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1 - Introduction
- Farhat Hasan, University of Delhi
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- Voices in Verses
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- 06 March 2024
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- 30 June 2024, pp 1-20
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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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- 06 March 2024
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- 30 June 2024, pp 177-188
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Dedication
- Bart Klem, University of Gothenburg
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- Performing Sovereign Aspirations
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- 30 April 2024
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- 30 June 2024, pp ix-x
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A Note on Transliteration
- Farhat Hasan, University of Delhi
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- Voices in Verses
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- 06 March 2024
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- 30 June 2024, pp xv-xvi
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2 - Individual Autonomy, Freedom of Contract and the Labour Market
- Supriya Routh, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
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- Labour Justice
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- 30 April 2024
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- 30 June 2024, pp 68-99
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Introduction
Individual liberty, contractual freedom and market participation are justiciable fundamental rights under the Indian Constitution. Individual rights to freedom of trade, business, profession and occupation are the bases of contractual freedom under the Constitution. However, freedom of contract is not identical to freedom of trade or profession. The scope of the latter is much broader than the former. An individual's profession, occupation, trade or business is also an expression of individual choices and aspirations – things that individuals value in their lives – when such choices are not substantially constrained. Contractual freedom is of a narrower import compared to the freedom of trade or profession, but an important one that also facilitates the aforementioned individual aspirations under market conditions. An exclusive focus on contractual freedom as an indicator to evaluate the scope (and realisation) of freedom of trade sidelines other motivations of workers to engage in a specific profession, occupation or business. An exclusive focus on the freedom of market exchange (that is, contract) also comes at the cost of ignoring the prerequisites and corequisites of such exchange. Such focus does not capture the role of education, training, skills, resources, social circumstances, cultural sensitivities and other factors that help expand the real freedom of the parties to such an exchange.
To elaborate, there is a valid basis to argue, as John Gardner does, that an isolated focus on the freedom of contract is restrictive of overall individual freedom. In the context of the employment relationship, if the primary legal emphasis lies on preserving or promoting the contractual feature of the relationship, the employee identity narrows down to that of an instrument of exchange (of labour), or contractor. As instruments of exchange employees remain merely as means of performing the (employer’s) contract. This instrumental understanding of employees articulates a narrow view of an employee's freedom, including her right to freedom of trade, by denying the capacity of choice and aspiration of such employee. Work or employment is broader than mere contractual exchange since it also signifies a worker's aspiration and self-fulfilment. This (or any) human aspiration is bound to be broader than an instrumental – means to something – understanding of one's freedom of contract. Accordingly, a mere contractual understanding of employment, without also referring to other social commitments (including other individual freedoms), is restrictive of the very freedom (that is, freedom of trade) that it purports to promote.
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 April 2024
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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.
10 - Deduction as Search
- Deepak Khemani, IIT Madras, Chennai
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- Search Methods in Artificial Intelligence
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- 30 April 2024
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- 30 June 2024, pp 319-366
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An intelligent agent must be aware of the world it is operating in. This awareness comes mainly via perception. Human beings use the senses of sight, sound, and touch to update themselves. However, the entire world is not perceptible to any of us. Our senses have limitations. We cannot hear the dog whistle, or see the bacteria living on our skin or the mountain on the other side of the world. But through science and communication we know about the worlds beyond our sensory reach. Telescopes from Galileo to James Webb have delivered spectacular images of the universe, some taken in the infrared band in the spectrum. We augment whatever we know by making inferences. The conclusions we draw may be sound or they may be speculative yet useful. Evolution has preserved in us both kinds of inference making capability.
The world is dynamic and has other agencies making changes in the world too. If we observe something we may guess the cause or intention behind it. This kind of speculation is called abduction. The conclusion is possibly true, maybe even likely. If we see the local bully striding towards us, we may suspect ill intent on his part, and take evasive action. Better safe than sorry. If we develop a cough and fever, we may fear Covid and isolate ourselves from others. When we observe a few white swans, we may conclude that all swans are white. This is called induction. Neither abduction nor induction is always sound. Conclusions we draw may not always hold. But they are eminently useful.
In this chapter we study deduction, a form of inference that is sound. The conclusions that we draw using deduction are necessarily true. The machinery we use is the language of logic and the ability to derive proofs. We highlight the fact that behind deduction the fundamental activity is searching for a proof.
Logic and mathematics are often considered to be synonymous. Both are concerned with truth of statements. In this chapter we confine ourselves to the family of classical logics, also known as mathematical logics, in which every sentence has exactly two possible truth values – true and false. Nothing in between. No fuzzy concepts like tall and dark. Is a person whose height is 176 centimetres tall? What about 175 then? And 174? When does she become not tall? Or modalities like maybe.
Sacrifice and Violence
- Reflections from an Ethnography in Nepal
- Marie Lecomte-Tilouine
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- June 2024
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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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- 30 April 2024
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- 30 June 2024, pp 126-141
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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 April 2024
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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 April 2024
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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.
