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Retro-Modern India
Firmly situated within the analytics of the political economy of a north Indian province, this book explores self-fashioning in pursuit of the modern amongst low-caste Chamars. Challenging existing accounts of national modernity in the non-West, the book argues that subaltern classes shape their own ideas about modernity by taking and rejecting from models of other classes within the same national context. While displacing the West - in its colonial and non-colonial manifestations - as the immanent comparative focus, the book puts forward a unique framework for the analysis of subaltern modernity. This builds on the entanglements between two main trajectories, both of which are viewed as the outcome of the generative impetus of modernisation in India: the first consists of the Chamar appropriation of socio-cultural distinctions forged by 19th-century Indian middle classes in their encounter with colonial modernity; the second features the Chamar subversion of high-caste ideals and practices as a result of low-caste politics initiated during the 20th century. The author contends that these conflicting trends give rise to a temporal antinomy within the Chamar politics of self-making, caught up between compulsions of a past modern and of a contemporary one. The eclectic outcome is termed as 'retro-modernity'. While the book signals a politics of becoming whose dynamics had previously been overlooked by scholars, it simultaneously opens up novel avenues for the understanding of non-elite modern life-forms in postcolonial settings.
The book will interest scholars of anthropology, South Asian studies, development studies, gender studies, political science and postcolonial studies.
eBook
Body Evidence
When South Asians immigrated to the United States in great numbers in the 1970s, they were passionately driven to achieve economic stability and socialize the next generation to retain the traditions of their home culture. During these years, the immigrant community went to great lengths to project an impeccable public image by denying the existence of social problems such as domestic violence, sexual assault, child sexual abuse, mental illness, racism, and intergenerational conflict. It was not until recently that activist groups have worked to bring these issues out into the open.In Body Evidence, more than twenty scholars and public health professionals uncover the unique challenges faced by victims of violence in intimate spaces . . . within families, communities and trusted relationships in South Asian American communities. Topics include cultural obsession with women's chastity and virginity; the continued silence surrounding intimate violence among women who identify themselves as lesbian, bisexual, or transgender; the consequences of refusing marriage proposals or failing to meet dowry demands; and, ultimately, the ways in which the United States courts often confuse and exacerbate the plights of these women.
eBook
Fabric(ated) fractures
\"Fabric(ated) Fractures\" is an exhibition catalogue that explores the complex intersections of identity, border politics, and communal trauma within the context of South and Southeast Asia. Curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt (Artistic Director of the Samdani Art Foundation), the volume documents a collaborative project that brought together artists from Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan to challenge the \"fabricated\" nature of national borders and the \"fractures\" they create in the collective consciousness. The work functions as a visual and critical discourse on how shared heritage is often severed by political cartography.
BOOK
The demands of recognition : state anthropology and ethnopolitics in Darjeeling
Since the British colonial period anthropology has been central to policy in India. But today, while the Indian state continues to use ethnography to govern, those who were the \"objects\" of study are harnessing disciplinary knowledge to redefine their communities, achieve greater prosperity, and secure political rights.
In this groundbreaking study, Townsend Middleton tracks these newfound \"lives\" of anthropology. Offering simultaneous ethnographies of the people of Darjeeling's quest for \"tribal\" status and the government anthropologists handling their claims, Middleton exposes how minorities are—and are not—recognized for affirmative action and autonomy. We encounter communities putting on elaborate spectacles of sacrifice, exorcism, bows and arrows, and blood drinking to prove their \"primitiveness\" and \"backwardness.\" Conversely, we see government anthropologists struggle for the ethnographic truth as communities increasingly turn academic paradigms back upon the state.
The Demands of Recognition offers a compelling look at the escalating politics of tribal recognition in India. At once ethnographic and historical, it chronicles how multicultural governance has motivated the people of Darjeeling to ethnologically redefine themselves—from Gorkha to tribal and back. But as these communities now know, not all forms of difference are legible in the eyes of the state. The Gorkhas' search for recognition has only amplified these communities' anxieties about who they are—and who they must be—if they are to attain the rights, autonomy, and belonging they desire.
eBook
Evangelising the Nation
Northeast India has witnessed several nationality movements during the 20th century. The oldest and one of the most formidable has been that of the Nagas - inhabiting the hill tracts between the Brahmaputra river in India and the Chindwin river in Burma (now Myanmar). Rallying behind the slogan, 'Nagaland for Christ', this movement has been the site of an ambiguous relation between a particular understanding of Christianity and nation-making.
This book, based on meticulous archival research, traces the making of this relation and offers fresh perspectives on the workings of religion in the formation of political and cultural identities among the Nagas. It tracks the transmutations of Protestantism from the United States to the hill tracts of Northeast India, and its impact on the form and content of the nation that was imagined and longed for by the Nagas. The volume also examines the role of missionaries, local church leaders, and colonial and post-colonial states in facilitating this process.
Lucidly written and rigorous in its analyses, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of South Asian history, religion, political science, sociology and social anthropology, and particularly those concerned with Northeast India.
eBook
Homemaking
Is it possible to think of a counter-hegemonic, progressive nostalgia that celebrates and helps sustain the marginalised? What might such a nostalgia look like, and what political importance might it have?
Homemaking: Radical Nostalgia and the Construction of a South Asian Diaspora examines diasporic life in south Asian communities in Europe, North America and Australia, to map the ways in which members of these communities use nostalgia to construct distinctive identities.
Using a series of examples from literature, cinema, visual art, music, computer games, mainstream media, physical and virtual spaces and many other cultural objects, this book argues that it is possible, and necessary, to read this nostalgia as helping to create a powerful notion of home that can help to transcend international relations of empire and capital, and create instead a pan-national space of belonging.
This homemaking represents the persistent search for somewhere to belong on one's own terms. Constructed through word, image and music, preserved through dreams and imagination, the home provides sustenance in the continuing struggle to change the present and the future for the better.
eBook