The Good Fight

Professor Nikita Dhawan speaks on the ‘Role of violence and non-violence in the struggle for independence’ - a conversation with Professor Swati Ganguly, as part of the Nabanna Earth Weekend 2022.

© TU Dresden

Nikita Dhawan holds the Chair in Political Theory and History of Ideas at the Technical University Dresden. Her research and teaching focuses on global justice, human rights, democracy and decolonization. She received the Käthe Leichter Award in 2017 for outstanding achievements in the pursuit of women’s and gender studies and in support of the women’s movement and the achievement of gender equality. She has held visiting fellowships at Universidad de Costa Rica; Institute for International Law and the Humanities, The University of Melbourne, Australia; Program of Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley, USA; University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain; Pusan National University, South Korea; Columbia University, New York, USA. Selected publications include: Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and Violence (2007); Decolonizing Enlightenment: Transnational Justice, Human Rights and Democracy in a Postcolonial World (ed., 2014); Global Justice and Desire: Queering Economy (co-ed., 2015); Negotiating Normativity: Postcolonial Appropriations, Contestations and Transformations (co-ed., 2016), Difference that makes no Difference: The Non-Performativity of Intersectionality and Diversity (ed., 2017); Reimagining the State: Theoretical Challenges and Transformative Possibilities (ed., 2019); Rescuing the Enlightenment from the Europeans: Critical Theories of Decolonization (forthcoming).

Swati Ganguly is Professor of English in the Visva-Bharati University. Her areas of interest include the culture of the Renaissance, feminist theory and fiction, translation studies, theatre and Rabindranath Tagore. A recipient of the Charles Wallace Fellowship for Translation Studies in 1996, she was translator in residence at the University of East Anglia, UK. She has translated and co-edited The Stream Within:  Short Stories by Contemporary Bengali Women (1999) and is the co-editor of the Rabindranath Tagore and the Nation (2011) and a commemorative volume Towards Tagore (2014). She was awarded the New India Foundation Fellowship (2012) and her book Tagore’s University: An idea and an Institution (1921-1961) is forthcoming. 

Nabanna Earth Weekend (NEW) is a free, open-access, nonprofit bilingual festival of literature, arts and ideas, with sessions in both English and Bengali, held every year in Santiniketan. In 2019 the first edition of this weekend festival coincided with the inauguration of the annual Nabanna mela, held around the time of Holi, the community festival celebrating renewal, colour and camaraderie.

NEW expands the scope of Nabanna to include a weekend festival of arts and ideas featuring writers and artists, cultural and creative thinkers. All creative fields are included, for a rich cross pollination of ideas, from traditional crafts, arts and literature, to contemporary design, cuisine and food cultures, sustainability and environmental concerns.