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Media Technology and Cultures of Memory studies narrative memories in India through oral, chirographic and digital cultures. It examines oral cultures of memory culled from diverse geographical and cultural landscapes of India and throws light on multiple aspects of remembering and registering the varied cultural tapestry of the country. The book also explores themes such as oral culture and memory markers; memory and its paratextual services; embodied memory practices in the cultural traditions; between myths and monuments; literary and lived experiences; print culture and memory markers; marginalized memories in hagiographies; displaying memories online; childhood trauma, memory and flashbacks; and the politics of remembering and forgetting.Rich in case studies from across India, this interdisciplinary book is a must-read for scholars and researchers of cultural studies, sociology, political science, English literature, South Asian studies, social anthropology, social history, and post-colonial studies.

This book provides analysis of a variety of biblical narratives and texts which are the vehicle for the expression, articulation and performance of diverse identities in the Indian context and is the first attempt to do so for a global audience of scholars and students.From pan-Indian social problems attributed to caste, class and gender inequality, to specific North Eastern tribal settings, Dalit struggles in rural Andhra Pradesh and the experience of Christian autorickshaw drivers in urban Chennai, the book explores the diverse geographical, cultural, social, economic and linguistic settings in which the Bible is encountered. The holistic and multidisciplinary approach to Biblical studies adopted broadens the field beyond textual exegesis. Encounters with the Bible are revealed in diverse chapters impacted by contexts of caste realities, the history of Indian Christianity, colonial and post-colonial frameworks and educational institutions. Full use is made of'vernacular'texts and traditions including oral and written cultural, folk tale, literary and auto/biographical narratives in Tribal, Dalit and British colonial settings. Diversity of method is championed through including sociological analysis of Indian social realities, qualitative fieldwork techniques and a kaleidoscope of visual and sensory environments with over 30 photographs. The book celebrates and promotes diversity in Indian biblical studies, creativity and sometimes conflicting perspectives. Encountering Diversity in Indian Biblical Studies will be of interest to students, scholars and researchers working on post-colonial biblical studies and diversity in Christianity, particularly in the Indian context.

This volume offers a number of images of contemporary India where glocalization is undoubtedly present. The twelve chapters included here provide different perspectives on the relationship between the corporeal and the spiritual, highlighting the union of both soul and body, which has been present from the very beginning of the Indian civilization.This volume offers clues to understand the differences and similarities that characterise the East-West encounter through artistic representations in the era of globalisation. It also enhances the importance of re-inscribing the fusion of the spiritual and the corporeal into the academic research agenda. In Western theory, the body has been arguably dismembered and separated from the spiritual. As such, this text opens up a range of possibilities to tackle and debunk the dualism of both the corporeal and the spiritual suggesting a rupture of the “logic” of binary thinking. The contributors specifically focus on Indian culture and analyse how we can empirically and theoretically reconcile mind and body in order to promote active and reciprocal exchanges among educators, students, researchers, social activists, and those professionally and spiritually engaged with Indian studies.

Decades of conflict and war have forced millions of men, women and children to flee from their homes and seek refuge in other parts of the country or in foreign lands - Afghanistan is one such country.This book is a study of the displaced Afghan migrant population in India, in particular the persecuted Sikhs and Hindus who are religious minorities in Afghanistan and make up a majority of Afghan migrants in India. It explores the relationship between acculturation and identity development. By focusing on the interactions between the Afghan immigrant population and the Indian society, the author analyses how the community negotiates identity and marginality in a country that does not recognize them as refugees. The author explains how the Afghan migrant population manages and negotiates various identities, bestowed upon them by the societies in their home and host countries in their day to day existence in India.An important study of acculturation and adaptation issues of migrant groups in the setting of a developing country, this book will be of interest to academics in the field of refugee and migration studies, ethnography of (ethnic) identity, and Middle East and South Asian Studies.

This volume challenges the assumption that Muslims in India constitute a homogeneous community. Focusing specifically on gender issues, the contributors instead locate the Muslim womens community within the social, economic, and political developments that have taken place in the subcontinent, pre- and post-Independence, in order to examine how the

This book brings together several important essays examining the interface between identity, culture, and literature within the issue of cultural identity in South Asian literature. The book explores how one imagines national identity and how this concept is revealed in the narratives of the nation and the production of various cultural discourses. The collection of essays examines questions related to the interpretation of the Indian past and present, the meanings of ancient and venerated cultural symbols in ancient times and modern, while discussing the ideological implications of the interpretation of identity and “Indianness” and how they reflect and influence the power-structures of contemporary societies in South Asia. Thus, the book studies the various aspects of the on-going process of constructing, imagining, re-imagining, and narrating “Indianness”, as revealed in the literatures and cultures of India.

