THIS IS THE second issue of Environment &Urbanization focusing on rural–urban linkages. The first, which came out in 1998, described the reliance of many low-income households on both rural-based and urban-based resources in constructing their livelihoods. But the majority of the papers also underlined the fact that this straddling of the rural–urban divide is usually ignored by policy makers, and that the rigid division between “rural” and “urban” on the part of sectoral strategies actually makes life more difficult for low-income groups. The papers in this issue show many reasons why it has become even less realistic for development specialists to separate into rural and urban camps. The notion of a “divide” has become a misleading metaphor, one that oversimplifies and even distorts the realities. As these papers demonstrate, the linkages and interactions have become an ever more intensive and important component of livelihoods and production systems in many areas – forming not so much a bridge over a divide as a complex web of connections in a landscape where much is neither “urban” nor “rural”, but has features of both, especially in the areas around urban centres or along the roads out of such centres (what can be termed the peri-urban interface). In addition, much of the rural population depends on urban centres for access to secondary schools, post and telephones, credit, agricultural extension services, farm equipment, hospitals and government services. Of course, there are still conflicts between rural and urban interests. But there are also conflicts between many urban interests and the needs of most of the urban population. There are also significant synergies between many rural and urban interests. Some factors can be generalized as having a key role in the increase in the scale of rural–urban linkages. Decreasing incomes from farming, especially for small-scale producers who, because of a lack of land, water or capital, are unable to intensify and switch to higher value crops, means that increasing numbers of rural residents engage in non-farm activities that are often located in urban centres. For those who continue farming, direct access to markets is essential in the wake of the demise of parastatal marketing boards – and markets are also usually located in urban centres. Better access to markets can increase farming incomes and encourage shifts to higher value crops or livestock. Population growth and distribution patterns affect the availability of good agricultural land and can contribute to rural residents moving out of farming. With the expansion of urban centres, land uses change from agricultural to residential and industrial, and in the peri-urban interface these processes go hand in hand with transformations in the livelihoods of different groups – with the poorest often losing out. Perhaps more significant than the absolute availability of natural resources in relation to population numbers and density are the mechanisms which regulate access to, and management of, such resources. These include land tenure systems and the role of local government in negotiating the priorities of different users and in providing a regulatory framework which safeguards the needs of the most vulnerable groups while, at the same time, making provision for the requirements of economic and population growth. Such mechanisms continue to call for attention, to

The links between urban and rural development

Drawing on fourteen months' ethnographic field research in western Uttar Pradesh among educated Dalit (ex-untouchable) and Muslim young men, this article uncovers a crisis in educated people's access to salaried employment in rural north India. Against the grain of other studies of youth underemployment in postcolonial settings, we argue that educated Muslim and Dalit young men have reacted to their exclusion from secure white-collar occupations by embracing education as a form of embodied cultural distinction rather than seeking out “traditional,”“indigenous,” or “village-based” identities. Young men elaborate on education's value with reference to a system of differences between moral, civilized, developed “educated” people and immoral, savage, underdeveloped “illiterates.” Education has become a type of discursive “scaffold” upon which people display their ideas about morality, development, and respect. These narratives are compromised and contested and highlight differences in the ability of ...

“A Useless Thing!” or “Nectar of the Gods?” The Cultural Production of Education and Young Men's Struggles for Respect in Liberalizing North India

This article tracks the journeys made by the term ‘gender’ in India. From its beginnings in the 1970s as a feminist contribution to public discourse, destabilizing the biological category of ‘sex’, we find that gender has taken two distinct forms since the 1990s. On the one hand, gender as an analytical category is being used to challenge the notion of ‘woman’ as the subject of feminist politics. This challenge comes from the politics of caste and sexuality. On the other hand, gender is mobilized by the state to perform a role in discourses of development, to achieve exactly the opposite effect; that is, gender becomes a synonym for ‘women’. Thus, the first trend threatens to dissolve, and the second to domesticate, the subject of feminist politics. This article explores the implications of both journeys in terms of a feminist horizon.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Ffr.2008.46.pdf

sexuality, caste, governmentality: contests over ‘gender’ in India

The study was conducted with a community sample (N = 1118) of participants from three caste groups (Brahmins, Thevars, and Gounders) from villages that are reported to have an extremely male-biased sex ratio in Tamilnadu, India. Chastity, Machismo, and Caste Identity scales were used to assess cultural beliefs about gender and caste. The correlations among beliefs about caste identity, chastity, and machismo were significant for all three caste groups. There was a significant difference between Brahmins and the other caste groups in beliefs about caste, chastity, and machismo. There was a significant interaction among marital status and gender. Married men’s scores on chastity and machismo were higher than unmarried men for all caste groups. Thevars and Gounders were high on machismo and chastity. Women in all caste groups, particularly Thevar women, were high on caste identity. The implications of the findings for the study of gender and immigration are discussed.

Beliefs about Chastity, Machismo, and Caste Identity: A Cultural Psychology of Gender

This article argues that, contrary to received notions in Indian communities about women’s bodies and actions being the primary sites of male honor, women, too, hold men responsible for male honor and that men’s honor is also shaped by women’s discourses on men’s actions. Additionally, the forms of masculinities men seek to shape have to be considered contemporaneously with the forms of femininities that are emerging around them. Traditional male authority, which rested on the axes of men’s economic provisioning, control over wives, and violence against women, is eroding in newer social conditions in which women are more autonomous. In this fluid situation, men and women, respectively, use concepts of sexual control and understanding to describe and normalize an emerging form of masculinity that allows for men to claim honor when practicing nontraditional gendered actions.

Reinventing Honorable Masculinity: Discourses from a Working-Class Indian Community

Notions and practices of masculinity are often reconfigured in the wake of rapid economic and socio-political transformation. This paper explores this aspect in a south Indian village across two dimensions. Changes in local economy have seen challenges posed to the long dominant position of the upper caste mudaliars based on their control on land, over the dalits. On the other hand, the entry of large numbers of women into the industrial work-force has played its part in modifying the relationship between caste, class and gender.

J Jeyaranjan

Papers

Work, Caste and Competing Masculinities