scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question

Showing papers in "Contributions to Indian Sociology in 2016"


Journal ArticleDOI
Abstract: In the context of the rise of feminist scholarship exploring links between caste, class and gender, the particular concern of this article is with developing a sociological framework that would hel...

29 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that discussions of place and home are marked by a tension between desires for reclaiming home and security, and the condition of unce... The article draws upon discussions with Pandits who contrast nostalgia for life in Kashmir with experiences of re-establishing social and political relationships after displacement.
Abstract: This article addresses two questions: first, how do communities facing protracted displacement deal with the experience of migration and place-making? Second, how do notions of home mediate this relationship? I approach these questions by taking the case of Kashmiri Pandits, the upper caste Hindu minority of the Kashmir valley, who were displaced due to the outbreak of conflict in Jammu and Kashmir in 1989–90 and a significant section of whom were located in displaced persons’ camps during 1990–2011. The article draws upon discussions with Pandits who contrast nostalgia for life in Kashmir with experiences of re-establishing social and political relationships after displacement. Place and migration here are both treated as contexts and products of social activity that involve considerations of objects, physical environment and communal relationships. The article will argue that discussions of place and home are marked by a tension between desires for reclaiming home and security, and the condition of unce...

20 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on methodological debates between feminisms and sociologies and suggest that before the advent of feminist studies, social scientists had not engaged critically with patriarcha.
Abstract: The article focuses on methodological debates between feminisms and sociologies It suggests that before the advent of feminist studies, social scientists had not engaged critically with patriarcha

19 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that discussions of place and home are marked by a tension between desires for reclaiming home and security, and the condition of unce... The article draws upon discussions with Pandits who contrast nostalgia for life in Kashmir with experiences of re-establishing social and political relationships after displacement.
Abstract: This article addresses two questions: first, how do communities facing protracted displacement deal with the experience of migration and place-making? Second, how do notions of home mediate this relationship? I approach these questions by taking the case of Kashmiri Pandits, the upper caste Hindu minority of the Kashmir valley, who were displaced due to the outbreak of conflict in Jammu and Kashmir in 1989–90 and a significant section of whom were located in displaced persons’ camps during 1990–2011. The article draws upon discussions with Pandits who contrast nostalgia for life in Kashmir with experiences of re-establishing social and political relationships after displacement. Place and migration here are both treated as contexts and products of social activity that involve considerations of objects, physical environment and communal relationships. The article will argue that discussions of place and home are marked by a tension between desires for reclaiming home and security, and the condition of unce...

13 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors explore endogenous egalitarian impulses among subaltern groups in India, and seek to interrogate the widely prevailing notion that ideas associated with modernity are the preserve of and emanate from elites in the political-economic sphere of the Indian state.
Abstract: How do subalterns imagine their membership in India’s political community? Many scholars argue that they imbibe the egalitarian ideals in India’s political–economic sphere. Others suggest that subalterns identify the modernising impulses of the political–economic sphere as a greater threat to their ways of life. Intervening in this debate, recent research enlivens analysts to the perspective that the political–economic sphere of the state cannot be unambiguously mapped onto modernity. Nor, for that matter, can the socio-cultural sphere be regarded as singular realm of uninterrupted tradition. This article is offered as a contribution to this strand of the scholarship. By exploring endogenous egalitarian impulses among subaltern groups in India, I seek to interrogate the widely prevailing notion that ideas associated with modernity are the preserve of and emanate from elites in the political–economic sphere of the Indian state. Subalterns eschew notions of hierarchy and value ideas of equality and social j...

9 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors pointed out that the parai is an art that dalits can take pride in and pointed to dissenting voices and campaigns by people who claim that the celebration of the drum merely perpetuates degradation, raising questions such as who speaks for a community, whether a symbol of oppression can truly become an icon of resistance and how marginalised communities can construct positive identities when their cultural memories and practices are inescapably associated with their subordination.
Abstract: In the past decade, there have been an increasing number of academic articles on the dalit drum or parai. For the most part, they note the processes by which this once humiliating caste service has been re-symbolised as an art form and has become central to dalit struggles for liberation. In such articles, there is an easy assumption that the parai is an art that dalits can take pride in. In this article, I problematise such claims by pointing to dissenting voices and campaigns by people who claim that the celebration of the drum merely perpetuates degradation. This raises questions such as who speaks for a community, whether a symbol of oppression can truly become an icon of resistance and how marginalised communities can construct positive identities when their cultural memories and practices are inescapably associated with their subordination.

