420636 results in Area Studies
1 - Introduction
- Farhat Hasan, University of Delhi
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- Voices in Verses
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This work is an exploratory study of the commemoration of women in cultural spaces during the early colonial period in South Asia. Based on a reading of the rather neglected compendia of women writers composing verses in Urdu and Persian in the varied and multiple pasts of Hindustan, it looks at memories of women's active participation in the literary spaces. Written in the nineteenth century, these compendia (tazkiras) written in Urdu were texts of memorialization, and reproduced memories of the freshness and depth that women poets brought to the literary culture. I read these texts as, following Pierre Nora, ‘sites of memory’ (lieu de memoire), and the life stories and poetic compositions found therein indeed serve to remind us of women's participation in the ‘literary public sphere’. These texts are not acts of recollection, but exercises in construction crucially motivated by significant sociopolitical considerations, one of which was to push for women's literacy within an indigenous frame of reference and to dispel the picture of the culture in Hindustan, found in British imperial writings and policy initiatives, as marked by inertia and stasis, particularly in matters relating to the lives of women.
This study then contests the commonplace assumption that the literary public sphere in the colonial period was markedly homosocial and gender exclusive, and argues instead that female scholars actively participated in shaping the norms of aesthetics and literary expression, and introduced fresh signifiers and linguistic practices to apprehend their emotions, experiences, and world views. Based on a reading of the largely ignored tazkiras of women poets, I suggest here that their compositions could be seen as a form of, in the language of Foucault, ‘erudite’ knowledge in that they enriched the literary space, even as they evoked considerable anxieties, and stood in a paradoxical relationship with the dominant episteme, both reinforcing and challenging its cultural assumptions and truth-claims. Women's poetry was neither antithetical nor excluded from the prevailing episteme and was in circulation in dispersed cultural spaces, such as the salons of the courtesans, the marketplace, household assemblies, and literary meetings. Indeed, in memorializing their voices from such dispersed locations, the authors of women's tazkiras were undertaking a genealogical exercise of recovering the ‘subjugated’ and suppressed voices in literary culture.
Bibliography
- Farhat Hasan, University of Delhi
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- Voices in Verses
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Dedication
- Bart Klem, University of Gothenburg
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- Performing Sovereign Aspirations
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A Note on Transliteration
- Farhat Hasan, University of Delhi
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- Voices in Verses
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6 - Tamil Nationalist Anti-politics in the Wake of Defeat
- Bart Klem, University of Gothenburg
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- Performing Sovereign Aspirations
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- 30 June 2024, pp 127-155
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The old guard of Tamil nationalist politicians moved back to centre stage after the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's (LTTE) defeat. The gentlemen lawyers and parliamentarians of the main Tamil party, Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kadchi (ITAK), had made way for armed youth militants in the 1970s, when Tamil nationalism became Tamil national liberation. Pleas for federal power-sharing then escalated into uncompromising separatism, and constitutional bargaining yielded to guerrilla violence. In 2009, the pendulum swung back. The now-ageing ITAK leaders moved to the front seat again. But what could they bargain for without leverage? How could they claim heirship of the national cause when the new political reality forced them to shed the aspiration of an independent Eelam? ITAK was thus confronted with one of the central conundrums of this book: the schizophrenic plight of separatist political parties, which are forced to pursue their aspirations through the very democratic landscape that they reject on principle. To understand ITAK's postwar positioning, we also need to reengage with the provincial council system discussed in Chapter 5. The Tamil nationalist movement saw the provincial councils as treason to the Tamil cause. But after the defeat of the LTTE, they were the only remaining forum for a semblance of self-government in the north and east of Sri Lanka. If ITAK refused to govern the Northern and Eastern Province, rival Tamil parties would do it in their place.
A performative conception of politics sheds light on the way ITAK handled the schizophrenic condition of simultaneously opposing and participating in the prevalent political framework. By lifting our preoccupation with formal institutions and associated moral yardsticks of democratic behaviour, this conceptualisation directs our focus to the repertoires with which political aspirations are enacted, within or beyond official mandates and procedures. More specifically, I will draw on the performative repertoire that Hansen (1999) has called ‘anti-politics’ in his work on Hindu nationalism. Anti-politics may be defined as a principled dissociation from the prevalent political arena. Evidently, the very attempt of extracting oneself from politics is itself a political act. Anti-politics should therefore not be understood as an apolitical phenomenon but rather as a performative attempt to construct a realm that is separate from (and typically elevated above) the established political arena.
