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This essay contextualises the emergence of a document regime which regulated routine travel through the deployment of the India–Pakistan Passport and Visa Scheme in 1952. It suggests that such travel documents were useful for the new Indian state to delineate citizenship and the nationality of migrants and individual travellers from Pakistan. The bureaucratic and legal mediations under the Scheme helped the Indian state to frame itself before its new citizens as the sole certifier of some of their rights as Indians. In contrast, applicants for these documents viewed them as utilitarian, meant to facilitate their travel across the new borders. The contrast and contestation between such different perceptions helps us to understand the continued significance of documentary identities in contemporary India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Patent Act extended to colonial India in 1859 introduced to Indians the right to file a patent for an invention. The article locates India as a site for invention and innovation, not by looking at the legal evolution of the law or the inventions themselves, but at the Indian patentees' engagement with the law. The consistent but small number of Indian patentees is suggestive of patent-filing being a form of sustained engagement with technological modernity. The establishment of a Patent Office completed the bureaucratic structure and was an intrinsic part of the development of India as a technocratic and scientific state. Examining the nature of this colonial institution, the paper examines a parallel process which shaped patenting: Indianisation. The colonial policy of Indianisation shaped Indians' access to employment and research in technical institutes. This had two visible but discrete consequences: in the number of Indian employees whose patents were acquired by the government, and the creation of a notable 'patent culture' with the Patent Office in Calcutta as a site and headed by an Indian. The paper uses the patent law as an axis to illuminate conversations around inventive activity in colonial India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The postcolonial legacy of India's borderlands is a legacy of othering, particularly of the religious other (meaning, other than Hindu). The 'friendly' India-Nepal border, however, negotiates the sameness of religion by managing the refractions of caste and gender. The shared sacredness of the landscape reproduced in the circulation of icons, myths and pilgrims also reaffirms the shared religious identity of those crossing it. This paper argues that the sameness that constitutes friendliness at this border rests on evaluating the gendered and caste righteousness of those crossing it. It is rendered most visible in alleged instances of elopement, marital infidelity and trafficking that come into public view at the open and friendly border. The paper describes how sameness is both refracted and managed through the observation of the daily mobilities and spatiality at the India-Nepal border at two check-points in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protestant communities in South India were vocal in dissenting against colonial rule and in expressing their discomfort with the demographic politics of nationalist discourse. Within this context, this paper focuses on young Christian women in Madras, who, in the 1930s and 1940s, articulated an internationalist ethic and a geography of ecumenical belonging that drew on their positioning within internationalist humanitarian, Christian socialist and global student Christian networks. Critiquing the narrowly regional and national geographies within which minoritised communities in South Asia have tended to be studied, I argue that these young women drew on social gospel theology to imagine an expansive international geography of social action, while critiquing their positioning as 'minorities' within the emergent Indian nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voting is a multifaceted decision that involves choosing a leader/party in spite of not agreeing with all that they represent. How then do voters deal with the aspects that they do not like? Using a cognitive dissonance approach, this research looks to study how educated secular voters who vote for the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi in India reduce the dissonance arising out of the communal repercussions of their vote. I find that voters both adjust their conceptions of secularism and their perceptions of communalism to justify their vote and reduce dissonance. This can have significant repercussions on democracy as voters who adjust their preferences become citizens who hold modified standards of accountability. This paper presents novel insights into voter decision-making, especially on how they may navigate between aspects they like and those they may not when taking voting decisions. It also provides rich patterns of political psychology for other researchers to explore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the lens of tiger photography on Instagram, this paper investigates a desire for wilderness without the human footprint; based on a false separation between nature and society, this aspiration finds expression through visual aesthetics on the platform. Protected areas in India are increasing, but this has not halted nature's financialisation. On the contrary, it has enhanced the availability of preserved nature for conversion to capital, mirroring earlier opportunities tied to resource extraction. Using insights from political ecology, I discuss how wildlife as hyper-spectacle on Instagram presents a natural world with the appearance of being untransformed by human