One of the only ethnographic studies of Dalit women, this book gives a rich account of individual Dalit women's lives and documents a rise in patriarchy in the community. The author argues that as Dalits'economic and political position improves, ‘honour'becomes crucial to social status. One of the ways Dalits accrue honour is by altering patterns of women's work, education and marriage, and by adopting dominant-caste gender practices. But Dalits are not simply becoming like upper castes; they are simultaneously asserting a distinct, politicised Dalit identity, formed in direct opposition to the dominant castes. They are developing their own ‘politics of culture'. Key to both, the author argues, is the ‘respectability'of women. This has significant effects on gender equality in the Dalit community.

Through the creation of post-colonial citizenship, India adopted a hybridisation of specific secular and western conception of citizenship. In this democratic framework, Indian Muslims are observed on how they make use of the spaces and channels to accommodate their Islamic identity within a secular one. This book analyses how the socio-political context shapes citizens'perceptions of multiple variables, such as their sense of political efficacy, agency, conception of citizenship rights and belief in democracy. Based on extensive surveys and interviews and through presenting and investigating the various meanings of jihād, the author explores the usage of non-Eurocentric conceptual approaches to the study of postcolonial and Muslim societies, in particular the meaning it carries in the psyche of the Muslim community. She argues that through means of argumentative and spiritual jihād, Indian Muslims fight their battle towards a realisation of citizenship ideals despite the unfavourable conditions of intra and inter community conflicts.Presenting new examinations of Islamic identity and citizenship in contemporary India, this book will be a useful contribution to the study of South Asian Studies, Religion, Islam, and Race and Ethnicity.

Cultural Realities of Being offers a dialogue between academic activity and everyday lives by providing an interface between several perspectives on human conduct. Very often, academic pursuits are arcane and obscure for ordinary people, this book will attempt to disentangle these dialogues, lifting everyday discourse and providing a forum for advancing discussion and dialogue. Nandita Chaudhary, S. Anandalakshmy and Jaan Valsiner bring together contributors from the field of cultural psychology to consider how people living within social groups, regardless of how liberal, are guided by collective reality and interconnected with life circumstances. The book discusses experiences and events in the lives of people of Indian cultures covering topics including family, food, pilgrimages, social dynamics and truth, in order to expand the material on human phenomena under the broad frame of cultural psychology. The book builds upon rich cultural traditions present in India, and precisely because of this focus, the book has much larger implications and relevance to the field and aims to orient the academic reader from around the world to viewing India and Indian society as a valuable area for research. Divided into three sections, the book covers:• Social presentation in culture• Representing relations• Children and youth in cultureThis book includes commentaries from expert academics from outside of India, providing a bridge between academic reality and cultural discourse and throwing fresh light on the everyday events presented in the text. Cultural Realities of Being will be essential reading for those studying Cross Cultural Psychology as well as those interested in social representation and identity.

What happens over time to Indians who spend their working hours answering phone calls from Americans—and acting like Americans themselves? To find out, the authors of Answer the Call conducted long-term interviews with forty-five agents, trainers, managers, and CEOs at call centers in Bangalore and Mumbai from 2003 to 2012. For nine or ten hours every day, workers in call centers are not quite in India or America but rather in a state of “virtual migration.” Encouraged to steep themselves in American culture from afar, over time the agents come to internalize and indeed perform Americanness for Americans—and for each other.Call center agents “migrate” through time and through the virtual spaces generated by voice and information sharing. Drawing from their rich interviews, the authors show that the virtual migration agents undergo has no geographically distant point of arrival, yet their perception of moving is not merely abstract. Over the duration of the job, agents'sense of place and time changes: agents migrate but still remain, leaving them somewhere in between—between India and America, experience and imagination, class mobility and consumption, tradition and modernity, here and there, then and now, past and future. However tangible and elastic their virtual mobility might seem in these relatively lucrative jobs, it is also suspended within the confines of the very boundaries they migrate across. Having engaged with these vivid and often poignant interviews, readers will never again be indifferent to an Indian agent's greeting at the other end of a toll-free call: “Hello, my name is Roxanne. How may I help you?”

South Asia is one of the most volatile regions of the world, and India's complex democratic political system impinges on its relations with its South Asian neighbours. Focusing on this relationship, this book explores the extent to which domestic politics affect a country's foreign policy.The book argues that particular continuities and disjunctures in Indian foreign policy are linked to the way in which Indian elites articulated Indian identity in response to the needs of domestic politics. The manner in which these state elites conceive India's region and regional role depends on their need to stay in tune with domestic identity politics. Such exigencies have important implications for Indian foreign policy in South Asia.Analysing India's foreign policy through the lens of competing domestic visions at three different historical eras in India's independent history, the book provides a framework for studying India's developing nationhood on the basis of these idea(s) of ‘India'. This approach allows for a deeper and a more nuanced interpretation of the motives for India's foreign policy choices than the traditional realist or neo-liberal framework, and provides a useful contribution to South Asian Studies, Politics and International Studies.

