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- Nitya Rao, University of East Anglia
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- Quest for Identity
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- 26 July 2023
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- 31 May 2024, pp vii-viii
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Acknowledgements
- Farhat Hasan, University of Delhi
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- Voices in Verses
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- 06 March 2024
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- 31 May 2024, pp xi-xiv
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5 - Ageing Girmitiyas and The Story of Salt Behind The Sugar
- 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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- 31 May 2024, pp 119-136
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Summary
Old age and ageing are categories that can ground anthropological reflection on ways of living. Anthropological inquiries into old age have also contributed to ethnographic practice: participant observation, the use of biographies, individual trajectories and audio-visual narratives form part of the research legacy of anthropological literature on old age. Evolving forms of social and spiritual care for geriatric needs reflect complex and diverse transformations in any era. This chapter points out that the existing literature on plantationbased indentured Indians is yet to feature detailed studies on ageing and the factors that may have accelerated the process. Additionally, there is a dearth of studies on the social-care networks that came into being to provide for the elderly once the indenture system was abolished and/or free living outside of the plantations started. While striving to fill this gap, this chapter endeavours to open up themes for further research.
RETHINKING ‘AGEING’ AMONG THE GIRMITIYAS
In the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, the indenture system was used to recruit Asian workers for employment elsewhere in the European colonies. Despite the end of slavery, the British Empire's quest to make sugar and keep it profitable continued. It was a major source of governmental revenue, and consumer demand increased as the masses developed a taste for this labourintensive commodity, using it to sweeten tea and coffee all over Europe. As a layered, divisive and discriminatory process, indenture steadily revealed the global division of labour as well as the scale of exploitation of the body that went along with it. The physical sweat and toil accompanied by regimes of bodily control not only became the salt behind the success story of sugar production, but, I argue, these factors also hold the key to understanding the problems of ageing among the indentured and ex-indentured population.
Ageing in an era when longevity (as we know it now) was yet to be established as a fairly probable norm, provides us with a compelling context. The colonial perception of ‘ageing’ under indenture was shaped by economic needs: in the plantation system, older workers were a burden or a liability. Able-bodied individuals likely to perform well under harsh tropical conditions were preferred. Thirty-five was considered too old to re-migrate. Many aspiring migrants were rejected on ‘account of old age or some bodily infirmity’.
6 - India’s Paradiplomacy and the Gulf Region: Challenges and Opportunities
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- By Kabir Taneja
- Edited by Harsh V. Pant, King's College London, Hasan T. Alhasan, King's College London
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- India and the Gulf
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- 01 August 2023
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- 31 May 2024, pp 163-183
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Summary
Introduction
One of the major shifts that the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi intended to make after taking power in 2014 was to empower India's states in the centre's foreign policy decision-making. This revision was ideally suited for the government's ‘Look West’ policy, with Modi's outreach to West Asia, particularly the Gulf, perhaps uncharacteristically being the single largest success story over the past six years.
The initial posture to empower Indian states more from within the federal structure as far as foreign policy goes seems to have been a non-starter. The idea behind empowering states to have a say in India's foreign policy in a framework of institutionalized sub-national exchanges to promote trade, culture, tourism, and people-to-people ties required both political vision and realpolitik zeal. However, in the times of multilateral dysfunctions and traditions of global diplomacy being potentially re-written by changing polities, citizenry, and more particularly the ecosystem and infrastructures designed around our current understanding of globalization and the world order, paradiplomacy conceptually would need to evolve.
India, the Gulf, and Iran have had historic and civilization ties. Currently, nearly 10 million Indians live and work in the larger West Asian region, and more than USD 50 billion annually are sent into the Indian economy by this diaspora as remittances. Indian states such as Kerala, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, and others have had close connections with countries such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. With over 200 million Muslims, India's outreach to West Asia till an extent has a natural existence, with state policies only following and attempting to incentivize existing connections by tapping into the principles of paradiplomacy. From a policy perspective, thinking about a controlled democratizing process for states to engage with sovereign states with a degree of autonomy is inviting on paper and challenging in practice despite intent at the highest levels.
In this chapter, we will look at the issue and potential of the sub-national approach of diplomacy beyond the charters of a sovereign state's relations with another on the same level from two practical approaches. First is the Indian state of Kerala, which provides a unique perspective by heavily relying on migration and employment in the Gulf States for its local economy and the Gulf's direct outreach to the state during the 2018 floods amidst a row between the state government and the centre.
