Whatever happened to class?
Venantius J Pinto
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Why is it that struggles for identity in Southasia have become so much more strident and visible over the years? Why do studies of class, labour and economic deprivation seem to have lost their shine? This shift in theorisation, which deeply impacts the intellectual culture in a region in which more than a billion people live – almost half of them below the poverty line – must be understood.
After the departure of the British, post-Independence academia in the Subcontinent was intensely affected by the grinding poverty and inequity engendered by the legacy of colonialism. To generations of scholars, class and exploitation were central to any study of the region’s ills. Yet class analysis, as an intellectual force, has been on the decline in Southasian academia. On the one hand, the rise of free-market ideology and neoliberalism has contributed to the marginalisation of the analysis of labour and class. On the other hand, postcolonial and post-structural theories have largely come to replace Marxism.
But the realities of people’s lives, as well as their feelings of deprivation, do not fit into neat categories. In this issue of Himal, we discover that issues of identity, culture, class and power are irretrievably enmeshed; there is no issue that is exclusively a question of identity, just as there is no issue purely of class. The social sciences must heed the complexities of people’s lives in order to be relevant to the social and political upheavals underway in Southasia. |
