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The hegemonic narrative linking coal to national sovereignty and energy security promoted by state and private actors, translates into policies promoting coal expansionism. The study is based on the proposition that the counter-discourse offered by non-state actors, mainly environmental civil society organization, represents a potential challenge against such narrative. The dialectical discursive dynamics around energy transition are explored within India's print media by employing the method of Discourse Network Analysis to trace the dominant storylines and discourse coalitions. The findings reveal two opposed storylines, one pro-coal the other anti-coal, underpinning the two ideologically cohesive discourse coalitions dominated by state and non-state actors, respectively. It uncovers the ideological fault lines between the two sets of actors, with the possibilities for synthesis and policy co-learning. The paper concludes by deriving implications regarding post pandemic challenges and possibilities emerging for both the sets of actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By examining the Sutta Nipāta, considered one of the collections containing the oldest texts of the Pāli canon, this study aims to reconstruct social, historical, and anthropological aspects of archaic Buddhist doctrine at the time of its definition in dialectic with the forces of orthodoxy and constituted power in 6th century BCE India. This study also provides important insights into the development and definition of contemplative practices devoted to the search for the 'absolute' (paramattha and brahmavihāra), which has often received little attention in meditation studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores how notions relating to the local and global are articulated in the works of the artist Subodh Gupta. I also consider how such terms relate to the notion of 'Indianness.' My examination is grounded within materiality, in particular the stainless steel utensils that have become the artist's primary, most well-known medium. This material is a culturally-specific phenomenon, located in a number of contexts within India (Gupta's country of origin). It is also associated with Gupta's ascent, when he became globally renowned in the mid-to-late 2000s, gaining recognition through his stainless steel sculptures and installations, as well as paintings depicting such objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theologians from the Black communities in the USA, South Africa and other places, and Dalit groups in India have struggled with a dialectic between the retrieval of subjectivity within political spaces inflected by ‘race’ and ‘caste’ and the opposition to these essentialist categorisations. On the one hand, their politics of resistance has been predicated on their specific Black or Dalit identities, while, on the other hand, the postulation of such identities has often been criticised for being essentialist and homogenising. It would seem, therefore, that such patterns of ‘theologies of liberation’ have to steer clear of the Scylla of a postmodern-style dissolution of subjectivities in which the Black or Dalit identities are effaced in a ‘raceless’ or ‘casteless’ amorphousness, and the Charybdis of ‘ontologizing’ the experiences of Blackness or Dalitness in a manner that may re-entrench these binaries that arguably cannot be fitted into the Christian eschatological vision of the reconciliation of humanity. In our analysis of some Black and Dalit theologies, we shall seek to illuminate the distinctive ways in which they assert hitherto repressed subjectivities, while seeking at the same time to avoid ontological dualisms between sections of humanity, now fractured along the lines of race and caste. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a postcolonial critique of power-resistance dialectics among outsourced call center workers in India. A constructivist grounded theory analysis of focus group and interview data with 65 participants reveals how microresistance intersects with global capitalism in ways that both accommodate and rupture Western discourses. These discursive and material intersectionalities are made visible through employees' processes of (1) aping the West, (2) articulating new logics and demonstrating Indian sensibilities, and (3) embracing a new life. The themes primarily reveal how the employees rupture the essentialist image of the other and challenge the dominant logic of neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indian democracy, with its vitality, resilience and blemishes, is puzzling. Many democrats and human rights activists find it hard to reconcile the country's democratic achievements with its tragic failures. The article analyzes the Indian structure of governance in order to identify general rules of successful democratic transition and consolidation, and formulate some policy recommendations for the Indian and other emerging democracies. In contrast to conventional theory, the article explains the 'counterfactual' nature of India's democracy and governance in terms of the ability of India's political actors to conflate the indigenous sense of dharma - righteous conduct - with modern concepts of rights, both individual and collective - acquired in course of British colonial rule. Several generations of political