Appendix: Algorithm and Pseudocode Conventions
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- By S. Baskaran
- Deepak Khemani, IIT Madras, Chennai
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- Search Methods in Artificial Intelligence
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- 30 April 2024
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- 30 June 2024, pp 441-448
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The algorithms presented in this book assume eager evaluation. The values of primitive types (integers, reals, strings) are passed by value, and tuples, lists, arrays, sets, stacks, queues, etc., are passed by reference, similar to how Java treats primitive values and objects.
The data structures (container types) like sets, arrays, stacks and queues, and the operations on those structures carry their usual meaning, and their usages in the algorithms are self explanatory.
Tuple
A tuple is an ordered collection of fixed number of elements, where each element may be of a different type. A tuple is represented as a comma separated sequence of elements, surrounded by parenthesis.
tuple → ( ELEMENT 1 , ELEMENT 2 , … , ELEMENT k)
A tuple of two elements is called a pair, for example, (S, null), ((A, S), 1), (S, [A, B]) are pairs. And a tuple of three elements is called a triple, for example, (S, null, 0), (A, S, 1), (S, A, B) are triples. A tuple of k elements is called a k-tuple, for example, (S, MAX, −∞, ∞), (A, MIN, LIVE, ∞, 42).
Note: parenthesis is also used to indicate precedence, like in (3+1) * 4 or in (1 : (4 : [ ])), its usage will be clear from the context.
List
A list is an ordered collection of an arbitrary number of elements of the same type. A list is read from left to right and new elements are added at the left end. Lists are constructed recursively like in Haskell.
list → ELEMENT : list
list → [ ]
The ‘:’ operator is a list constructor; it takes an element (HEAD) and a list (TAIL) and constructs a new list (HEAD : TAIL) similar to cons(HEAD, TAIL) in LISP. Using head:tail notation, a list such as [3, 1, 4] is recursively constructed from (3 : (1 : (4 : [ ]))), similar to cons(3, cons(1, cons(4, nil))) in LISP. The empty list [ ] has no head or tail.
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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- 30 April 2024
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- 30 June 2024, pp i-vi
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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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- 20 April 2024
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- 30 June 2024, pp 176-196
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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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- 30 April 2024
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- 30 June 2024, pp 1-18
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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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- 30 April 2024
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- 30 June 2024, pp xv-xvi
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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 April 2024
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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.
4 - Industrial Democracy and Republican Citizenship: Collective Action in Resource Redistribution
- Supriya Routh, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
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- Labour Justice
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- 30 April 2024
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- 30 June 2024, pp 135-169
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Summary
Introduction
The Constitution of India specifies the subject matter of distribution (social goods or the measuring standard of social justice) – consisting of individual freedoms (Part III) and material resources (Part IV) – in furtherance of the social justice agenda. While the Constitution equally safeguards individual freedoms of all citizens, it does not specify a rule – a method – for the redistribution of material resources except for noting that ‘weaker sections’ of the population should receive ‘special care’ as the state seeks to minimise and eliminate inequalities. With this general guidance, the Constitution leaves the specific rule of redistribution to be determined through the political ‘governance’ process. This approach to redistribution means that constitutionally mandated redistribution must take place through direct citizen participation in governance. Participatory democracy, as the third component of the social justice agenda, is particularly appropriate as a basis for a redistributive framework given the nation's exceptionally diverse and large population. Operationalising a specific, singular, functional redistributive method, albeit with contextual modifications, is bound to be difficult, if not impossible, for a country as heterogeneous as India. The Constitution subjects redistributive entitlements to a participatory decision-making process to make room for contextual sensitivity in diverse circumstances.
Liberal theories of justice based on individual autonomy widely recognise the significance of this process in shaping the nature of the economy (and polity). The role of democratic deliberation in workplaces has been underscored from the perspectives of workplace democracy and workplace republicanism. Workplace democracy sees participatory decision-making as the right to collective governance of enterprises, and workplace republicanism defines it as a worker's right to contest arbitrary management decisions. It is, thus, argued that democracy in workplaces is important in both conferring control of productive assets on workers and protecting them from the management's caprices. These perspectives emphasise the participatory process operating within the capitalist relations of production based on private contract and property relationships and are thereby consistent with the Indian Constitution's scheme of social justice. As noted earlier (in Chapter 1), the Constitution conceives of worker-citizens as autonomous self-interested actors in market exchanges. The Constitution supports the foundation of this mode of market participation without interfering in the outcome of individual exchanges.
3 - Representing an Inclusive Literary Culture: Women Poets in the Bazaars and Kothas
- Farhat Hasan, University of Delhi
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- Book:
- Voices in Verses
- Published online:
- 06 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 30 June 2024, pp 55-90
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- Chapter
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Summary
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.