Sheetal Chhabria 🇵🇸
@SheetalChabbers
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Historian • Capitalism, Colonialism, Poverty • Super-Stretching Marx • book:
Boston, MA
Joined October 2019
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Marxism is a male sport. Yet there are amazing women who think clearly and cogently about political economy. Below, a few would be classics that still get overlooked by the masculinity of it all:
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Tania Li
Sylvia Federici
Add more please.
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When we write about India, we must write about it like Israel, a people once colonized now becoming colonizers, not simply as victims of colonialism.
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Every time I hear “subscribe to our RSS feed” I panic for a second.
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@PratitiTiyas
Been thinking a lot about how much stem research ends up supporting human destruction. Wish I had some data on this. Or a documentary or anything. Any ideas?
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Once South Asianists figure out India is a colonizing and not just a colonized country, they might be able to cope with the ethical implications of working on Kashmir. But just maybe….
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Marxism is a male sport. Yet there are amazing women who think clearly and cogently about political economy. Below, a few would be classics that still get overlooked by the masculinity of it all:
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Tania Li
Sylvia Federici
Add more please.
79
74
628
Now would be a great time to nationalize
@harvard
. Seize the endowment. Redirect educational resources towards the public good. Create accountability. Etc.
It can be the UMass Cambridge Campus.
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I usually don’t debate on Twitter. But India’s situation has me desperate. The number of people defending privatized billionaire profits in health care while so many of their country die is astonishing. What kind of monstrous nationalism and patriotism is this?
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I have a Ph.D and wrote a prize winning book. BUT believe me when I say, I do not understand 80% of what academics are saying. And after all these years, I blame THEM.
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In 1995, Ayesha Jalal argued that India was much more authoritarian than most observers thought. Many dismissed her analysis then...they were wrong.
Turns out, there's more to politics than meets the eye.
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I don't like to dwell on this much but my parents never completed college and I do not come from a learned family. Plus, I have many stories of grad school profs reminding me where I'm from. Thus, it means a lot to me that someone thought my book was, "Beautifully written..."
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My favorite “self-driving “car is a public bus or train. Especially when the actual drivers are unionized.
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In hindsight, how much of south Asian studies has turned out to be an apology for Hindutva?
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I see I have won a prize by the
@AHAhistorians
. I am so glad. But right now I am going on a hike with my 7yo in a state park to make up for the lack of childcare. So I will write more when I can.
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Public libraries are possibly the best institution humans ever created.
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Apparently paying rent and buying food is a threat to the economy’s temperature now.
"$2,000 checks would be a pretty serious mistake."
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers says larger stimulus checks to Americans could risk overheating the economy
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In the second half of 1947, some 100k Muslims in Kashmir were massacred by the RSS, Hindus, and Sikhs, all aided and abetted by Maharaj Hari Singh.
Lessons:
1) we rarely learn this when we learn about partition, we should
2) the RSS isn’t a result of the liberalism of 1991
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The primary responsibility of scholars should be to the people who (often unknowingly) become the subjects of the scholarly gaze. We have NO RESPONSIBILITY to other scholars or "our field" -- let our field go to hell if it must. Knowledge for knowledge's sake is BS.
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South Asian studies in America has long been oblivious to the rise of Hindutva. Even worse, it has provided theoretical cover for it.
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India is not a poor country.
India is a looted country, and looted not just by Europeans but our very own patriots.
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I love teaching, but sadly it is barely 30% of my job. This week I spent the other 70% fighting the admin on their you-will teach-in-person-no matter-what and provide-remote-options for-your-students-but you-may-never-get-sick or-have-a-child-who-is-sick policy.
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I personally think all conferences and talks should be on zoom forever. (Or until the universities are dead, or we are.) Reasons:
1.) Reduce CO2 emissions w/o air travel
2.) increase audience and access
3) get to sit on couch
4) don’t lose time traveling
5) reduce tourism
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Not sure who needs to hear this but India's precolonial past was no rosy time of mutual admiration, love and belonging.
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In 1990 there were no billionaires (in US dollars) in India. In 2018 there were over 120. This was in the same period that hundreds of thousands of farmers committed suicide. “India’s rise” is fundamentally linked to the farmer’s fall, but it didn’t have to be this way.
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I am grateful to
@AHAhistorians
for the South Asian History book prize. I hope the prize brings visibility to an issue I have agonized over for decades. Why do Bombay's (and India's) majority struggle to live? Which systems of power justify such grueling inequality?
