In this powerful, compassionate work, one of anthropology’s most distinguished ethnographers weaves together rich fieldwork with a compelling critical analysis in a book that will surely make a ...signal contribution to contemporary thinking about violence and how it affects everyday life. Veena Das examines case studies including the extreme violence of the Partition of India in 1947 and the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 after the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In a major departure from much anthropological inquiry, Das asks how this violence has entered "the recesses of the ordinary" instead of viewing it as an interruption of life to which we simply bear witness. Das engages with anthropological work on collective violence, rumor, sectarian conflict, new kinship, and state and bureaucracy as she embarks on a wide-ranging exploration of the relations among violence, gender, and subjectivity. Weaving anthropological and philosophical reflections on the ordinary into her analysis, Das points toward a new way of interpreting violence in societies and cultures around the globe. The book will be indispensable reading across disciplinary boundaries as we strive to better understand violence, especially as it is perpetrated against women.
This innovative study explores the interface between nation-building and refugee rehabilitation in post-partition India. Relying on archival records and oral histories, Uditi Sen analyses official ...policy towards Hindu refugees from eastern Pakistan to reveal a pan-Indian governmentality of rehabilitation. This governmentality emerged in the Andaman Islands, where Bengali refugees were recast as pioneering settlers. Not all refugees, however, were willing or able to live up to this top-down vision of productive citizenship. Their reminiscences reveal divergent negotiations of rehabilitation 'from below'. Educated refugees from dominant castes mobilised their social and cultural capital to build urban 'squatters' colonies', while poor Dalit refugees had to perform the role of agricultural pioneers to access aid. Policies of rehabilitation marginalised single and widowed women by treating them as 'permanent liabilities'. These rich case studies dramatically expand our understanding of popular politics and everyday citizenship in post-partition India.
Unruly hills Karlsson, Bengt G
2011., 20110515, 2011, 2011-05-23, 20110101
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The questions that inspired this study are central to contemporary research within environmental anthropology, political ecology, and environmental history: How does the introduction of a modern, ...capitalist, resource regime affect the livelihood of indigenous peoples? Can sustainable resource management be achieved in a situation of radical commodification> of land and other aspects of nature? Focusing on conflicts relating to forest management, mining, and land rights, the author offers an insightful account of present-day challenges for indigenous people to accommodate aspirations for ethnic sovereignty and development.
As a thriving port city, nineteenth-century Bombay attracted migrants from across India and beyond. Nile Green's Bombay Islam traces the ties between industrialization, imperialism and the production ...of religion to show how Muslim migration fueled demand for a wide range of religious suppliers, as Christian missionaries competed with Muslim religious entrepreneurs for a stake in the new market. Enabled by a colonial policy of non-intervention in religious affairs, and powered by steam travel and vernacular printing, Bombay's Islamic productions were exported as far as South Africa and Iran. Connecting histories of religion, labour and globalization, the book examines the role of ordinary people - mill hands and merchants - in shaping the demand that drove the market. By drawing on hagiographies, travelogues, doctrinal works, and poems in Persian, Urdu and Arabic, Bombay Islam unravels a vernacular modernity that saw people from across the Indian Ocean drawn into Bombay's industrial economy of enchantment.
Based on extensive fieldwork in Calcutta, this book provides the first ethnography of how middle-class women in India understand and experience economic change through transformations of family life. ...It explores their ideas, practices and experiences of marriage, childbirth, reproductive change and their children's education, and addresses the impact that globalization is having on the new middle classes in Asia more generally from a domestic perspective. By focusing on maternity, the book explores subjective understandings of the way intimate relationships and the family are affected by India's liberalization policies and the neo-liberal ideologies that accompany through an analysis of often competing ideologies and multiple practices. And by drawing attention to women's agency as wives, mothers and grandmothers within these new frameworks, Domestic Goddesses discusses the experiences of different age groups affected by these changes. Through a careful analysis of women's narratives, the domestic sphere is shown to represent the key site for the remaking of Indian middle-class citizens in a global world.
Interest in Shi'a Islam has increased greatly in recent years, although Shi'ism in the Indian subcontinent has remained largely underexplored. Focusing on the influential Shi'a minority of Lucknow ...and the United Provinces, a region that was largely under Shi'a rule until 1856, this book traces the history of Indian Shi'ism through the colonial period toward independence in 1947. Drawing on a range of new sources, including religious writing, polemical literature and clerical biography, it assesses seminal developments including the growth of Shi'a religious activism, madrasa education, missionary activity, ritual innovation and the politicization of the Shi'a community. As a consequence of these significant religious and social transformations, a Shi'a sectarian identity developed that existed in separation from rather than in interaction with its Sunni counterparts. In this way the painful birth of modern sectarianism was initiated, the consequences of which are very much alive in South Asia today.
This book examines the reasons behind the Great Divergence. Kaveh Yazdani analyzes India's socio-economic, techno-scientific, military, political and institutional developments. The focus is on ...Gujarat between the 17th and early 19th centuries and Mysore during the second half of the 18th century.
An uncertain glory Drèze, Jean; Sen, Amartya
2013, 2013., 20130811, 2013-08-11
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When India became independent in 1947 after two centuries of colonial rule, it immediately adopted a firmly democratic political system, with multiple parties, freedom of speech, and extensive ...political rights. The famines of the British era disappeared, and steady economic growth replaced the economic stagnation of the Raj. The growth of the Indian economy quickened further over the last three decades and became the second fastest among large economies. Despite a recent dip, it is still one of the highest in the world. Maintaining rapid as well as environmentally sustainable growth remains an important and achievable goal for India. In An Uncertain Glory, two of India's leading economists argue that the country's main problems lie in the lack of attention paid to the essential needs of the people, especially of the poor, and often of women. There have been major failures both to foster participatory growth and to make good use of the public resources generated by economic growth to enhance people's living conditions. There is also a continued inadequacy of social services such as schooling and medical care as well as of physical services such as safe water, electricity, drainage, transportation, and sanitation. In the long run, even the feasibility of high economic growth is threatened by the underdevelopment of social and physical infrastructure and the neglect of human capabilities, in contrast with the Asian approach of simultaneous pursuit of economic growth and human development, as pioneered by Japan, South Korea, and China. In a democratic system, which India has great reason to value, addressing these failures requires not only significant policy rethinking by the government, but also a clearer public understanding of the abysmal extent of social and economic deprivations in the country. The deep inequalities in Indian society tend to constrict public discussion, confining it largely to the lives and concerns of the relatively affluent. (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ".
Calcutta has one of the largest Anglo-Indian populations in the world. This is a community with members who occupy a wide range of socio-economic positions and who live a variety of lives that are ...always nuanced by their being Anglo-Indian. However, the community has been conveniently stereotyped by the media. Christmas in Calcutta goes beyond the stereotype and delves deep in this study of the Anglo-Indian community in Calcutta.
The book comprises life stories, memoir pieces and essays on issues of contemporary interest. It is organised into four sections: 'Identity' focuses on the origins, characteristics and the constitutional definition of the community; 'Faith', or specifically the practice of Christianity, is the subject of study in the second section; 'Education' points out some of the failings of the education system for the community; and the final section, 'Community Care', talks about Anglo-Indian care and the consolidation of their community through this care.
By drawing on the vital lives of real individuals, the author hopes that there is a change to the lens through which these people of India are viewed.
This examination of the state of Hyderabad challenges the idea of the dominant British Raj as the sole sovereign power in the late colonial period. It redefines the nature of political sovereignty in ...the era of colonialism, and identifies the close relationship between Muslim rule and political modernity.
