Pub Date : 2023-03-04DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2023.2181532
Tom Wilkinson
Abstract Advertisements for commodities offer a unique keyhole into the shifting consumption practices and media constructions of the youthful consumer. An analysis of five student and youth magazines foregrounds the gendered and materialistic idealisations of leisure invoked to promote branded goods in the Indian youth market. Analysing advertisements in these magazines allows us to trace the increasingly sophisticated way in which capitalist actors stratified the domain of advertising by life stages during the late colonial and early post-colonial periods in India. This finding runs contrary to the grain of historiography that contends that the Indian ‘market’ failed to respond to the interests of consumers prior to the media liberalisation of the 1980s and 1990s.
{"title":"Consuming Students: Advertisements and the Indian Youth Market, 1935–65","authors":"Tom Wilkinson","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2181532","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2181532","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Advertisements for commodities offer a unique keyhole into the shifting consumption practices and media constructions of the youthful consumer. An analysis of five student and youth magazines foregrounds the gendered and materialistic idealisations of leisure invoked to promote branded goods in the Indian youth market. Analysing advertisements in these magazines allows us to trace the increasingly sophisticated way in which capitalist actors stratified the domain of advertising by life stages during the late colonial and early post-colonial periods in India. This finding runs contrary to the grain of historiography that contends that the Indian ‘market’ failed to respond to the interests of consumers prior to the media liberalisation of the 1980s and 1990s.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"481 - 511"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42366555","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 : 2023-03-04DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2023.2183639
Kanak Rajadhyaksha
the revision of entries and maps (103). Offering a summary of the reception of the encyclopaedia by the Tamil public, we are told that by the time the final supplementary volume appeared in 1968, ‘much had changed in the Tamil cultural world’, epitomised most of all by the rise to political power of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) (108). The snapshot of reviews provided in Chapter 6 seeks to explain how its reception in the regional press remained largely lukewarm, critical or even hostile at the hands of DMK ideologues. The Kalaikalanjiyam came willy-nilly to be identified with the Congress and the Indian nationalist position on the language question and judged harshly by the latter for what they considered its ‘mixed manipravala style’ and failure to use tanittamil or pure Tamil. As the book reiterates, the shaping of a discourse of Tamil regional identity and cultural production were inflected partly by the legacy of the Madras school of Orientalism, partly by the imperatives of nationalism and its cultural project as conceived by its early ideologues, and partly by Dravidian ideology that produced another compelling set of counter-perspectives. Not the least of its contributions is that the present study opens up the field to further research on the complex bearing that these skeins had upon debates around shifting definitions of ‘traditional’ and modern socio-political, cultural and knowledge repertoires, as well as upon specific issues of content, style, patronage and audienceformation for the Tamil sphere, particularly in the decades just before and after 1947.
{"title":"Waiting for Dignity: Legitimacy and Authority in Afghanistan","authors":"Kanak Rajadhyaksha","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2183639","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2183639","url":null,"abstract":"the revision of entries and maps (103). Offering a summary of the reception of the encyclopaedia by the Tamil public, we are told that by the time the final supplementary volume appeared in 1968, ‘much had changed in the Tamil cultural world’, epitomised most of all by the rise to political power of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) (108). The snapshot of reviews provided in Chapter 6 seeks to explain how its reception in the regional press remained largely lukewarm, critical or even hostile at the hands of DMK ideologues. The Kalaikalanjiyam came willy-nilly to be identified with the Congress and the Indian nationalist position on the language question and judged harshly by the latter for what they considered its ‘mixed manipravala style’ and failure to use tanittamil or pure Tamil. As the book reiterates, the shaping of a discourse of Tamil regional identity and cultural production were inflected partly by the legacy of the Madras school of Orientalism, partly by the imperatives of nationalism and its cultural project as conceived by its early ideologues, and partly by Dravidian ideology that produced another compelling set of counter-perspectives. Not the least of its contributions is that the present study opens up the field to further research on the complex bearing that these skeins had upon debates around shifting definitions of ‘traditional’ and modern socio-political, cultural and knowledge repertoires, as well as upon specific issues of content, style, patronage and audienceformation for the Tamil sphere, particularly in the decades just before and after 1947.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"518 - 520"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48625362","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 : 2023-03-04DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2023.2181535
F. Batool
Abstract Prior research on Latin American and European populism has used the inclusionary and exclusionary distinction to differentiate between Left- and Right-wing populism. As Right-wing populists demand exclusion of immigrants and foreigners and Left-wing populists demand inclusion of the lower social class in the political landscape, the former is described as exclusionary and the latter as inclusionary. In this paper, I test this typology, comparing the populism of two political leaders in Pakistan across two different eras: Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto during 1967–77 and Imran Khan during 1996–2022. I argue that in the absence of an overarching liberal discourse, the inclusionary-exclusionary distinction has no meaning because populists of illiberal democracies can rely upon a greater ideological malleability, swinging between inclusionary to exclusionary politics in accordance with the demands of the moment.
