Jyotirmaya Tripathy
Biographic Data
| ID | 643710 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jyotirmaya Tripathy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jyotirmaya |
| FAMILY NAME | Tripathy |
| SIGNATURE | TRIPATHY J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Indian Institute of Technology Madras |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6387-0001 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
In Love with the City: Aesthetics, Belonging and Development in the Wall Murals of Bhubaneswar
Indian urban planning is not merely dependent on visual solidity and awe-inspiring infrastructure but also on aesthetically pleasing spaces that offer alternative ideas of city as geographies of contemplation and affection. In their effort to create a narrative of belonging, city corporations across India create cultural and developmental art to engineer a reflective and forward-looking city. This article draws from the wall murals of Bhubaneswar…
The Developmental Desire: The Crucible of Masculinity, from Nehru to Modi
The recent boom in critical literature engaging with the development/masculinity nexus in contemporary India requires unpacking and further critique, not to over-emphasize the need for a grounded understanding of that dyad. India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi are brought to conversation over their developmental thought vis-à-vis their masculinities and the way they reflected and guided peop…
Between People and the State: The Ambivalence of Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellowship in India
The Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellowship (PMRDF), a flagship programme of the Ministry of Rural Development to facilitate development programme delivery in districts affected by Maoist violence, was introduced in 2011 and suspended in 2014. Though in a state of limbo at present, PMRDF created a complex template where binaries such as state/people, top-down/participatory and security/development were transcended and new ways of belonging …
Development Science: Linking Postcoloniality and Indian Institutes of Technology
Post-independence Indian science as a medium of national development offers an opportunity to engage with the West beyond the straightjacket of domination and subordination. This ambivalence is reflected in the conception and materialisation of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), established under the guidance of Western powers to strengthen India’s technological progress. Being delivered from the West, IITs created conditions of sameness and…
Picturing Development: Outdoor Campaign Materials during the 2019 General Election in India
The paper engages with the world of outdoor election campaign materials (posters, banners and billboards) and their ways of establishing developmental truths during India’s general election of 2019. Offering a content analysis as well as their discursive production, the paper seeks to understand how these materials commissioned by the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are loaded with development metaphors even while diffe…
India's Experiment with Community Development: Revisiting the State and Community
Development in postcolonial India remains a contested terrain where competing approaches are negotiated and operationalized. From the early days of independence, development discourse in India carried elements of Nehruvian impulse of state-led technocratic development as well as people-centric community development primarily influenced by the Gandhian notion of the village economy. The present paper aims at engaging with this Indian development c…
Development Modernity in India, an Incomplete Project: From Nehru to Modi
Modernity as a set of attitudes based on reason, or as the cultivation of scientific temper, was informed by the imperative of development in a postcolonial state like India. Alongside the rise of democracy, there was the pressing need for removing poverty and ensuring fulfilment of basic needs for the common people. It is in this sphere of addressing poverty and underdevelopment that India became modern in a very material and substantive sense. …
Namma Chennai: The Dravidian City and Its Others in Tirumurti’s Fiction 1
Tirumurti’s novels are haunted by the specter of non-Dravidian others (Brahmins, Hindi speakers and North Indians) who lurk in the margins of plot development and contribute to the production of Chennai’s difference. The authorial investment on their claims and legitimacy is selectively ambivalent, ranging from internalization of Dravidian ideology to open interrogation of the same. To traverse that uneven trajectory, the author develops a framew…
Between Madras and Chennai: Narratives of belonging in a postcolonial city
Fictional narratives on Chennai, after its official conversion from Madras in 1996, offer an intriguing register for exploring ways of belonging. Using a postcolonial framework, the paper closely scrutinizes T. S. Tirumurti’s Clive Avenue and Chennaivaasi (and some other authors invested in Chennai’s contemporary culture) and subjects them to critique as sites of meaning making. An effort is made to explore how these narratives respond to the new…
Development Against Violence: Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellowship (PMRDF) in India
This article advances the literature on development vis-à-vis Naxal violence in India by using the Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellowship (PMRDF) as a site of developmental meaning making. In the process, it reappraises the idea of the development state, its relation with violence, and its ways of vernacularizing itself through PMRDF. Drawing from the experience of three PMRD Fellows from West Bengal and interrogating existing scholarship …