I see I have won a prize by the
@AHAhistorians
. I am so glad. But right now I am going on a hike with my 7yo in a state park to make up for the lack of childcare. So I will write more when I can.
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“There must be something rotten in the very core of a social
system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery.
—Karl Marx”
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@AudreyTruschke
This has to do with ethnographic ethics and responsibility to ACTUAL PEOPLE WHO WERE USED AS DATA
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On May 27, Juned Shaikh (not on Twitter) and I will discuss his new book, Outcaste Bombay, alongside mine. We will discuss Dalit Marxism, paths for revolution (not) taken, and working class unity and disunity.
Register here: The City and its Poor | CSAS
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"Colonial Madras was a slave society—a fact few histories disclose."
Just published -- a book forum on Rupa Viswanath's Pariah Problem, a must read to understand how caste is labor control, a control that thrives under colonial rule.
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Hindu Nazis.
In the heart of Delhi, raising Nazi-style salutes, hundreds vow: “We all pledge, that until our last breath, we will make India a Hindu nation. We will fight and die and, if required, kill.” Fascism is risen in India, and the world turns blind eyes.
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It is much easier to get people outraged than organized.
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Economists think there is something called “economics” that occasionally encounters another thing called “politics.”
I have no idea what is just economics. Can’t figure it out.
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"India" is a colonizing concept, not a victim of colonialism. Every self-styled "poco" scholar needs to rethink how we tell our histories.
Thread: ‘Unknown, Unmarked, and Mass Graves of Jammu and Kashmir.’
The existence of 2,700 unknown, unmarked, and mass graves, containing 2,943 bodies, across 55 villages in Bandipora, Baramulla, and Kupwara districts of Kashmir was documented in 2009 by The International...
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Adjunct labor is to the university what migrant labor is to the farm.
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So class reductionism is bad. But what about scholars who avoid or at worse totally invisibilize class composition in their study?
Is class evasionism as bad as class reductionism?
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Don’t read Judith Butler. Read this.
Judith Butler's piece in
@LondonReview
highlights the nature of imperialist liberal emancipation, in its pedantic lack of urgency and nebulousness.
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I think the scholar, Tania Li, is grossly under appreciated, especially amongst South Asianists.
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News Reports of “protests turning violent” is mischievous — meant to undermine the large amount of coordination and discipline it takes to stage an action. The state is the source of all violence.
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Many nationalist and poco historians conveniently forget what Dharma Kumar taught us in 1965 — that exploiting landless labor was a casteist function of accumulation long before the British got there.
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@LaiciteStan
No. 1) you conflated Palestinian and “Islamist” 2) anti-semitism was not created by the palestinians.
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After forgiving all student debt, we should make all education entirely public. Seize the endowments and invest in education for all.
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How did institutions of higher ed become more greedy and miserly than stores like Costco. It turns out you are more likely to get health and dental insurance working for Costco than some of the greatest institutions of education on earth. No wonder
@hgsuuaw
must strike.
👊
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My book is out in India. It shows how the wellbeing of the city—rather than of its people—became an increasingly urgent goal of government, with agrarian distress, famished migrants, and the laboring poor seen as threats to be contained or excluded.
Announces its
#NewBook
, Making the
#ModernSlum
by
@SheetalChabbers
. It traces the long histories of
#impoverishment
and
#inequality
that constantly reproduced Bombay's
#infamous
#slumproblem
.
#ModernSlum
#southasia
#colonialbombay
#Mumbai
#UrbanStudies
#History
#Indianhistory
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Teltumbde, Shoma Sen, Hany Babu; Adivasi rights activists Stan Swamy and Mahesh Raut; poets Varavara Rao and Sudhir Dhawale; lawyers Surendra Gadling and Sudha Bharadwaj; writer-researcher Gautam Navlakha, activists Rona Wilson, Arun Ferreira…
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This is what all that education helps folks do — measure which naps at which will make the poor more productive. But the napping rich? Who will make them more valuable?
Excellent paper demonstrating that short afternoon naps, not more sleep at night, increase productivity of the urban poor.
This is something Naaru the shopkeeper in Kolkata has been claiming for years (much to my frustration).
Now science backs him up. Thanks
@raogautam
!
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I am an academic. What does that mean? My job description: professional email writer, anxiousness-antidote provider, low level agitator, writer on rare occasions.
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@DissentMag
This is embarrassingly bad. Only the editor himself could have gotten away with this.
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Ayesha Jalal was right all along about India.