Sacrifice and Violence
- Reflections from an Ethnography in Nepal
- Marie Lecomte-Tilouine
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- 01 December 2025
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Violence is at the heart of the sacrifice, despite its denial in the texts. For the participants and observers, it materialises in the exposure of everyone and everything to the 'fountains of blood'. The specificity of this public and holistic violence, orchestrated in Nepal by the highest dignitaries and aimed at the rejuvenation of the cosmic, political and social order, allows us to see sacrifice as the ultimate model of legitimate violence. At the same time, observation reveals its oxymoronic nature through the opposite effect its violence has on its participants. As such, sacrifice is not only the organiser of society, but also the revelator of its internal tensions and fault lines. The book explores the complex aspects of royal ceremonies, their contestation by different groups, and finally the contours of the new legitimacy that sacrifice found during the revolutionary period under its most extreme form of human sacrifice.
7 - Traditional Islamic Charities
- Christopher Candland, Wellesley College, Massachusetts
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- The Islamic Welfare State
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We are the real NGOs. We don't take. We give.
—Arshad AhmadEvery Muslim is obligated to be a philanthropist.
—Aijaz AhmedChapter 3 presented the major theological conceptualizations of the faithful's obligation to provide welfare in a Muslim society. These include such institutions and practices as awqaf (trusts), zakat (annual obligatory charity), and ushr (obligatory charity from irrigated land), khams (obligatory Shia donation to one's Imam), sadqah (donation to the poor or those working ‘in the way of God’), infaq (spending to please God), and qurbani (donated meat of sacrificed animals). We examine, over the next four chapters, the specific practices of Islamic social welfare in Pakistan.
Providing zakat is one of the five pillars of Islam and the one that many Muslims take most seriously; the invocation to pay zakat is made thirty-two times in the Quran, although it begins to appear only in the second year of Muslim life in Madinah. The Prophet Muhammad referred to zakat as the ‘treasure of Islam.’ Without payment of zakat, it has been said, prayers are not meaningful. The recommendation that one should spend in ways that please God (infaq fi sabilillah) is made more than 150 times in the Quran. Infaq receives more emphasis in the Quran than praying or fasting.
Pakistan is home to practices—including pilgrimages to and worship at dargah (shrines) and provision of langar (community kitchens)—that are common to Southern Asia. Pilgrimage to and worship at a dargah is common to Asian Islam, from Iran, where it is known as a mazar, to Indonesia, where it is known as a makam. Bangladesh and India are also home to madaris (Islamic seminaries) and Indonesia to pesantren (Islamic seminaries). And these practices are not unique to Islam. The langar is a central feature of any Sikh gurudwara. Welfare practices based at religious institutions are central to social life throughout Pakistan.
Khairat is in the weave of Pakistan. Like Pakistan and its population, the diversity of charitable activity itself is astonishing. Thousands of associations— of all varieties—are providing welfare services annually to tens of millions of people. Most of these welfare associations are private, operating without support from government, and independent, operating without political affiliation.
1 - Sovereign atonement
- Md Azmeary Ferdoush, University of Eastern Finland
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- Sovereign Atonement
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- 30 June 2024, pp 27-47
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The “problem” for the Bangladeshi state regarding the newly gained enclave residents and territories was twofold: First, there was the problem of legibility – that is, creating a condition that would enable the state to intervene to an extent so the former enclaves became easily “readable” to it by employing numerous “standardization” mechanisms (Scott, 1998). Second, there was the problem of “governmentality” (Foucault, 2007) – that is, an institutional ensemble that would permit the exercise of governmental power with compartmentalized governing apparatuses to manage the enclave residents and territories. Since the enclaves were not under the formal jurisdiction of the state of Bangladesh until they were exchanged, they were neither legible nor governable. However, as they were handed back to the host state, creating legible state spaces and governing the population gained paramount importance (Ferdoush, 2021a). Yet what makes this highly suggestive and equally interesting is how they were brought under the schemes of legibility and governmentality because of the enclaves’ unique history and status. A range of actors, including journalists, academics, state elites, and politicians, have always justified this uniqueness as exceptional. The exceptional rhetoric gained traction because it fit the zone of indistinction between the inside–outside, as Giorgio Agamben (1998) identifies, and because it allowed an ease of explanation for state territories that did not fit the postcolonial territorial norm – that is, to be located within the nation's geo-body (Winichakul, 1994). The exception therefore holds the key to our reading of the former enclaves, even after they were exchanged and made part of regular state spaces. It concurrently unpacks the mechanisms and the rationale behind selectively privileging one group of the population over others. The very nature of the exception thus provides an answer to a crucial question: why and how does the sovereign bring the same population it once excluded under its protection and onto which it projected violence?
