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There appears to be a globally unifying discourse that suggests Muslim communities are not supportive of girls' education12. This paper aims to destabilize such a discourse by inserting the narratives of Muslim parents pursuing girls' education in Assam's Nagaon district. By paying attention to the concepts of bhal suwali (good girlhood) and bhal ghor (good family) articulated by parents in my study, this paper connects the performances of certain types of gender practices with the pursuit of class aspirations. It shows that good girlhood works as symbolic capital that helps Muslim parents to culturally authorize their daughters as legitimate actors in the field of education, while legitimizing themselves as good family. This paper draws attention to three practices of respectable femininity through which good girlhoods are enacted in the field of education, namely: negotiating poverty respectably, prioritizing gendered discipline, and merging career aspirations with marital prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a comparative assessment of South Africa and India's service delivery improvement strategies, challenges, successes and lessons learnt in advancing their service delivery reform programmes. The cardinal argument in the paper is that the public administrative systems adopted and inherited in the post-democratic epochs in India and South Africa were incapable of meeting the service delivery needs of their respective citizens. They epitomised the traditional and hierarchical public administrative systems that were the object of reforms in the 1990s. The reform initiatives also coincided with global reforms on public administration systems taking place under the aegis of the new public management framework. A key feature of new public management is its application of private-sector ideas to the public sector, such as individual accountability. The paper further undertakes a comparative review of service delivery improvement frameworks of South Africa (Batho Pele) and India (Sevottam) in relation to their objectives and implementation modalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies photographs of Bombay's built environment, especially Dalit and working-class houses, taken by two social scientists in the 1920s and 1930s. The photographs are situated at the intersection of four discursive temporalities: (a) social reforms initiated by Indian nationalists of the late nineteenth to twentieth centuries; (b) sanitary reforms and urban restructuring undertaken by city administrators and the colonial state, which reappeared vigorously after the plague epidemic of 1896; (c) colonial knowledge production, including census, labour and housing reports that informed academic social–scientific knowledge; and (d) Dalit and working-class social movements that aspired to transgressing the limits of reform in order to re-define self and the collective, and demand the redistribution of material resources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]