The hijab verdict denying Muslim girls and women their rights is surprising only when you still believe that India is a democracy. We have been an ethno nationalist, fascist state — a Hindu Rashtra for a while.
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How do you write a whole book about non-violence and barely mention Gandhi, MLK, or Nelson Mandela, all while citing euro-male thinkers for the most banal statements? Ask Judith Butler.
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India was once colonized but is now a colonizing country.
The Indian army is deployed against its own people, many are jailed indefinitely for “sedition,” and the government sponsors a vast drain of wealth from the masses to the few.
But who will liberate Indians from India?
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@blackleftaf
Thank you for saying this. It is so incredibly racist to claim we(Americans) have a right to water because we are not a third world country. Don’t they too have that right?
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8yo while crossing George Washington bridge: “This should be called The Workers Bridge since GW didn’t build it, workers did.”
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I am a tenured history professor and >80% of academic research agendas make little sense to me, either because I cannot comprehend the lingo or because the researcher does not know their own point. Something is wrong in academia.
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No matter how much I rationalize it, I hate the disappearance of time.
This past weekend my feline companion, Qismat, of 12 years left for good.
I miss her.
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The anti-colonial cause is not helped by celebrating or romanticizing what we imagine to be pre-colonial.
Pre-colonial India was full of power relations; some were different and yet some were similar to the violence of colonial rule.
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What must it be like to have been Imprisoned for 3 years after being the author who warned us how it would happen?
“the police also planted stories in the local press that naxalites were behind the Khairlanji protests.”
-Anand Teltumbde in The Persistence of Caste
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“No, India cannot be isolated. We need help.” -Arundhati Roy
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Homi Blahblah signed the original letter. Just saying.
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“Neoliberalism, pivoted as it is on the principle of open competition in the global marketplace, essentially entails a social Darwinist order that is antithetical to the conception of social justice.”
Excerpt From
The Persistence of Caste
Anand Teltumbde
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Trends in post colonial studies have made many forget what the historian Dharma Kumar taught us: that the number of landless laborers was already high before colonialism. Colonial power may not have been the radical break many assume - Especially if you were a Dalit.
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I am discussing my book on Mon 4/19
@UCBerkeley
with the excellent Sai Balakrishnan, author of Shareholder Cities.
The timing makes it possible for many to "attend."
9am Berkeley | 12 noon New York | 4pm London | 9pm Lahore | 9:30pm Delhi |
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India was a founding member of the International Labour Organization. By joining, as shown in an absolutely brilliant article by Rupa Viswanath, the category "Labour" was evacuated of its casteist meanings and turned into the general and abstract category that would hide caste.
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I am shocked at how many museums still divide art into "Islamic" and "Indian" art. Those two are not the same kind of category, nor are they exclusive. I wish it would stop.
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When are we going to talk about the monstrous policing problem in India?
Faisal Husain, a vegetable vendor in Uttar Pradesh’s Unnao, died less than an hour after being brutally beaten by the Bangarmau police for violating lockdown curfew on Friday (May 21). |
@IsmatAraa
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“The Untouchables have no Press.
—B.R. Ambedkar, 1945”
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As Jalal said, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh could be subjected to comparative historical analysis to reveal how India was more authoritarian under the facade of democracy and that Pakistan was more democratic under the facade of authoritarianism.
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Writing tip of the day: Write for an appreciative audience.
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The notion that “the west” is exceptional for its nurturing of democracy has always been a lie, told to hide its deeply imperial tendencies both at home and “abroad.”
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I experience this call for me/us to condemn Hamas to be racist. As if I must prove to you again and again that I am not a savage, that I cry when I witness suffering and death. What bs. For that reason I don’t care for
@JudithButler___
. There is no grief in a vacuum….
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I am really glad about the IP waivers. But please stop “celebrating” it.
“Celebration” is hardly called for. In India, Brazil, elsewhere, folks are dying cuz they can’t breathe. Vaccines are far away. More immediate action is necessary. Let’s grieve together, not celebrate.
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“A caged bird can still sing.” - Stan Swami, 84yo Jesuit, human rights activist, killed by the Gov’t of India July 5, 2021, through cruel imprisonment FOR NO FUCKING REASON AT ALL.
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2 main things explain why India has long been one of the world's worst places to get sick:
1.) (re) production of poverty that compounds illness
2.) the power of Indian capitalists to evade responsibility and exploit instead
COVID is no different
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So glad for my essay, "Manufacturing Epidemics," in which I argued that inequality breathes life into every pathogenic event, included in this volume with so many I admire. Do check it out...excerpt & TOC below. Great work by
@CheriChe
,
@TheIndiaForum
, and
@OrientBlackSwan
.