Consuming Indigeneity: Baba Ramdev, Patanjali Ayurveda and the Swadeshi Project of Development
How does the discourse of indigeneity converse with the imperatives of economic and cultural globalization in a postcolonial state like India? The complexity of the question and the possibility of multi-layered responses become all the more intriguing when such a discourse is promoted by Ramdev, a yoga guru turned entrepreneur. Responding to the question, the article focuses on the role of tradition in normative development thought and its mainst…
Development as Urban Imaginary: Post-colonial Planning and Heteroglossic Cities of India
Contemporary India’s tryst with development continues to revolve around cities, and the latter remain the locus of India’s development narrative. But instead of seeing the city as already constituted or as a backdrop for economic activities, the present article proposes to implicate the city as a producer and product of social relations as well as a site of resistance and conformity. While doing so, it moves away from conventional modernist parad…
The development language: BPL category and the poverty discourse in contemporary India
The paper highlights the complex relationship between development and language and argues that poverty as a condition of underdevelopment is materialized in representation. Instead of limiting the scope of the topic to the rhetorical aspects of development thought, it is proposed that development language produces a specific reality of poverty while writing about it. Using a post-structuralist framework and drawing from various Planning Commissio…
The Making of Culture in Contemporary Indian Environmental Movements
This paper is about the making of culture, its problematic relation with national and global discourses on development, but more than anything else, the shifting nature of what we call culture and the place of development in it. It offers a critique of both the modernist framework, which sees culture as development's other as well as the post-development tendency to exaggerate local cultures as the space of genuine development. Instead, it makes …
Development as biopolitics: Food security and the contemporary Indian experience
Development is concerned with the biological security and well-being of people, and so all development theory and practice are biopolitical in a fundamental sense. The paper argues that for development to be made meaningful, it needs to legitimate itself through the production of healthy bodies, which can be realized through food security, immunization drives, and housing schemes among others. A postcolonial democratic state like India makes an e…
Biopolitics, torture, and the making of the terrorist: An essay on un-moderning
The paper explores the production of ideal political life within modernity and offers a critique of the modern security state which transforms antinational individuals to the condition of bare life. Since the nation-state is believed to be a modern formation, the unification of political rationality and the national subject is seen as a necessary project of the nation-state to create patriotic citizens out of individuals. It is for this reason th…
Does Development Exist outside Representation
Drawing from the insights of post-structuralism, the essay questions the ontology of underdevelopment existing prior to its representation and locates the idea of development within discourse. Since language constructs reality within a signifying system, the problem of underdevelopment is a product of particular cultural experiences and is not innocent of power. By weaving objective narratives of evolution and progress, development discourse succ…
What is a terrorist
Taking issue with the commonsensical understanding of terrorism as an anti-modern formation, the present article proposes to locate terrorism in the broad framework of statism, its collusion with power and the creation of knowledge on which popular consciousness is grounded. This approach helps in demystifying the problem of terrorism and implicates the state in the creation of terrorism discourse. Seen thus, terrorism is less a tangible object o…
How gendered is Gender and Development? Culture, masculinity, and gender difference
Gender studies in general, and Gender and Development (GAD) in particular, through their belief in a cultural conditioning of gender behaviour, use the idea of ‘culture’ in a restrictive sense which perpetuates a conceptual difference between men and women, and also between First World and Third World women. There is a tendency among gender experts to magnify the difference between men and women, and categorise them into two radically different r…
Territory and Identity: The Indian Experience
Consuming Indigeneity: Baba Ramdev, Patanjali Ayurveda and the Swadeshi Project of Development
How does the discourse of indigeneity converse with the imperatives of economic and cultural globalization in a postcolonial state like India? The complexity of the question and the possibility of multi-layered responses become all the more intriguing when such a discourse is promoted by Ramdev, a yoga guru turned entrepreneur. Responding to the question, the article focuses on the role of tradition in normative development thought and its mainst…
Development as biopolitics: Food security and the contemporary Indian experience
Development is concerned with the biological security and well-being of people, and so all development theory and practice are biopolitical in a fundamental sense. The paper argues that for development to be made meaningful, it needs to legitimate itself through the production of healthy bodies, which can be realized through food security, immunization drives, and housing schemes among others. A postcolonial democratic state like India makes an e…
Does Development Exist outside Representation
