Showing papers in "Contributions to Indian Sociology in 2008"

‘Money itself discriminates’ Obstetric emergencies in the time of liberalisation

Abstract: Citizenship rights in India are being transformed under economic liberalisation. In this article, we use obstetric crises to provide an entry point to explore recent changes in people's access to health care and their understandings of their civic rights and entitlements. We draw on our research in rural Bijnor district (Uttar Pradesh) between 1982 and 2005. Over this period, the state has increasingly failed to provide a safety net of emergency obstetric care. Poor villagers seeking institutional deliveries in private facilities face either exclusion or indebtedness. Moreover, ‘consumers’ have no capacity to regulate the quality of private health care provision—but nor do the state or civil society organisations. Villagers critique the state's failure to provide the health care that they regard as a citizen's entitlement. Yet the health care market is accorded no greater legitimacy by its ‘customers’. Far from providing opportunities for empowerment, then, changes in health care provision serve to disemp...

Understanding acculturation among second-generation South Asian Muslims in the United States

Abstract: This article addresses an understudied area in studies of immigration—why patterns of acculturation of second-generation immigrants vary. To address this question, I draw on ethnographic research c...

Between encompassment and closure The ‘migrant’ and the citizen in India

Abstract: The figure of the citizen as it emerged with modernity also produced the ‘constitutive outsider’ denoting differential or layered inclusions. The legal-constitutional language of citizenship in India and the manner in which it has unfolded in practice shows that citizenship oscillates ambivalently between encompassment and closure, creating a differential layering of citizenship. While encompassment unfolds as a potential moment of liberatory change, closure, as a simultaneous differential experience of citizenship, creates a breach in the differentiated-universalism envisaged by the logic of encompassment. It is this oscillation and ambivalence which creates the ‘disturbed zones of citizenship’ that propel the category of the citizen out of a legal trapping into a concept whose realisation has its own logic and momentum. In order to demonstrate this, this article maps the amendments that have taken place in citizenship laws in India, sieving out in particular the category of the ‘migrant’, to identify mo...

'Paying back to society': Upward social mobility among Dalits

Abstract: This article discusses the way upward social mobility is subjectively experienced by Dalits in India. It proposes a phenomenological analysis of upward social mobility, looking particularly at the way in which upwardly mobile persons deal with the tension between their group of origin and their new group. The main argument is that a moral imperative to ‘pay back to society’ structures the experience of a sharp change in class and status. The specificity of the experience of upward social mobility in the Indian context seems to be that it is not characterised by a tendency to forget the group of origin in order to better acculturate to the new group, nor is it characterised by feelings of ‘being ashamed’ of the group of origin, and even less by a sentiment of ‘guilt’ about abandoning this group. On the contrary, the perpetuation of a link with the group of origin (i.e., the caste group) seems to completely shape the experience of mobility. After showing that the basis of this particular ethos of mobility i...

Narrative absence : An 'Untouchable' account of Partition migration

Abstract: The core of symbolic communities, like the community of Partition migrants, is formed through the discursive ownership of historical experiences—for instance, the loss of human lives, personal prop...

‘We work together, we eat together’: Conviviality and modernity in a company settlement in south Orissa

Abstract: Among themselves and within their families, workers of a public sector power project in Orissa, constantly and intentionally, violate the restrictions on inter-caste contact that they perceive as prevailing in their various villages of origin. Subscribing to the teleology of modernisation, the workers dichotomise the industrial settlement and the village as ‘modern’ and ‘backward’ sites, respectively. Their withdrawal into these ‘backward’ villages for weddings and other rituals is explained with reference to the ‘outside’, peripheral character of the settlement. I argue that this conceptualisation hints at a spatial limitation of the institution of caste, and has, at the very least, facilitated the creation of a ‘modern’, caste-negating working class.

The caste of the nation: Untouchability and citizenship in South India

Abstract: Following the devastating tsunami that ravaged parts of the South Indian coast in December 2004, there were reports of continuing caste discrimination against India's Scheduled Caste (Dalit) commun...

Human rights movements in India: State, civil society and beyond

Abstract: This article is an attempt to trace the various phases of the human rights movement (HRM) and the assumptions underlying each of them in terms of the inter-relationships between the state, civil society and democracy. The 1970s witnessed the first phase of the HRM— the ‘civil liberties phase’—working within the framework of state-civil society complementarity. HRM along with emphasising the autonomy of institutions also struggled to recover a ‘rights based civil society’, where all citizens could have access to fundamental rights. The 1980s were marked by a shift to the second phase—the ‘democratic rights phase’—with a new state versus civil society framework. During this phase, the HRM made efforts to construct civil society as a pure ‘realm of freedom’ that stood squarely outside the state and consisted of various militant and radical social movements. Towards the end of the 1990s, the third phase—the ‘human rights phase’—reconstituted itself on a new civil society versus political society framework. Th...

Aadamkhor Haseena (The Man-Eating Beauty) and the anthropology of a moment:

Abstract: In this article I trace certain related trajectories: the emergence and possible disappearance of the cinematic form of the soft-porn ‘morning show’; the waxing and waning arrangements of certain spaces in the city of Delhi, in particular cinema halls in Old Delhi; and lives enmeshed in this unstable itinerant matrix of cinema and the city. In confronting these situations of permanent mobility, we are led to the conceptual issue of time. Do the hands of a clock describe units of experience? Does time privilege movement or rest? How do we understand time in terms of both materiality and subjectivity? How do cinematic affects relate to durational experience? I address these questions by setting out the anthropology of a ‘moment’ as a way of understanding durational experience. The moment is conceptualised in two distinct but related forms: as a chronograph (that tracks trajectories of movement and matter) and as a crystal (that follows varying states of mind). Understanding the issue of time as a philosophi...

