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This special issue of Contemporary South Asia comprises a selection of six papers presented at the 27th Annual Conference of the British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS) held at the University of Leeds, 3–5 April 2013. The papers in this special issue represent a fraction of what was presented at the 27th BASAS conference. However, they reflect well the diversity within BASAS in terms of the career stage of members, the breadth of contexts studied and the range of disciplinary approaches to the study of South Asia. While there was no explicit theme driving the selection of papers for this edition, an emphasis did emerge upon thinking about the reproduction, embodiment and resistance of authority and marginalization through examining the specific role that location and space play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the spatial and temporal dimensions of varied schooling agendas for poor and oppressed caste children and adults in the princely state of Travancore in nineteenth-century colonial south India. Schools became socially contested and politically charged spaces in which various subaltern castes, particularly the Dalits and Nadars, articulated a new language of social and religious self-fashioning. British Protestant missionaries played a crucial role in provoking these imaginations and yet, the joint workings of caste and racial prejudices resulted in ambivalent cultural encounters in the educational landscape. Caste was central to these contestations and negotiations in making modern child subjectivities and tended to produce new forms of inequality and reproduce existing ones. I argue that schooling campaigns for the poor resulted in the perpetuation of hierarchised, caste-inflected norms of childhood and produced multiple marginal children in local society. This paper draws upon British Protestant missionary archives to highlight the unstable and violent geographies in which children of subaltern castes navigated the sphere of modern schooling in colonial Travancore and the constitutive function of schools in the making of marginal childhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postmodern anthropology has used the claims of reflexivity, inter-subjectivity and recognition of differences in individual experiences in its attempt to unsettle the authority of traditional anthropology. This has led anthropologists to assert that ethnography is a cultural construct, whereby 'fieldwork' is conceptualised as 'embodied spatial practice'. Drawing on village studies from India, this paper argues that the recognition of different embodied practices of ethnographers from diverse social locations has not necessarily led to the democratisation of the discipline. Conversely, insufficient engagement with hierarchical, overlapping power relations within the ethnographic field, as well as within the disciplinary establishment, has led to the standardisation of disciplinary articulations of research ethics, the terms of which privilege hegemonic groups within the discipline. The articulation of the concerns of scholars from marginalised social groups often remains difficult within such disciplinary frameworks. This paper argues that establishing a critical tradition in ethnography in the true sense requires the postmodern sensibility of recognition of the differences in experiences, supplemented with feminist and subaltern critical interrogations of power and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since humans climbed down from the trees, they have looked up to the stars and the desire of exploration of the heavens above us only ever increased with the advancements in the field of science's. Launch of Artificial Satellite by the name of Sputnik by the USSR in 1957 ignited a space race between two rival superpowers i.e., USSR and United States. This Space war led to many astonishing inventions and innovations which helped the humanity to put a man on the moon and gave a dream to look further and achieve the sky itself. In modern times, with further more advancements in the technological aspects of means on space travel, such as SpaceX building Starship to travel to mars and Japanese Space Agency extracting a sample from Asteroid, there is nothing which can stop humanity from touching the stars. The question however in front of us is that when humanity do touch the stars (metaphor for celestial bodies) will it have the rights over it? Will we give them rights of ownership just because they have possession over it? The question is somewhat more complicated than it seems as the countries or companies who are reaching the skies, are investing huge amount of resources to achieve a certain mission but if they don't have any right over the celestial body, how will they carry on with their mission? This research paper deals with the concept of property rights in space whether a country or company can own a part of it? Along with the legality of property rights in space, this paper also focuses on ethical conundrum that whether a country or company deserves to get rights in space and consequences of same. This paper further focuses on India's proposed Legislation "Space Activities Bill" and how will it help the private activities in the space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction frames a selection of papers that encourage a richer spatial understanding of the years before the Partition of India. The papers respond to two types of questions. One type is spatial (at what scale do we approach Partition? Through which spaces should we attempt to understand both micro and macro processes? Movements across what distances constituted Partition?). The second type is temporal (what timescales do we invoke when approaching Partition? Of what was it the endpoint? What sort of memories were invoked and made during India's multiple partitions?). This introduction establishes the main trends in Partition historiography, tracked through the last two decennial anniversaries. It sketches out spatial analyses of Partition to date, regarding territory and displacement especially, but shows that much of this geographical interpretation has been implicit rather than explicit, and that most have begun with Partition. Whilst framing many of their arguments in twentieth-century colonial practice, and occasionally straying into the post-colonial, the papers in this special issue mostly focus on the 1930s-1940s at a range of scales (from the international, through the nation-state, to cities, mohallas and courtrooms). Collectively they make the argument that if Partition has a history, then it also has an historical geography. We hope these papers will help people read these histories and geographies with a finer spatial eye. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global policy organizations, financial institutions, and national governments have emphasized high-value agriculture in the world's semi-arid areas inhabited by the greatest proportion of its poor, stressing linking households to markets to improve their well-being. This is assumed to involve state withdrawal and the ascendance of self-evident market forces. By means of ethnographic fieldwork in semi-arid western India, this paper discusses how the market does not arise spontaneously, but is deepened through state intensification. Rural households are imbricated with new markets by the state's rendering of development policy market-driven, and through democratic decentralization, which has emerged as an instrument to facilitate the penetration of market actors into remote rural communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That Indian literary tradition has been shaped and nourished by the sense and sensibility of a woman's space by both, male and female writers is a universally acknowledged fact. But, simultaneously, socio-historical truth of the subservient status forced on women also prevails poignantly across time and space. By exploring the deep recesses of vast domains of Indian literature, the paper as the title suggests, attempts to illustrate the literary responses lent towards the understanding of women as a parallel discourse to the perennial polemics of discrimination leveled against it. The paper, thus, aims to stand in defence of literature suffering almost scandalous charge of favoritism for patriarchal linguistic idiom conjured up to debunk, defame and belittle women and justify them as worthy of their maltreatment in literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist geographers such as Doreen Massey and Gillian Rose propound that space is produced by and is productive of gender relations. Feminist critical purview identifies the public/private binary as one of the sites in which the structures of gender and space overlap. The demarcation of the public and private spheres predicates on spatial practices which isolate the embodied, domestic activities of the private sphere from the putatively disembodied, political public sphere. However, the massive unemployment rates and institutional work-from-home (WFH) practices consequent to the COVID-19 pandemic precipitated the geographical refashioning of workplaces, undermining the demarcation of the public and the private. Paradoxically, this deterritorialization has not destabilized the gendered spatial practices informing the public/private binary. Irrespective of the construction of home as a feminine space, the domestic sphere is embedded in the heterosexual matrix and has traditionally been subject to the authority of the paterfamilias. The lockdown and quarantine measures aggravated the vulnerable positioning of women in their homes and predictably engendered a cataclysmic rise in domestic violence cases. The rhetoric of privacy embedded in the ideology of domesticity facilitates violence against women despite the criminalization of domestic abuse. The proposed paper problematizes the public/private divide and analyzes how the notion of the private domestic space legitimizes the instances of gendered violence reported during the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are tangible indicators that India, being a revisionist state and with a mature space program, aspires to join the club of states with space weapon capability. It is argued that India's quest for space weaponization is detrimental to strategic stability and deterrence of the South Asian region. Re-conceptualizing and revising existing space laws to develop a new legal framework to address momentum towards the weaponization of outer space is important in this context. This paper assesses the emerging trend of space militarization leading to space weaponization and its implications for South Asian security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For India, the concept of Indo-Pacific spans from the East Coast of Africa to the Western Pacific. This is because for India, it is the outer limit of the Indo-Pacific, and South Pacific acts as the new periphery of its Act East policy. Many ASEAN nations are deliberating about the utility of the Indo-Pacific. In the past, the then Indonesia Foreign Minister Marty Natalagewa had proposed the Indo-Pacific treaty and in 2019, ASEAN discussed the new geo-strategic construct despite variations in the approach and subscription. For India, South Pacific has three major objectives catering to its Act East policy; its need for supporting votes for its Security Council permanent member seat, Indian diaspora in the region, and harnessing sea bed mineral resources with island nations under the blue economy concept. However, whether India does have the desire or is just scouting for resources and therefore wants to protect its strategic interest across the Indo-Pacific region needs further scrutiny. India's approach with regard to Indian Ocean has been appreciated but now it is using Act East policy to encapsulate South Pacific region through its Oceania approach. The paper discusses strategic and functional aspects of India's approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The city scape is constantly touted as a much used scenographic background, with enormous deployment of technological apparatus to stage everything from street theatres, to Queer pride parades etc. These spaces also open up the much required attention to the apparatus of surveillance which are officially then produced as “safe spaces” for the demonstration of identity politics which the “neo-liberal” state is supposed to promote. Amongst the state-sponsored neo-liberalism and surveillance, the anti-rape movement in 2012 in Delhi acted as conundrum for its level of participation by the law-abiding citizens who took over strategic locations. This paper attempts to analyze the protest performances that happened during the anti-rape movement, and map the spaces where these performances took place. The movement which was initially contained at Jantar Mantar, one of the state assigned spaces of protest, spilled out to India gate and Raisina Hills as the protestors dissented and committed acts of arson against the state. It was during this period that various groups and individual performers who were usually confined to proscenium and institutional spaces after the incident after a long time brought such avant garde performers into streets, giving them an opportunity to engage and communicate with larger audiences. Performances by theater veterans like Maya Rao and various left oriented groups like Jana natya Manch generated unexpected political response. The sudden crowded streets would burst out in songs reminiscent of the second wave feminism, and other theatrical devices which were ready to capture the impulse of the moment. This paper seeks to analyze the performances by using theoretical frameworks of idea of social memory inscribed within the performance text and the coded and regimented body of the performer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widespread presence of scenography is showing various changes in modern Western theatre societies. Like other Indian ritual theatres, Drauadi's ritual theatre has indigenous visual elements. This paper examines the scope of scenography analysis in open area theatrical performances in Draupadi's festival of Chittore District in Andra Pradesh. In the cross-disciplinary performance review, I present hidden elements of scenography in ritual performance of Draupadi's festival. This paper also shows the examination of space, text, color and composition, performers and spectators in Draupadi festival with in the context of scenography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Along the twisted contours of statecraft, not only do sound and fury not signify nothing, but nothing also signifies something. What are the ways in which the state activates frameworks of silence and noise, and of visibility and invisibility, to exert authority over specific cultures? This paper looks at two specific mountain cultures, separated by a hundred years and thousands of miles, to interrogate these questions of power and violence. It attempts to trace a trajectory of power-resistance by paying attention to silence, noise, visibility and invisibility - from the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia to the trauma to Kashmiri identity wrought by the recent abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. It notes how disciplinary power seeks to legitimize itself by transforming space into infrastructure, and how this tendency plays out in West Virginia in the 1920s and in Kashmir today, to articulate the uneasy relationship between violence, power and identity that suffuses our world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In February 1946, the 20,000 sailors of the Royal Indian Navy, the colonial navy of the Government of India, mutinied. Having a number of grievances, from colonial rule of India, inefficient demobilisation procedures and ill treatment from superior officers, sailors on ships and shore establishments across the Indian Ocean took part in the mutiny, which represented the largest time a military force had disobeyed British Rule since the Mutiny of 1857. This paper examines the ways in which the geographies and mobilities of naval service shaped the political lives of the sailors in the RIN. On the one hand, both military (naval) and colonial forms of discipline worked through the spaces of the ship to attempt to control and order sailors’ lives. On the other, the mobile nature of life at sea, travelling from place to place and encountering colonial difference within the RIN, opened the door to different political ideas to influencing the sailors. At the same time, far from being a disconnected space, separate from the land, the naval ship combined with sailors’ land-based connections allowed them to contest and rework ‘landed’ political activity from the sea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages with the politics of the production and representation of spatial identity in the light of one of the most violent massacres in the history of refugee rehabilitation in India, post 1947 Partition - the Marichjhapi massacre of 1979. The Marichjhapi massacre has escaped public scrutiny for almost two decades. It came to public attention as recent as the late 1990s. This paper will go beyond recollecting ghastly incidents at Marichjhapi (one of the many islands of Sundarbans) and highlight the relationship between politics, spatial injustice and the vulnerability of the peripheral locations within states. The first part of the article looks at the ways in which Forest Laws were misused against the refugees. The way international debates on forest preservation appropriated the reality of the massacre of the lives of refugees in Marichjhapi is what this part discusses. The second part of the paper looks at the discourse of social injustice as an outcome of the production and representation of 'space' in the context of the events at Marichjhapi. Drawing from Lefebvre's conceptions of organisation of space and its influence on social relations, I have argued that both justice and injustice become visible in the specificities of places. Thus the understanding of the interaction between space and societies is essential to the understanding of spatial injustice. Often, the politics of caste identities are at the heart of such spatial injustice as the Marichjhapi massacre testifies to. I have concluded my article with a discussion of spatial injustice from the perspective of borderlands or places located on territorial margins of the state. The materiality of a state's presence depends on the ways its powers are defined at the borders. Thus the location of a space on the borders and its consequent representation makes it far more vulnerable to the violence of state power than it otherwise would have been. The massacre at Marichjhapi was an outcome of a distortion in the representation and definition of that power. My main arguments are: first, instances like Marichjhapi challenge and redefine dominant discourses on state-subject relationships, providing, in the process, fresh perspectives to the understanding of such binaries as insiders/outsiders, inclusion/exclusion, us/them etc. Second, creation of a spatial identity constitutes the