More than 80 per cent of the world's refugee population comprises of women and their dependent children. An overwhelming majority of these women come from the developing world. South Asia is the fourth largest refugee producing region in the world, a majority of whom are women. ‘Refugee women and children form 76 per cent of the total refugee population in Pakistan, 79 per cent in India, 73 per cent in Bangladesh and 87 per cent in Nepal’. The sheer number of women among the refugee population portrays that it is a gender issue. On the basis of examples taken from different refugee experiences in South Asia, this chapter argues that both displacement and asylum are gendered experiences. At least in the context of South Asia it results from and is related to the marginalization of women by the South Asian states. These states at best patronize women and at worse infantilize, disenfranchise and de-politicize them. It is in the person of a refugee that women's marginality reaches its climactic height. By refusing to create a South Asian refugee regime, states in South Asia continue their castigation of non-conforming women to the status of political non-subjects.

STATE FORMATION AND THE QUESTION OF ABDUCTED WOMEN

The Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 witnessed probably the largest refugee movement in modern history. About 8 million Hindus and Sikhs left Pakistan to resettle in India while about 6–7 million Muslims went to Pakistan.

Abstract

Among the most environmentally sensitive sectors are pulp-and-paper and petrochemicals. In a historical perspective, FDI played an important role in the establishment of the petrochemicals industry in Brazil in the 1970's, when it was driven by strategic state policies to develop the domestic intermediate goods industry. In the pulp-and-paper sector, FDI became prominent just after the year 2000, and it has been exclusively driven by market forces. This chapter presents a comparative analysis of the environmental issues related to FDI in these two sectors in Brazil and extensively focuses on the importance of the international context in fostering domestic environmental commitments. One conclusion is that, in general, domestic firms in these sectors are just as environmentally friendly as foreign firms. What would explain such convergence? First, the stringency of the domestic environmental regulations has pushed for higher environmental standards in both sectors; second, and specifically in the case of the pulp-and-paper sector, international market environmental requirements also contributed to this trend. Last, but not least, the technological competencies accumulated by the domestic firms in both sectors, which are closely related to the strategic state industrial policies applied to them, strengthened their capability to enter into an environmental-technological path. One policy lesson drawn from these case studies is that attracting FDI is not a guarantee of a higher level of sectoral environmental control, while an integrated policy approach to environmental, technological and industry capacity to enhance national environmental control at the industry level is highly recommended.

Desires to be connected with everyone else, to feel the barriers between self and others disappear and to enjoy a complete interconnection of experience, are powerful collective forces in this culture. One of the paradoxes and impossibilities of this wished for state of harmonic engagement is that the individual absorbs the wish from the collective; the individual only becomes who they are, and able to articulate the wish by virtue of their place in a wider symbolic matrix. Many varieties of psychoanalysis participate in that paradox by locating the wish to return in the individual, rather than in the collective, and finding narcissistic impulses to ‘return’ in the child within. Like notions of heritage in late modernity, however, this ‘return’ is constructed for us, and it constructs a place for us that never was.

One way of ‘returning’, appropriately enough, is through ‘Ecstasy’, a drug in tablet form best taken while dancing. Go to a club, perhaps ‘Paradise’, and smuggle a dose past the bouncers in your sock. Perhaps you would buy one inside. In my case, an angel bought me one for my birthday. Dope slows you down, unlike Speed, and although it helps you dance for a long time, you are still pretty much in control. One thing I had noticed about the club called ‘Home’, however, had been how friendly all the hot and strobe-lit bodies had been.

The Hindustan–Pakistan plan of 3 June 1947 and the subsequent partition, which resulted in the movement of over 15 million people across the borders of Bengal and Punjab, generated a national memory of rape, abduction and unprecedented brutalization of women. Yet, partition is often interpreted as being beyond gender politics. A corrective entails a new interpretative study of this fracture with a focus on women, which will move beyond women's experiences to metaphoric uses of gender in state politics in a time of crisis.

