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In this powerful, compassionate work, one of anthropology's most distinguished ethnographers weaves together rich fieldwork with a compelling critical analysis in a book that will surely make a signal contribution to contemporary thinking about violence and how it affects everyday life. Veena Das examines case studies including the extreme violence of the Partition of India in 1947 and the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 after the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In a major departure from much anthropological inquiry, Das asks how this violence has entered \"the recesses of the ordinary\" instead of viewing it as an interruption of life to which we simply bear witness. Das engages with anthropological work on collective violence, rumor, sectarian conflict, new kinship, and state and bureaucracy as she embarks on a wide-ranging exploration of the relations among violence, gender, and subjectivity. Weaving anthropological and philosophical reflections on the ordinary into her analysis, Das points toward a new way of interpreting violence in societies and cultures around the globe. The book will be indispensable reading across disciplinary boundaries as we strive to better understand violence, especially as it is perpetrated against women.

In South Asian urban landscapes, men are everywhere. And yet we do not seem to know very much about precisely what men do in the city as men. How do men experience gender in city spaces? What are the interactional dynamics between different groups of men on city streets? How do men adjudicate between good and bad conduct in urban spaces? Through ethnographic descriptions of copresence on public transport in Kolkata, India, this book brings into sight the gendered logics of cooperation and everyday morality through which masculinities take up space in cities. It follows the labor geographies of auto-rickshaw and taxi operators and their interactions with traffic police and commuters to argue that the gendered fabric of urban life needs to be understood as a product of situational forms of cooperation between different social groups. Such an orientation sheds light on the part played by everyday morality and provisional support in upholding male privilege in the city.

Once celebrated as a model development for its progressive social indicators, the southern Indian state of Kerala has earned the new distinction as the nation's suicide capital, with suicide rates soaring to triple the national average since 1990. Rather than an aberration on the path to development and modernity, Keralites understand this crisis to be the bitter fruit borne of these historical struggles and the aspirational dilemmas they have produced in everyday life. Suicide, therefore, offers a powerful lens onto the experiential and affective dimensions of development and global change in the postcolonial world. In the long shadow of fear and uncertainty that suicide casts in Kerala, living acquires new meaning and contours. In this powerful ethnography, Jocelyn Chua draws on years of fieldwork to broaden the field of vision beyond suicide as the termination of life, considering how suicide generates new ways of living in these anxious times.

In the late-nineteenth century, British travelers to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands compiled wide-ranging collections of material culture for scientific instruction and personal satisfaction. Colonial Collecting and Display follows the compelling history of a particular set of such objects, tracing their physical and conceptual transformation from objects of indigenous use to accessioned objects in a museum collection in the south of England. This first study dedicated to the historical collecting and display of the Islands' material cultures develops a new analysis of colonial discourse, using a material culture-led approach to reconceptualize imperial relationships between Andamanese, Nicobarese, and British communities, both in the Bay of Bengal and on British soil. It critiques established conceptions of the act of collecting, arguing for recognition of how indigenous makers and consumers impacted upon \"British\" collection practices, and querying the notion of a homogenous British approach to material culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

The partition of India in 1947 was a seminal event of the twentieth century. Much has been written about the Punjab and the creation of West Pakistan; by contrast, little is known about the partition of Bengal. This remarkable book by an acknowledged expert on the subject assesses the social, economic and political consequences of partition. Using compelling sources, the book, which was originally published in 2007, shows how and why the borders were redrawn, how the creation of new nation states led to unprecedented upheavals, massive shifts in population and wholly unexpected transformations of the political landscape in both Bengal and India. The book also reveals how the spoils of partition, which the Congress in Bengal had expected from the new boundaries, were squandered over the twenty years which followed. This is an intriguing and challenging work whose findings change our understanding and its consequences for the history of the subcontinent.

