Search

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]

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]

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 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 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]

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]

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 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]

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]

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 introduction discusses the articles in this Special Issue, which are all focused on exploring the everyday interactions between marginalised individuals and groups and the state in contemporary India. In particular the articles highlight the experiences of a diverse set of marginalised groups - Muslim artisans and weavers, Dalits, Tibetan exiles and post-conflict victims in Gujarat - in order to work towards an understanding of the politics of citizenship from the margins. Across these articles two interlocking themes emerge. Firstly, how different marginalised groups have experienced, critiqued and engaged with different aspects of the 'welfare state'. Secondly, the way in which agencies were articulated from the margins through these processes of engagement, shaping and recasting interactions between the state and society in India. We argue that the deployment of different strategies of engagement with the state by India's marginalised can be viewed as a politics of citizenship, through which marginalised people (re)make themselves as citizens. This essay is thus a call for future research on citizenship as a lived experience which is operationalised in local practices and quotidian interactions between the state and society. [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]

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]

'Politics is dirty' is a truism, a taken-for-granted reality in much of the world, particularly in India. Its implications are likewise seen as inescapable. Scholarship examining women's political underrepresentation often cites the 'dirty' nature of democratic politics as a key disincentive for women to participate. While not disputing that politics is, in some respects, 'dirty', I question the mechanisms through which it is said to hinder women's political representation. Drawing upon ethnographic research with female party workers and elected municipal councillors in Dehradun, North India, I analyse how 'dirty politics' positions women as 'out of place' within the political realm. While both men and women engage in acts of political care, men can more easily transgress the boundaries between them, straddling both 'dirty politics' and a 'politics of care'. This production of the 'political' as a realm unsuitable for women or mismatched with their activities, is one factor contributing to the underrepresentation of women in politics in South Asia, and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the evolution of public policy for cultural and creative industries in the context of building India as a digital nation. How has the rise of digital industries in the building of the country permeated policies related to cultural industries, and what have been the consequences of this trend? It will also explore the tensions regarding the evolution of the role of the State in shaping and regulating such industries in the broader context of culture being increasingly associated with national identity. This article starts by showing that in a context where cultural policies remain centered on heritage, the support to culture by the state has remained limited, both in financial terms as well as regarding the implementation of specific regulations which would require protection from traditional market forces. Then, it analyzes several action plans that have been developed as part of the Digital India government initiative and assesses emerging issues for the cultural and creative industries, which are increasingly associated with the functioning of digital devices and operators. Finally, it discussed recent modalities of state intervention through the transfer of the role of cultural operator to digital platforms and the attempts to control expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the significant events that led to the emergence and growth of the online Indian audio-visual sector. The principal argument that drives this narrative is the co-evolution of Indian formal and informal media economies that led to the media industries' digital transformation. Drawing on historical analysis of the Indian film and television industries, we argue that just as the informal means of finance, social relations, illegal cable and satellite distribution had a formative influence on how these industries formalized, the Indian online audio-visual sector is driven by distinctive formalization processes, led by creators who are engaging with both local and global UGC-led platforms as well as PGC-led portals. Using a critical media industries framework, with data gathered from semi-structured interviews with 'above-the-line' Indian online media practitioners together with trade press literature, we propose an analytical framework that incorporates both platforms and portals as industrial objects for mapping digital production cultures that originate as inherently informal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every year, large numbers of aspiring parents from all over the world come to India to fulfil their dreams of parenthood. They hire an Indian surrogate and with the help of state-of-the-art medical technology, they are able to conceive children they can call their ‘own’. Since 2005, commercial gestational surrogacy in India has become a lucrative industry thanks to the cheap gestational labour, and cheaper medical services. However, this largely unregulated industry is facing roadblocks in international bureaucratic processes. The child born from the arrangement is often caught between conflicting international laws and deemed ‘stateless’. I wish to look at how the state and international laws tend to define persons and relationships