A two-day conference hosted by the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay, to bring together scholars engaged in identifying and examining the histories of the cultural practices of the political Left in modern India.

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The mainstream communist parties in India have been generative of and have relied on debates and practices in the realm of art and imagination. The work of theatre groups and practitioners, writers, filmmakers, visual artists, creative producers, cultural theorists—sometimes directly affiliated to Communist parties, sometimes ‘independent’—has provided a crucial ground for it. While there has been some attention to such practices in the context of Bengal and Kerala, as well as some recent interest in transnational networks, a rich archive of such initiatives in other parts of India remains to be discussed, translated, or even discovered for a larger academic discussion. The Left has also fostered cultures of being, belonging, working, mobilising, and politicising through many labour and protest movements, trade unions, associations, familial and interpersonal networks and relationships: these in turn have enabled, provoked, and inflected artistic expressions. The discursive field of the political Left in India has also been an embattled one with critiques from within as from the outside. These critiques from other formal political formations, including from Dalit, feminist, minority and sexuality positions or movements, have often taken artistic forms worth serious attention.

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Cultures of the Political Left is a step forward to open up the academic inquiry into a wider field that seeks to examine various cultural practices as ones of reiteration, refusal and debate; it seeks to bring these dispersed and divergent strands in conversation with each other. Existing scholarship has worked predominantly within the rubrics of the national, the regional, or the global. This conference, while engaging with these analytical frames, also hopes to complicate and transform them in order to attend to the intensely transactional nature of these formations.

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