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Caste in the South Asian context is a deeply felt phenomenon, practised through bodily and sensory regimentation, and the prescriptive social organization of bodies in space. These relationships between caste and embodiment have historically been closely regulated in norms around the partaking, sharing and cooking of food, and meat in particular. This paper examines how these gastronomic prescriptions endure and take on new meanings in digital food media, which disrupts physical space and food's relationships to the body and sensory experience. Drawing on two years of ethnography with creators who produce home-cooking content in the emerging Indian "creator economy," this paper considers how caste is embodied, articulated and remediated online during a time of violent Hindu nationalist food politics in India. How is caste articulated even when it is not explicitly named by creators in their posts? How are caste-based disgust and humiliation, and conversely, caste intimacy elicited by creators as they labor for the creator economy? Bringing together feminist and anti-caste theories of experience, articulation and embodiment, the paper theorizes caste as affect, and in doing so, illuminates how it comes to have a digital life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The captivating tribal communities living across the length and breadth of the state of Central India and mostly in Odisha have enriched the cultural heritage of the region by their cultural diversities. Gadaba's religious life reflected through their rich folk traditions of songs, dance, music, rituals and festivals celebrated round the year adds colourful dimensions to their very existence. The amazing conglomeration of traditions, beliefs, sorrows and philosophies that together constitute and vitalize the religion of tribes has descended from antiquity and has been preserved unimpaired to the present day. Every dimension of their life covering round the year activities is intimately connected with religion and the world view associated with it. It is these aspects of their culture that give meaning and depth to their lives and solidarity to their social structure. However, in recent days many changes have been taken place in traditional religious life of Gadaba tribe. Against this backdrop, this paper has tried to explore some of that core structure of Gadaba's religious life as well as the changing dimensions of their religious manifestation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large number of people from villages in the India–Bangladesh borderlands are migrants to Indian cities, particularly to the National Capital Region (NCR) of Delhi. Migration from Cooch Behar, an industrially backward district in the northern part of the state of West Bengal in India sharing border with Bangladesh and the Indian state of Assam, has been a regular practice as subsistence agriculture fail to provide the landless agricultural labourers continuous employment and competitive wages. This paper is based on ethnographic study in Delhi NCR and the former 'Chhit Mahals' (as the former border enclaves of Bangladesh and India were called in Bengali) in Cooch Behar district, in the period immediately following their exchange, of historically marginal migrant households whose members work in the construction industry. With the implementation of the 1974 Land Boundary Agreement between India and Bangladesh and the finalisation of the India-Bangladesh land boundary, the former Chhit Mahals, that is border enclaves of Bangladesh and India, were exchanged between the two states in August 2015. The former Bangladeshi Chhit Mahals in Cooch Behar are now Indian villages, whose residents had opted for Indian citizenship. This paper explores migration from these former Chhit Mahals with a relational political economy perspective. It analyses both broader socio-cultural, economic, and political processes and interests and the migrants' own feelings which interact with migration to demonstrate how the migrant's labour value is determined at the intersection of identity, affect and the international border, with marginalisation of the migrants from the India–Bangladesh borderlands emerging as a product of layered struggles and a dynamic of continuous cultural reconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper inquires into the heteronormative regimes of sexual morality, focusing on the experiences of gay and queer men within the locus of family. Drawing upon a phenomenological ethnography involving interviews with the Indian gay community, this study demonstrates the disciplinary power of sexual morality over queer lives. It examines the varied strategies of moral regimentation within the locus of family, including regimenting through silencing, moral dictation, and penalizing. These strategies reflect the prevailing conservative and sex-negative attitudes in Indian society, particularly patriarchal expectations toward men and the pressure for marriage, which augments familial and social burdens on gay men, resulting in emotional distress. The cumulative effects lead to gay men living double lives, presenting a socially accepted façade while repressing their authentic queer selves, indicating a guilty conscience and internalized homophobia. These experiences correlate with risky sexual behavior, substance abuse, and overall compromised mental health. This phenomenological inquiry highlights the role of the family as a locus of moral control of queer individuals and contributes to the sociological understanding of morality as a power-relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]