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The article discusses the nationalism, internationalism and cosmopolitanism in the interwar period focusing on the leftist internationalism that sought to appropriate and displace colonial liberalism, focusing on the paper "Nationalism, Internationalism and Cosmopolitanism: Some Observations from Modern Indian History," by Partha Chatterjee. It explores the significance of Fundamental Rights Resolution with particular consideration on the destabilization of nationalist imaginary in India.

This paper examines the values that informed the actions of two polities in seventeenth-century Bengal, the Nadia Raj and the Malla dynasty, through a close analysis of their temple inscriptions—a form of royal laudation or praśasti. Focusing on this inscriptional record of each polity, the paper is divided into three sections. The first section analyzes the language of the inscriptions in order to examine the ways in which each polity crafts a political language. The second section addresses how each set of inscriptional records speaks to each polity's political culture. Finally, the third section discusses questions of patronage and reception in order to draw connections in each polity between its public language and its public settings. The paper concludes with some thoughts on what it meant for a polity to speak publicly in seventeenth-century Bengal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article critically examines the assumptions and processes involved in identifying historically distinctive plant identities by their Latin botanical names. By following late-colonial efforts to identify a medicinal herb mentioned in some versions of the Ramayana, this paper argues for a historicist analysis of the process of “retro-botanizing.” In so doing, it also distinguishes between two different forms of “tradition,” the “factualized” and “embedded.” Finally, it blurs the allegedly watertight distinction between historical and mythic pasts. Instead of trying to distinguish these pasts ontologically, I argue that it is more productive to see specific pasts in relation to the sorts of futures they produce, that is, their respective historicities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Migration scholars have long regarded the trajectory of the third generation as a critical test of assimilation; however, scholarship to date has been limited and largely focused on socioeconomic attainment. In this article, we rely on a large dataset of adolescent respondents in England, Germany, and the Netherlands to compare the second and third generations in terms of their social networks and cultural identities. The third generation shows stronger ties to the native fourth-plus generation alongside weaker ties to coethnics. We document comparable, albeit more moderate, dynamics of assimilation over generations in regard to national and ethnic identification, along with substantial variation by country of destination and ethnic origin group. Our results point to a dominant trend of assimilation at the third generation and suggest future challenges to provide a more durable assessment of postwar migration waves two generations after settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that the 2007 state elections in Uttar Pradesh (UP), India's largest state, were the first “mass mobile phone” elections in India. The paper charts the spectacular growth of the cheap cell phone in India and in Uttar Pradesh, documents the organizational strengths of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), and explains how a party once based on Dalit (ex-Untouchable, or Scheduled Caste) support was able to cooperate with Brahmins. In these processes the mobile phone acted as a remarkable “force multiplier” to the existing BSP organization and helped party workers to circumvent the general hostility of mainstream media. The paper does not contend that the mobile phone won the 2007 elections; rather, it argues that the BSP was able to exploit a potent new tool, ideally suited to poor people who often were limited in their ability to travel. The paper points to similarities with the Obama campaigns of 2008 and notes that though other political groups in India attempt to imitate the methods, they may lack the essential organization and dedicated workers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

India's Northeast frontier is at the margins of three study areas: South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. This paper attempts a history of mapping in its broader sense as a cultural universal over a relatively long period. It is not a history of cartography, but focuses on the interface between cartography and cosmography, which were, in turn, shaped by imperial power and geographical knowledge. This approach offers a high-altitude view of this Asian borderland as the imperial frontier of both the Mughals and the British, and the national fringe of Republican India. The authors argue that imperial geographical discourses invested the colonial Northeast (British Assam) with a new kind of territorial identity. Surveyors and mapmakers objectified the geo-body of this borderland in a spatial fix and visualized it as a Northeast-on-the-map. Cartographic territoriality naturalized traditional frontiers into colonial borderlands, which, in turn, forged national boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay studies the evolution of India's anticorruption machinery and discourses of corruption from the 1940s to the 1960s as a tussle between the logics of bureaucracy and democracy playing out as part of decolonization. Anticorruption began as a way of safeguarding the British Government of India's war effort from wayward officials pilfering supplies. As the postcolonial government retooled coercive wartime laws and empowered an increasing number of bureaucrats to manage the economy for developmental purposes, anticorruption