Marxist Critical Theory Across Asian Borders:  India and the Concept of Pan-Asia

Roundtable at he Annual Conference on South Asia, UW Madison 2025

Abstract

Low-key yet noticeable developments have taken hold in recent years in South Asia-related contexts across a variety of disciplines, from social theory (Sartori, 2008); film studies (Ganguly, 2010), intellectual history (Kaiwar, 2014), and literary studies (Sahota, 2018):  new engagements with Marxist thought beyond postmodernism, and geographies wider than those of the nation-state.  The paradigms ventured by these works and others like them intersect in ways that are salient for both South Asian studies and the epistemologies that undergird it.  This roundtable seeks to discuss two interrelated phenomena:  1) how India and other Asian regions have interacted and combined under various auspices, including Pan-Asianism, Maoism, and as members of transregional political blocs, e.g. BRICS; and 2) how a return to Marxist critical theory has challenged pervasive paradigms such as those stemming from (post-)colonialism.  The present conjuncture with its rapidly shifting realities has outstripped the theoretical interventions modeled on a metaphorics of textuality and made exigent a reexamination of our historical periodizations, temporal presuppositions, geographical models, and operative scales of agency.  By putting India into a conceptual contact zone with transnational imaginaries of Asia (including Pan-Asianism and Maoism), this roundtable aims to focus on different articulations between the local and the transregional, questioning the quasi-ineffable binds that putatively connected Asian cultures together in the early twentieth century, and asking whether pervasive predicaments vis-à-vis global capital in recent decades bring these regions into dialogue on distinct epistemological grounds.  This roundtable also intends to assess what the new critical paradigms mean for rethinking relations between South Asian studies, empirical research, and the formulation of new models of critical theory.  It asks whether this field might not also be the grounds for not merely empirical data gathering for already existing theoretical models e.g. poststructuralism, but rather for a genuine critical theory for the contemporary moment.

Keywords:  India, Pan-Asianism, Marxism, Critical Theory, transnationalism

Speaker List

Speaker 1 (GS Sahota) researches South Asian literary and cultural history with a focus on modern northern India; his work has engaged critically with the Frankfurt School’s conceptual frameworks for grasping cultural developments that have traversed Asian geographies such as Romanticism, the topic of his remarks for this roundtable.

Speaker 2 (Viren Murthy) is a specialist in transnational Asian intellectual history and will make some preliminary remarks about how Marxists in Tamil Nadu have combined identity politics, a politics of tradition and Marx’s idea of Asiatic mode of production.

Speaker 3 (Nandini Chandra) specializes in the field of global comics studies, South Asian literary modernism, and critical theory. Her contribution to the roundtable will include an attempt to marry value-theory Marxism with the Mauss-inspired school of reading world histories through the lens of the gift exchange, in South Asian literary practices, specifically.

Speaker 4 (Yue Qiu) focuses on the Sino-East Pakistani Maoist ties in the 1960s and 1970s. She also has a keen interest in broader studies of the Third World and the Belt Road Initiatives. In this roundtable, she wants to explore how translation became the site of anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles across China and East Pakistan in the 1960s and 1970s.

Speaker 5 (Aditya Bahl) studies Third World print cultures, Cold War political economy, and subaltern religion. In this roundtable, he will explore how the political defeat of Maoism in Punjab sparked an unexpected turn towards French structuralism in the early 1970s. These new attempts to rejuvenate Marxism produced novel engagements with both French thinkers (Greimas, Barthes, and Hjemslev), as well as Sikh and Sufi writings.

Speaker 6 (Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan), our chair, is a distinguished professor of literary and cultural studies with numerous publications on topics ranging across critical theory, diaspora, and (trans)nationalism.  With his subtle sense of the relevance of location in and beyond different theoretical paradigms, he is especially well-poised to serve as the main interlocutor for this roundtable.

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