by regulating entry and exit, especially through verification and authentication of kin. The world of transparent and visible boundaries – and their policing – is seen through the transnational processes of identifying the stateless children born through the arrangement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1992 the 73rd amendment to the Indian constitution called on states to create and empower rural local governments. Despite the amendment, however, there is variation in the extent of decentralization of power from states to rural local governments in the country. How has this process of decentralization influenced health outcomes in India? The research note addresses this question by collecting preliminary data on political, administrative and fiscal decentralization and examining trends in different dimensions of decentralization and infant mortality rates among select states (Assam, Rajasthan, Kerala and Tamil Nadu) from 1994 to 2017. These states display disparities in the outcome of interest and infant mortality, and have income levels that do not explain all the variation in infant mortality trends. Preliminary results demonstrate the need to adopt a multidimensional approach toward studying the consequences of decentralization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that geopolitics is a major obstacle to an effective Indian policy on substantive maritime governance. It holds that India's involvement in maritime governance is predominantly shaped by geopolitics and driven by two geopolitical concerns, Delhi's drive to counter China's expanding influence in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) and India's pursuit of leadership in that region. This emphasis on geopolitics is perfectly reasonable from India's perspective but comes at the cost of constraining Delhi's maritime governance policy and reducing India's ability to address substantive maritime governance issues. Hence, India's focus on geopolitics undermines substantive maritime governance. The focus on geopolitics negatively impacts substantive maritime governance because it: 1) leads India to oppose China's involvement in IOR's maritime governance; 2) creates bureaucratic obstacles to India's substantive maritime governance; 3) constrains Delhi's ability to concentrate its substantive maritime governance efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The threat of statelessness has the potential to be realized anew in India with the announcement of the impending National Register of Citizens (NRC). It has propelled this populous democracy once again into controversy. The importance of this announcement in conjunction with the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) cannot be overstated. We draw on the case of Assam for its potential to predict the implications and consequences of a pan-national register of citizens and the threat of detention, deportation, and large-scale rendering of statelessness for those excluded from the drafts. We stress the need for India to take incremental steps to establish transparent procedures and a clear trajectory for persons rendered stateless in situ by this state project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an ethnographic focus on a Muslim village in rural West Bengal, this article explores how a group of women have come to defy gendered socio-cultural and locally rooted religious interpretations to become the bureaucratic and political gatekeepers within their community. The wider climate for Muslim men at this moment across India, the characteristics of bureaucratic spaces themselves and the perceived necessity of this kind of work for the most marginal are all identified as facilitating this shift. Yet in addition to these factors, this article will claim that the women themselves are wilfully utilising these encounters in order to become seen by the organs and actors of the local Indian state. It is not simple recognition they are after, nor to be considered as bureaucratic or political insiders, but rather to be seen on their own terms in diverse and context dependant ways that are ultimately of their choosing. As such, this shorkārī kāj or political work has become a central part of their daily lives and identities, to which it is suggested that their attributes and experiences as women may make them particularly well suited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between emotions, identity and work in the narratives of Muslim women in rural Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan, India. The article uses an in-depth account of two families where all women engage in income generating work. The women experience complex challenges, struggles and negotiations, and they make remarkable decisions in resolution. The role their emotions play in their decisions articulates an entrepreneurial self that offers a newer interpretation of the relationship between emotions, identity and work. By detailing their struggles, negotiations and remarkable decisions, this article attempts to move towards a sociology of hope that marks the spirit of these women in overcoming the constraints in their everyday. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This ethnographic article focuses on interactions between poor Muslim women, various intermediaries/brokers, and the Indian state. The article illustrates the complexities of claim-making and the forms of subjugation/marginalisation Muslim women experience when attempting to access resources, documents or paperwork. Contrary, however, to many representations of Muslim women's engagements with the state, we also draw out agentive aspects as women hustle and negotiate to make claims and assert citizenship rights. Outcomes are variegated but also incorporate some women in brokerage roles, challenging assumptions regarding state/people mediation in India which foregrounds male brokers. The empirical detail is situated in a theoretical context incorporating gendered distinctions between shifting imaginaries of 'nation' and lived experiences of the 'everyday state'. In a context where 'nation' has been evoked and articulated as a feminine form – through evocations of mata (mother) – we