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| 1 |
ID:
135829
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper examines how the poor female borrowers of Grameen Bank microcredit in rural Bangladesh sought to fight social marginalisation through the production of domestic space. Impoverished women used meagre housing loans from Bangladesh's micro-lending bank to replace their climatically vulnerable and poverty-stricken mud huts with ‘modern’ houses made of such durable materials as tin and reinforced concrete columns. But did these enterprising women's pursuit of a strong shelter lead to a higher quality of life and social empowerment? This paper contends that an analysis of a poor entrepreneur's use of microcredit to build a durable house as a pre-condition for social well-being calls into question development economics' conventional emphasis on economic growth as the key indicator of social advancement.
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| 2 |
ID:
135836
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In 2003, I published Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, a book in which I reflected upon what I termed ‘unthinkable thoughts’. Such thoughts would be interpretive historical hypotheses that are so alien to popular cultural values that they become inconceivable, even when the evidence might point in their direction. In my case, once I expressed such thoughts, they produced not only a new eruption of defensive mechanisms to shore up the reputation of a venerated hero and all those values he symbolises, but also destabilised an historical discourse that had its own internal divisions. In Maharashtra, a small group of activists reacted to the unthinkable thoughts in my book and called for its ban, and the denunciation of that book became a hot button issue during India's national elections of 2004.
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ID:
135832
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This article analyses Bengali- and Hindi-language travelogues written by Indian railway travellers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the authors of these texts were influenced by the literary and interpretative sensibilities of European guidebooks of the period, especially English-language railway guides to India, they did not uncritically adopt their colonial discourses. Rather, Indian authors created a distinct narrative, rejecting or appropriating European ideas with discretion, primarily to suit their specific vision of India. I argue that in their writings, Indian authors, like their European counterparts, participated in a process of creating ‘others’, which had fundamental implications for the imagining of colonial Indian society.
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| 4 |
ID:
135831
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Indian diplomacy has often been accused of carrying a ‘moralising tone’. This article examines the roots of ideas of exceptionalism in Indian diplomacy, particularly those centring on India's moral leadership aspirations. By exploring the discourses, identities and institutions that shaped Indian diplomacy and diplomatic institutions in the decades before and after Independence, it shows how Indian diplomats drew lines of comparison between their nation and others, understood India's global standing, and conceived of special moral responsibilities for India in world politics. Since moral leadership aspirations persist as a component of Indian foreign policy today, a historical and institutional analysis of diplomatic self-understandings can be of contemporary relevance to scholars and practitioners seeking to understand India's increasingly influential global role.
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| 5 |
ID:
135830
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The recent murder of anti-superstition crusader Narendra Dabholkar highlighted competing discourses on the place of local healing shrines in contemporary India. While healing shrines are dismissed as regressive and exploitative sites by the rationalist movement, mental health discourses seek to either abolish them or utilise them in community psychiatry initiatives. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mahanubhav temples in western India, this paper argues that healing shrines are better seen as spaces of refuge for those in distress. Such a position moves away from the rationalist perspective, while also questioning the incorporation of such shrines in the (global) mental health agenda.
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| 6 |
ID:
135837
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It is rare indeed that ancient Indian history makes the news, but this is precisely what happened in February 2014. From The New York Times to The Guardian, from The Times of India to The Australian, media outlets all around the world reported that Wendy Doniger's book, The Hindus: An Alternative History, had been withdrawn from sale in India. The publisher, Penguin Books India, pulled the 800-page tome from the shelves in response to legal action brought by a conservative Hindu activist, Dinanath Batra. Four months later, a second book by Doniger, On Hinduism, also fell victim to India's citizen censors.
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| 7 |
ID:
135835
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The collection of essays included in this issue of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies deals with a subject that, in the early months of 2014, commanded public attention on two counts: firstly, the decision of Penguin India to remove from sale and pulp Wendy Doniger's book, The Hindus: An Alternative History; and secondly, the appointment of Professor Y.S. Rao to the chairmanship of the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR). Both events are related in that they were immediately connected in the minds of interested parties with the anticipated and then achieved victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the elections for the centre held in April and May 2014. Of these events, the first relates directly to the dissemination of scholarship in Social Sciences and Humanities as they apply to India, whereas the second concerns how this scholarship will be undertaken under the auspices of state funding. They are interrelated to the extent that they potentially embody a new paradigm in the study of Indian history and religion, one that could have implications outside India itself.