convergence of multiple, often conflicting, identities as social identities, ethnic identities and institutional identities, mostly with a fatal outcome. Third, geographical location of spaces has a lot to do with the formation of spatial identities and is decisive in shaping spatial justice. Finally, instances like Marichjhapi are subaltern narratives that are neither acknowledged by elite nationalist historiographies nor even by the existing subaltern schools. They need to be understood to be able to understand the process of nation-building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The violence in Gujarat in 2002 presented a paradoxical phenomenon, namely, a spectacle of violence ostensibly enacted by non-state forces that was covertly and overtly sanctioned by the state. Violence was both spatially localized and physically concentrated on Muslims. Apologists invoked a history of communal conflict and specifically of Muslim provocation, explaining the pogrom of 2002 as having ample precedent and justifiable cause. This paper addresses Ahmedabad's urbanity as an enabling locus for such violence, and draws on historical and ethnographic research to argue that spatial and perceptual practices in the city have combined to ghettoize Muslims, and produce forms of knowledge complicit with structural and episodic violence against them. Such practices (and their discursive uptake) are enabled by political conjunctures that give structurally embedded processes form and visibility. This paper explores the issue of political violence and Muslim vulnerability in Gujarat under the explanatory rubric of the 'Special Political Zone,' an informal analogue to a Special Economic Zone (SEZ), the latter being a site exempt from prevailing regulations, purportedly to enhance economic growth. The political ability to endow specific sites with exceptional legal status for economic outcomes implies the 'Special Political Zone,' a site where select laws of the land are voided to ensure specific political outcomes, for example the staging of violence to dramatize the restructuring of the relationship between majority and minority. This paper offers a limited examination of this hypothesis taking Ahmedabad as a privileged site where much of the violence in Gujarat in 2002 was concentrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the basic philosophy behind India's space strategy based on ideological, sociological, political, economic, geostrategic and legal constructs. The paper uses the metaphor of “deconstruction” made famous by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida's (1930–2004) to understand various transitions (if any) in India's space policy over the years and the philosophy behind them. The paper follows a ‘narrative based scrutiny’ approach to recognise Indian attitude for investments into space technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper uses archival materials, interviews, and secondary scholarship to examine debates among Indian coalitional activists on legal argumentation against India's national sodomy law in Naz Foundation v. Government of NCT of Delhi in particular, and in their mobilization activities in general. At the heart of activists' debates was whether "rights to privacy" was the appropriate legal justification with which to argue the unconstitutionality of the sodomy law. Activists warned against uncritically advancing the notion that the sodomy law was an unlawful intrusion into an individual's privacy, understood in spatial terms as existing within the bounds of a physical home or area, instead highlighting how gender and class shaped queer citizens' engagements with private space. The paper argues that activists' critical examinations of private and public space in the Indian context problematize canonical foundations of queer theory and sociological approaches to sexual citizenship, much of which assumes that all queer life moves from an inner sanctum of private secrecy, experienced as shameful, to an outer realm of equality vis-à-vis the state, the public, and the economy through declarative acts of embodiment. Drawing on critical queer studies scholarship, the paper argues that the legal debates in Naz and Indian queer activism reveal the unstated Western liberalism in prevailing scholarship on the promise of law for queer communities in contexts where core differences exist in material and social realities, and, consequently, in the meanings that individuals attach to space, privacy, embodiment, and visibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mumbai is a collection of seven islands strung together by a historically layered process of reclamation, migration and resettlement. The built landscape reflects the unique geographical characteristics of Mumbai's archipelagic nature. This paper first explores the material, non-material and epistemological contours of space in Mumbai. It establishes that the physical contouring of space through institutional, administrative and non-institutional mechanisms are architected by complex notions of distance from the city's coasts. Second, the paper unravels the unique discursive strands of space, spatiality and territoriality of Mumbai. It builds the case that the city's collective imaginary of value is foundationally linked to the archipelagic nature of the city. Third, the paper deconstructs the complex power dynamics how a sea view turns into a gaze: one that is at once a point of view as it is a factor that provides physical and mental form to space. In conclusion, the paper makes the case that the mindscapes of space, value and power in Mumbai have archipelagic material foundations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: India in Asia and Brazil in Latin America are regarded as the most promising global economies. This paper examines the openings and possibilities for space technology collaboration between India and Latin American states under the larger rubric of science and technology collaboration. While the distance and language barriers between the two regions have proved a hindrance in the past, the paper proceeds with an assumption that, in the 21st century, such barriers should not be a limitation on developing strategic, economic, and science and technology partnerships among nation-states. The paper argues that the Latin American states are keen to have their own satellites because of their significant utility in the socioeconomic sector and this offers an opportunity to India to use cooperation in space technologies as a powerful tool for engagement in Latin America. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Space and its reconstruction has emerged as one of the foremost devices of capitalist development. In this context, this paper attempts to develop a critique of the prevailing logic of ‘development’ in India. It argues that the contextual realities of the current exclusionist economic policy in India are defined not only by the nexus of the neo-liberal policy regime and disciplinary political authority, but also by the resistance and struggles of the dispossessed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The memorandum of understanding between Enron and the Maharashtra State Electricity Board, signed on 20 June 1992, set in motion the Dabhol Power Project, the largest corporate-led venture in Indian history. But even while the project was gaining official clearance, it attracted considerable local opposition on environmental and livelihood related grounds. Additionally, the fact that Enron was awarded the contract by the Congress Party led state government of Maharashtra, in the absence of procedural transparency and open bidding, entangled the project in deep controversy. This paper, based on fieldwork, examines opposition to the Dabhol Power Project. I particularly focus on the relevance of militant particularism, and the importance of counter-hegemony of the working class and/or the subaltern counter-public in the context of multi-scaled manifestations of neoliberal power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the telegram and its impact upon meaning and language, including Indian nationalist strategies subverting imperial control. After 1860, the British Indian Empire emerged as a crucial strategic element in the telegraph network of the globe. It included countries outside present-day India and the larger sphere of 'informal empire.' The paper uses the terms India and the Indian Empire in this broader sense. Changes in time and shortening of distance, allowed messages to be sent and received rapidly but permitted multiple interpretations of what telegrams meant. It was a world of electronic communication where codes and ciphers and mistaken meanings were recurrent: a world of shadowy meanings. This paper analyses the technological and interpretative dimensions of this asymmetrical world of transnational electronic communication flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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As states concentrate their developmental capacities in space, the sub-national scale has emerged as a focal point of policy-making in India. The rescaled spatiality of the state is being inscribed on land. Land is the primary resource available to sub-national states to attract private investment in post-reform contexts. Yet, the promulgation of innovative policies is only the start of the space-state relationship. This paper follows rescaled state policy through to its reception and appropriation by business, community and family networks that operate in the real estate industry, which is a major land user. Dynamic multi-dimensional spatial relations involving scales and networks do not engage with a staid, centralised, formal state. Instead, real estate firms work with a state that is itself networked, and that straddles formality and informality, as well as shadows. India’s land economy is animated in this teeming space of state, scale and networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No account or discourse on Kāśī goes without claiming the extraordinary status of the place; the city is considered the eternal tīrtha, where all notable places of Indian sacred geography are represented by local replicas; moreover, according to Puranic tradition Kāśī dwells on Lord Śiva triśūla, surviving the universal dissolution for it exists outside space, beyond time. The perception of the historical place gets often confused with the mythical image forged by the māhātmya tradition and supported by different actors in the course of time (sacred specialists, "new Hindūs", nationalists, orientalists and tourists). The paper deals with the image of Kāśī beyond time and space and analyses its construction through history and society. Basing our reflections on the phenomenological approach to the study of spatial dimension, we want to highlight the interactions between the struggle of creation of a mythic space of the city and the inevitable intrusions and contributions of lived places and their practices, as depicted in the visual sources on Banāras. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper investigates the spatial organization of social relations in settlement contexts through a quantitative and distributional analysis of surface ceramic attributes from Iron Age Period (1200–300 BC) archaeological sites in Southern India. The results discern variation in depositional contexts across each site, from which I infer a variety of basic settlement activity structures (e.g., site maintenance, trash disposal, residence, animal husbandry, metallurgy, ritual). I use these results, together with further analyses of artifact and feature distributions, to infer a basic suite of places, place-making practices and some of the social relations and organizational structures that produced these historically unique Iron Age settlement landscapes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Following a brief sketch of the shift within development geography from rural to urban themes, this paper examines Nijman's description and analysis of Mumbai's slums. This is characterised by a historical and geographical stratification, with an emphasis on the congruence of economic and social geography in Dharavi. His analysis is conducted primarily at the community level. In this commentary the reader's attention is drawn to the livelihood strategy approach, which originated from the rural context but is also relevant in the slum setting. Such an approach could be useful in documenting the dynamic of slums and of the households that inhabit them. But households are just one of the actors in this struggle for space. Also making an appearance are public authorities, NGOs and businesses, each with a claim to the same space. At the same time, the struggle is played out at several levels and is imbedded in the local situation, which