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

‘Bordering’ Life: denying the right to live before being born

This study pushes the boundaries of the border thinking discourse to examine grassroots perceptions of foeticide together with how women are valued in a society that is underpinned by preference for a male child. Using a bordering conceptual framework, the paper re-visits the female positionality within epistemic locations of culture and societal values in both colonial and the modern Indian context. Grounded in primary research in the state of Haryana that exhibits lowest female to male ratio at birth in the country, the analyses indicate rigid or at best sluggish movements in social norms as the key driver for India’s declining sex ratio. The border thinking discourse further enables to situate the different aspects of female positionality and gender perceptions in the society into the specific domains of the bordering conceptual framework. This offers a novel approach to engage with social norms that border life and opportunities for females in the society

The “untouchable” who touched millions: Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, Navayana Buddhism, and complexity in social work scholarship on religion

Dr. B. R. Ambedkar was a twentieth century socio-political and religious reformer whose activities impacted millions of lives, especially among India’s Dalit community. This article illustrates his lifework and its lessons for social work scholarship on religion. Using the examples of Ambedkar and Navayana Buddhism, I discuss three sources of complexity for social work scholarship on religion: 1) religion may function as both oppressive and emancipatory; 2) religion is malleable, not monolithic; and 3) religion is situated in and interactive with contexts. I conclude with suggestions for how social work scholarship on religion may account for complexity

Introduction: reconsidering the region in India: mobilities, actors and development politics

In this introduction to a special issue on ‘Reconsidering the Region in India’, we aim to develop a synthetic and theoretically nuanced account of the multifarious ways in which the idea of region has been imbricated in diverse spatial, political, cultural and socio-economic configurations. We draw from various bodies of anthropological, geographic and historical literature to elaborate on three themes that we believe are central to understanding contemporary processes of region-making in India: trans-regional mobilities and connections; the actors who produce and perform regional imaginaries; and changing regional politics of development.IS

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