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This special section is dedicated to the BASAS conference 2021. The conference coincided with the devastating second wave of Covid-19 in India, which started in March and peaked in May 2021. Case numbers and mortality in South Asian countries were very high and their health systems too struggled to keep up with these unprecedented times. As governments across South Asia appeared to fail their populations, a sense of crisis was shared by conference participants, many of whom were personally affected by this wave. This conference was unique in that it took place after a two-year gap due to the Covid-19 pandemic and in that it was the first fully online BASAS conference. The papers in the special section draw attention to significant areas of research in South Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experiences in the post-partition Indian subcontinent refute the conventional expectation that the ‘possession of citizenship enables the acquisition of documents certifying it’ [Jayal 2013. Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 71]. Instead, identity papers of various types play a vital part in certifying and authenticating claims to citizenship. This is particularly important in a context where the history of state formation, continuous migration flows and the rise of right-wing majoritarian politics has created an uncertain situation for individuals deemed to be on the ‘margins’ of the state. The papers that constitute this special issue bring together a range of disciplinary perspectives in order to investigate the history, politics and materiality of identity documents, and to dismantle citizenship as an absolute and fixed notion, seeking instead to theorise the very mutable ‘hierarchies’ and ‘degrees’ of citizenship. Collectively they offer a valuable lens onto how migrants, refugees and socio-economically marginal individuals negotiate their relationship with the state, both within South Asia and in South Asian diaspora communities. This introduction examines the wider context of the complex intersections between state-issued identity documents and the nature of citizenship and draws out cross-cutting themes across the papers in this collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue of Contemporary South Asia comprises a selection of six papers presented at the 27th Annual Conference of the British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS) held at the University of Leeds, 3–5 April 2013. The papers in this special issue represent a fraction of what was presented at the 27th BASAS conference. However, they reflect well the diversity within BASAS in terms of the career stage of members, the breadth of contexts studied and the range of disciplinary approaches to the study of South Asia. While there was no explicit theme driving the selection of papers for this edition, an emphasis did emerge upon thinking about the reproduction, embodiment and resistance of authority and marginalization through examining the specific role that location and space play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral campaigning in India is now effectively multi-modal and inhabits both the virtual and the real sphere. However, tools and techniques of campaigning vary across parties. The two parties that this paper focuses on, the BJP and the AAP, are known for running highly organized campaigns marked by their intensity and voter reach. The paper looks at the specific case of the Delhi assembly elections of 2015 and 2020 to compare strategies and the election campaign of the two parties. The paper argues that while the campaign of both parties was methodical and micro-managed, the selection of electoral issues and customization of the campaign to the addressed audience varied. The parties are comparable in terms of being leader centric, tending towards the personalization of politics, and both conducted professionalized campaigns, yet the political marketing of the element of affect differed. To demonstrate this, the paper firstly draws on literature in the field of political communication to illustrate the role of emotions, or the aspect of affect, in an electoral campaign. Secondly, through a perusal of media reportage and analysis, the paper traces the process by which personalization was manifested and how the narrative of affect came to be framed in the election campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Using India as a theory building case, this paper puts forward a theoretical framework for understanding countries' responses to global rules and implementation effects across diverse global governance regimes and contexts. The initial premise for this paper is that the strategic structure of implementation dilemmas faced by states and actors within countries need to be understood in addition to design dilemmas. Successful global regimes must not only solve cooperation and uncertainty problems at the initial stages in choosing the right institutional matrix, but also 'require changes in domestic institutions.' The need to change domestic institutions creates certain implementation dilemmas. These dilemmas are a joint product of the institutional design, specific policy issue and the domestic logic of responses after international agreements have been signed. This broader idea helps understand a wide variety of India's interactions across global governance institutions. I also suggest a novel empirical strategy of cross-institutional analysis to assess implementation dilemmas. While we have numerous cross-national studies of how compliance occurs in a wide variety of countries, we lack theory-driven, empirically grounded, comparative studies of a single country or a group of countries across diverse global regimes. Such a framework can help us better understand how countries interact with a variety of global institutions and the reciprocal effects. This framework is