leaders who straddle the worlds of modern India - her legislatures, courts of law and sprawling bureaucratic agencies - and the traditional worlds of castes, religions, ethnic groups and regional language communities have striven to devise new rules and institutions that would connect the modern and traditional faces of this complex country. This, I argue here, has led to the deepening of democracy, which is contingent on the political process that draws as much on the indigenous norms and colonial modernity as on the extension of representation down to the level of the village community, and the empowerment of marginal social groups, lower social classes, religious minorities and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Many Hindu pilgrimage sites in India experience heavy influxes of pilgrims and are subject to considerable environmental impact. Existing literature on the study of the environment in pilgrimage sites, however, appears to follow two divergent directions: one emphasizes degradation of the physical environment while the other highlights the sacred character of the place and how that is compromised by contemporary visitor flows. The aim of this paper is to move beyond this divergence and to demonstrate how contemporary environmental problems are outcomes related to a historical process of environmental change that accompanies the making of a sacred place. This paper is based on a case study of Vrindavan, a Hindu pilgrimage site associated with Krishna worship in northern India. More than 6million visitors visit Vrindavan annually. Using a historical geography approach and socio-spatial dialectic conceptual framework, the paper explains how this pilgrimage landscape was established in the 15th century, and how since then it has evolved into a religious-urban place comprising more than 5500 temples. Its development is categorized into three periods: pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial. In each period, the socio-spatial fabric showed significant transformations that resulted from the interaction of three critical factors: the influence of local and global socio-economic processes on the cultural economy of pilgrimage, the relationship of this economy to spatial change, and institutional controls that regulated the other two factors. It is argued that the environment of pilgrimage is simultaneously social, economic, cultural and religious and shaped by the need to maintain the place as sacred. This insight is useful for a better understanding of contemporary environmental problems so that they may be addressed effectively. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this commentary I would like to offer some reflections on the Deleuzian concept of 'assemblage' (agencement) from the perspective of my grounding in 'governmentality studies' and, secondly, on the latter's central concern with the concept of the security 'apparatus' (dispositif). I would like to suggest that the two be thought of dialectically, both as concepts and as actually-existing things in the world. After outlining my use to date of these concepts, and their deployment in my research into colonial India, I will counterpoise Giorgio Agamben's and Giles Deleuze's reflections on Michel Foucault's use of the term dispositif/apparatus. Deleuze's obvious and acknowledged indebtedness to Foucault's work, but his explicit re-rendering of the Foucauldian interest in order with the Deleuzian conceptualisation of dis-order, will be used to conclude with some methodological suggestions regarding how Deleuze and Foucault, agencement and dispositif, assemblages and apparatuses, can and should be thought together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a study of hitherto unexplored geography textbooks written in Bengali between 1845 and 1880, this paper traces the evolution of a geographic information system related to ethnicity, race, and space. This geographic information system impacted the mentality of emerging educated elites in colonial India who studied in the newly established colonial schools and played a critical role in developing and articulating ideas of the territorial nation-state and the rights of citizenship in India. The Bengali Hindu literati believed that the higher location of India in such a constructed hierarchy of civilizations could strengthen their claims to rights of citizenship and self-government. These nineteenth century geography textbooks asserted clearly that high caste Hindus constituted the core ethnicity of colonial Indian society and all others were resident outsiders. This knowledge system, rooted in geography/ethnicity/race/space, and related to the hierarchy of civilizations, informed the Bengali intelligentsia's notion of core ethnicity in the future nation-state in India with Hindu elites at its ethnic core. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concepts such as community and models of community organisation (CO) have been defined in static terms for a fairly long time. They need to be revisited and their complexity appreciated. The current article demonstrates the potential of dialectical engagement of CO faculty in the field with a view to opening up theory to critical questioning. The nature of knowledge so generated is uncertain, dilemmatic, but it is more in correspondence with the realities of the day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]