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Indigenization has been an important nationalist project undertaken by various colonized countries seeking to liberate the existing knowledge systems from colonial hegemony. In India too, one witnesses serious efforts at indigenization that began during the colonial rule as part of the anti-colonial nationalist struggle. This continued after independence with new vigour. It found resonance in the domain of social sciences and the Indian social scientists have been engaged in debates around decolonizing the extant knowledge texts in their respective domains. An essential part of indigenization of social science in the Indian context is their vernacularization, which implies a process of translation and adaptation of the knowledge texts in its diverse local/regional languages. Underscoring the importance of both the processes in decolonizing the social sciences, the paper also highlights the existing and the emerging challenges to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature on international migration from India in the past has focused on the formation and development of 'Indian diasporas'; that is, Indians who have moved to various parts of the world and maintain socio-economic, cultural and political lives in India as well as other countries. However, little attention has been paid toward 'temporary migrants' who have migrated to different countries with a temporary visa and in the course of time extended their visas to become 'permanent residents'. Temporary migration from India has become a common trend over the last two decades, especially since the acceleration of globalisation and the developments in the fields of information and communication technologies. Although it is argued that this type of migration took place in the past - for instance, Indians migrated to British, French, Dutch and Portuguese colonies during the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries as indentured labourers for a period of three to five years and later extended their stays - what is new about the current trend is the new state policies of different host countries and the socio-economic and cultural background of the immigrants. This paper is an exploratory study of this contemporary phenomena of movement from 'temporary migrant' to 'permanent resident', a phenomena which has not been given much attention by academicians and policy makers in India. The present paper outlines this trend with an illustration of Indian H-1B visa holders in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the1830s the colonial government in India became the agency for the promotion of ‘Western education’, that is, education that sought to disseminate modern, Western, rational knowledge through modern institutions and pedagogic processes. This paper examines a historical episode in which certain key categories of modern Western thought were pressed into service to explain a consequence of the dissemination of Western knowledge in colonial India. The episode in question was that of the alleged ‘moral crisis’ of the educated Indian, who, many argued, had been plunged into confusion and moral disarray following his exposure to Western knowledge in the schools and universities established by his British ruler. In the discourse of moral crisis, the knowledge being disseminated through Western education was simultaneously put to use in explaining an unanticipated effect of this education. How adequate was Western knowledge to explaining its own effects? More generally – for this paper is drawn from a larger study of how modern Western knowledge ‘travelled’ when transplanted to colonial India – what is the status of the knowledge we produce when we ‘apply’ the categories of modern Western thought in order to understand or explain India? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the issues on substate phenomena and power transition theory in India. The author focuses on how a government's political power specifically its political capacity and its effects on domestic demographic changes. This concept specifically posit that subnational governments with high levels of political capacity are more likely to experience lower infant mortality rates. The authors also gain an additional interesting implication of their work that at least two of the three traditional measures of power in power transitions theory.