then used to understand India's interactions with diverse global regimes in an illustrative manner in this article, and in greater detail by other authors in the section published in this issue of Contemporary South Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue of Contemporary South Asia seeks to capture the diversity and situatedness of the caste experience and deepen our understanding of caste dynamics and lives in the twenty-first century. In this Introduction, we highlight the continuing salience of caste, offer an overview of theoretical understandings of caste and foreground the importance of analysing caste in the present as a dynamic form of human relations, rather than a remnant of tradition. Following on from this, we highlight the increasingly global spread of caste and reflect on what happens to caste-based social relations when they traverse continents. In conclusion, we introduce the papers that make up this special issue. Taken together, they speak to changes in attitudes towards caste, but also the persistence of caste-based identities and dynamics in India and Britain. Even though the papers presented in this special issue work with the assumption of caste being a reality in and among the Indians, caste-like status hierarchies have existed in most, if not all, societies, and they continue to persist and intersect with other forms of differences/inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gig work has been considered 'disruptive' by platforms for its market efficiency, but concerns around precarity of work in the Global North have been raised since the early 2000s. In India, the dominance of informal work makes precarious work the norm, thus begging the question, does gig work disrupt or extend this precarity in new directions? Based on in-depth interviews with gig workers in India, this paper explores the relations between the informal economy and platform-based gig work in India with a focus on the experiences of workers. The paper argues that, much like informal work, gig workers bear a disproportionate risk, with their work regulated by social identities of caste and gender that determine entry and exit from work. The digital mediation of work in the gig economy extends such existing social relations of informal work into gig work, especially as labour remains deregulated by the Indian state. Through this, India points us in the direction of what the future of work may be for workers in a global digitised gig economy where such precarious and insecure work is now increasingly entrenched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DP Mishra, chief minister of Madhya Pradesh from 1963 to 1967 and twice minister in Central Provinces and Berar (1937–1939, 1946–1950), was a key figure in Congress politics and provincial governance from the pre- to the post-independence period in India. Mishra was a noted Patel acolyte and a vocal critic of Nehru. A Brahmin leader, he identified with an elite-based Hindu politics of caste and community. He was also an efficient administrator and his career peaked in 1966–1967 when he acted as a counsellor to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In this paper, I argue that his political life is an important prism through which to view Congress politics, its High Command culture, its character in provinces/states and its continuities with the colonial state in governance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Telegram, an encrypted digital messaging application, is an emerging hotbed for digital piracy. It has several features that make it attractive for pirates, including the ability to share large files at scale, coupled with an emphasis on privacy and security that allows for such sharing to be carried out largely anonymously. Telegram gained prominence in academic literature as a safe haven for activities in the digital realm that have increasingly found themselves subject to institutional censure. However, while most studies have delved into the matter of online video piracy on Telegram, perspectives on the economic models and revenues relied on by Telegram pirates in India remain largely unexplored. This paper proposes to discuss Telegram's ascent as a significant medium in the Audio-Visual piracy market in India and will more specifically analyse the mechanisms of piracy monetization (payment services, and ad-revenue generators) which represent an important stake in pirates' strategies. Finally, the paper argues that the analysis in terms of economic models represents a valuable contribution to current debates on copyright enforcement. The methodology relies on both primary and secondary sources complemented with semi-structured interviews with pirates and an entertainment industry professional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing scholarship on the Emergency’s sterilisation programme largely excludes women’s experiences, echoing the Shah Commission of Inquiry’s focus on men’s complaints against the government in its published reports. This paper re-orients historical understandings of this programme to account for female sterilisation during 1975–1977. By reading the Commission’s extensive collection of archived files against the grain, I use the male-dominated archive to illuminate the gendered nature of this policy and its effects on India’s women. Against dominant perceptions that the Emergency’s sterilisation programme focused entirely on vasectomy, this paper discusses instances where women were critical in families’ attempts to negotiate the regime’s coercive measures. It also analyses the negative impacts of coercion on the ‘girl child’ and the consequences of the Emergency’s single minded focus on sterilisation for the Mother and Child Health programme. Through these discussions I argue that such measures exacerbated existing gendered biases. In doing so, this paper challenges dominant understandings of the Emergency’s sterilisation programme