About the Editor and Contributors
- Edited by Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Climate Justice in India
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- 03 November 2022
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- 31 May 2024, pp 246-249
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Part I - Origins
- 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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- 31 May 2024, pp 15-16
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6 - Modern Art and East Pakistan: Drawing from the Limits
- Edited by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Vazira Zamindar, Brown University, Rhode Island
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- How Secular Is Art?
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- 21 February 2023
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- 31 May 2024, pp 157-188
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Summary
Looking from East Pakistan
Questions of art and secularism raised in this volume are seeking a South Asian scale, possibly with resonant histories or historiographical possibilities across the subcontinent’s unstable twentieth-century borders. Invited to write on Bangladesh—a critical yet often-marginal perspective in such conversations—my quandaries were two: Are such questions around art and the secular posed to or drawn from the particular histories of the subcontinent’s (relatively young) nation-states? And along that drift, what analytical, even unsettling work, can such particular histories do, in the imagination of such questions aiming subcontinental scales?
My concerns in this essay are historiographical. Not in the sense of re/configuring multiple positions on questions of art and the secular in Bangladesh, but looking from the region and its particularity, as a methodology of perceiving the secular in its plural form(ation)s, as we attempt to generate truly subcontinental art histories. Such looking from location, I am hoping, can release Bangladesh—former East Pakistan, 1947–1971—from being merely an indexical marker for representing South Asia (beyond the hegemonic centre that Indian art/histories have held in the region), and become rather an analytical vantage point to re/generate subcontinental questions. The locational, I will argue, is neither a (simply) spatial nor a rhetorical marker; it is both temporal and epistemological; and as such an agent of the historical itself. While the locational tends to be subsumed within the nation (particularly so in conversations on postcolonial modernities and artistic modernisms), it sustains a critical traffic with transnational and transregional currents (or the often-used scale of the ‘global’), which needs more critical attention in South Asian art/historiography.
As a vantage point, Bangladesh is both a young nation-state of fifty years and the vestige of the long decolonization in South Asia. In this essay, I am positioning myself in East Pakistan: that brief political entity between two climactic partitions in the subcontinent—India’s in 1947 with the creation of Pakistan, and Pakistan’s in 1971 with the liberation of Bangladesh. East Pakistan was formed from the partition of the Bengal province of British India in 1947, on grounds of religion, as a new Muslim-majority Pakistan emerged alongside independent India with the eclipse of British Empire in the subcontinent.
5 - Commemorating Women Poets: Memory, Gender, and the Literary Culture in the Persianate World
- Farhat Hasan, University of Delhi
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- Voices in Verses
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- 06 March 2024
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- 31 May 2024, pp 118-153
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Summary
In recreating women's literary spaces, the tazkiras not only mention the poets of their time but also refer, in interesting details, to the life stories and lyrical compositions of women poets from the historical and imagined pasts. In the process of commemorating them, these texts portray them as exemplars in terms of their literary skills and aesthetic qualities for the littérateurs of their generation. As commemorative texts, both BN and TN memorialize their literary precursors, but, in the process of doing so, they remind us of the historical presence of an inclusive literary space in which were ensconced memories of lyrics allegedly composed by women. The poets from the multiple pasts claimed an undying existence, an enduring and ever-inspiring presence, in the literary public sphere. It should be emphasized here that even as these tazkiras are exclusively concerned with women poets, the literary community they seek to reproduce and represent is not gender-specific; the community of women poets, writing and reciting poems in Persian and Urdu, did not constitute an exclusive social group, but were seen as a crucial component of the larger Persianate literary culture. In fact, the overwhelming interest of Ranj and Nadir in publishing their compendia was to draw the attention of the reader to the significance of women literati in shaping the norms of aesthetics and appropriate expression in art and literature.
Tazkiras as Commemorative Exercises: Memorializing Women and Their Words
In the last several decades, there have been quite a few insightful studies on the tradition of biographical commemoration in the Persianate world, and scholars have looked at the complex ways through which remembrance – repeated and constructed – served to structure a moral community, and circulating within networks of communication, reinforced ethical norms and appropriate practices. It is for this reason that some scholars have described the tazkiras as ‘memorative communications’ wherein memories were restructured by forms of communication and vice versa. The appropriate ethical norms and behaviour, and aesthetic tastes and expression constituted the Persianate adāb (singular: adab), which were reiterated and reformulated in and through the remembrance of the lives and work of exceptional persons.