evolved into a key demonstration of accountability by the state to the Indian people. Meanwhile, discourses of corruption became increasingly politically potent as India's imperial subjects became voting citizens. These discourses created pressure for a reform of the anticorruption machinery. But the mechanisms resisted full democratization and continued to privilege the executive branch as they had in colonial times. Anticorruption mechanisms became used to subdue challenges to power that took place. They were themselves corrupted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores why victims of cattle theft in colonial north India avoided the police and courts, whose very purpose was to apprehend thieves and to restore stolen property. Throughout colonial rule, victims recovered stolen cattle themselves and with the help of khojis (trackers) and panchayat (indigenous systems). From the mid-nineteenth century onward, however, the British colonial government introduced criminal laws, like the Indian Penal Code and the Indian Evidence Act, and relied on colonial police to enforce those laws. These colonial laws and policing systems proved not only highly ineffective at dealing with theft, worsening the plight of victims while protecting thieves, but they also eroded the authority of indigenous institutions. By revisiting an important case, the Karnal Cattle Lifting Case (1913), the article shows how the institution of colonial police and courts oppressed rural Indian people and how and why Indian people, in turn, avoided colonial justice systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious conversions by Dalits in colonial India have largely been examined as mass movements to Christianity, with an implicit focus on men. However, why did Dalit women convert? Were they just guided by their men, family, and community? This paper explores the interrelationship between caste and gender in Dalit conversions afresh through the use of popular print culture, vernacular missionary literature, writings of Hindu publicists and caste ideologues, cartoons, and police reports from colonial north India. It particularly looks at the two sites of clothing and romance to mark representations of mass and individual conversions to Christianity and Islam. Through them, it reads conversions by Dalit women as acts that embodied a language of intimate rights, and were accounts of resistant materialities. These simultaneously produced deep anxieties and everyday violence among ideologues of the Arya Samaj and other such groups, where there was both an erasure and a representational heightening of Dalit female desire. However, they also provide one with avenues to recover in part Dalit women's aspirations in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines family planning during the Emergency in India, drawing upon the archive of the Shah Commission of Inquiry. It aims, primarily, to understand why family planning became such an important point of state intervention during the Emergency, when millions were sterilized. I argue that family planning was intended as a technocratic fix for the problem of poverty and that, although the family planning program existed before the Emergency, it received a fillip through Indira Gandhi's Emergency-era push for poverty eradication thanks to the established position of population control as a prerequisite for economic development. Secondly, it aims to understand how the Emergency and sterilization have become conflated in popular memory, such that the driving forces of poverty eradication and economic development have dropped out of the story altogether. The link between poverty eradication and population control has been forgotten, and a narrative of arbitrary family planning “excess” endured. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The harmonium is both widely played and widely condemned in India. During the Indian independence movement, both British and Indian scholars condemned the harmonium for embodying an unwelcome foreign musical sensibility. It was consequently banned from All-India Radio from 1940 to 1971, and still is only provisionally accepted on the national airwaves. The debate over the harmonium hinged on putative sonic differences between India and the modern West, which were posited not by performers, but by a group of scholars, composers, and administrators, both British and Indian. The attempt to banish the sound of the harmonium was part of an attempt to define a national sound for India, distinct from the West. Its continued use in education served a somewhat different national project: to standardize Indian music practice. This paper examines the intertwined aesthetic and political ideals that underlie the harmonium controversy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the nature and understandings of history, or itihasa/Purana, in eighteenth-century India using two Mangalkabya narratives. These materials belong to a large genre of performance narratives, usually devoted to eulogizing various deities, that were produced in Bengal for several centuries. The paper illustrates how a "traditional" genre such as the Mangalkabya was effectively used to articulate contingent political and cultural preoccupations. The narratives studied here show that the historical experiences and contexts mirrored in them were derived from Mughal rule over Bengal and large parts of India during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The paper seeks to historicize and contextualize the shifts noticeable in these narratives and to engage with the notion that premodern, precolonial India lacked a sense of history molded by contemporary material and cultural imperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the context in which skilled artisans introduced innovations in India around 1900 and suggests that such steps carried the potential for conflicts between the innovator and those affected by his