and explores women’s experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this analysis, we examine the relationship between the effective number of parliamentary parties (ENPP) at the state level in India and the initial policy responses among Indian state governments to the COVID-19 pandemic between January and April 2020. We find that by April 2020, Indian states with a relatively lower ENPP adopted more stringent measures to address the spread of the pandemic while states with a higher ENPP adopted less stringent measures. We hypothesize that it may have been more difficult for states with a larger number of parties to quickly adopt mitigation measures early in the pandemic, while it may have been relatively easier for states with a smaller number of parties. We discuss avenues for future research given the findings and the data presented in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Indian Hindu nationalist movement is largely sustained by a network, hundreds of organisations strong, linked in greater or lesser degrees to a central organisational node: the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. In this paper I propose a new, critical, definition of this network: That which is constituted by organisational sites through which a central executive may exert authority, (a) through existing institutionalised communication channels, and (b) without coercion. By reconfiguring the analytic focus on this network, which I refer to as the Sangh, from its organisational nodes, to the linkages through which power travels, I propose a new research agenda on this Hindu nationalist organisational network that I argue more clearly identifies the spread, intentions and weaknesses of the far-right in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides one of the most accurate estimates of the size of the Indian middle class, using an eclectic set of variables rooted in three major theories of class; Marxist, Weberian, and Bourdieuian. Using this original and theoretically inclusive method offers a solution to the problem of capturing the conceptual complexities of the middle class and provides a holistic examination of its composition. Through statistical analysis of the India Human Development Survey II (2011–12), the paper reveals three significant findings: firstly, it calculates the size of the middle class to be 28.05% of the urban and rural population in India. Secondly, it demonstrates that despite the occupational diversity that exists among middle classes, a large proportion of the middle class are salaried employees. Thirdly, and most importantly, it demonstrates that contrary to common assumptions in the growing literature on the middle class, a considerable segment of the Indian middle class resides in rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postmodern anthropology has used the claims of reflexivity, inter-subjectivity and recognition of differences in individual experiences in its attempt to unsettle the authority of traditional anthropology. This has led anthropologists to assert that ethnography is a cultural construct, whereby 'fieldwork' is conceptualised as 'embodied spatial practice'. Drawing on village studies from India, this paper argues that the recognition of different embodied practices of ethnographers from diverse social locations has not necessarily led to the democratisation of the discipline. Conversely, insufficient engagement with hierarchical, overlapping power relations within the ethnographic field, as well as within the disciplinary establishment, has led to the standardisation of disciplinary articulations of research ethics, the terms of which privilege hegemonic groups within the discipline. The articulation of the concerns of scholars from marginalised social groups often remains difficult within such disciplinary frameworks. This paper argues that establishing a critical tradition in ethnography in the true sense requires the postmodern sensibility of recognition of the differences in experiences, supplemented with feminist and subaltern critical interrogations of power and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ways in which egg donors, surrogate mothers, and intended parents in India imagine and unimagine their relationship with children born through third-party reproduction. Third-party reproduction is inseparable from plural parenthood and the question of who the 'real' parents are. In a legal and medical context, gestational surrogacy in India treats surrogates as not 'real' mothers, in favour of the 'natural' relationship between the intended mother and child. Here, the 'genetic tie' may ignore gestation in giving predominance to 'genes', but this logic is inverted in the case of egg donation, in which it is not uncommon for people to regard egg donors as 'real' mothers. Who is regarded as a 'real' parent, and who is not, is deeply embedded in the social process of creating kinship, shared notions of bodily substances, corporeal reality, and social recognition of 'one's own child'. The elements of gestation, genetic relations, and nurturing compete and coexist in the practice of third-party reproduction. This paper explores the multiple aspects of 'real' and 'fictive' kinship and its entanglement in making 'a child of one's own' in third-party reproduction in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beef festivals are a dramatic and visible form of protest against the Indian government's ban on beef. These festivals are framed popularly as an assertion of Dalit ‘cultural rights’ and identity, with beef represented as the cultural food of Dalits. While it is clear that the beef ban is a casteist ban based on a Brahmanical food hierarchy, this paper explores the limits of resisting casteism through the assertion of caste-based cultural rights and identities, or as an assertion of an individual right to food choice. It argues that such a politics of resisting casteism runs into problems of the culturalization of caste, and limits the kinds of radical Dalit subjects and actors who could emerge as liberatory political subjects. The paper calls for reframing beef festivals as ‘antagonistic’ moments that articulate the degradation of Dalit labor in the politics of beef, reassert Dalit identity as an anti-caste identity rather than a cultural caste identity, and herald a politics of ‘multiculturalism against caste’. [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]

