Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India. By Kanchan Chandra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 368p. $80.00. In the post-9/11 world where the “clash of civilizations” has moved beyond classroom debates to the public realm, it is refreshing, and challenging, to see a study that does not give ethnicity an easy ride. The title of this book is slightly misleading, though, because even while it concedes that appeals for political support on the basis of ethnic categories based on “race, caste, tribe or religion” (p. 2) are frequently made, sometimes with considerable success, it asserts that such tactics do not always succeed. When they do, it is not necessarily because of their putative appeal to sentiments but, instead, because both ethnic candidates and their supporters, rather than being swayed by appeals to their nonrational selves, are actually driven by sophisticated calculations of expected gain. Their utility calculus takes the size of the ultimate prize as well as the probability of winning it into account when they choose to align themselves with one set of politicians as opposed to another. Kanchan Chandra's parsimonious and general model explains why ethic parties in India, riding on Hindu or, for that matter, Tamil nationalism, succeed in some contexts but not in others.

Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India

Caste and development: Contemporary perspectives on a structure of discrimination and advantage

The caste system, its salient characteristics, and its subtle and more obvious transformations, coupled with its persistence and pervasiveness, have been central to studies of Indian society. This review provides a specific view of caste and its transformations with an emphasis on the socioeconomic or labor market dimension. Such a perspective is particularly crucial as one of the distinctive features of caste is the inheritance of occupations. A major argument of modernization has been the increasing movement away from occupational inheritance. This review traces the limited support for the “Orientalist” view of caste as essentially unchanging and focuses on the fluid nature of caste and its transformation in the economic domain.

Caste in Contemporary India: Flexibility and Persistence

Networks, Labour and Migration among Indian Muslim Artisans provides an ethnography of life, work and migration in a North Indian Muslim-dominated woodworking industry. It traces artisanal connections within the local context, during migration within India, and to the Gulf, examining how woodworkers utilise local and transnational networks, based on identity, religiosity, and affective circulations, to access resources, support and forms of mutuality. However, the book also illustrates how liberalisation, intensifying forms of marginalisation and incorporation into global production networks have led to spatial pressures, fragmentation of artisanal labour, and forms of enclavement that persist despite geographical mobility and connectedness.

By working across the dialectic of marginality and connectedness, Thomas Chambers thinks through these complexities and dualities by providing an ethnographic account that shares everyday life with artisans and others in the industry. Descriptive detail is intersected with spatial scales of ‘local’, ‘national’ and ‘international’, with the demands of supply chains and labour markets within India and abroad, with structural conditions, and with forms of change and continuity. Empirically, then, the book provides a detailed account of a specific locale, but also contributes to broader theoretical debates centring on theorisations of margins, borders, connections, networks, embeddedness, neoliberalism, subjectivities, and economic or social flux.

Networks, Labour and Migration among Indian Muslim Artisans

L'article analyse les usages ideologiques d'une education formelle dans une communaute de Chamar (anciens Intouchables ou Dalits) du nord de l'Inde, et notamment sur ses modes de deploiement dans le but d'ameliorer les individus et la communaute. L'education est en particulier necessaire pour offrir une echappatoire a l'identite chamar hereditaire, integree et pejorative. En outre, la recente mobilisation politique contre l'establishment parmi les basses castes dans le nord de l'Inde a donne un nouvel elan a ce changement d'identite. Pour comprendre la nature et l'etendue de la transformation sociale des Chamar, l'auteur explore les notions du passe, les aspects du rituel et les theories populaires de la socialisation. A partir de la, on voit emerger une substance sous-jacente, proteiforme, du « soi » et de la communaute, dans le cadre de laquelle la reconstruction du present est liee a celle du passe. Dans ce cadre, l'auteur montre que les effets de l'education sont contradictoires. D'une part, il y a la substance « eduquee », construite et partagee, qui agit comme une force unificatrice parmi les Chamar face au monde exterieur. D'autre part, l'education, en tant qu'experience individualisante, et les processus connexes de mobilite verticale desagregent le corps politique de la communaute, de sorte que l'effet « liberateur » de l'education se trouve incorpore dans la creation de nouvelles inegalites.

‘In the past we were a bit “Chamar”’: education as a self‐ and community engineering process in northern India

Orthography and Transliteration. Glossary of Selected Terms. Foreword. Acknowledgements 1. Chamar Modernity: Progressing into the Past 2. 'Today We Cannot Touch Anything': Reflections on the Crux of Identity and Political Economy 3. Ethnohistories Behind Local and Global Bazaars: Chronicle of a Weaving Community and its Disappearance 4. 'We Used to Live like Animals': A Self- and Community-engineering Process 5. Irrational Modernity? Religious Agency, Science and Spirits 6. Beyond the Vote: Politics as Sociality, Imagination and Identity 7. The Bourgeois Woman and the Half-naked One: Gendering Retro-modernity 8. The Politics of Indian Modernity Bibliography. About the Author. Index

Retro-modern India: Forging the Low-caste Self

Arjun Appadurai has argued that ‘the materiality of objects in India is not yet completely penetrated by the logic of the market’.1 However, the entry and the visibility of modern and contemporary Indian art into the circuits of the global art world increasingly challenge this argument. The story of modern and contemporary Indian art is one of the inscription of local objects and their ‘Indianness’ into the above circuits, with market value being created inthe process. If the globalisation of the art world provides a conceptual and material arena where objects are circulated, displayed and bought and sold through auction houses, exhibitions, biennales and art fairs, this article analyses an event that epitomises some of the forces at play in this arena: the contemporary art exhibition ‘The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today’ held in 2010 at the Saatchi Gallery, London. An artistic cum business instantiation of ‘India in Europe’—and one that challenges the visual and aesthetic canons ‘tradition...

Post-colonial Renaissance: 'Indianness', contemporary art and the market in the age of neoliberal capital.

In this article I analyse the history of weaving in a Chamar community on the outskirts of the city of Banaras, eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP). I explore the recruitment of rural Chamar men as apprenti...

Ethnohistories behind local and global bazaars: Chronicle of a Chamar weaving community in the Banaras region

This article draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in northern India on historically marginalised women's political participation. In particular, it examines women party activists in Dalit politics and the possibilities for the existence of feminist politics in the spaces analysed dense with masculine powers, caste identity-driven politicians and women's obstacles in building a political career for themselves. It is argued that these women present a theoretical impasse: labelling their practices as non-feminist would negatively connote the subjectivity and agency of those women who are engaged in different political worlds, even when they replicate dominant structures or embody traditions not exclusively based on the gendered individual as an actor or beneficiary of politics. Drawing from a comparison between women in Dalit politics and Hindu Right organisations, women activists are analysed through the lenses of their self-realisation trajectories, theirs and their political movements' relat...

Manuela Ciotti

Papers

‘In the past we were a bit “Chamar”’: education as a self‐ and community engineering process in northern India

Retro-modern India: Forging the Low-caste Self

Post-colonial Renaissance: 'Indianness', contemporary art and the market in the age of neoliberal capital.

Ethnohistories behind local and global bazaars: Chronicle of a Chamar weaving community in the Banaras region

At the margins of feminist politics? A comparative analysis of women in Dalit politics and Hindu Right organisations in northern India