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As India consolidates an aggressive model of economic development,
indigenous tribal people known as adivasis continue to be
overrepresented among the country's poor. Adivasis make up more
than eight hundred communities in India, with a total population of
more than a hundred million people who speak more than three
hundred different languages. Although their historical presence is
acknowledged by the state and they are lauded as a part of India's
ethnic identity today, their poverty has been compounded by the
suppression of their cultural heritage and lifestyle. In Adivasi
Art and Activism, Alice Tilche draws on anthropological fieldwork
conducted in rural western India to chart changes in adivasi
aesthetics, home life, attire, food, and ideas of religiosity that
have emerged from negotiation with the homogenizing forces of
Hinduization, development, and globalization in the twenty-first
century. She documents curatorial projects located not only in
museums and art institutions, but in the realms of the home, the
body, and the landscape. Adivasi Art and Activism raises vital
questions about preservation and curation of indigenous material
and provides an astute critique of the aesthetics and politics of
Hindu nationalism.
In 2002 widespread communal violence tore apart towns and villages
in rural parts of Gujarat, India. In the aftermath, many Muslims
living in Hindu-majority villages sought safety in the small town
of Anand. Following such dramatic displacement, the town emerged as
a site of opportunity and hope. For its residents and transnational
visitors, Anand's Muslim area is not just a site of
marginalization; it has become an important focal point and
regional center from which they can participate in the wider
community of Gujarat and reimagine society in more inclusive terms.
This compelling ethnography shows how in Anand the experience of
residential segregation led not to estrangement or closure but to
distinctive forms of mobility and exchange that embed Muslim
residents in a variety of social networks. New Lives in Anand moves
beyond established notions of ghettoization to foreground the
places, practices, and narratives that are significant to the
people of Anand. New Lives in Anand is available in an open access
edition through the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, thanks to
the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Open
access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295749655
Commercial cinema has been among the most powerful vectors of
social and aesthetic modernization in South Asia. So argues
Iftikhar Dadi in his provocative examination of cinema produced
between 1956 and 1969-the long sixties-in Lahore, Pakistan,
following the 1947 Partition of South Asia. These films drew freely
from Bengali performance traditions, Hindu mythology, Parsi
theater, Sufi conceptions of the self, Urdu lyric poetry, and
Hollywood musicals, bringing these traditions into dialogue with
melodrama and neorealism. Examining this layered context offers
insights into a period of rapid modernization and into cultural
affiliation in the South Asian present, when frameworks of
multiplicity and plurality are in jeopardy. Lahore Cinema probes
the role of language, rhetoric, lyric, and form in the making of
cinematic meaning as well as the relevance of the Urdu cultural
universe to midcentury Bombay filmmaking. Challenging the
assumption of popular cinema as apolitical, Dadi explores how films
allowed their audiences to navigate an accelerating modernity and
tense politics by anchoring social change across the terrain of
deeper cultural imaginaries. By constituting publics beyond social
divides of regional, ethnic, and sectarian affiliations, commercial
cinema played an influential progressive role during the mid- and
later twentieth century in South Asia. Lahore Cinema is freely
available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open
Monograph Ecosystem) and the generous support of Cornell
University. DOI: 10.6069/9780295750804
Over the course of the twentieth century, Bombay's population grew
twentyfold as the city became increasingly industrialized and
cosmopolitan. Yet beneath a veneer of modernity, old prejudices
endured, including the treatment of the Dalits. Even as Indians
engaged with aspects of modern life, including the Marxist
discourse of class, caste distinctions played a pivotal role in
determining who was excluded from the city's economic
transformations. Labor historian Juned Shaikh documents the
symbiosis between industrial capitalism and the caste system,
mapping the transformation of the city as urban planners marked
Dalit neighborhoods as slums that needed to be demolished in order
to build a modern Bombay. Drawing from rare sources written by the
urban poor and Dalits in the Marathi language-including novels,
poems, and manifestos-Outcaste Bombay examines how language and
literature became a battleground for cultural politics. Through
careful scrutiny of one city's complex social fabric, this study
illuminates issues that remain vital for labor activists and urban
planners around the world.