As a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS), its 2006 annual conference marked an auspicious juncture in the history of the association. One of the conference's central themes was to highlight several important shifts, both imminent and long term, in the pace and direction of South Asian studies in the United Kingdom. The unprecedented large international turnout at the conference provided concrete proof that the interdisciplinarity and global reach of the academic community working on this region remains as strong as ever. Growing recognition within the media, government and business of the significance of South Asia in international affairs, particularly the emergence of India as a global economic and political power, has given a much-needed impetus to the spirit and purpose of BASAS. The ambition to maintain and build on the capacity of British and European universities to produce linguistically and culturally skilled South Asianists, both for furthering knowledge as well as meeting the requirements of industry and the diplomatic services, has never before been so crucial. There are promising signs that the role of BASAS in fostering an intellectually vibrant environment for South Asianists is winning broader institutional support. This article surveys the key themes covered during the conference, some of which are well reflected in the diverse range of papers selected for this special edition. [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]

The aim of this paper is to examine the story of the American Baptists and how their mission activities in the Naga Hills District (1871–1955) have impacted upon present day politics in the Indian state of Nagaland. Baptists make up nearly 95% of the current Naga population in Nagaland. The paper will investigate the relationship between the Baptist mission's philosophy on education, Christian conversion and the subsequent rise of a sense of 'national community' amongst the Nagas. Although the primary motivation for the American missionaries was to convert, the British administrators also thought that introducing Christianity would prevent influence on these tribes from Hindu and Muslim groups. Thus began Christianity's part in a developing framework for resistance in this region, raising significant questions with regard to Christianity's persistence as a form of political articulation in contemporary Nagaland. This political articulation, I suggest, is related to a greater sense of agency brought about by Christianity and Missionary activities in the fields of education and print. The American Baptist Foreign Mission Society (ABFMS) was at the forefront of these changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the role played by education as a mediator of inter-generational social mobility in India. It uses a nationally representative data set (the National Election Study 2009) to describe and establish patterns of social mobility in India, and subsequently, to establish the role played by education with regard to this mobility. In particular, it attempts to test the ‘merit’ argument by analysing whether the effect of social origins (class and caste; along with locality and gender) on mobility and on gaining access to one class destination (where education is expected to be critical) has declined, and whether education plays a role. However, while the paper finds high rates of inter-generational stability, rural–urban disaggregation complicates the broader picture. The role of education is also key, especially for women. The paper finds that education plays an important role with regard to social mobility chances, but the effect of caste and class of origin remains significant. Focusing on one class destination – the professional class – once we control for education, the impact of caste seems to vary, while the role played by class of origin remains statistically significant. The implications of these patterns by gender and locality are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the political developments around the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement that escalated in India through most of 2011. Although the overtone of the movement was primarily about corruption, my aim in this paper is to explore the debates regarding democracy that the movement unleashed. The accounts that this paper draws on focus on the tension and competition that arose during the anti-corruption movement amongst two civil society groups – ‘Team Anna’ and the National Campaign for the People’s Right to Information – regarding the meaning and practice of democracy. I argue that this conflict reflects a broader tension deeply rooted in democratic debates in India, traceable to the early nationalist debates during the anti-colonial Independence movement. These findings suggest that conflict and competition are crucial ingredients of democratic debate, contributing to the sustenance and enrichment of the idea of democracy. This argument is particularly timely, for it helps us to understand the rise to power of the Aam Aadmi Party. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines papers presented at the 2008 Annual Conference of the British Association for South Asian Studies. A number of topics were covered including the causes of tribal violence in the Andaman Islands, nationalism and ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka and the study of India in the twentieth century.