intervention and available to tourism. Instagram offers a route into understanding the paradoxical stance of nature in contemporary tourism and conservation discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During colonial times, dioramas were commonly used to portray the diverse peoples of India. They depicted essentialised human types through plaster models in rural settings, engaged in typical activities, and dated back to the exhibition of human beings in universal expositions held in Calcutta, Delhi and London. Since Independence, there have been determined efforts to move away from colonial stereotypes and to decolonise government-funded museums in India. Meanwhile, Adivasi artists are finding their own way out of the curatorial confines of the museum. This paper describes how Indian museology still struggles to exorcise the ghosts of the Victorian museum and India's own internal colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Indo-British interactions at the United Nations during 1945–47, a significant and hitherto overlooked episode of India's transition within the British Commonwealth from a colony to a dominion. In this twilight period of the British Raj, India sent its first delegations onto the international stage—forays that were critically received by London and subsequently employed to anticipate New Delhi's global role in post-1945 international affairs. The delegations' delicate composition, combative activities and difficult interactions with their British counterparts established the diplomatic implications of decolonisation for London. The focus of existing literature on India's international identity at this time has been on the formulation of Jawaharlal Nehru's non-aligned approach to the Cold War. This article, instead, concentrates on its presentation and reception. Secondly, the story of India's presence at the UN usually begins with the Korean War (1950–53). This article shows that in fact it was in 1946–47 that the first impressions of the country's independent foreign policy were given by an interim Indian government. Based on the papers of Frederick Puckle, advisor on Indian affairs at the British Embassy in Washington (1943–47) and of Vijayalakshmi Pandit, leader of India's UN delegation, and supplemented by relevant official records, oral histories and memoirs, the article presents an unheralded facet of India's emerging independent identity in this period of pre-Independence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this first paper, we explain why traditional knowledge is an important theme in the study of Indian agriculture, especially given the crises routinely facing poor, smallholder farmers. We begin with an overview of some of the key authors who have written about the problems facing small farmers both within and outside India. Different authors have focused on different aspects of the benefits that can be derived from the local knowledge and skills of farmers, but these do not always pertain to organic farming. Our interest in organic farming is specifically about 'traditional' knowledge. With the industrialisation of agriculture in India and elsewhere, many poor, small farmers have been deskilled and placed into vulnerable positions. Traditional knowledge has been undermined, overwhelmed or has survived only in fragments. How 'traditional knowledge' might be retrieved, reinvented, reintroduced and modified so as to create a farmer-driven, sustainable and biodiverse agriculture is our concern. In the final section of this paper, we analyse the four situations we have been working on as examples of the possibilities and challenges facing the revival of 'traditional knowledge' in the villages of Kolkata, central India and Sikkim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Indian and Pakistani Punjab, this paper focuses on how, despite membership in or conversion to majority religious communities, former untouchables in both countries continue to experience caste-based discrimination. In India, a rights-based idiom for caste politics is limited by fragmentation within the Dalit community and the compromises required by electoral politics, while the imposition of a totalising Islamic identity by the state has resulted in the erasure of caste from the political discourse in Pakistan. This paper suggests that class-based mobilisation may be a better route to Dalit empowerment on both sides of the border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a new and original perspective on the plight of migrants in India. It incorporates an in-depth and practical analysis of Indian legal policies through the lens of migrant and refugee rights. In examining the extra-legal provisions operating in two of India's borderland states--Assam and Jammu & Kashmir--I show how special legal exemptions in Indian law inherently undermine efforts to protect migrant rights. I argue that these extraordinary laws hinder pathways to justice in three distinct ways: by circumventing international principles of non-refoulement; challenging the jurisdiction of India's Supreme Court; and delegitimising migrant-friendly laws. In highlighting an often overlooked aspect of migrants' rights issues, this paper brings the human element of India's regional border disputes and related legal mechanisms to the fore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the efforts of two Indian Muslim journalists, Abul Kalam Azad (1888–1958) and Aziz Burney (1952–), to use and overcome the constraints of direct and indirect censorship in order to address a community (qaum) conceived in their own image. It deals with these attempts through their responses to a series of national- and international-level crises, and to political groups that attempted to unite