8 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the importance of the Niyamgiri case lies in the legal representation of indigeneity that emerges as a counterpoint to automatic assumptions of developmentalism and cultural homogeneity.
Abstract: This article seeks to understand the contrarian impulses embedded in the historic Supreme Court judgement in the ‘battle for Niyamgiri’ that resulted in tribal gram sabhas rejecting the bauxite mining proposal of the Odisha state government and transnational corporation, Vedanta. It proposes that the importance of the Niyamgiri case lies in the legal representation of indigeneity that emerges as a counterpoint to automatic assumptions of developmentalism and cultural homogeneity. However, rather than seeing this as an epistemic or discursive break in the practice of law, it proposes that we see the case ‘jurisdictionally’, as a practice of representation that is enacted through technologies and devices of law. It is important to understand that constitutive actors—lawyers, judges, ministers, experts, tribals—within specific jurisdictional spaces can change the prudence and diction in law, beyond the internal necessity of rules underwritten by tradition or dominant discourse. It is through this lens that t...

7 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors suggests that paradigmatic changes took place in sociological traditions in India from the late 1970s to the 1990s in a manner similar to the catalytic changes occurring in the same pe
Abstract: This article suggests that paradigmatic changes took place in sociological traditions in India from the late 1970s to the 1990s in a manner similar to the catalytic changes occurring in the same pe

6 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the question of state power, violence and the identity predicaments of a marginalised Muslim community called Marakkayars living in Beemapalli, a coastal hamlet located in the Thiruvananthapuram district of southern Kerala is discussed.
Abstract: This article is about the question of state power, violence and the identity predicaments of a marginalised Muslim community called Marakkayars, living in Beemapalli, a coastal hamlet located in the Thiruvananthapuram district of southern Kerala. Based on insights from judicial discourse and ethnography of an event of spectacle state violence that occurred in Beemapalli in the year 2009, the article shows how the contesting discourses that emerged after the violence are entangled with a larger transformation that has taken place in the recent history of this locality—the shift from an ethnic enclave to a ghetto. The judicial discourse which justifies the police violence in Beemapalli and the counter narratives from the locality that vehemently oppose it give interesting insight into the confrontations between the state and a ghettoised community prior to and after the violence. The article also demonstrates how the relationship between the state agencies and ghettoised Marakkayar Muslims is saturated with...

6 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the function of mine workers' observance of the colliery-goddess cult, described as the Khadan-Kali cult, for gaining access to divine power so as to secure safety, and explains its relationship with the new political and scientific accident-control emphases adopted by workers from the 1920s onwards.
Abstract: This article interprets the function of mine workers' observance of the colliery-goddess cult, described as the Khadan-Kali cult, for gaining access to divine power so as to secure safety, and explains its relationship with the new political and scientific accident-control emphases adopted by workers from the 1920s onwards. Some observers regard the workers' industrial-religious rites an expression of the pre-bourgeois customs. The latter is understood to have been in contradistinction to the modern principle of secular ethics and reason. Mine workers with such 'fatalistic' outlook could make few efforts to curb occupational hazards. Such outlook was an allegory of workers' loss of control over their own personal destinies and of the price they paid for industrialisation. These observations, my study shows, would overlook, in our case, the fact that the colliery-goddess cult embodied the desire of workers for control over hazardous mining and for self-preservation. Indeed, it gave way to the secular-safety politics and also inscribed newer meanings to the relationship between the deity and her adherents. Miners vested in it a critique of the new official scheme that attributed responsibility for fatality and injury to an individual miner and subjected him/her to certain punitive actions. The article relies on material collected from archives and historical-anthropological survey of 25 former mine workers, undertaken during 2003-09. Language: en