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]

In this paper, we examine how the Indian welfare-capitalist state, in responding to the pandemic in diverse ways, has appealed to the 'guilt conscience' and played on the vexed positionality of the mobile elite, who following the pandemic, have to give up their freedom of mobility. We argue that the very condition of political legibility of the mobile subject is predicated upon the ethico-moral ideal of the 'good citizen', who, in the statist imagination, ought to not only feel guilty but also compromise their civil liberties in questions of mobility. Under this quasi-medical dispensation, all mobilities become transgressive acts, while the implementation of the prevailing immobility regime depends more on the good citizen's ethico-moral imperative than any discourses of legality or pathology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 2009 and 2014, Thirumavalavan, the leader of the largest Dalit party in Tamil Nadu, served as an MP in Delhi. This paper draws on research with the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK or Liberation Panther Party) to raise a number of key questions about representation and democracy in a multi-level federal system. Although they are a minor party, their experience of national politics offers insights into the workings of party systems in India. The paper considers the extent to which they are constrained by alliance partners and political rules-of-the-game. It then considers the question of representation, and asks what the VCK managed to achieve in Thirumavalavan's constituency of Chidambaram and the extent to which they could raise issues at the national level both through formal and disruptive means. Finally, the paper reflects on the advantages and disadvantages for a small party of having a foothold in the Centre and draws out the lessons of the VCK's experience for our understanding of Indian politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the 'expanded state' in post-liberalisation India within the context of official responses to the Maoist insurgency in rural central and eastern India. I analyse a scheme called the Prime Minister's Rural Development Fellowship, which was launched as part of the central government's attempt to wean ordinary men and women away from Maoist insurgents through rural development. Under this scheme, young women and men are appointed to assist state officials in implementing rural development programmes in districts classified as 'Left-Wing Extremist'. What does the institution and practice of this fellowship tell us about the state in India today in the context of counterinsurgency and beyond? I address this question on the basis of ethnographic fieldwork in an erstwhile Maoist district in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal. By closely shadowing the everyday work of one Prime Minister's Rural Development Fellow (PMRDF), I show how the PMRDF is located outside the state, and yet constitutes the state. By focussing on the role of the PMRDF, I reveal one of the many new configurations of the state that are emerging in India today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through bringing history into conversation with ethnography, this paper re-examines scholarly understandings of Hindu nationalism and the practice of seva (service). Whereas much scholarship addresses Hindu nationalist service through a secular-liberal register, this paper considers what this language excludes. Giving critical attention to elite activists within the Hindu nationalist-led Vanavasi Kalyan Kendra (Tribal Welfare Centre), in Jharkhand, India, my research demonstrates how elite activists translate service into a religious language of somatic representation. This constructs marginal agents as passive subjects of a heavily moralistic ethical-self making project. This critical analysis opens up for study the differing ritual-politics of caste and gender which underlie the participation of marginal actors, practices which are not reducible to a discourse of religion or a universal category of acts. In order to grasp these more complex models, this paper gives importance to the ways in which its ethical discourses are inhabited in manifold ways. This tells a story of how Western models of religion are parochialized, and challenges the relationship between authority and agency which permeate our imagination of non-liberal discourses like those invoked by Hindu nationalist service projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The burgeoning influence of liberal market economy coupled with a ‘good governance’ paradigm across post-communist and post-colonial states emphasizes a market concept of equality, while turning ‘citizens’ into ‘customers’. This trend has been further accentuated by the massive inlets of Information Communication Technologies into governance mechanisms having a significant impact on the ways of governmentality and thereby on the substance and processes of documenting citizenship. It is in this wider context of intersecting economic and political changes that this paper captures the shifting regimes of citizenship in India as manifested through the processes of Unique Identification, or Aadhaar scheme, an initiative by the Government of India that seeks to give every Indian resident a unique identity documentation. Although Aadhaar does not authenticate citizen identity, nonetheless, in its promise to build a ‘national grid’ of identity information infrastructure, it indicates a meta-structure of a new inclusion/exclusion paradigm of citizen formation in India that appears to reinvent early liberal values of civic republicanism based on property rights. Rather than assessing the merits of this scheme, this paper demonstrates how new technologies of governmentality could impact the citizenship regime in India while keeping with the demands of a growing neo-liberal political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2014 Lok Sabha election marks a watershed for Indian politics. The elections in the state of Assam have been marked by interethnic violence, fuelled by issues of indigeneity and ‘illegal’ migration. This paper primarily discusses the electoral result from the Kokrajhar constituency in lower Assam, the heart of Bodo politics and a hotbed for ethnic conflict. Two decades of armed struggle resulted