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Khare and Varman present a compellingly pessimistic analysis of the plight of the poor in India. The dilemmas of the poor are often exacerbated by large corporations seeking to find ways to market products to impoverished emerging market consumers.  In India, consumers are frequently hurt by these initiatives, small retailers may suffer, while corruption and trickery by petty bureaucrats and ruthless landlords help the rich get richer at the expense of the poor.  The article by Khare and Varman is a scathing indictment based on detailed ethnographic evidence but it reveals only a fraction of the disadvantages and traps of disempowerment facing those Indians living lives of great precarity.  In this comment, we seek to build upon Khare and Varman’s insightful analysis both in order to reinforce their conclusions about the Kafkaesque existence of India’s poor and to introduce some further considerations and complications that make the quagmire even more entrapping.  We focus on four sources of these problems:  patriarchy, bureaucracy  and corruption, class and caste power and hierarchies, and uneven and inadequate infrastructure. We also highlight some largely individual and non-government initiatives that may offer hope of escaping this quagmire for the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the current pandemic, gender non-conforming communities (GNCs) in India have been engaging themselves as critical citizens through a demonstration of civic engagement and social responsibility. This paper, based on narratives, documentary evidence and media reports, demonstrates how GNC volunteers are playing a decisive role in accentuating the virtues of representative democracy by serving as 'monitorial citizens' in India. It also considers the social dynamics involved in GNC people becoming 'monitorial' in a heteronormative society. This means consolidation of their community network and its strategic and instrumental use not just to serve their community, but also a diverse cis-gendered population consisting of migrants, homeless, marginalized, and the poor. In this process, they are creating a shared sense of belonging, based on mutual experiences of discrimination, with other communities that are not categorized as gender non-conforming. Their actions also challenge the normative standards set by mainstream society and create an alternative to existing power hierarchies by capsizing the heteronormative 'gaze'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses research which investigated gender roles in Kalaripayattu martial art practices in India. Topics explored include the dance and ritualistic movements involved in performing Kalaripayattu to cultivate physical and mental control, the link between women's sexuality and the practice of Kalaripayattu by women in public, and the gender bias in Kalaripayattu training methods which may be attributed to physiology.

'Social distance,' and 'social distancing' have become the linguae francae of our world ravaged by COVID-19. Pandemic related social distancing prescriptions, however, do not operate in a vacuum. How do social distancing strategies for containing the pandemic intersect with extant social divisions? Using a unique census-scale micro-dataset from rural Karnataka (an Indian state as large as France), we meditate on this question by drawing on theoretical insights from multiple disciplines including the intellectual genealogy of 'social distance' as a measure of social divisions. Our rich dataset contains independent India's first census-scale enumeration (n ≈ 36.5 million) and coding of elementary caste categories (≈700 jatis). Our dataset is also the first to combine self-reported jati and religion information. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first systematic large-n portrait of intra-village residential segregation in rural India. Our micro-segregation analysis along jati and religion axes provides evidence for a 'permanent cordon sanitaire.' Our analysis also sheds light on how the pandemic intersects with internal migration trajectories in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The religiously sanctioned Devadasi system in India exemplifies intersectional oppression of gender, caste, and sexuality. Historically, Devadasis, or "servants of God," were women wedded to God who performed temple duties and were considered sacral women with ritual powers. As part of her duties, the Devadasis offer sexual services to her patrons, invariably the economically and socially powerful patriarch/s in society. The Devadasis were not a monolithic community; there were caste-based segregations within the Devadasi community which delineated their social positions. Devadasis were drawn from castes lower in the hierarchy (non-Brahmins) and the Scheduled castes (Dalits). To distinguish the two categories, the Devadasis from the non-Brahmin castes were referred to as Kalavantin/Isai Vellalar/Kalavantulu and those from the Dalit castes were referred to as Jogini/Mathamma; their social and economic status were entirely different. The Devadasis from the non-Brahmin communities performed classical music and dance, while the Dalit Devadasis performed folk dances during temple festivals. Though the Devadasi system was outlawed in 1988, the practice of dedicating young girls as Devadasis continues to be prevalent among the Scheduled castes. This paper argues that the activists who fought for the liberation of the Devadasis from the oppressive system focused mostly on the Devadasis from the non-Brahmin castes, excluding the Devadasis from the Scheduled castes. This paper contextualizes the prevalence of the Devadasi system within the interconnected matrices of caste and gender structures in Hindu society. Drawing on the socio-historical trajectory of the emancipation of Devadasis in Goa, a state in Western India, this paper analyzes the caste hierarchies and social inequities embedded within the Devadasi system. Apart from discussing the legal interventions initiated by the State to abolish the Devadasi system, this paper also analyses the role of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) in the emancipation and empowerment of Dalit Devadasis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the political and social conditions in India and mentions that the procedural fascism and substantive fascism was due to the absence of decent examples of leadership and decent models for mobility. The author observes that the Indian ruling party and the state elite have installed fear, anger, and exclusion as the principles of civic and political life. Other topics include the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir, politics of division and hate and Maratha regionalism.

