Of Nomadology and India(n-ness)

Avishek Ray will explore how the dichotomy between the ‘good’ wanderer and the ‘bad’ wanderer in the ‘Indian tradition’ was premised upon a highly contingent process of religio-political partisanship and struggles over territorialisation. He will argue that the impulse to assume that nomadicity as a ‘radical’ practice articulating political dissidence and the figure of the ‘nomad’ as the prototype of a non-conformist, affective subject have perpetually existed in the ‘Indian’ cultural repertoire – for example, think of the nineteenth-century Orientalist claims on the origin of the Romani community, or for that matter, the Beats’ obsession with ‘India’ – is symbolic of an essentialist notion of ‘India’.