in concessions granted to the Bodos, the largest plains tribe in Assam, in the form of a territorial council, under the Sixth Schedule of the Indian constitution. In the 2014 election, for the first time in the history of the constituency, a non-Bodo candidate won, with an impressive 51% of the vote share. The electoral outcome may be seen as a further polarization of the existing ethnic cleavage between Bodos and non-Bodos in the region. Using the theory of outbidding, it will be shown that the victory of a non-Bodo in the constituency may be seen as an outcome of a history of inter-group conflict in the region as well as intra-group rivalry among various factions of the Bodo leadership. Further, this case also illustrates that the propensity of the outbidding effect to foment inter-ethnic violence is greater in contexts where political institutions (in this case autonomous/territorial councils) encourage a singular axis of identity as a basis of mobilization. In conclusion, the paper discusses the implications of this election result for the politics of ‘ethnic homeland’ in Assam. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this ethnographic study I demonstrate how students, teachers, and parents use the affordances of social media platforms to insert religious identities within educational spaces, learning experiences, and classroom interactions. This study was conducted in three schools in tier-I cities of India. The aim of this study was to examine the role of parents and teachers in socializing young students to perform their religious identities while engaging with both educational content and their classmates from a different religious community. In this paper, I argue that social media networks are largely used by individuals to reactivate the existing discursive-discriminatory practices which populate the already dense and politicized mediascapes in cities of India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Election Commission of India (henceforth, the EC), an institution created by the Constitution of India in 1950, manages and conducts parliamentary and state assembly (provincial level) elections. In recent elections, it has made tremendous efforts to make the electoral process more participatory. More than 900 million people were eligible to vote in the Indian parliamentary elections of 2019. In addition to the conventional ways of spreading voter awareness, the EC tried to reach out to voters through previously untried means to persuade them to come to the polling booths and vote – reflecting an institutional enthusiasm for popular mobilisation. However, there are also a significant number of missing names from the electoral rolls, and the EC faces accusations of being apathetic towards this anomaly. Is this eagerness on one hand and anomaly on the other symptomatic of 'democracy at crossroads', with India transiting to a more efficacious and involved institutional functioning, or is this an instance of strained institutional performance in the face of rising popular aspirations and tighter executive controls? The paper tries to explore this theme by looking at the functioning of the EC and its efforts towards voter participation in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how family, kin and other intimate relations are reimagined and reconstructed in contemporary India. I introduce the concept of 'intimate networks' to analyze connections between villages, cities and abroad, looking at ways in which people create familial relationships in and across various spatial locations. I argue that there is a shift away from traditional norm of emphasizing patriliny and primogeniture to broadening kin and personal relations, including lateral kin and affines, acquaintances and friends to seek opportunities for education and employment. There is a circular flow of people, things, cash and information between villages, cities and abroad, rather than a unilateral migration from rural to urban, as traditional modernization theory advocates. Circular flow is made possible by construction of intimate networks involving exchanges and flow of substance-codes, such as things, cash and information between people. I also examine emergence of new relationships of care beyond family and kin ties in rurban areas where residents combine aspects of rural and urban in ways that defy assumptions of straightforward modernizing transition from rural to urban. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper inquires into the meaning of food – specifically of food smells – for issues of urban citizenship in the context of urban renewal in Mumbai. The city’s southern neighbourhoods are currently being transformed by a process of chawl-redevelopment. Chawl-redevelopment is the primary governmental tool to open these areas up for new residential developments by demolishing old structures and constructing new high-rise enclaves for the rich, while simultaneously promising to providein siturehousing to the old, lower middle-class residents. A common feature of these new building complexes is that the most prestigious and luxurious new apartments are sold exclusively to vegetarians. While segregation between vegetarians and non-vegetarians in the real estate market is anything but a new phenomenon in Indian cities, I argue that both popular understandings of this practice and scholarly debates about citizenship fall short of grasping its complexity by essentializing affects or effects of food-based exclusion. Using the concept of sensorial citizenship, the paper analyses the mutual relation between rights and aesthetics in order to understand issues of exclusion and belonging in the contemporary Indian metropolis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent caste conflicts have revolved around discourses of honour, caste pride and shame. Although Dalit movements have been at the receiving end of the violence and have condemned the casteism underpinning it, they operate within a society in which questions of honour are highly significant. Dalit women activists are trapped in an unenviable position within the twin structures of caste and patriarchy, both of which speak to debates about group boundaries and honour. Taking the recent violence as its starting point, this paper draws on interviews with and observations of Dalit women in the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (Liberation