4 - Representing the Kothas: The Two Sisters in the Literary Sphere
- Farhat Hasan, University of Delhi
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- Voices in Verses
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- 06 March 2024
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- 31 May 2024, pp 91-117
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Summary
In this chapter, we look at, with a focus on two sisters, both courtesans – Zuhra and Mushtari – the meaning of and constraints on the participation of women entertainers in the literary sphere. We hear them ‘speak’ and from their speech-acts explore their construction of selfhood, articulation of subjectivities, and resistance to dominant social and literary norms. At the same time, we make an effort to unravel the anxieties that their literary talents evoked in the sociocultural spaces, and the reasons for their immense popularity in social memory. We also ask how their agency in the cultural domain was represented in the literary sphere, in particular the biographical compendia of the time.
The Courtesans as Models of Literary Emulation: The Pre-eminence of the Sisters in Cultural Spaces
Why these sisters? My reason for choosing them is because their literary acumen was widely accepted, and critics often measured the compositions of other women poets against the depth and range of their poems. The sisters had, it seems, set the standards that other poets were expected to aspire to and emulate. Nazakat, ‘an endearing public performer’ (mahbūba-i bāzārī) based in Bombay, wrote a couplet and a ghazal as an accompaniment to (and in the same meter as) one of the poems of Mushtari; comparing her effort with the literary skills of the two sisters, Nadir found her endeavour no more than ‘meaningless verbosity’ (tūl-i fazūl), and decided not to include the ghazal in his tazkira. Ranj was blunt, and saw her attempt to imitate Mushtari as ridiculous. He says:
She [Nazakat] wrote this ghazal which she visualized as an aesthetic response to one of the poems of Mushtari Lucknawi. How can the Sun be compared with a tiny particle (kahān zarrah kahān āftāb)? How can the shoddy distich (bhadde ash‘ār) of Nazakat be an answer to the ghazals of Mushtari?
In the case of another courtesan by the same name, Nazakat, Ranj expressed his appreciation of her poetry by comparing her with Mushtari (and Sardar). This courtesan, based in Jaipur, could, says Ranj, get the likes of Mushtari envious. Clearly then, in matters of literary expression and aesthetics, Mushtari, and her sister, Zuhra, were held out as models against whom other poets were assessed, and their compositions evaluated.
7 - Conclusion
- Farhat Hasan, University of Delhi
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- Voices in Verses
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- 06 March 2024
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- 31 May 2024, pp 168-174
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Summary
Reading the biographical compendia of women poets written in the nineteenth century, we cannot but appreciate the impressive presence of women in the literary field. However, this impression fades away when we look at the more popular literary biographies, anthologies, critical literature, and instruction manuals; in the dominant literary strands, indeed women poets are scarce, if not totally absent. The nineteenth century was the period in which the figure of a woman poet evoked moral anxieties, resulting from the reformist zeal to keep women away from eros and love, and other emotions associated with Persianate poetry. Elite women should, for sure, be educated but only in the subjects that helped them efficiently manage their domestic spaces; there were, as we see in several reformist texts, detailed discussions on what women should and should not read, and among the books that they were instructed to shun were romantic tales and works of poetry. Commendably, the women's tazkiras contest these assumptions, and make available to the interested readers an archive of women's voices, and draw our attention to the ever-present but barely recognized contribution of women poets to the shaping of the literary culture in early modern Hindustan.
It is not without basis to argue that women's lyrical compositions represented a marginalized and incongruent literary culture, but doing so would be banal and simplistic and, above all, quite ahistorical. Women poets were present in poetic assemblies (mushā‘ira) organized by aristocrats and rich patrons; and in the salons of the courtesans, young men learnt the niceties of language, and men of letters experimented with new forms of thought and expression. In our study of women littérateurs here, we have seen that their lyrics, despite their creative depths and fresh signifying practices, were firmly obedient to the literary adāb, or the norms of aesthetics and expression. Their interventions in the literary field served to enrich and deepen the field, even as they continually challenged and contested its dominant assumptions. It is for this reason that I described their compositions, in one of the earlier chapters, as situated within the realm of what Foucault terms as ‘subjugated knowledges’, reflecting a cultural practice that was ‘masked’ by the power-language ensemble of relations but still conversed with the dominant literary and aesthetic norms and values in an aporetic relationship where women's speech both reinforced and challenged them.
