Respect, status and domestic work: Female migrants at home and work

The transition from adolescence to adulthood is a complex and often contradictory process for female, ethnic minority, migrant strangers, moving as domestic workers to Delhi, India’s capital. Drawing on empirical work in a village in Jharkhand State, which has witnessed increasing migration of adolescent girls as domestic workers to Delhi over the last two decades, this paper highlights the experience of tribal domestic workers at home and at work. It points to their agency in dealing with the contradictions they face between earning incomes, acquiring markers of status and gaining respect across the urban and rural worlds they stride

Confronting poverty and educational inequalities: Madrasas as a strategy for contesting dominant literacy in rural Bangladesh

In a context of globalisation and the rapid expansion of low-paid ‘global’ jobs, formal schooling is no longer perceived as contributing to the acquisition of skills that are appropriate or even relevant to active engagement with the new opportunities. Based on empirical material from a village in Bangladesh, this paper explores the role of madrasa education in challenging the dominant paradigm of learning embedded in formal secular schooling. Despite charges of low quality and traditionalism, local narratives reveal how madrasa learning is used to negotiate and transform inequalities, both in material and social terms. Madrasa education is cheaper, and addresses issues of poverty, but the narratives also emphasise learning the Arabic language, seen to facilitate male overseas migration to the Gulf countries, a channel for upward social and economic mobility. In a context of global competition that supports individualism, a focus on character and morality as represented through an Islamic identity, alongside communitarian values, is seen as important for maintaining a degree of social cohesion and is hence socially valued. Reading and reciting the Quran are also viewed as essential traits for a woman, enabling her to appropriately socialise her children in the absence of her migrant husband. One finds here a simultaneous process of contestation and resistance, seeking successful occupational trajectories and social recognition for men, while at the same time contributing to the reproduction of gendered inequalities

Marriage, Violence, and Choice:Understanding Dalit women's agency in rural Tamil Nadu

Literature on Dalit women largely deals with issues of violence and oppression based on intersections of class, caste and gender. Women’s bodies, sexuality and reproductive choices are linked to the ideological hegemony of the caste-gender nexus in India, with marriage and sexual relations critical in maintaining caste boundaries. Often the ways in which women manipulate their multiple, interlinked identities as women, Dalits, workers and home-makers to resist control over their bodies (labour and sexuality), negotiate conjugal loyalty and love, and construct a sense of selfhood is missed in the analyses. Based on research in rural Tamil Nadu, I analyse in this paper Dalit women’s narratives that reflect multiple concerns and dilemmas about marital choice and violence, generating in the process a deeper understanding of agency, voice and gender relations, as fluid, dynamic, and intersecting in response to changing experiences, positionalities and subjectivities

Male ‘providers’ and female ‘housewives: A gendered co-performance in rural North India

Problems of measuring and public recognition of women’s work are not merely statistical. This article highlights the co-performance of stereotypical gender roles, where men and women jointly seek to establish the status of women as housewives rather than as farmers and of men as providers, thereby upholding a particular social order and simultaneously reinterpreting the meanings of existing norms to include new realities. Evidence from rural north India demonstrates the discernable disjunctures between social norms, narratives and action. Conscious of the growing insecurities faced by their husbands in the context of a rapidly changing economy, women try to allay rather than aggravate them. Instead of asserting their identities as ‘workers’, their strategies for gaining recognition and reciprocity from their husbands focus on reconstituting gender relations in the household, by expanding individual spaces and making incremental gains within the existing social order, rather than struggling for wider transformative changes

Infinite Product Exponents for Modular Forms

Recently, D. Choi obtained a description of the coefficients of the infinite product expansions of meromorphic modular forms over $\Gamma_0(N)$. Using this result, we provide some bounds on these infinite product coefficients for holomorphic modular forms. We give an exponential upper bound for the growth of these coefficients. We show that this bound is also a lower bound in the case that the genus of the associated modular curve $X_0(N)$ is $0$ or $1$.Comment: 11 page

Migration, Representations and Social Relations: Experiences of Jharkhand Labour to Western Uttar Pradesh

Studying a stream of migration from Jharkhand to western Uttar Pradesh (UP), this article focuses on the work and life experiences of migrant labour from tribal India. Based on an in-depth study of a Jharkhand village, alongside a briefer stint at the destination village in UP, it examines the micro-level nuances and complexity of migrant labour movements and their often unexpected and unrecognised social consequences, particularly, the renegotiation of class and gender relations at home and the destination. Apart from pointing to the deep interconnections between the relations of production and reproduction, it demonstrates how the use of distinct representations of work and life due to spatial distanciation contribute to renegotiating both labour relations and social identities