Ravinder Kaur

University of Copenhagen, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, Faculty Member

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Ravinder Kaur is Associate Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen where she also directs the Centre of Global South Asian Studies. She is currently engaged in two long-term research projects. The first focuses on post-reform India’s transition into an attractive ‘emerging market’ in the global political economy, and second, explores the yet unfolding connections between Asia and Africa via a study of new business connections between India, China and Ghana. Her previous research focused on the questions of forced migration, refugee resettlement, social class and caste and the making of modern citizenship during India’s Partition in 1947.
Her publications include Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi (Oxford, 2007), editor of Religion, Violence and Political Mobilization in South Asia (Sage, 2005), and co-editor of ‘Governing Difference: Identity, Inequity and Inequality in India and China’, Special Issue, Third World Quarterly (2012). Her most recent publication is a co-edited special issue of Identities entitled ‘Aesthetics of Arrival: Spectacle, Capital and Novelty in post-reform India’ (2015).
Kaur works across the disciplines of history, anthropology and international politics. She is the Primary Investigator of two major projects ‘Nation in Motion: Globalization, Governance and Development in New India’ (2010-2015) and ‘Emerging Worlds: Explorations of New South-South Connections’ (2014-2018).

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World History/Archives/Futures by Ravinder Kaur

The Ukraine question: How should the South respond

International Politics , 2023

The global south appears to be moving, this time from the margins of history to the centerstage w... more The global south appears to be moving, this time from the margins of history to the centerstage where the future is being rehearsed. Take a look at the new colorcoded world map–green, red, and yellow–that has begun taking shape since Putin launched his “special military operation” in Ukraine. In this palette of geopolitics, green stands for nations that voted in favor of the UN resolutions against Russian aggression, red for those who opposed, and yellow for abstentions. To no one’s surprise, the areas marked red include Russia and a handful of allies whereas the green covers “the West” and allies. In contrast, the sizeable yellow mostly signals nations across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These colors by no means neatly coincide
with the mid-twentieth century taxonomies of the old first, second, and third worlds. And nor have they developed fixed positions on the Ukraine question. In the first three months of the war, nations like Kenya, Cambodia, and Mexico among others traversed the green and yellow spectrum, whereas China or Kyrgyzstan moved from yellow to red. In doing so, this fluid territory has emerged as an unlikely arbiter of power, an influential referee in the latest edition of the “new world order” in the making.

Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in Twenty-First-Century India (August 2020)

Stanford University Press , 2020

The early 21st century was an optimistic moment of global futures-making. The chief narrative was... more The early 21st century was an optimistic moment of global futures-making. The chief narrative was the emergence of the BRIC nations, branded afresh as resource-rich hubs of untapped talent and potential, "opened up" for foreign investments. The tantalizing promise of economic growth also offered utopian visions of "good times", and even restoration of lost glory to the nation's citizens. Brand New Nation reaches into the past as well as the future of this phenomenon. It discloses the on-the-ground experience of the relentless transformation of the nation-state into an attractive investment destination for speculative global capital. Ravinder Kaur provocatively argues that to be deemed an attractive nation-brand in the global economy today is to be affirmed as a proper nation. The infusion of capital produces investment-fueled nationalism, a populist force that can be turned into an instrument of coercion. Grounded in the history of modern India, the book reveals the close kinship between identity economy and identity politics, publicity and populism, and violence and economic growth.

The Market Hunters: Corporate Masculinity and the Art of Opening the Economy

Tasveer Ghar, 2020

Headlined ‘Modi’s India: The illusion of reform’, the image is difficult to dismiss.2 What makes ... more Headlined ‘Modi’s India: The illusion of reform’, the image is difficult to dismiss.2 What makes it especially compelling is its appearance on the cover of The Economist, a weekly newspaper dedicated to liberal economy and politics, with an extensive global reach. How are we to read this image? What do the ideas of masculinity or emasculation mean in this setting? Who or what precisely has caused this emasculation to occur? What are we to make of the wild beast and its relationship with the human astride it? Or, of the fact that both appear to be immobilized, even powerless, unable to undertake any action? More importantly, what function does the journal that hosts the image play in this power dynamic? These questions are at the heart of this enquiry which sets out to examine the art of the opening up of the ‘frontiers’ of global capitalism, an art form that emerges upon a specific convergence of capitalist logics and fine arts in the production of the world economy. What we witness here is the constant fear that lurks underneath the display of hyper-masculinity: the fear of being emasculated, of being permanently bypassed by global capital.

