New Books In Communications

How do affective sites such as memorials and statues produce political visions, emotions, and opportunities? And how are they used strategically to further particular political projects? In this episode, we discuss these questions with Rahul Ranjan with specific reference to his new book The Political Life of Memory: Birsa Munda in Contemporary India (Cambridge UP, 2023). The book engages these issues by examining representations of Birsa Munda’s political life and the making of anticolonialism in contemporary Jharkhand. By highlighting contrasting features of political imaginations deployed in developing memorial landscapes, Ranjan shows how both the state and Adivasi use memory as a political tool to lay claims to the past of the Birsa Movement. Rahul Ranjan is an interdisciplinary scholar with a key interest in environmental anthropology and humanities, political ecology and social justice. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway. Kenneth Bo Nielsen is an