6 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the nature of the social vis-a-vis the dead and explore how the anthropological accounts of death get refracted when seen from the vantage point of the dead.
Abstract: The article seeks to redraw some key discussions on death in Banaras by focusing on the subject matter of the ‘dead’ rather than that of death. Pitched in the shadow of select earlier works on anthropology of death pertaining to Banaras, the general probing centres on the query whether the three realms of dying, death and dead can be delinked and thus seen in a certain relative autonomy from each other. Further, how do the anthropological accounts of death get refracted when seen from the vantage point of the dead? Based on ethnographic fieldwork at intertwined field sites of the home and the hospital, manual and electric cremation ghat and the shaivite aghorashram (hermitage) in relation to the river Ganga, the descriptions involve discussion over declaration of death versus discovery of the dead, distinction between touching and handling of the dead and latent implications of the varied names of the dead. The core concern of the article is to explore the nature of the social vis-a-vis the dead. I show h...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article explored the many ways that sociologies and feminisms have intersected with an equal emphasis on the actual content of these intersections as well as on the context of the context.
Abstract: This article explores the many ways that sociologies and feminisms have intersected with an equal emphasis on the actual content of these intersections as well as on the context. First, the article...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Srinivas's explanation of caste was caught up in an inherent contradiction that led him to make inconsistent inferences as mentioned in this paper, which has led to inconsistencies in the writings on the subject.
Abstract: In sociology and in the wider academia, caste is regarded as the basic unit of the Indian society. Yet, this academic notion of caste, I argue, had emerged only in the late 19th century in the course of the census operations in colonial India. Hence, the pervasive scholarly practice of translating varna and jati, indigenous social forms whose existence can indeed be traced from the earliest times, as caste, is erroneous; it has led to inconsistencies in the writings on the subject. To illustrate, I analyse the writings of the eminent sociologist M.N. Srinivas in this article. Srinivas’s explanation of caste was caught up in an inherent contradiction that led him to make inconsistent inferences. Srinivas was not unaware of the problem. However, the idea of ‘system’ that he had imbibed from the discipline of social anthropology prevented him from reviewing his historically received notion of caste. Hence, those inconsistencies continued.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Chapekar, S.N. as discussed by the authors, B.S. Baviskar, B.Aatre, Trimbak Narayan. The Politics of Development: Sugar Co-operatives in Rural Maharashtra. 1995 (3rd edition).
Abstract: Aatre, Trimbak Narayan. 1995 (3rd edition). Gaon gada (Village Cycle). Pune: Warada Books. Baviskar, B.S. 1980. The Politics of Development: Sugar Co-operatives in Rural Maharashtra. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chapekar, S.N. 1934. Badlapur—Aammcha Gaon (Badlapur—Our Village/Town). Social, Economic, Religious and Historical Survey of One Village/Town (Marathi). Pune: Arya Sanskriti Mudranalaya.


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A reflection on my career as a feminist anthropologist as mentioned in this paper suggests that it was feminism that allowed sociology to be reflexively reversed in using the life of an individual to understand the bigger system.
Abstract: This article is a reflection on my career as a feminist anthropologist It suggests that it was feminism that allowed sociology to be reflexively reversed in using the life of an individual to understand the bigger system It moves on to discuss my own engagement with feminist anthropology: my growth as a scholar in the field over nearly four decades which also mirrors some aspects of the development of the subject and the Indian scholarship around it It maps my trajectory and that of the discipline of anthropology over locations of caste, class and postcoloniality It also provides a review of the relationship between feminism and anthropology in India

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The relationship between feminism and sociology is explored in this paper, arguing that each has to indiscipline and discipline the other on different registers, and that the practices of a feminist pedagogy offer possibilities for revitalising the discipline of sociology.
Abstract: The Introduction to this volume draws the map of the relationship between feminism and sociology, arguing that each has to indiscipline and discipline the other on different registers Contextualised within the pedagogic need to ground interdisciplinarity, the article argues that feminism and sociology must be brought together to alter each other in a transformational manner Addressed to sociologists, it attempts to graft feminism and sociology on the axes of language, location and lineage It suggests that the disciplinary crisis faced by sociology may be reduced with the adoption of a reflexivity that is at the intersection of sociology and feminism It also suggests that the practices of a feminist pedagogy offer possibilities for revitalising the discipline of sociology It provides summaries of the articles in the volume that lead us to reflexivity and pluralism




Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the secure/normative family from the standpoint of one or more members entering the arena of social movements because this, in many ways, is seen as putting nation/society before the family In this context, they attempt to understand how two activists of a Marxist group called Magowa1 enter different spheres of social/collective action and negotiate duties/obligations of the familial in the process of critiquing the normative, recasting lived practices in the family or creating alternate support structures to the family.
Abstract: The article seeks to critically examine the secure/normative family from the standpoint of one or more members entering the arena of social movements because this, in many ways, is seen as putting nation/society before the family In this context, the article attempts to understand how two activists of a Marxist group called Magowa1 enter different spheres of social/collective action and negotiate duties/obligations of the familial in the process of critiquing the normative, recasting lived practices in the family or creating alternate support structures to the family I hope to tease out the processes of restructuring or reorganising the private sphere that seem inevitable when one or more members of the family enter the arena of social movements While drawing from the insights from family studies in India, and social movement studies, the article attempts to explore the lives of two activists from the group to map mainly the ‘failed’ or ‘successful’ journeys of the processes of restructuring the ‘priva