World as Commodity: Or, How the Third World became an Emerging Market

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2018

When and how did the third world transform into an emerging market in the global economy? Kaur ad... more When and how did the third world transform into an emerging market in the global economy? Kaur addresses this ongoing reinscription of the old third world as market, unpacking new modes of imagination and knowledge at the heart of this historical shift. She argues that if the quest for valuable commodities led to the discovery of the new world in an earlier age, the early twenty-first century is characterized by the rediscovery of that familiar world along the speculative index of untapped national enclaves—signaling potentiality and accessibility—rapidly opening up across continents. The world-as-commodity captures and encloses entire territories to be transformed into branded sites of unlimited commodification and exchange and actualize the capitalist dream of unending growth. A world grasped and imagined in commodity form is what eventually can be put at the disposal of investors. Dressed up as branded commodities, third world nations become visible as attractive investment destinations in the global publicity. The article takes the spectacular Brand India exhibition at the World Economic Forum, Davos, as an example of how the commodification of the nation-form is performed, and how cultural difference is harnessed and co-opted in the service of global capital.

The People's State: Rethinking Popular Politics in the early Twenty-First Century

by Ravinder Kaur and Nayanika Mathur

Over the past two decades, a rich scholarship has emerged around the "everyday state" as an analy... more Over the past two decades, a rich scholarship has emerged around the "everyday state" as an analytical category of social and political life. Grounded in the disciplines of anthropology, political science, sociology, legal studies, and development studies, this body of work turned focus on bureaucracy, documents, corruption, communal violence, police operations, and legal practices to show how the ordinary and the extraordinary events shaped the structures and language of state authority. What underpinned this approach was the idea that state power is not pre-constituted, it is established through routine and banality as well as spectacular performance of its authority in the public sphere. This insight is critical, more so in the current moment when the established structures of governance-national and global-are said to be rendered fragile, even weakened by the rise of "the people" as a political force. The category of "the people" has always been a force in modern democratic politics, but what is telling in the contemporary discourse is how older categories are redeployed in the early 21 st century in unanticipated ways. Taking the current anxieties about the return of "the people" and the impending breakdown of democratic structures as our focal point, we set out to rethink concepts of the state, the political, governance, and the economy in relation to 21 st century political subjectivities. The workshop is an invitation to trace the past and the present, and indeed speculate on the future, of politics and political subjectivities. We ask whether the focus on the everyday state has inadvertently ended up overlooking the larger dynamics of politics? What kind of landscape is being produced upon the intersections between Politics (with a big P) and the idea of the people? How might disciplines such as anthropology and political theory or law and history intersect to produce new understandings of the state? How might the very category of "the people" be expanded by not just going back in history or by looking at subaltern populations but, also, in the context of the Anthropocene might we open it out to incorporate the nonhuman? How might concepts of authoritarianism or populism be productively applied and modified to understand the Indian state? The workshop will bring together scholars across disciplines of history, anthropology, political science, and political economy to rethink these questions from a variety of vantage points in South Asia and Europe.

World as Commodity: Or, How the Third World became an Emerging Market

Writing History in a Paperless World: Archives of the Future

The rapid expansion of the seemingly limitless digital universe invites us to rethink the questio... more The rapid expansion of the seemingly limitless digital universe invites us to rethink the question of archives. If information in the time of high-speed Internet connectivity is easily produced, searched, circulated and consumed, it is as easily deleted and effaced from the public domain too. The digital content (especially user-generated) on blogs, websites, and social media platforms is both plentiful – often expressed as ‘information overload’ – and fragile; it risks perishing almost as fast as it is produced. The historians of the future seeking to write the history of the early twenty-first century will be faced with this problematic. While one approach is to seek technological solutions toward storing the digital content, another is to reconsider what the very notion of past might mean in the age of acceleration. The past is produced rapidly as every passing moment is buried under fresh layers of information and news almost every second on multiple media. This article considers the challenges of writing the history of the vanishing present.