makes comparative and longitudinal research an interesting way to define the place of slums and their inhabitants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper, I deploy an analytic of ‘translocal assemblage’ as a means for conceptualising space and power in social movements. I offer a relational topology that is open to how actors within movements construct different spatial imaginaries and practices in their work. In using the prefix ‘translocal’, I am signifying three orientations. First, translocal assemblages are composites of place-based social movements which exchange ideas, knowledge, practices, materials and resources across sites. Second, assemblage is an attempt to emphasise that translocal social movements are more than just the connections between sites. Sites in translocal assemblages have more depth than the notion of ‘node’ or ‘point’ suggests – as connoted by network – in terms of their histories, the labour required to produce them, and their inevitable capacity to exceed the connections between other groups or places in the movement. Third, they are not simply a spatial category, output, or resultant formation, but signify doing, performance and events. I examine the potential of assemblage to offer an alternative account to that of the ‘network’, the predominant and often de facto concept used in discussions of the spatiality of social movements. I draw on examples from one particular translocal assemblage based in and beyond Mumbai which campaigns on housing within informal settlements: Slum/Shack Dwellers International. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: During the first three decades after 1947, the Indian economy grew only 3% per year but there was vast expansion in the science and technology (S&T) infrastructure. Decades later, especially during the last few years, the economy has grown much faster, but the S&T systems have not experienced the transformation that business and industry have. The net result is that the public sector S&T system is facing a major crisis even as the private sector contributes little to the national R&D effort. Wealth generation in India by private S&T services, especially in information technology, has led to greater prosperity for the educated middle class, but has also led to greater inequalities in income. The national scene is one of generally uneven achievement and extraordinary potential. This paper argues that unless another major shift in S&T policy occurs, there is real danger that India will not move beyond its status as a blue-collar S&T power. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Demystifying Trans Narratives: Gender in Post Modern India attempts to demystify the term 'Trans Narrative' and introduce transgender autobiographies to both the gender marginalized as well as the mainstream heteronormative society. It is a study of the autobiographies of three transgender writers across India and attempts to focus on a renewed narratology in relation to self and body in these narratives. The omittance of trans narratives from mainstream society have functioned as an act of silencing nonconforming genders since these unconventional literatures threaten to destabilize the neat binaries of male/female and masculine/feminine. The study analyses three autobiographies by three transgender writers, namely, Laxminarayan Tripathi's Me Hijra Me Laxmi (2015), A. Revathi's Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story (2010) and Living Smile Vidya's I am Vidya (2007) and focuses on the so-called unnarratable in these narratives. By unnarratable it refers to those narratives which should not be told or mentioned because of the prevailing social conventions. During the Victorian Era, sex and private self was always the unnarratable whereas in the contemporary era, it's same-sex desire and sex change. Hence by euphemism, illusion, metaphor, and metonymy, such tabooed subjects which cannot be narrated are signified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policies sometimes exempt particular categories of regulatees for reasons of equity and political feasibility. Will the non‐exempt oppose the policy because they shoulder all of the policy costs? We outline an analytic framework for "stress testing" public support among the non‐exempt when they are provided negative information about exemptions and reduced policy effectiveness. Empirically, we study public support for the odd‐even road space rationing policy in India. Using a survey experiment with 2,182 car owners in Bangalore, we find considerable baseline support for this policy. While support among the non‐exempt erodes when they are told about exemptions, there is no additional erosion when they are told that exemptions reduce policy effectiveness. This suggests that the perception of fairness, not policy efficacy, drives the erosion of support among the non‐exempt. Yet the policy survives the stress test because the majority of respondents continue to support it, in spite of support erosion among the non‐exempt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hans J Morgenthau said, "International politics is a struggle for power", where each nation seeks to enhance its power and influence. The age of space technology that commenced with the launch of Sputnik - I in 1957, heralded the beginning of a new program capable of serving as a double-edged instrument fulfilling both the defense and development needs of a country. Space program has been instrumental in the enhancement of national power. During the initial period of commencement of space age, national prestige, national pride and military applications were the main motivating forces behind the embracement of space program. India's space program, which started its journey in 1962, has been now recognized as one of the leading countries in the world in the arena of space-based research. A post-colonial country, which is aspiring to become a major power in the 21st century, has a magical instrument in its possession, i.e., its space program, which has immense capabilities to serve both defense and development needs of India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an ongoing debate on an India-China space race. Both states have made investments in the space domain for the last few decades for social, scientific, commercial, and military reasons. The January 2007 anti-satellite test conducted by China significantly raised