The “exceptional turn” in political geography, with Agamben's retake on Carl Schmitt's idea of the sovereign being the one “who decides on the state of exception” (Agamben, 1998, p. 11), complicated by bio-power, bare lives, and in/exclusion within or from the law, has produced an impressive body of scholarship (Hopkins, 2019; Mountz, 2013).
4 - Reconstituting ‘Pure Tamil Space’ after Sovereign Erasure
- Bart Klem, University of Gothenburg
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- Performing Sovereign Aspirations
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- 30 June 2024, pp 77-99
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The May 2009 defeat of the LTTE was a watershed moment in modern Sri Lankan history. In the final year of intense fighting, the insurgency was gradually pushed back into an ever-smaller swath of the northern Vanni. With hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped between the battle lines, the humanitarian situation became more acute by the day. There was frantic speculation about an LTTE comeback, a final trick or a last-minute international intervention. And then the LTTE sovereign experiment disintegrated. Scores of battered survivors poured out of the last rebel stronghold in Mullivaikal, a sliver of northeastern coastline squashed between the lagoon, the sea and the advancing government forces (see Map 2.1). The remaining LTTE leaders were killed, including, in the final hours, the movement's illustrious commander Prabhakaran. The news of his death, supported by graphic pictures, conveyed the definitive defeat of the LTTE and resounded throughout the global expanse of the Sri Lankan community. This changed everything.
Earlier phases of the war had been defined by violent turning points that left scars of irreversible societal rupture: Black July in 1983, the Eviction in 1990 and the Exodus in 1995. ‘The End’ in 2009 (Seoighe 2017; S. Thiranagama 2013) surpassed these junctures. In terms of historical significance, it arguably even surpassed Sri Lanka's independence, which had after all been a relatively smooth, non-violent recalibration of the sovereign arrangement under the British crown. The 2009 military victory marked the singular sovereign assertion of the Sri Lankan government. It elevated President Rajapaksa to the level of a mythical and unquestionable father of the nation, at least initially. And it marked the perishing of LTTE sovereignty, voiding its moral and legal referents – acts committed in its name had now become baseless.
The pictures of Prabhakaran's corpse did not just display a fallen military commander. They showed the slain embodiment of the LTTE struggle, revered like a divine figure and the ultimate referent of the movement's sovereign power. His death had profound consequences for the Tamil nationalist movement at large. The collective trauma of the wholesale killing of civilians in the run-up to the LTTE defeat, widely considered genocide in Tamil circles, left deep imprints in Tamil political consciousness.
Frontmatter
- Mukesh Kumar, Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University
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- Between Muslim Pīr and Hindu Saint
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4 - Traces of Female Bhojpuri Migrants in Suriname
- Edited by Ashutosh Kumar, Banaras Hindu University, India, Crispin Bates, University of Edinburgh
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- <i>Girmitiyas</i> and the Global Indian Diaspora
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- 20 April 2024
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- 30 June 2024, pp 83-118
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This chapter explores the portrayal of Bhojpuri indentured female migrants and their identity formation in Surinamese photographs. By examining several archival photographs, I connect visual traces to various contemporaneous cultural developments described by Tejaswini Niranjana, Roshini Kempadoo, Marina Carter, Anouk de Kooning and Patricia Mohammed. Analysing the photographs, considering the social circumstances that must have influenced identity formation, it is possible to reconstruct the social roles that were imposed on women migrants. As noted by Bhikhu Parekh, I attempt to understand the journey of these women and how they were transformed by diasporic experiences. Since Bhojpuri females belonged to villages characterized by diverse Indian traditions, how did the latter remain or change within this process leading to multiple identities? These photographs can be mined not just for their archival and historical value but also for what they aesthetically communicate and the way they have been staged. The photographs have been archived in various collections, including the National Archives, the Tropenmuseum and the Rijksmuseum collection in the Netherlands.