Colonial and postcolonial historians writing in English relied upon an emancipated slave's eighteenth-century Persian text, Tahmās Nāma, to construct the history of the Punjab in the same period. In this process, they have mistranslated the text and the genre. Rather than reading Tahmās Nāma as factual history or as a moral text of refinement, this article argues that if we return to the original account, in Persian, we see that the text is primarily auto/biographical. While this auto/biography does provide some insight into eighteenth-century political history of the Punjab and Mughal Hindustan, it—more importantly—sheds light on the ethnic, religious, social, economic and gendered lives of the author, Miskin, and the people whom he includes in his narrative. These intersecting and overlapping identities have been erased, flattened or misrepresented in translations of the text. Based on a re-reading of the auto/biography in its original language, this article considers how identity and slavery—conceptual categories of the present that are elided in the mistranslations—function in the text, and how those categories were understood, negotiated and leveraged during the eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outbreak of Covid-19 has been highly racialised and stigmatised around the world based on the origin of the virus and its highly infectious nature. Profiling of Asians or mongoloid looking individuals as a suspect carrier of the virus and the resultant taunts and discriminations occur worldwide. In India, the pandemic has reinforce racism against Northeast Indians, which the country has been grappling with this social problem in the last one decade or so. Such discriminations were overt acts of racial prejudice that primarily stems from the nonrecognition or misrecognition of Northeast Indians, who are mainly mongoloid race, as Indians. During the pandemic, the fight by Northeast Indians was with the mindset of the rest of Indians as much as the virus itself. It was a fight not only against the presumption of being 'non-Indian' with negative affiliation, or worse 'unwanted Indians', but also to get due recognition and acceptance as equal Indians. The absence of stringent anti-racism laws may have resulted in the pervasiveness of overt acts of racism during the pandemic. However, such actions are best understood on the structural elements that underpin Indian societies. The legal measures to address this social problem will reduce overt acts of racism but addressing covert racial acts, which are structural in nature, is a long way to go. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I want to focus on some aspects of the political process in India that have an impact on the treatment of religious minorities. Much of the discussion on multicultural jurisdictions deals with differentiated citizenship rights that allow religious groups to maintain their normative universe. This literature shows the tensions surrounding individual and group rights. I want to approach the question of religious freedom from a rather different angle. I want to first focus on the protection of bare life in the face of religious violence and then examine the issue of conversion from one religion to another. The issues of human security and conversion are linked in India, since Hindu nationalists see Muslims as forcibly converted Hindus who should be reconverted. To highlight the importance of majoritarian nationalism rather than political systems in the treatment of religious minorities, I offer a brief comparison with China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through ethnographic contact with the working lives of male autorickshaw drivers in contemporary Kolkata, India, this article unravels the gendered politics of co-presence in shared movement systems in the city. In doing so, it makes a feminist intervention in the literature on urban infrastructures by revealing precisely how ideas of masculinity operate as an invisible structuring principle of everyday mobility. The discussion foregrounds conflict, cooperation and disappointment as the key experiential axes along which male transport workers inhabit infrastructural space in the city. It argues that urban infrastructures are experienced by working-class men as a reminder of their struggle to accomplish the norm of respectable breadwinner masculinity, even as they function as a terrain which allows other expressions of masculinity – such as risk-taking, mastery over space, camaraderie – to be enacted and affirmed. Using a micro-sociological approach to understanding interactions in the spaces of commuting, this article brings into view the interface between cultures of masculinity and the social life of transport infrastructures through which gendered spatial inequalities are lived in the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The invocation of "the people" as the foundation of the nation state raises the specter of "belonging" and involves a staging of the essence of the nation. In India, religion is taken to be the essence of the nation within the framework of hindutva ideology. Muslims are regarded not only as secondary citizens but also as enemy targets for national mobilization. The sovereignty of the Indian state thus necessarily depends on violence directed at the Pakistani national outside of its borders and at the Muslim population residing within. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a plethora of research on North Korea, understanding and managing the challenges posed by the country have long been complicated with no simple solution to put an end to this decades-long security and economic predicament on the Korean Peninsula. With the potential for international conflict, attention must be given to the converging messages emerging from the scholarly works reviewed in this article: Glyn Ford, Talking to North Korea: Ending the Nuclear Standoff, Van Jackson, On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and the Threat of Nuclear War and William Overholt's collection North Korea: Peace? Nuclear War? These works speak to the need to: take seriously the risk of nuclear war; consider the connectedness of the North's decades-long security and economic reform dilemmas; and to acknowledge that the mistrust that is deeply rooted on all sides must be mitigated to bring peace. These books are published at a critical juncture of increased tensions following a highly publicised but remarkably short-lived effort at a breakthrough on the Korean nuclear issue, Pyongyang's rapidly evolving security posture and its perennial domestic challenges. Each of these volumes provides valuable insights on these challenges for North Korea and internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we introduce the