Mosaic of Narrative Manipulations-Power and Production of Subjectivity in (Post) Colonial India

Power and Production of Subjectivity in (Post) Colonial India Mukesh Srivastava The central argument of (his essay relates to the rise of a cultural interpretative community and vision of history as they got inextricably woven with, and enabled, the institutional and academic innovations in Bengal at the end of the 18th century. This crucial hegemonic move was characterised by a transition away from mere mercantile or despotic to a strategic and 'benevolent' articulation of power via knowledge. The intellectual disciplines that arose in the new colonial space were specialised ones in which the human subject was collapsed into swarming detail. Later, the subject was acted upon by the new disciplines to acquire the rules of the details most naturally and thus to make them both docile and functional. From these disciplines evolved a diffuse, highly elastic, apparatus of cultural and ideological formation in India. The enunciative strengths of such an apparatus have only gained new dimensions in the post-colonial phase, as the anxiety to wed culture with the concept of a nation has grown enormously in recent times.