international concerns on issues concerning space security. China's strategic space program is witnessing major advances, and China's attainments in the space arena in terms of its financial investments, expanse of programs, technology proficiency, and future plans are ahead of those of India. At the same time, both states are pursuing programs such as the development of navigational networks and missions to the Moon and Mars. In this context, it is of interest to analyze China's increasing focus on satellite technologies and India's response. This article analyzes the possible manifestation of a "security dilemma" in the context of outer space among these states and concludes that the dilemma is suggestive, but not definitive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite political, technological, and economic constraints, Pakistan is considered an aspiring space power with a relatively modest space program compared to the larger, more successful ones of China and India. Innovative leadership, smart allocation of national resources, and political will are all necessary for any country to progress in such a high-technology field. The Chinese and Indian space programs pose unique challenges and opportunities for Pakistan. Rivalry with India over its regional and extra-regional ambitions means that Pakistan would have to give serious thought towards bolstering its space program as part of its national outlook in the twenty-first century. Pakistan can utilize cordial relations with China to improve its nascent space infrastructure through collaborative efforts to gain eventual self-sufficiency for socioeconomic and strategic purposes in the South Asian region. While Pakistan may not have the economic clout of a bigger power, it can utilize the "Space 2.0" concept of multilateral and public-private partnerships to empower its space program, enhance its domestic scientific and technological base, and build an indigenous space industry that can reap dividends at home and abroad. This can also benefit Pakistan's needs to maintain strategic parity with India and stake its own claims as an emerging space nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the growth of school sports and sense of space in colonial India. He mentions the use of schools to disseminate British education in its colonies, the implementation of sports to help create a middle class culture, and the sociological impact on Indian male students.

This article identifies a major transformation in India's approach to strategic technology development from an earlier Commission model, epitomized by atomic energy, that seeks the enhancement of sovereign power, to a Mission model, epitomized by telecommunications, directed toward the furthering of biopolitical power. It compares five strategic industries in India—atomic energy, space, electronics, biotechnology and telecommunications—and shows that no single factor is responsible for technological success or failure. Outcomes depend on the strength of political networks, the structure and maturity of the industry, the extent of bureaucratic resistance, and the technological strategy adopted. This finding contests the widely held perspective that success in strategic technology development is the product of the extraordinary efforts of a single individual, a technology “czar,” and explains the persistence of this narrative by highlighting the role of technoscience in mediating a highly ambivalent relation between the Indian middle class and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In contemporary, South Africa space continues to remain highly racialised despite shifts and changes brought about by the end of apartheid in 1994. The recreational space of the Blue Lagoon, the focus of this study, and in close proximity to the Indian Ocean was historically demarcated for the use of Indians only. In this article, the ways in which a selected group of Indian men in Durban give meaning to the changing face of Blue Lagoon are examined. By drawing on focus group discussions, the article highlights the interaction between race, space and the construction of masculinities through which male power is expressed and inequalities are produced. The study finds that the Blue Lagoon is an important space through which Indian masculinities are produced and consolidated. However, the Blue Lagoon functions to express race and class inequalities through the investment made in the car and the construction of a racialised other. The article concludes with some implications for challenging inequalities and the exclusion it supports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dalits (ex-untouchables) in Tamil Nadu, as in many other places of India, have historically resided in cheris or settlements set apart from the village or oor. Cheris often lack amenities like schools, ration shops, health centers or panchayat buildings and are set off the main road down poorly lit and surfaced roads, revealing the significance of space and the spatiality of social relations to the caste system. As Dalits in Tamil Nadu have mobilized politically, they have challenged the hierarchical nature of social space in the face of much backlash, seeking to create meaningful public spaces that are open to, and representative of, all castes. This article concerns the Dalit contestations over space and the wider ramifications of such struggles in the sociopolitical sphere, and argues that the process of democratization requires alterations to social and well as political spaces and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The origins of the Indian space program are typically traced back to the founding of a rocket launch base in Thumba in the state of Kerala in India in the 1960s. In creating infrastructure at Thumba, Indian scientific elites used geography as an instrument to create a vast international network of scientific and political actors committed to the science that was possible within India, particularly cosmic ray studies. They were drawing on a long tradition of linking geography to science redolent of the colonial era but were inspired by their newly constituted political imaginary of independent India as a place where science, geography, and nation were perfectly mapped on to each other. NASA’s help was crucial in this regard, enabled as a tool in Cold War high politics, as American technocrats sought to steer India towards the West, while India itself was