In India, caste groups ensure their durability in an era of multiculturalism by officially representing caste as cultural difference or ethnicity rather than as unequal descent-based relations. Challenging dominant social theories of caste, this book addresses questions of how caste survives the system that gave rise to it and adapts to new demands of capitalism and democracy. Based on original fieldwork, the book shows how the terrain of culture captured by a new grammar of caste revitalizes castes as cultural communities so that the culture of a caste is produced, organized and naturalized in the process of transforming jati (fetishized blood and kinship) into samaj (fetishized culture). Castes are shown to not be homogenous cultural wholes but sites of hegemony where class, gender and hierarchy over-determine the meanings and materiality of caste. Arguing that there exists a new casteism in India akin to a new racism in the USA, built less on biology and descent and more on purported cultural differences and their rights to exist, the book presents an extended critique and a search for an alternative view of caste and anti-casteist politics. It is of interest to students and scholars of South Asian culture and society.

Since the 1990s, the Indigenous movement worldwide has become increasingly relevant to research in India, re-shaping the terms of engagement with Adivasi (Indigenous/tribal) peoples and their pasts. This book responds to the growing need for an inter-disciplinary re-assessment of Tribal studies in postcolonial India and defines a new agenda for Adivasi studies. It considers the existing conceptual and historical parameters of Tribal studies, as a means of addressing new approaches to histories of de-colonization and patterns of identity-formation that have become visible since national independence. Contributors address a number of important concerns, including the meaning of Indigenous studies in the context of globalised academic and political imaginaries, and the possibilities and pitfalls of constructions of indigeneity as both a foundational and a relational concept. A series of short editorial essays provide theoretical clarity to issues of representation, resistance, agency, recognition and marginality. The book is an essential read for students and scholars of Indian Sociology, Anthropology, History, Cultural Studies and Indigenous studies.

This book highlights the present perceptions of the East and the West as seen through the eyes of eminent scholars from India, and in doing so, theorises on identity politics. Identity Politics in India and Europe combines qualitative methods (20 interviews) with historical and philosophical analysis. The first part of the book discusses the history of perceptions between the Europe of Latin Christianity and the so-called Muslim world, starting from the 7th century onwards. The second part is devoted to a discussion on the emergence of modernity and how it changed the identity politics of earlier times. The third part explores the role that intellectual elites have to play. It comprises interviews of eminent scholars and thinkers in India such as Imtiaz Ahmad and Ashis Nandy. These make for an insightful read, especially as subtle ideological differences surface in their responses to a set of common questions. The interviews are set in the historical context of the relations between Europe and the Muslim world and analysed from a theoretical angle, drawing from theories of modernity, conceptions of justice and notions of identity politics. The book will be of great interest to the world of social science academia, especially those with specific interest in the history of transnational politics.

This book develops an interesting angle on a recognised issue of concern not just in the politics of South Asia, but much more broadly in the context of the contemporary world and developing global politics It explores the key contemporary issue of religious nationalism using a new approach: based on political psychologyIt will appeal to scholars and students of political sciences, IR, sociology, religious studies and social psychology as well as to those interested specifically in Indian politics

This volume offers a new understanding of caste in contemporary India. It argues that the traditional view of caste - as a single hierarchy, with Brahmans at the top and the untouchable castes at the bottom - is no longer valid. Based on fieldwork, the articles in this volume prove that ritual dominance does not determine the nature of caste interactions in any way. From politics to gender to economic interaction, the single, pure hierarchy is constantly being questioned and weakened. Castes that once had the status of shudras are now claiming, on occasions, a position superior to Brahmans and Kshatriyas; agrarian castes - such as Jats, Ahirs and Gujars - are at the political forefront, taking caste identities outside the village; the once passive untouchable castes are now aggressive and militant, and aware of their rights in a democratic society. This exciting collection of original articles demonstrates how caste identity today challenges the outdated notion of a single, all-encompassing hierarchy, within which each caste co-exists peacefully.

The continual, unpredictable, and often violent'traffic'between identities in colonial and postcolonial India is the focus of Parama Roy's stimulating and original book. Mimicry has been commonly recognized as an important colonial model of bourgeois/elite subject formation, and Roy examines its place in the exchanges between South Asian and British, Hindu and Muslim, female and male, and subaltern and elite actors. Roy draws on a variety of sources—religious texts, novels, travelogues, colonial archival documents, and films—making her book genuinely interdisciplinary. She explores the ways in which questions of originality and impersonation function, not just for'western'or'westernized'subjects, but across a range of identities. For example, Roy considers the Englishman's fascination with'going native,'an Irishwoman's assumption of Hindu feminine celibacy, Gandhi's impersonation of femininity, and a Muslim actress's emulation of a Hindu/Indian mother goddess. Familiar works by Richard Burton and Kipling are given fresh treatment, as are topics such as the'muscular Hinduism'of Swami Vivekananda.Indian Traffic demonstrates that questions of originality and impersonation are in the forefront of both the colonial and the nationalist discourses of South Asia and are central to the conceptual identity of South Asian postcolonial theory itself.The continual, unpredictable, and often violent'traffic'between identities in colonial and postcolonial India is the focus of Parama Roy's stimulating and original book. Mimicry has been commonly recognized as an important colonial model of bourgeois/el