special issue through framing the debate on the role of caste in India's current land wars. We draw attention to how caste consistently mediates land transfers in present day India by pre-empting, undermining, or fuelling processes of social contestation, as well as the ways in which land claims in turn shape realigned or reimagined caste identities. Based on this, we make three main arguments. The first and most obvious one is that in contemporary conflicts over land, caste matters in evolving ways that deserve attention. Second, we argue that caste and land are recursively linked categories that are produced and reproduced in continuous interaction, even as multi-scalar political economies (re)shape them. And third, that different registers of caste are articulated by different social groups in more or less overt ways as they stake often competing claims to land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014, the state of Andhra Pradesh was bifurcated by the Indian government, leaving the truncated state without a capital city. A period of political uncertainty before bifurcation and the announcement of the new capital city created possibilities for land speculation and for the acceleration of the commodification of real estate in different parts of the state. Concentrating on Guntur-Vijayawada in the Coastal Andhra region and Donakonda town close to the Rayalaseema region, this article explores how speculative investments based on political calculations by members of regional elite castes translated into the emergence of competing regional investment zones as possible future choices of the capital city. Through an extended and largely ethnographic study, this article shows how caste politics and regional processes of land speculation led to land transfers without violent struggles between different groups. Rather, the cultural politics of regional differentiation and the economy of anticipation allowed a pragmatic convergence of interests to emerge, where acquisition of agricultural land was followed by silent dispossession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the caste and class dimensions of the local resource politics of conservation displacement. Through long-term study of a conservation displacement site in central India, it interrogates how alliances and rivalries contoured along historical class-caste contestations result in differential patterns of recovery from "green grabbing" and exclusionary conservation. It is argued that contestations within and between subaltern social groups, traditional dominant castes and newly upwardly mobile peasant castes are geared towards cornering resource flows associated with the local welfare/developmental state. Given severely limited avenues of gainful employment for the rural poor in the neo-liberal era, access to the local gatekeeping economy shapes trajectories of accumulation and decline in the context of India's new land wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the political narratives around a two-decade -old process of land acquisition and development in the "global city" Rajarhat, a former rural settlement in the Indian state of West Bengal. These narratives are built against the backdrop of a neoliberal state acting as a corporate facilitator, particularly in matters of land, and the concomitant dispossession. The multifaceted politics of Rajarhat took shape during the erstwhile communist regime in West Bengal, the dichotomy of a self-identified Left state engaged in forceful and violent land acquisition thus forming an interesting paradox. The article also presents evidence against the long -held political myth of caste relations being irrelevant in Bengali politics, by examining the upper-caste -dominated social relations in Rajarhat and the formation of low-level cartels or "syndicates" in the area. In conclusion, the article points to the reinvention and redeployment of caste relations – even in increasingly urban spaces where "hierarchical" caste practices are usually taken to be on the decline – rooted in the duality between land struggles and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adivasi population represents a special case in India's new land wars. Strong individual and community rights to agricultural and forest lands have been enacted for this group based on notions of adivasi identities as primeval, but without linking these to economic and political influence. This article interrogates the adivasi land question seen through a caste lens. It does so via case studies in two states to understand the ways in which adivasi identity can be mobilised for its instrumental value and used to demand land rights. In Andhra Pradesh, the Supreme Court's Samatha Judgement has prevented virtually all private mining activities. In Jharkhand, however, similar legislation is seen to be trumped by the national Coal Bearing Areas Act, as well as by former and current land acquisition acts that allow industrial land claims to take precedence over identity-based ones. Available evidence indicates the challenges involved in bringing support for land rights that are premised on a supposedly unchanging adivasi identity when these rights go against dominant interests. This circumstance serves to highlight the possibilities present in caste analysis to understand the plight of adivasis, despite their usually distinct treatment in scholarly analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anti-Special Economic Zone (SEZ) mobilisation in Haryana failed to generate a mass movement. This is despite the political strength of farmers and their deep resentment of the government's policy to build up land reserves for industrial purposes. This article argues that there are two main reasons for this outcome. First, the state government put in place a series of significant policies to compensate landowners and give them a stake in the industrial project, primarily through payment of an "annuity." Second, the main anti-SEZ movements were led by dominant landowning castes who did not incorporate the concerns of landless labourers and tenant farmers who faced equally or even more dire consequences from the government's land acquisition policy. Moreover, mobilisation relied on traditional caste institutions such as khap panchayats and farmer unions strongly associated with Jats, rather than adopting a more broad-based approach. Entrenched caste animosity and pre-existing conflicts of interest between landed Jats and Dalits, who have traditionally worked as agricultural labourers, further explain the limited scope of the mobilisation among rural groups. The analysis underscores how hierarchical relations shape social movements, define the claims they make and ultimately impact their effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the