BIC TALKS - 110. The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality

110. The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality

04/13/21 • 47 min

Rahul Rao, scholar and author of Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality, in conversation with writer Kavya Murthy talks about the inheritance that the former colonies are living with and how they have managed to warp and expand the imperialist biases and criminalisation of the Queer community.

Primarily examining three locations - India, Uganda and Britain - the relationship between the state and interaction with the international position, Culpability of colonial powers, current trans lives conditions in India and the responses of the UN and other international bodies, Out of Time ties together the aspects of Race, caste, class and human rights in the struggle for queer identity rights across centuries in the past and the future.

Rahul Rao has research interests in international relations theory, the international relations of South Asia, comparative political thought, and gender and sexuality.

Kavya Murthy is a writer, editor and content strategist for digital platforms and curates books and events for Champaca Bookstores.

Rahul Rao has research interests in international relations theory, the international relations of South Asia, comparative political thought, and gender and sexuality.

Kavya Murthy is a writer, editor and content strategist for digital platforms and curates books and events for Champaca Bookstores.

Previous Episode

109. India’s Violent Borderlands

Suchitra Vijayan, author of Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India, talks about what propelled her to travel 9,000 miles along India’s borderlands. In conversation with Vaibhav Vats, Vijayan recounts her reportage along India’s tenuous boundaries with Bangladesh, Myanmar, China and - most contentious of all – Pakistan. The conversation delves into the nature of borders, the peculiar origins of India’s demarcations and the fractured, founding history that underpins the Indian nation-state. Vijayan and Vats also muse on how the violence on the peripheries slowly permeates inwards, as raging conflicts over citizenship and identity - once an issue confined largely to the borderlands - have moved to the centre of the Indian body politic.

Suchitra Vijayan is an award-winning photographer, the founder and executive director of the Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organisation. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. A Barrister by training, she previously worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before co-founding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, which gives legal aid to Iraqi refugees.

Vaibhav Vats is an independent writer and journalist. His work has appeared in the New York Times and Al Jazeera, among other publications. He is working on a book on Hindu nationalism and the making of India’s Second Republic.

Next Episode

111. Innovating Government

In this episode Vivek Wadhwa author, academic, entrepreneur explores the ideas in his book 'From Incremental to Exponential: How Large Companies Can See the Future and Rethink Innovation' in a conversation with Dr. Srivatsa Krishna, IAS and Secretary CEO of Coffee Board of India.

Ray Kurzweil of Singularity University has predicted that for the first time in human history, we are entering the “Exponential Era”. We are going to experience 20,000 years of technological change in the next 100 years- from the birth of agriculture to the birth of the Internet, twice, in the next century. We are living in the times when flying taxis, autonomous vehicles, robots as personal valets, reusable rockets are all happening in front of our eyes, most of them ready for prime time.

For the first time there is not only Moore’s Law like acceleration in several technologies but also convergence among them. How will these impact governments? Can they remain immune to change or will this lead to more innovating governments? How must governments in India and elsewhere leverage these technologies to serve better? How do we move from 'Incremental to Exponential' in governance?

The original live event was in collaboration with the IAS Officers Association.