Showing papers in "Contributions to Indian Sociology in 2014"

Book Review: India's middle class: New forms of urban leisure, consumption and prosperity by Christiane Brosius. New Delhi: Routledge, 2010.

Abstract: This book examines several aspects of India’s post-liberalisation cultural transformation, particularly the highly visible modes of consumption that have come to symbolise the growing and increasingly assertive ‘middle class’. Based on fieldwork carried out mainly in Delhi between 1997 and 2007, the study reflects Christiane Brosius’s earlier interests in visual representations by documenting, through photographs as well as text, some of the new practices and forms of religion, retail, urban public culture, housing, sociality and self-cultivation that have transformed metro cities such as Delhi and Bangalore so dramatically since the 1990s.

T-shirts and tumblers Caste, dependency and work under neoliberalisation in south India

Abstract: This article explores the variegated nature of processes of neoliberalisation and their diverse impacts on relations of caste and dependency in rural India. Focusing on the rural hinterland of Tiruppur, a major industrial cluster in Tamil Nadu, south India, the article examines the ways in which neoliberal regimes insert themselves in the region and combine, coexist or clash with existing institutional regimes of power. It documents the highly differentiated and unpredictable effects neoliberalisation has on the lives of villagers who have become directly or indirectly engulfed by its processes, paying particular attention to the uneven impacts on local landscapes of capitalist production and on rural relations of caste and dependency. The article examines rural transformations through the contrasting experiences of Dalits in two villages that became connected to the Tiruppur industry. While in one village, Dalits gained access to the urban industry, in the other, they remained disconnected from urban garment jobs due to persistent relations of debt bondage and unfree labour. It is argued that processes of industrial neoliberalisation do not lead to linear transformations in caste relations and social inequalities. Rather, the relevance and meaning of caste are transformed in uneven, and often even contrasting ways, depending on how particular localities are integrated into wider institutional regimes of power and rule. Processes of neoliberalisation unleash powerful encounters between old structures of power and new regimes of rule, and generate new configurations that defy prediction and expectation.

The anthropology of neoliberal India: An introduction

Abstract: This special issue brings together ethnographic accounts exploring local and regional effects of transformations in India that social scientists have described under the heading of ‘neoliberalism’ (Alternative Survey Group 2007; Oza 2006; Patnaik 2007). Chief among these transformations in India are the economic restructuring processes after 1991 when the Government of India launched far-reaching policies of economic liberalisation, arguably under the pressure of global financial institutions. Acknowledging this significant turning point, we aim to highlight, however, the variegation with which neoliberal ideas, policies and technologies are dispersed and experienced among different segments of the population. In doing so, the authors of this special issue pursue an ethnographically informed ‘grounding’ of large neoliberal transformations. In Michael Burawoy’s terms, such grounding is about ‘extending out from the micro-processes to macro forces, from the space–time rhythms of the site to the geographical and historical context of the field’ (2000a: 27).

Structural contingencies and untimely coincidences in the making of neoliberal India: The Kandla Free Trade Zone, 1965–91

Abstract: This article introduces the concepts of untimely coincidences of modes of production and structural contingencies in global capitalism to the study of neoliberalism in India and beyond. I argue that these concepts are crucial to revive a historical anthropology, which shows that neoliberalism is one of several possible manifestations of capitalism, past and present. The analytical gain of such a revised view on neoliberalism is then exemplified by a historical–anthropological account of the development of India’s first special economic zone, the Kandla Foreign Trade Zone, from 1965 to the late 1980s. Based on these findings, I conclude my plea for conceptual changes in anthropology’s approach to periodising national and global histories of neoliberalism.

The politics of dispossession in an Odishan steel town

Abstract: The article discusses how industrial workers in Rourkela, a steel town in Odisha, experience the large-scale job losses entailed by the recent restructuring of India's first public sector steel plant. In this article, I argue that this manpower reduction presents a moment of what Harvey (2003) calls accumulation by dispossession and which he considers as the hallmark of neoliberal capitalism. Importantly, I add to Harvey's analysis that this process is experienced, and acted upon, in significantly different ways by different fractions of the town's steel workforce. Taking a long-term historical perspective, I will show that these differences are rooted in the politics that the postcolonial regional state of Odisha has pursued in the town since the 1950s. In methodological terms, the argument put forward in this article follows Burawoy's (2000) call for an ethnographic 'grounding' of global processes such as neoliberalisation that pays attention to how such processes shape and are shaped by local histories of dispossession and resistance against it.