In this first book-length study of Mumbai’s taxi industry and of
the livelihoods that surround it, Tarini Bedi draws from the lives
and voices of chillia taxi drivers who have sustained a hereditary
trade for more than a century. Bedi considers the Bombay taxi in
all its forms: a material object that is driven, an economic and
political connection, an expression of kinship, an embodiment of
urban time and technology, and more. She illustrates how the
accumulation of capital in this masculinized and mobile trade
depends on forms of fixed domestic labor and an ethics of care, and
how connections among these factors impact the production and
reshaping of working-class personhood and laboring subjects. From
beginning to end, the world of Mumbai automobility unfolds through
depiction of the sensory, embodied, and political domains of taxi
drivers’ work. While most understandings of automobility remain
tied to Western assumptions, patterns of driving,
(sub)urbanization, and engagements with the road, realities in the
Global South differ. Mumbai Taximen provides a correction to this
imbalance from Mumbai through a timely exploration of South Asian
social, material, political, labor, and technological histories and
practices of motoring and automobility.
Bhakti, a term ubiquitous in the religious life of South Asia, has
meanings that shift dramatically according to context and
sentiment. Sometimes translated as "personal devotion," bhakti
nonetheless implies and fosters public interaction. It is often
associated with the marginalized voices of women and lower castes,
yet it has also played a role in perpetuating injustice. Barriers
have been torn down in the name of bhakti, while others have been
built simultaneously. Bhakti and Power provides an accessible entry
into key debates around issues such as these, presenting voices and
vignettes from the sixth century to the present and from many parts
of India's cultural landscape. Written by a wide range of engaged
scholars, this volume showcases one of the most influential
concepts in Indian history-still a major force in the present day.
In 2002 widespread communal violence tore apart towns and villages
in rural parts of Gujarat, India. In the aftermath, many Muslims
living in Hindu-majority villages sought safety in the small town
of Anand. Following such dramatic displacement, the town emerged as
a site of opportunity and hope. For its residents and transnational
visitors, Anand’s Muslim area is not just a site of
marginalization; it has become an important focal point and
regional center from which they can participate in the wider
community of Gujarat and reimagine society in more inclusive terms.
This compelling ethnography shows how in Anand the experience of
residential segregation led not to estrangement or closure but to
distinctive forms of mobility and exchange that embed Muslim
residents in a variety of social networks. New Lives in Anand moves
beyond established notions of ghettoization to foreground the
places, practices, and narratives that are significant to the
people of Anand. New Lives in Anand is available in an open access
edition through the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, thanks to
the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Open
access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295749655
Stone figures hardened by ascetic discipline and heroic effort face
north in deep shadow. There they meet the gazes of the same gods
and goddesses but with gentler bodies enacting grace, warmth,
seduction, and marriage, drenched in sunlight, facing south. These
figures adorn the eighth-century Kailasanatha temple complex in
southeastern India, built by rulers who were both warriors and
ascetics, engaged in the work of this world and in spiritual
quests. They designed their temple as an exuberant visual feast to
sustain both modes of being. In Opening Kailasanatha, Padma Kaimal
deciphers the intentions of the monument’s makers, reaching back
across centuries to illuminate worldviews of the ancient Indic
south. She reveals how circling the complex in a clockwise
direction focuses the mind and spirit on worldly engagement; in a
counterclockwise direction, on renunciation and ascetic practice.
This pairing of highly charged, complementary pathways enabled
devotees to grasp these counterpoised opportunities in their own
listening, gazing, moving bodies. By focusing on the material form
of the complex—the architecture, inscriptions, and sculptures,
along with the spaces they carve out that guide light, shadow,
sound, and footsteps—Kaimal offers insights that complement what
surviving texts tell us about Shaiva Siddhanta ideas and practices,
providing a rare opportunity to walk in the distant past.
For centuries, people from Mustang, Nepal, have relied on
agriculture, pastoralism, and trade as a way of life. Seasonal
migrations to South Asian cities for trade as well as temporary
wage labor abroad have shaped their experiences for decades. Yet,
more recently, permanent migrations to New York City, where many
have settled, are reshaping lives and social worlds. Mustang has
experienced one of the highest rates of depopulation in
contemporary Nepal—a profoundly visible depopulation that
contrasts with the relative invisibility of Himalayan migrants in
New York. Drawing on more than two decades of fieldwork with people
in and from Mustang, this book combines narrative ethnography and
short fiction to engage with foundational questions in cultural
anthropology: How do different generations abide with and
understand each other? How are traditions defended and transformed
in the context of new mobilities? Anthropologist Sienna Craig draws
on khora, the Tibetan Buddhist notion of cyclic existence as well
as the daily act of circumambulating the sacred, to think about
cycles of movement and patterns of world-making, shedding light on
how kinship remains both firm and flexible in the face of
migration. From a high Himalayan kingdom to the streets of Brooklyn
and Queens, The Ends of Kinship explores dynamics of migration and
social change, asking how individuals, families, and communities
care for each other and carve out spaces of belonging. It also
speaks broadly to issues of immigration and diaspora; belonging and
identity; and the nexus of environmental, economic, and cultural
transformation.