actions. Conflicts could arise over the protection of knowledge, over the right to make a change, in the form of resistance, or as a choice between maintaining and diluting quality. Conflicts were absent when the mediation of social and political leaders was available and when skilled artisans emerged from unconventional backgrounds. By stressing the capacity of artisans to innovate and by suggesting that individuals were the agents of innovation, this paper refocuses attention on the skilled individual within a historiography that has been rather neglectful of both craftsmanship and the craftsman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the invention and sophistication of drones and unarmed aerial vehicles, satellites, and more recently, cyber espionage, "spy pigeons" remain a serious threat at the India-Pakistan border. The entanglement between flying pigeons for "sport" and capturing pigeons for "espionage" is critical to construe multiple meanings of more-than-human border intrusion in South Asia. Such an incursion not only endangers long-standing values of human-pigeon companionship but also moots a perplexity of intrusion that lies between the ethical acceptance of the more-than-human intruders and necessary resistance to their hostile infiltration. Explored through the geopolitically complex experiences of intrusion that have shaped the India-Pakistan relationship since Partition, intruding spy pigeons provide a critical perspective on distrust, animosity, and espionage in South Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides the first systematic study of the short- and long-run effects of parental death on the cognitive, noncognitive (locus of control), and physical development of Indian children. Exploiting rich longitudinal data over 15 years, I use difference-in-differences with individual fixed effects to account for time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity between orphans and non-orphans and investigate the mechanisms. This method is an improvement over previous cross-sectional approaches to such explorations. I find that paternal death is negatively correlated with orphans' cognition but is not correlated with locus of control or physical health. Cognitive effects are mediated by a 10-percentage-point-lower probability of enrollment and a 20% decline in monetary investments in the child, eventually leading to one less year of schooling by age 22. These negative outcomes are concentrated among the least wealthy families, who respond to the shock by reducing consumption and increasing their labor supply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1930s Hindi short story "Mugaloṃ ne saltanat bakhś dī" ("The Mughals Gave the Sultanate Away") by self-proclaimed apolitical author Bhagavatīcaraṇ Varmā offers an alternative version of how the British Crown took the rule of India away from the Mughal Empire. An in-depth analysis of this story written during the buildup to the decolonization of India evaluates how two different kinds of what is often referred to as "outside rulers" are depicted in this story: the Mughal emperors and the British colonial rulers. This case study assesses whether the story shows a different attitude toward Mughals and the centuries-old Muslim culture in India, compared to how both historic rulers are viewed and represented by right-wing Hindu nationalists: Muslim Indians seem to be made part of the "other" rather than a part of an inclusive interpretation of the Indian "self." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the early twentieth-century Indian prison as a colonial sexological laboratory, arguing that it grounded a spatial form of sexual science tied to the science of confinement. Uncovering a crucial and previously unstudied Indian prison scandal, it shows how the would-be prison sexologist John Mulvany's experiments on subaltern Indian sexual "deviants" developed alongside and helped reconstitute the architecture of the prisons he administered, from Calcutta's Presidency Jail to Alipore's New Central Jail. It also demonstrates how he mobilized racist criminological theories about Indian prisoners' desire for sociability over privacy to isolate sex offenders in graded patterns of cellular confinement and to prevent prison sex. It further explores how Mulvany's interception of the intimate letters of such sequestered prisoners led him to conceptualize pederasty as a mass site of habitual Indian racial excess. Finally, it documents how the state prevented the circulation of Mulvany's studies, anticipating outcry about having exposed Indian political or revolutionary prisoners to sexual abuse. While scholars have predominantly studied the circulation of sexology among imperial bourgeois publics through the Foucauldian framework of a sexological will to knowledge, this essay theorizes how the colonial state's dominance over penology amplifies our understanding of subaltern sexual life and of sexological epistemologies subtended by a will to ignorance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All leading long-term global population projections agree on continuing fertility decline, resulting in a rate of population size growth that will continue to decline toward zero and would eventually turn negative. However, scholarly and popular arguments have suggested that because fertility transmits intergenerationally (i.e., higher fertility parents tend to have higher fertility children) and is heterogeneous within a population, long-term population growth must eventually be positive, as highfertility groups come to dominate the population. In this research note, we show that intergenerational transmission of fertility is not sufficient for positive long-term population growth, for empirical and theoretical reasons. First, because transmission is imperfect, the combination of transmission rates and fertility rates may be quantitatively insufficient for long-term population