show how shifts towards a masculine imaginary, symbolised within Hindu-nationalist discourses, impacts Muslim women's subjective experiences. We also illustrate that, whilst gendered imaginaries of 'the nation' are shifting, the 'everyday state' has long been experienced as a masculinised formation. Here we show how embodied involvements with the everyday state were constituted through gendered bureaucratic histories, spatial configurations, urban cosmologies and broader ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The many Muslim women who make up India's burgeoning informal economy, challenge any attempt to reduce them to homemakers whose lives are delimited by culture and religion. An examination of their lives reveals the complex forces that shape their worlds, and illuminates how they variously negotiate landscapes of inequality in contemporary India. Here I focus on the biography of one Muslim widow to illustrate how she labours to live and dream in contemporary India as various social forces intersect to create precarity in her life. While neoliberal priorities and a shrinking social safety-net affect underprivileged women across religious lines, the intersection of gender, class, and religion in Hindu majoritarian India has made it even more challenging for low-income Muslim women like her to make ends meet. However, dominant forces are not totalising, and the biographical method reveals how one woman negotiates precarity, employing various skills as she adapts to changing conditions, juggling multiple jobs to meet expenses, and envisioning a better future. We see not just the deep inequalities that create precarity for some, but also how dreams can be a material force in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Islamic law gives women shares in the estate of a deceased parent, husband, and certain other relatives. However, in India they rarely obtain the inheritance shares to which they are entitled. When the time comes, they typically either waive their inheritance rights or are prevented by their male co-heirs from accessing them. Those who assert a claim to their shares find themselves vilified by their natal kin and by society at large, as greedy, grasping, selfish, unwomanly and lacking in family feeling. They are often even ostracized by their brothers, sisters-in-law, and other family members. Drawing upon data from interviews conducted in Delhi in 2011, I explore this gap in India between Islamic law and actual practice, with specific reference to a Muslim daughter's right to inherit natal property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines two simultaneous dynamics in contemporary India: the development of new urban spaces, and an intensification of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva). Examining the case of Noida (a township adjacent to Delhi), this article suggests that the entrepreneurial mode of urban development [Harvey 2006. Spaces of Global Capitalism. New York: Verso] has restructured local spaces, which in turn may give rise to rival attempts at group making, seeking to recreate exclusive identities out of choice and resentment to mobilise political action. Such rival attempts may enable Hindutva to entrench itself in local milieus through multiple modes, including the soft mode of 'neo-Hindutva'. Overall, the article outlines the dynamic association between new urban processes and exclusivist/nativist forms of politics in contemporary India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender quota campaigns to increase women's parliamentary presence in India have been ongoing for more than twenty years. Meanwhile, each general election results in the slow growth of women MPs, partly due to political parties nominating few women. The 2019 election was no different in this respect –women still make up fewer than 15% of lower house MPs. Incidents of gendered violence against women candidates also contributed to a characterisation of 2019 as a 'toxic' election, and will likely further discourage women's entry into politics. One positive development, however, was two regional parties' implementation of voluntary party gender quotas in their parliamentary candidate nominations. This article focuses on women's political participation as candidates and voters in the 2019 parliamentary election. Parties are scrutinised as key gatekeepers for women's political recruitment. The article also discusses the new narrative of the growing power of women voters in India, exemplified by closing gender gaps in voter turnout, and representing another aspect of women's political engagement, potentially influencing parties' responsiveness to women voters. The article concludes by discussing the broader implications and significance of the 2019 election, areas for further research, and prospects for women's participation and representation in the new parliament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay draws from an ethnographic study on nurses and attendants in the city of Kolkata to re-turn to the question of women's consciousness and agency. I trace women's reluctance to participate in union activities both to the failure of formal mechanisms of collective bargaining in representing workers' interests, and to gendered norms that come in the way of organizing women workers. I explore how the performance of respectable femininity, legitimized by class and caste norms, inhibits women's participation in intensely politicized masculine domains. Though at first glance it may seem that women's reluctance to participate in union activities is gender neutral, I demonstrate that gender norms produce a social field that denies women political agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009, the Government of India embarked on a mission to issue each of India’s over one billion residents a unique biometric identification number, Aadhaar (literally, ‘foundation’). An Aadhaar database would link the demographic and biometric information (iris scans, fingerprints, facial photograph) of residents to a 12-digit number. India currently commands the world’s largest biometric database. While Aadhaar does not guarantee citizenship, benefits, or services, its