Hindus and Muslims. These include the nascent Khilafat movement, which was key to their coming together in the independence struggle and the Congress Party, and Congress' ambiguous relationship with Muslims in the post-Independence period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the knowledge-practices used by rural activists to raise public concerns about the use of water and land resources by a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Uttar Pradesh, India, between 2004 and 2014. These knowledge-practices included the use of semiotics and carefully crafted discourses—such as slogans and protest songs—to produce knowledge about villagers' rights to rural subsistence and survival. An aim of this paper is to show the impressive ways in which the social movement persevered by building both public claims to a moral economy as well as village-level practices and institutions that helped to enact visions of what a moral economy could or should be. Of particular significance were activists' efforts to frame rural water extraction and water rights through a subsistence-focused morality of rural development. This moral economy underscores villager-articulated desires for beneficial forms of economic activity that support rural livelihoods rather than prioritising environmentally destructive corporate activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reveals the racialisation of India's post-colonial citizenship regime by following the history of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam. Assam's NRC shows how political elites at both the subnational and national level have excluded minority populations through multivalent racialised nationalist imaginations. I show how racialisation is an important analytic to understand how ethnic, linguistic and religious groups are essentialised in relation to one another, and I contend that citizenship is embedded within these historical and social processes. I conclude that challenging the NRC must go beyond critiquing the process as a bureaucratic nightmare to contend with borders that entrench exclusionary ideas of citizenship towards imagining emancipatory futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the development of a close relationship between the Ford Foundation—the world's richest and most internationally oriented philanthropic organisation in the Cold War era—and India in the 1950s. Unlike existing literature on private foundation–recipient country relationships, which overwhelmingly focusses on the donor perspective, this essay explores the recipient perspective, thereby contributing to the emerging literature on Third World agency in international politics. Complicating the idea that recipient countries were overwhelmingly interested in aid maximisation, this article shows that India moved closer to the Ford Foundation in order to fulfil diplomatic rather than aid-related objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Orthodox approaches to managing Himalayan rivers endorse a singular focus on water as a resource to be harnessed for national security and economic progress, as epitomised by the proposed acceleration of large-scale hydropower construction in the Brahmaputra basin. In reality, existing large-scale hydropower development in the region frequently involves corruption, environmental destruction and forced displacement. This paper argues for an alternative approach to understanding the role of water in India's extractive zones within and beyond the boundaries of the nation, utilising the notions of ‘embeddedness’, ‘hydro-informality’ and ‘rescaling politics’. It is argued that reframing the river in this way can open up space for more just and sustainable practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the relationship between agricultural pricing policy and state legitimacy in India through a case study of the onion crisis that began in 2010. It places the government's responsive pricing policy to the onion crisis within the historical context of how agriculture and food policy were used by colonial and post-colonial governments to create state legitimacy. The paper argues for the centrality of agricultural pricing policy to understanding state legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper departs from the analytic lens of citizen versus the state and brings to attention intra-bureaucratic interactions in the wake of Aadhaar by focusing on the ongoing implementation of an Aadhaar Enabled Biometric Attendance System (AEBAS). Based on ethnographic research in a North Indian state, I show how AEBAS' goals of performance evaluation and management were partially, and unintentionally, circumvented by staff members, in part owing to the socio-technical design of the system. I argue that an unintended consequence of projects using digital media technologies to quantify and manage performance is their tendency to produce a performance of management, and that scholars and activists must pay attention to such disjunctures inherent in projects of command and control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay serves as an introduction to a special section on the senses in late colonial India. Participating in the act of decolonising sensory studies, this collection explores the intersections between post-colonial studies and sensory studies by paying particular attention to the sensorium of the colonised. In the historical and geographical context of colonial South Asia, the senses are embedded in acts of distinction across race, caste, class, and bodily and gender hierarchies. The collection intervenes by paying attention to the relationship between power and sense perception as it finds register in media, scientific practices and literature of the