Drawing from the insights of post-structuralism, the essay questions the ontology of underdevelopment existing prior to its representation and locates the idea of development within discourse. Since language constructs reality within a signifying system, the problem of underdevelopment is a product of particular cultural experiences and is not innocent of power. By weaving objective narratives of evolution and progress, development discourse succ…
Picturing Development: Outdoor Campaign Materials during the 2019 General Election in India
The paper engages with the world of outdoor election campaign materials (posters, banners and billboards) and their ways of establishing developmental truths during India’s general election of 2019. Offering a content analysis as well as their discursive production, the paper seeks to understand how these materials commissioned by the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are loaded with development metaphors even while diffe…
The Making of Culture in Contemporary Indian Environmental Movements
This paper is about the making of culture, its problematic relation with national and global discourses on development, but more than anything else, the shifting nature of what we call culture and the place of development in it. It offers a critique of both the modernist framework, which sees culture as development's other as well as the post-development tendency to exaggerate local cultures as the space of genuine development. Instead, it makes …
Territory and Identity: The Indian Experience
What is a terrorist
Taking issue with the commonsensical understanding of terrorism as an anti-modern formation, the present article proposes to locate terrorism in the broad framework of statism, its collusion with power and the creation of knowledge on which popular consciousness is grounded. This approach helps in demystifying the problem of terrorism and implicates the state in the creation of terrorism discourse. Seen thus, terrorism is less a tangible object o…
How gendered is Gender and Development? Culture, masculinity, and gender difference
Gender studies in general, and Gender and Development (GAD) in particular, through their belief in a cultural conditioning of gender behaviour, use the idea of ‘culture’ in a restrictive sense which perpetuates a conceptual difference between men and women, and also between First World and Third World women. There is a tendency among gender experts to magnify the difference between men and women, and categorise them into two radically different r…
Does Development Exist outside Representation
Drawing from the insights of post-structuralism, the essay questions the ontology of underdevelopment existing prior to its representation and locates the idea of development within discourse. Since language constructs reality within a signifying system, the problem of underdevelopment is a product of particular cultural experiences and is not innocent of power. By weaving objective narratives of evolution and progress, development discourse succ…
Biopolitics, torture, and the making of the terrorist: An essay on un-moderning
The paper explores the production of ideal political life within modernity and offers a critique of the modern security state which transforms antinational individuals to the condition of bare life. Since the nation-state is believed to be a modern formation, the unification of political rationality and the national subject is seen as a necessary project of the nation-state to create patriotic citizens out of individuals. It is for this reason th…
The development language: BPL category and the poverty discourse in contemporary India
The paper highlights the complex relationship between development and language and argues that poverty as a condition of underdevelopment is materialized in representation. Instead of limiting the scope of the topic to the rhetorical aspects of development thought, it is proposed that development language produces a specific reality of poverty while writing about it. Using a post-structuralist framework and drawing from various Planning Commissio…
The Making of Culture in Contemporary Indian Environmental Movements
This paper is about the making of culture, its problematic relation with national and global discourses on development, but more than anything else, the shifting nature of what we call culture and the place of development in it. It offers a critique of both the modernist framework, which sees culture as development's other as well as the post-development tendency to exaggerate local cultures as the space of genuine development. Instead, it makes …
Development as biopolitics: Food security and the contemporary Indian experience
Development is concerned with the biological security and well-being of people, and so all development theory and practice are biopolitical in a fundamental sense. The paper argues that for development to be made meaningful, it needs to legitimate itself through the production of healthy bodies, which can be realized through food security, immunization drives, and housing schemes among others. A postcolonial democratic state like India makes an e…
Development as Urban Imaginary: Post-colonial Planning and Heteroglossic Cities of India
Contemporary India’s tryst with development continues to revolve around cities, and the latter remain the locus of India’s development narrative. But instead of seeing the city as already constituted or as a backdrop for economic activities, the present article proposes to implicate the city as a producer and product of social relations as well as a site of resistance and conformity. While doing so, it moves away from conventional modernist parad…
Consuming Indigeneity: Baba Ramdev, Patanjali Ayurveda and the Swadeshi Project of Development
