Pub Date : 2023-11-27DOI: 10.1080/09584935.2023.2275991
Gaoxin Li, Jianguang Sun
Published in Contemporary South Asia (Vol. 31, No. 4, 2023)
发表于《当代南亚》(2023年第31卷第4期)
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Pub Date : 2023-11-26DOI: 10.1080/09584935.2023.2280988
Knut A. Jacobsen
The article looks at the uses of the concept of parikramā (circumambulation of a sacred spot) in the 2019 Supreme Court of India judgement on the Ayodhyā dispute and its aftermath. It unpacks the H...
{"title":"The ritual of parikramā, Hinduization of space and the case of Ayodhyā","authors":"Knut A. Jacobsen","doi":"10.1080/09584935.2023.2280988","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2023.2280988","url":null,"abstract":"The article looks at the uses of the concept of parikramā (circumambulation of a sacred spot) in the 2019 Supreme Court of India judgement on the Ayodhyā dispute and its aftermath. It unpacks the H...","PeriodicalId":45569,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary South Asia","volume":"50 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138496141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-21DOI: 10.1080/09584935.2023.2280516
Nick Tackes
Following the Indian Supreme Court's verdict allowing the construction of a Rām Mandir at the site of the former Babri Masjid in 2019, Hindu nationalists have put renewed pressure on the North Indi...
{"title":"The view from Mathura: nationalist projections in local perspective","authors":"Nick Tackes","doi":"10.1080/09584935.2023.2280516","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2023.2280516","url":null,"abstract":"Following the Indian Supreme Court's verdict allowing the construction of a Rām Mandir at the site of the former Babri Masjid in 2019, Hindu nationalists have put renewed pressure on the North Indi...","PeriodicalId":45569,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary South Asia","volume":"58 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138496133","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-25DOI: 10.1080/09584935.2023.2271861
Marko Valenta, Marianne Garvik
ABSTRACT This article explores the experiences of Nepalese highly skilled migrants who use temporary migration to the Gulf region as a stepping-stone to further migration to developed countries outside the region. Furthermore, we explore the factors that influence migrants’ trajectories by applying the aspiration–ability model to understand various migratory steps of the Nepalese stepwise migrations. Here, we distinguish between migrants’ aspirations, abilities and structural forces – in South Asia, the Gulf and outside the region – that can either enable or restrict their agency. We find that the countries in the Middle East have emerged as important destinations for Nepalese migrants. It is also argued that the receiving countries in the Gulf are not the most popular destinations for skilled migrants from Nepal. However, for many aspiring skilled migrants, these countries appear to be the most affordable or only available destination at a certain stage of their migration trajectories and professional careers.
{"title":"The dynamic of stepwise migrations of Nepalese high-skilled migrants via the Middle East","authors":"Marko Valenta, Marianne Garvik","doi":"10.1080/09584935.2023.2271861","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2023.2271861","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores the experiences of Nepalese highly skilled migrants who use temporary migration to the Gulf region as a stepping-stone to further migration to developed countries outside the region. Furthermore, we explore the factors that influence migrants’ trajectories by applying the aspiration–ability model to understand various migratory steps of the Nepalese stepwise migrations. Here, we distinguish between migrants’ aspirations, abilities and structural forces – in South Asia, the Gulf and outside the region – that can either enable or restrict their agency. We find that the countries in the Middle East have emerged as important destinations for Nepalese migrants. It is also argued that the receiving countries in the Gulf are not the most popular destinations for skilled migrants from Nepal. However, for many aspiring skilled migrants, these countries appear to be the most affordable or only available destination at a certain stage of their migration trajectories and professional careers.","PeriodicalId":45569,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary South Asia","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135216531","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-25DOI: 10.1080/09584935.2023.2272707
Isha Gupta
ABSTRACT Aggregate growth numbers for India present a positive outlook as its economic momentum builds back and the economy displays full recovery following the Covid-19 crisis. It consequently reflects the Indian economy’s underlying resilience and ability to resuscitate its overall growth, driven by the rebound in private consumption despite the strong global headwinds and widening external deficits. However, its rural economy indicators point to a contradictory set of circumstances since this segment has been afflicted with persistently stagnant real wage growth in agricultural and non-agricultural occupations. It is further accompanied by the pileup of past debt for this section of the population, accumulated in the slowdown years of the post-demonetization phase, which has resulted in a continual weakening of rural consumption demand. The purpose of this research note is to provide a preliminary review of a deep-rooted crisis in India’s rural economy. This crisis is not merely an outcome of Covid-induced and inflationary factors, but rather dates back to the post-demonetization period. The data uncovers an enduring vicious spiral for the rural population group that not only questions the consumption stimulus to growth, but also imperils the resilience and economic prospects of the Indian economy.