\"Behind India's high recent growth rates lies a story of societal conflict that is scarcely talked about. Across production sites, state institutions and civil society organisations, the dominant and less well-off sections of society are engaged in a protracted conflict that determines the material conditions of one quarter of the world's 'poor'. Increasingly mobile, and often engaged in multiple occupations in multiple locations, India's 'classes of labour' are highly segmented, but far from passive in the face of ongoing processes of exploitation and domination. Drawing on detailed fieldwork in rural South India over more than a decade, the book uses a 'class-relational' approach that focuses on 'the poor's' iniquitous relations with others, and views class in terms of contested social relations rather than structural locations marked by particular characteristics. The book explores continuity and change amongst forms of accumulation, exploitation and domination in three interrelated arenas of class relations: labour relations, the state and civil society. Marginal gains for labour derived from structural change are contested by capital, local state institutions and state poverty reduction programmes tend to be controlled by the dominant class, and civil society organisations tend to reproduce rather than challenge the status quo. On the other hand, elements of state policy have the capacity to improve the material conditions of 'the poor' where such ends are actively pursued by labouring class organisations. It is argued that social policy currently provides the most fertile terrain for redistributing power and resources to the labouring class, and may clear the way for more fundamental transformations.\"

Based on extensive fieldwork in Calcutta, this book provides the first ethnography of how middle-class women in India understand and experience economic change through transformations of family life. It explores their ideas, practices and experiences of marriage, childbirth, reproductive change and their children's education, and addresses the impact that globalization is having on the new middle classes in Asia more generally from a domestic perspective. By focusing on maternity, the book explores subjective understandings of the way intimate relationships and the family are affected by India's liberalization policies and the neo-liberal ideologies that accompany through an analysis of often competing ideologies and multiple practices. And by drawing attention to women's agency as wives, mothers and grandmothers within these new frameworks, Domestic Goddesses discusses the experiences of different age groups affected by these changes. Through a careful analysis of women's narratives, the domestic sphere is shown to represent the key site for the remaking of Indian middle-class citizens in a global world.

This book argues that the role of the British East India Company in transforming warfare in South Asia has been overestimated. Although it agrees with conventional wisdom that, before the British, the nature of Indian society made it difficult for central authorities to establish themselves fully and develop a monopoly over armed force, the book argues that changes to warfare in South Asia were more gradual, and the result of more complicated socio-economic forces than has been hitherto acknowledged. The book covers the period from 1740, when the British first became a major power broker in south India, to 1849, when the British eliminated the last substantial indigenous kingdom in the sub-continent. Placing South Asian military history in a global, comparative context, it examines military innovations; armies and how they conducted themselves; navies and naval warfare; major Indian military powers - such as the Mysore and Khalsa kingdoms, the Maratha confederacy - and the British, explaining why they succeeded.

As a thriving port city, nineteenth-century Bombay attracted migrants from across India and beyond. Nile Green's Bombay Islam traces the ties between industrialization, imperialism and the production of religion to show how Muslim migration fueled demand for a wide range of religious suppliers, as Christian missionaries competed with Muslim religious entrepreneurs for a stake in the new market. Enabled by a colonial policy of non-intervention in religious affairs, and powered by steam travel and vernacular printing, Bombay's Islamic productions were exported as far as South Africa and Iran. Connecting histories of religion, labour and globalization, the book examines the role of ordinary people - mill hands and merchants - in shaping the demand that drove the market. By drawing on hagiographies, travelogues, doctrinal works, and poems in Persian, Urdu and Arabic, Bombay Islam unravels a vernacular modernity that saw people from across the Indian Ocean drawn into Bombay's industrial economy of enchantment.

The Gaddi of North India are agro-pastoralists who rear sheep and goats following a seasonal migration around the first Himalayan range. While studies on pastoralists have focused either on the pastoralists' adaptation to their physical environment or treated the environment from a symbolic perspective, this book offers a new, holistic perspective that analyzes the ways in which people \"make\" place. Based on extensive fieldwork, this book not only describes a contemporary understanding of the Gaddi's engagement with the environment but also analyzes religious practices and performances of social relations, as well as media practices and notions of aesthetics. Thereby, the landscape in which the Gaddi live is understood as a network of places that is constantly being built and rebuilt through these local practices. The book contributes to the growing interest in approaches of practice within environmental anthropology.