Winner, 2018 Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian
Humanities Buddhist representations of the cosmos across nearly two
thousand years of history in Tibet, Nepal, and India show that
cosmology is a rich language for the expression of diverse
religious ideas, with cosmological thinking at the center of
Buddhist thought, art, and practice. In Creating the Universe, Eric
Huntington presents examples of visual art and architecture,
primary texts, ritual ideologies, and material
practices-accompanied by extensive explanatory diagrams-to reveal
the immense complexity of cosmological thinking in Himalayan
Buddhism. Employing comparisons across function, medium, culture,
and history, he exposes cosmology as a fundamental mode of
engagement with numerous aspects of religion, from preliminary
lessons to the highest rituals for enlightenment. This wide-ranging
work will interest scholars and students of many fields, including
Buddhist studies, religious studies, art history, and area studies.
Art History Publication Initiative. For more information, visit
http://arthistorypi.org/books/creating-the-universe
Although demographically a minority in Kerala, India, Syrian
Christians are not a subordinated community. They are caste-,
race-, and class-privileged, and have long benefitted, both
economically and socially, from their privileged position. Focusing
on Syrian Christian women, Sonja Thomas explores how this community
illuminates larger questions of multiple oppressions, privilege and
subordination, racialization, and religion and secularism in India.
In Privileged Minorities, Thomas examines a wide range of sources,
including oral histories, ethnographic interviews, and legislative
assembly debates, to interrogate the relationships between
religious rights and women's rights in Kerala. Using an
intersectional approach, and US women of color feminist theory, she
demonstrates the ways that race, caste, gender, religion, and
politics are inextricably intertwined, with power and privilege
working in complex and nuanced ways. By attending to the ways in
which inequalities within groups shape very different experiences
of religious and political movements in feminist and rights-based
activism, Thomas lays the groundwork for imagining new feminist
solidarities across religions, castes, races, and classes.
In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian
past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical
memory in world-historical context. He presents memory as the
result of both remembering and forgetting and of the preservation,
recovery, and decay of records. By describing how these processes
work through sociopolitical organizations, Guha delineates the
historiographic legacy acquired by the British in colonial India;
the creation of the centralized educational system and mass
production of textbooks that led to unification of historical
discourses under colonial auspices; and the divergence of these
discourses in the twentieth century under the impact of nationalism
and decolonization. Guha brings together sources from a range of
languages and regions to provide the first intellectual history of
the ways in which socially recognized historical memory has been
made across the subcontinent. This thoughtful study contributes to
debates beyond the field of history that complicate the
understanding of objectivity and documentation in a seemingly
post-truth world.
Tech companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft promote the
free flow of data worldwide, while relying on foreign temporary IT
workers to build, deliver, and support their products. However,
even as IT companies use technology and commerce to transcend
national barriers, their transnational employees face significant
migration and visa constraints. In this revealing ethnography, Amy
Bhatt shines a spotlight on Indian IT migrants and their struggles
to navigate career paths, citizenship, and belonging as they move
between South Asia and the United States. Through in-depth
interviews, Bhatt explores the complex factors that shape IT
transmigration and settlement, looking at Indian cultural norms,
kinship obligations, friendship networks, gendered and racialized
discrimination in the workplace, and inflexible and unstable visa
regimes that create worker vulnerability. In particular, Bhatt
highlights women's experiences as workers and dependent spouses who
move as part of temporary worker programs. Many of the women
interviewed were professional peers to their husbands in India but
found themselves "housewives" stateside, unable to secure
employment because of visa restrictions. Through her focus on the
unpaid and feminized placemaking and caregiving labor these women
provide, Bhatt shows how women's labor within the household is
vital to the functioning of the flexible and transnational system
of IT itself.
Mahatma Gandhi redefined nutrition as fundamental to building a
more just world. What he chose to eat was intimately tied to his
beliefs, and his key values of nonviolence, religious tolerance,
and rural sustainability developed in tandem with his dietary
experiments. His repudiation of sugar, chocolate, and salt
expressed his active resistance to economies based on slavery,
indentured labor, and imperialism. Gandhi’s Search for the
Perfect Diet sheds new light on important periods in Gandhi’s
life as they relate to his developing food ethic: his student years
in London, his politicization as a young lawyer in South Africa,
the 1930 Salt March challenging British colonialism, and his
fasting as a means of self-purification and social protest during
India’s struggle for independence. What became the pillars of
Gandhi’s diet—vegetarianism, limiting salt and sweets, avoiding
processed food, and fasting—anticipated many twenty-first-century
food debates and the need to build healthier and more equitable
global food systems.