There is a lack of academic scholarship on female indentured labourers in archival photographs. The images selected from Suriname feature individuals from Chinese, Indian and Indonesian indentured labour communities that were shipped there and lived alongside the descendants of enslaved Africans. Women have been documented in the actual landscape of the places they lived in Suriname, becoming agents of reinvention and cultural innovation. This chapter seeks to address and discuss this, in particular the ethnic mixture and diverse cultural influences that are visually unavoidable in these images. I argue that by viewing the cultural and ethnic diversity apparent in these photos, we can analyse visual traces that may indicate the emancipation of female Bhojpuri migrants from gender norms based in the rural settings in India.
THE ARRIVAL OF BHOJPURI MIGRANTS
After the abolition of slavery by the Dutch government in 1863, indentured labourers were required in Suriname to maintain the plantation economy. Most of the recruited labourers came from the region covering the western part of Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP). The present generation of diasporic Indians living in Suriname and the Netherlands have their migrant roots mostly in these Bhojpuri- and Awadhi-speaking regions.
When the first ships with Indian indentured migrants from Calcutta arrived in Suriname in 1873, only a small proportion of the inhabitants were Dutch.
8 - Emigration Against Caste and The Globalization of Castelessness
- Edited by Ashutosh Kumar, Banaras Hindu University, India, Crispin Bates, University of Edinburgh
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- <i>Girmitiyas</i> and the Global Indian Diaspora
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The understanding of caste or casteism and resistance against it beyond South Asia remains rudimentary. Popular subfields such as South Asian studies, postcolonial studies, Indian Ocean studies and Indian diaspora studies have been woefully deficient in engaging with caste as a foundational problem in the history of the Indian subcontinent. Likewise, such disciplines have not given much-needed focus to the caste-free (and anti-caste) culture, politics, economy and history of caste-oppressed communities in the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial periods. This has led to a lopsided understanding of, for instance, the re-establishment of caste through colonial apparatuses and how the privileged-caste groups, such as Brahmins, re-entrenched themselves to turn the British Raj into a British–Brahmin Raj. Significantly, however, we have now begun to learn about the multiple movements and discursive and non-discursive practices of the marginalized communities who challenged the domination of self-privileging-caste groups in colonial and postcolonial India. In this chapter, I examine how immigration, emigration and transmigration were part and parcel of the repertoire of resistance of caste-oppressed Indians, taking particular examples from the experiences of Indian migrants who settled in the Caribbean.
The institutionalized structures and violent practices of race, caste and gender have always been crucial push factors of migration in the modern period. Recent philosophical and interdisciplinary studies have engaged with how aspects of race, gender and nationality intersect with migration. However, thus far, theories of migration and philosophies of immigration have inadequately engaged with the emigration of caste-oppressed communities during European colonialism in South Asia or with the postcolonial transmigration of such communities between the Global South and the Global North. The hitherto unexamined interrelationship between colonial policies and the emigration of Indians against caste, on the one hand, and the reconstruction of a caste-free life overseas by oppressed Indians, on the other, provide critical philosophical, cultural, political, economic and historical dimensions to migration.
Colonial racial capitalism depended upon comprador privilegedcaste groups for its success (and stability). A large majority of Indians were, as a result, culturally othered, spatially segregated and economically underprivileged as lower castes and untouchables through the colonial state's legitimization of precolonial privileged-caste identities and practices. The Brahmins – who constituted not even 5 per cent of India's population, then and now – reaped maximum benefits through the propagation of their castepower and by utilizing British colonial apparatuses.
1 - Islam and the Social Welfare Ideal
- Christopher Candland, Wellesley College, Massachusetts
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- The Islamic Welfare State
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To you has come an Apostle from among you. Any sorrow that befalls you weighs upon him; He is eager for your happiness, full of concern for the faithful, compassionate and kind.
—Quran 9:128Religion has been said to consist in that of which we are assured; but it is partly that which we hope or even that which we dream, and perhaps the influence of the hope and the dream is greater than that of the certainty.
—William Hale WhiteIn the early twenty-first century, welfare services in much of Africa, the Americas, and Asia resemble that of North America and Western Europe in the early nineteenth century, a century before the emergence of the modern welfare state. Communities of faith provide the bulk of welfare services in much of the world. Religious associations organize elementary schools, health clinics, and relief camps for their own communities and others. Many people in low-income countries must provide essential welfare services for themselves. This includes education, healthcare, and emergency assistance. Government commitments to public services in many countries are too low to meet the most basic needs, medical and educational, of millions of people. In many places, religious charities are the only providers of formal education, professional healthcare, emergency assistance, and disaster relief. Religious charities work to improve the well-being of millions of people daily and keep millions of people alive annually. Worldwide, the religious charitable sector provides basic education and healthcare to hundreds of millions of people.