period. Across the section, we suggest that making sense of empire is also to make sense of the sensory regimes of empire that have resonances in the contemporary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the political technologies of a caste certificate regularly employed by a Denotified Tribe, the Kunchikorves, in the Mumbai slum of Dharavi. The author demonstrates how the Kunchikorves mobilise kin and affine relations and engage with different organs of the state in an effort to authenticate their caste status. These ‘caste certificates’ are needed to make use of reservations policies to get government jobs and higher education. Municipal jobs and promotions are desirable as the basis for secure employment and upward mobility. Describing the circuitous methods by which the Kunchikorves obtain such authenticating documents, this paper notes that caste identity, while not hinging on notions of purity or pollution, is still an important vehicle for collective identification in contemporary India. The post-colonial state can be said to have extended and elaborated the colonial state's enumerating and objectifying imperatives when it comes to group identity. Groups such as the Kunchikorves are complicit in these objectifying measures, and actively seek out authenticating proofs of an identity that was originally pejorative, arbitrary and imposed. This paper argues that the Kunchikorves’ manufacturing of caste certificates secures them a job,while at the same time bequeathing them a caste categorisation necessarily mediated by processes of bureaucratic authentication. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores media coverage of instant 'triple talaq'—a form of divorce practised by some Indian Muslims—and 'love jihad'—a supposed trend of Muslim men coercing Hindu women into conversion and marriage. The Hindu Right position itself as champions of gender justice in the context of outlawing instant triple talaq, but in discussions of 'love jihad' sideline women's rights (to choose their own religion and spouse) and focus on national security. This reveals the strategic use of women's rights by the Hindu Right to further entrench its imagination of a secular Hindu nation threatened by the Muslim man. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with butchers, cattle traders and beef eaters in South India, the aims of this paper are twofold. Firstly, it challenges two dominant assumptions made in respect of cattle slaughter and beef consumption in South Asia: one, that the beef trade directly concerns only Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis and Christians, and two, that respect for cattle is the near sole preserve of upper-caste Hindus. Secondly, given the strength of the empirical evidence against these two assumptions, it considers how such a stark framing of the debates along caste and communal lines has been sustained so successfully and for so long. Using insights from the anthropology of ignorance—to which this article makes a unique contribution—I argue that part of the answer lies in the strategic acts of not knowing what goes on at particular junctures along the chain from the cowshed to the dinner plate, which a number of different actors are complicit in working to maintain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes the ‘Silk Letters Conspiracy’, a complex, transnational scheme uncovered by British colonial officials in 1916, as the starting point for a discussion on the writing of revolutionary histories in post-colonial India. It considers the generally vexed position of Muslims in histories of early twentieth-century anti-colonialism and the lengths to which some scholars, particularly those associated with the Deoband seminary in northern India, have gone in response in order to create a counter-narrative of Muslim revolutionary anti-colonialism that was fully in keeping with the broader nationalist struggle. Later, the paper speculates on whether other historical lives, such as that of Abul Kalam Azad, one of the most high-profile Muslims in the leadership of the Indian National Congress in the 1940s and 1950s, could also be so re-inscribed and made part of the revolutionary script of the 1910s, and to what end this might be done. Throughout, this article meditates on the problematic nature of testimony, memory and the colonial archive. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents an ethnographic study of a redevelopment controversy in Delhi's old city. It considers the perspectives of traders, hawkers, politicians and officials on the proposed revamping of the Meena Bazaar. The paper illustrates how hermeneutic and aesthetic dimensions suffuse public and political life in India. Specifically, sincere intentions, evoked in speech and performance, are seen as a prerequisite of public presentation and as a locus of interpretive scrutiny. In an ambiguous and indeterminate milieu, promises and motives are probingly assessed, often in ironic and dramaturgical form. The paper foregrounds the ‘hermeneutics of the bazaar’, an interpretive sensitivity to intentionality, and ‘structured sincerity’, the efficacy, and reflexive steering, of performed conviction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sanitation work is considered highly polluted in Hindu society and the stigma inflicted on sweepers and manual scavengers (safai karamcharis) extends to their children. This paper examines how safai karamcharis navigate parenting from the 'polluted' margins. It explores strategies adopted to protect children from stigma and explains how these strategies are temporal and partial. It also discusses the hope parents place on education for their children's social mobility but how securing quality education is