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Pub Date : 2023-10-23DOI: 10.1080/09584935.2023.2271855
Tanvi Pate
Conventional wisdom on India’s nuclear geopolitics takes a top-down approach, foregrounding state perceptions of India’s nuclear role in regional and global politics. This conventional approach overlooks the bottom-up processes, such as media representations, which have been fundamental in shaping India’s nuclear identity. This is because media representations comprise common-sense knowledge, since media is the primary source of information in a democracy. Building on theoretical underpinnings of popular geopolitics, this article focuses on analyses of media representations in the Editorial of the English daily The Hindu from 2011–2020. This national newspaper boasts the second-largest readership among English dailies. The direct link between The Hindu Editorial’s representations of ‘nuclear India’ and India’s ‘regional’ and ‘global’ selfhood is crucial. The concerned period of 2011–2020 was pivotal in charting Indian geopolitical identity, as India partook in international negotiations after the US-India Nuclear Deal in 2008 and became a member of multilateral export control regimes like the Wassenaar Arrangement, Australia Group, and Missile Technology Control Regime. This article deconstructs the Editorial texts to elicit the intertextual links underpinning the ‘geopolitical cultural signifier’, ‘geospatial mythology’, and ‘self/other’ binary representation that operationalises India’s nuclear identity in regional and global settings.
{"title":"Popular geopolitics of ‘nuclear India’: tracing the evolution of India’s ‘regional’ and ‘global’ identities in the English daily <i>The Hindu</i> from 2011–2020","authors":"Tanvi Pate","doi":"10.1080/09584935.2023.2271855","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2023.2271855","url":null,"abstract":"Conventional wisdom on India’s nuclear geopolitics takes a top-down approach, foregrounding state perceptions of India’s nuclear role in regional and global politics. This conventional approach overlooks the bottom-up processes, such as media representations, which have been fundamental in shaping India’s nuclear identity. This is because media representations comprise common-sense knowledge, since media is the primary source of information in a democracy. Building on theoretical underpinnings of popular geopolitics, this article focuses on analyses of media representations in the Editorial of the English daily The Hindu from 2011–2020. This national newspaper boasts the second-largest readership among English dailies. The direct link between The Hindu Editorial’s representations of ‘nuclear India’ and India’s ‘regional’ and ‘global’ selfhood is crucial. The concerned period of 2011–2020 was pivotal in charting Indian geopolitical identity, as India partook in international negotiations after the US-India Nuclear Deal in 2008 and became a member of multilateral export control regimes like the Wassenaar Arrangement, Australia Group, and Missile Technology Control Regime. This article deconstructs the Editorial texts to elicit the intertextual links underpinning the ‘geopolitical cultural signifier’, ‘geospatial mythology’, and ‘self/other’ binary representation that operationalises India’s nuclear identity in regional and global settings.","PeriodicalId":45569,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary South Asia","volume":"40 12","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135413680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-18DOI: 10.1080/09584935.2023.2268559
Vibhuti Ramachandran
ABSTRACTIndian law prescribes ‘protective custody’ for sex workers, placing them in carceral shelters after police and NGO-initiated raids and rescues. Frequent allegations of abuse and incidents of escape are followed by media and judicial scrutiny, leaving shelter detention itself unquestioned. This article situates shelter detention in two ways. It examines its legal prescription in the Indian socio-legal context and its connections to global anti-trafficking and anti-immigration contexts. It also engages with Foucauldian concepts and feminist, socio-legal, historical, and anthropological work on India to analyze the power shelter detention instantiates. Next, the article critiques shelter detentionby drawing upon my ethnography at a Mumbai shelter and reflections on methods and ethics, and by tracking how the media and judiciary responded to an escape. Through these methods, approaches, and findings, I argue that shelter detention curtails sex workers’ mobilities and impedes their livelihoods through: 1) Its legal prescription, authorizing multiple forms of governance; 2) Its implementation, shaped by challenges of governance delaying sex workers’ release; and 3) Media exposés and judicial interventions further intensifying surveillance. The article shows, further, that sex workers’ escapes and acts of resistance illuminate not just ‘exceptional’ abuse, but the routine, ever-expanding forms of governance animating shelter detention.KEYWORDS: Indialawshelter detentionpostcolonial stateNGOssex traffickingethnography AcknowledgementsI am grateful to the multiple interlocutors–the shelter staff, magistrates, NGO workers, and detained women–who shared their perspectives with me during my fieldwork. I am also grateful to the shelter administration and monitoring committee for permitting me access at a time when the shelter was under such intense scrutiny. Early versions of