Very excited to see this excerpt from the introduction to our book on India and Covid-19, in
@scroll_in
.
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@visvak
Honestly I think there is a huge hierarchy in academia. Lots of senior folks haven’t read anything new in a decade or two and keep citing their old friend from the 70s who had the same thoughts they did. Younger folks feel a lot more pressure.
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Capitalism didn’t create the vaccine, but it certainly hoarded it.
The American pharmaceutical industry has mobilized over 100 lobbyists to fight the effort to waive IP rights and allow the developing world to produce generic covid vaccines, new disclosures show
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All those casually equating anti colonialism in India to black liberation in US beware. Du Bois and Gandhi do not mix. Ambedkar hated Gandhi. Other Marxist Dalits disagreed with Ambedkar. Little knowledge of anything is bad. Single figures can never stand in for anti-colonialism.
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Diversity should not mean having a seat at the table. It should mean breaking the table.
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Faiz was a communist. A Marxist. There is no celebration of his poetry without contention of that fact.
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Isn’t it awful how competitive academics are with each other? You would think we would work together to save the world. But instead we use our decades of learning to tear others down.
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The way Wilkerson uses "caste" neither explains race in America nor caste in India. Thank goodness for sharp minds like
@blackleftaf
to clearly understand our condition and therefore what can and ought to be done about it.
“Just as caste—in India and elsewhere—cannot be reduced to exploitation, neither can the social relations of racial capitalism in the United States be characterized by caste, despite similar forms of oppression.”
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The racial line between colonizer and colonized was policed by Indian capitalists who wanted to super exploit Indian labor.
Poco studies has got it entirely wrong.
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Things I like about Wordle --
1.) It is not monetized, no ads, nothing
2.) It is finite, not endless.
3.) It is a shared experience since we all do the same puzzle daily
4.) Promotes focus rather than scattered-brain-syndrome
Anything else?
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Political ambiguity is prized in academia. It is seen as “nuance” or “complication.” Sometimes ambiguity even passes for “sophistication” since a plurality of conclusions was permitted.
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I am excited to be in conversation with Hussain Indorewala (find his great writing here: ) about my book at
@iitbombay
Center for Policy Studies. 8am EST or 7pm IST on Wed.
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Art moves people. Good literature transforms the reader. Academic writing kills both the reader and the subject. How come?
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Hierarchy in academia comes in many forms. Many senior “stars” haven’t read anything new in decades and keep citing their old friend from the 70s who was and is their intellectual twin. In contrast, younger folks pressure themselves to read the lit, policing their own ideas.
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India’s republic day celebrations just as every other day before — with violent suppression of dissent.
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I can’t fathom that Mike Davis is mortal. His words and ideas have influenced me for over 15 years. I teach his books every semester and never stop learning as I reread them again and again.
Mike Davis, whom I admire tremendously, is close to death. An update.
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Far too many scholars of South Asia use the place and the suffering of the people to advance their own careers, & position themselves as decolonial or avant-garde— it has to be stopped. This is a start.
You ask, “who was harmed?” Let me attempt to respond:
1) The Kashmiri patients, suffering from intense intergenerational & ongoing PTSD from the genocidal Indian Occupation (Ref:
@genocide_watch
) who didn’t know their “private” meetings w/ their therapist/psychiatrist were… 1/n
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Since the 19th century, India’s disease burden has been disproportionately high. Now 1 in 22 covid deaths are in India. The numbers are rising. Independence, nationalism, patriotism, temple building, have done NOTHING to help most Indians.
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"Democracy as expressed in the formalization of regular elections can and often does co-exist with the inherently authoritarian tendencies of the state."
and
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(Although I am tired) I am presenting a paper at CUNY - Thursday. It is very much a work in progress so I recommend expectations be super low. My concerns are simply the pitfalls of internationalism when tethered to a Eurocentric history of capitalism.
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Bordering has a long history within imperialist-capitalist greed.
Refusing to take or fearing refugees, whether due to climactic events or wars, is a form of enclosure.
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Not sure which colonial era historians need to hear this but just because Parsis are not British doesn’t exempt them from being criticized for labor exploitation and greed. Occasional philanthropy also doesn’t help. and yes of course not all Parsis.
Class analysis matters.
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Who is a scholar of South Asia who critiques the mediating and tempering effect Gandhian non-violence had on anti-colonial liberation?
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