From "Book-view" to "Field-view": Social Anthropological Constructions of the Indian Village

The Indian village has often been seen as the ultimate signifier of "authentic native life", a place where one could see or observe the "real" India and develop an understanding of the way local people organised their social life. Though it was during the colonial period that the Indian society was first essentialised as a land of 'village republics', the later traditions of scholarship too have continued to treat village as the basic unit of the Indian society. This paper attempts a critical examination of the social anthropological studies of the Indian village that were carried out during the 1950s and 1960s. It focuses on the way village social life was constructed in these monographs and in what ways these constructions of the Indian village differed from and continued with the earlier constructions in the colonial ethnography.

Introduction. Towards a Sociology of India’s Economic Elite: Beyond the Neo-Orientalist and Managerialist Perspectives

Is there such a thing as an “Indian way of doing business”? Many publications, whether academic or not, indeed assert the singularity of Indians’ approach to business, often mobilizing an orientalist gaze and reifying the peculiar conception of business that supposedly prevails in the subcontinent. This special issue of SAMAJ proposes to move away from a focus on “doing business” in order to rather dedicate more attention to the role of economic elites in the production and reproduction of in..

Caste: experiences in South Asia and beyond

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Taylor and Francis in Contemporary South Asia on 03/07/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2017.1360246 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.This special issue of Contemporary South Asia seeks to capture the diversity and situatedness of the caste experience and deepen our understanding of caste dynamics and lives in the twenty-first century. In this Introduction, we highlight the continuing salience of caste, offer an overview of theoretical understandings of caste and foreground the importance of analysing caste in the present as a dynamic form of human relations, rather than a remnant of tradition. Following on from this, we highlight the increasingly global spread of caste and reflect on what happens to caste-based social relations when they traverse continents. In conclusion, we introduce the papers that make up this special issue. Taken together, they speak to changes in attitudes towards caste, but also the persistence of caste-based identities and dynamics in India and Britain. Even though the papers presented in this special issue work with the assumption of caste being a reality in and among the Indians, caste-like status hierarchies have existed in most, if not all, societies, and they continue to persist and intersect with other forms of differences/inequalities.Published versio

Religions, democracy and governance: spaces for the marginalized in contemporary India

The constitutional framework that structures the relationships between religion and politics in India reveals how the democratic and liberal concern for equal treatment and liberty for all has been pursued, along with a deep commitment to recognizing and protecting religious and cultural diversity. This paper emphasises the distinctiveness of the Indian conception of secularism. Experience of the working of Indian democracy over the last six decades reveals that competitive electoral politics compels parties to woo people from different communities. Even when a religious community has an organized religious political party that claims to speak on its behalf, not all sections of the community align themselves with that party. Other axes of identity, such as caste, divide religious communities. The spaces opened by democratic politics and the dynamics it creates need, therefore, to be factored into any discussion of religion and politics. Relationships between religion, politics and governance are further examined through case studies from the states of Punjab and Maharashtra of political mobilizations by marginalized groups within three religious communities: Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. Each of these mobilizations involves a cluster of castes and occupational groups in a region. They highlight the different ways in which religion and caste intersect and are implicated in the political process

Mapping faith-based development activities in contemporary Maharashtra, India

Despite apparent commitment to secular political and development models, over the last six decades in India, the presence of religion in the public sphere has expanded. Whilst religious organizations' involvement in welfare and charitable activities has a long history, the objectives of the religion reform movements and faith-based organizations that emerged during the colonial era were to strengthen their respective faith communities, drawing clearer boundaries between them, fighting against perceived 'social evils', and gaining legitimacy vis-a-vis the colonial state. The nationalist struggles and coming of independence significantly changed this social context. After independence, a state-centred development model, whilst it did not displace religious organizations from some of their traditional spheres of operation, deterred further growth in the numbers of FBOs. The new communitarian and religious consciousness that has emerged since the 1980s has, however, resulted in growing numbers of FBOs that participate in the so-called 'secular spheres', including education, health and community development. Little systematic information in available on the extent and characteristics of these organizations and their activities. This preliminary study therefore sought to 'map' the scale and characteristics of FBOs and to provide an overview of their engagement in development activities in contemporary India. Limited resources led to a focus on the cities of Pune and Nagpur in Maharashtra, an Indian state with a large Hindu majority and a number of religious minorities - a typical religious demography. Using a snowball sampling approach, and despite definitional difficulties and the contentious nature of the label 'faith-based' in India, 133 organizations were identified and interviewed. While this is not necessarily a representative sample, it reveals some of the organizations' key characteristics

Die indische Mittelschicht: Aufstrebende Kulturen in Politik und Wirtschaft

Die beiden Autoren befassen sich in ihrem Beitrag, der zuerst 2011 in der Zeitschrift "KAS-Auslandsinformationen" erschien, mit der politischen und wirtschaftlichen Bedeutung der indischen Mittelschicht. Es war die aufstrebende indische Mittelschicht, innerhalb derer in der Spätphase der britischen Kolonialherrschaft die Idee von Indien als moderner und demokratischer Nationalstaat geboren und artikuliert wurde. In den vergangenen beiden Jahrzehnten fand die indische Mittelschicht für ihren wirtschaftlichen Erfolg in der neuen, globalen Wirtschaft hohe Anerkennung. Ihre Größe hat zudem deutlich zugenommen, so dass sie als Grundlage wirtschaftlichen Wachstums und demokratischer Stabilität gelten kann

India: some reviews of literature related to religions and development

This review comprises of six essays aimed at the development of an inter-disciplinary framework for understanding religions and development in modern India. It was motivated by the increasing realization amongst social scientists that there is a need to take faith seriously in understanding the complexity of discourses of development, as promoted by the imperatives of democratic nation building in post-colonial India. Beginning, in the first chapter, with a contextualisation of the study of religion and development in post-colonial India, the review then moves to provide a discussion of the historical forces that shaped religion in the subcontinent; an analysis of the demographic aspects of religious communities in India; a consideration of the role of Roman-Catholic faith-based organizations (FBOs) in the provision of education; a sociological perspective on religion and development in North-east India; and, finally, an exploration of FBOs at the State level in Bihar