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| 8 |
ID:
135827
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Naṭaṉa Gopāla Nāyaki Svāmikaḷ (1843–1914), born Ramabadran, was a Vaiṣṇava poet, mystic and performer who belonged to the Saurashtra community of Madurai. Revered within his community as the ‘Saurashtra Āḻvār’ (poet-saint), he is arguably their most important literary and musical figure. Initially known only to his intimate circle of family, as Nāyaki Svāmikaḷ's fame spread, his simple devotional compositions (kīrttaṉai) written in Tamil and Saurashtra are purported to have attracted disciples from all classes and castes in Madurai. Today, Nāyaki Svāmikaḷ's fame is largely confined to the Saurashtra community of Madurai, although the annual celebration in December of his samādhi (death, final liberation) brings together both the Tamil and Saurashtra communities of Madurai. The samādhi (sacred sepulchre) just outside Madurai is the primary locus for his worship, where he is remembered through the daily performance of his kīrttaṉais. In this paper, I trace the making of a twentieth-century Hindu saint within a small, but visible, migrant minority community in South India along the intersecting vectors of his hagiography and the circulation and performance of his Tamil and Saurashtri kīrttaṉais. I argue that Nāyaki Svāmikaḷ's hagiography and music bring together the Saurashtra community of Madurai, while simultaneously seeking to broaden his appeal outside the spatial confines of Madurai.
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| 9 |
ID:
135828
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In this paper, I take marriage as the point of entry for exploring social alliances amongst an affluent cluster of the Bangladeshi middle class. Using semi-structured interviews, biographies, family histories, intergenerational data, matrimonial biodata, chat histories, group discussions and blogs, I traced marital genealogies from Bangladesh to Britain in order to understand the strength of their transnational network. I argue that homogamy has become instrumental for this class in consolidating its power as new networks are forged through marriage and in which women play a significant role. These alliances result in the conflation of different kinds of capital, generating a convergence of influence and access among individuals that transcends national boundaries, reconfiguring the group as a cosmopolitan class. This provides a novel perspective on how Bangladeshi women of this class exercise power in marital negotiations while navigating normative practices and patriarchal structures.
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| 10 |
ID:
135834
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Human rights groups have documented the plight of Pakistan's religious minorities for years, but it is only recently that these minorities have become the focus of academic political science discourse. This discourse, however, borrows from a well-developed liberal literature on Pakistan's democratic instability that makes assumptions about the inclusiveness of democratic regimes and exclusivism of dictatorships—most notably that of General Zia-ul-Haq. On close scrutiny, these assumptions do not hold. In this paper, I evaluate the political capacities of minorities through an institutionalised assessment of the quantity and quality of minorities’ voices in an electoral–legislative framework. Such a model, in the context of a plural society, is more likely to better reflect the capacity of a minority's ability to withstand the tyranny of the majority, and assess the potential for its integration into the political mainstream. Towards this end, I analyse the demography–representation correlates of the Christian minority in Pakistan's federal legislatures since Independence in 1947. I argue that the institutionalised Christian presence has often been sub-proportionate, lacking in authority and leverage, and tokenistic. Finally, I suggest remedial measures to improve the efficacy of minority representation and political empowerment by adapting certain voting paradigms suggested by Lani Guinier.
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| 11 |
ID:
135826
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The hereditary women performers of north India, called ‘nautch girls’ by the colonial British, and courtesans or tawa'ifs by today's scholars, played a central role in the performance of music and dance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Substantial recent scholarship has focused on their songs, poems and cultural history; thus, this article addresses choreography, the missing part of their performance practice. Through a detailed examination of dance descriptions in nineteenth-century treatises and comparison of this material with colonial iconography and travel writings, I offer new research about nineteenth-century female performance, placing its practice in historical context and speculating about its evolution and change.
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| 12 |
ID:
135833
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article compares colonial and post-colonial transformations to the upper stretches of the River Ganga in north India. Exploring mixed sensitivities to the Ganga's developmental and religious significance, the discussion draws on the historical record to compare the implementation and impacts of canal irrigation technologies under the British with contemporary policies to build hydroelectric dams on the sacred river. The article evaluates similarities between the two, while investigating the veracity of activist claims that the British were more sensitive than the independent Government of India to the demands of river devotees that the Ganga continue to flow unfettered past sites of cultural and religious significance.
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