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While much has been written about how imperialist and Indian nationalist historiographies have approached 1857, scant attention has been paid to how it has been remembered in Pakistan. This article endeavours to explore the ways in which 1857 has been articulated by the state in India and Pakistan through a study of their commemorative postage stamps. On the face of it, India's emphasis on nonviolence and Pakistan's quest for an Islamic history make 1857 a misfit within the historiographies of both states. However, the paper outlines that during the centenary in 1957, both India and Pakistan commemorated 1857 while maintaining some discursive distance from it. While Pakistan chose to memorialise it as the beginning of its struggle for independence, India recessed it within the broader framework of independence itself. The paper goes on to demonstrate how this position has changed drastically over the years. In order to weave a composite and inclusive history of the country, India now celebrates the legacy of 1857 by appropriating it within the frames of national unity, patriotism, and anti-imperialism. Pakistan, on the other hand, uses 1857 merely as a means to segue into a discussion of reform efforts led by the subcontinent's Muslim elite, thereby relegating it to the background of the Pakistan movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do rising powers engage with international institutions? While this question has remained important, we have very few theoretically grounded, empirical studies that look at this engagement. This paper seeks to address that gap by focusing on India's engagement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It argues that rising powers engage with the institution's distinctive design, seeking to change features such as the rules for controlling the institution. The issues the institution covers matter: the nature of the issue area can facilitate engagement. For example, in the case of India's engagement with the IMF, the technical nature of the issue arena provided autonomy to the executive and facilitated the process of formulating and implementing its strategy. The Indian executive has engaged mostly with formal rules during the period under review. Contrary to expectations that status-quoist institutions will normally discourage states from seeking change, the paper finds that India expended its resources to influence quota reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates why India actively negotiated and ratified the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), the first global health treaty to curb tobacco use worldwide. The World Health Organization's (WHO) decision to conduct FCTC negotiations aligned with India's shifting disease burden that was pivoting from infectious to non-communicable diseases, particularly cancer, which shot up due to surging tobacco use. The WHO's decision to frame the agreement around constraining global tobacco commerce, particularly the might of multinational tobacco companies, meshed with the interests of New Delhi, which was concurrently seeking to curb surging tobacco consumption. This triggered a positive approach and attitude to FCTC negotiations, leading to India's ratification. India's negotiation and ratification of the FCTC shows that the literature(s) on rising powers and international organizations must consider how factors like the WHO's institutional politics, specifically the intent to negotiate a focused global agreement to curb tobacco production and distribution worldwide, affects how countries perceive and seek to use that agreement to bolster domestic policy concerns like tobacco control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In India, marginalised people with serious or chronic illness face particular challenges to finding sustainable treatment, and often experience financial devastation. One state welfare scheme (the EWS hospital bed quotas) holds the promise of treatment for those in Delhi's margins, through partnerships with corporate hospitals. Yet, the process of gaining access to treatment via the scheme is very frustrating. This ethnography illustrates the ways in which low-income patients' attempts to lay claim to state services often bring them into play with a mode of the state that is, in anthropologists' conceptions, opaque, arbitrary and erratic. In response to the 'illegible' modes of access to the scheme, patients and their families are compelled to construct and reproduce their eligibility to access treatment, through a repertoire of intricate and entwined practices, namely: the attainment of credible low-income documentation, the use of big men to leverage resources, and different kinds of performance. The burden of enacting these practices is further compounded and troubled by the state scheme's blurry entanglement with the private sector, in which roles and responsibilities for a 'duty of care' to citizens with illness are elusive. This paper therefore aims to be an original contribution to the social sciences, in interpreting health-seekers' experiences of state-private schemes in Delhi within anthropological understandings of the state and marginalised people's meaning-making of illegible state processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the case of a community of Bengali immigrant settlers along the coast of Odisha in India at the centre of a unique citizenship controversy. Families have arrived here gradually over the years since 1947, and have generally acquired a range of identity documents from Indian state agencies. These documents certify to a range of rights that signal social and political participation within India: land ownership, voting rights and the receipt of official welfare subsidies. With little warning, a 2005 order by the state government following a high court directive led to the production of a list of 1551 persons, declaring such persons as ‘infiltrators’. The list ostensibly comprises those who have entered India illegally after 1971 or born to parents who entered illegally. While no deportation, as originally intended, has taken place, the nullification of their various documents of citizenship has created a void in their lives. This paper examines the wider politics of the case, especially focusing on how those with nullified documents negotiate the authority of the local state and actors within their own society, and what this reveals about the ever contested nature