Hermit Village or Zomian Republic? An update on the political socio-economy of a remote Himalayan community

Hidden in a remote valley in Himachal Pradesh, the Village of Malana appears as a self-governing egalitarian community cosmologically committed to evading external influence. With its own system of village government and its own court for settling disputes, Malana enjoys a measure of village autonomy under its powerful tutelary deity, Jamlu. This article asks whether James Scott’s concept of ‘nonstate space’ can be extended to this isolated corner of the Indian Himalaya. Might Malana be a surviving example of what Pierre Clastres termed ‘a society against the state’? Why would the people of Malana opt for self-imposed isolation and how have they been able to maintain it? This paper follows the attempt made by Colin Rosser in the early 1950s to undertake ethnographic fieldwork in ‘the hermit village of Malana’. Reviewing Rosser’s efforts to solve the mystery of Malana’s physical, social and economic isolation, this paper considers changes in the society and economy of rural India and also in the ways in which anthropology as a discipline has approached these topics. Updating the story to the present permits a re-evaluation of Rosser’s finding as we consider how change has come to Malana village

Calcutta Botanic Garden and the colonial re-ordering of the Indian environment

This article examines three hand-painted colour maps that accompanied the annual report of the Calcutta Botanic Garden for 1846 to illustrate how the Garden’s layout, uses and functions had changed over the previous 30 years. The evolution of the Calcutta Botanic Garden in the first half of the nineteenth-century reflects a wider shift in attitudes regarding the relationship between science, empire and the natural world. On a more human level the maps result from, and illustrate, the development of a vicious personal feud between the two eminent colonial botanists charged with superintending the garden in the 1840s

The Teacher, the Activist, and the Maulvi: Emancipatory visions and insurgent citizenship among Gujjars in Himachal Pradesh

Exploring the intersection of state, religion, and ethnicity, this article considers the opportunities for individual and collective advancement available to Muslim Gujjars in Chamba district of Himachal Pradesh. Following the lives of three prominent members of the community—a teacher, a political activist, and a maulvi—it considers their respective orientations to the state and their relationships with their fellow Gujjars, to illustrate the different ways in which Gujjars have sought to transcend their marginal and subordinated position as an ethnic and religious minority. With state-promoted schemes of affirmative action and reservation offering only limited opportunities for social and economic advancement, we see how Gujjars have responded to their continued marginalization, first through political mobilization as an ethnic group and, more recently, through the establishment of Islamic educational institutions and association with Tablighi Jama'at. This leads to an evaluation of the emancipatory potentials and contradictions of insurgent citizenship when mobilized around specific aspects of ethnic and religious identity. Against a backdrop of economic liberalization and accompanying shifts in civil society, I show how the distribution of rewards that derive from strategies of assimilation, engagement, and withdrawal are structured in particular ways, including by class and gender

From labour contractors to worker-agents: Transformations in the recruitment of migrant labourers in India

This article examines the circumstances in which the tasks performed by professional labour contractors may be passed on to worker-agents. It does so by critically engaging with the experience of migrant workers from the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand as they travel to work in the Peermade tea belt in the South Indian state of Kerala. Specifically, we identify shifts in economic and political contexts that have permitted these functions to pass from labour contractors to workers-agents and from a Sardari (top-down) to a Ristedari (kinship based) system. Outlining the functions of the labour contractor—as bridge, broker and buffer—the article details the complex processes and the series of negotiations that occur during the transition from labour contractor to worker-agent-led recruitment and the implications of this shift for labour relations in the production setting. We conclude by calling for further consideration of the ‘worker-agent’ as a key emerging figure in understanding the contemporary transformations in the reproduction of footloose migrant labour, which may have larger ramifications for other contexts in South Asia and beyond

Global partnerships on paper and in practice: Critical observations from inside a Global Challenge Research Fund capacity-development project

This article describes the bureaucratic processes required to establish and manage a single international capacity-development project that brought together a funding council (AHRC), UK University (SOAS University of London) and universities and other research organisations in Myanmar and Ethiopia. Drawing from ethnographic critiques of the planning and audit practices employed in international development and in the UK University sector, we track the formal certification of partnership as enacted through due diligence and contracts, budgets and timeframes, and reconciliations and reporting. These practices point to pervasive assumptions about capacity transfer and the unequal basis of international research coalitions spanning the Global North and Global South. In this article, we challenge these assumptions by documenting how the allocation of capacity is constrained in hierarchies of time and space. For equitable partnership arrangements to be achieved, we recommend that capacity development be considered a long-term exchange that flows from mutual reflection and learning from one another

International Research Coalitions: UK universities learning to be better partners

In this learning paper on partnership we explain the Global Research Network on Parliaments and People (GRNPP) experience of managing international research coalitions. Our Deepening Democracy Programme was launched in 2017 in response to the pervasive perception that researchers and research organisations located in the Global South have limited capabilities. We recognised that this was misguided. While resources for research and higher education may be limited in the Global South, and are unevenly distributed between and within nations, there are no limits to the talent, skill and commitment found in any place. This is why when we set up grant-making within this programme and encouraged Myanmar and Ethiopian scholarsto apply as Principal Investigators. Evidence that our approach works, and that scholars in the Global South produce outstanding work if in control of their own research, can be found on our partners’ research pages and in this output library. We have been reflecting on the partnerships involved in this programme. In this paper we are addressing the question: – how can UK universities be better partners in the context of our neo-colonial world? What kind of decision-making, ethics, financial systems, technical support and communication are needed? Richard Axelby, Emma Crewe, Sewit Hailesalassie, Jas Kaur, Myat Thet Thitsar and Bethel Worku-Dix outline how we have been managing and learning about grant-making, partnership and evaluation over 4 years. We also offer principles and practical recommendations about how to engage in ethical grant-making and partnership

Pastures new : pastoral development and the determination of grazing access in the Indian Himalayas

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

How Gaddi Vote their Identity: political representation, participation, and citizenship in Lower Chamba

This article uses decisions about voting, including the decision not to vote, as a prism to consider what it means to be Gaddi in 21st-century Himachal Pradesh (H.P.). While the results of polls can tell us how people voted, they say little about the background to electoral decision-making—the reasoning by which interests, identities, and ideologies are compressed into the simple choice between candidates. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in rural Chamba district, the article tracks participation in elections for the H.P. State Legislative Assembly and a local Panchayat from 2000 to 2022. The paper concludes by presenting electoral contests as arenas in which the performance of citizenship is entangled with shifting forms of identity combining the social, administrative, and political