Pastoral predicaments: The Gujars in history

Abstract: This article investigates the growing marginality of pastoralism using the Gujar agitation of 2007–08 in India as a point of entry. Although the process began with colonialism, pastoralism is currently witnessing a crisis in postcolonial India as the consequence of a progressively sedentarising state, intensification of commercialised agriculture and urbanisation. The Gujars of Rajasthan have made claims for recognition demanding scheduled tribe (ST) status to counter inequality. Clearly, this inequality has been historically constituted. Hence, the play of inequality and resistance is addressed through an examination of two clusters of events around the years 2007 and 1857. Currently, the state defines tribes in terms of indices that have been subject to neither review nor public debate. It is not only the vision of the state that is compromised by colonial anthropology and history, but also that of civil society and community. Tragically, communities are forced to format their histories in terms of an a...

Islamic deshbhakti: Inscribing a Sufi shrine into the Indian nation-space

Abstract: This article presents an analysis of an iconographical series that has recently emerged in video compact discs (VCDs) devoted to Sufi Chishtiyya shrines (dargahs) in central and north India. This s...

Intimate gifts and ‘bad’ deaths Reflections on organ transplants, state and society in Gujarat

Abstract: This article is an ethnographic perspective on organ donation in the western Indian state of Gujarat. It suggests that debates around organ donation—from the perspective of religion as well as state—become critical to an understanding of not just how a global discourse translates into a local cultural context, but also how it configures specific cultural subjectivities around religion, death and violence. Through a discussion on how organ donation is framed by law and society as a desirable social good in general and as dan in particular, the article concludes that the emergent public discourse on organ transplant finds an ‘elective affinity’ with Hindu and Jain debates on death, rendering itself as a discourse that excludes Gujarat’s Muslims. Given the violence that configures recent Gujarati Muslim experiences of death, the article asks what the social consequences of organ donation discourses are for those who cannot share in the discursive construction of organ donation as a celebratory exercise in gi...

From monopoly power to deregulated markets The travails of a state-owned firm (ITI Ltd)

Abstract: India’s policymakers justified the introduction of neoliberal economic reforms by advancing one of the main grounds that it would help optimise the performance of state-controlled enterprises. This article argues, on the contrary, that the reform process had an extremely deleterious effect on these enterprises’ operations. Based on a detailed ethno-historical case study of ITI, a large public sector manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, the article highlights the contradictory nature of neoliberalisation. Even as public sector companies were exposed to new rules of competition, they continued to be subjected to a web of bureaucratic constraints. The article then proceeds to contest the official narrative of the transition from a command economy to a market economy as a gradualist and pain-free process. For public sector managers and workers, in fact, the rupture with the past proved to be a precipitous and fairly violent experience. The article concludes by examining a key strategic measure adopte...

Karamchedu and the Dalit subject in Andhra Pradesh

Abstract: The modern history of the Dalit movement in Andhra Pradesh involves significant experiences relevant to the sociology of caste and Dalit studies than is often reflected in existing scholarship. At ...

Situating marriage payments Bride-price and dowry among the Bedias of north India

Abstract: There are very few contextual accounts of bride-price payments among north Indian communities. Despite the paucity of ethnographic data, assumptions regarding transitions in the practice are commonplace. This article discusses marriage payments among the Bedia community within the broader context of their survival upon familial prostitution and focusses upon how they construe bride-price and dowry, both practiced under varied circumstances. I argue that Bedia marriage payments do not neatly fit into the prevailing assumptions regarding transitions from dowry to bride-price and are constructed differently under different conditions. The internal variations and contradictions in these constructions are interpreted in light of the social location and practices of Bedias.

Sociological traditions: Contexts, claims and practices

Abstract: Students of sociology are likely to come across synoptic accounts of the ‘Lucknow School’ in courses relating to the growth and development of sociology in India. Most, if not all, may find names such as Radhakamal Mukerjee, D.P. Mukerji and D.N. Majumdar, the ‘three Ms’ as T.N. Madan (2013: 3) calls them in his recently edited volume entitled Sociology at the University of Lucknow: The First Half Century (1921–1975),1 somehow familiar. This familiarity, though, does not presuppose any serious understanding on their part of the substantive works of the Lucknow sociologists. Preliminary ideas about Radhakamal Mukerjee’s work in the field of social ecology, or D.P. Mukerji’s stress on the study of tradition, or D.N. Majumdar’s ethnographic work among tribes, or A.K. Saran’s repartee to Louis Dumont, is all that one can generally expect. Given the general amnesia surrounding the works of the pioneers at Lucknow, Madan’s volume is a noteworthy contribution to the recent attempts at retrieving

‘Our own two hands create our destiny’: Narrative patterns and strategies in male sādhus’ personal stories

Abstract: This article describes and analyses the personal narrative performances of male Hindu renouncers (sādhus) in the north Indian state of Rajasthan. Based on 10 years of ethnographic research with sādhus in three districts of Mewar, south Rajasthan, it considers the telling of life stories as a ‘narrative strategy’ through which male sādhus not only interpret and experience their lives, but also give voice to the complexity of asceticism as practiced in north India. To that extent, this article addresses the narrative strategies that male sādhus draw on in the telling of their life stories and the ways in which those rhetorical strategies are gendered. On the basis of the data presented, the article examines sādhus’ emphases on the interrelated themes of action, effort and practice as central to men’s experiences of renunciation. It further analyses male sādhus’ use of illness and healing as complementary narrative motifs with which they construct their renunciant authenticity and challenge common perception...

