Grands hommes vus d'en bas. L'iconographie officielle et ses usages populaires

Cet article propose d'aborder les images des grands hommes sous une perspective inédite. Par contraste avec les analyses déjà nombreuses consacrées à l'iconographie officielle, il s'agit de décaler le regard pour examiner comment la figure des hommes d'État fait l'objet d'appropriations qui échappent au registre de l'officiel tout en prenant appui sur lui. Ce changement de perspective permet de saisir les grands hommes non plus " par le haut ", tels qu'ils se donnent à voir dans leur grandeur officielle, mais " par le bas ", du point de vue des acteurs subordonnés. Ces usages populaires des icônes politiques impliquent un jeu souvent ambigu avec le monde officiel. Selon les cas, il pourra s'agir de capter, de cannibaliser, de moquer, d'accommoder ou d'apprivoiser le pouvoir à travers ses effigies. Les usages populaires de la figure du grand homme constituent en définitive des actes d'invention qui ne laissent pas indemne le modèle officiel

The ‘Righteous Anger’ of the PowerlessInvestigating Dalit Outrage over Caste Violence

This contribution brings to our attention a Dalit (‘untouchable’) protest movement against caste violence (the 2006 Khairlanji massacre). Although anger is supposedly an emotion used in an open and demonstrative manner by the powerful as a means to enact their domination, the Dalit movement engaged in acts of ‘emotion work’ that upset such a social mapping of emotions. The paper engages critically with the sterile and biased concept of ‘axiological neutrality’ and advocates instead the heuristic possibilities enabled by the ethnographers’ personal exposure to the emotion work performed by social movements. The protest’s ideological stance illustrates the politically marginalised Dalits’ appropriation of democratic conceptions through the language of injustice and outrage. Two different sets of actors involved in the protest are distinguished: human rights and progressive activists of the peasant NGO movement on the one hand, and the local anti-caste movement of Dalits on the other. The distinct kinds of emotion work each set of actors performed, and the framing of the massacre as an outrage to moral values, highlights how, in the mobilisation for Dalit rights, the popular language of communal outrage and the language of democratic rights articulate with and support one another

Les statues d’Ambedkar en Inde

Cet article revisite, du point de vue de la culture matérielle, un épisode majeur de l’histoire de la démocratie en Inde. La façon dont sont repris certains attributs typiques d’une stylistique officielle dans les statues d’Ambedkar installées par les militants dalits dans l’État de l’Uttar Pradesh invite à réfléchir aux usages populaires de l’officialité. Les multiples distorsions subies par l’esthétique officielle une fois retranscrite dans une esthétique du bazar, avec des moyens artisanaux, offrent une image du pouvoir proche et familière, à l’opposé des mises en scène monumentales du pouvoir d’État par lui-même, tout en se nourrissant d’elles. Peut-on cependant se contenter de cette interprétation légitimiste en termes de « déformations » ? Loin d’être envisagé comme caricature ou parodie du pouvoir (on peut en revanche parler de « déforcement » de la violence symbolique de l’État, qui consiste à rendre cette autorité appropriable et manipulable), le recours populaire à l’officialité qui s’observe dans les pratiques militantes autour de ces statues semble répondre davantage à une façon de légitimer, de donner de l’autorité à l’idéologie anti-caste des dalits en tant que ressource symbolique mobilisable dans la lutte des dominés.This article revisits a significant episode in India’s democratic history, looking at it from the perspective of material culture. The way in which certain aspects typical of official stylistics are taken up in statues of Ambedkar erected by Dalit militants in the state of Uttar Pradesh encourages us to think about popular uses of officialty. The multiple distortions that official aesthetics undergo as they are retranscribed in the aesthetics of the bazaar forge an image of power as something proximate and familiar. This both forms a contrast with state power’s monumental enactments of itself, and simultaneously feeds into it. But is this legitimist analysis based on the idea of a “deformation” enough? Far from being a caricature or parody of power (we might, however, speak of a “deforcement” from the heat of symbolic state violence, thereby affording people a handle on its authority), popular recourse to or invocation of officialty as witnessed in the militant practices that surround these statues is better understood as a means of legitimising or bestowing authority upon the Dalit’s anti-caste ideology. This becomes a symbolic resource that can be deployed in their struggle against oppression

Política contra o grão. O movimento Dalit de Uttar Pradesh em meio à ONG-ização

Desde o final da década de 1990 a sociedade civil transnacional começou a abordar a questão da discriminação de castas na Índia. O que acontece com a “abordagem baseada nos direitos humanos oficiais” e seu corolário, “empoderamento”, promovida pelas instituições internacionais, uma vez que adentram no domínio da política subalterna de emancipação? Este artigo é sobre o efeito da ONG-ização na trajetória política dos Dalits(“intocáveis”). Depois de recordar os principais passos desse tardio reconhecimento internacional da opressão da casta, eu me concentro em um estudo de caso da província de Uttar Pradesh, destacando as maneiras criativas através das quais financiamentos estão sendo utilizados e com quais efeitos. Defendoque em um contexto altament epolitizado como o de Uttar Pradesh, os atores locais deste processo de ONG-ização defendem ativamente suas concepções e práticas políticas envolvendo-se em reflexões críticas de sua práxis política. Ao concentrar a atenção sobre as mudanças que afetam os trabalhadores agrícolas dos Dalit, no contexto da liberalização(como feminização da força de trabalho em função da migração laboral dos homens),as organizações desenvolvem estratégias para perseguirem- sob o rótulo do empoderamento das mulheres-um movimento reverso de politização que foi iniciado anteriormente pelas mobilizações políticas do partido político Dalit, oBSP. Sua dependência d eagências de financiamento exige, contudo, ajustes táticos de seu trabalho político, de modo a se adequarem às normas tecnocratas, cujas exigências e custos podem ser exaustivos

