Pramod K. Nayar - Writing Wrongs: The Cultural Construction of Human Rights in India

The Cultural Construction of Human Rights in India

Pramod K. Nayar

First published 2012 in India

by Routledge

912 Tolstoy House, 1517 Tolstoy Marg, Connaught Place, New Delhi 110 001

Simultaneously published in the UK

by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2012 Pramod K. Nayar

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-415-52908-2

W riting Wrongs instantiates the cultural turn in contemporary Human Rights studies globally. It is an exercise in literary-cultural studies that examines the cultural apparatus of Human Rights in India. It assumes that Human Rights need to be studied not only within the domains of political theory or juridico-legal discourses, where it seems to have a natural habitation, but within the cultural domain as well. It suggests that a culture of Human Rights emerges and is visible through the circulation of discourses of victimage, oppression and suffering, in the form of autobiography, memoirs, reportage and media coverage, documentaries and creative works. The cultural apparatus of Human Rights is the set of social and cultural factors, texts and responses to those texts, through which a society or a nation comes to awareness and activism about Human Rights a process this book terms the cultural construction of Human Rights. The cultural apparatus is the entry of the language and discourses of Human Rights into the everyday and the popular. It refers to the narrative interventions in existing discourses with the insertion of new identities (victims), contexts (casteism, racism), economies (suffering) into popular and public discourses of the nation India to produce a rights imaginary and a rights literacy.

The aim here is not to deny the role of juridical, legal and institutional structures like the courts, tribunals or the state in creating the urgent apparatus for safeguarding the Human Rights of as many individuals as possible. Rather, my aim is to show how the subject or person of Human Rights campaigns and discourses are anticipated and prepared for in the cultural texts that surround us. The cultural texts of Human Rights constitute a documentation of a subjects violations. They also disturb, even subvert, the texts and textual apparatuses through which victims of Human Rights violations are, or can be, (re)presented. This book is a study, therefore, of a public culture of documenting, reflecting on and circulation of narratives whose very presence and readership institutes the Human Rights moment for and in any civil society. It marks, I hope, a step towards what Michael Rothberg has called supplement[ing] the fascination of the everyday in cultural studies with a reminder of the need to confront extremity (Rothberg 2000: 8), or rather, by showing how the extreme, where rights are constantly violated, sits adjacent to the everyday in contemporary Indian public culture.

Sophia McClennen and Joseph Slaughter have expressed a concern that human rights begin to lose their institutional force as the founding ideals of a polity when they become a free-floating discourse of social satisfaction and goodwill (2009: 2). McClennen and Slaughters cautionary note that human rights might become indistinguishable from consumer rights (ibid.: 2), is salutary. However, Slaughter himself in his ground-breaking work Human Rights, Inc. (2007) had argued a strong case for the cultural foundations of Human Rights moving across fiction and UN documents to prove his point. Writing Wrongs, likewise, suggests that a public culture of Human Rights has a key role to play in revitalizing civil society, and its institutions. As I shall demonstrate in , this culture of Human Rights can contribute towards the making of a recursive public through the formation of a narrative society that understands itself, and therefore hopes/strives to reflect on and reorganize itself, through narratives. This book is therefore a study of narratives that produce and constitute such a culture of Human Rights. It offers an ethics of reading, of literary and cultural analysis, even as it calls for a narrativizing a putting into narrative of atrocity, violation, abuse and Human Rights. It initiates a certain ethical reading of these cultural texts in which a rights imaginary can be put to work.

A note on the genres and media examined in this book is in order. I have used for my study autobiography, reportage, documentary films, literary fiction, memoirs and poetry produced by individuals whose chief (stated or unstated) project is to document atrocity and the denial of rights. This elision of generic and media boundaries is deliberate. Through such a cross-genre approach establishing a functional equivalence between genres and media, I hope to trace the contours of the culture of Human Rights. I am unfaithful to the law of genre or translation because the intention here is to trace the figure of the Human Rights subject across public cultures many forms.

I hope Writing Wrongs underscores, in its modest way, the need for an ethical turn to literary-cultural studies and a cultural turn to Human Rights studies.

PKN

Hyderabad, July 2011

T his book has been some years in the making, and has accumulated audiences, advisors, commentators and support-systems in many places. It is a privilege to thank them, with the proviso that any shortfalls here are entirely of my own making.

My parents and parents-in-law continue to be a source of encouragement and support even as they offer polite suggestions about breaks and relaxation. Nandini and Pranav, the latter with multiple charts and projects, Ben10 and Transformers, ensure that I am not completely lost in the groves of academia (where the wild things are). Nandinis consistency, affection and care, and boundless energy for everything smoothens life in the study. To these immediate locations and environs I owe much gratitude to their many gifts, blessings, prayers and affections I remain indebted.

The arguments found their incipient enunciations at various places. I have been privileged with some warm and truly incisive respondents at these talks: Miriamne Krummel, Amy Anderson and Akhila Ramnarayan at the University of Dayton, OH, USA, 2008 (a trip facilitated by the India Foundation and its incredible Harish Trivedi, the Indian Council for Cultural Relations and the University of Dayton); Rod Edmond, Caroline Rooney, Donna Landry at the Dept. of English, University of Kent at Canterbury, 2008; Alan Lester at the University of Sussex at Brighton; Colin Harrison, Joe Moran and Elspeth Graham of Liverpool John Moores University (I should also express my thanks to LJMU for inviting me as Visiting Professor in 2008). Parts of were delivered as a Plenary talk titled The Postcolonial