Description
This book discusses the epistemic foundation of the heuristic construct ‘vagabond’ and the convergence between the politics of itinerancy and that of dissent in the context of South Asia.
It describes the fraught relationship between ‘native’ itinerant practices and techniques of governmentality which have furnished different categorizations and taxonomies of mobility. The book demonstrates the historical seismic breaks – from the Orientalist to the post-Orientalist, from the premodern to the modern, and from the colonial to the post-colonial – in the representation of the vagabond in the juridico-political imagination, in historiography and cultural articulation. For instance, the drunk European sailor, the quasi-religious mendicant, and the helpless famine refugee have all been referred to as ‘vagabonds’ in the colonial archive. This book examines the histories and conditions behind these conceptual overlaps, as well as the uncanny associations among categories that uneasily coexist and mirror each other as subsets of a vast range of phenomena, which may loosely be called ‘vagabond(age)’.
This volume will be of interest to students and researchers of literature, cultural studies, colonial and post-colonial studies, history, migration studies, sociology, and South Asia studies.
Table of Contents
List of Figures and Illustrations. Acknowledgements. 1. Introduction Part I: The Rupture(s) in the Non-West 2. Sacralizing the Vagabond: The Pre-History 3. Colonial Bengal and the Case of Mimicry 4. Insurgent Vagabond: The Postcolonial Turn Part II: Imag(in)ing the Vagabond: Virulent Mobility in Post-Colonial Times 5. Demographics and Territoriality 6. Picturing the Vagrant: Resurrecting from the Abyss of Proscription 7. Itinerancy as a Critique of Development Part III: Literarizing the Vagabond: Towards a Radical Theory of Wandering 8. The Politics of Orientalism and Pitfalls of Scripto-centricism 9. The Chimeral Face of History: Buddhist Subversion Reconsidered 10. Postcolonial Literature: The Return of the Repressed 11. Epilogue Index.
