Contemporary South Asia 

About: Contemporary South Asia is an academic journal published by Taylor & Francis. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Caste. It has an ISSN identifier of 0958-4935. Over the lifetime, 1045 publications have been published receiving 9856 citations.

Talking back! Empowerment and mobile phones in rural Bangladesh: a study of the village phone scheme of Grameen Bank

Abstract: The study assesses the efficacy of the Village Phone (VP) scheme in ameliorating the ‘information poverty’ of the villages that have obtained access to mobile phones in Bangladesh. More specifically, the study has sought to describe the ways in which the VP is operated, how the service is utilised and by whom, and the impacts of the service in terms of economic and social empowerment of individuals (especially phone ladies) and communities. The study found that at the individual level, the VP has indeed contributed significantly to income generation. Socially, it has given a new status and image to those women who are getting Grameen Bank's support to start this venture both at the family and community levels. Moreover, at the community level, it has narrowed gaps between cities and villages by enhancing more communication between family members. Economically, it has increased business transactions and dissemination of information.

Pirate modernity: Delhi's media urbanism

Abstract: Pirate modernity: Delhi's media urbanism, by Ravi Sundaram, Abingdon, Routledge, 2010, 228 pp., ISBN 978-81-89643-07-2 In the preface of the book, Ravi Sundaram writes, ‘(r)ather than media analysi...

Jugaad as Systemic Risk and Disruptive Innovation in India

Abstract: Jugaad is the latest/trend in management and business reports of India's awakening. The term refers to the widespread practice in rural India of jury-rigging and customizing vehicles using only available resources and know-how. While the practice is often accompanied by indigence and corruption in traditional interpretations, the notion of jugaad has excited many commentators on India's emergence into the global economy in its promise of an inimitable Indian work ethic that defies traditional associations of otherworldliness and indolence – widely reported as inherent in India's society and culture. Jugaad has been identified across India's economy in the inventiveness of call-centre workers, the creativity of global transnational elites, and in the innovativeness of Indian product designs. The term has seen an unprecedented growth in popularity and is now proffered as a tool for development and a robust solution to global recession. Jugaad is now part of a wider method for working within resource constra...

From the ruins of empire: the revolt against the West and the remaking of Asia

Abstract: Often in his non-fiction writings, Pankaj Mishra has underlined the influence of colonialism and western modernity in structuring the world from which he gained his intellectual consciousness. Like...

For the record: on sexuality and the colonial archive in India

Abstract: Even as the notion of an exhaustive and unchanging archive has been debunked in recent years, archival research itself has witnessed renewed popularity. Anjali Arondekar’s For the record is an attempt to assess afresh the concept, function, status, procedures, and facility of the archive in setting, settling and serving different politico-discursive claims and formations. According to Arondekar, ‘the archive has emerged as the register of epistemic arrangements, recording in its proliferating avatars the shifting tenor of debates around the production and ethics of knowledge’ (2). However, archival studies remain informed by one form or another of the repressive hypothesis. That is to say, archival scholarship is willy-nilly impelled by the desire for legitimisation in the present through revelation and recuperation of that which has been deemed to have been erased, excluded, ignored or traduced in the past. In its scrutiny of sexuality’s connections with the colonial archive, For the record works on other premises to open new lines of inquiry. ‘Rather than render sexuality’s relationship to the colonial archive through the preferred lens of historical invisibility (which would presume that there is something about sexuality that is lost or silent and needs to ‘come out’),’ it ‘pursues the questions of how sexuality is made visible in the colonial archive and of how this process paradoxically discloses the very limits of that visibility’ (3). Arondekar calls this a different ‘archival romance’ and argues that ‘[t]he critical challenge is to imagine a practice of archival reading that incites relationships between the seductions of recovery and the occlusions such retrieval mandates’ (1). For the record has four main chapters in addition to a preface, a theoretical introduction and a brief conclusion. The chapters explore the (con)figurations of sexuality in the colonial archive in variously constitutive anthropological, legal, literary and pornographic documents and writings between 1843 and 1920. More specifically, they focus one each on Richard Burton’s missing report on male brothels in Karachi, the Khairati sodomy case of 1884 which did not result in a prosecution, India rubber dildos and the new colonial economies of pleasure and profit they were part of, and the many-layered mutiny stories of Rudyard Kipling. Since Arondekar is concerned to understand ‘the processes of subjectification made possible (and desirable) through the very idiom of the archive’ (3), her study throughout engages with both the archive’s special capacity to license modern sexuality/subjectivity as well the nature of the archive itself that is produced by such self-recovering, truth-b(e)aring politico-epistemological practices. For the record is a dense dissertation on the politics of archival studies vis-à-vis discourses on modern sexuality. Its elaboration of the multiply coded status and Contemporary South Asia Vol. 20, No. 4, December 2012, 533–549