of citizenship in post-partition India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates the role of the Courts in lending currency to the politics of Hindutva in the 1990s. It focuses on some of the significant and connected cases of the Ayodhya dispute and the infamous Hindutva judgments to illustrate how the court legitimised, perhaps inadvertently, a jingoistic and intolerant ideology as an acceptable political strategy. The rise and electoral successes of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) post-emergency accompanied the party's reliance on the judicial instruments to make its Hindu nationalist ideology palatable to a larger audience and the 'secular' citizen. Contrary to the stance of Hindu nationalist organisations against codification of Hindu law and any state interference in matters of religion at the time of independence, in the 1990s the movement relied significantly on judicial instruments for its own legitimacy and for expanding the domain of religion by seeking the patronage of 'law'. The Court, in what came to be known as the Hindutva judgments, attempted to separate 'Hindutva' from 'Hinduism', thereby aiding the launch of a new dawn of Hindutva which could then become synonymous with democracy and development. Most significantly, it also opened the doors for electoral promises to be routed through the courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper delineates 'enterprise Hindutva' as a mediatized form of Hindu nationalism shaped largely by the affordances of social media and the cultural practices surrounding them in urban India. Enterprise Hindutva is argumentative, experientially voluntary and capable of working with contradictions. It inhabits the ideological project envisioned as a range rather than a point of convergence. Enterprise Hindutva suggests that it is through the very bickering on social media and repetition of simplified summaries of key ideological principles that Hindutva finds its latest mediatic conditions for renewal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines perceptions of the state by urban Muslim artisans in India. Through ethnographic analysis, I focus on the life and work trajectories of two artisans whose perceptions and experiences of the state differ widely. The common thread running through each artisan's experience is that their engagement or disengagement with the state produces subjectivities that are both deemed authentic. One artisan's involvement with the state serves to authenticate not only her skills and craftsmanship but also her sense of self, while another artisan's refusal to engage with the state authenticates his work and sense of self because of his experience of the state as corrupt. I am particularly interested in how state-issued documents, such as the certificate conferred to winners of the national awards for highly skilled artisans and the artisan identification card, are perceived as legitimate or illegitimate based on ideals of what it means to be an authentic artisan. This paper also examines how conceptualizations of the margins through the medium of documents can provide alternate ways of understanding experiences of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exiled Tibetans in India are an unusual marginalised community. With their own government structure operating within the sovereign state of India, albeit without legal recognition, they are both de facto refugees from the perspective of the Indian state and Tibetan 'citizens' in the eyes of the Tibetan government-in-exile (TGiE). Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines the complex, dynamic and at times contradictory three-way relationship between this population and the two 'governments' which strive to identify, document and rehabilitate them. After sketching out the context of relations between India and (exile) Tibet, these interactions are explored through two key sets of state-population relations: the identification of individuals as citizens and refugees, and the provision of welfare. Interweaving 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' perspectives on such state-citizen and state-state relations, this paper juxtaposes the rhetoric of both 'governments' with Tibetan citizens' micro-political interactions with these state structures and foregrounds the importance of scale for analyses of the state. The paper concludes by reflecting on how this case can offer a critical spotlight on broader understandings of the everyday state. It is argued that this case provides particularly valuable leverage in demonstrating the partial and processual nature of statehood and powerfully exposes the contingent practices which underlie the social construction of political power in so-called 'normal' states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the interactions of power as analysed through the formulation story of a recently enacted social policy, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), India. It explains the various drivers that led to the passing of this policy, with a view to analysing the extent and nature of power as was played out in the making of this policy. The paper sets out the way in which social policy formulation can be understood to be arising from interactions and linkages between individual actors, who together make up policy coalitions and networks. These interactions are described through a four-fold classification of processes (parliamentary, executive, party political and civil society) into which the actions and contributions of these actors feed, giving rise to an iterative, messy and complex reality. Power in the policy formulation network is shown as multi-sited as well as relational. The paper concludes with an endorsement for reconfiguring the geographies of power in the form of a kaleidoscope of actors and events, within and through which power flows and is exercised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper strives to pluralize notions of taste in relation to the canonized category of the Hindu or Indian temple. I put 'Hindu' in italics because I include Jain temples in my discussion and I put 'Indian' in italics because the architecture I discuss predates India as a nation-state and in the twenty-first century includes buildings in South and Southeast Asia as well as the Diaspora. Through a discussion of the Archaeological Preservation Aesthetic (APA) and multiple variants of the Ritual Renovation Aesthetics (RRA), new ways of looking emerge. This paper seeks to reconcile the hegemonic assumptions about art historical taste and the temple within an increasingly global environment. The main argument is predicated on temple users' practice as a form of curatorial practice in the field and provides a deep description of the multiplication of aesthetics due to increasing privatization of temple administration in India. The tenth-century cluster of temples from the Medapata region (Southern Rajasthan) serves as case study for a widespread phenomenon of putting ancient temples 'back' into worship during the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assistance to India from Japan under its Official Development Aid (ODA) programme has been particularly important for infrastructure development. India has been the single largest recipient of Japanese ODA since 2003–2004. Most of it has been directed towards long-term participation in infrastructure, much of which comes from the enormous demand. With the Indian Prime Minister’s visit on 3 August 2014, Japan committed to invest $35 billion in different sectors focusing on infrastructure in the coming five years. This investment will boost India’s infrastructure sector. Poor infrastructure is a constraint to sustaining India’s high and inclusive growth rate. One major bottleneck in infrastructure development is infrastructure financing (along with many others, such as land acquisition, environment clearance, and cost-time overruns). In this context, the paper explores the impact of Japanese ODA on the infrastructure sector in India, the trends and priority sectors for Japanese ODA, and the problems and challenges of this developing relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is about forest governance in India and presents a unique, federalism perspective on the subject. While forest governance and federalism have both been deeply researched in academic scholarship, there is little work that deals with the linkages between the two. In addressing this gap in scholarship, the article explains forest federalism through a focus on three dimensions. The first is the Constitutional construct of the forest sector, and its interpretations through legislative provisions. The second is the administrative, financial and institutional linkages between the Centre and States, including the influence of the Indian Forest Service. The third looks at vertical and horizontal asymmetries in the sector, and the ways in which these relate to administrative and resource concerns in federal functioning. The paper concludes with a reflection on the relevance of forest federalism in on-going international environmental debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exiting impact analysis studies on the Self Help Group-Bank Linkage Programme (SBLP) of the National Bank of Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) underline that the programme has done extremely well in rural India in terms of its outreach, generating income, reducing poverty levels and empowering people both economically and socially. This paper evaluates the impact of SBLP on Self Help Group (SHG) members at the household level from a gender perspective. The analysis of the study is based on a large sample of primary data covering 4791 SHG households and 900 SHGs collected from six states in India. Furthermore, the sample covers more than 60% of SHGs that consist of members belonging to below poverty line families. Overall, the performance analysis reveals that households whose member(s) belong to all-female SHGs perform better than households whose members belong to other types of SHGs. This is mainly because female SHGs are doing extremely well in terms of recovery of loans and per capita income and savings. A chunk of female SHG members in all the six sample states reported an improvement of their social empowerment after joining the SHG programme. Furthermore, the fall of poverty is more pronounced in cases of households whose members belong to female SHGs at 26.0 percentage points between pre-SHG period and post-SHG period. The policy implication is that the formation of female SHGs needs to be encouraged and all necessary services should be provided to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After an extended period of indifferent economic growth, the Indian economy has been one of the fastest growing economies of the world since the 1980s. Both the timing of India's growth acceleration and the causes of India's economic growth remain contested. The paper argues that India's growth turnaround occurred in the late 1970s, and not in the 1980s or 1990s as commonly understood. Furthermore, most interpretations of India's growth acceleration have tended to privilege one dimension of the growth experience over another, and that an analysis of the causes of India's growth suggest a more complex story and that no single perspective can provide a convincing explanation of India's growth phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ascendance of the multiplex film theatre in India has great significance in the creation of new public space, and is part and parcel of the long-running contestation of modernity and citizenship in postcolonial India. However, while the histories of urbanism, cinema and modern politics are usefully indicative of each other, their relationship in this instance also needs to be further related to the history of leisure capital in India and, in particular, to the contemporary dynamics of the media economy. The rise of the multiplex is closely related to the re-organisation of working practices and of capital investment within the film exhibition sector. The aggregation of interests within what has traditionally been a highly fragmented industry with largely informal organisation is a result of both the entry of outside concerns into the theatrical market and of operational change within the industry itself as leading players pursue an agenda of 'corporatisation'. It is these new corporate entities, funded by institutional investors and public flotation, that dominate the multiplex business, which has arisen in marked contrast to the loose agglomeration of family-owned theatres that have previously characterised theatrical exhibition in India. As the leading multiplex brands embark upon a massive programme of expansion into India's second-tier cities, this paper provides a critical account of the emerging political economy of the multiplex paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]