this article were presented at the Annual Conference of the American Ethnological Society in Boston (2014) and the South Asia by the Bay Graduate Student Conference (2014) at UC Santa Cruz, where it benefited from the insightful comments of Jennifer Musto and Anjali Arondekar as discussants. I also wish to acknowledge here the late Sally Merry, my PhD advisor, whose insights have shaped this article and my broader research immeasurably. The directions this article has taken were shaped during conversations with Mirna Guha and Kimberly Walters, co-guest editors for this Special Section, whose feedback on the article I deeply appreciate. Gowri Vijayakumar provided helpful comments as I revised the article. At various stages, this article has also benefited from conversations with and input from (Justice) S. Muralidhar, Pratiksha Baxi, Rohit De, Susan Coutin, and Sarah Whitt. Finally, I wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful, nuanced, and engaged feedback.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 The city named Bo
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Pub Date : 2023-10-05DOI: 10.1080/09584935.2023.2262943
Bhawani Buswala
Focusing on the experiences of the marginalised castes in North India, this article examines the use of given names in intercommunity micro interactions and how it shapes the practices of everyday humiliation. With ethnographic data from Dalit activist discourses as well as everyday life in an urbanising village in Rajasthan, this article analyses how the upper castes tend to deform the given names of the members of the Dalit community to produce undignified names, and how the community claims their right to be addressed with appropriate names. I engage with the complexity of the formation and use of undignified names by analysing their function in shaping the local political field to regulate participation in the public sphere and how they are linked to valuable names in the production of social distinctions and their economic benefits. Taking names as an important symbolic object, this article foregrounds the politics of humiliations in everyday intercaste vyavahar to understand the micro dynamics of caste reproduction and how it is negotiated and contested.
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Pub Date : 2023-10-03DOI: 10.1080/09584935.2023.2263379
Sridhar Krishnan
ABSTRACTWhile much has been written about how imperialist and Indian nationalist historiographies have approached 1857, scant attention has been paid to how it has been remembered in Pakistan. This article endeavours to explore the ways in which 1857 has been articulated by the state in India and Pakistan through a study of their commemorative postage stamps. On the face of it, India's emphasis on nonviolence and Pakistan's quest for an Islamic history make 1857 a misfit within the historiographies of both states. However, the paper outlines that during the centenary in 1957, both India and Pakistan commemorated 1857 while maintaining some discursive distance from it. While Pakistan chose to memorialise it as the beginning of its struggle for independence, India recessed it within the broader framework of independence itself. The paper goes on to demonstrate how this position has changed drastically over the years. In order to weave a composite and inclusive history of the country, India now celebrates the legacy of 1857 by appropriating it within the frames of national unity, patriotism, and anti-imperialism. Pakistan, on the other hand, uses 1857 merely as a means to segue into a discussion of reform efforts led by the subcontinent's Muslim elite, thereby relegating it to the background of the Pakistan movement.KEYWORDS: IndiaPakistan1857stamps AcknowledgementsI am indebted to Divisha Srivastava and Akhila Nagar for feedback on drafts of this paper. I am grateful to Jebin Samuel for his help in editing this article. I am also thankful to the anonymous reviewers for their inputs. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the 2022 BISA Annual Conference held at Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 17 June 2022. My thanks to South Asian University for partially funding my travel for the Conference.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 For a detailed account of the enduring rivalry, see T. V. Paul (Citation2006).2 Pakistan observes its Independence Day on 14 August each year, while India observes it on 15 August.3 Although the nomenclature of the event has been subject to many debates, the problem of attaching these events to a category is not the puzzle of this paper. Hence, I shall be referring to these events collectively as 1857 throughout this essay.4 For more on stamps as a source for doing International Public History from the vantage point of India and Pakistan, see Sharma (Citation2021b).5 Pandey’s story became a subject of academic debate in the aftermath of a biopic that was released in 2005. For more, see Banerjee (Citation2018).6 One of the prominent scholars within this stream of thought was Bipan Chandra. Consider, for instance, the views expressed in his essay ‘The Making of the Indian Nation’. Arguing that India was a nation distinct from European nations because despite its cultural heterogeneity, there was nonetheless a ‘common consciousness’ that had developed over the years through ‘
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Pub Date : 2023-08-29DOI: 10.1080/09584935.2023.2229756
R. Saul
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