Caste and Sexuality in Modern Indian Literature

This thesis investigates the centrality of caste in modern Indian English fiction. Although caste permeates and is relayed through the religiously sanctioned practice of ‘untouchability,’ it hides in popular discourse. One pivotal strategy whereby caste tries to maintain itself is its investment into questions of sexuality. I argue that caste is anti-desire; its organizing principle is embedded in violence that impacts everyone to varying degrees, irrespective of one’s caste status, but it affects sexual minorities and Dalits the most. The construction of the Brahmin-Dalit category defines, limits, and thus controls every other socially constructed category. Not only does the brahminic elite brahminize the socio-cultural geography, it performs caste in ways that seep into the embodied self of both upper castes and Dalits. All material and embodied spaces emerge as a theological version of Hinduism. Despite such underpinnings of caste, scholars (predominantly those with upper-caste backgrounds) have ignored caste. They have been happy to explore and challenge colonial power structures, but they have ignored Brahminization, which predates all forms of colonialism in India by centuries as a form of internal colonization of sexual minorities and non-brahminic Others. Drawing upon Indian literary fiction, queer theory, postcolonial discussion, and current public discourse in India, I seek to develop a queer theory that focuses on India and contributes to Dalit Studies. Although there have been discussions of queer sexualities and caste-based practices as separate issues, none, to my knowledge, has combined the two. Taking significant clues from Western queer theory, I turn to Indian sources, both past and present, with a major emphasis on ancient Sanskrit texts in which caste is embedded, to explore caste and caste’s (violent) interplay with sexuality in present-day India. It argues that while modernity can trigger a positive change, a true transformation demands caste reform, not only for the benefit of outcasts but also for the upper-caste people. The introduction of this thesis defines the field of caste in Indian Writing in English, ranging from Gandhian politics to the present-day discourse on caste. The first chapter examines the functioning of caste in a brahminic home in R. K. Narayan’s The English Teacher (1945). The following chapters analyze the complexities of caste from both brahminic and anti-brahminic perspectives in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), providing an account of caste in upper-caste homes from queer, material, and linguistic perspectives. The final chapter of this study connects the epistemology of caste violence analyzed through Indian English fiction to two recent events: the socio-cultural response to the Covid 19 pandemic and the death of the upper-caste actor Sushant Singh Rajput, thus highlighting the variety of ways in which caste continues to shape and govern brahminic communities in contemporary India. The conclusion of this study demonstrates the pervasiveness of caste and hopes to provoke further critical inquiry in the field of caste studies and sexuality studies that focus on India.Diese Dissertation untersucht die Schlüsselrolle der Kaste in der modernen indischen englischsprachigen Literatur. Obwohl das Kastensystem alle Lebensbereiche durchdringt und in der religiös sanktionierten Praktik der Unberührbarkeit“ weiterlebt, kommt es im allgemeinen Diskurs nicht vor. Eine zentrale Strategie, mit der sich das Kastensystem zu behaupten versucht, ist ihr Deutungsanspruch in Fragen der Sexualität. Ich behaupte, dass die Kastenordnung Lust feindlich ist; ihr Ordnungsprinzip beruht auf einer ihr inhärenten Gewalt, die jeden in unterschiedlichem Maße trifft, unabhängig von der eigenen Kastenzugehörigkeit, aber gerade sexuelle Minderheiten und Dalits (Unberührbare) trifft sie am stärksten. Die strenge Hierarchie der Brahmanen-Dalit-Pyramide definiert, begrenzt und kontrolliert somit jede andere gesellschaftlich begründete Ordnung. Die brahmanische Elite brahmanisiert (vereinnahmt in ihrem Sinn) nicht nur die soziokulturelle Landschaft, sie setzt die Kastenordnung auf eine Weise um, die in das Konzept des Selbst der oberen Kasten und der Dalits eindringt. Alle materiellen und verkörperten Räume erscheinen als theologische Version des Hinduismus. Trotz dieser Dominanz der Kaste ignorierten Wissenschaftler (vorwiegend solche, die selbst einer höheren Kaste angehören) die Kaste. Sie gaben sich damit zufrieden, koloniale Machtstrukturen zu erforschen und in Frage zu stellen, aber sie ignorierten die Brahmanisierung (den Einfluss der Brahmanen), die durch die Jahrhunderte vor allen Formen des Kolonialismus in Indien als eine Form der internen Kolonialisierung von sexuellen Minderheiten und Nicht-Brahmanen existierte. Ausgehend von indischer Literatur, der Queer-Theorie, dem postkolonialen und dem aktuellen öffentlichen Diskurs in Indien versuche ich, eine Queer-Theorie zu entwickeln, die sich auf Indien konzentriert und zu den Dalit-Studien beiträgt. Es gab Diskussionen über queere Sexualitäten und kastenbasierte Praktiken, doch wurden diese als getrennte Themen behandelt und meines Wissens bisher nicht in Kombination untersucht. Ich nehme wichtige Anhaltspunkte aus der westlichen Queer-Theorie auf und wende mich indischen Quellen zu, sowohl aus der Vergangenheit als auch aus der Gegenwart. Ein Hauptaugenmerk liegt dabei auf alten Sanskrit-Texten, um dasKastensystem und das gewalttätige Zusammenspiel der Kastenordnung im Hinblick auf die Sexualität im heutigen Indien zu untersuchen. Ich behaupte, dass die heutige Zeit zwar eine positive Veränderung anstoßen kann, eine echte Transformation jedoch eine grundlegende Reform der Kastenordnung erfordert, nicht nur zum Nutzen der Ausgestoßenen, sondern auch für die oberen Kasten selbst. Die Einleitung dieser Arbeit definiert das Feld der Kaste in der indischen Literatur in englischer Sprache, ausgehend von der Zeit Gandhis bis zum heutigen Diskurs über Kasten. Das erste Kapitel dieser Dissertation untersucht die Funktionsweise der Kaste in einem brahmanischen Haus in R.K. Narayans Der Englischlehrer (1945.) Die darauf folgenden Kapitel analysieren die Komplexität der Kaste sowohl aus brahmanischen als auch aus anti-brahmanischen Perspektiven in Arundhati Roys Der Gott der kleinen Dinge (1997) und Das Ministerium des äußersten Glücks (2017). Es handelt sich um eine Darstellung der Kastenzugehörigkeit in den Häusern der oberen Kaste aus queerer, materieller und sprachlicher Perspektive. Das abschließende Kapitel dieser Untersuchung setzt die Epistemologie der Macht der Kaste, analysiert anhand der beschriebenen indischen englischsprachigen Literatur, in Verbindung mit zwei aktuellen Ereignissen: der soziokulturellen Reaktion auf die Covid-19-Pandemie und dem Tod des Schauspielers Sushant Singh Rajput, der der obersten Kaste angehörte. Diese Betrachtung hebt die Vielfalt der Wegehervor, auf denen Kaste weiterhin brahmanische Gemeinschaften im heutigen Indien prägt und dominiert. Das Fazit dieser Untersuchung zeigt die weite Verbreitung der Bedeutung der Kaste. Ich hoffe, weitere kritische Untersuchungen auf dem Gebiet der Kasten- und Sexualitäts-Studien, die sich auf Indien konzentrieren, anzuregen