Covid-19 Pandemic by Ravinder Kaur

The Goddess and the Virus

The Pandemic: Perspectives on Asia , 2020

This essay explores the viral art of twenty-first-century pandemic politics in India. Grounded in... more This essay explores the viral art of twenty-first-century pandemic politics in India. Grounded in the world’s “harshest” lockdown, the essay traces the hyper-nationalist battle against the virus with and through images on the twin fronts of health and economy. A key figure in this viral warfare is the familiar Bharat Mata/Mother India, but this time transformed into a disease devi entrusted with the task of protecting the nation from the contagion. The new goddess differs from her previous incarnations as indeed from Hinduism’s more conventional disease divinities: she is neither a reservoir of the contagion nor does she offer a cure. The contagion itself is located outside the body of the goddess, external to the national borders in the form of “China virus” and internal as Muslim “super spreader,” that she sets out to vanquish. What becomes visible here is the making of the political agency of the virus and its divine vanquisher, both visually reconfigured to wage a modern viral warfare to safeguard health and the economic wellbeing of the nation. We conclude by considering some images of dissent and solidarity with those who have been disadvantaged and distanced.

New India - Post-reform histories by Ravinder Kaur

Brand New Nation 2020 TOC

A Note to the Reader Brand New Nation is the long history of India's transformation into an emerg... more A Note to the Reader Brand New Nation is the long history of India's transformation into an emerging market in the twenty-first-century. It shows how India has become an enclosure of capital and Indian hyper-nationalism a force fueled upon capital investment flows. Far from being a counter-force against free-market globalization, the twenty-first-century nationalism is deeply entwined with the promise of capitalist growth. India itself has become a business enterprise, one that desires to be the "factory of the world": its lifeblood the dreamworlds of "India growth story" and the majoritarian quest of recovering a mythical Hindu golden past. The introduction "Futures Market" lays out the historical roots of the capitalist enclosures of the twenty-first-century. Those not inclined towards theoretical discussions can skip pages 15-33 (see TOC below) to directly open the section called "The Nation Branders" which profiles the makers of Brand India. The subsequent section "Notes on Gate-Crashing" deals with Davos and the fieldwork among the elite policymakers, ad-executives, bureaucrats, and the billionaires. The Book Plan The book unfolds not in a chronological order but in a thematic one; each chapter is a step in the making of the brand new nation. The introduction presents the logic and form of the brand-new nation, and the subsequent chapters are a journey into the investment-fueled nationalist politics that brought this form alive. It is not a teleological reading of the twenty-first-century nation-state. Instead, the chapters offer insights into the hopes and anxieties, contradictions and failures, and speculations and unanticipated outcomes that have refashioned the nation as a branded investment destination. In addition to the introduction, the book is composed of six further chapters arranged in three thematic parts. The first part deals with the affective and bureaucratic designs of the dreamworlds of New India. Chapter 2-Economy of Hope-looks at the moment that the economy opened up and the accompanying affective-material entanglements, which produce what I call the economy of hope in the postcolony. Here I lay out the making of Brand India as a bureaucratic operation that sells hope in and optimism about India's economic potential to global investors. The logic of Brand India is harnessed to a collective dream of realizing the nation's great destiny through economic success-its rejuvenation via capital infusion. I trace the long history of newness and the many incarnations of New India, of which the twenty-first-century investment-destination model is the most recent iteration. Chapter 3-Remixing History-turns to the political-aesthetic project of remixing history to produce a distinct ancient modern identity: a seductive polychromous package of global hypertechnology and ancient civilizational culture. The spectacular imagery of India produced in the Incredible India megacampaign is at the heart of this inquiry. Produced under the sign of Incredible India at the beginning of the third millennium, an entire iconography of beautiful, digitally enhanced images came into being, a desirable photo album of how New India wanted to be

Aesthetics of Arrival: Spectacle, Capital, Novelty in post-reform India (co-author: Thomas Blom Hansen)

Identities: Global Studies in Power and Culture, 2015

India's celebrated 'arrival on the global stage' as a desirable 'emerging market' for global inve... more India's celebrated 'arrival on the global stage' as a desirable 'emerging market' for global investors signals the spectacular moment that is said to have ruptured the barriers between the first and third worlds. If the notion of arrival anticipates the long-awaited acceleration in the pace of history, it also harnesses a euphoric India to the limitless future promised by the new. In this special issue, we set our focus on the aesthetics of arrival that signal novelty, visibility and celebration of post-reform India within and outside the nation. We ask how novelty is manufactured and experienced when the majority of the population remains excluded from new India. The answer probably lies in the way in which this other India is signified as the past, as 'old India' that holds back the nation. The novelty, we propose, is not only experienced in the promise of the future, but also in the aesthetic force of the promise to overcome a humiliating past, tainted by colonialism, in order to realise a truer and more timeless 'new' India

