Bøger i South Asia in the Social Sciences serien

The caste system is central to understanding the politics of inequality and discrimination in India and elsewhere. This book explains how caste and law have mutually evolved in India's democratic order, providing new insights into why caste oppression may persist despite India's constitutional promises of equal opportunities.

In Search of Home explores a new yet less explored space of urban poverty - rehabilitation housing for the displaced poor, which increasingly dots the peripheries of Indian cities. This longitudinal ethnography examines these new liminal zones suspended between a slum and the legal city, producing 'citizenship in-limbo' and relegating the poor to perpetual dependence on the state albeit legal residence. It examines how the flexible governance of such housing produces illegalities, and how state institutions and actors stand to gain through systemic corruption that co-opts urban poor groups, pre-empting radical resistance. This book makes central the gendered nature of such politics, detailing the everyday political work of women, vital to the development of poor neighbourhoods and political struggles for housing. This analysis of rehabilitation housing policies and their implementation, chronicles the myriad strategies employed by the urban poor, from documenting to political performances, in their struggles for a home.

It departs from the dominant liberally oriented scholarship produced on Sri Lanka in the past three decades. It re-introduces the neo-Marxist approaches through the works of Antonio Gramsci and draws attention to class and inter-ethnic class relations as useful variables in the contemporary political analysis.

This book examines the relationship between ethnic conflict and economic development in modern Sri Lanka. Drawing on a historically informed political sociology, it explores how the economic and the ethnic have encountered one another, focusing in particular on the phenomenon of Sinhala nationalism. In doing so, the book engages with some of the central issues in contemporary Sri Lanka: why has the ethnic conflict been so protracted, and so resistant to solution? What explains the enduring political significance of Sinhala nationalism? What is the relationship between market reform and conflict? Why did the Norwegian-sponsored peace process collapse? How is the Rajapaksa phenomenon to be understood? The topical spread of the book is broad, covering the evolution of peasant agriculture, land scarcity, state welfarism, nationalist ideology, party systems, political morality, military employment, business elites, market reforms, and development aid.

How does democracy empower marginalized voters under conditions of inequality? The author probes into this question grounding her research in the context of Pakistan, an emerging democracy whose voters have actively been involved in defining its political history but about whom we know very little. They turn up in sizeable numbers to vote during elections, even under military rule, prompting all kinds of contradictory stereotypes about how Pakistani rural voters behave as electoral cannon fodder. But no one has looked very closely at why they vote as they do, or why they vote at all when their political agency is severely limited by high socio-economic inequality. By using original data collected across different villages and households in rural Pakistan, this book finds that electoral politics enables even the most marginalized voters to strategically further their interests vis-a-vis elite groups, but that persistent inequality limits their ability to organize or compete.

This book uncovers an endemic link between micro-practice of archaeology in the trenches of Archaeological Survey of India to the manufacture of archaeological knowledge wielded in the making of political and religious identity by Indian state and summoned as indelible evidence in the juridical adjudication in the highest Indian courts.

"Founding Mothers of the Indian Republic begins with the momentous task of demolishing the prejudices attached with the phrase 'founding fathers' that has held an immense sway over constitutional interpretation. It shows that women members of the Indian Constituent Assembly had painstakingly co-authored a Constitution that embodied a moral imagination developed by years of feminist politics. This book traces the genealogies of several constitutional provisions to argue that, without the interventions of these women framers, the Constitution would have been much lesser than the celebrated document of rights and statecraft that it is. Situating these interventions in the larger trajectory of Indian feminism in which they are rooted, in the nationalist discourse with which they perpetually negotiated, and in the larger human rights discourse of the 1940s, it shows that the women members of the Indian Constituent Assembly were much more than the 'founding mothers' of a republic"--

An account of contemporary religious life in Lucknow illuminates the embrace and contestation of Hinduization in a Dalit community, it examines the practices by which signs of the community's Hindu affiliation are amplified and tied to a new ethic of publicity. Lee tracks Dalit religion to encompass it within a newly imagined Hindu body politic.

Colossus is a comprehensive, data-driven, theory-rich, and multidisciplinary compilation that dissects the figurative anatomy of Delhi and India's National Capital Region. It will find a prominent place in studies on South Asia, urbanization and urban social behavior, and become a standard resource on these subjects.

This book illustrates that social actors in minority language education in Nepal made simultaneous claims to more than one social identity by discursively positioning 'ethnic identity' as 'national identity'. By arguing for an analytical necessity to adopt relational approach, it aims to complicate the neat compartmentalisation of identities.

Drawing on long-term fieldwork in the former Maoist heartland of Nepal, this book explores how the Maoist conflict transformed Nepali society between 1996-2006. It demonstrates how the everyday became a primary site of revolution in Nepal during the war and how people adopted previously transgressive practices and recreated their lives.

This volume analyses the ways in which the works of twentieth-century philosopher Michel Foucault have been received and re-worked by scholars of South Asia. It surveys the past, present, and future lives of the mutually constitutive disciplinary fields of governmentality and South Asian studies.

This book challenges the ongoing debates on poor people's negotiations with democracy. It analyses the varied ways in which the poor participate in a democracy. Based on fieldwork, Roy argues that poor people neither assimilate into the universal values associated with democracy nor maintain their difference vis-a-vis democracy.

This book explores how industrial firms in South Asia manage the challenges of production after the withdrawal of the government from directing industry in the 1980s. Naseemullah argues that in Pakistan and India, manufacturers manage capital and labor differently based on their backgrounds, complicating industrial transformation by the state.

The democratic Left in India is in crisis. During the first decade of this century it slid from its highest parliamentary presence to virtual irrelevance. A key to its retrieval, this book argues, lies in its ability to imagine a new popular politics for reinventing its democratic credentials beyond electoral posturing. In this respect, much can be learnt from the Left's governmental practices as they have evolved since the late 1960s, crafting a unique blend of politics, policy, idealism, practicality, vision and delivery. By looking at the problematics of government from the days of deft land reforms to messy land acquisition, this book situates 'government as practice' as a prism for critical thinking on democratic politics in postcolonial India. Grounded in empirical and archival research, the book will be useful for those who are passionate as well as sceptical about the revival potentials of a new Left in India's fast-changing political economy.

This work deciphers how subalternity is both constituted and contested through state-society relations in India's Bhil heartland. At the core of the book lies a concern with understanding the dialectics of power and resistance that give form and direction to the political economy of democracy and development in contemporary India.

This volume analyses the ways in which the works of twentieth-century philosopher Michel Foucault have been received and re-worked by scholars of South Asia. It surveys the past, present, and future lives of the mutually constitutive disciplinary fields of governmentality and South Asian studies.

This book shows how public interest litigation (PIL) grants appellate courts flexibility in procedure, allowing them to manoeuvre themselves into positions of overweening authority. It locates the political challenges that PIL uses in its very process, arguing that its fundamentally protean nature stems from its mimicry of ideas of popular justice.

Makes an intervention in debates around the nature of the political economy of Pakistan. It is the first comprehensive academic analysis of Pakistan's political economy after thirty-five years, addressing issues of state, class and society, examining gender, the middle classes, the media, the bazaar economy, urban spaces and the new elite.