concepts of orchestration and spectacle to analyse the work of leaders of an anti-dispossession movement in rural West Bengal. It examines what being a movement leader entails and argues for the importance of connections and social relations in the production of both movement leadership and movement spectacles. By introducing a Dalit perspective on a movement that was otherwise led by the local middle-caste peasantry, the article shows how local caste and class relations have been important in defining access to positions of movement leadership; in disconnecting specific Dalit interests from the movement's larger political agenda; and in giving rise to certain forms of internal policing of caste boundaries within the movement. The fact that the ability to cultivate and "connect" to the new political spaces opened by the anti-dispossession movement correlates strongly with historically produced caste and class inequalities calls for greater attention to the internal caste politics of anti-dispossession movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Widespread "land wars" in contemporary India have rekindled older debates over the implications of capitalism for caste, with some arguing that land dispossession for new economy projects may be liberating for Dalits. We assess this argument through comparative ethnographic and survey research into the consequences of dispossession for Dalits in the cases of two Special Economic Zones built during the 2000s. We advance three arguments. The first, methodological, is that approaching this question requires systematically comparing the outcomes of dispossession for Dalits relative to upper castes. The second, based on such an assessment, is that the interaction between exclusionary growth and caste-based agrarian inequalities has in both cases expanded socio-economic inequalities between upper and lower castes and left most dispossessed Dalits worse off in absolute terms. Third, the cases demonstrate important qualitative differences across generally bad outcomes for Dalits, which derive from the combination of project characteristics and pre-existing agrarian inequalities. While demonstrating how the exclusionary growth driving dispossession in contemporary India is generally unpromising for Dalits, we underscore the importance of comparative ethnographic research into the interaction between different forms of dispossession and specific agrarian social structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community radio in India operates within a clear framework of development. This calls into question the fundamental purpose of community radio: communication rights, activism, voice, community participation or development? Drawing on ethnographic research conducted at two rural stations in South India, this research explores the influence of a pervasive development discourse on the grassroots activities and functions of community radio. The starkest example of this was observed through the far-reaching influence of the Government of India's highly publicised sanitation programme, the Swachh Bharat Mission. This programme represents a pervasive example of the modernisation paradigm in development communication, yet it was found to proliferate throughout community radio, a medium more often associated with participatory communication. This development discourse was found to profoundly impact the way both broadcasters and audience members engage with and experience community radio. The findings highlight a disconnect between the theoretical and ideological frameworks of community radio and the ways in which a development discourse operates through the stations at the grassroots level. As such, this article argues that community radio in India represents a liminal space where multiple development communication paradigms interact and compete with the theoretical underpinnings of the movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores mobilization to reduce the deepest inequalities in the two largest democracies, those along caste lines in India and racial lines in the United States. I compare how the groups at the bottom of these ethnic hierarchies—India's former untouchable castes (Dalits) and African Americans—mobilized from the 1940s to the 1970s in pursuit of full citizenship: the franchise, representation, civil rights, and social rights. Experiences in two regions of historically high inequality (the Kaveri and Mississippi Deltas) are compared in their national contexts. Similarities in demographic patterns, group boundaries, socioeconomic relations, regimes, and enfranchisement timing facilitate comparison. Important differences in nationalist and civic discourse, official and popular social classification, and stratification patterns influenced the two groups' mobilizations, enfranchisement, representation, alliances, and relationships with political parties. The nation was imagined to clearly include Dalits earlier in India than to encompass African Americans in the United States. Race was the primary and bipolar official and popular identity axis in the United States, unlike caste in India. African Americans responded by emphasizing racial discourses while Dalit mobilizations foregrounded more porously bordered community visions. These different circumstances enabled more widespread African American mobilization, but offered Dalits more favorable interethnic alliances, party incorporation, and policy accommodation, particularly in historically highly unequal regions. Therefore, group representation and policy benefits increased sooner and more in India than in the United States, especially in regions of historically high group inequality such as the Kaveri and other major river Deltas relative to the Deep South, including Mississippi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One core concern of workplace sexual harassment is the low rate of reporting, which arguably adds to its suppression and consequent individualization of harassment. The recent #MeToo movements across the globe have been focal points for women to report incidents of sexual harassment. I examined what it has meant for women in India to speak about their experiences of sexual harassment in broadcast media news interviews during the #MeToo movement. Discursive psychological examination showed that interviewers and interviewees (women who were reporting) attended to and managed issues with the perceived legitimacy of reporting sexual harassment. Interviewees had to account for their reporting in the context of the #MeToo movement while managing not to be seen as being swept up by it. Women treated these concerns as gendered phenomena rather than merely interpersonal in justifying their reporting and the #MeToo movement. These findings