Department of Comparative Literature
Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures
The Concept of Minority at the Dawn of Partition: Ambedkar, Savarkar and Jinnah
Date: Monday, 19 July 2021
Time: 6 PM HK Time (GMT +8)
Speaker: Jesús F. Cháirez-Garza, Lecturer, History of Race and Ethnicity, University of Manchester
Via Zoom
This paper analyses B.R. Ambedkar’s political writings in the years prior to Partition. I contextualise Ambedkar’s changing views on Pakistan through his Thoughts on Pakistan (1941), Pakistan or the Partition of India (1945, 1946); and Communal Deadlock and a Way to Solve It (1945). Ambedkar’s writings in this period were concerned with what he perceived as an attack on the political concept of the ‘minority’ in India. Since Dalits throughout India were a heterogeneous cluster of communities without a common denominator (such as language, profession or territory) other than their social and political oppression, their recognition as a political category gave structure to the body of their politics. Yet, at this time the future of the concept of political minority was under threat from different camps including the Hindu right, the Muslim League and Congress.
About the Speaker
Dr Jesús F. Cháirez-Garza is a Lecturer in the History of Race and Ethnicity at the University of Manchester. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Cambridge where he studied the thought of Dr B.R. Ambedkar and the concept of untouchability as a political category. From 2015 to 2018, Jesús was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Leeds where he researched the influence of pragmatism in the Global South, particularly in Mexico and India. Currently, Jesús is working on an AHRC project that investigates the intellectual origins of Indian anthropology.
About the Moderator
Dr. J. Daniel Elam is an assistant professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. In 2018-2019, he was a Fellow in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. He has previously taught at the University of Toronto and was the Mellon Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow in ‘Bibliomigrancy’ at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Daniel specialises in transnational Asian and African literatures in the twentieth century, modernism, postcolonial theory, and global intellectual history. He works on literature from the ‘global south’, with a focus on anticolonial movements in British Empire. He also works Black American anti-racist thought in the 1920s and 1930s, Third World solidarity movements during the Cold War, and anti-Apartheid activism in South Africa in the 1960s-1980s. He has written on Bhagat Singh, M.K. Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, W.E.B. Du Bois, Emma Goldman, and other figures. He has published essays in many journals, including Postcolonial Studies, Interventions, and PMLA. More information about his work can be found at www.jdelam.com
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