architects submit that its reliable, real-time identity verification infrastructure potentially allows for the targeted delivery of any good to its intended recipient. Aadhaar is fashioned as an ID concerned with a pristine bodily uniqueness untarnished by the social, political, or economic. Aadhaar frequently provokes the questions: Who is the recipient of Aadhaar and to what community does Aadhaar afford membership? Based on ethnographic fieldwork in India’s capital, New Delhi, this article examines how Aadhaar comes to inform ideas of identity and belonging held by its implementers, as well as the population it targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the development and early politics of theDalit Panther Iyakkam(DPI), or Dalit Panther Movement, of Tamil Nadu, India. Established in 1982, the DPI advanced a political programme that petitioned state authoritiesquademocratic citizens. By submitting written appeals through formal institutional channels, DPI organisers lobbied officials to perform their professional duties and advocated the delivery of rights, impartial administration of law, and equitable access to social and economic development. This article explores the initial phase of Dalit Panther politics in Tamil Nadu through its own documentary evidence, drawing upon DPI Chairman A. Malaichamy’s personal letters, written appeals, and received correspondence, as well as original pamphlets and handbills distributed at political rallies. Countering interpretations of Dalit assertion that accentuate ‘illiberal’ techniques as its natural form and state welfare as its principle target, the article shows that legal advocacy served as an integral feature of early DPI politics. But, when state institutions proved unresponsive and the movement developed a grassroots presence, DPI activists expanded their programme to encompass contentious street politics as a complementary means to make claims on state authority, amplify their voices to centres of power, and demand recognition as democratic citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The genre of English-language stand-up comedy is increasingly becoming popular in India’s metropolitan cities. This study uses the concept of the public sphere to examine YouTube videos of a prominent Indian live comedian, Daniel Fernandes. The analysis shows that Fernandes’ verbal humor is based on several performative techniques such as linguistic code-switching, calculative pauses, and juxtaposition of incongruous things. The study, furthermore, demonstrates that English-language stand-up comedy extends the bourgeois public sphere by a satirical commentary on political, social, and cultural issues in contemporary India as well as internationally. The article also argues that the public sphere exemplified by the genre of English-language live comedy is not entirely new, but an advancement of the classical public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Headaches, infertility and cancer are some of the health hazards most commonly associated with exposure to the electromagnetic fields (EMF) generated by mobile handsets and base transceiver stations. In contemporary India, home to the world’s second biggest market of mobile phone users, the impact of EMF on health has attracted a considerable degree of attention in recent years, leading to debates between citizen lobby groups, central and municipal authorities, telecommunication companies, medical practitioners and scientists. This essay discusses anti-tower activism in urban India and the government’s response to it, aiming to understand how online newspapers and magazines report on this topic and how concerned citizens use various media platforms to challenge government policies around telecom towers. It argues that interpreting anti-tower protests simply as the result of fear-mongering by the media or uninformed citizens overlooks the ways in which campaigners strategically employ discourses about health hazards, in particular the scientific uncertainty surrounding the impact of EMF on health, to protest against the haphazard proliferation of towers and to voice their discontent with the state’s failure to regulate and control the telecom industry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The question of social mobility in a terrain of increasing inequality has gained particular urgency in post-reform India. We approach social mobility not as a one-way ascent toward the top, rather as a risk-laden enterprise prone to fluctuations that include both incremental gains and the possibility of sliding downwards. We argue that to ‘move up the ladder’ is not merely a matter of individual choice or hard work in the face of odds as free-market believers have long held. It is as much an outcome of collective political bargaining, privileges that dominant class and caste status affords, access to resources and, indeed, occasional luck. Two propositions follow. First, we suggest that the state remains albeit as a reluctant enabler of social mobility in the age of markets. Second, the participation in the new economy hinges also upon one’s ability to ‘dress up’ for the part, to be able to craft one’s look as if one belonged to spaces – work or leisure – that one desires to inhabit. The work of appearances, we suggest, does not operate at individual levels alone, it also encompasses the nation’s spectacular projection of itself in the global political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When the Indian car manufacturer Tata Motors launched its new ‘people's car’ in 2008 it was widely predicted to revolutionise automobility in India. Yet seven years after the launch, the car has barely made an impact on the Indian car market and is widely regarded as a failure. This article offers a detailed study of the rise and fall of India's ‘people's car’. Based on a mapping of the changing popular representations and symbolic imaginaries that attach to the car as a means to mobility and an object of identity and social status, we suggest that the car failed neither because it was mediocre, nor because it remained economically out of reach for most Indians. Rather, we argue that its insertion into the lower