are discussed in relation to research on silencing of women's voices in reporting, the role of media, and broadly addressing sexism and sexual harassment at the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Muslims in India have lived alongside Hindus peacefully for many centuries. Yet in the contemporary period some politicians have orchestrated division for political ends, for example, during the Godhra-Gujarat riots in India in 2002 in which there were many Muslim casualties. Critics allege that the ruling party in Gujarat, the Bharatiya Janata Party, and its leader Chief Minister Narendra Modi (now the Prime Minister of India) were responsible for the Godhra-Gujarat riots. Once again, in 2020, under Narendra Modi's Prime Ministership, riots against the Muslims took place in Delhi. Within the framework of identity politics in India, where religion seems to dominate the social, economic and political spheres, based on my participants interviews, this paper mainly focuses on how the 2002 Gujarat riots impacted on Muslims in Gujarat. Based on other primary sources, this paper also briefly examines the recent 2020 Delhi riots. I conclude that, in the era of identity politics when Muslims form a disadvantaged minority, national and international policy makers should promulgate policies that would improve social cohesion in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the policy prescriptions that seek to address the educational backwardness of Muslim minorities in India. In particular, it highlights the flawed focus on madrasa reform in these documents and the linearism reflected in policy recommendations on madrasa modernisation. It draws on field-based narratives to challenge the flawed binaries of traditional and modern, religious and secular, which underpin the policy initiatives of madrasa reform in India. It argues that policy prescriptions like madrasa modernisation, framed with little understanding of the everyday lives of madrasa students and their families, risk remaining empty phrases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's rights are a core part of a global consensus on human rights. However, we are currently experiencing an increasing popularity of anti-feminist and misogynist politics threatening to override feminist gains. In order to help explain this current revival and appeal, in this article I analyse how anti-feminist communities construct their collective identities at the intersection of local and global trends and affiliations. Through an in-depth analysis of representations in the collective identities of six popular online anti-feminist communities based in India, Russia and the United States, I shed light on how anti-feminists discursively construct their anti-feminist 'self' and the feminist 'other' between narratives of localized resistance to change and backlash against the results of broader societal developments associated with globalization. The results expose a complex set of global–local dynamics, which provide a nuanced understanding of the differences and commonalities of anti-feminist collective identity-building and mobilization processes across contexts. By explicitly focusing on the role of discursively produced locations for anti-feminist identity-building and providing new evidence on anti-feminist communities across three different continents, the article contributes to current discussions on transnational anti-feminist mobilizations in both social movement studies and feminist International Relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postcolonial and black feminist scholars have long cautioned against the dangerous proximity between the politics of sexual violence and the advancement of nationalist and imperial projects. In this article, we uncover what it is in particular about efforts to address sexual violence that makes them so amenable to exclusionary nationalist projects, by attending to the political aftermaths of the rape of Jyoti Singh in Delhi in 2012, and the cases of mass sexual abuse that took place during New Year's Eve in Cologne in 2015. Tracing the nationalist discourses and policies precipitated in their wake, we demonstrate how across both contexts, the response to sexual violence was ultimately to augment the securitizing power and remit of the state—albeit through different mechanisms, and while producing different subjects of/for surveillance, control and regulation. We highlight how in both cases it is through contemporary resonances of a persistent (post)colonial echo—which enmeshes the normative female body with the idea of the nation—that sexual abuse becomes an issue of national security and the politics of sexual violence becomes tethered to exclusionary nationalisms. Revealing the more general, shared, rationalities that bind the nation to the normative female body while attending to the located political reverberations that make this entanglement so affectively potent in the distinct contexts of India and Germany helps distinguish and amplify transnational and intersectional feminist approaches to sexual violence that do not so readily accommodate nationalist ambitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

May 2015 witnessed the Dangawas massacre in Rajasthan's Nagaur district, one of the most brutal caste atrocities in recent Indian history, which resulted in the death of five Dalits of the Meghwal caste at the hands of a Jat mob. Across Rajasthan, the violence of Dangawas, which marked the culmination of a decades-long land conflict, has become synonymous with the continuing reality of caste-based violence and the law that is meant to address it: The 1989 SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act. However, Meghwal survivors in Dangawas often articulate scepticism about the ability of law to provide them with a true sense of restitution. Emphasising a desire for social space (jagah), which they map onto the land at the root of the bloodshed, Dangawas' Meghwal survivors are caught in a post-traumatic moment marked by fear of further suffering. The memory of inconceivable violence, which has left them alienated in a divided village, has not only made renewed attempts of assertion, and demands for radical justice temporarily inconceivable, but has also led Dangawas' survivors to ask questions about their own agency and the meaning of sociality in an environment where members of a dominant caste still see themselves as guarantors of economic and social belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – the paramilitary corps that animates the contemporary Indian Hindu nationalist movement – increasingly relies on its Muslim wing to bolster its denials of extremism. The RSS claims hold that crowds of Muslims join its Muslim wing, the Muslim Rashtriya Manch, through