Panther Party) in Tamil Nadu to chart how discourses of honour both facilitate and constrain their capacity to act. For all the party’s emphasis on women’s rights, women activists face an uphill struggle to secure recognition, respect and responsiveness both within the party as well as wider society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws from the idea that acts of naming have constantly changed and that practices of naming need to be located in a larger network of practices and histories that to various extent determine a community's changing notions of identity. I explore these changing notions of identity as performed through acts of naming among the Kodavas, an ethno-linguistic minority group from the Kodagu district, Karnataka State, India. My objective in this paper is to look at naming from three perspectives, constantly interacting with each other. I study naming from three different temporal locations, as informed by various factors. Firstly, what one might tenuously call as conventional naming practices among the Kodavas. Secondly, how these practices were affected by acts of legibility brought in through colonial intervention and thirdly, the gradual but perceptible shifts in contemporary naming practices that negotiate between legibility of a modern nation, legibility of a majoritarian Hindu practice and of a desired Kodava identity. My analysis points to fluidity of practices that can be termed ‘illegible’ to dominant practices thereby asserting identity in creative ways. Illegibility, I argue, makes identities unstable, less knowable and thereby not easy to contain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

This paper examines the everyday experiences and perspectives of Muslim Ansaris (weavers) in urban north India with respect to the 'welfare state'. The case of a recent health insurance scheme, initiated by the Indian government, constitutes the paper's focus. Narratives around the scheme expressed by residents in a majority Muslim mohalla (neighbourhood) in Varanasi illustrate the ways in which the state's presence was more often experienced through its perceived absence and inaccessibility. But even whilst such experiences represented broader patterns of neglect, locally interpreted as the upshot of being India's largest religious minority, this community was not stricken by a sense of absolute alienation and nor did individual or collective actions exhibit outright disaffection towards the state. More appropriately, 'defensive agencies' informed by degrees of pragmatism, acceptance and resilience, were articulated in an effort to protect, as well as improve the future capacities and ambitions of the neighbourhood residents where the state had seemingly failed. The paper concludes however with a word of caution about celebrating such agency, and reflects on the potential for transformative politics by Muslims in urban India. [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 analyses the gendered experience of the state for the Muslim survivors of violence in Gujarat in 2002. Most of the scholarship on the working of the state after communal violence in post-independence India concentrates on the anxiety to re-instate the 'myth of the state', through policies that establish its respectability after violence. The emphasis is on understanding the mechanics of the state, its 'order making' function. Very little attention has been paid to understanding the lived experience of the modern state from a gendered perspective. What studies there have been tend to focus on the internal power structures within nationalist discourses, the patriarchal nature of state assertion, and point to forgotten narratives within the meta-narratives of violence and suffering. There is very little evidence examining how men and women experienced the same process differently, or how they make sense of their experiences, in a context where the lines between order and chaos, legitimacy and illegitimacy and trust and betrayal were constantly being redrawn. In examining memories of loss and suffering, this paper shows the contrasting and shifting ways in which the state is experienced, imagined and granted legitimacy by men and women from the margins. [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 will address the multiple forms and layers of porosity that give borderlands, such as the Bengal borderland, their distinctive nature as zones of contestation. Cross-border interactions continue to be an integral feature of everyday life in the Bengal borderland despite increasing militarisation and regulation by the Indian government in the last decade. Criminalization of local cross-border flows has driven them underground - while organized cross-border crimes (smuggling and trafficking) enjoy considerable attention, the breadth and depth of informal cross-border interactions in the quotidian lives of borderlanders remain understudied. What is the significance of such daily cross-border transactions? How do they feed into the local perceptions of the state policies of border control? How do they relate to larger organized flows of smuggling and trafficking? Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in the border district of North 24 Parganas in West Bengal, India, this paper critically examines the rationales and practices of such informal 'illegal' cross-border interactions and problematizes the territorial logic of the postcolonial nation-state as it is contested in the realities of the borderland. Such a focus also enables a construction of the social history of those people in whose worlds an international border appeared in the monsoon of 1947, thus relating the present configurations of porosity to the regional unity that existed in the pre-Partition past. [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]