Market Capitalization and Firm Value: The Size Factor

Current multifactor valuation pricing models use size (measured by market capitalization) of a firm as one factor to determine the value of a security. The problem with current standard models was that none of them could explain the value of a security consistently and accurately based on current factors and in particular the size factor. The purpose of this quantitative study using existing time-series data over a 10-year period from 2006 to 2015 was to examine the impact of size factor on the realized rate of return of financial securities, while controlling for the impact of market rate of return. There are currently many valuation models but there is no 2-factor model or a model that uses a size factor that includes mid-cap sized securities. The research questions examined mid-cap sized securities for the size factor in a 2-factor model to determine the accuracy of predicting financial returns compared to the current standard Fama-French 3-factor model. The main theoretical framework that guided the study was the efficient market hypothesis that postulates that the price of a stock reflects all relevant available information. Data were collected for historical returns of 15 individual firms and portfolios of securities based on size. Multiple regression analysis methodology was used to examine the impact of size factor on the realized rate of return of financial securities, while controlling for the impact of market rate of return in the modified 2-factor model that included mid-caps. The results of the study indicate that size is a statistically significant factor in a 2-factor model that included mid-caps. The positive social impact of this study is that it could provide greater confidence in financial markets by providing a fair and equitable means of investment and flow of capital for a robust economy

NEGLIGENCE AS OPTIMIZATION PUZZLES: A NEW THEORY OF NEGLIGENCE

This thesis addresses the following questions, among others. Can two people take the exact same precautions yet face different liabilities for identical accidents? Can two people exercise the same overall care yet face different liabilities? Can a person take more precautions than the efficient level of care requires at the time of the accident, yet justifiably be found liable in negligence? More generally, is the Hand Formula economically misguided or inapplicable, at least in many real-world scenarios? Is the Restatement (Third) of Torts equally misguided or imprecise? Is orthodox economic analysis of negligence law predicated and contingent upon over-constrained and unrealistic assumptions? What are the prerequisites for the application of the conventional model of negligence adjudication? The principle issues examined include (i) Interacting precautions and multidimensional frameworks; (ii) Short-run versus long-run optimization of negligence puzzles; (iii) Pathdependencies and dynamic analysis of care measures; (iv) Non-strictly convex and discontinuous social costs functions; (v) Fluctuating and discontinuous social cost functions; (vi) Threshold effects in costs and efficiency functions; (vii) An expansive methodology to cost-benefit analysis in torts: degrees of freedom, mixed and tailored approaches