organic nationalist awakenings that imply tacit acceptance of the RSS' Hindu nationalist agenda. Based on a year of interview-based research in North and West India with more than 80 Manch members, defectors, critics and leaders, I provide empirical evidence that challenges the claim that the RSS is winning over Muslim minds. Instead, I suggest that Muslims join for largely instrumental reasons; for material reward and security, but also to rebuke traditional Muslim centres of power and to draw close to the charismatic leadership of Manch leader Indresh Kumar. While discussions of motivations are famously fraught, I rely on interviews not to conclusively list membership motivations, but to assess the claims made by the RSS. As Hindu nationalists consolidate and intensify their activities after the 2019 general election, understanding how the RSS does or does not 'win over' India's Muslim communities is necessary groundwork to address the position of minorities in a Hindu nationalist future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes to create a discourse of migrant labourers in the city of Bengaluru/Bangalore, especially during the current period of crisis ensued by COVID-19 pandemic. Despite being an essential part of the informal sector economy these workers are often rendered invisible from the urban social, cultural and political spaces of this global city. The United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Development (Habitat III), held in Quito, Ecuador in October 2016 declared the New Urban Agenda (NUA) -- that was adopted as the guideline for urban development for the next twenty years -- with the vision of 'cities for all'. But in reality, for their regional, linguistic, cultural, class and caste differences, the migrant labourers in the city are marginalized from the mainstream urban scene. The paper investigates the historiography of the migrant labourers in the city to interrogate the space they occupy in Bengaluru/Bangalore. Some of the important questions the paper attempts to grapple with are also about their fight for survival amidst the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic and the relief measure responses from the state. Evidences show, the immigrant labourers are perceived as the city's necessary 'Other' who are needed to build the city but barely finds any representation in the planning grids of urban architects. Their direct experiences and negotiations with 'the lived city', available from news archives and other secondary sources, will be interrogated through the lens of 'the Right to the City', a concept introduced by Henri Lefebvre. The paper attempts to explore if they have any agency to assert their rights to the city and become a meaningful stakeholder in the democratic control over Bengaluru/Bangalore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has produced two different narratives in India. One, here described as "historical," looks back to the pandemics of the colonial past—bubonic plague from 1896, influenza in 1918–19—as a source of comparisons, lessons, and dire warnings for the present. This narrative envisages the reenactment of past scenes, including flight from the cities, victimization of the poor, and the questioning of state authority. The other narrative, here called "insurgent," questions the value of historical analogies, doubts that history ever substantially repeats itself, and stresses the specificity of postcolonial Indian politics and health. While recognizing the validity of both narratives, the author urges caution in employing colonial history to critique contemporary events and, while recognizing the 1890s plague as a watershed moment, questions whether even the most devastating pandemics (such as 1918's influenza) necessarily result in profound social, political, and health care changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We conducted four focus group discussions followed by three studies to develop and validate a scale for measuring traditional attitudes toward women in Indian society. Study 1 (n = 592) yielded four factors (i.e., Perceived Feminine Frivolity and Selfishness; Extra-Familial Patriarchal Attitudes; Within-Family Patriarchal Attitudes; Perceived Feminine Weakness) underlying traditional negative attitudes toward women in Indian society. In Study 2 (n = 250), a four-factor reflective model offered a comparatively better model fit and robust psychometric properties for the proposed scale. Study 3 (n = 343) showed that the proposed measure (the Traditional Attitudes toward Indian Women scale; TAIW) explains a significantly greater amount of variance in violent attitudes toward women as compared to a scale standardized in other cultures, demonstrating the predictive relevance of the scale. Decoding the complex relationship between culture and gender-based violence, our measure establishes a clear link between traditional gender and violent attitudes toward women both among male and female participants. We discuss the implication of our findings for policy, research, professional practice, and psychological intervention to create a more inclusive and egalitarian social experience for women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Residents of marginalised urban settlements in low- and middle-income countries jointly experience multiple short-term basic service deficits which impair their health and broader wellbeing. A wide range of bottom-up strategies has been identified and employed to enhance basic service access in these contexts, but few scholars have attempted to conceptually organise these strategies. This study synthesises the disparate means identified in the literature to effect jointly experienced basic service access enhancements. It draws on fieldwork conducted in four notified slums situated in Hyderabad, India, to create a typology of the full range of strategies employed by collectively organised residents, illustrate how strategies interact in practice, and suggest a prioritisation of strategies with reference to the extent of pressure they exert on the local urban state to improve service provision over time. The study finds that high-pressure strategies which alter the incentives of public agencies and align them with those of residents appear the most promising to mediate the tension between short-term and long-term service needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author discusses everyday practices of gender in India in the twentieth-century, particularly men's domesticity. Also cited are the impact of colonial rule on familial relations, condition of women, and domestic life, the relationship between domesticity with processes of nation-building, as well as the role of women's bodies in the fight for modernity and freedom.

