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Kerala, the Indian state has the distinction of producing the earliest mangoes in the country, in February and the season extends up to May, coinciding with South West monsoon. Mango cultivar ‘Neelum’, the last commercial variety to attain maturity in the State is hampered by the incidence of fruit fly and anthracnose disease. An attempt was made during 2019-20 to extend the availability of the fruits of this cultivar by giving a surface coating with ‘Nipro Fresh’ wax containing the fungicide, Carbendazim, followed by shrink-wrap packaging in trays made of areca nut leaf sheath, before sanitizing with chlorine (100 ppm) and alum solution (1%). Surface coating with ‘Nipro Fresh’, followed by shrink-wrap packaging of trays containing mangoes, and their subsequent storage in cool chamber at 12-13 °C and 85-90 % relative humidity, extended the shelf life by 54 days, compared to the uncoated and unwrapped samples which had a shelf life of 9 days under ambient conditions. Respiration rate, physiological loss in weight, total soluble solids and carotenoids showed a steady rise while titratable acidity, total phenols and ascorbic acid recorded a declining trend.

When it comes to the relationship between the Bible and ancient empires, the focus for the most part remains on the past and on the imperial contexts in which these texts were written. It must be noted that even though historical-critical scholarship has drawn our attention to historical contexts, empires continued to remain in the background in biblical studies. This chapter focuses on the relationship between the Bible and empire, not only of the past but also the present. It examines in depth the works of biblical scholars who have made a conscious attempt to expand the field of Biblical studies. Furthermore, by highlighting the points of convergence and divergence between the Bible and precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial empires, scholars can begin to see the ways in which the relationship between the Bible and empire has constantly evolved, transformed, and mutated as scholars transgress boundaries and draw on the work of one another.

This chapter explores the concept of “shuttling” as a hermeneutical tool to interpret New Testament texts. As the world moves toward regressive nationalism, persons embodying hybrid identities threaten an exclusive view of the nation from within its boundaries. In the Indian context, the term “Indo-Western” is used to describe persons shuttling between Indian and Western cultural values. The Indian Christian community, and in particular Indian Christian women, have found themselves oscillating between traditionalism and modernism, and shuttling between the East and the West in an attempt to define their Indian-ness while living in postcolonial India. This shuttling between cultures has rendered Indian Christian women perpetual outsiders both inside and outside of the nation. Thus, reading biblical texts through the lens of “shuttling,” while acknowledging their place as belonging “neither here nor there,” enables Indian Christian women to interpret texts as outsiders that never fully belong to either context.

The phenomenon of outsourcing has taken on a new meaning in the surrogacy industry, as infertile couples (both Indian and non-Indian)1 with considerable financial resources seek out and hire the local wombs of poor Indian women for the purposes of generative labor. Sentiments regarding the ethical and moral nature of this practice are quite often divided. Journalist Sagarika Ghosh documents one such exchange in the television program, Face the Nation. Ghosh interviews four prominent women, two of whom are Dr. Indira Hinduja, a gynecologist at a reputed hospital in India, and Kishwar Desai, author of the novel Origins of Love. When asked if commercial surrogacy is a practice that exploits the poor women in India, Dr. Hinduja responds: “If the poor woman is carrying a baby to give someone a very meaningful, profound life, meaningful result to its life, if the couple by themselves, by their pleasure—want[s]to compensate those women, what’s wrong with that? ”2 Advocates of modern surrogacy like Dr. Hinduja, highlight the business of surrogacy as an altruistic practice by suggesting that such a transaction is a win-win situation for both the women involved. However, as critics have duly noted, such an argument fails to pay attention to the redesignation of “women’s labor” as a commodity exchanged in the free market for a price.

While colonial contexts prided themselves in separating the colonized from the colonizer using racial, economic, and geographical boundaries, the new global Empire, disguised under the prospect of economic progress, shatters barriers of such separation and creates desire for a new kind of liberation among Third World countries. This liberation, while promising economic emancipation and racial equality, is contingent upon the voluntary submission to exploitation. At the same time, penetrable borders cause anxiety for the global Empire as it allows for an unsupervised mixing leading to the creation of heterogeneous subjectivities. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri point out, “The dark side of the consciousness of globalization is the fear of contagion.”1 Contaminated subjects, as a result, become excellent sites for economic opportunity as their hybrid subjectivities make them desirable subjects that at once belong, but not quite, to the new Empire.

Outsourcing is often understood as an invention of modern Empire, a byproduct of globalization. However, the notion of hiring racially othered laborers from a certain socioeconomic class under the guise of economic development and “civilizing”; expansion is a concept as old as colonization itself. The modern surrogate mother living and working in a postcolonial India catches glimpses of herself in the reflection of the textual body of the amah and the dhaye/ayah.1 These women living in colonial India and hired by the Empire, particularly the British memsahibs,2 become foster-mothers to the future progeny of the Empire. Thus, while for the modern surrogate mother it is the womb that marks the point of contact between the self and the other, for the colonized amah/ayah it is the brown breast/body that binds the oppressor with the oppressed, uniting them and making them one.