{"title":"Populism in Pakistan: The Exclusionary-Inclusionary Divide in the Politics of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and Imran Khan","authors":"F. Batool","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2181535","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2181535","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Prior research on Latin American and European populism has used the inclusionary and exclusionary distinction to differentiate between Left- and Right-wing populism. As Right-wing populists demand exclusion of immigrants and foreigners and Left-wing populists demand inclusion of the lower social class in the political landscape, the former is described as exclusionary and the latter as inclusionary. In this paper, I test this typology, comparing the populism of two political leaders in Pakistan across two different eras: Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto during 1967–77 and Imran Khan during 1996–2022. I argue that in the absence of an overarching liberal discourse, the inclusionary-exclusionary distinction has no meaning because populists of illiberal democracies can rely upon a greater ideological malleability, swinging between inclusionary to exclusionary politics in accordance with the demands of the moment.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"265 - 282"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41558562","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 : 2023-03-04DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2023.2180592
S. Mitra
Abstract Since the 1990s, the Government of India has undertaken several policy initiatives to facilitate cross-border flows. Such initiatives can be read as an effort to transform ‘battlefields into marketplaces’. This paper examines the rise of the border town of Champhai, located on the India-Myanmar border in the state of Mizoram in Northeast India. The formation of a new urban centre in a frontier region based on border trade reveals different dimensions of transition in Northeast India’s borderlands. The paper explores two key themes: how border trade, comprised of legal and illegal flows, has transformed Champhai into Mizoram’s third-largest city, and how increasing trade across the border reorients the interethnic dynamics with strong implications for ethnic and citizenship politics in Mizoram. The paper concludes by highlighting the different aspects discussed in the article that would determine the borderland dynamics in Mizoram.
{"title":"The Indo-Myanmar Borderlands: Border Trade, Urbanisation and Ethnic Politics in Mizoram, India","authors":"S. Mitra","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2180592","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2180592","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Since the 1990s, the Government of India has undertaken several policy initiatives to facilitate cross-border flows. Such initiatives can be read as an effort to transform ‘battlefields into marketplaces’. This paper examines the rise of the border town of Champhai, located on the India-Myanmar border in the state of Mizoram in Northeast India. The formation of a new urban centre in a frontier region based on border trade reveals different dimensions of transition in Northeast India’s borderlands. The paper explores two key themes: how border trade, comprised of legal and illegal flows, has transformed Champhai into Mizoram’s third-largest city, and how increasing trade across the border reorients the interethnic dynamics with strong implications for ethnic and citizenship politics in Mizoram. The paper concludes by highlighting the different aspects discussed in the article that would determine the borderland dynamics in Mizoram.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"445 - 463"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44846458","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 : 2023-02-22DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2023.2175968
A. Sen, H. Nagendra
Abstract Culture-specific knowledge plays an important role in shaping environmental conservation. Yet we lack a holistic and contemporary understanding of how such local cultural systems interface(d) with ecologies, especially in the fast-growing cities of the Global South which face profound environmental challenges. In this paper, we explore nature-based cultural systems embedded in folk-songs to understand situated social-ecological histories of human-inhabited peri-urban landscapes in the city of Bengaluru in South India. Drawing on empirical observations from the city, we trace local imageries of erstwhile lake-based social systems through folk-songs, mythologies and oral narratives. We demonstrate how many of these cultural narratives, largely embedded within symbolic linkages to the lake ecology, continue to manifest themselves as folk expressions in the city, despite the fact that most of the lakes have been polluted or are managed via restrictions that prohibit village residents from accessing them as they once did for agriculture, livelihoods and domestic use. The songs are also rich reminders of socialities, which, despite being divisive and hierarchical to a large extent, were symbolically and materially embedded in nature.