'I am India Shining' : Investor-Citizen and the Indelible Icon of Good Times

Journal of Asian Studies , 2016

This paper addresses the highly publicized failure of the spectacular 'India Shining' mega-public... more This paper addresses the highly publicized failure of the spectacular 'India Shining' mega-publicity campaign (2003-4). This state sponsored campaign aimed to communicate the success of 1990s economic reforms in transforming India from an aid-recipient developing nation to a lucrative 'emerging market' in the global economy. Instead of 'uplifting' the mood of the nation, it brought to surface the underlying acrimony and exclusion experienced by a vast majority of the population. Reading the controversy against the grain, I argue that far from being a failure, the mega-campaign actually boosted the flagging economic reforms project. I argue that the discourse of failure is built upon a popular conflation of the 2004 electoral defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party with that of the neoliberal project of economic reforms itself. I show how the India Shining images helped popularize the reforms at an unprecedented mass scale that until then had largely been limited to elite policy debates and reform packages. And how the public discontent accrued from one's exclusion from the 'good times' ushered by the reforms, and not reforms per se. The controversy allows us to witness the making of a new form of 'investor-citizenship' shaped around the language and logic of loss/profits. The very edifice of failure, in fact, makes apparent the shift to a capitalist dream world and the withering away of the old order.

The Innovative Indian: Common Man and the Politics of Jugaad Culture

The idea of jugaad, or frugal innovation, has gained wide popularity within policy circles and bu... more The idea of jugaad, or frugal innovation, has gained wide popularity within policy circles and business schools as a breakthrough formula – from a quick-fix solution grown in adverse conditions to a six-point business principle – for economic growth generation. I argue that the new jugaad innovation narrative offers an uplifting, potentially emancipatory discourse of mobility in a setting where even after two decades of economic reforms wealth gap and poverty stubbornly persists. Central to this shift are two processes. First, a dramatic re-signification of the aam aadmi, within a new conceptual scaffolding of India in relation to modern science and technology where the ability to innovate is portrayed as a natural gift, a deeply ingrained collective Indian trait that even the unlettered common man possesses. Second, the conditions of adversity and absence of public services for Indian citizens is turned on its head to position India as an ideal laboratory condition within which a culture of innovation takes birth. In short, jugaad enables dramatic transformation of what was once considered unchanging, static and immobile mass into a source of innovation, inspiration and ultimately socioeconomic mobility.

Snakes and Ladders: Rethinking Social Mobility in Post-reform India (co-author: Nandini Sundar)

The question of social mobility in a terrain of increasing inequality has gained particular urgen... more The question of social mobility in a terrain of increasing inequality has gained particular urgency in post-reform India. We approach social mobility not as a one-way ascent toward the top, rather as a risk-laden enterprise prone to fluctuations that include both incremental gains and the possibility of sliding downwards. We argue that to 'move up the ladder' is not merely a matter of individual choice or hard work in the face of odds as free-market believers have long held. It is as much an outcome of collective political bargaining, privileges that dominant class and caste status affords, access to resources, and indeed, occasional luck. Two propositions follow. First, we suggest that the state remains albeit as a reluctant enabler of social mobility in the age of markets. Second, the participation in the new economy hinges also upon one's ability to 'dress up' for the part, to be able to craft one's look as if one belonged to spaces – work or leisure – that one desires to inhabit. The work of appearances, we suggest, does not operate at individual levels alone, it also encompasses the nation's spectacular projection of itself in the global political economy.

Good Times, Brought to you by Brand Modi

Television & New Media2015, Vol. 16(4) 323 –330© The Author(s) 2015Reprints and permissions:s... more Television & New Media2015, Vol. 16(4) 323 –330© The Author(s) 2015Reprints and permissions:sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1527476415575492tvn.sagepub.com
Special issue: Modi and the Media: Indian Politics and Electoral Aftermath
Good Times, Brought to You by Brand Modi
Ravinder Kaur
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Abstract
The impending arrival of the long awaited “good times” emerged as a powerful meme in the 2014 general elections in India. The vague but exhilarating promise of good times was not only translated into catchy campaign slogans but also acquired its own fast-circulating hashtags, domain names, and strong everyday presence on social media. In this article, I open up the notion of good times through an account of #acchedin and locate it within the longer trajectory of neoliberal economic reforms. I ask what good times might even mean in a nation that has transformed itself fully into commodity-form to become an attractive investment destination for global investors. The newly crafted Brand Modi, the natural inheritor and prime agent of 1990s Brand India, now works in tandem in anticipation of the long awaited, and ever elusive, transformative epochal threshold of good times ahead.

