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Please join the Asian Studies department for “Small-unit technics” for an “Anti-Revolutionary” World: Rammanohar Lohia, Asian Socialism, and Postcolonial Democracy, a talk by Dr. Niharika Yadav, Berg Postdoctoral Fellow at Macalester. 

THDA 202, 4:45pm on Thursday, November 7. Refreshments.

In this talk, Dr. Yadav will trace the ‘small-unit technics’ as a leitmotif that runs across the Indian socialist Rammanohar Lohia's post-war writings and speeches. Upon the edifice of this technology, Lohia advocated an ambitious program: a critique of Marx’s account of capitalist development, a theory of imperialism, a vision of non-western (Asian) socialism and a model of economic and political progress that denounced both American and Soviet teleologies.  In Lohia we see the coming together of two powerful conjunctures: the “third worldism” of the 1950s and critiques of imperialism and capitalist development of the 1960s and 1970s. As argued in this talk, the tensions within the visions of these moments also play out in the friction between Lohia’s national and world-making ambitions. By rewriting the global history of capitalist development from the perspective of formerly colonized Asian societies, Lohia advanced a compelling argument for the small-unit technics as the basis of a new socialist civilization. His plans collapsed however, in their career as “democratic socialism” in postcolonial India.  

Niharika Yadav a historian of political life in twentieth century South Asia, investigating the literary, political, and economic genealogies of socialist ideas and practices. On abroader scale, her work concerns global histories of democracy and socialism in the 20th century. Yadav’s current book project, Languages of Socialism: Caste and Democracy in Postcolonial India, 1930-1960, examines how a range of actors in the Marathi and Hindi language public spheres translated and reimagined a global political language of “democratic socialism” into new forms—as social theory, literary aesthetic, and mass movement. Before coming to Macalester, she completed a Ph.D. in History at Princeton University and an M.Phil. in History at the University of Delhi.