A market for dead things : the Gujari Bazaar and the politics of urban reformation in Ahmedabad

Abstract: This thesis traces the inclusion of the Gujari Bazaar into Ahmedabad’s (located in Gujarat, India) most ambitious development project to-date, the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project (SRFDP), and maps the contentious politics of reformation engendered by that process. By early 2013, when I began my fieldwork, this modernist riverfront renewal initiative had displaced all of the self-established settlements along the Sabarmati River’s narrow banks, an estimated 13,000 homes. Estimates of evicted homes remain highly contentious. Many scholars cite estimates around 14,000 (Desai 2012: 49). During an interview, the current Director of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation Guruprasad Mohapatra estimated the number of evictions around 13,000. Meanwhile the official estimate done by a Mumbai-based Non- Governmental Organization (NGO) estimated 12,000. Despite the number of homes, others have estimated that these structures housed close to 40,000 families (Mathur 2012: 64). Some were relocated, but the spike in evictions produced an uncertain and skeptical environment for remaining activities. The Gujari Bazaar, a weekly “informal” market often claimed to be 600- years old, operated on the eastern bank of the river near Ahmedabad’s “Old City” area (located adjacent to Ellis Bridge and around the Mahalaxmi Mandir) throughout these evictions. Fearing removal, representatives of the Gujari Bazaar, including external actors, filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) to secure its future. By 2012, the PIL was settled and the Gujarat Supreme Court ordered that the market be included and given a new space. Early 2013 was a time of greater security for the market. My field research lasted for four months from February to May. Research methods were largely ethnographic, including participant observation and in-depth field interviews. In order to make a compelling case in the PIL, the representatives of the Gujari Bazaar argued that it was a piece of historical value and part of Ahmedabad’s heritage. The new spatial context of the market and its “thematic programing,” however, suggests contesting visions of “heritage,” and provokes the question, “what does heritage mean in the simultaneous preservation and consumption of the past and the perception of cultural authenticity in light of a substantial modernist reimagining of city space? Contesting notions of heritage supplied the terms for both Gujari’s inclusion in and co-option by the Sabarmati Project. Despite a larger discourse of inclusion and social justice, the process of Gujari’s absorption in the Sabarmati Project was not internally consistent or harmonious. The uncertain environment of forced evictions and legal contest produced a new set of contesting relations within the market. The PIL painted a simplistic and ultimately romantic narrative of dominance and resistance that sanitized these internal politics. It placed the Ahmedabad Gujari Association (AGA), especially its president Nafis, as the representative of all market vendors. However,…

Matrimonial strategies among peasant women in early 20th century Garhwal

Abstract: The extensive presence in the legal archives of cases of non-normative conjugalities in Garhwal cannot be explained as exceptions or cultural vestiges as colonial observers tended to do. By tracing their recurrence using the temporal depth of historical sources, the article is able to rehabilitate what appeared as deviant, marginal or even immoral practices at a given time, as culturally available strategies. They are interpreted in this article as practical solutions to the reproductive needs of the small peasant household. These conjugal arrangements were particularly useful when the support of lineage members was undependable or even hostile, as frequently in the case of widows. Such households could not be sustained, however, if their land were to return to the lineage on the death of its head. This conundrum forced them to negotiate the rule of patrilineal inheritance. While men were historically empowered to contest lineage rights under the colonial interpretation of local custom, women’s property w...

On labour bondage

Abstract: To the vast literature on labour bondage in South Asia, there is a new contribution—a treatise by a newcomer to this field of study. Siddharth Kara is a former investment banker who changed track to set himself up as a world expert on forced labour—as we come to know from a Q&A interview published in The Economist.1 The author has apparently earned his credentials by roaming around the subcontinent over the last 11 years in order to map the wide diversity practised in human servitude. So far, he has abstained from going public on his field investigations, although not all the way. The book under review is part of a larger research project and was preceded a few years ago by another work focused on sex trafficking (Kara 2009), now followed by this one on, what Kara labels, ‘modern slavery’. As he clarifies right from the start of his odyssey, he is a man with a mission that took him all these years to complete. Moral outrage is the driving force of his crusade. There is nothing wrong with that banner—not being able to dispose freely of one’s labour power is a

Digitised money transactions and cultures of malling Frauds and debt-making in New Delhi

Abstract: This article explores the sociality of digitised money transactions in the use of credit and debit cards in New Delhi. The article draws from insights in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and uses ethnographic practices to capture the complexity of digital money usage. The findings suggest that digital money and its required technological infrastructure do not operate as neutral interventions. Rather, credit cards and consumer behaviour are generated by and implicated in a range of cultural codes and practices, such as contexts for debt vulnerability and fraud. Courts, banks and the government currently appear to be behind the regulatory curve for managing these transactions which clearly seem to outpace the existing legal capacities in India. Significantly, it also emerges that credit card usage, consumer debt and digital frauds need to be grasped as linked phenomena. Money and technology, hence, I argue, operate in sociologically and politically charged contexts.

