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| 1 |
ID:
097135
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2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article considers the politics of urban belonging for a religious minority, Brahmos, in Kolkata, India, through the contradictory notions of cultural particularism and cosmopolitanism. In his concept of 'Cosmopolitan Patriotism', Kwame Appiah argues attachment to a home, 'with its own cultural particularities', can co-exist with 'taking pleasure from the presence of other different places that are home to other different people'. By building on Appiah's situated cosmopolitanism I analyse Brahmo attachments to the city of Kolkata, through the particularism of the middle-class Bengali city and its conceptual other, the cosmopolitan, classless, fraternal city. But rather than representing these local and global affiliations as disjunctive, I explore how such belongings can co-exist and destabilise.
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| 2 |
ID:
097133
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2010.
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This paper applies the 'bank rent' approach to understanding the development of the banking system in Bangladesh since its independence. The paper uses the financial restraint model as an analytical framework and argues that there still remains room for creating bank rents in order to change the current dreary performance of the banking system. The paper unearths a varied level of high nominal lending rates, high nominal spreads and too low or negative real spreads as per different clusters of banks both in the pre-liberalized and liberalized regime, and concludes that this persistent varied performance is largely the outcome of a high amount of non-performing loans, inefficiencies in managing credit risks, and fragmentation and distorted competition in the banking system. This varied level of performance of the banking clusters also results from the government's intervention in the activities of nationalized commercial banks and specialized banks for mediating credits to priority sectors at a subsidized rate. The paper suggests that a more coordinated use of monetary and fiscal policies is required with a view to creating appropriate rents for banks for redressing their current dismal performance.
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| 3 |
ID:
097139
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2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The books reviewed here deal with issues that are integral to the global problem of citizenship and its conceptual flow in time and space. Although not explicitly political, they point towards the difficulty of achieving liberal citizenship in illiberal societies where mass mobilization has often led to the decline of modernity and liberal institutions. Is it possible for people whose identities are radically different to share a common space to which they feel morally committed, without having to dissolve their differences? The stories of the rise and fall of 'heartlands' in Uttar Pradesh, struggling Christian minorities in Pakistan, and ownership of the Taj Mahal, a revered and much loved Islamic shrine in a primarily Hindu society, share this question in common. This new research agenda that these books generate has the potential for the construction of an indigenous and hybrid citizenship, and the reconfiguration of power under a different form of institutions and rules with no fixed, narrow, empirical referents, akin to the sense of belonging that visitors to the noble Taj celebrate, even though ever so fleetingly.
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| 4 |
ID:
097130
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2010.
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India's role is seen as crucial for the long-term stability of Afghanistan, and India realizes that a stable, prosperous and democratic Afghanistan is also in its strategic interests. This article examines the trends in India's ties with Afghanistan in the past few years and argues that, driven by its growing regional and global ambitions, India is following a multi-pronged strategy in Afghanistan. A range of factors are propelling India towards an unusually proactive policy towards Afghanistan, and the success of India's Afghanistan policy will go a long way in determining whether India will be able to emerge as a provider of regional security in South Asia. First, a very brief historical overview of India-Afghanistan relations is followed by the delineation of trends in this bilateral relationship. Subsequently, an analysis of Indian strategic interests in Afghanistan is presented and placed in the broader regional strategic context.
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| 5 |
ID:
097134
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2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Kalari is an arena that imparts a whole body of knowledge in Kerala, south India, including kalarippayattu (martial arts). In recent times, these centers have been exclusively referred to as cultural performance centers, corroding the intrinsic value and diluting the religious essence of such places and praxis. This essay explores kalari and kalarippayattu from a Hindu religious perspective and suggests that kalari and kalarippayattu embody the celestial and terrestrial in its spatial and corporeal representations. Divided into two sections, the essay first discusses some historical background of kalari and kalarippayattu traditions; and, secondly, from a bhakti perspective it examines kalari and kalarippayattu, proposing it to be a nexus of the celestial, corporeal, and terrestrial.
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| 6 |
ID:
097137
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2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper presents results on the participation of rural workers in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme based on a pilot survey of three villages in the Chittoor district, Andhra Pradesh (AP), India. These villages are Kaligiri, Obulayyapale and Reddivaripalle, and they were surveyed in December 2007. In contrast to an earlier study of ours on Rajasthan, Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) participated in higher numbers in AP, but in both states these groups participated for slightly lower spells than the residual group of 'Others'. We find that AP performed better than Rajasthan in terms of targeting poorer caste and income groups such as SCs, STs and landless households. The number of days worked on average was much higher than suggested by other assessments. Our econometric analysis further reinforces the view that disadvantaged groups are not only more likely to participate but also for longer spells. Thus the performance of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme has been far from dismal.
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