Pain,Personhood and the Collective: Dalit Life Narratives

Dalit life narratives have gained prominence in the last two decades in line with the increasing visibility of Dalits in the Indian public sphere and their vociferous demands for a more just political and social order. This can be productively situated not just in the contemporary global context of the proliferation of narratives and testimonios of human rights violations in other parts of the world, but also in the context of an emerging conversation on the nature of “Dalit personhood” in the Indian public sphere, a category infinitely more complex than legal subjectivity and abstract citizenship. The Dalit narratives analysed here are rich illustrations of this double movement: they witness on behalf of a suffering community and keep alive the singular, non-universal nature of Dalit pain through an aesthetic that is not wholly translatable into the lexicon of rights and justice. By invoking the historical and rhetorical force of two prose fictional genres, the Bildungsroman and the picaresque, the analysis has sought to recast the testimonio less as a proxy for the legal witnessing and amelioration of Dalit pain than as a rich and expressive medium of Dalit personhood. This way of reading Dalit lives accords India's ex-untouchables a stature beyond that of victims at the mercy of the capricious sentimentality of upper-caste solidarity.     

Partition and the Ruptures in Dalit Identity Politics in Bengal

A number of historical studies have revealed that there were powerful Dalit movements among groups such as the Rajbansis and Namasudras in northern and eastern districts in colonial Bengal. The weakening and in some cases almost disappearance of these movements after 1947 is difficult to explain. One plausible explanation could lie in the emotional and physical displacement caused by Partition of the province. Both groups lived in the border region and lost their geographical anchorage following Partition. This essay explores the movement of the Namasudras before and immediately after Partition. Partition represented a major historical contextual shift that resulted in a transfiguration of Namasudra identity politics in the two Bengals, revealing the conjunctural nature of such collective social identities. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the Namasudra experience of displacement and struggle for rehabilitation brought to the foreground their “Hindu refugee” identity, overshadowing, at least for a time, their Dalit cultural politics.     

越国玉器的等级研究

越国贵族墓葬以墓葬规模为指示性要素,可分为五个等级,以此作为越国玉器等级研究的基础,结合玉器器类组合和器形纹饰的分析,可将越国玉器分为七个等级。越国玉器的等级研究为复杂的越国社会形态研究提供了新的途径和方法。     

Modernity as a “Rain of Words”: Tracing the Flows of “Rain” between Dalit Women and Intellectuals in Tamil Nadu

In this paper I investigate the ways in which modernity in contemporary Tamil Nadu may be understood as something other than a purely exclusionary category. I enquire into the flow of language, imagery, music, resonant phrases and film dialogues that has allowed the values of the Self Respect movement in Tamil Nadu to move as a “Rain of Words” across social divisions of class, gender and caste. Egalitarian humanism and rationalism are here treated as part of a modern “tradition”, allowing us, in the process, to redefine what “tradition” might mean. The central place and reverence accorded to intellectuals in Tamil modernity is explored in respect to political party workers, NGOs, parish priests, and social workers in rural areas. I bring together two aspects of Tamil politics normally treated as separate, or in tension with one another: the egalitarian rationalism of the Self Respect movement, and the cultivation of language for its affective and non-rational elements in the politics of language nationalism. Arguing that it is the latter that has allowed the former to circulate as effectively as it does, I focus on the fresh meanings given to these values by young Dalit girls from agricultural labouring communities, as well as girls in coastal fishing communities in Tamil Nadu.     

The Intersection of Gender,Caste and Class Inequalities in Child Nutrition in Rural India

While studies have investigated inequalities in child nutrition along single axes of social power such as, gender, caste and class, there has not been any study that has examined the intersection of the different axes in determining nutritional outcomes of children. This paper examines the intersection of gender, class and caste in determining children's nutritional outcomes for rural north, rural south and rural India as a whole. The paper investigates the intersectionality of the three axes in rural India and focuses on regional differences. The results show that children with particular disadvantageous group affiliations often find significant compensatory benefits from other beneficial identities. Class inequality dominates caste inequality and caste inequality dominates gender inequality in rural North India for all levels of stunting. In contrast, caste inequality dominates class inequality which in turn dominates gender inequality for severe stunting in rural South India.     

Gendered-Caste Violations and the Cultural Politics of Voice in Rural Orissa,India

Despite the legal ban on untouchability over four decades ago, caste discrimination and atrocities perpetrated against ‘untouchable’ women (or Dalits) continue to be a part of the social landscape in India. Based on a decade-long partnership between a Canadian NGO, a partner Dalit/Adivasi local organization and 75 partner villages in South Orissa, this article provides a localized snapshot of the contemporary nature of caste atrocities committed against Dalit women in the Mohana administrative block. It briefly elaborates on Dalit explanations for such assaults and suggests that when it comes to addressing gendered-caste victimization, there are limits to open democratic advocacy which need to be acknowledged by activists and critical scholarship engaged with the cultural politics of ‘voice’.     