Our questions then are: Was there a politics of gender in the politics of partition? Has that thrown up an alternative meaning of women's identity? Did this emergent feminine identity result in objectification and exclusion of women? These questions assume greater importance if we consider that women's experiences of migration and destitution during partition and the state's response to it is a pointer to the relationship between the women's position as marginal participants in a highly insecure environment and the politics of gender subordination as perpetrated by the state. […]

ABDUCTION AND SOME ISSUES

A large number of abducted women have been missing during the trans-border movement. On the basis of individual complaints received it seems that the number was well over 50,000. Some incidents relating to these abducted women/persons exemplify the politics of gender during partition.

BACKGROUND

The interpretation and application of the Exclusion Clauses under the 1951 Convention on the Protection of Refugees has been evolving, factoring in historical and political considerations, not all of which proved to be conducive to securing a comprehensive legal framework designed for refugee protection. In the 1990s, Western Europe faced an unprecedented rise in applications for refugee status, prompting the European Union (EU) member states to tighten borders to keep out ‘illegal migrants’, to shorten asylum procedures, to limit the right of appeal and to pass on responsibility to other nations – ‘safe third countries’ – through which asylum seekers travelled en route to Western Europe. […] The application of the Exclusion Clauses under Article 1F of the Convention is a case in point. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has consistently argued in favour of a restrictive interpretation of the Exclusion Clauses, given the legal nature of the provisions as an exception from Article 1A and the potentially serious consequences of exclusion from Convention protection. But state practice is far from homogeneous and a range of problems regarding the interpretation and application of the Exclusion Clauses persist. […]

At the same time, demographic trends suggest that a comprehensive overhaul of immigration laws and policies is required for Western European countries to avoid a slump in population and a subsequent economic backlash. In several countries, legislation has been adopted or brought underway with a view to pave the way for eligible foreign nationals to be granted citizenship.

Among the many questions this thought provoking quotation raises are: who are the people whose stories we tell, what aspects of their stories do we choose to highlight, when and where do we look for stories, how do we tell the stories we find, and why do we tell some stories but not others? More specifically, now, as beachcombers on the many shores devastated by the recent tsunamis, whose experience, knowledge and wisdom do we draw upon to tell the many tales waiting to be told? Which are the stories that have remained untold despite the carpet coverage given to the disaster and its immediate aftermath?

Early critiques of media coverage in the wake of the tsunami tragedy of 26 December and beyond focused primarily on the widespread use of extremely graphic images of the dead and injured, especially on television, in contrast to the discretion exercized by the international media during the 9/11 disaster in the US, suggesting double standards with regard to the dignity and privacy of human beings in the so-called First and Third Worlds.

INTRODUCTION

Forced displacement is a topical issue in all developing countries. It is often seen as an inevitable consequence of development. Thus, forced displacement and social problems associated with it are often represented almost like a ‘collateral damage’ of modernization, which, in turn, is seen as an irrevocable solution for ‘ills’ of the so-called Third World. It is only very seldom if ever that we discuss about forced displacement in the context of so-called highly developed political communities, such as the European Union (EU). This is very unfortunate since forced displacement is connected to the ways European societies are governed. […]

Perhaps, one reason why forced displacement is not seen as such a pressing problem in the EU countries is that once forced displacement takes place due to environmental disasters or some infrastructure development projects, it is thought to be governed in an organized way following the procedures of good governance. While this arguably is a case, what remains unrecognized is that forced displacement of people is conducted also on grounds other than environmental disasters and development. […]

In the European context it is commonplace to locate identity related forced displacement into Europe's ‘peripheries’, such as the Balkan region. But the EU itself is in fact a significant generator of forced displacement. This is not only because the EU countries have played a central role in restructuring world economy which has put people on the move, but it is also a case in a much more immediate sense. Every year about 350,000 people are deported from the EU.