Post-exotic India: On Remixed Histories and Smart Images

This paper examines the aesthetics of remixing history at the heart of the neoliberal project of ... more This paper examines the aesthetics of remixing history at the heart of the neoliberal project of India's image makeover as the 'land of limitless opportunity' for global tourists and investors. I argue that the project of remixing India's history is predicated upon the ontological fault line of how to retain and erase the original simultaneously while shaping the new in the contemporary global. Taking the Incredible India campaign as an example, I show how the original essence of India is revealed and authenticated in the very moment of its disappearance as it is morphed in the aesthetics of the contemporary global. The post-exotic self, I further argue, is not produced by effacing the exotic past, but by condensing, accelerating and fast-forwarding it into a timeless, infinite global present. And in doing so, it also reveals the blueprint of the ongoing visual rearrangement of nation's civilisational past in the making of new India.

Aesthetics of Arrival: Spectacle, Capital, Novelty in Post-reform India - Table of Contents

This special issue addresses the moment when India was said to have ‘arrived on the global stage’... more This special issue addresses the moment when India was said to have ‘arrived on the global stage’1 adorned, crafted and repackaged as the seductive ‘India Story’ in the eyes of the world. The India Story – shorthand for prosperous, techno-friendly, enterprising, middle-class beneficiaries of the gains of economic reforms in ‘new India’ – signals the spectacular event of transformation that seemingly ruptured the barriers between the first and third worlds. India was not only spoken of as a desirable ‘emerging market’ but also a ‘rising power’ that had seemingly joined the high table of global politics in a dramatic upset of established power hierarchies. The event conjures the long-awaited acceleration in the pace of history recalling what Reinhart Koselleck (2004) designated the ‘epochal threshold’ that marked the temporal shift into modernity (neuzeit). The German term Neuzeit (new time) captures this sense of a time ‘completely other, even better than what has gone before’ (2004, 233) perceived to be an unstoppable force heralding the new. The ‘now’ or the eternal present in this imaginary reoriented towards a limitless future could hence be relocated within the horizons of expectation and hope.2 The very sign of India was now no longer representative of deprivation and dystopian collapse, but a signifier of a new world of affluence, enterprise, techno-mobility, consumption and fresh market opportunities that an economically stagnant Western world is in search of. Thus re-signified, the ‘new’ India seemed to have arrived on the global stage, propelled by a breathless rhetoric of ascent, escalation and acceleration. To use Dipesh Chakrabarty’s memorable phrase, India finally appeared to be moving out of the ‘waiting room of history’ (2000) as if on its maiden journey to seek afresh fortune, recognition and destiny in a world that had long denied it its rightful due.

Remains of Difference: New Imaginaries of Otherness in Post-Reform India

Interrogating India's Modernity: Democracy, Identity, Citizenship, Nov 2014

Governing Difference in India and China: an introduction

by Ravinder Kaur and Ayo Wahlberg

Third World Quarterly, May 2012

Writing History in a Paperless World: Archives of the Future

Nation's Two Bodies: the idea of 'new' India and its other

Third World Quarterly, May 2012

The idea of a post-1990s re-formed India is shaped by animaginary of a fractured body of the na... more The idea of a post-1990s re-formed India is shaped by animaginary of a fractured body of the nation—a ‘new’ nation in tune with theneoliberal desires of a structurally adjusted world and the ‘old’ nation con-stitutive of superﬂuous matter in excess of that seductive world. This imaginaryis not only etched in popular discourses but also in the policy-making apparatusengaged in the task of creating a global identity for India. Taking the Brand India initiative—promoted by the Indian state to produce positive images of thenation for global publicity—as a case study, this article argues that in this shift from nation building to nation branding, the very idea of prosperity and equityhas now become ﬁrst and foremost a matter of image. In this world of images,one can also witness how a competitive strategy to seek more corporateinvestments through concerted brand campaigns has redeﬁned the relationshipbetween the nation and corporations. While earlier it was the corporationswhich sought the endorsement and patronage of the sovereign, now it issovereign nations which are seeking to become the most ‘favoured investment destinations’ that purvey global capital

Ravinder Kaur

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World History/Archives/Futures by Ravinder Kaur

Covid-19 Pandemic by Ravinder Kaur

New India - Post-reform histories by Ravinder Kaur

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