Negotiating the nation: diaspora contestations in the USA about Hindu nationalism in India

ABSTRACT. Diaspora positions and identities are being continually constructed, negotiated and reframed. Nevertheless, many studies tend to focus on the ethno‐centric, exclusionary and/or nationalistic orientation of some groups. In this article, I will explore variations in the responses of the Indian American diaspora community to Hindu nationalism in India. The article will focus on the opposition of progressive groups to a particularly controversial Hindu nationalist leader, Narendra Modi. They stand in contrast to those US‐based organisations that support Modi and his political ideology. The debate between the two sides shows a high degree of political polarisation within the community. This study illustrates the variations in interpretations of nationalism and identity that exist among groups operating in the transnational political space. In particular, it shows us that the political process that articulates these differences can impact policy in the home or adopted country.     

Wrestling women: Caste and neoliberalism in rural Haryana

In the 2016 blockbuster film Dangal, a young wrestler by the name of Geeta Phogat is taken by her father to Rohtak, in the western Indian state of Haryana, to participate in her first wrestling match. He is ridiculed for attempting to enroll his daughter into the hyper male domain and sent on his way. But the organizers soon relent when they see the potential for a salacious scandal of a girl fighting a boy. The scene establishes rural Haryana as a space of hyper misogyny and public space dominated by men who enjoy crude entertainment. But when the young Geeta takes on the toughest of contestants and defeats him, the victory symbolizes something larger – vindication against routine humiliation girls are made to feel. The year 2016 brought unprecedented publicity to women wrestlers in India. Sakshi Malik won the Bronze medal in wrestling for India at the Rio Olympics, and film audiences were treated to two blockbuster films on women wrestlers from Haryana. In this essay, I suggest that the celebratory story of wrestling women both elides and is made possible by Haryana’s, and the larger Indian state’s, neoliberal agenda. I argue that neoliberalism is able to accommodate the contradictions of Haryana’s skewed sex ratio while at the same time produce and celebrate successful women athletes. Second, the story of wrestling women cannot be understood without caste as a fundamentally structuring dimension of success. I make these arguments at three different scales – body and household, village and district, the state.     

Types and Patterns of Later-life Migration

This paper refines previous typologies of later-life mobility by explicitly evaluating the spatial migration patterns and household characteristics of retired American migrants. Migrants' lifecourse attributes (economic status, disability, presence of spouse), large-scale migration patterns (internal migration) and household characteristics (living arrangements, economic independence, residential independence) are used to identify three types of post-retirement mobility. The first type, amenity migration , has a distinctive spatial pattern that suggests a search for attractive climate and leisure amenities. The second type of mobility, assistance migration , can be traced to low income and the absence of a spouse in the household. It often results in residential and economic dependence – specifically, in co-residence with adult children or other labor force members. The third type of mobility, migration in response to severe disability and spouse absence , tends to result in nursing home residence. While amenity migration has long been associated with good health and favorable economic status, this analysis reveals that many disabled and lower-income retirees share the inmigration pattern typical of amenity migrants. In fact, amenity migration is the predominant type of mobility among those migrants with fewer than two unfavorable lifecourse attributes (low income, severe disability and spouse absence). Unlike previous lifecourse typologies, this study shows no clear relationship between moderate disability and co-residence with adult children. The results suggest that co-residence is primarily a strategy for reducing living costs rather than a means of coping with moderate disability.     

The Indian nation and selective amnesia: representing conflicts and violence in Indian history textbooks

‘Unity is always obtained by means of brutality’ wrote Ernest Renan. Following this idea, this article investigates how social conflicts and violence are included or muted in national history. This is done by comparing the successive series of history textbooks used in India in the postindependence period. The historical narratives contained in the textbooks were influenced by different conceptions of the Indian nation, and these variations allow us to observe and better understand what is remembered or forgotten in the national narrative. We will see that conflicts and violence are referred to when they involve the nation against its ‘other’ but depictions of conflicts within the nation as it is imagined are avoided. Thus, certain violent episodes of the past find a place in the national historical narrative, yet violence in itself is never described.     