The major debates in the history of printing in Bengal until recently have revolved around the early typefaces and the contribution of Bengalis in making these. The actual impact of printing on Bengali life and culture, by contrast, was assumed to be fairly straightforward. The impact of printing in this straightforward narrative was assumed to have been formative of the wide-ranging cultural phenomena commonly dubbed as the ‘Bengal Renaissance’—a cultural ferment usually framed as one that sought to replace the traditional Bengali cultural milieu based on orality by a textually grounded and rationalized set of cultural practices. Anindita Ghosh's fascinating recent study, however, has challenged this linear account of the relationship between print and cultural transformation. Ghosh argues that the impact of print was much more pluralised and multivalent than has hitherto been acknowledged. Its relationship with precolonial worlds of oral culture was not necessarily one of opposition, and the high literary texts of the Bengal Renaissance were not necessarily the only new cultural trend which took advantage of the new printing technology. Ghosh's work has provided a long-awaited critical framework within which to approach the vibrant plurality of Bengali printing that had already been noticed by a previous generation of historians, such as Tapti Roy and Ramakanta Chakrabarty, and some amateur enthusiasts such as Nikhil Sarkar (better known as ‘Sripantha’). The reformist high literature was only a small component of the entire print output.

These little essays on what it is to be a human subject in a culture permeated by psychoanalytic sign systems were first published between 1994 and 2008. The first of these predate the publication of my academic studies of the social construction of contemporary psychoanalysis, and most were written before and during my training as a psychoanalyst. These are occasional pieces, and so they address quite diverse cultural phenomena in order to make sense of how they hook their audiences, us.

Many of the essays were published in the organs of psychological, psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic bodies. This is because an argument needs to be made against those who too easily assume that only their particular concepts capture and describe fantasy and reality. I have tried, often in vain, to disturb the strongly held belief of those in thrall to psychoanalysis that it is universally true. What I describe in the essays is how psychoanalysis functions as something that is only locally true. The argument applies to each of different varieties of psychoanalysis I find at work in the phenomena I explore, and it is important to recognise the different functions that different ideas in psychoanalysis serve, as their proponents battle against each other and pretend that they alone have the keys to unlock our secrets.

The more refugees suffer, the more women suffer. Women and their dependent children constitute over 80 per cent of the world's refugee population. This sheer quantity makes the refugee issue largely and qualitatively a gender issue. In this section, a host of writers and activists pen the pains and agony of hapless women whose sufferings as ‘refugees’ reflect the general condition of their servitude to existing social conditions of oppression even during the so-called merrier times. But, this victimhood is only one part of the tale; the other part is the story of the rising of women as agents of resistance and change, and thereby of politics. Not only in the present times of so-called ‘empowerment’ of women, but in all the ages, they stood up to do so, employing the available means of their times. So do the refugee women of today's world: they suffer and struggle.

However, in the post-partition (1947) Indian subcontinent scenario, women suffered doubly when an attempt was made by the consensual decision of the prime ministers of India and Pakistan, to repatriate the ‘persons’ (mainly raped women), abducted during the outbreak of the worst ever communal riot on the eve of partition, on both sides. A law was duly passed by Indian Parliament on this issue. Paula Banerjee unfolds the politics of such an impracticable and insensitive approach towards women (because they constituted the highest number among these ‘persons’ and, secondly, although they were citizens, age wise, in the eyes of the law, but had no voice over the one-sided decision) by the androcentric newborn states.

Most stories about psychoanalysis are about others, how we might interpret what they have made of it. Not in this case. One of the intriguing elements of Lacanian psychoanalysis is the idea that an analysand may give account of the progress and end of their analysis through the institution of ‘the pass’. In this way, something secret is told and such testimony might, Lacan once hoped, serve to validate and provide more knowledge about the psychoanalytic process. The most important secret, though, is precisely that psychoanalysis is always already public, a public event between two people perhaps, or a secret that is shared between many who may not want to say that they recognise the nature of this secret. Or they may secretly hold to another view of the public account they profess to be the correct one.