In many countries, some government officials and military officers have created a welfare state for themselves but not for ordinary citizens. As a result, national cohesion in these countries must rely more on nationalism and patriotism than on the demonstrated commitment of government to provide welfare services and the reciprocal commitment of the citizenry to consent to taxation and obedience to the rule of law. In Pakistan, the private religious welfare sector provides education and health services to millions of people every year. Government hospitals and government schools are the least preferred option. The services of the private religious sector often exceed in quality the services of the government. Further, the Islamic social welfare sector probably serves more people than does the government.
List of Abbreviations
- Christopher Candland, Wellesley College, Massachusetts
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- The Islamic Welfare State
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3 - Performing an Insurgent Sovereign Experiment
- Bart Klem, University of Gothenburg
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- Performing Sovereign Aspirations
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- 30 June 2024, pp 48-76
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This chapter discusses the rise of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's (LTTE) de facto state after the retreat of the Indian military in 1990, when the movement firmly asserted itself as the sole voice of Tamil nationalism, and its climax during the internationalised peace process of the 2000s. The subsequent LTTE defeat and its aftermath are discussed in Chapter 4. Like other insurgent movements and unrecognised forms of government (Arjona, Kasfir and Mampilly 2015; Caspersen 2012; Corcuff 2012; Kyris 2022; Mampilly and Stewart 2021; Staniland 2014; Alice Wilson 2016), the LTTE operated in the conviction that acting like a state may lead to being seen as a state, which may lead to implied forms of acceptance and a better prospect of becoming a state. The movement set out to normalise and stabilise control over people and territory with an array of governing institutions, thus probing its trajectory towards more established institutions and implied forms of recognition. Other authors have described the probationary character of such an unfinished aspirational trajectory as a ‘dress rehearsal’ (McConnell [2016] in relation to Tibet) or an ‘aporetic state’ (Bryant and Hatay [2020] in relation to north Cyprus). I will describe the evolution of the LTTE's institutional framework as a sovereign experiment, an exploratory pursuit that comprises sovereign mimicry and sovereign encroachment.
Sovereign mimicry is a form of citational practice (Weber 1998) whereby insurgencies replicate prior institutions, rules, buildings, uniforms, emblems and flags but make small adjustments. Like any other form of mimicry, this yields outcomes that seem like duplicates of the state but are in fact slightly different, and herein lies their unsettling potential (Bhabha 1994; see also Klem and Maunaguru 2017, 2018). Sovereign encroachment entails a practice of tacit restraint towards the purportedly hostile institutions of the Sri Lankan state and deliberate attempts at percolating and co-opting these institutions – a form of bricolage in support of insurgent assertions of rule. Crucially, the performative efforts of insurgent movements like the LTTE are undergirded by the capacity for violence, of both a disciplinary and a spectacular kind.
3 - Representing an Inclusive Literary Culture: Women Poets in the Bazaars and Kothas
- Farhat Hasan, University of Delhi
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- Voices in Verses
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Studying the women poets in BN and TN, the reader is quickly confronted with two important components in the narrative structure. The first is the biographical prelude that precedes their literary compositions; in both the tazkiras, there is a clipping from their life stories that sets the context for delving into their poems. This is a standard writing technique in poetic tazkiras, but it is not without some significance here; one of its objectives is to guide the reader into the poet's work. It is as if a woman poet's life story or clippings therefrom provide the framework for the appreciation of her work. There is a thick enmeshment of the art with the person, and the life (and the body) of a poet with her poetic compositions. The second important element of the narrative structure is an overwhelming, but still permeable, distinction between ‘the secluded women’ (pardah nashīn) and ‘the public women’ (bāzāri ‘aurat); interestingly, the latter are further divided by the fluid and often overlapping categories of the courtesan (tawāi’f), the prostitute (randī), the slave girl (kanīz), the skilled dancer-cum-harlot (khāngī), the lower caste prostitute (kanchanī), and professional entertainers (domnīs).
‘Women of the Bazaar’: Internal Hierarchies and the Representation of Difference
There were many more distinctions that divided the bāzārī women, but the shifting boundaries among them always made it difficult to define any of these categories with any sense of precision. In an interesting interlude, Nadir informs us that the kanchanīs were called kanjars in Punjab, and in some places in Hindustan, they were also called the ‘children of Lord Ram’ or rām-janiyān. At several other places, he says, they were called pātar, gāyinān, and abchar; while they all came from lower caste groups, the distinctions in nomenclature referred not only to the regional specificities but also their sub-caste affiliations. In his ethno-historical aside on ‘public women’, he points out that owing to the lower social status of the kanchanīs, the khāngīs refrained from associating with them, even as they were both engaged in prostitution. He further informs us that the khāngī community was a close-knit group, with strict rules of inclusion.