growth: higher fertility parents may nevertheless produce too few children who retain higher fertility preferences. Second, today even higher fertility subpopulations show declining fertility rates, which may eventually fall below replacement (and in some populations already are). Therefore, although different models of fertility transmission across generations reach different conclusions, depopulation is likely under any model if, in the future, even higher fertility subpopulations prefer and achieve below-replacement fertility. These results highlight the plausibility of long-term global depopulation and the importance of understanding the possible consequences of depopulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, Naisargi N. Dave examines the relationship between animals and love in India, animals and love in multispecies anthropology, and between ethics and love more generally. She argues that ahimsa (nonviolence) and love share the characteristic of abnegating moral responsibility beyond the self and its attachments. Thus, Dave argues, against some strains of contemporary political thought, love is not the antithesis to ethical indifference but its very ground. Love is an indifference to all that does not accomplish its lovability. Dave's offering of an alternative interspecies ethic is what she calls indifference to difference—or "being in difference"—and she locates shades of this immanent ethic in precolonial South Asian conceptions of love as well as in a prenationalist revolutionary philosophy of ahimsa. Dave claims that love is an injustice because when we love it is the one or ones who are special to us that we save. She argues instead for an impassioned ethics without love: an indifference to difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The premise that a woman’s social status has intergenerational effects on her children’s health has featured prominently in population science research and in development policy. This study focuses on an important case in which social hierarchy has such an effect. In joint patrilocal households in rural India, women married to the younger brother are assigned lower social rank than women married to the older brother in the same household. Almost 8% of rural Indian children under 5 years old—more than 6 million children—live in such households. We show that children of lower-ranking moth­ers are less likely to sur­vive and have worse health out­comes, reflected in higher neonatal mortality and shorter height, compared with children of higher-ranking mothers in the same household. That the variation in mothers’ social status that we study is not subject to reporting bias is an advantage relative to studies using self-reported measures. We present evidence that one mechanism for this effect is maternal nutrition: although they are not shorter, lower-ranking mothers weigh less than higher-ranking mothers. These results suggest that programs that merely make transfers to households without attention to intrahousehold distribution may not improve child outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of economics literature has few studies on how traveling impacts economists and their ideas. Much fewer still exist on the travels of lesser-known economists such as Romesh Chunder Dutt. Dutt (1848–1909) was the founder of agricultural economics in India, a civil servant in the imperial administration, a writer, and an early nationalist fighting for Indian independence. Dutt encouraged traveling because, according to him, if Indians were to see and experience progress in Europe they could better understand modernity. Indian travel writing, unlike the European counterpart, was about experiencing what Indians had learned about modernity at the imperial universities in India. And yet, when the Indian travelers went to Europe they observed modernity alongside poverty, something that modernity should have excluded. Travel and travel writing for imperial subjects like Dutt was an empowering act where the gaze of the other was reversed: Indians showed that they could now also observe and study the British subject. I argue that Dutt's travels ultimately provided him with a new method to examine the world and criticize the way it was organized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rise of Hindu nationalist statecraft under the Modi regime, India finds itself at a perilous conjuncture that compels a critical rethinking of the political economy of the world's largest democracy. In this article, we propose a conceptual framework for doing so, centered on a Gramscian rethinking of the relationship among law, social movements, and state formation in the longue durée of Indian democracy. Working across three hegemonic transitions in Indian democracy, we argue that social movements and the state have constituted each other across this longue durée, and that this co-constitution has been both mediated by and inscribed in law. Crucially, we focus on the making and unmaking of compromise equilibriums between dominant and subaltern social forces in state-society relations in and through law and legal formations from the transition to independence, via the unravelling of the Nehruvian state, to the present moment of neoliberalization and authoritarian populism. The article is organized around three analytical concerns—law and hegemony, state formation as a hegemonic process, and the dialectic of power and resistance in passive revolution. In the conclusion, we bring our reflections to bear on the current conjuncture in Indian democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author focuses on the league against Imperialism and the Meerut Conspiracy Case. It states the connection of Jawaharlal Nehru, first prime Minister of India, with the league warranted a serious threat to the colonial state's policing of India's boundaries in the context of the bureoning and robust internationalist networks against imperialism.

Young urban Indian women have made women's rights to seek pleasure and have fun, especially in public, central to a new repertoire of feminist resistance and also as a way of demarcating themselves from "joyless" feminisms of the past. Concerns around pleasure, fun, and joy appear far removed from the everyday lives of poor and marginalized rural women. In this contribution, the author foregrounds rural women's pleasure-seeking practices, in consumption, fun, and friendship, which were the unanticipated outcomes of their involvement with a local NGO seeking to empower poor women. These were primarily lower-caste, lower-class women who were partially included in the aspirational futures of a globalized India, through poorly paid and precarious development work. Their participation in such work—a disciplinary domain imbued with its own regulatory potentials—enabled the development of new skills, techniques, and capacities in an entirely other domain, of nonwork or fun. The fact that fun, pleasure, and self-making relied on cultures of enterprise, empowerment, and aspiration also brings into view some of the contradictions at stake in neoliberal India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The worship of Vishwakarma, a god long associated with India's hereditary artisans and their tools, has achieved new relevance with the rise of industrial capitalism in South Asia. No longer moored solely to artisanal caste interests, worship of the god heralds a range of publics in which technē (crafting, fabricating, or making) is an exalted activity and public concern. Using "technophany" as a conceptual framework, we argue that deifications of technology and technicity sit at the core of Vishwakarma worship. Rather than treat religion and technology as ontologically distinct modalities of being-in-the-world, we use this framework to show how artisans, technicians, mechanics, and engineers use Vishwakarma worship to bring industrial technologies into alignment with the cosmos. Drawing on historical and ethnographic materials, we push beyond earlier scholarship that has treated Vishwakarma worship as a holdover from peasant culture or as a set of practices pitted against industrial capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the advent of prenatal sex-determination technologies in the mid- 1980s, India has experienced an increasingly male-biased sex ratio at birth, presumably from sex-selective abortions. Abortions lengthen birth intervals, but we know little about how birth spacing has changed or the effects of these changes. I show that, although the overall length of birth intervals increased from 1970 to the mid-2010s, well-educated women with no sons had the most substantial lengthening, as well as the most male-biased sex ratios. Furthermore, most of these changes took place immediately after the introduction of prenatal sex-determination technologies. Consequently, some women without sons now have longer birth intervals than those with sons, reversing India's traditional spacing pattern. Women with low education continue short birth spacing when they have no sons, with only limited evidence of male-biased sex ratios. Because of the rapid lengthening of birth intervals, period fertility rates substantially overestimated how fast cohort fertility fell. Moreover, predicted cohort fertility is still 10%-20% above the period fertility rate. If the lengthening of birth intervals arises from repeated abortions, the associated short pregnancy spacing may counteract any positive effects of longer birth spacing. There is, however, no evidence of this effect on infant mortality. Judging from sex ratios, sex-selective abortion use is not declining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the causes behind the institutional change that promoted regulated private-sector competition in India's booming telecommunications sector. This change occurred incrementally by resolving conflicts of interest driven by the twin engines of fiscal crisis and technological change in cellular telephony. The Prime Minister's Office and the Ministry of Finance pushed for the change, whereas the Department of Telecommunications resisted it. As private participation succeeded, the relationship between the private sector and government financial organizations made a significant impact on parts of the government that favored change. Cellular technology offered the private sector with a first-mover's advantage because it had gambled on it when government-owned corporations had ignored its commercial potential. Evolutionary change occurred through a process of institutional layering that involved establishing new institutions along the edges of old ones and allowing them to grow differentially. The pace of institutional change accelerated in times of financial crises when the mismatch between policy intention and institutions led to a withdrawal of private investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses recent field research to challenge the widely held view that a "Dalit revolution" is occurring in North India. Drawing on two years' ethnographic research in a village in western Uttar Pradesh, the authors uncover the growing importance of a generation of local political activists among Dalits (former untouchables) while also showing that these young men have not been able