Local Forest Protection, Gender and Caste—Dhani Hill, Orissa, India

A questionnaire survey covering 35% of all households in five villages was conducted in a local forest protection group in Orissa, India. The aim was to study dependency, involvement and attitude towards forest protection based on gender and caste. A conceptual model indicating differences between the groups was used as a base. Women experienced more problems of restrictions caused by the protection and more threats associated with the forest than did men. Voting in meetings and a wish for more plantations was of greater importance for women than for men, while men emphasised importance of co-operation with government. Direct involvement was very low among women, even though they were well informed about forest issues. Tribal groups were the main contributers of labour, while general caste had been involved for considerably longer in forest protection than other groups. The tribal groups also wanted more plantations and had a good understanding of the ecosystem. For example, they indicated the value of a growing forest. Men and general caste tended to be more outspoken in this type of questionnaire situation compared to women and scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. The general attitude towards Dhani Hill, however, was positive and could be linked to daily use and future optimism. This optimism and the involvement of all the different groups should be considered as crucial in the timing of local forest management interventions. This should be seen together with the diversified opinions and ways of expressing such opinions depending on gender and caste.     

'A fist is stronger than five fingers': caste and dominance in rural north India

This paper explores the spatiality of caste and power in contemporary rural north India. I aim to introduce the social institution of caste to a non-specialist audience and illustrate how caste is changing. The paper draws upon Pierre Bourdieu's notions of social capital and habitus and the India-based research ofSrinivas (1955) andMendelsohn (1993). I argue that while caste as a religiously sanctioned system of resource transfer is in decline, caste organization and identity are important forms of social or symbolic capital for rural elites. Drawing on detailed empirical research in western Uttar Pradesh, I demonstrate the continuing importance of caste dominance in the reproduction of social inequality and relate caste to other axes of power.     

Beach Boys Do It Too: Subculture and Commoditised Desire in a Transnational Tourist Site in Kerala,South India

This article is based on an ethnographic study of a group of Scheduled Caste (SC) male youth in a globalised tourist site in Kerala, South India, who participate in situational sexual and romantic relationships with predominantly tourist women from the global north. We first aim to expand on the “sex and romance tourism” literature of such encounters to provide an Indian context. Secondly, we aim to highlight how young men involved in such encounters undertake complex mediations of localised and global forms of consumption and commoditisation to participate in the neoliberal tourist market place. Mainly by way of a subculture known as the Jungees, we describe how young men utilise the former processes to seek economic and social mobility for themselves and their families but also to valorise and re-imagine their identity along racial, gendered, caste and class-based dimensions. Finally, we explore the young men’s articulation of a hierarchy of preferred encounters that draws on gendered, sexualised and racialised local and global imaginaries of commoditised desire(s) of tourist women from the global north. We highlight the ways in which participants actively utilise the neoliberal context to engage in a range of self-generated livelihood strategies and to contest their marginality.     

Performing the national territory: The geography of national‐day celebrations

The nation is a relatively abstract imagined community that is visualised through a variety of symbols as well as communicative and performative practices. In this paper, we explore how the national territory, one of the foundations of the nation‐state, is performed on national‐day celebrations and brings the nation into being. Drawing on ethnographic research on national days in Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, we show how the state's internal administrative divisions and ethnic differences are at once made explicit but also subordinated to the nation. Moreover, we show how in such celebrations, potentially disruptive or competing affiliations such as ethnicity and regional loyalties are re‐imagined. Both the rotation of the central celebration and its replication all over the national territory carry the nation into the regions and integrate the regions into the nation‐state. The ‘co‐memoration’ turns participants and spectators from locals into national compatriots and thus not only performs nationality but also performs the relationship among nation, state and citizen, set within a particular territory.     

Property and Propriety: Jewish Landlords in Early Twentieth-Century Toronto

Drawing on literatures on the social construction of place and identity, and on the changing nature of urban property ownership, this paper examines Jewish immigrants to Toronto as housing landlords, situating their activities in the context of wider changes in the city's housing market and of their needs to raise capital, achieve status and foster group identity. Using archival and newspaper evidence to reconstruct the behaviour of individual landlords, it is argued that ownership of inner-city property fulfilled numerous functions, especially related to other aspects of business proprietorship, but that it also accentuated the geographical concentration of poorer Jews, with critical implications for their relations with non-Jews.     

清代杭州灵隐书藏及经藏考略

本文考证了清代杭州灵隐书藏及经藏情况,高度评价了这些藏书和藏经在学术史和文化史上的意义。     

Profiling the profiloscope: facialization of race technologies and the rise of biometric nationalism in inter-war British India

Abstract

The history of race and technology in British India has avoided engaging with the way in which this played out amongst nationalists. The history of biometrics too has similarly overlooked the role of anti-colonial nationalists. The history of the now-forgotten profiloscope allows us to address both oversights. But the history of the profiloscope is more than just a history of a technological apparatus. It is also the trace of a forgotten political imaginary, viz. biometric nationalism. Biometric nationalism sought to deploy biometrics in developing a dynamically anti-essentialist and non-individualistic conception of nationhood at a time when the nation-form had come to largely monopolize mainstream of anti-colonial political discourse.     