Book Review: Beatrix Hauser. 2012. Promising Rituals: Gender and Performativity in Eastern IndiaHauserBeatrix. 2012. Promising Rituals: Gender and Performativity in Eastern India. New Delhi: Routledge. xv + 277 pp. Plates, maps, bibliography, index. ₹795 (hardback).

Abstract: members of the movement understood society as a whole and conceived their ‘objects of discontent’ (Scott 2004: 91). This, I believe, would not only facilitate greater understanding of the relationship between the movement’s particular dissatisfactions with society and the ways in which it apprehended them, but also its blind spots, unreconstructed gendered identities and violence on the other. Together with Roy’s book, such analyses would help us grasp the romance and tragedy of Naxalbari as well as enable critical evaluation of the terms in which we understand our own present predicaments and political projects.

Book Review: Ashwini Deshpande. 2011. The Grammar of Caste: Economic Discrimination in Contemporary India:

Abstract: contradictions are worth examining. Servants have always had agency and even traditional servants have walked away often. Moreover, working shorter hours in multiple households means that they are able to quit one job and know that another part-time job would still be available. Today’s servants do not operate in isolation—they check out work conditions through mobile phones and their social networks, and negotiations over salaries, holidays and sick leave are never one-sided but involve much haggling. Finally, if Kolkata represents relatively uniform employer practices (i.e., abysmally low salaries and a continuity of ideologies from the colonial era), other Indian cities exhibit a diverse labour market. As such, whilst cultures of servitude have similarities, they also have varied features, be it Asia, Africa or within India. While future comparative work can strengthen this area of research, Ray and Qayum’s study is pathbreaking and makes a significant contribution to a neglected subject.

Book Review: Vasudha Chhotaray. 2012. The Anti-politics Machine in India: State, Decentralization and Participatory Watershed Development

Abstract: situation in which ‘their [i.e., of the labouring poor] land is needed but their labour is not’. This shift, under the capitalist logic of accumulation, from labour casualisation to labour redundancy prompts one to ask, with Bernstein (2004), whether it is apt to conclude that the struggle for land is going to be the principal form of working-class struggle in the global South at the present juncture. This question remains relatively unaddressed in the book. Yet, Breman’s insistence on a better understanding of political alternatives for the emancipation of labour is critical and urgent. When he refers to Katherine Boo’s (2012) disturbing description of how scavengers in Annawadi near Mumbai sleep on the top of the garbage heap they have collected to prevent other scavengers from stealing them (p. 106), the author makes one realise that in the final analysis, the removal of such shocking human conditions is a civilisational question. And he concludes, on a critical yet constructive note, that ‘... in a fundamental way, the ideology of inequality, presumably the hallmark of Hindu civilization, to a large extent seems to have lost social legitimacy’ (p. 389). This measured confidence arguably indicates the direction in which the politics of change will likely progress in India.

Book Review: Subir Bhaumik. 2009. Troubled Periphery: Crisis of India’s North East

Abstract: Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 2 (2014): 279–305 caste and religious groups. Economic deprivation is one of the most important issues that requires serious attention. Jayati Ghosh has also emphasised the need to expand affirmative action to cover the rural–urban divide, besides gender gaps. Third, as a comparative study in development policy studies, the volume could have been enriched by inclusion of studies on a few other countries, say, for example, Malaysia and Brazil, which are also struggling with such policies. Anyway, it may not be fair to complain about weaknesses of an otherwise valuable collection that enables a reader to engage more deeply with several complicated issues related to affirmative action.

Invoking sociology at University of Lucknow (1921–75) Framing considerations

Abstract: How to think about ‘sociology’ at the University of Lucknow is certainly a problem, accentuated not just by the fact that the trajectory indicated by Sociology at the University of Lucknow: The First Half Century (1921– 1975) (SUL, hereafter) has an extended time frame (or chronology)— 1921–75, to be precise—but also marking a practice whose specificities cannot be rendered exclusively ‘Indian’ and/or ‘colonial’. To be sure, as Professor T.N. Madan (hereafter, TNM) has admitted, a central purpose in assembling the writings of the ‘Lucknow Quartet’ and the commentaries