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The politics of heritage from Madras to Chennai
In this anthropological history, Mary E. Hancock examines the politics of public memory in the southern Indian city of Chennai. Once a colonial port, Chennai is now poised to become a center for India's new economy of information technology, export processing, and back-office services. State and local governments promote tourism and a heritage-conscious cityscape to make Chennai a recognizable brand among investment and travel destinations. Using a range of textual, visual, architectural, and ethnographic sources, Hancock grapples with the question of how people in Chennai remember and represent their past, considering the political and economic contexts and implications of those memory practices. Working from specific sites, including a historic district created around an ancient Hindu temple, a living history museum, neo-traditional and vernacular architecture, and political memorials, Hancock examines the spatialization of memory under the conditions of neoliberalism.
eBook
Castes of Mind
When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization.
Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus.
Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.
eBook
Promoting Entrepreneurial Universities in India: A Case Study of IIT Madras
Abstract Entrepreneurial Universities (EUs) are gaining increasing significance across the globe, as a source of deep-tech start-ups. EUs through the generation of knowledge-based entrepreneurship, along with teaching and research, are emerging as a new source of deep-tech startups in the developed world. Among the emerging economies, India has the potential to emerge as the leading Start-up Nation globally. If an increasing number of deep-tech start-ups has to emerge from India, it is imperative to consciously and explicitly promote EUs. However, EUs are a new phenomenon and efforts to promote EUs are at their infancy in India as of now. Though India pursues an exclusive “startup promotion policy” at the national level as well as at the regional levels since the middle of the last decade, there is no explicit emphasis on EUs yet. Against this backdrop, this article explores the evolution of IIT Madras as an EU along with its Research Park, its major entities, their interrelationship, and role they play in the generation of deep-tech start-ups. Subsequently, the article proposes an EU structure for deep-tech startups, in the context of IIT Madras. Finally, the article brings out how IIT Madras has gained Sustainable Competitive Advantage through its EU and then derives policy implications for the promotion of EUs.
Journal Article
Utilizing fluctuation asymmetry to assess the effects of U-238 radioactivity on the marine ecosystem around the Madras nuclear power plant, India
The monitoring of marine ecosystems is crucial due to the growing threat posed by nuclear power plants and other nuclear anthropogenic emissions. In our work, we used a straightforward and low-cost biomonitoring technique called fluctuation asymmetry (FA) to examine the variation between the left and right sides (developmental instability) of organisms’ traits that were influenced by genetic and environmental variables in the early stages of ontogenesis. The specimens of fish (
sp.) and crabs (
) were collected seasonally and used as bioindicators to determine the effects of Uranium-238 (U-238) radioactivity around a nuclear power plant. The obtained results revealed that FA values were not considered typical values (FA = 0) in all seasons. Moreover, FA values of
sp. exhibited insignificant fluctuation for a particular characteristic through the different seasons, while a significant fluctuation occurred amongst the characteristics themselves throughout the same season. Inversely, FA values of the four characteristics in
displayed seasonal variation amongst them all. Statistically, there was a strong positive correlation (
= 0.5,
< 0.05) between U-238 radioactivity in the flesh of both organisms and the fluctuation asymmetry of different traits but it is not a sign that any radioactive pollution exists.
Journal Article
Birth Patterns in the Aftermath of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in India: The Case of Madras City
This paper examines the timing of one‐time fluctuations in births subsequent to the 1918 influenza pandemic in Madras (now Chennai), India. After seasonally decomposing key demographic aggregates, we identified abrupt one‐time fluctuations in excess births, deaths, and infant deaths. We found a contemporaneous spike in excess deaths and infant deaths and a 40‐week lag between the spike in deaths and a subsequent deficit in births. The results suggest that India experienced the same kind of short‐term postpandemic “baby bust” that was observed in the United States and other countries. Identifying the mechanisms underlying this widespread phenomenon remains an open question and an important topic for future research.
Journal Article