Understanding the Bahujan Samaj Prerna Kendra: Space,Place and Political Mobilisation

On the tenth anniversary of its first term in state government, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) opened the Bahujan Samaj Prerna Kendra in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. The Kendra is a majestic, temple-like building designed to commemorate and celebrate the achievements of the Dalit movement in India. In this article I examine its symbolic and political features, which I argue must be understood against the backdrop of caste prejudice and the ongoing exclusion (social, spatial and economic) of Dalits in India. The Kendra prompts consideration of how the design and use of public space implicitly or explicitly excludes lower classes and castes, and the way in which the BSP has both challenged and used spatial strategy in its political discourse. I further suggest that the Kendra signals a new phase in the cultural politics of Dalits, articulating a new vision of moral, political and spatial order.     

洛阳周公庙与五贤祠的兴衰

洛阳周公庙始建于隋末,位于隋唐东都洛阳宫城应天门东侧,后代历经修缮.五贤祠位于周公庙旁边,从某种意义上说它是周公庙的补充和延伸.文中披露有关文献和近年出土的碑刻文物,见证了洛阳周公庙与五贤祠的兴废.     

"Between Belonging": Habitus and the migration experience

This paper explores the impacts of migration both on the small island community of Grand Manan, New Brunswick, and on the group of Newfoundland families who have moved there from their homes 1500 km away. Based upon personal interviews with individuals and families, impacts and meanings are examined in terms of social networks, community cleavages, and intergenerational differences. The complexity of patterns and the ambiguities experienced by both groups are related to Bourdieu's concept of ‘habitus’, and its relevance for changing meanings of ‘place’ and ‘community’. In exploring the changing patterns of social relationships and meanings of community, this paper highlights issues of social cohesion and tensions associated with forging new identities, and examines the particular impacts upon youth whose sense of belonging is explicitly between homes. The experience of migration for those who decide to stay permanently is shown to be different than for the majority who come as seasonal migrants. In the decision to stay through the winter or not, crucial factors are both the sense of belonging back in Newfoundland and whether or not families have children, whose abilities to forge new relationships are the everyday concerns for parents. While the importance of jobs provides the main incentive to migrate, the difficulties associated with integrating into new social groups, negotiating new identities, and adjusting to different educational requirements pose almost insurmountable challenges for many families. It is in the details of family lives, values and perceptions, told through their narratives of experience, that we begin to discern the ambiguities and fluidity of evolving habitus for both groups. Cet article analyse les effets de la migration à la fois sur la petite communauté insulaire de Grand Manan au Nouveau‐Brunswick et sur les families qui s'y sont déplacées, depuis Terre‐Neuve, à plus de 1500 km de distance. Basé sur des entrevues auprès d'individus et de families, il examine le sens et l'effet de la migration en accordant une attention particulière aux réseaux sociaux, aux disparités communautaires et au fossé intergénérationnel. On y fait appel au concept d'habitus de Bourdieu pour rendre compte de la complexité des pratiques propres à chacun des deux groupes et de l'ambiguité du sens qu'ils confèrent à leur expérience. L'analyse contextualisée de la dynamique des relations sociales et du sens de la communauté met en lumière des questions liées à la cohésion sociale et aux inévitables tensions liées à ces dynamiques. Plus particulièrement, l'article examine les effets de la migration sur les jeunes dont le sentiment d'appartenance se définit précisément entre deux ‘chez soi’. L'éxpérience de la migration chez ceux qui ont décidé de s'établir de façon permanente est bien différente de celle vécue par la majorité qui se déplace de façon saisonnière. Le sentiment d'appartenance à Terre‐Neuve et le fait d'avoir ou non des enfants (leur capacité de tisser de nouvelles relations sociales étant un souci permanent pour les parents) sont des facteurs fondamentaux dans la décision de ‘passer l'hiver’ ou non. Bien que les emplois soient la principale motivation pour migrer, les difficultés d'intégration au sein de nouveaux groupes sociaux, le développement de nouvelles identités, l'adaptation à un nouveau régime scolaire sont très difficiles à surmonter pour de nombreuses families. Par l'entremise du récit de leur expérience, qui révèle les détails de la vie de famille, des valeurs et des perceptions individuelles et collectives, il est possible de cerner les ambiguïtés et la fluidité de l'habitus changeant des deux groupes.