fraught with challenges, and that while education is necessary it is insufficient for the children of safai karamcharis to achieve social mobility and freedom from caste-based occupational rigidity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why did Mumbai's famous dance bars have to close in 2005? This paper analyses the ban and its aftermath in terms of (1) a colonial and post-colonial genealogy of the regulation of allegedly obscene public performances in India and (2) the provocative location of the dance bars vis-à-vis the cultural politics of consumerist globalisation. Combining a reading of arguments around the ban with first-hand ethnographic vignettes, the paper is a contribution to a critical analysis of the politics of publicity in India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Towns have been described as nodes of rural–urban mobility, while megacities have been described as hubs of international mobility. This paper uses the term ‘global town’ to describe a town as a hub of rural–urban and transnational migration. It draws attention to the connection between regional power dynamics, transnational migrants' ties with their home region, and urban transformation. Regionally-dominant groups can use a town to reproduce their rural power base, while less powerful communities can use a town to seek refuge from violence and marginalisation. These processes crucially affect the experiences of transnational migrants, who also participate in the transformation of the town when they ‘return home’ and buy property there, particularly after retirement. Our use of the term ‘global town’ is illustrated through a case study of Anand, Gujarat. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Subaltern Studies continues to be generative for understanding the present, provided we expand our evaluation beyond the question of ‘who is subaltern?'. This paper considers instead underlying methodological orientations that outlive their original empirical context, lending themselves to fresh applications. The original method trained us to notice gaps in governmental discourse, silences that underlie its claims to know and administer all within its domain. Based on ethnographic work in rural south India, the paper argues that despite the radical expansion of governmental discourse, it still does not coincide with the everyday practices people continue to inhabit. These practices shape, for example, rural women's everyday poesis in the stories they tell of injustices they have suffered, and the way these injustices erupt as disorder in the body's relationship to the world. To be able to write about these silences minimally requires, however, a second orientation, also present in early Subaltern Studies. This is the underlying epistemic confidence that it is possible, despite the odds, to understand better the meanings and workings of practices that may no longer constitute coherent or self-sufficient worlds—but which nevertheless continue to enjoy a vital and lively presence for subalterns, and for us all. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In times of heightened, no-longer-linear migratory flows, when migrations oscillate and even double back on their own routes, this article interrogates the unwritten social contract of hospitality between host and guest. Taking as a case study Amit Chaudhuri's returnee narrative, Calcutta: Two Years in the City (2013)—his personal account of relocation to India—this paper juxtaposes the mismatch between hospitalities assumed and experienced, from India's lukewarm hospitality to the expectations of its elite (even celebrity) sojourner authors, now diasporic returnee migrants. The article highlights the tensions in negotiating host-guest roles, particularly when insider-outsider, stranger-native boundaries blur. It also raises the question of whether some degree of re-orientalism is therefore inevitable in the cosmopolitan returnee's perceptions and subsequent representations of what was once 'home' and now is 'home again'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates a case of state formation in South Asia that emerged from below. In India, the state of Maharashtra has had a history of social movements by people evicted by dam construction dating back to the 1920s. The cumulative effect of these movements led Maharashtra to enact a law in 1976 to empower dam evictees, thus establishing the first rehabilitation law in India. These movements democratised the state and transformed its legal arena through a rights-based, claim-making approach. I argue that in post-colonial India, the state and society co-evolved through dialectics that were instrumental in transforming both, and that the making of the Maharashtra Resettlement of Project Displaced Persons Act, 1976, was the precursor to all acts subsequently passed in India in response to a rights-based, claim-making approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes an archival journey into the making of institutes of international affairs in late colonial India. By exploring the intertwined lives of two such institutions, it unearths an ideational fight over the study of international affairs in India between the Indian Institute of International Affairs (IIIA), established in 1936, and the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), started in 1943. From the outset, the IIIA was strongly pro-government and saw the ICWA as an institutional rival and a propaganda front for the Indian National Congress (INC). Closer to Independence, the two institutes were increasingly divided along communal and nationalist political lines. The IIIA's leadership became dominated by Muslims and the Muslim League and the ICWA by Brahman Hindus and the INC. As a result, a battle for legitimacy and recognition ensued over participation in international conferences and the ability to publish meaningful research. The ICWA successfully organised the Asian Relations Conference in March 1947, which sealed the fate of the IIIA. It moved to Pakistan in the wake of Partition, then quietly closed down after co-existing briefly with the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs (PIIA). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Several anthropological essays in this issue of South Asia, each engaging the figure of hysteria, are reviewed through the relation of phenomena typified as hysterical to accusations of these being counterfeit or 'duplicate'. A conceptual vocabulary to analyse the essays draws from the author's work on India's Aadhaar biometric identification platform as a means to transform a nation into a database and govern through an array of technical practices termed 'de-duplication'. De-duplication emerges as a useful way to attend to the stakes in the enunciation or refusal of the hysterical symptom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the plethora of lists that the Sri Lankan Buddhist revivalist Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1933) composed across his many notebooks. Rather than seeing lists as mere repositories of data, the text foregrounds aspects of form and formatting of the list as a genre and practice. Dharmapala's notebooks emerge as key material aspects in the creation of his self, and list-making is revealed as an emotional practice. The various lists and their central role in Dharmapala's life and thinking are explored by tracing list-making as a cultural practice belonging both to colonial modernity and to the ancient Theravada Buddhist tradition. This is shown in two particular foci: the temporal operations performed by Dharmapala's historical and autobiographical lists, and the spatiality and visuality in and around his lists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1965 India-Pakistan War, also known as the Second Kashmir War or the 'Seventeen-Day War', is usually understood through the lens of military history, regional geopolitics and the long-standing 'Kashmir question'. This article looks instead to the construction of social and political meaning around the conflict through an examination of the war's mediatisation in Pakistan. An analysis of different media forms—including radio broadcasts, news dailies, press photography and popular poetry—reveals how a war imaginary was shaped by both domestic crises and global ideological dissension, extending beyond the notion of a timeless Indo-Pak enmity. Taking place at a pivotal moment in the global Cold War, public narratives were built upon not only state agendas but also popular concerns regarding militarism, sovereignty and the politics of aid. These framings ultimately illustrate the deeper entanglements that exist between war, media and mass publics—extending beyond the goals of wartime propaganda alone to produce new national imaginaries and collective subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After four and a half decades of Green Revolution agrarian development, the state of Punjab is now, according to many commentators, in a state of social, economic and ecological crisis. In this paper, I interpret this crisis through a Gramscian lens as a ‘crisis of authority’, in the sense that while the dominant paradigm (the Green Revolution) can no longer provide solutions to the state's most pressing social problems, there is no clear single alternative either. This situation provides a political opportunity for non-hegemonic groups to articulate various other possibilities that address fundamental questions. This paper focuses on the work of one such group, the Kheti Virasat Mission (KVM). KVM is a civil society organisation that promotes ‘natural farming’ as a solution to the crisis in Punjab: natural farming is a chemical-free method of farming, which relies exclusively on materials available at the local level. This paper looks at KVM's methods of intervening in the crisis situation and examines the difficulties faced at the level of implementation. It argues that KVM's successes and failures highlight the uneven capacities of different classes and social groups to effectively respond to a ‘crisis of authority’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the role of non-government organisations (NGOs) and the implications for democratisation in India. By analysing one such organisation, this paper argues that NGOs do not always contribute positively to the democratisation process. It shows how Seva Mandir, an NGO working in the tribal areas of Rajasthan, has adopted a purely technocratic and apolitical service delivery approach and promoted a neo-liberal model of development. The unintended consequence of promoting this model has been the growth of a culture of ‘organised dependency’ at the grass-roots level, which has adversely affected the larger objectives of empowerment and democratisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Through close readings of recent fiction from English, Hindi and Kannada sources, this paper analyses the feminist ethic of care with reference to adult daughters caring for their critically-ill or dying mothers. The discussion focuses on problems associated with the care ethic and examines some of its assumptions, particularly its inability to account for the emotional complexity of adult caregiving relationships, which can make the invocation of relationality difficult; its focus on responsiveness to needs, such as those of helpless infants, which prevents adequate engagement with ideas of reciprocity; and, finally, its extraction of the caregiving relationship from the network of social and familial relationships in which it is embedded. Alongside my critique of the ethic of care, I will also examine the extent to which mainstream moral concepts, such as rights and contracts, may continue to be relevant to the dynamics of intergenerational relations in old age. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The powerful shadow cast by the Dravidian movement on its very scholarship has meant that the focus of scholarly attention has been on the recent, institutional and secular history of the movement, with scant attention paid to its earlier religious roots. While the important role played by the pioneer Neo-Saivite elites has been noted, there have been few attempts to understand or theorise either the significance of this Neo-Saivite factor or the strategies and methods through which the Neo-Saivite revivalists fashioned and articulated a form of non-Brahmin Tamil nationalism. This paper seeks to address this lacuna by examining the largely untapped accounts of the Neo-Saivite movement written by orthodox Saivite contemporaries, who were highly critical of the movement and sought to expose both its deviation from ‘true’ Saivism and its political agenda. It is these criticisms of the Neo-Saivites that best illuminate how Saivism was deployed for a Dravidian and non-Brahmin Tamil nationalist project. The paper also argues that it is through a critical study of the Neo-Saivite movement that we can adequately address the question of the social base of the Dravidian movement, which has long continued to haunt its scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This multi-disciplinary paper brings together two bodies of evidence that, to our knowledge, have not before been combined: literature about the efficient functioning of the East Kolkata Wetlands in the production of fish is juxtaposed against scientific research that documents the heavy metal pollution of those Wetlands caused by industries such as tanneries. Our primary question is whether it is safe to eat the fish (and other produce) of the Wetlands; a related issue is to assess the strengths and limitations of traditional knowledge. In discussing what the farmers know and what the scientists know, we have placed our work in the context of a framework developed by Richards in 1979. Our conclusions suggest that the expertise of the farmers and the expertise of the scientists can be brought together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India is in the grip of an agrarian crisis. Economic, social, environmental and political forces have adversely affected the relationship between the small-scale primary producer and the production process. In the context of this crisis, traditional knowledge-inspired food systems have given rise to 'islands of success' that have allowed small and marginal farmers to reclaim their livelihoods across the country. In this paper, we analyse three different islands of success using an agro-ecological framework, arguing that such islands of success based on traditional knowledge are becoming an increasingly necessary approach to agriculture. However, political will, political engagement and effective policies that support traditional knowledge in agriculture are required for these islands of success to become waves of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a cultural politics of nationalism and alternative medicine in India. It investigates the rhetoric of a popular guru, Ramdev, who criticises ‘the West’ and promotes ‘homegrown’ yoga and Ayurveda for strengthening individual bodies and the body of the nation. I argue that the expansion of the Ayurvedic market in India and Ramdev's personal success are both based on discourses that interweave a neo-liberal quest for health with nationalist sentiments and consumerist desires. I show how yoga and Ayurveda—situated within narratives of citizens’ duty to consume the homegrown—have become political tokens of national belonging and biomoral consumerism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intervenes in the debate over whether secularism can protect religious minorities in India or whether alternative models are needed. I explore this issue by examining Rohinton Mistry's novelFamily Matters, which focuses on religious extremism within the minority Parsi community. The novel suggests that the individual needs to maintain ‘a fine balance’ between religious beliefs and personal rights. It recognises that secularisation has shaped modern religious identity and, consequently, facilitated religious extremism. By de-coupling religion from secularisation, Mistry demonstrates that religion need not be rigid and can adapt to different social circumstances, while continuing to provide moral strength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines connections between biological anthropology in India and Nazi German anthropology, particularly through Profulla Chandra Biswas (1904–84), a Nazi sympathiser and founding head of the University of Delhi's Department of Anthropology. Influenced by his PhD supervisor, Nazi anthropologist Eugen Fischer, Biswas propagated eugenics ideologies and used them to advance his academic career and determine foundational priorities for one of the largest anthropology departments in the Indian subcontinent. Ethnographic fieldwork from a kinship perspective demonstrates that although they are often forgotten by present-day anthropologists, efforts to 'cut off' these intellectual genealogies merely allow their intellectual and ethical legacies to continue without critical reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its rise in 2014, Islamic State (IS) has attracted more than 30,000 volunteers to take part in the conflicts raging