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"Subramanian, Ajantha, 1969-"
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Shorelines
After a clerical sanction prohibited them from fishing for a week, a group of Catholic fishers from a village on India's southwestern coast took their church to court. They called on the state to recognize them as custodians of the local sea, protect their right to regulate trawling, and reject the church's intermediary role.
In Shorelines, Ajantha Subramanian argues that their struggle requires a rethinking of Indian democracy, citizenship, and environmentalism. Rather than see these fishers as non-moderns inhabiting a bounded cultural world, or as moderns wholly captured by the logic of state power, she illustrates how they constitute themselves as political subjects. In particular, she shows how they produced new geographies-of regionalism, common property, alternative technology, and fisher citizenship-that underpinned claims to rights, thus using space as an instrument of justice. Moving beyond the romantic myth of self-contained, natural-resource dependent populations, this work reveals the charged political maneuvers that bound subalterns and sovereigns in South Asia.
In rich historical and ethnographic detail, Shorelines illuminates postcolonial rights politics as the product of particular histories of caste, religion, and development, allowing us to see how democracy is always \"provincial.\"
eBook
The caste of merit : engineering education in India
Just as those who have been least disadvantaged by their racial identity often announce that Americans live in a post-racial era, those who have historically benefited from their caste affiliation rush to declare that India is a post-caste nation. In The Caste of Merit, Ajantha Subramanian addresses the controversial relationships between technical education and caste formation and economic stratification in modern India. Through a series of in-depth studies of the elite Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-the institutions Nehru once described as modern India's new temples-she explains that caste has not disappeared from India. On the contrary, it has acquired a kind of disturbing invisibility. Caste is now borne by the lower castes who invoke their affiliation in the public, political arena to claim resources from the state. The upper castes, by contrast, treat such discussions as backward and embarrassing. Caste privilege, Subramanian argues, is certainly working in India. But it has been transformed by a new discourse of \"merit.\" Reservations or quotas for historically disadvantaged groups, much like affirmative action in the United States, are a subject of great import in India. Admission to colleges and employment in the public sector are two of the most hotly debated subjects when it comes to quotas. Meanwhile, lynchings, gang rapes, ritual humiliation, and political intimidation of low-caste Indians appear in newspaper headlines and on social media timelines with frightening regularity. It is within this dangerous context that Subramanian's provocative and empirically based argument about the dominance of Brahmins in the Indian Institutes of Technology must be read.-- Provided by publisher.
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