About the Poets and Artists
- Edited by Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Climate Justice in India
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- 03 November 2022
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- 31 May 2024, pp 250-250
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7 - Social Mobilizations for Climate Action and Climate Justice in India
- Edited by Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Climate Justice in India
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- 03 November 2022
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- 31 May 2024, pp 140-161
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Summary
Introduction
In September 2019, more than 300 representatives of farmers’ organizations, trade union federations, indigenous people's organizations, fisher groups, women's organizations, environmental groups, and a few progressive political parties from Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and various parts of India met in Hyderabad. This four-day-long convention concluded with the founding of the South Asian People's Action on Climate Crisis (SAPACC). The delegates voiced their concerns about the anticipated effects of the impending climate crisis and ‘critiqued the inadequacy of governments’ policies’ (Adve 2019). In the past, India's climate activists focused almost exclusively on multinational corporations and the governments of industrialized countries, who are responsible for causing the climate crisis. They argued that questioning the Indian government would ‘dilute’ the demand for holding industrialized countries accountable. Therefore, the SAPACC's public critiques of India and other countries in South Asia marks an important shift in the evolution of climate movements in the region.
Social movements and civil society organizations work within the complex politico-economic and institutional context of India. On the one hand, the Constitution of India is regarded as highly progressive, affording citizens a variety of civil and political rights and freedoms and a scaffolding of democratic institutions that are functional to some extent. This context is particularly conducive for the functioning of civil society institutions that focus on relatively less controversial and apolitical questions, for example, Gandhian organizations dedicated to the ‘welfare’ of the poor, or those promoting tree-planting programmes. On the other hand, organizations advocating for the rights and entitlement of the poor, and those demanding effective enforcement of constitutional provisions and a welfare state, often confront a state that is extremely opaque and highly vindictive (Banerjee 2008). This ‘Janus-faced nature of the postcolonial state’ explains why some types of environmental movements thrive in Indian society while others face violent threats (Kashwan 2017, 10). Yet these contradictory workings of the Indian state must be understood in the context of global capitalism and its domestic beneficiaries. Instead of weakening state control in the wake of economic liberalization in the early 1990s and beyond, the Indian state has transformed into a highly centralized and extractive state that abuses its authority blatantly to selectively reallocate land and other natural resources (Rajan 2011).
1 - ‘Coolie Catching’: The Recruitment of Indentured Women to Colonial Natal
- 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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- 31 May 2024, pp 17-41
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Summary
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, labour migration led to the settlement of Indians throughout the British Empire. Fiji, Mauritius, British Guyana and South Africa became key labour procuring colonies. Thousands of men, women and children crossed the oceans to work on plantations and estates under contracts of indenture. Studies on indentured migration are well documented. Its gendered aspects have been the subject of research examining issues such as mobility, agency, resistance and citizenship. In most instances, the gendered experiences of indenture are discussed in the place of destination – that is, life on the plantations and estates. However, the narratives around recruitment practices concerning women immigrants have primarily been an untapped area of analysis.
Carter, Lal, Hoefte and Reddock have alluded to some aspects in their studies of women indentured immigrants to Mauritius, Fiji and the Caribbean, examining colonial attitudes towards women as well as the role of women recruiters in labour mobilization to the colonies. In South African historiography, while several publications have explored varied aspects of female experiences in the migration process, no extensive study has been done on the recruitment practices surrounding women's migration to Natal. This gap is explored in this chapter. The unequal ratio between men and women labourers migrating to Natal created many problems for recruiting agents, colonial officials and employers. Securing the 40 per cent set quota for women immigrants was at times hampered by socio-economic conditions in India, depot medical examinations and colonial attitudes towards female labour. An analysis of these aspects of indenture will provide rich insights into recruitment practices and procedures concerning women immigrants to Natal and the factors that shaped their decision to migrate.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Indentured immigration to Natal began in 1860 at the request of sugar planters. In 1874, the Natal government agreed to indenture labourers from the southern and northern areas of India. They entered a contractual agreement for five years. Those who re-indentured were entitled to claim a return passage to India or a small piece of land for settlement after 10 years. Many immigrants took advantage of this concession, and by 1891 it is estimated that there were approximately 30,000 Free Indians in Natal. However, they, together with ‘passenger’ Indians, began to compete with the colonialists in trade and agriculture and soon generated widespread protests in the colony.