The civil war between the Sri Lankan state and Tamil militants,
which ended in 2009, lasted more than three decades and led to mass
migration, mainly to India, Canada, England, and continental
Europe. In Marrying for a Future, Sidharthan Maunaguru argues that
the social institution of marriage has emerged as a critical means
of building alliances between dispersed segments of Tamil
communities, allowing scattered groups to reunite across national
borders. Maunaguru explores how these fragmented communities were
rekindled by connections fostered by key participants in and
elements of the marriage process, such as wedding photographers,
marriage brokers, legal documents, and transit places. Marrying for
a Future contributes to transnational and diaspora marriage studies
by looking at the temporary spaces through which migrants and
refugees travel in addition to their home and host countries. It
provides a new conceptual framework for studies on kinship and
marriage and addresses a community that has been separated across
borders as a result of war.
In the enchanted world of Braj, the primary pilgrimage center in
north India for worshippers of Krishna, each stone, river, and tree
is considered sacred. In Climate Change and the Art of Devotion,
Sugata Ray shows how this place-centered theology emerged in the
wake of the Little Ice Age (ca. 1550-1850), an epoch marked by
climatic catastrophes across the globe. Using the frame of
geoaesthetics, he compares early modern conceptions of the
environment and current assumptions about nature and culture. A
groundbreaking contribution to the emerging field of eco-art
history, the book examines architecture, paintings, photography,
and prints created in Braj alongside theological treatises and
devotional poetry to foreground seepages between the natural
ecosystem and cultural production. The paintings of deified rivers,
temples that emulate fragrant groves, and talismanic bleeding rocks
that Ray discusses will captivate readers interested in
environmental humanities and South Asian art history. Art History
Publication Initiative. For more information, visit
http://arthistorypi.org/books/climate-change-and-the-art-of-devotion
This multilayered historical ethnography of Bodh Gaya - the place
of Buddha's enlightenment in the north Indian state of Bihar -
explores the spatial politics surrounding the transformation of the
Mahabodhi Temple Complex into a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2002.
The rapid change from a small town based on an agricultural economy
to an international destination that attracts hundreds of thousands
of Buddhist pilgrims and visitors each year has given rise to a
series of conflicts that foreground the politics of space and
meaning among Bodh Gaya's diverse constituencies. David Geary
examines the modern revival of Buddhism in India, the colonial and
postcolonial dynamics surrounding archaeological heritage and
sacred space, and the role of tourism and urban development in
India.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bombay was
beset by crises such as famine and plague. Yet, rather than halting
the flow of capital, these crises served to secure it. In colonial
Bombay, capitalists and governors, Indian and British alike, used
moments of crisis to justify interventions that delimited the city
as a distinct object and progressively excluded laborers and
migrants from it. Town planners, financiers, and property
developers joined forces to secure the city as a space for commerce
and encoded shelter types as legitimate or illegitimate. By the
early twentieth century, the slum emerged as a particularly useful
category of stigmatization that would animate city-making projects
in subsequent decades. Sheetal Chhabria locates the origins of
Bombay's now infamous "slum problem" in the broader histories of
colonialism and capitalism. She not only challenges assumptions
about colonial urbanization and cities in the global south, but
also provides a new analytical approach to urban history. Making
the Modern Slum shows how the wellbeing of the city-rather than of
its people-became an increasingly urgent goal of government,
positioning agrarian distress, famished migrants, and the laboring
poor as threats to be contained or excluded.
In this first book-length study of Mumbai’s taxi industry and of
the livelihoods that surround it, Tarini Bedi draws from the lives
and voices of chillia taxi drivers who have sustained a hereditary
trade for more than a century. Bedi considers the Bombay taxi in
all its forms: a material object that is driven, an economic and
political connection, an expression of kinship, an embodiment of
urban time and technology, and more. She illustrates how the
accumulation of capital in this masculinized and mobile trade
depends on forms of fixed domestic labor and an ethics of care, and
how connections among these factors impact the production and
reshaping of working-class personhood and laboring subjects. From
beginning to end, the world of Mumbai automobility unfolds through
depiction of the sensory, embodied, and political domains of taxi
drivers’ work. While most understandings of automobility remain
tied to Western assumptions, patterns of driving,
(sub)urbanization, and engagements with the road, realities in the
Global South differ. Mumbai Taximen provides a correction to this
imbalance from Mumbai through a timely exploration of South Asian
social, material, political, labor, and technological histories and
practices of motoring and automobility.
