume presents a set of keywords and concepts embedded in the languages of South Asia and its vast cultural landscape. It reiterates specific attitudes, ways of seeing and methods of doing, which are embedded in the historical and contemporary experiences in the region. The words, concepts, ideas and attitudes in the volume explore the contexts of their production and how their meanings might have changed at different historical moments. The volume also attempts to work out if these words and concepts can infuse a certain intellectual rigor to reinvent social sciences and humanities in the region and beyond. Individual essays, which are creative, imaginative, ethnographic and historical, explore the possibility of South Asian intellectual worlds and words to create a broader crossregional and global social science and humanities. The volume argues that it is important to move away from the intellectual shackles inherited from colonial and neo-colonial experiences while also not succumbing to the traps of local reductionist nativisms and cultural nationalisms.

The volume has a foreword by Nivedita Menon and the contributors include A.P. Ashwin Kumar, Ambika Aiyadurai, Anushka Kahandagamage, Anasua Chatterjee, Anwesha Sengupta, Banu Subramaniam, Binit Gurung, H.M. Harisha, Harshana Rambukwella, Ihsan Ul-Ihthisam, Ishita Dey, Jagath Bandara Pathirage, K.V. Cybil, G. Kanato Chophy, Magna Mohapatra, Neha Mishra, Ophira Gamliel, Pankaj Sekhsaria, Pooja Kalita, Prashant Ingole, Prathama Banerjee, Ravi Kumar, Ravi Nandan Singh, Razzeko Delley, Renny Thomas, Roshan Praveen Xalxo, Sabin Ninglekhu, Sasanka Perera, Sayantan Datta, Sebanti Chatterjee, Sumbul Farah, Swargajyoti Gohain and V. Rajesh.

Renny Thomas is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Bhopal, India, and was the Taki Visiting Global Professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University, New York, USA (2024–25). Before joining IISER, he taught Sociology at the University of Delhi (2015–21). He has been a Charles Wallace Fellow in Social Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK (2017–18) and a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Cultural History at the Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany (2022–23). He is the author of Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment (2021) and co-editor of Mapping Scientific Method: Disciplinary Narrations (2022).

Sasanka Perera is Chairman of the Colombo Institute for Human Sciences, and was Professor of Sociology at University of Colombo, Sri Lanka and South Asian University (SAU), New Delhi. He is the author of several books including Violence and the Burden of Memory: Remembrance and Erasure in Sinhala Consciousness (2015), Warzone Tourism in Sri Lanka: Tales from Darker Places in Paradise (2016) and The Fear of the Visual? Photography, Anthropology and Anxieties of Seeing (2020). He has edited and co-edited various volumes including Sociology and Social Anthropology in South Asia: Histories and Practices (2018), Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia: Decoding Visual Worlds (2019), Against the Nation: Thinking Like South Asians (2019) and Humour and the Performance of Power in South Asia: Anxiety, Laughter and Politics in Unstable Times (2022).