Pub Date : 2018-04-30DOI: 10.1177/2230807518770257
Nameirakpam Bijen Meetei
Abstract Contemporary state politics is marked by intra-state conflicts, many of which have ignited civil wars. In the midst of diversity, and despite her success in sustaining democracy, India still faces intra-state conflicts, which often threaten its territorial integrity. Presently, Jammu and Kashmir and the North-Eastern States are the most talked about cases in this regard. This article studies the nature of conflicts in North-Eastern India and the way the state has responded to such conflicts. The study finds the existence of five major types of conflicts and almost an equal number of responses from the state. Though, over the years, India has successfully resolved many forms of disputes, in the case of the North-Eastern States, on the contrary, state’s responses have resulted into new cases of conflicts. Thus, in the absence of adequate principles and institutions, bringing a lasting solution to these issues does not look like achievable in the immediate future.
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Pub Date : 2018-04-27DOI: 10.1177/2230807518767710
A. Parkes
Abstract German sociologist Max Weber observes that the centralisation of administrative function is imperative to a stable nation state. Yet, despite this sovereign necessity, attempts at incorporating heterogeneous sociopolitical entities into a cohesive society eluded nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Afghanistan. Ahmad Shah Durrani is known as the father of Afghanistan. He bears this title because he unified a collection of tribes and established a pseudo-confederation of territories in 1747. However, the following two centuries were less constructive and subsequent state centralisation was fraught and ultimately fruitless for Afghanistan. Contemporaneous centralisation remains embryonic and strained by tribal clout. It is within this context that nineteenth- and twentieth-century Afghan amirs, khans, and kings attempted to modernise, centralise, and unify a consortium of conservative tribal microsocieties. Many of the same complications of the nineteenth and twentieth century continue to obfuscate modern Afghanistan.
摘要德国社会学家马克斯·韦伯认为，行政职能的集中对于一个稳定的民族国家来说是必不可少的。然而，尽管有这种主权上的必要性，将异质的社会政治实体纳入一个有凝聚力的社会的尝试却未能在19世纪和20世纪初的阿富汗实现。Ahmad Shah Durrani被称为阿富汗之父。他之所以拥有这个头衔，是因为他在1747年统一了一批部落，建立了一个伪领土联盟。然而，接下来的两个世纪没有那么有建设性，随后的国家中央集权对阿富汗来说是令人担忧的，最终毫无结果。当代的中央集权仍然处于萌芽状态，并受到部落影响力的影响。正是在这种背景下，十九世纪和二十世纪的阿富汗之友、可汗和国王试图现代化、集中化和统一一个保守的部落微型社会联盟。十九世纪和二十世纪的许多复杂情况继续使现代阿富汗变得模糊不清。
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Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.1177/2230807517733912
M. Oommen
{"title":"Jairam Ramesh, Indira Gandhi: A Life in Nature","authors":"M. Oommen","doi":"10.1177/2230807517733912","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2230807517733912","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41287,"journal":{"name":"History and Sociology of South Asia","volume":"12 1","pages":"107 - 110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/2230807517733912","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41446669","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.1177/2230807517732489
Amit Upadhyay, Sasheej Hegde
Abstract This article is directed at historicising the language and practice of ‘civil liberties’ in India, and it does so by addressing the specific contingencies that have marked its early twentieth-century trajectory that continue to resonate in our historical present. Of course, the immediate point of departure for the article is a methodological fixation with what has been termed as a ‘political approach’ to rights, whose limits set the terms for a more historically resonant and contextually determined approach to an appraisal of normative languages like rights and civil liberties in highly charged political contexts. In thus illustrating the argument that the political approach to rights has translated into a constriction of the space of our normative languages, the effort here is also to set in perspective the pathways for a historicisation of ‘civil liberties’ in India—one sensitive to its subterranean regulatory folds that served to constitute the inner and outer limits of protest across socio-political collectivities active in the historical fields of action germane to the twentieth century India. These regulatory folds have persisted and sustain themselves well beyond the contours of the Constituent Assembly (CA) that went on to make for a republican India (although this latter point is only being hinted at within the broad ground traversed by this article).
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Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.1177/2230807517732633
M. Sajjad, Afroz Alam Sahil
Abstract This essay primarily concerns itself with attempting to retrieve contributions of some of the local and regional leaders of the Champaran Satyagraha Movement who have largely been left out by the existing literature. Further, it draws upon some of the unexplored archival sources as well as some vernacular literatures, mainly Hindi besides memoirs as well as newspaper reports have been used for the study. Yet, one faces huge constraints of evidences to find answers to many pertinent questions, which emerge after delving into the subject. This essay has been able to cull out significant information about the contributions of Pir Munis, mostly through the memoirs of the Hindi literatures and Hindi newspaper, Pratap. There is still a need to trace out many other sources to find out details about many other local leaders, who have been mentioned in this essay. Besides retrieving the roles played out by the local leaders and vernacular intelligentsia at great personal risks of state repression, this essay brings out that the agrarian problems of Champaran still suffers from something which has been inherited as a legacy during the colonial era, and even after seven decades post-independence many issues remains unresolved.
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Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.1177/2230807517726407
Puja Vengadasalam
Abstract Gandhi is a much-misunderstood political leader. Due to the unique aspects of his leadership and his political philosophy of satyagraha, his contemporaries misunderstood him. The author undertakes an assessment of Gandhi’s leadership, using Gorn’s five dimensions of leadership. How Gandhi’s leadership style and philosophy impacted Mandela and the Dalai Lama, Aung San Sui Kyi and Martin Luther King among others is studied. By interposing Gorn’s leadership framework on the salt and spin movements that occurred during India’s struggle for freedom, the author finds that Gandhi’s leadership theoretic of satyagraha is tenable. As the article points out, what makes Gandhi and his satyagraha so significant is that it continues to influence current leadership and movements, and his substantial legacy overflows national, geographic and time boundaries.
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Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.1177/2230807517741794
Shaoni Shabnam
Abstract The ‘new middle class’, often identified as an upwardly mobile segment, primarily employed in the growing private service sectors, such as the information technology, and supposedly, representative of the changing lifestyles and consumption patterns of the Indian middle class, has stolen much of the limelight of the contemporary popular as well as scholarly discourses on the Indian middle class. 2 2 This article draws upon from the fieldwork conducted as part of my PhD work completed in 2016. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the international seminar on ‘The Middle Class in World Society’ held at ISEC (Institute of Social and Economic Change), Bangalore, India on 16th and 17th December, 2016. This article, on the other hand, takes up a different social group located in West Bengal, having a close relationship with the state, often described as the ‘old middle class’/‘Nehruvian middle class’ in the postcolonial context, the respondents being predominantly public sector employees and academicians. By taking up the register of sanskriti (culture), the article argues that it is fundamentally through forging continuity from the past that this historically dominant social group is engaged in the construction of Bengali middle classness. Through an analysis of class and its relation to cultural distinctiveness, the article shows that the specific way in which this relation plays out in case of the respondents in my study and argues that any theoretical attempt to understand the complex relationship between class distinction and the question of taste needs to be grounded within narrowly defined contextualised specificities.
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Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.1177/2230807517733584
Khekali
Abstract The British search for the custom within tribes to reproduce their knowledge which could be used for the imperial expansion in the Naga Hills of North East India. Nagas practiced oral tradition, therefore the colonial court judgment was based on how it understood what the litigants testified orally in the court without any prior documented directives. This way customary tradition of the people was interpreted back to the people according to how the court identified and understood what was customary. This strategically established symbolic authority, namely, favouring of ‘custom’ in the dispensation of justice. In addition to the British expansionist mission, there was also a very strong contender in the form of American Baptist Missionaries in the Naga Hills. Village life underwent a huge change as the Missionaries introduced the system of separating the village communities into the ancient ones and the converts khels (colony/block), which further altered the space for the operation of custom. In the process, the significant differences lasted as long as the imperial rule in the Naga Hills as is evident from many cases that read ancients/heathens v Christians lodged in the colonial courts in the Naga Hills.
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Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.1177/2230807517726406
Megha Sharma
Abstract The complexities of studying informal sector labour can be dealt with bringing a wide range of identities and ideas used by the workers, which encompass beyond the socio-economic and political identities. 2 2 This article is based on my MPhil dissertation, ‘Conditions of Informality: Beedi Industry in Colonial and Post 1947 Central India’, submitted to the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2015. This article attempts to capture the diversified identities among the home-based beedi-making women workers and their settlement in Madhya Pradesh based on their oral interviews. Further, it captures how the division of work is sustained and perpetuated through the gendered allocation of work over the years. It also recounts how the state has perpetuated this division as the natural allocation of work in official discourse. Precisely, the article argues that how the worker’s narratives are an essential source to question the way work is explained in official language and the inequalities justified by the state.
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Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.1177/2230807517740046
P. Campbell
Abstract Bashing V.S. Naipaul’s travel books on India, the Caribbean, the Islamic World and Africa has produced a massive body of writing since the 1980s. Focusing on his perceived racism and Islamophobia, this literature seeks to thoroughly discredit Naipaul as a reliable chronicler of the lives of the victims of Western imperialism. Condemned, indeed, as an apologist for Western imperialism, Naipaul’s admitted brilliance as a writer of fiction has been dulled by these accusations. There is much truth in these critiques, but they are based on arguments that range from the accurate to the problematic to the quite simply wrong. Too many attacks on Naipaul’s work come from writers who have a limited knowledge of the body of his work or who misconstrue the knowledge they do have. Stepping back from the assault on Naipaul reveals important reasons to re-examine and rethink the meanings of his work and the lives it chronicles.
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