{"title":"‘Songs of the Lake’: Understanding Cultural Expressions of Nature through Dwindling Folk-Songs and Mythologies in Bengaluru","authors":"A. Sen, H. Nagendra","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2175968","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2175968","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Culture-specific knowledge plays an important role in shaping environmental conservation. Yet we lack a holistic and contemporary understanding of how such local cultural systems interface(d) with ecologies, especially in the fast-growing cities of the Global South which face profound environmental challenges. In this paper, we explore nature-based cultural systems embedded in folk-songs to understand situated social-ecological histories of human-inhabited peri-urban landscapes in the city of Bengaluru in South India. Drawing on empirical observations from the city, we trace local imageries of erstwhile lake-based social systems through folk-songs, mythologies and oral narratives. We demonstrate how many of these cultural narratives, largely embedded within symbolic linkages to the lake ecology, continue to manifest themselves as folk expressions in the city, despite the fact that most of the lakes have been polluted or are managed via restrictions that prohibit village residents from accessing them as they once did for agriculture, livelihoods and domestic use. The songs are also rich reminders of socialities, which, despite being divisive and hierarchical to a large extent, were symbolically and materially embedded in nature.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"283 - 302"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46296277","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 : 2023-02-19DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2023.2176064
C. Yamini Krishna
Abstract Film was one of the new technological inventions of the ‘long nineteenth century’ that often instilled a fear of loss of the existing way of life and of disturbing existing social structures. In India, this manifested in a variety of ways, such as through the censorship of films by the government, but also by social codes which created major barriers for many to work in the film industry. In this article, I discuss film and its negotiations with caste in the twentieth century through close reading of the Indian Cinematograph Committee Report, film magazines, advertisements, audience responses and the speeches of nationalist leaders. I argue that rather than democratising desire by producing the universally desirable object of the star body, popular films in India produced desire that conformed to existing caste structures. The paper contributes to debates about early cinema and caste beyond the question of representation.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2023.2162238
Mihiri Tillakaratne
Abstract This article examines To T, or Not To T?, a solo play by D’Lo, a queer transmasculine Sri Lankan Tamil American performance artist and comedian. Considering the Super Aunty character, I examine how aunties orient diasporic life towards multiple modes of belonging and exclusion. Specifically, I explore how Aunty Discipline directed toward the queer diasporic child is vital in creating future hetero-reproductive diasporic subjects, then consider the intimacies of fictive kinship through the term ‘fam’. The queer diasporic body is a text on which others enact diasporic meanings, but D’Lo uses that very queer body to actively reimagine and re-image family and community, thereby infusing these spaces with his own queer ontologies and epistemologies.
摘要本文考察了To T或Not To T？，D’Lo的一部个人戏剧，他是一位跨性别的斯里兰卡泰米尔裔美国表演艺术家和喜剧演员。考虑到“超级阿姨”这个角色，我研究了阿姨们是如何将流散的生活定位为多种归属和排斥模式的。具体来说，我探讨了针对酷儿流散儿童的Aunty Discipline在创造未来的异性生殖流散主题中是如何至关重要的，然后通过“家庭”一词来考虑虚构亲属关系的亲密关系。酷儿散居体是其他人在其上表达散居意义的文本，但D’Lo利用这个非常酷儿的身体积极地重新想象和重塑家庭和社区，从而将这些空间融入他自己的酷儿本体论和认识论。
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2023.2159650
A. Baishya
As a literary critic working in Northeast Indian Studies, I was delighted to read the following comment by social scientist Sanjoy Barbora in his monograph, Homeland Insecurities: ‘Fiction... is a good way to navigate the current bottlenecks around the autonomy movements in Assam, especially in their ability to hold claims for justice and demands for political pragmatism that excluded large sections of people there’ (75). My delight stems not from this valorisation of fiction alone, but from the fact that Barbora crafts a very nuanced and complex account of the political and social shifts in Assam in the last couple of decades through some powerful storytelling. Consider, for instance, his account of Siddhartha Patar’s travails in Chapter 3. Siddhartha was a young man from Morigaon who was duped by an agent and sent to work on a ship owned by an Iranian businessman. He was detained in a port in Iran for a substantial amount of time before being freed and sent back home. Pondering what makes young men like Siddhartha migrate out of Assam in search of employment, Barbora makes a striking observation: ‘The answers to such questions are, at best, staging posts for other equally contentious queries, giving one the impression that issues of mobility in Assam are rooted in a historical narrative that has little room for nuance. One of the reasons for this is the political weight that immigration lends to any discussion on civic issues in the state’ (85). Indeed, deploying both ‘longue dur ee’ ethnography and his extensive experience as a human rights activist, Barbora utilises nuanced storytelling to navigate the bottlenecks around two of the biggest issues that any Assam studies scholar has to confront: the issue of autonomy and the issue of migration. Both have seen tectonic shifts in the last couple of decades and Barbora’s timely monograph is an attempt to grapple with the scale of these changes. Two argumentative threads bind the five chapters and the conclusion. First, everything that he writes about has been ‘overdetermined by militarization of crucial spaces of debate and dialogue within civil society’ (1). Second, ‘a dense reading’ of localised issues in Assam ‘refract attention to larger universal changes across the globe’ (1). Chapter 1, ‘From Autonomy to Accommodation’, is both an introduction to the themes explored in the book and, as the ‘from–to’ juxtaposition in the title suggests, a temporal
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2023.2154024
Haider Shahbaz
Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) is one of the most influential books of literary studies, and it has, arguably more than any other academic book, contributed to the advancement of post-colonial studies in the Western academy. A large, impressive body of scholarly contributions have taken up Said’s project of interrogating Western representations of non-Western people and understanding how these representations are consolidated and distributed by and, in turn, consolidate and distribute imperial power. While this work is necessary, its narrow focus on Western literary representations, often in English or French, misses one of Said’s most profound concerns in Orientalism: how orientalist representations circulate and gain currency in the so-called orient itself. In the ‘Introduction’ to Orientalism, Said directly addresses readers in the post-colonial world, alerting them to the power and influence of orientalist discourse: ‘My hope is to illustrate the formidable structure of cultural domination and, specifically for formerly colonized peoples, the dangers and temptations of employing this structure upon themselves or upon others’. Said analyses a specific pattern of cultural domination whereby orientalist representations are absorbed by intellectual and popular discourses in postcolonial sites due to global hierarchies of political power and knowledge production: ‘the pages of books and journals in Arabic (and doubtless in Japanese, various Indian dialects, and other Oriental languages) are filled with second-order analyses by Arabs of “the Arab mind”, “Islam”, and other myths’. Based on these observations, Said declares: ‘The modern Orient, in short, participates in its own Orientalizing’. How can we critically study such self-orientalising representations in post-colonial literature? Maryam Wasif Khan’s book, Who is a Muslim? Orientalism and Literary Populisms, addresses this question. Building on Aamir Mufti’s suggestion that ‘the critique of Orientalism must ultimately lead us to the Orientalized spaces themselves’, Khan’s book tracks ‘the longer journey of the oriental tale into the orient, and subsequently into the postcolonial nation-state’ (185). Khan develops the argument that Muslims in South Asia were separated from Hindus by orientalist literary representations, especially the oriental tale and its post-colonial adaptations, marking Muslims as foreigners while representing Hindus as the true and only natives of India. She joins scholars such as Vinay Dharwadker, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, Aamir Mufti, Mrityunjay Tripathi and Walter Hakala in studying the impact of British orientalism on the development of modern literary traditions in South Asia, especially focusing on the identitarian split between Muslims and Hindus that continues to have disastrous consequences for the people of South Asia. Khan provides a unique and compelling angle into the discussion by focusing on the
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