to effect a broad structural transformation at the local level. The authors use this case to identify a need for further research on South Asian political change that links party political transformation to questions of local level social practice and subaltern consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Dalit consciousness in Punjab emerged against the backdrop of the teachings of Ravidass, an untouchable saint-poet of the North Indian Bhakti movement who presented a middle path between assimilation and radical separatism for the construction of a separate Dalit identity. Dera Sach Khand Ballan, one of the most popular Ravid ass Deras in Punjab, played an important role in concretizing this path by chiseling the markers of a separate Dalit identity in the state. The author assesses the long-term implications of the newly emerged Dalit consciousness in Punjab for the deepening of democracy in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contested historiography of the 1857 rebellion and its importance in shaping the Indian nationalist imagination make it an excellent entry point into an investigation of nationalist pasts and their archival bases. This paper examines a concatenation of influential narratives of different genres that have become critical sources for a history of the rebel leader Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi and for configuring her as an icon of heroic Indian womanhood. It places each of these sources, ranging from late nineteenth-century Marathi texts to mid-twentieth-century Hindi narratives, within their specific spatio- temporal setting and highlights the contradictory regional projects underlying apparently smooth nationalist narratives. Through a close examination of the making of the Lakshmibai archive, the author argues that a consideration of the editorial and textual practices that went into the making of reliable and usable archives for a modern historiography is critical to the unpacking of nationalist historiographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comprehensive picture of provider coalitions in health policy making remains incomplete because of the lack of empirically driven insights from low- and middle-income countries. The authors examined the politics of provider coalitions in the health sector in Karnataka, India, by investigating policy processes between 2016 and 2018 for developing amendments to the Karnataka Private Medical Establishments Act. Through this case, they explore how provider associations function, coalesce, and compete and the implications of their actions on policy outcomes. They conducted in-depth interviews, document analysis, and nonparticipant observations of two conferences organized by associations. They found that provider associations played a major role in drafting the amendments and negotiating competing interests within and between doctors and hospital associations. Despite the fragmentation, the associations came together to reinterpret the intentions of the amendments as being against the interests of the profession, culminating in a statewide protest and strike. Despite this show of strength, provider associations only secured modest modifications. This case demonstrates the complex and unpredictable influence of provider associations in health policy processes in India. The authors' analysis highlights the importance of further empirical study on the influence of professional and trade associations across a range of health policy cases in low- and middle-income countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1937, Burma formally separated from India. The separation might seem self-evident, given India and Burma's framing as distinct, bounded spaces. Yet, in the Patkai mountains straddling them, separation was a complex process with only a murky sense of finality, more problematic and contested than generally acknowledged. The border ran through similar groups and complex networks, which posed recurring problems for local inhabitants and frontier officials. As independence neared, colonial officials unsuccessfully tried to reshape the Patkai's territorialization. Viewed from the Patkai, the narrative of an amiable divorce between two ill-suited partners crumbles. The separation was one of several partitions that created bounded spaces across South Asia during the twentieth century. Seeing Burma and India as distinct others privileges spatio-cultural hierarchies rooted in colonial frameworks, assimilated by postcolonial political arrangements and nation-state-centric scholarship. This article foregrounds the need to explore how India and Burma were made against one another and recover alternative spatialities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay traces the development of China–India studies from the mid-nineteenth century to the present in order to take stock of the field, which has witnessed a surge in publication over the past two decades. The assessment presented here weaves the main shifts in China–India political relations with the emergence of various strands of China–India scholarship, since the two aspects often intersect. The major lacuna in the field, this essay argues, is a framework needed to analyze the complex connections and the pertinent comparisons between China and India. It contends that research on China–India topics should ideally attempt to combine comparative and connective frameworks with analyses that transcend geographic, temporal, and disciplinary boundaries to address this lacuna. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low- and middle-income countries in Asia have seen substantial improvements in infant mortality over the last three decades. This study examines the factors contributing to the improvement in infant survival in their first year in six Asian countries: Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, and the Philippines. I decompose the overall improvement in the infant survival rate in the respective countries from the 1990s to the 2010s into the part that can be explained by the improvements in circumstantial environments in which infants develop and the remaining part that is due to the structural change in the hazard functions. This decomposition is achieved by employing the random survival forest, allowing me to predict the counterfactual infant survival probability that infants in the 2010s would have under the circumstantial environments of the 1990s. The results show that large parts of the improvement are explained by the improvement in the environments in all the countries being analyzed. I find that the reduction in family size, increased use of antenatal care, longer pregnancy periods, and improved living standards were associated with the improvement of the infant mortality rate in all six countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on history of national accounting thus sees competition between western powers during and around the two World Wars as a major animating force in the drive to establish an authoritative system of national accounting. It mentions role of colonialism and imperial politics and the book "Wealth and Taxable Capacity of India" by K. T. Shah and K. J. Khambata. It also mentions reformulation of ideas of Indian poverty and India's future political economy.

The article focuses on the Kargilis remarked on the disproportionate killing of Muslims who violated curfews regarding Amarnath land transfer by the Indian state, as compared to the Hindu protestors in Jammu. It mentions that military occupation in everyday parlance by tracing the tenuous line that Kargilis navigate between solidarity with Kashmiris and performing sentinel citizenship for the Indian state.

Weaving on the handloom in India remains in the twenty-first century a large industry practiced by several million people, including, besides weavers themselves, others engaged in supporting activities. Indian hand weaving is a potentially viable ecological textile industry for the future, particularly if factors such as environmental damage and social costs are included in measuring viability. However, Indian hand weaving suffers from the perception that it is a relic of the past. Too, in the market it is undercut by cheaply made machine-produced cloth fraudulently sold as handmade. Research into the history of hand weaving revealed that there were two distinct modes of production, one in which expensive cloth was made for the elite, and another in which ordinary cloth was made for ordinary people. Since the making of expensive fabrics needed expensive raw materials, the weavers were dependent on an investor to supply these materials, creating a hierarchic dependency. The vernacular production of cloth, on the other hand, was democratic with lateral relations between the different stages of production. Malkha has simplified spinning by avoiding bale-pressing cotton lint, a technology introduced in colonial times to carry cotton long distances from the field. Malkha spinning centers are substantially smaller in size than conventional mills, closer to the small scales of Indian cotton farming and hand weaving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Handloom weaving in India is a vibrant and dynamic craft-based technology that is more than two thousand years old. It is the second-largest provider of rural livelihoods, with a 10 percent share of the domestic textile market, unified under the cultural brand of "handloom." Yet weavers, like other craftspeople in India, stand in the shadow of deep divisions: rich/poor, urban/rural, modern/traditional, Brahmin/Dalit, educated scientist/illiterate laborer. As a system of knowledge, handloom weaving is associated with a museumized past rather than a promising future; the weaver is seen as a laboring body rather than an innovative mind. Yet through theorizing handloom weaving as sociotechnology, this essay endeavors to explicate the sustainability and innovation in handloom weaving. Studying examples of innovation in handloom weavers, the essay explores craft livelihoods as offering the opportunity for political action: as a unifying device for cultural cohesion, as embodied knowledge that engages both mind and body, and as a tool for justice and equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the state and decolonization in the subcontinent in India's Punjab between 1947 and 1955. Topics discussed include the role of border in both generating and overcoming uncertainties over state authority and control and the ways in which the postcolonial state sought to overcome its uncertainties regarding the border through the bureaucratic practices and discourse of local state actors.