Afterword
- Christopher Candland, Wellesley College, Massachusetts
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- The Islamic Welfare State
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It was a source of pride to Pakistanis but not a surprise to many to read that a Pakistani-American walked into an embassy and anonymously donated US$30 million for victims of the February 2023 earthquake in Turkey. Since I began the study of Muslim charity in Pakistan, more than a decade ago, Pakistanis have continued to merit their well-earned reputation for philanthropy in Pakistan and globally. But one emergent phenomenon requires mention.
Provincial and national governments of Pakistan have greatly expanded social welfare programs since I conducted field research, between 2010 and 2020. Through emergency cash transfers, loans and scholarships, visits from health workers, coverage for in-patient care, vocational training, and other programs, governments of Pakistan have implemented programs for students, job seekers, and entrepreneurs, and have greatly increased access to emergency and basic medical attention. Government provision of basic social welfare—in education, employment, and health—at provincial and national levels have created new infrastructure government-funded, everyday human security in Pakistan. The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and nationally greatly strengthened government social welfare programs. The Sehat Sahulat Program covers families with in-patient medical care. The Ehsaas Program provides cash transfers to millions of vulnerable people, directed toward the disabled, low-income or widowed women, orphaned children, students from low-income families, and other groups. It may be hoped that the establishment of government-funded social welfare programs before and the response of the government to and since the humanitarian and economic crises caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 will have made Pakistan's current political and economic crisis somewhat less punishing to the poor. In June 2023, as this book goes to press, a conflict between the military of Pakistan, and its preoccupation with ‘national security,’ and the people of Pakistan, and their need for everyday human security, as has been witnessed before times of horrendous man-made humanitarian disasters in Pakistan, is threatening.
List of Figures and Tables
- Edited by Ashutosh Kumar, Banaras Hindu University, India, Crispin Bates, University of Edinburgh
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- <i>Girmitiyas</i> and the Global Indian Diaspora
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5 - The Bureaucratic Evolution of Devolution
- Bart Klem, University of Gothenburg
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- Performing Sovereign Aspirations
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- 30 June 2024, pp 100-126
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With the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the experiment of establishing a de facto Tamil state had been violently erased. However, this was not the only institutional form created in pursuit of Tamil self-government. It had been dominant in the 1990s and 2000s, but there was a parallel institutional experiment, one that was premised on power-sharing within the framework of the Sri Lankan state: the North-Eastern Provincial Council (NEPC). The NEPC was created through the 1980s peace accord enforced by India, but it is part of a longer sequence of contested experiments with ethnic power-sharing in Sri Lanka, which dates to late colonial times and which continues to evolve. The central principle of these efforts is the devolution of government power from Colombo to sub-national levels. Ironically, the NEPC comprises an arrangement that none of the protagonists wanted, but which has nonetheless survived.
While the first part of this chapter takes stock of the NEPC's turbulent history, I will mainly focus on the postwar dynamics, when the council outlived the LTTE and emerged as the only remaining institutional legacy for some semblance of a Tamil government. My analysis zooms in on the day-to-day work of provincial bureaucrats. In a book about the grand historical themes of Tamil nationalism and Sri Lanka's civil war, it may seem unnecessary to become engrossed in bureaucratic processes, technical memos and departmental hierarchies. However, as I will elaborate in this chapter, the calm orderliness of the civil service and the turbulent conflict dynamics that engulfed provincial councils are not divorced realities. Civil servants enact the state, and the enactment of the state sits at the very heart of Sri Lanka's ethno-political conflict. The everyday work of neatly dressed bureaucrats with their paperwork, procedures and protocol, their tidy offices and stiff hierarchies (Photograph 5.1) is part of the same historical trajectory as the civil war and its aftermath.
There is valuable scholarship about what Sri Lanka's provincial councils could or should be doing, based on a diagnosis of the constitutional arrangements and governance structure (Coomaraswamy 2003; Rupesinghe 2006; Welikala 2012a).
Appendices
- Mukesh Kumar, Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University
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- Between Muslim Pīr and Hindu Saint
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- 30 June 2024, pp 235-326
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