Although there is such a thing as Indian thought, it seems to play no role in the way social sciences and philosophy are practiced in India or elsewhere. The problem is not only that we no longer employ terms such as atman, avidya, dharma to reflect on our experience; the terms that we do indeed use—sovereignty, secularism, rights, civil society and political society, corruption—seem to insulate our experience from our reflection. This paper will outline Gandhi's framing of our predicament in Hind Swaraj. It will then discuss three very different examples taken from our peculiar life with concepts that will also serve to clarify and illustrate the framework I am outlining. It will then very briefly discuss how Gandhi saw the Gita as showing him a way out of the predicament. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper calls attention to matsyanyaya, or state of nature theories, in classical Indian thought, and their significance. The focus is on those discussions of matsyanyaya found in the law books, political treatises and the Mahabharata epic. The significance and relevance of matsyanyaya theories are shown through a comparison with early modern state of nature theories and an elaboration on the possible place of rights and dharma in matsyanyaya and the consequences of this for classical Indian political theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates about translation have now advanced to a stage in which translation is acknowledged as a key dimension of social life. At the same time, a translation approach to social praxis demands that we rethink basic premises of the social sciences. Taking translation as a key dimension of sociality means regarding difference as primary, and forces us to focus on the exchanges and interconnections between and across different contexts. What stands out are the multiple contextual involvements of social actors. This paper views translation as interactive and non-representational. Based on the distinction between implicit and explicit levels of social translation, it explores the potentialities of translation as a way of reaching out to others and overcoming the restrictions of context by instituting a “third idiom”. Taking the example of Buddhism and other universalistic idioms employed by Dalits in India, the article discusses attempts to translate one's concerns, and oneself, in a way that implicates one's opponents as well as society at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents an overview of the method and procedure followed by the National Social Science Documentation Centre, India, to assess the present state of affairs relating to publication policy, bibliographical control, distribution and use of government reports in India. The result of an opinion survey on the subject using Delphi technique has been included. The results show that there are gaps in government report collections in libraries. These reports have enormous research value. The underutilization of these reports can be ascribed to both service inadequacies and user motivation. There is an urgent need to compile a comprehensive catalogue of all government reports (published by the states as well as the center) which will eventually take the form of a user's guide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates whether past declines in mortality could have created a huge deficit of eligible men in the marriage market, and whether the ensuing competition for mates could be responsible for the coercive character the dowry system of marriage has assumed in India. New indices have been developed to measure the trends in bridegroom availability that aid in the inquiry into the demographic origins of marriage squeeze. It is contended that the marriage squeeze against women was particularly intense in India because mortality decline, in addition to age structural changes, drastically reduced the number of widowers in the population who once accounted for about one-fifth of the annual supply of bridegrooms. Our projections indicate that, as a result of recent declines in fertility, the marriage squeeze against females will ease substantially by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and that marriages of men will begin to be delayed more than those of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article ethnographically traces the performance of data collection and analysis for a cancer cost-of-illness study in an East Indian Cancer hospital. By reflecting on my experience in this project, I show how the hospital's obligations for philanthropic and business self-sustainability spatially and temporally structured data in a way that produced the conditions of possibility for what was able to be made knowable of patients' experiences in cancer health economics. While collecting and analysing data within the spatial and temporal structuring of this self-sustainable hospital, I argue that our research team attempted to craft an ethical epistemology by incorporating the unique realities of Indian cancer patients based upon assumptions made from our tacit knowledge. Specifically, we called upon this knowledge to exercise a form of tacit epistemological ethics for patients existing in an in-between space of classification within Euro-North America cancer health economics frameworks. Finally, I suggest that in light of an attempt to produce a more ethical economic logic, the results of the cost-of-illness analysis are ultimately returned to larger conditions of possibility within austere health systems and Euro-North America health economics frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India presents a heterogeneous socio-economic ethos, rooted within structures of patriarchy and caste, rendering any transformation of traditional gender roles, increasingly challenging. Gender socialisation begins in childhood and is assimilated through schools. Students imbibe gender concepts through textbooks and classroom experiences, which either reinforce their social perceptions or influence them to critique inequalities and bias. Adopting a multi-pronged approach through feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA) and content analysis, this research evaluates the images used in Indian school social science textbooks, for constructs of gender representation, structures, and stereotyping. The research reveals that gender structures depicted in textbooks foster patriarchy and gender bias. There is minimal effort to depict feminist activism and little scope to foster gender reflexivity and social debate, which only sustains stereotypical perceptions of gender roles within Indian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of social ills such as unemployment, poverty, and accelerating pace of rural-urban migration is not only enormous in magnitude, but also complex by nature in developing countries. This article introduces an innovative regulatory approach that addresses the complexity and scale of such problems. An analytical and decision-making model is presented. This model prescribes reflecting on two or more problems simultaneously. Such an approach is expected to create a fresh opportunity for policy makers and scholars in solving problem scenarios, bringing their vantage point to bear on pressing social matters. The model presented in this article is applied to analyze the NREGA or National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 in India. This Act represents a novel approach to policy-making and demonstrates the positive role governments can play in labor markets. The design, implementation, and promising initial results clearly challenge existing wisdom on how to make effective policy decisions. The framework presented in the article best explains various facets of this remarkable policy and shows how governments can intervene in the labor markets and correct for imperfections. Pioneering future applications to other social and economic challenges are suggested. Also, implications for research and policy are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the works of social scientist Brij Mohan. The author says that Mohan uses a holistic approach to addressing social problems and his study about social psychiatry earned him the title of Father of Social Psychiatry in India. Due to persuasion from former Louisiana State University School of Social Work acting dean Scott Briar who is also his predecessor, Mohan applied for permanent dean post and was accepted. Among his topics of interest are freedom and oppression, ideology and values, social development and welfare.