Anand Teltumbde, Khairlanji. A Strange and Bitter Crop

The importance of the Khairlanji events lies partly, but not mainly, in the exceptional degree of cruelty displayed by the village mob when it engaged, in broad daylight, in the murder and collective rape of four members of a Dalit family. After all, events of caste-based violence have occurred regularly in Indian villages since the 1970s, when the dynamics of Dalit emancipation threatened to upset the rural traditional order. Khairlanji’s historical importance rather lies in the massive Dali..

Anand Teltumbde, Khairlanji. A Strange and Bitter Crop

The importance of the Khairlanji events lies partly, but not mainly, in the exceptional degree of cruelty displayed by the village mob when it engaged, in broad daylight, in the murder and collective rape of four members of a Dalit family. After all, events of caste-based violence have occurred regularly in Indian villages since the 1970s, when the dynamics of Dalit emancipation threatened to upset the rural traditional order. Khairlanji’s historical importance rather lies in the massive Dali..

Introduction. The Moral and Affectual Dimension of Collective Action in South Asia

‘No politics’ says the roaring tiger that illustrates this special issue of SAMAJ. This sticker was bought from a street vendor in Kanpur, a city located in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, during a celebration of the Ambedkar jayanti (birthday commemoration) in 2008. It is highly indicative of the way emotions can be valorized as pure and authentic expressions from the body, and pitted against regular politics, stigmatized as the impure realm of politicking, deals and compromises. This exp..

Bariz (Paris), le temps des campements : filmer la lutte des migrants ». Entretien de Nicolas Jaoul par Corinne Fortier

International audienc

Grands Hommes vus d’en bas

Cet article propose d’aborder les images des grands hommes sous une perspective inédite. Par contraste avec les analyses déjà nombreuses consacrées à l’iconographie officielle, il s’agit de décaler le regard pour examiner comment la figure des hommes d’État fait l’objet d’appropriations qui échappent au registre de l’officiel tout en prenant appui sur lui. Ce changement de perspective permet de saisir les grands hommes non plus « par le haut », tels qu’ils se donnent à voir dans leur grandeur officielle, mais « par le bas », du point de vue des acteurs subordonnés. Ces usages populaires des icônes politiques impliquent un jeu souvent ambigu avec le monde officiel. Selon les cas, il pourra s’agir de capter, de cannibaliser, de moquer, d’accommoder ou d’apprivoiser le pouvoir à travers ses effigies. Les usages populaires de la figure du grand homme constituent en définitive des actes d’invention qui ne laissent pas indemne le modèle officiel.This article offers a novel perspective on representations of great men. In contrast with the growing body of work dedicated to the study of official iconography, it shifts the analytical gaze and examines how images of statesmen are appropriated in ways which simultaneously draw on and endeavour to break with the official register. This change of perspective allows us to grasp these great men not as they appear in their official grandeur, “from above”, but as they are seen by subordinate actors: “from below”. These popular uses of political icons involve an often ambiguous game with the world of officialdom. They may seek to capture, cannibalise, mock, accommodate or domesticate power through the deployment of its effigies. In short, popular uses of these images of great men constitute acts of invention which trouble the official model

Confronting denials of casteism

© 2021 The Authors. Published by Centre d’Etudes de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.7610Punjab-born Meena Dhanda moved to the UK in 1987 as a Commonwealth Scholar in Philosophy at the University of Oxford. There she became a researcher specializing on caste among Punjabi youth both in the UK and Punjab (Dhanda 1993; Dhanda 2009). In 1992, she started teaching Philosophy and Cultural Politics at the University of Wolverhampton, a city with a large concentration of Punjabi-speaking people of Indian origin (2011 census). She has since published several articles on caste in the UK (Dhanda 2020, 2017, 2014) and has become one of the important voices in the debates on the prevalence of casteism in the UK. She joined the UK anti-caste movement in 2008. In 2013, she was appointed Principal Investigator [PI] of a research project on “Caste in Britain” funded by the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission. She has also regularly appeared in British media, as featured in the documentary Caste Aside (Mogul 2017) and was the sole consultant for a BBC1 documentary: Hindus: Do we have a caste problem? (Qayum 2019), which has been viewed by over 1 million people. She talked about her anti-caste activism experience in the UK with Nicolas Jaoul, a French anthropologist who has specialized on the Ambedkarite movement in India and worked on its British counterpart as well (Jaoul 2006, and in this special issue)