The article discusses updates on the economic situation and social policy in India. Topics explored include the social welfare programs in the country which aim to improve education, health, and nutrition services particularly for children, the structure and implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) workfare program, and observations on the welfare policies of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

An essay is presented about the housing crisis in China, India and Brazil and the redevelopment of informal settlements. Topics discussed include the proliferation of informal settlements in China without tenure security or basic services and amenities, comparison of housing policies in the three countries showed new forms of exclusion for inhabitants of informal settlements, demolition with new construction as an approach to redeveloping urban villages in Guangzhou.

The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was passed by the parliament of India on December 11, 2019. Muslim women and many other people in India are contesting this act on the grounds that it provides citizenship status on a religious basis. Key enactments of dissent in relation to anti-CAA protests have become visible globally through the media. One is the very visible presence of a local community of Muslim and other women in the physical space of protests in Shaheen Bagh, Delhi. We draw from on-site interviews with Muslim women protestors at Shaheen Bagh to examine how Muslim women are using their physical bodies in protest sites to show dissent and to challenge the hypermasculine Hindu body politic of India. Based in our grounded analysis, we explore four main themes in this study: visibility of Muslim women in protest sites, using social media for international visibility, pushing against fear, and using care as a protest strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite recent signs of change, the Indian church was rather reluctant to acknowledge the clerical sexual abuse scandal as its own problem. In the Indian context, the scandal entails not only the abuse of minors, but also the abuse of women and other vulnerable adults by church personnel. The hierarchical structure of Indian society, gender relations based on patriarchy, and postcolonial attitudes provide a fertile ground for abuse. Clericalism, centralization of power in the church, and continuing negative attitudes to sexuality are further contributing factors. The clerical sexual abuse scandal calls for developing new ethical horizons based on a theology of a participatory church, and a reconsideration of the church's attitude to sexuality and gender relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Droughts statistically significantly and negatively impact household nutrition. • In a median drought, calorie, protein, and fat intake fall by at most 1.4 percent. • Droughts cause households to move away from a balanced diet. • Droughts reduce crop production and employment but have no effect on food prices. • Lower income appears to be the primary mechanism for the decline in food utilization. This paper investigates the impacts of droughts on food expenditure and macronutrient consumption among rural Indian households. To isolate causal effects, I exploit random year-to-year variation in a dry shock, defined as the absolute deviation of rainfall below its long-run mean. I find that the dry shock has a statistically significant and negative effect on household nutrition. For a median dry shock, I estimate that households spend 1 percent less per capita per month on food and consume up to 1.4 percent fewer calories, protein, and fat. Disaggregating the effects by food group, I demonstrate that household diets become less balanced as a result of droughts: the dry shock leads households to rely primarily on cereals and to purchase less vegetables, fruits, pulses, and animal-sourced foods. Hence, droughts negatively impact not only the quantity but also the quality of rural household diets. Finally, I explore the potential channels for these effects. I argue that rather than higher food prices, a decline in household market and non-market income is the primary reason for lower household food consumption and nutrition during droughts. Taken together, these findings suggest that attaining food security amid extreme weather conditions requires an integrated approach that focuses on food not only for survival but also for leading a healthy and active life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary Indian society apparently seems to be at a juncture where it claims more number of women to be educated and independent but, on the other hand, the incidents of vicious mental, social and corporeal violations of women are at peak. Amidst all the ongoing blazing talks and movements, this study is a small attempt of delving into the tale of being women, which may help in cognising the discourse which might be at the core of this double-bind social picture. For this purpose, 30 Bengali (Indian) married women were selected through purposive sampling technique for interview, all of whom were within the age range of 18–40 years. Participants had minimum school-level education and belonged to lower middle to upper middle socio-economic status. They were reportedly free from any mental or physical handicap. The data gathered through open-ended semi-structured in-depth interviews were analysed using thematic analysis procedure. Analytical readings of findings explored a socially structured world of women; the becoming rather than being of women. The findings indicated how every sphere of their lives—mental, social or corporeal—seems to be under several mediums of authoritative forces; how their lived life, myths about womanhood and socialisation construct their present life, and how the historicised power-politics of gender craft their conceptualisations of body, rights, independence and subjectivity. This study aspires to contribute to the knowledge of women's subjective positioning in an attempt to depict the backdrop which makes