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Rereading India from (a Without that’s) Within: The View from “West(ern) South-East Asia”

Professor POLLEY Jason S.
Assistant Professor,
Hong Kong Baptist University

Abstract:
This talk complicates the possibility of a representative pan-Indian imaginary. My autoethnography emerges at the conjunction of (i) three decades of regular months’ long backpacking returns across India, (ii) three decades of devoted reading of Indian English fiction, and (iii) three months of travel in Northeast India, sister states where the few tourists I encountered were almost categorically “mainland Indian.” It was especially in mountainous places as far-flung as Aizawl, Kohima, Itanagar, and Shillong that I had learned to naturalize the appellations “mainland Indian” and even “Indian”. And it’s in “India”’s Seven Sisters’ states that I experienced a complex form of “Indian” belonging. Because I’m both a gora and a bhai, an interloper and a familiar, I allegorically experience two (of many) forms of “Indian” Otherness: the Otherness of “mainland Indians” in “West(ern) South-East Asia” and the Otherness of “West(ern) South-East Asians” in “mainland India.”

Research Seminar
2024-10-08
25 October 2024 (Fri)
12:00nn HKT
E-Zone, Room 332 Fung King Hey Building

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