Several recent studies propose that political choices of Indian youth can hardly be distinguished from those of their parents in many respects. Contrary to this well-established understanding, this article shows that when set apart from the spheres of family and work, students in a flagship Indian university—mostly in the social sciences and humanities—gradually transform their political attitudes in light of prolonged exposure to a campus environment. Through combining ethnographic study with the analysis of a survey of political attitudes of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) students, we show that time spent in situ fosters participation to political activities, increases chances of joining a student organization and make students more likely to identify themselves as politically radical. The class and caste background of students, on the other hand, are not strongly associated with political attitudes, showing the integrative nature of politicization on the JNU campus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the treatment of gender issues in “research for development” natural resources management (NRM) projects. Through discussion of an NRM research project in the United Kingdom and India, the article explores how the use of inaccurate gender stereotypes results in projects being compromised. The article seeks to explain why this happens despite widespread appreciation of the centrality of gender issues to NRM and poverty. In explanation the article identifies the significance of difficulties in the partnerships between the natural and social science dimensions of these projects. The study demonstrates that instead of easy and equal partnership, the relationship between natural and social science practitioners and practices remains characterized by inequality and poor communication, with serious consequences for the understanding of, and response to, gender issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines selected high school textbooks from India and Pakistan to see how they craft two different histories out of a shared past. Central to this endeavour, the article suggests, is the device of placing the two nations' histories within differently imagined geographies. Indian textbooks represent the naturalness of India through a geography and cartography first created in the colonial era. Influences from outside of these 'natural' boundaries are deemed to be 'foreign' to Indian history or culture. Pakistan's imagined geography is different. Underplaying subcontinental links, Pakistani textbooks stress the 'natural' affinities of Pakistan with the Islamic world. Ultimately, such nationalist geographies teach students in India and Pakistan - who may live no more than fifty miles away from each other and whose grandparents may well have lived together as neighbours - to imagine themselves as not only the inheritors of different pasts, but as inhabiting different geographical spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policies of economic liberalisation have been accompanied by discourses on the rise of the new middle class in India. The newness of this Indian middle class is marked by changing consumption practices and lifestyles. The visibility of the urban middle classes sets into motion a politics of forgetting with regard to social groups that are marginalised by India's policies of liberalisation. The politics of forgetting refers to a political-discursive process in which specific marginalised social groups are rendered invisible within the dominant national political culture. Such dynamics unfold through the spatial reconfiguration of class inequalities. Both middle-class groups and the state engage in a politics of forgetting that displaces the poor and working classes from such spaces. The result is the production of an exclusionary form of cultural citizenship which is, in turn, contested by these marginalised socioeconomic groups. The article draws on original qualitative field research conducted in Mumbai (Bomhay). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of fertility in any given society involves the study of the family and its institutional characteristics. Reproduction is one of the primary functions of the family, and it is through this that the society maintains itself against the hazards of mortality. This article examines fertility in relation to the age at return marriage using the data from a study in a rural area in India. The author discusses how the interval from return marriage to first birth is usually long among Indian women and explores the factors that contribute to the low incidence of childlessness in the country.

The article reports about higher technical education and socio-economic development. It discusses social science, development studies and engineering education. Surveys are conducted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to present a factual and quantitative collation of data on social science teaching in schools and other institutions of polytechnic education at university level. It deliberates on social science teaching in higher technical education in Great Britain and the Federal Republic of Germany. It also offers a comprehensive view of development in comparative education in social sciences, innovations in higher technical education in India, and the conditions of curricular innovation. Also, it gives a brief discussion on the technologist as the agent of a new diplomacy in teaching and research.