keenly aware of a more proximate phenomenon, Pakistan’s own burgeoning efforts to do the same. Concerned about domestic opprobrium to large Indian investments in space technology, Indian and American actors shielded the Thumba project from critique by installing it under the umbrella of the international order, in this case the United Nations. This internationalism was complemented by a deep and firm belief in the universalism of modern science as a portable instrument, capable of improving the social order anywhere, regardless of political or social context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although B.R. Ambedkar, the chief architect of the Indian Constitution, is well known for his struggle against caste and the practice of untouchability, his ideas have seldom been linked to concepts such as nationalism or space. In an attempt to shed some light upon this under-explored subject, I analyse the relationship between the village, the city, the practice of untouchability and the emergence of nationalism in Ambedkar's thought. Focusing primarily on his writings, post 1935 concerning untouchability, I will argue that for Ambedkar, space played a critical role in both the perpetuation and evanescence of untouchability and similarly in the neglect and emergence of nationalism. More specifically, a small locus with tightly knit social and commercial associations, such as the Indian village, facilitated the ongoing differentiation of the population into two distinct groups, touchables and Untouchables. This social and spatial segregation perpetuated the practice of untouchability while preventing the growth of nationalism. However, a bigger and more crowded setting, such as the city, not only complicated the observance of social norms such as untouchability, but also benefited the creation of a corporate feeling of ‘oneness’ among individuals, which according to Ambedkar, was a condition for the emergence of nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the role of 'space' in Indian and Pakistani public sector universities in fostering national pride. University spaces have been highlighted, in both countries, for being used by the governments as agents fostering the national narrative yet there is limited research on how these spaces contribute to the visual culture of educational institutions and in the inculcation of nationalistic values. This article adds to the conversations regarding the fostering of national belonging and pride in universities by exploring space as a constitutive element of the visual culture of the higher education environment in India and Pakistan. In both countries, the physical spaces of public universities have become platforms for channelling student voices. This research uses two state-funded universities, from Delhi (in India) and Lahore (in Pakistan), and Lefebvre's conception of space to conduct a discourse analysis of bulletin boards, graffiti, statues, sculptures, and any other imagery found online pertaining to the campuses and analyse how it is a 'conceived' and 'perceived' aspect of the visual culture of the universities. It adds to current scholarly conversations on national pride and consciousness in India and Pakistan by showing how university spaces can potentially play an active role in promoting the state's narrative in students' or educators' everyday educational experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article posits that a spatial discourse can be discerned in broadcasting and media policies in India that has framed nationalism, globalization, sovereignty, and citizenship. Through a range of spatial practices, India’s nation-state has historically elaborated two overlapping modalities of power: national sovereignty from 1947 to 1990, and governmentality since 1991. To understand the spatial discourses and the modalities of power we need to move beyond methodological nationalism: that is, explanations that treat state as a container and a fixed entity, where social relations are organized within territorially bounded national spaces. The article demonstrates that the spatial discourse of the state can be grasped through a transnational framework that considers national and international as part of the wider global field of relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers information on the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) in Narmada River in western India. It states that SSP is the largest multipurpose project that dislocates population from 245 villages, primarily tribal population and inundates thousands of hectares of land. It infers that the said project created economic risks to the Adivasis because many of them are not receiving two hectares of land and women are not enjoying high status in their families and community.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participatory research with a Rajasthani (India) drinking water supply project indicates that women's participation has generated an ongoing struggle inside the implementing nongovernmental organization (NGO) and in villages. A Bakhtinian analysis of the project's women's participation program can illuminate the micropolitics of dialogic struggles surrounding women's participation and its related spaces. Bakhtin's concepts of utterance, dialogic process, and chronotope offer geographers a framework for analyzing the constant, simultaneous production of meaning and space. A Bakhtinian analysis of NGO fieldworkers' speech accesses the micropolitics within social relations, which construct gendered spaces. Gendered participatory approaches need reevaluation because dialogues about women's participation extend the scope of that participation beyond what is intended by development policymakers and practitioners. As part of their work, fieldworkers simultaneously are influenced by and contribute to shifting spaces of gendered domination, flexible meanings of women's participation, and newly audible voices. Verbal struggles over gendered spaces lead to new meanings of women's participation. These new meanings in turn expand the influence of women's participation as a platform for sociospatial change. Gendered gains may be temporary and incremental, but where before there was little precedent or feeling for women's participation within the drinking water supply project, over time women's participation became linked to all project goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]