Search

James Staples. 2020. Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian: The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India. Seattle: University of Washington Press. xvi + 229 pp. Figures, notes, glossary, references, index. $30 (paperback)

The authors offer andolan/protest imaginaries, meditations that move between the heady inspirations of current protests and the stultifying violence of state practices in South Asia. Each contributor speaks of sight lines of possibility and peril, even as they struggle to inhabit a divided and ravaged landscape. For Paromita Vohra and Anjali Arondekar, andolan gardens grow into supply chains that may or may not create food for thought and struggle. Ayesha Kidwai's dream of a multilingual university accompanies the protest dialogues of activists Diti and Vihaan. Suryakant Waghmore's journey of caste and voice provides the counterpoint to Mir Suhail's images of fury, joy, and death. Together, the authors move toward justice.

Civility is generally lost in translation in non-Western contexts, and tends to be limited to its liberal form in the social sciences. To address this impasse of West versus East, individua...

This paper explores the nature of urbanism that caste associations seek to construct in the metropolis of Mumbai. To this end it asks: what role do caste associations play in the cosmopolit...

The electoral success of the BJP in 2014 was hailed as the triumph of development over identity. The party seemingly reached beyond their traditional constituency and appealed to Dalit voters through an aspirational campaign. This tallies with arguments that electoral logic determines that the BJP will pursue a path of moderation. The past two years, however, have seen a significant increase in Dalit assertion and mobilisation in opposition to the BJP. This paper takes these two trends to raise to inter-related questions: firstly it questions the extent to which the BJP has moderated its attitudes towards Dalit citizens and secondly, it asks whether Dalit politics has indeed moved from identity to development. The paper draws on a range of secondary sources to argue that BJP moderation is delimited and that critiques of Dalit identity politics obscure both the identitarian strategies of other parties and the materiality of identity-based mobilisation.

Sukhadeo Thorat and Nidhi Sadhana Sabharwal (eds), Bridging the Social Gap: Perspectives on Dalit Empowerment, New Delhi, SAGE Publications, 2014, xxvii + 279 pp., ₹995 (hardback), ISBN: 9788132113119. Jayshree P. Mangubhai, Human Rights as Practice: Dalit Women Securing Livelihood Entitlements in South India, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2014, xiii + 295 pp., ₹850 (hardback), ISBN: 9780198095453.

In India, Dalit mobilization for land rights and the cultivation of gaairan (grazing lands) in the last decade has attracted the attention of international civil society actors who participate in such mobilization through local non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This article contextualizes the debate on the growth and role of NGOs by presenting the politics of formation and working of a funding-driven network of NGOs on Dalit rights and livelihoods in India. It cautions against exaggerating the role of international civil society actors in local democratization processes, and also argues that the feared depoliticizing of public interests as a result of INGO involvement is misplaced in the case of Dalit politics.

Caste has bounded Indian civilization and culture historically and continues to do so as it transitions Into neoliberal space and time. India’s growth story of the last two decades promises a sustainable revolution of sorts in the subcontinent’s material sphere. Rapid urbanization, growth of the middle classes, decreasing poverty, and lightning changes in consomption patterns point to a secure future full of opportunities and development. In real terms this means that by 2025 a continual rise in personal Incomes will spur a tenfold increase, enlarging the middle class to about 583 million people, or 4–1 percent of the population (Beinhocker, Farrell, and Zainulbhal, 2007). In absolute numbers, by 2025 India’s wealthiest citizens will total 24 million, more than the current population of Australia (ibid.).

Gandhi has tremendous influence on current development thinking. Most of those influenced fall under the counter-modernist or the postmodernist school. The influence of Gandhi's thoughts cuts across to the fields of policy, activism and development practice as well. Since the popular method of analysis of Gandhi and the Gandhian, has increased its saleability, especially in the West, it hardly helps us to understand the real nature of Gandhian leadership of an interest- based political movement in its competitive context. This paper besides reviewing Gandhi's thoughts on development and presenting the modernist critique of Gandhi, also poses the proximity of subalterns to modernity as a challenge to the Gandhian mode of development.