I realised that I had reached an end to my analysis, and could account for it, one morning when I was sitting on the toilet. I was expelling something. I had eaten Cheerios for breakfast (and a stupid Lacanian joke about the importance of serial repetition has it that ‘the cereal is serious’). Time to move on. What I had ‘discovered’ is that psychoanalysis does not have to be true for it to work, and the way psychoanalysis has worked for me is precisely to rediscover that psychoanalysis does not have to be true for it to work.

The connection between mental illness and female articulation, assertiveness and creativity is one that society has nurtured. The idea that a woman who speaks her mind, acts in her own interests and–most significantly–openly expresses her sexuality must be insane goes back millennia, linked to the concept of “female hysteria” recorded by Plato and found even earlier in Egyptian papyri. Closer to home is the modern woman whose refusal or inability to conform to stifling social norms has resulted in her incarceration and abuse at the hands of family, church and the mental health industry who gain from the silence of women.

In Dialogues with Madwomen (1994), filmmakers Allie Light and her husband Irving Saraf have coaxed seven “madwomen” – including Light herself–into telling their stories. Using a mixture of home movies, archival footage of mental wards, reenactments and (mostly) interviews with their subjects, Light and Saraf have created a complex, moving portrait of women in whom depression, schizophrenia and multiple personalities coexist with powerful, sometimes inspired levels of creativity.

These women are often dazzling in their verbal facility, talking with honesty, humor and passion about the most intimate details of their lives. The first interviewee is director Light, who recalls the loss of interest in her domestic life that made her check herself into a hospital for treatment. She tells of her doctor's unusual attempts at behavior modification: “One weekend he told me I could go home if I promised to bake a turkey.

On a Saturday night in Leeds, I learnt something about pinball and psychoanalysis. By psychoanalysis, I don't mean dreaming and joking and slipping as revealing what is unconscious or the way that what happens in families affects how boys and girls develop, but rather some of the basic descriptions of thinking that were elaborated by Freud even before he used the term ‘psychoanalysis’ and that continued to underlie his accounts of how and why repression and free association work. There is plenty of pop-psychoanalysis around us now, but you will still not find much there, in popular culture, about quantities of excitation in the neurological apparatus. Descriptions of narcissism and sibling rivalry don't require us to think about neurology, but that is where Freud started speculating in his ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ (the title provide by the editors upon the manuscript's first publication in 1950), and if a lot of psychoanalysis was already there in that project, we need to understand how those representations of mind endured and how they are still here, still with us now.

Unlike the other more fantastic contents of psychoanalytic discourse that fascinate so many people in the media, the formal structure of the mind that Freud scribbled during a train journey in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess – in a manuscript that was not published until after his death – seems like dull stuff.

This book presents a selection of poetry from 1872–1900, with Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee year of 1887 serving as a ‘mid-point’. Most of the poems have been published before or in 1900, with two exceptions: Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose main body of work was published in 1918, and A. E. Housman's verse written after the trial of Oscar Wilde: composed in 1895; yet not published until 1937. A feature of these years is the quality and quantity of verse produced by less well-known writers alongside the established ‘major authors’ Tennyson, Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘early’ Hardy and ‘early’ Yeats, and the traditional poets of the fin-de-siècle. Where possible, the poetry is contextualised in terms of the significant intellectual and historical forces informing the later phases of Victoria's Empire. In a poem discussed in the introduction, for example, Constance Naden speaks of Darwin as a ‘Seer, savant, merchant, poet’.

As is common with the agonies of selection in an undertaking such as this, it simply has not been possible to include every one and every thing. Though there are many poets here, the main criteria has been ‘quality rather than quantity’, as well as a conviction that, however modish the expectation, one can err by ‘overinclusion’. A favourite Venetian saying of Robert Browning's was ‘Tutti ga i so gusti e mi go i mii’ (‘Everyone follows his taste, and I follow mine’). Yet I hope that, among the hundred and fifty voices represented here, a characteristic and representative flavour of the intelligence of this period can be found.