ranks of a powerful status hierarchy of identity-defining objects precluded it from adequately tapping into new and hegemonic forms of consumer aspiration in ‘New India’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents a study of the textbooks composed and released by the Tibetan Government-in-Exile for the Central School for Tibetans in India. By examining the textbooks on Social Studies and history, it looks at how the Tibetan Government-in-Exile engages with various external and internal ‘others’ in the process of constructing knowledge of the Tibetan nation, and at how it represents Tibetan life to those who were born in exile. It is contended that schooling and power are interrelated, and textbook curricula represent a way in which national power dominates the selection and representation of public knowledge. The article concludes by suggesting that the limits applied by their refugee status to the Tibetans in India has sometimes turned into the energy/force of empowerment, which not only permits flexibility in the shaping of a national identity but creates spaces for negotiating the multiple boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines patterns of voter turnout and electoral competition in India's urban parliamentary constituencies. It places the 2014 Lok Sabha elections in historical context, drawing on constituency-level data from national elections since 1977 to explore broad changes and continuities in electoral competition, party structures, and voter turnout, with particular focus on comparisons between urban and rural India. The purpose of the article is descriptive, seeking to fill a gap in the literature on electoral competition in urban India. I find evidence that India's urban constituencies have recently, on average, been less competitive and participatory than non-urban constituencies, though this has not been a consistent trend since the mid-1970s. This article concludes with a brief outline for a research agenda on electoral politics in urban India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 2014, a regional party in Odisha, the Biju Janata Dal, defied national trends by thrashing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress Party at both parliamentary and state elections. It offered voters a high-profile regional leader who had radically centralised power and retained the capacity to govern somewhat effectively, even forcefully. It thus countered the appeal of BJP leader Narendra Modi to offer those same things. This analysis examines how this state government – like a few others – was able to withstand the national swing towards the BJP and Modi. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1993, the prognosis for Urdu newspapers in north India was dismal. The readership was aging and dwindling as the new generation learned Hindi in Devanagiri script. Urdu calligraphers (katibs) were not passing their skills on to a new generation and writers skilled in Urdu were becoming increasingly hard to find. Fifteen years later, Delhi is home to a prosperous and expanding Urdu press. The number of newspapers had tripled, circulations were often higher than they had been in the past, profits were up and the atmosphere at Delhi's major Urdu newspapers was upbeat. A large part of the explanation lies in the intersection of language ideologies and new writing technologies. On the one hand, Urdu indexes crucial politically urgent populations, leading to a renewed interest in it from many sectors. On the other hand, new more flexible technologies allowed the retiring katibs to be replaced by computer typesetting that strongly resembles north Indian calligraphic styles and new software allows an entire daily newspaper to be assembled and sent to press using a single laptop. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in 1993 and 2008 at some of New Delhi's Urdu dailies and interviews with several editors, this article describes the mutual influences of Urdu language ideologies about Muslim identity and technological innovation in the revival of the Urdu daily. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commentary on Indian politics frequently uses the term populism narrowly to refer to short-term, electorally driven expenditure. However, the term is more insightfully used when referring to an ideological construct that celebrates the importance of the people as an undivided group. Politics in Tamil Nadu has had a strongly populist character since the 1960s with both the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and All-India Anna DMK (AIADMK) making appeals to the ‘people’ of the state. In the last decade, the DMK has adjusted its populist appeals to better connect with lower status groups, a constituency traditionally targeted by the AIADMK. The AIADMK re-worked its approach, using a technocratic populist discourse during its campaign to win the 2011 assembly elections, addressing concerns of higher status voters while still acknowledging its poorer supporters. Populist appeals have been adjusted to compensate for political weaknesses in the two governing parties. Economic and social changes since the late 1990s have created opportunities, as well as imperatives, for reworking populist appeals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on two ethnographic examples of the sociocultural aspects of populations genetic research in India, the article explores in what ways tests aimed at assessing ‘genetic differences’ between populations can be viewed as enabling or disempowering for individuals, communities or nations subjected to such tests. The first builds on a response to DNA research demonstrated by the leaders of the Jewish Bene Ephraim community of Andhra Pradesh, a Dalit group who in the late 1980s declared their descent from the Lost Tribes of Israel. The second focuses on the Indian Genome Variation Consortium, a research network established in India in 2003 with the aim of mapping the country's human genetic diversity. Building upon Prainsack and Toom's theoretical concept of situated dis/empowerment, I suggest that in both case studies empowering and disempowering elements of DNA testing appear to co-constitute and co-produce