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| 1 |
ID:
090338
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Film permeates all spheres of Tamil Nadu social life extending into the domains of state governance and political discourse. Every chief minister since the 1960s and many prominent politicians, for instance, have previously been film actors, directors or screen writers. Many Tamil politicians, therefore, use film as a propaganda tool, as well as utilising their own fan club membership as potential election vote banks. Focusing on the fan club network of one prominent Tamil politician, the veteran actor Vijayakanth, the article investigates this link between politics and film culture. It argues that social theorists analysing this social phenomenon focus too much attention on the propaganda function of film texts rather than examining actual embodied social relationships within the interrelated arenas of film culture and politics. Consequently, this focus overlooks fans' political agency. Countering this perspective, the article argues that, in fact, Tamil film star fan clubs provide important social spaces for fans' participation in the democratic political process, even though these spaces are hierarchically structured and function to contain youthful exuberance.
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| 2 |
ID:
090340
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Until the 1970s, Sri Lanka was often seen as a model for a third world democratic welfare state. However, its image as a model of development and democracy has been rapidly and severely tarnished over the 1980s and the 1990s. Recently, a number of studies have attempted to explain the reasons for Sri Lanka's fall from grace. According to these studies, Sri Lanka's recent history of underachievement and economic crisis can be attributed to the country's 25-year-old war, policy mistakes, an inefficient large public sector, and poor governance. In this study, I propose to argue that the erosion of 'productive' social capital has also played an important role in the sorry tale of development in Sri Lanka. To this end I investigate how its accumulated stocks of productive social capital have been eroded.
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| 3 |
ID:
090339
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2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The familiar dichotomies 'modern and traditional', 'public and private', and 'secular and religious' have long been considered self-evident analytical categories in the social sciences. In recent years, however, an academic paradigm shift, together with the influence of post-colonial theories, has led many to question such binaries in an attempt to go beyond and dissolve them. The following examination of local practices within a South Asian culture in the context of modernity and globalisation takes this approach. The first section is a retrospective look at twentieth-century historical discourses about family systems among Muslims in South India. The second part analyses recent changes in cultural practices within the same group, focusing on the impact that migration and 'Islamisation' have had on gender relations over the past three or four decades. By 'Islamisation' I do not mean a fixed ideology, but a changing perception that strengthens religious and cultural values among people who consider themselves Muslims.
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| 4 |
ID:
090336
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Riddles need not necessarily be couched in mysterious terms and pose a conundrum with Sphinxian undertones. At times even a traditional saying can pose an enigma, raising questions that have no ready answers. In Sanskrit there is a traditional exhortation handed down over generations urging us to invoke five maidens at dawn who are celebrated as pratahsmaraniya (remembered every dawn, auspicious)
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| 5 |
ID:
090337
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Lucknow occupies a particularly poignant place in the musical imagination of North India. A city with a proud cultural history, Lucknow in the first half of the nineteenth century nurtured an explosion of innovations in vocal music, instrumental music and dance whose effects were felt well beyond the Awadh region. Memories of this sublime period of creativity are still today capable of evoking a potent sense of nostalgia amongst connoisseurs. That such memories so passionately endure is testimony to the special place that the arts occupied in the life of that city when it was the capital of a kingdom.
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