Ecological and molecular basis of differential resource use in populations of burying beetles Nicrophorus vespilloides

A fundamental prediction of ecological theory is that competition for resources can drive the evolution of specialised resource use. One way in which costly competition can be avoided is via individual specialisation, i.e., the persistence of specialised individuals within a generalist population that utilise a smaller subset of the entire population’s resource base. This could occur through the evolution of genetic morphs that specialise on different resources. Although correlational evidence exists that is consistent with this prediction, there is surprisingly little evidence that competition causes resource specialisation. Burying beetles are an ideal species for testing this prediction. They require the carcass of a small vertebrate such as a mouse or a songbird for reproduction, but carcasses can be unpredictably distributed and competition to secure ownership is correspondingly intense. For my PhD project in Prof. Rebecca Kilner’s lab, I tested whether this fierce competition for a carcass breeding resource has driven the evolution of beetles that specialise in breeding on dead mammals or dead birds. With field experiments at three different woodlands, I tested for evidence of a bias in the type of carcass favoured by Nicrophorus vespilloides and if this bias changed across the burying beetle season (from April to October each year). I found spatial and seasonal variation within each of the three populations in the preference for dead mice over dead birds. In two populations, beetles were more likely to be trapped upon dead mice overall, but were occasionally trapped with greater frequencies on dead birds. This trend was completely reversed for the third population, where beetles were more likely to be found in traps baited with dead birds than dead mice. The patterns of resource use I observed in the field could be due to adaptive partitioning of resource type within populations. To test this hypothesis, I measured the reproductive success of wild beetles induced to breed on different types of carrion. Although I found seasonal variation in beetle reproductive success on different types of carrion, I found no evidence that this resulted from variation in carrion preferences at the individual or population level. Instead, it is more likely to be explained by variation in individual quality. In collaboration with Dr Michael Sheehan at Cornell University, we sequenced females trapped on each type of carrion within all three woodlands, to test whether carrion specialisation was associated with genetic differences. Consistent with this possibility, we found divergence at ~ 50 loci in each of the three populations. Several of these loci were associated with olfaction and sensory-system development. In the lab, I set up replicate experimentally evolving populations of N. vespilloides which were bred either on mice or chicks for ~ 20 generations. I used these populations to test whether, in principle, beetles within a natural population could become divergently adapted to specialise on different types of carrion. I found no evidence to support this possibility, perhaps because there was insufficient standing genetic variation in the founding populations to select upon. However, there was some indication that the experimental populations might have diverged in cryptic ways that I did not measure directly. To understand the chemical basis for differential resource use, I carried out several analyses in collaboration with Prof. Patrizia d'Ettorre at Université Paris, using mass spectrometric techniques. We found little evidence that the volatiles emitted from carrion differ substantially between birds and mice. We also found little evidence that a beetle’s cuticular hydrocarbons predict the carrion it will be attracted to in nature. However, we did find seasonal variation in the cuticular hydrocarbon profiles of wild-caught beetles that could be related to beetle quality or breeding status. In short, although we found some evidence for differential carrion use within wild burying beetle populations and some indication that this is associated with genetic differences among individuals, some of this variation is also due to phenotypic variation in individual quality. While it is possible that carrion specialists could evolve within natural populations, we found no strong evidence to suggest that this happens routinely.I received financial support from St. John’s College, the Cambridge Philosophical Society, the Santander International Mobility Grant, the Gilchrist Educational Trust, the Leche Trust, the Department of Zoology as well as the University of Cambridge for my studies, research collaborations and during periods of hardshi

A Critique of Western Liberalism

In this thesis I draw attention to the connections between Western liberalism, particularly exemplified by the idea of liberal freedom, and (in)visible modalities of oppression. In chapter 1, I examine how the philosophical basis of liberalism allows it to serve as a mediator of oppression. In chapter 2, through a genealogical analysis, I trace out the link between liberalism and political economy. Here I focus on the imbrication between (neo-)liberalism, capitalism, and the production of subjectivity. My analysis aims at revealing the specific form of subjectivity engendered under the sign of liberal freedom. In chapter 3, I take up post 9/11 liberal rights discourse and demonstrate the ways in which it commits violence materially, ideologically, and discursively, against particular internal and external populations. Here I tie the present day Western liberal project to histories of colonialism, racism, and patriarchy. In chapter 4, as against liberal methodology, I put forth certain alternative methodological suggestions that would allow us to better comprehend the dynamics of oppression and work towards mitigating hierarchical structures of power that inevitably frame both local and global contexts