4 January 2008 Contributions to Indian Sociology at fifty

Abstract: In this article I try to answer three questions. First, with what objective did Louis Dumont (situated in Paris) in association with David Pocock (his successor as Lecturer in Indian Sociology at Oxford) launch Contributions to Indian Sociology fifty years ago in 1957? Second, why did he bring the periodical publication to a close in 1966? Third, what led some of us to start a ‘New Series’ in the following year (1967)? These are factual questions to which factual answers can be given. Apart from mentioning the significance of Contributions for my own work, I do not make any attempt to evaluate Dumont’s project and refrain from both praise and criticism, agreement and disagreement. Before we may do any of this, it is imperative that we get the facts of the case right. I do, however, go beyond mere narration of the facts and clarify certain points about which serious misunderstandings are regrettably widespread. I begin with a discussion of Dumont’s theoretical orientation from which he derived the approach that he recommended for the study of Indian civilisation and the societies that comprise it. In the next section of the article, I focus on the contents of the nine numbers of Contributions which came out between 1957 and 1966. I conclude this section with the reasons for the closure of the original series. Finally, in the fourth section, I talk briefly about the considerations that led to the decision to continue the publication of Contributions as a new series with redefined objectives. Some remarks are made on the editorial steering of the course of the journal.

Islamic ‘reform’, the nation-state and the liberal subject The cultural politics of identity in Kachchh, Gujarat

Abstract: This article argues that transnational Islamic movements provide discursive fields within which Muslim women in Kachchh, Gujarat, are able to contest prescriptive notions of work, the body, honour and piety. It reflects on the articulation of collective identity and its gendered dimensions, as manifested in a conjuncture of global discourses—Islamic reform as well as NGO-led political–economic emancipation. While neo-liberal development discourse is rooted in the philosophy of the liberal, autonomous, modern subject, movements of religious revival are often thought of as epitomising the non-liberal, ‘traditional’ subject. I suggest that the dichotomies of modernity/tradition or liberal/non-liberal are productively disrupted when one examines how these discourses become entangled with one another to produce subjectivities that are somehow indebted to both, as a new space opens up for women to selectively redefine choices that are responsive to both local and global conditions. The article also uses this et...

Towards a radical sociology of religion

Abstract: At the beginning of the 20th century Max Weber and the other founders of sociology believed that, in the face of the onward march of rationalisation, known religion as a constitutive element of modern society was being superceded. And yet, writing at a time when the sociology of religion was of central concern (and not a sub-discipline), Weber felt constrained to observe: ‘The modern man is in general, even with the best will, unable to give religious ideas a significance for culture and national character which they deserve’ (Weber 1930: 183). However, concerned more with the sui-generic character of society than with individual initiatives, his contemporary, Emile Durkheim was confident that even as known religions such as Christianity and Judaism declined, new religious forms would inevitably arise in modern society, for ‘there is something eternal in religion that is destined to outlive the succession of particular symbols in which religious thought has clothed itself’ (1995: 429). Through much of the 20th century, most scholars showed little interest in such prognoses. As Geertz (2005: 10) put it recently, the study of religion was ‘pretty much of a backwater’ among anthropologists and sociologists, and the second half of the 20th century saw ‘the secularization

Control and access: The everyday dimensions of property

Abstract: This article looks at access to and control over property and its complex inter-linkages with kinship and gender. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork among Tamil migrants in two localities of Delhi, a resettlement colony and a middle-class colony, between 1996 and 1998. The Tamils belonged to a wide range of castes and had been in Delhi for periods ranging from a few years to several decades. The study expands the conventional understanding of property by employing the concept of ‘symbolic capital’. Property, thus, includes not only material assets such as houses and jewellery, but also other resources like education and kin networks. Further, the study centrally examines access to and control over these resources in an everyday context rather than ownership, which can be merely nominal. In turn, rights to property shape both kinship relationships and gender practices in Tamil society.

For a Sociology of India: Satish Saberwal in conversation with Nandini Sundar and Amita Baviskar:

Abstract: As part of an ongoing engagement with the sociology of India, CIS will profile the life and work of senior sociologists. This interview was conducted over three sessions at Professor Saberwal's home, on 6, 11 and 26 August 2008. We also requested Mrs. Edith Saberwal to contribute to the discussion regarding their personal life. The interviews were laced throughout with Professor Saberwal's characteristic humour—which unfortunately, we cannot fully reproduce here. We thank Professor Saberwal for answering all our questions patiently. We are very grateful to him and his daughter Gayatri Saberwal for carefully correcting the transcript.

Roots of partition

Abstract: ‘There is a good deal common between people in India and Pakistan. Why then did we have the Partition?’ (p. ix). This was a question that Saberwal was asked by a student of Punjab University, Lahore, while on a visit in 2000. Ostensibly, the book under consideration is a response to that query. Or then again, it is more: a culmination, perhaps of his search for the ‘roots of crisis’ in contemporary India. Looking back, it seems evident that the reports of large-scale caste and communal violence, extensive mobilisations of labouring people in rural and urban areas, widespread gender violence, several pogroms and assassinations from the end of the 1970s onwards were all disturbing manifestations of recurring civil disorder sans a transformative agenda, and ominous signs of an intensifying political crisis. In an earlier work, Saberwal had invoked James Manor in identifying the nature of the crisis: