Talk:Amrita Dhar

By Renuka Joshi

Amrita Dhar is an assistant professor at Ohio State University. She teaches courses on topics such as - early modern literature, disability studies, critical race and postcolonial studies, migration studies, and the environmental humanities. According to her university profile, she engages in modern English literature, disability studies, poetry, poetics and world mountaineering literature according to her bio she has published papers on Invention of race, Caste in India. She states that ' quote ' in which she portrays India as intolerant and submissive towards caste based discrimination with unsubstantiated statements.

In 2021, she endorsed the "Dismantling Global Hindutva" conference and made the allegation

"the current government of India [in 2021] has instituted discriminatory policies including beef bans, restrictions on religious conversion and interfaith weddings, and the introduction of religious discrimination into India’s citizenship laws. The result has been a horrifying rise in religious and caste-based violence, including hate crimes, lynchings, and rapes directed against Muslims, non-conforming Dalits, Sikhs, Christians, adivasis and other dissident Hindus. Women of these communities are especially targeted. Meanwhile, the government has used every tool of harassment and intimidation to muzzle dissent. Dozens of student activists and human rights defenders are currently languishing in jail indefinitely without due process under repressive anti-terrorism laws."

Publications related to India

1. Dhar, Amrita. “Confessions of the Half-Caste, or Wheeling Strangers of Here and Everywhere,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, vol. 11, no. 2, 2020, pp. 212-219

   Amrita Dhar compares and contrasts the movie "Omkara" by Vishal Bharadwaj with the seventeenth century play "Othellos" by Shakespeare focusing on a subset of elements and characters. In her analysis, she

   • Invents a caste discrimination narrative and overlays it onto “Omkara”
   • Categorizes the characters from the film into privileged and unprivileged based on surnames without any background evidence from the movie, instead relying on her prejudices
   • Makes uncorroborated reference to the meaning and roots of the word “daiwa” used in the movie.
   • She makes the unsubstantiated claims with no justification or relevance to the topic at hand -"The word ‘daitwa,’ close to the word ‘asura,’ is frequently used in many Sanskritic languages to refer to lower-caste men, who aresimultaneously seen to be morally and physically ugly and undesirable, yet hypersexualised."
   • “Hindu majority still works hard to keep the country’s lower castes ‘in their place’ – this is unsurprising.”
   • “To massive sections of the Indian subcontinent and beyond, Dalit bahujan lives still do not matter. Most privileged-caste individuals remain complicit within a careful ‘Project of Unseeing’ whereby caste-based discrimination is so normalized as to be invisible and therefore unremarkable.”

2. Dhar, Amrita. “Food and Literature of the Himalayan Heights.” The Writer’s Feast: Food and the Cultures of Representation, edited by Supriya Chaudhuri and Rimi B. Chatterjee. Orient BlackSwan, 2011, pp. 206-22.
3. Dhar, Amrita. “On Teaching Im/Migration in an Undergraduate Classroom,” Radical Teacher, vol. 120, 2021, pp. 61-68 (open access).