PEvoLM: Protein Sequence Evolutionary Information Language Model

With the exponential increase of the protein sequence databases over time, multiple-sequence alignment (MSA) methods, like PSI-BLAST, perform exhaustive and time-consuming database search to retrieve evolutionary information. The resulting position-specific scoring matrices (PSSMs) of such search engines represent a crucial input to many machine learning (ML) models in the field of bioinformatics and computational biology. A protein sequence is a collection of contiguous tokens or characters called amino acids (AAs). The analogy to natural language allowed us to exploit the recent advancements in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and therefore transfer NLP state-of-the-art algorithms to bioinformatics. This research presents an Embedding Language Model (ELMo), converting a protein sequence to a numerical vector representation. While the original ELMo trained a 2-layer bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTMs) network following a two-path architecture, one for the forward and the second for the backward pass, by merging the idea of PSSMs with the concept of transfer-learning, this work introduces a novel bidirectional language model (bi-LM) with four times less free parameters and using rather a single path for both passes. The model was trained not only on predicting the next AA but also on the probability distribution of the next AA derived from similar, yet different sequences as summarized in a PSSM, simultaneously for multi-task learning, hence learning evolutionary information of protein sequences as well. The network architecture and the pre-trained model are made available as open source under the permissive MIT license on GitHub at https://github.com/issararab/PEvoLM.Comment:

Success Strategies Being Implemented in Fresh Milk Supply Chains

Deregulation of the Australian dairy industry, and ensuing supermarket strategies are transforming the fresh milk supply chains. Factors such as increasing consumer awareness, concerns about food safety and environment, innovation, supply chain integration and rationalisation of supply base are adding momentum to this transformation. Milk processors in response to changing market expectations are getting proactive in their relationship with retailers across all aspects of business, innovating to generate sufficient returns from proprietary brands and strategically orienting themselves to develop a mixed customer portfolio and appropriate management structures to service that portfolio. Milk producers are expanding businesses to achieve production and cost efficiencies and strengthening contractual relationships on input and output side for a greater security.Livestock Production/Industries,

Preemption of State Law Claims Involving Medical Devices: Why Increasing Liability for Manufacturers is a Perilous but Pivotal Proposition

A circuit split regarding the preemptive scope of the Medical Device Amendments of 1976 (MDA) has widened over the past several years. The split encompasses both the circumstances under which the MDA implicitly preempts state law claims and the scope of the MDA\u27s express preemption provision. Manufacturers of medical devices regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) enjoyed many years of favorable rulings on the issue of federal preemption and deference to the primacy of FDA jurisdiction on monitoring or enforcement actions. However, the circuit split is reshaping the litigation landscape, and injured plaintiffs may rely on certain Circuit Court of Appeals\u27 cases that have ruled against federal preemption to buttress new or existing product liability claims. Device manufacturers are also changing their approach to tackle the large number of impending lawsuits. This Note proposes resolving the circuit split by condensing the scope of federal preemption and further increasing liability for manufacturers to an unprecedented scale such that the tort regime substantially supplements federal agency enforcement

Painless Scrotal Ulcers Become Something Unexpected: A Rare Case of Scrotal Calciphylaxis

Calciphylaxis is a rare vascular disorder that presents with painful skin necrosis due to calcium accumulation in skin and adipose tissue. Most commonly, cutaneous manifestations of calciphylaxis are seen on the buttocks, thighs and extremities. Very few cases have presented unconventional locations of these calcified eschars and ulcers such as the penis and scrotum. Risk factors for this disease include chronic kidney disease, hyperparathyroidism, long-term hemodialysis and diabetes. This case presents an atypical presentation of painless scrotal ulcers. A high degree of clinical suspicion in patients with ESRD on HD and T2DM is needed to effectively reach a diagnosis of calciphylaxis. The high rate of mortality and morbidity coincide with the risk factors associated with this condition. Early recognition of calciphylaxis in a patient with no pain despite the presence of ulcerations warrants a closer look into their comorbidities to identify this disease on the differential as it is critical to start treatment early to prevent devastating outcomes

Trends In Australian Fresh Milk Supply Chains

The completion of the dairy industry deregulation process in June 2000 is transforming the fresh milk and fresh milk products supply chains in Australia. This transformation is set in an environment where markets are getting more complex and competitive, consumers more discerning and conscious about food safety and public policy is more focused on environment related issues. Supply chains are becoming more integrated, and innovation in product, process and supply chains is revolutionising the way products are being produced, distributed and marketed (Fearne & David 1999). This paper is based on research which, following supply chain management literature, identifies the success strategies in the dairy industry supply chains in Australia. The enquiry seeks to understand the nature and shape of supply chains and the exchange relationship between supply and value chains. The fieldwork for the research involved semi-structured interviews at middle to senior management level in the retail, processing, production and input market of the dairy industry supply chains. The data was managed and analysed using software NVivo ver. 2.0, which assists in identifying major themes and relationships between concepts in data