How does the discourse of indigeneity converse with the imperatives of economic and cultural globalization in a postcolonial state like India? The complexity of the question and the possibility of multi-layered responses become all the more intriguing when such a discourse is promoted by Ramdev, a yoga guru turned entrepreneur. Responding to the question, the article focuses on the role of tradition in normative development thought and its mainst…
Development Against Violence: Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellowship (PMRDF) in India
This article advances the literature on development vis-à-vis Naxal violence in India by using the Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellowship (PMRDF) as a site of developmental meaning making. In the process, it reappraises the idea of the development state, its relation with violence, and its ways of vernacularizing itself through PMRDF. Drawing from the experience of three PMRD Fellows from West Bengal and interrogating existing scholarship …
Development Modernity in India, an Incomplete Project: From Nehru to Modi
Modernity as a set of attitudes based on reason, or as the cultivation of scientific temper, was informed by the imperative of development in a postcolonial state like India. Alongside the rise of democracy, there was the pressing need for removing poverty and ensuring fulfilment of basic needs for the common people. It is in this sphere of addressing poverty and underdevelopment that India became modern in a very material and substantive sense. …
Namma Chennai: The Dravidian City and Its Others in Tirumurti’s Fiction 1
Tirumurti’s novels are haunted by the specter of non-Dravidian others (Brahmins, Hindi speakers and North Indians) who lurk in the margins of plot development and contribute to the production of Chennai’s difference. The authorial investment on their claims and legitimacy is selectively ambivalent, ranging from internalization of Dravidian ideology to open interrogation of the same. To traverse that uneven trajectory, the author develops a framew…
Between Madras and Chennai: Narratives of belonging in a postcolonial city
Fictional narratives on Chennai, after its official conversion from Madras in 1996, offer an intriguing register for exploring ways of belonging. Using a postcolonial framework, the paper closely scrutinizes T. S. Tirumurti’s Clive Avenue and Chennaivaasi (and some other authors invested in Chennai’s contemporary culture) and subjects them to critique as sites of meaning making. An effort is made to explore how these narratives respond to the new…
Between People and the State: The Ambivalence of Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellowship in India
The Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellowship (PMRDF), a flagship programme of the Ministry of Rural Development to facilitate development programme delivery in districts affected by Maoist violence, was introduced in 2011 and suspended in 2014. Though in a state of limbo at present, PMRDF created a complex template where binaries such as state/people, top-down/participatory and security/development were transcended and new ways of belonging …
Development Science: Linking Postcoloniality and Indian Institutes of Technology
Post-independence Indian science as a medium of national development offers an opportunity to engage with the West beyond the straightjacket of domination and subordination. This ambivalence is reflected in the conception and materialisation of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), established under the guidance of Western powers to strengthen India’s technological progress. Being delivered from the West, IITs created conditions of sameness and…
Picturing Development: Outdoor Campaign Materials during the 2019 General Election in India
The paper engages with the world of outdoor election campaign materials (posters, banners and billboards) and their ways of establishing developmental truths during India’s general election of 2019. Offering a content analysis as well as their discursive production, the paper seeks to understand how these materials commissioned by the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are loaded with development metaphors even while diffe…
India's Experiment with Community Development: Revisiting the State and Community
Development in postcolonial India remains a contested terrain where competing approaches are negotiated and operationalized. From the early days of independence, development discourse in India carried elements of Nehruvian impulse of state-led technocratic development as well as people-centric community development primarily influenced by the Gandhian notion of the village economy. The present paper aims at engaging with this Indian development c…
The Developmental Desire: The Crucible of Masculinity, from Nehru to Modi
The recent boom in critical literature engaging with the development/masculinity nexus in contemporary India requires unpacking and further critique, not to over-emphasize the need for a grounded understanding of that dyad. India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi are brought to conversation over their developmental thought vis-à-vis their masculinities and the way they reflected and guided peop…
In Love with the City: Aesthetics, Belonging and Development in the Wall Murals of Bhubaneswar
Indian urban planning is not merely dependent on visual solidity and awe-inspiring infrastructure but also on aesthetically pleasing spaces that offer alternative ideas of city as geographies of contemplation and affection. In their effort to create a narrative of belonging, city corporations across India create cultural and developmental art to engineer a reflective and forward-looking city. This article draws from the wall murals of Bhubaneswar…
Political science (19 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Politics (14 works) · Law (12 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works)