1 - A Crisis of Reproduction: Gender, Land and Migration in Contemporary Jharkhand
- Nitya Rao, University of East Anglia
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- Quest for Identity
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- 26 July 2023
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- 31 May 2024, pp 3-34
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Summary
This book collates papers I have written over the past twenty-five years based on intensive long-term engagement with the adivasi (mainly Santal) population of the Santal Parganas region of Jharkhand state. The main arguments presented in this book, while located within particular historical and political moments in the region, have global relevance across multiple disciplines, like development and gender studies and explorations of indigeneity and ecological change. The chapters in this book contribute to the production of knowledge in three broad areas.
First, they contribute to an improved understanding of gender as contextual, relational and dynamic, moving beyond the socially constructed roles and relationships between men and women. Such an understanding generates the need for reflexive methodologies that provide possibilities for studying relationships across space, time and institutional settings. Second, they seek to deepen our understanding of adivasi societies in relation to their ecological environment, especially their conceptualizations of land and labour, and how these ideologies feed into shaping unequal power relationships amongst themselves and with other groups. Third, they help us realise the importance of locating these dynamic relationships, whether at the level of the household or the community, and the interlocking of personal or individual, community and ecological needs and aspirations, within the changing political and economic context.
On 2 August 2000, the parliament approved the Bill for the reorganisation of Jharkhand as a separate state. Much has been written about the politics and governance of the newly established Jharkhand state and the continuities and changes in livelihoods. But analyses of gender roles and relations, and how these are affected by resource relations, livelihood transitions and the new narratives of citizenship, are missing from the discourse. This provided me the space to focus on the opportunities and the contradictions that have emerged in the new state, as aspirations of the state and its adivasi populations diverge – the former focusing on capitalist growth and the latter on the control over natural resources.
Methodologically, my approach combines historical and ethnographic methods from a feminist epistemological lens. I combine early insights on gender, indigeneity and ecology from colonial archival records like the land revenue settlement records of the early twentieth century with life history narratives from the post-independence years to the present.
Index
- 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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- 31 May 2024, pp 258-276
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Index
- Edited by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Vazira Zamindar, Brown University, Rhode Island
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- How Secular Is Art?
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- 21 February 2023
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- 31 May 2024, pp 415-429
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1 - India’s Gulf Policy: From Non-alignment to Multi-alignment
- Edited by Harsh V. Pant, King's College London, Hasan T. Alhasan, King's College London
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- India and the Gulf
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- 01 August 2023
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- 31 May 2024, pp 15-38
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Summary
Introduction
The Gulf region, comprising the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states – namely Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – Iran, and Iraq, has come to acquire a place of prominence in India's foreign policy and international relations over the last three decades. A number of factors, including the post–Cold War shift in Indian foreign policy, growing trade and financial remittances, energy security, and a converging threat perception of transnational terrorism, are responsible for the change. This is a far cry from the decades of the Cold War when, despite the geographic proximity and historical linkages, the region was peripheral to India's foreign policy and was viewed through the prism of solidarity among the postcolonial states. This had resulted in India's Middle East policy becoming initially Cairo-centric and later revolving around Baghdad. The non-alignment policy and the preoccupation with Pakistan meant vital regional countries, namely Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, remained on the periphery of India's Middle East policy during much of the Cold War era.
The end of the Cold War, disintegration of the Soviet Union, and domestic economic compulsions forced India to begin a gradual shift in its foreign policy, and simultaneously, India's Gulf and Middle East policy witnessed a change. The need for foreign economic partners and energy security concerns led New Delhi to reach out to the Gulf countries, especially Oman and Iran, and at the same time, Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao took the bold step to normalize relations with Israel to adjust to the changing global order. Despite the shift, the idea of non-alignment continued to remain central to India's foreign policy discourse – and even at times its foreign policy conduct – with the concept of strategic autonomy acquiring importance.8 The discussions on India's engagement with the world, including the Middle East, continued to revolve around non-alignment, as underlined in the report Nonalignment 2.0 – published in 2012 – which articulated the need for India to adopt strategic autonomy and balancing as the abiding principles of its international engagement.9
Although India's foreign policy debates displayed extraordinary sensitivity to alliance-building as violating the principles of non-alignment and strategic autonomy, in practice, however, New Delhi had begun to shift to a policy of multi-alignment soon after the 1998 nuclear tests over which India faced international condemnation.