each other, as they both reinforce reductionist accounts of human sociality and serve as rhetorical tools for social and political liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay examines the way extractions of human blood – for medical donations, portrait paintings, and petitions – have come to form a significant means of political communication (particularly as a means of political protest) throughout India, focusing in particular on a case study from the south of a karate teacher and artist who, through painting multiple portraits of the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister with his blood, sought land for his karate school. The second half of the essay explores wider features of India's ‘sanguinary politics’, focusing in particular on ways in which publicly witnessed deployments of political activists' own blood once seemed to promise both intensification and purification of mass political idioms. It also considers how and why this promise has largely remained unfulfilled. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

International surrogacy arrangements have created paradoxical situations of ‘legal orphanhood’ where highly desired surrogate babies with multiple parents are not recognized by either the child's country of birth or the country of the child's commissioning parent(s). This article examines the parentage and citizenship status of children born to Indian surrogate mothers and foreign commissioning parent(s). In the absence of comprehensive legislation, Indian courts have struggled to address these fundamental issues of surrogate babies given the differing interests of the parties and countries involved. The rights of surrogate children are addressed only on an ad hoc basis and only after the commissioning parents encounter actual difficulties in taking children to another country. By viewing the rights of the surrogate child as paramount, surrogate children born through surrogacy arrangements in India should have their origins known and documented accurately to preserve their identity. In addition, Indian citizenship should automatically attach at birth to prevent statelessness. Contrary results place the interests of other parties above the rights of the child. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Contemporary Indian feminism is concerned with a number of social justice issues, including the circumstances under which ‘adivasis' or tribal people, live. India has a large body of work on these peoples, but much of this romanticises them and fails to treat them as the inhabitants of a modern, industrial and globalising India. In this article, I discuss two works published by Indian feminist presses that provide new and alternative ways of representing adivasis. Anita Agnihotri's Forest Interludes: A Collection of Journals and Fiction is a multi-genre collection that reflects the author's time spent as an IAS officer in adivasi regions of eastern India. Agnihotri plays the dual role of privileged outsider and informed insider, which lends her narrative a forceful authority. Bhaskaran's life story of the Keralite adivasi activist C.K. Janu, Mother Forest: The Unfinished Story of C.K. Janu, attempts to present adivasi politics as relevant to modern India, yet the formal structuring of the text and the stylistic choices made by the translator and editors undercuts this. Both Forest Interludes and Mother Forest contain formal and stylistic innovations and, though not without problems, they represent a promising departure from traditional literary representations of adivasis – a departure that situates these subaltern peoples within a more contemporary discursive field. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent attempts to rethink labour history and contemporary labour struggles in India have variously memorialised the ‘lost worlds’ of industrial labour struggle and argued for stretching the terms of labour historiography, in part, by moving beyond the conceptual and political boundaries of the factory gate to take into account the complex configurations of labour, accumulation and struggle. This article contributes to this scholarship with a methodological focus on political theatre by three organisations in India. I ask what we might learn about labour and labour struggles when we look through the lens of cultural activism by the urban and rural poor. Drawing on Kalyan Sanyal's provocative distinction between accumulation and need economy, I argue that contemporary cultural work and activism both refuses and contributes to the market-based fetishisation of surplus-value as the sole purpose of work and as such it founds a view of labour and labour struggle that learns from labour and not just capital. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents the Indian electricity sector as a case study of the evasion of responsibility in public policy. India's electricity policy repeatedly fails to meet its own targets and is universally lambasted as inadequate. The state appears aware of many of the reasons for these failures, yet policies have consistently failed to make effective corrections. Part of the explanation for this institutional and policy stasis lies in the pervasive shirking of responsibility by actors throughout the electricity sector. The sector is analysed to explore the mechanisms through which responsibility is displaced, deflected or dissipated. These mechanisms include ‘agency’, ‘presentational’ and ‘policy’ strategies, which are both pre-emptively and reactively deployed. Using these strategies, responsibility is shifted through (1) institutional architecture which formally delegates power to other actors, especially exploiting the ambiguity in federalism, sectoralism, privatization and decentralization; (2) rhetorical displacement of blame onto other actors or ‘exogenous’ factors and (3) everyday policy procedures and bureaucratic practices designed to distance officials from decision making. By negating the requirement for institutional and analytical responsiveness, these evasions of responsibility perpetuate systemic failures and undermine the credibility of the Indian state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]