As India consolidates an aggressive model of economic development,
indigenous tribal people known as adivasis continue to be
overrepresented among the country's poor. Adivasis make up more
than eight hundred communities in India, with a total population of
more than a hundred million people who speak more than three
hundred different languages. Although their historical presence is
acknowledged by the state and they are lauded as a part of India's
ethnic identity today, their poverty has been compounded by the
suppression of their cultural heritage and lifestyle. In Adivasi
Art and Activism, Alice Tilche draws on anthropological fieldwork
conducted in rural western India to chart changes in adivasi
aesthetics, home life, attire, food, and ideas of religiosity that
have emerged from negotiation with the homogenizing forces of
Hinduization, development, and globalization in the twenty-first
century. She documents curatorial projects located not only in
museums and art institutions, but in the realms of the home, the
body, and the landscape. Adivasi Art and Activism raises vital
questions about preservation and curation of indigenous material
and provides an astute critique of the aesthetics and politics of
Hindu nationalism.
Tech companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft promote the
free flow of data worldwide, while relying on foreign temporary IT
workers to build, deliver, and support their products. However,
even as IT companies use technology and commerce to transcend
national barriers, their transnational employees face significant
migration and visa constraints. In this revealing ethnography, Amy
Bhatt shines a spotlight on Indian IT migrants and their struggles
to navigate career paths, citizenship, and belonging as they move
between South Asia and the United States. Through in-depth
interviews, Bhatt explores the complex factors that shape IT
transmigration and settlement, looking at Indian cultural norms,
kinship obligations, friendship networks, gendered and racialized
discrimination in the workplace, and inflexible and unstable visa
regimes that create worker vulnerability. In particular, Bhatt
highlights women’s experiences as workers and dependent spouses
who move as part of temporary worker programs. Many of the women
interviewed were professional peers to their husbands in India but
found themselves “housewives” stateside, unable to secure
employment because of visa restrictions. Through her focus on the
unpaid and feminized placemaking and caregiving labor these women
provide, Bhatt shows how women’s labor within the household is
vital to the functioning of the flexible and transnational system
of IT itself.
Enclaves along the India-Bangladesh border have posed conceptual
and pragmatic challenges to both states since Partition in 1947.
These pieces of India inside of Bangladesh, and vice versa, are
spaces in which national security, belonging, and control are shown
in sharp relief. Through ethnographic and historical analysis,
Jason Cons argues that these spaces are key locations for
rethinking the production of territory in South Asia today.
Sensitive Space examines the ways that these areas mark a range of
anxieties over territory, land, and national survival and lead us
to consider why certain places emerge as contentious, and often
violent, spaces at the margins of nation and state. Offering
lessons for the study of enclaves, lines of control, restricted
areas, gray spaces, and other geographic anomalies, Sensitive Space
develops frameworks for understanding the persistent confusions of
land, community, and belonging in border zones. It further provides
ways to think past the categories of sovereignty and identity to
reimagine territory in South Asia and beyond.
Over the course of the twentieth century, Bombay's population grew
twentyfold as the city became increasingly industrialized and
cosmopolitan. Yet beneath a veneer of modernity, old prejudices
endured, including the treatment of the Dalits. Even as Indians
engaged with aspects of modern life, including the Marxist
discourse of class, caste distinctions played a pivotal role in
determining who was excluded from the city's economic
transformations. Labor historian Juned Shaikh documents the
symbiosis between industrial capitalism and the caste system,
mapping the transformation of the city as urban planners marked
Dalit neighborhoods as slums that needed to be demolished in order
to build a modern Bombay. Drawing from rare sources written by the
urban poor and Dalits in the Marathi language-including novels,
poems, and manifestos-Outcaste Bombay examines how language and
literature became a battleground for cultural politics. Through
careful scrutiny of one city's complex social fabric, this study
illuminates issues that remain vital for labor activists and urban
planners around the world.
Whether from the perspective of Islamic law's advocates,
secularism's partisans, or communities caught in their crossfire,
many people see the relationship between Islamic law and secularism
as antagonistic and increasingly discordant. In the United States
there are calls for "sharia bans" in the courts, in western Europe
legal limitations have been imposed on mosques and the wearing of
headscarves, and in the Arab Middle East conflicts between
secularist old guards and Islamist revolutionaries
persist-suggesting that previously unsteady coexistences are
transforming into outright hostilities. Jeffrey Redding's
exploration of India's non-state system of Muslim dispute
resolution-known as the dar-ul-qaza system and commonly referred to
as "Muslim courts" or "shariat courts"-challenges conventional
narratives about the inevitable opposition between Islamic law and
secular forms of governance, demonstrating that Indian secular law
and governance cannot work without the significant assistance of
non-state Islamic legal actors.
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