Conclusion: The Afterlife of the Police Action and Contemporary Muslim Debate
- Afsar Mohammad, University of Pennsylvania
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- Book:
- Remaking History
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- 01 August 2023
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- 31 May 2024, pp 244-281
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Summary
How could we forget a violent massacre of such a massive magnitude that occurred at the very heart of the country? How do we read such a historical event in the wake of an authoritarian Hindu Raj and the making of contemporary Muslim discourses?
Although these are the same questions that I have been attempting to explore at a conceptual level throughout, the origins of such questions lie in the everyday lives of my interlocutors of the Police Action. My documentation of oral histories about the Police Action started in 2006 and came to an end in the first week of January 2020 when I witnessed a huge “million people march” in Hyderabad (Figure C.1) against the National Register of Citizenship (NRC) and Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). Mass protests during this period have registered a “high visibility” of common Muslims in the public sphere of South Asia. As Akeel Bilgrami suggested, “The common Muslim has done what even Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, or Azad couldn’t.” Some of my interlocutors, since they were also active in the political sphere during their twenties, tried to make connections between 1948 and 2020 when the citizenship of Muslims metamorphosed into a “national problem.” As a result of Hindu nationalism or ethnonationalism, the being and belonging of Muslims in India have become a major “problem,” both empirically and theoretically. As Manan Ahmed noted: “To be a Muslim in India today is to be a problem. The Muslim is a theological problem, a social problem, a cultural problem, and critically, a geopolitical problem.”
While working on this book between 2012 and 2021, I also witnessed the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) in the USA. The question of why some lives do not matter became a major debate, as the minoritized voices of African Americans, Muslims, and women marched along the main streets throughout the nation. As a student who has an interest in the making of everyday religious lives of marginalized communities, particularly Muslims, I began to make a few connections of questions such as Muslim being and belonging, the idea of citizenship, and the hegemony of a nationalist narrative that became prominent in everyday debates in the USA and India too.
11 - Re-enchanting Mughal Architecture: A Critique of the Secular Disenchantment of India’s Past
- Edited by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Vazira Zamindar, Brown University, Rhode Island
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- How Secular Is Art?
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- 21 February 2023
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- 31 May 2024, pp 333-352
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In the fall of 2017, the Taj Mahal (Image 11.1) made international news once again. This time it was not due to pollution, or its sectarian registration as a Muslim cemetery, or tourism development schemes, but because the state government of Uttar Pradesh, controlled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party, commonly known as the BJP), removed it from its tourism brochure. This removal was the final incident in a series of public actions, and the one that gained global media attention. Earlier in the year, the newly elected Hindu nationalist chief minister Yogi Adityanath claimed in a speech that the Taj did not represent Indian culture. This statement was followed by the BJP legislator Sangeet Som’s public claim that the Taj Mahal was a ‘blot’ on India’s culture and built by traitors, which then led BJP leader Vinay Katiyar to resuscitate the theory that the tomb was once a temple dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva. These actions were by no means the first challenge to the Taj Mahal’s existence as a monument of Mughal achievement. The first case of disrespect was reported in 1830 when the first governor general of India Lord Bentinck wanted to dismantle the tomb and sell its marble at the going market rate. The story was never corroborated by eyewitnesses or written evidence but with every retelling it signalled the colonial approach to land management and the East India Company’s desire to turn its territories, along with their monuments, into profitable holding. Fanny Parks, the wife of an East India Company clerk, who sympathized with the Mughals, wrote in her travel diaries against the wanton destruction of their monuments in the name of profit. After she cites the article about Bentinck’s scheme in the Calcutta newspaper John Bull, she asks: ‘If this be true, is it not shameful? … By what authority does the Governor-general offer the taj for sale? Has he any right to molest the dead? To sell the tomb raised over an empress, which from its extraordinary beauty is the wonder of the world?’ When Parks’s diaries were published in 1850 in London her writings represented an early challenge to the East India Company’s valuing of India’s Mughal monuments for no more than their raw material.
Part V - Policy and Politics
- Nitya Rao, University of East Anglia
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- Quest for Identity
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- 26 July 2023
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- 31 May 2024, pp 273-274
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