NLS Faculty Seminar | Three Genres of India at the Limit: The Obsolete, The Ruinous, The Unfinished

In this week’s faculty seminar, Dr. Atreyee Majumder, Associate Professor, Social Science, NLSIU and Kundan Sen, Senior Writing Instructor, Undergraduate Writing Programme, Ashoka University, presented their essay titled “Three Genres of India at the Limit: The Obsolete, The Ruinous, The Unfinished.” The seminar was held on April 9, 2025, at 3:45 pm, in the Ground Floor Conference Hall at NLSIU’s Training Centre.

Abstract

This essay studies India as a conceptual limit. Taking contemporary India as its starting point, it asks: what is the India-concept? We go to some limit-zones to find the answer. To analyse its location at the limit-zones of a concept, we focus on those narratives that develop when the vantage point is from the margins and not the dominant centres of the Indian experience. This essay posits that the India-concept can be understood through three distinct genres: the obsolete, the ruinous, and the unfinished. The obsolete unpacks India in its becoming-modern condition as constant acts of moving out of and maneuvering at the peripheries of circuits of value and motion. The ruinous looks at genres of living and being that are completely out-of-sync with dominant forms of living and being and attendant hierarchies of values. The unfinished looks at those futures that were never heralded, within the larger embrace of neoliberal modernity, but remain within horizons of expectation for groups of people. Collectively, these three genres, we argue, give us a sense of the limit-zones of the dominant versions of the India-concept.

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