An essay is presented which argues that the British imperial legal framework of competing jurisdictional authorities and quasi-sovereignty in the late nineteenth century, presented challenges in Indian local contexts. Topics discussed include how these challenges demanded local reforms in governance which could be met by the panchayat and debates on the panchayat in the Indian press as a way of mapping questions of law and governance in India.

This article considers the relationship between the official, legislated claims of heritage conservation in India and the wide range of episodic and transitory inhabitations that have animated and transformed the monumental remains of the city, or rather cities, of Delhi. Delhi presents a spectrum of monumental structures that appear variously to either exist in splendid isolation from the rush of everyday urban life or to peek out amidst a palimpsest of unplanned, urban fabric. The repeated attempts of the state archaeological authorities to disambiguate heritage from the quotidian life of the city was frustrated by bureaucratic lapses, casual social occupations, and deliberate challenges. The monuments offered structural and spatial canvases for lives within the city, providing shelter, solitude, and the possibility of privacy, as well as devotional and commercial opportunity. The dominant comportment of the city's monuments during the twentieth century was a hybrid monumentality, in which the jealous, legislated custody of the state became anxious, ossified, and ineffectual. An acknowledgement and acceptance of the hybridity of Delhi's monuments offers an opportunity to reorient understandings of urban heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This effort has been undertaken by one of India's most experienced foreign policy practitioners, Shivshankar Menon, in his voluminous book I India and Asian Geopolitics: The Past, Present i . Doing so would also help India fight poverty, hunger, and illiteracy, which, according to Menon, are critical to transforming India. It is important to note that while Menon's book gives a fairly comprehensive account of regional and global settings in which India must operate, it falls short in explaining why cooperation, not confrontation, is a must for India. [Extracted from the article]

The author reflects on relations between caste ideology, organization of space, and sense perception. The author talks about his ethnographic and archival research in the cities of Lucknow and Benares in Uttar Pradesh, India on Dalit religious history. It also cites reference of the book "Joothan: A Dalit's Life" by Omprakash Valmiki.

The author presents postcolonial debates on citizenship and urbanization of slum residents in New Delhi, India. Topics discussed include physical eviction of the residents of Kali Masjid from their homes; views of James Holston on urban citizenship and programs of social security in India. It also talks about social security for unorganized sector workers to entitlements to housing.

An essay on comments on Engseng Ho's inter-Asian concepts for mobile societies is presented. It states that Ho's historiography is a reminder of the dominance of trans-hemispheric migration in discussions of mobility and the effects of this dominance on the approaches to inter-Asian connection. Also examined is the interpretation of Islamic China and Islamic India.

Engaging in such public theology and indicating one's sectarian belonging through visible signs, Fisher argues, served to create a Smarta 'Saiva public, and the sectarian age in South India saw the formation of many such sectarian publics. Thus, for example, the poet and theologian Nilaka ha Dik ita defended attacks against the textual integrity of 'Saiva texts such as the I Linga Pura a i , which 'Srivai ava theologians argued contained too many interpolations to be considered authoritative. In I Hindu Pluralism i , Elaine M. Fisher closely examines the works of South Indian Smarta 'Saiva Brahmins from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century to better understand how they articulated the boundaries of their own community. [Extracted from the article]

This article identifies a major transformation in India's approach to strategic technology development from an earlier Commission model, epitomized by atomic energy, that seeks the enhancement of sovereign power, to a Mission model, epitomized by telecommunications, directed toward the furthering of biopolitical power. It compares five strategic industries in India—atomic energy, space, electronics, biotechnology and telecommunications—and shows that no single factor is responsible for technological success or failure. Outcomes depend on the strength of political networks, the structure and maturity of the industry, the extent of bureaucratic resistance, and the technological strategy adopted. This finding contests the widely held perspective that success in strategic technology development is the product of the extraordinary efforts of a single individual, a technology “czar,” and explains the persistence of this narrative by highlighting the role of technoscience in mediating a highly ambivalent relation between the Indian middle class and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]