in Syria and Iraq. Despite a large presence of more than 160 million Muslims in India, not more than a hundred people have travelled abroad to join IS. This article attempts to explain the low participation of Indian Muslims in foreign conflicts. Drawing on existing literature and interviews with academics, government officials and members of the Muslim community across India, this article demonstrates that insurgency movements such as the Afghan Jihad in the 1980s, Indian government actions, and other factors such as logistical issues, family structure, ideological opposition and racism in IS ranks have collectively played a role in preventing Indians from taking part in the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts. This article is valuable given the low level of literature pertaining to Indian Muslims and their absence from the global jihadist community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalisation has introduced new sources of mobility for India's youth, yet not all youth experience mobility in the same way. The unevenness of mobility trajectories is especially visible in regional towns, where poor rural migrants and more globally connected middle-class youth occupy the same social space. To illustrate these mobility trends, this paper presents the stories of youths from various backgrounds in the town of Darjeeling, exploring different sources of mobility for rural and urban youth. While rural youth experience some forms of upward mobility as they migrate into the town, urban youth are confronted with downward mobility and are frustrated in their aspirations for professional careers and ‘modern’ lifestyles. For aspiring urban youth, upwardly-mobile rural people are seen as a threat to their privilege, blocking their mobility aspirations. This is contributing towards emerging tensions between rural and urban populations within the town. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates caste dynamics within the information technology (IT) industry in Chennai. While there has been considerable commentary on the dominance of 'upper' castes within the industry, significantly less has been said about how 'upper-casteness' is retained and reinforced. In exploring everyday forms of upper-caste assertion, this article unpacks constructions of 'corporate Brahminism' on the IT office floor. Moreover, by analysing the experiences of employees from a broader range of caste backgrounds, it highlights spaces of resistance in the industry, underlining the relationality of caste in privileged sites of work within the modern economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attention to the visual within the political anthropology of India has focused almost exclusively on spectacle and the excessively visible. This paper examines the question of visibility by interrogating the conditions that enable collective agendas to be seen as political, and advocates closer attention to the role of the state in these processes of recognition. In doing so, it emphasises shifts in the visual aspects of communicative networks and uses specific examples of mass protest and blockage agitation to trace longer histories of practice, expanding the domains of both the visual and the political available as objects of scholarly attention. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in suburban middle-class Hyderabad, India, this paper explores gender equality in the context of rising companionate marriage ideals. Informants described a shift in marriage from a hierarchical relationship of respect to a more equal relationship of friendship, expressed concern about marital disharmony caused by ‘ego problems’ and insisted that women's ‘adjustment’ was essential for a successful marriage. Complex conjugal power negotiation reflects class distinction projects as informants sought to claim the ‘moral middle’ between lower and upper classes by presenting themselves as progressive and open-minded, but also respectably Indian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comparative study of mobilisation by two lower-class occupational groups in Varanasi, India, presents a puzzle: one group, the boatmen of the Mallah community, have successfully formed and sustained several associations to promote boatmen's occupational interests, whereas another group, the handloom weavers of the Ansari community, have no self-formed, durable, active associations. This paper argues that transformation and decline of the weaving industry and significant class divisions within a community that continues to be highly marginalised have left the handloom weavers particularly vulnerable and pose steep challenges to self-organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using Partha Chatterjee's insights on the formation of ‘civil society’ and how this is distinct from ‘political society’, this paper theorises the mobilisation of popular support via social media during the so-called ‘anti-corruption movement’ in India in 2011. It tracks the main themes of the civil society-led movement's Twitter feeds during two crucial phases of fasting by its self-proclaimed Gandhian leader, Anna Hazare. This highlights the mixing of nostalgic pre-independence discourses with new media savvy and provides a means of contextualising what such discursive mobilisation means for contemporary political formations in a post-colonial society such as India. The case study also sheds light on the urban- and middle-class-centred nature of the protest and its preference for media over electoral representation—this is in line with Chatterjee's conceptualisation of a civil society that undermines the authority of the state and excludes the rural and urban poor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]