Meeting the Daktars

This book is about daktari medicine. Simply put, daktari medicine was the name given to the medicine practised by daktars. But who exactly were the daktars?

The term itself, as we shall see in Chapter I, did not emerge until the second half of the nineteenth century. Even then they did not constitute a single homogenous group but were rather a composite group made up of many heterogeneous elements whose social status and pedagogical background both differed widely. Yet, after the 1860s the word daktar clearly referred to people who were thought to practise ‘western’ medicine. John Iliffe's comprehensive study East African Doctors: A History of the Modern Profession mentions the development of similar vernacular designations for some early African practitioners of ‘western’ medicine. In some cases the terms used to refer to them drew upon older ‘indigenous’ vocabularies, such as mganga or omusawo or, as in the Kenyan dakitari, the term was, like in Bengal, a vernacularization of the English ‘doctor’.

To what extent these daktars drew upon earlier traditions of South Asians practising ‘western’ medicine cannot now be ascertained with any degree of certainty. This much, however, is certain: South Asia had been exposed to ‘western’ medicine for at least two centuries before the term daktar emerged as a socially significant identity. Numerous European medical travellers such as Francois Bernier, Niocolao Manucci, Garcia d'Orta and John Ovington, visited Mughal South Asia.

Introduction

Decline in health and emergence of certain illnesses have been reported as the first category of cues or ‘body reminders’ of ageing in a study by Karp, 2000 (cited in Vincent, 2003) based on qualitative interviews with male and female professionals in America. Similar results have been found in studies on the aged in India, where decline in health status, restrictive activity pattern and being ‘inactive’ were associated with old age (Rajan et al., 1999). These perceptions of the aged are substantiated by empirical evidence which shows that a positive relation exists between age and morbidity among adults, i.e. at old age there is higher prevalence of morbidity implying that the risk of illness and morbidity is higher among the aged (Duraisamy, 2001). Further it has been found that as age advances the probability of disability also increases (Gupta and Sankar, 2003).

As men and women live longer there will be an increase in aged persons with chronic illness and disability which is a matter of concern for ageing individuals as well as health care planners of the society. Chronic morbidities and disabling conditions adversely affect the quality of life of the elderly. Poor health is a cause for concern among the aged as illness episodes have the potential to cause economic shock (Crystal et al., 2000), lead to financial dependency (Pal, 2004), loss of autonomy, reduced social contact and loneliness.

David Arnold has described the plague epidemic of the 1890s as an occasion for an unprecedented ‘attack on the body’. Plague, clarified Arnold, ‘was specifically identified with the human body and thus occasioned an unprecedented assault upon the body of the colonized’. Informed by the arrogance of what it believed to be ‘scientific’ practice, the British Indian state sought to intrude upon the colonized body as it had never done before. The forcible search and quarantine measures instituted by the government eventually led to widespread protests and violence and even the assassination of W. C. Rand, the Sanitary Commissioner of Pune. This account, however, has been largely based upon the experiences of the Bombay Presidency. Though mention is made of other regions across the subcontinent, the scope of Arnold's pioneering work did not include the interrogation of regional specificities. Ira Klein's demographic study of plague mortality and antiplague measures also focussed primarily on the western and northern regions of the subcontinent, while Ian Catanach's studies highlighted the ‘tensions of empire’ that the politics around the plague brought to the fore. Apart from the conflict between the Pune politicians, Catanach highlighted the differences within the European medical community. Rajnarayan Chandravarkar's study, based once again on Bombay, highlights the ways in which the ‘epidemic’ came to be constituted and the diverse and varied responses it evoked. He highlighted the absence of a generalized ‘Indian reaction’ even within the context of Bombay.