This paper is an ethnographic exploration of two television news channels in India, Star News in Hindi and Star Ananda in Bengali, part of Rupert Murdoch's burgeoning media empire in the country. It seeks to answer a couple of basic questions: in the world of private television news, who are the news producers and who is their audience? Through these questions, the paper tries to understand some of the fundamentals of news business; the intricate links that exist between television ratings, target audience groups, the journalist's news sense and content. It examines corporate policies in television organisations, which in pursuit of advertising revenue not only curtail editorial independence, but editorial imagination. I claim that despite the proliferation of news channels across the country, the economics of the television industry enforces a unitary vision of an affluent nation; an India articulated by the privileged for themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Militarisation and structural violence under the Armed Forces Specials Powers Act (AFSPA) is tied to a strong moral framework to proselytise recalcitrant citizens. Deploying Jacque Derrida's point that law is not justice, this paper highlights how the pursuit of justice within the framework of law is a challenging task. Interrogating the contentions around what constitutes 'justice' under the AFSPA, this paper exposes how states legitimise lawlessness through draconian laws like the AFSPA. In this manner, lawlessness is established as a precedent for states to reproduce forms of lawless regimes and undemocratic mechanisms. This paper proposes that along with the campaigns to repeal the AFSPA, we need to reflect upon what kind of justice we seek. Repressive and discriminatory regimes of law, government or practice survive even after they have been formally dismantled. Here, both the state and its citizens negotiate reality regarding the limits of justice in their own way. For the Indian state, it has had to constantly over-extend its coercive powers in order to control the situation. While for its citizens who live under the AFSPA, such a reality is not only a matter of concern but it also redefines their position as citizens/subjects, to the extent that they question the very foundations of democracy, the language of rights and the unsatisfied appeal of justice. Their negotiations are a reminder that the state apparatus' exercise of power has largely remained unchanged in Northeast India. Despite the framing of rights - be they as part of colonial edicts or postcolonial constitutions - there are spaces where the limits of this discourse are constantly questioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dalit or ex-untouchable women's voices and perspectives have been marginalized not only in Dalit movements but also in predominantly upper-caste Hindu-led women's movements. This paper aims at exploring the unheard voices and perspectives of Dalit women in the context of Dalit assertion in the state of Uttar Pradesh, north India. Scholarly writing examines the different facets of Dalit political assertion led by the Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh. Few scholars, however, examine the ways in which individual and organizational actors engage with women of Dalit castes through social activism in the state. This paper is an attempt to do so. Specifically, it examines, with special reference to issues of culture and identity, the engagement of a grassroots women's non-governmental organization with rural Dalit women in southern Uttar Pradesh. The paper begins with an enquiry into why engagement with issues of culture and identity is necessary for social activism with Dalit women, and how it is carried out. It then examines whether social activism and electoral politics with Dalit women cross-cut each other, and also what implications this or its lack has for the women. Finally, the paper asks how far activism and politics can go towards re-inventing Dalit (women's) identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manual labour has become less prevalent in western contexts, but livelihoods based on physical work remain pervasive in many developing countries. It is such a world of seasonally migrating manual labourers in India that this paper explores. It focuses on how seemingly vulnerable and malnourished bodies in this rural context are enabled to labour. The necessity of mobilising bodies to perform crucial labouring implies that bodies are primary resources for the working poor. I do not wish to suggest a reductionist understanding of the body as a strictly corporeal asset, as is often presupposed in nutritional modelling. Emerging labouring performances emanate from the body, but they are derived from far more than mere flesh and bones. Work capacity may be theoretically predictable from nutritional status, but work capacity is not synonymous with labouring performance. Such labouring performances are enabled through a whole suite of social, cultural, environmental and political capacities that are inflected into individuals to become the resource that is conveniently packaged as ‘the body’. The research for this paper is drawn from 10 months of grounded ethnography in Maharashtra focused on 22 case-study households. Through an exploration of these families' work experiences, food intakes, habituated learning, psychological realms and cultural beliefs and practices, this paper contributes to our understanding of how labourers are able, can choose, or are allowed to apply their bodies at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) in India opens a new chapter in rural governance, signifying transformative potential for enhancing economic and social security. One of the key objectives of the Act is to aid in the empowerment of marginalised communities, especially women, Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs). However, no analytically rigorous attempt has been made to study the mechanisms and processes that are leading to empowerment or even the (unintended) processes of disempowerment. Our paper investigates (dis) empowerment as a process rather than as a (quantifiable) outcome and analyses the mechanisms through which the embedded gender and caste norms are being challenged (though not completely eroded), but also how powerful actors at household, community and market levels can come to resent processes that entail upward mobility of women and marginalised communities. We draw on a comparative study based on extensive qualitative indepth interviews and participant observation, in rural areas of two Indian states, Uttar Pradesh (North India) and Andhra Pradesh (South India). The former exhibits almost all the elements we associate with low development, whereas the latter belongs to a group of southern Indian states with higher levels of human and economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]