their lives accessible for violation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During 1895–1970, in the Indian coalfield of Jharia, circular migration of the mineworker coexisted along with the fact that workers became regular over time. This article suggests that the development of employee benefits influenced the patterns of migration and settlement of workers. Employers, guided by a new industrial sensibility, came up with specific employee benefits, with an objective of continuous production from a group of settled workers. The workers' approach to social security and the pressure exerted by them shaped the expansion of employee benefits. My finding takes an issue with the thesis of cheap migrant labour. The latter argument has insufficiently revealed the actual preferences of employees. My work critiques another thesis which suggests that workers maintained a preference for investment in rural homesteads; therefore choosing to remain oscillating migrants. My study suggests that workers developed a notion of the civilised and human form of life from the 1920s onwards. The self-respect campaign amongst the unprivileged caste groups, the movement for industrial democracy and national reconstruction and the International Labour Organisation's (ILO's) advocacy of civilised and human life for workers, gave a spur to new reproduction preferences. Now, they sought employee benefits regarded as necessary for a dignified living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disabled children aged between 5-14 years replicate a double burden of vulnerabilities since they form a considerable part of the dependent population and are precluded from the activities of a normal life. The inextricable linkage between poverty and disability forces the disabled children to participate the labor market as child labor instead of attaining elementary education. This further makes it impossible for them to enter into mainstream economic activities. The accessibility of education and status of employment as child labor for them varies across different types of impairment and various socioeconomic indicators. In this backdrop, the objective of our present study is subsequently two-fold. Firstly, it investigates the discrepancy in educational attainment and child labor status of disabled children in Tamil Nadu across type of disability and various socio-economic indicators. Secondly, it examines the impact of Tamil Nadu Disabled Persons Act, 2007 on the educational status of the mentally disabled children. The 2011 Census has been used and multinomial logit model is applied to analyze the first objective. For policy evaluation, the 2001 and 2011 Census have been utilized and difference-in-difference (DID) framework in non-linear model is employed. Orissa is considered as our control state in DID framework. Our results show physically and mentally disabled children are more likely to attend educational institutions and participate less in child labor force as compared to children with multiple disabilities. Urban disabled children have higher chances of attending schools and are less likely to drop out compared to their rural counterparts. There is no significant difference across gender in workforce participation of disabled children, but in case of attaining education, male disabled children are more likely to attend educational institutions than their female counterparts. Also, disabled children who have never been married are less likely to work as child labor. The Disabled Persons Act, 2007 is found to have insignificant impact on educational attainment of mentally disabled children. Both national and state level need to be reprioritized to protect disabled children from exploitations like child labor and child marriage and to include them in the mainstream education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study draws coping strategies from in-depth interviews conducted with a convenience sample of 21 low-income abused women in Mumbai, India. Data were analyzed and synthesized using a thematic analysis procedure. The qualitative analysis utilizes problem-focused and emotion-focused coping framework to report the findings. Problem-focused coping strategies of abused women from India include (a) joint meeting (b) back and forth between marital and natal home. Emotion-focused strategies include (c) spirituality/religion (d) hope, keep quiet, cry a lot and keeping busy. Implications for practice and future research in India with abused women are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through ethnographic material gathered in the Muslim woodworking mohallas (neighbourhoods) of a North Indian city, this article attends to 'performed' elements of everyday convivial interactions. It builds on work that situates conviviality as a normative project aimed at understanding and fostering interaction within urban space which bridges forms of difference. Through descriptive accounts, the article illustrates how convivial exchanges can embody degrees of instrumentality and conceal relations of power and marginalization that act to silence outrage or contestation. This 'performed conviviality' is dealt with in a broader context of 'scale' to consider how marginalization and connectedness—the marginal hub—intersect in even the most mundane moments of convivial exchange. By tracing processes of marginalization, boundary making, and bordering within the local, city-wide, state, and international contexts, the article follows the production of a marginalized or 'border' subjectivity through to the individual level. The subjectivities produced in this context act to enforce degrees of self-imposed silence among those subjected to processes of marginalization. In addition—and again attending to scale through an acknowledgement of the connected nature of the mohallas —the article also considers the role of conviviality in global chains of supply through the creation and maintenance of bonds and obligations that facilitate production in the city's wood industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]