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  3. South Asia in the Social Sciences

This series will features monographs incorporating innovative social science research on contemporary South Asia. The emphasis will be on understanding contemporary developments through empirically grounded research that uses unconventional and new sources of information and innovative methods. It will aim to open up new fields and methods of investigation and theoretical construction.

  • General Editors: Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University
  • Editorial Boards: Pranab Bardhan, University of California, Berkeley, Stuart Corbridge, Durham University, Satish Deshpande, University of Delhi, Christophe Jaffrelot, Centre d’etudes et de recherches internationales, Paris, Nivedita Menon, Jawaharlal Nehru University

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30 results in South Asia in the Social Sciences

Page 1 of 2

Counting Caste
  • Censuses, Politics, and Brahmanical Power in India
  • Trina Vithayathil
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    March 2025
    Print publication:
    01 June 2026
  • Counting Caste critically investigates the Indian state to implement social justice reforms despite political leaders periodically conceding to organized demands for change. Vithayathil focuses on the 2011 Census, where, for the first time in post-independence India, the government agreed to collect caste-specific data. However, shortly after this concession, bureaucratic forces successfully blocked the caste count, redirecting it to an inexperienced part of the government. This led to the launch of an alternative project that produced unreliable data. Through this case study, Vithayathil unravels the process of bureaucratic deflection, where political leaders and civil servants stall or subvert policy changes. The book sheds light on how state institutions resist the documentation of caste power, highlighting the ongoing institutionalization of 'castelessness' – which frames caste solely as a problem of the oppressed, obscuring the realities of caste privilege. It explores the complex dynamics of caste, power, and resistance in contemporary India.

A Woman's Job
  • Making Middle Lives in New India
  • Asiya Islam
  • Published online:
    28 November 2024
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025
  • Against the backdrop of rapid socio-economic change in post-1990 India, scholars and policy makers have expressed surprise at the low rate of women's participation in the workforce, particularly in urban areas. A Woman's Job presents a unique urban ethnography of young lower middle class women's lives in Delhi as they weave in and out of service employment, education, and domestic contracts. Urban, educated, and skilled, these young women seek employment in cafes, malls, call centres, and offices in the globalising landscape of Delhi. Their participation in work enables access to 'things', such as, jeans, smartphones, English language, and the metro, that symbolise global modernity. However, caught in a web of gender, class, and caste inequalities, their identification as 'working' women also generates social anxieties. The book shows how women adopt 'middle-ness' as a strategy of life-making at the multiple sites of work, home, and leisure.

Questioning Migrants
  • Ethnic Nationalism at the Limits of Pakistan
  • Tahir H. Naqvi
  • Published online:
    13 November 2024
    Print publication:
    23 January 2025
  • The Muhajir Qaumi Movement (MQM), propelled by ethnic violence and led by university students with lower-middle-class backgrounds, transformed the cities of the southern Pakistani province of Sindh into an ethnic majoritarian stronghold at the unlikely height of a military dictatorship. The more novelaspect of the MQM's platform was it demand for the recognition of Muhajirs as a separate, 'oppressed nationality' within Pakistan. Questioning Migrants is a granular historical and ethographic study of the MQM's capacity to think beyond the exlusivism of Muhajir nationalism toward its contingency and toward a more plural and subaltern framing of the universal. It speaks to significant themes in Pakistan Studies: the legacies of Partition, the rise of the martial state, and the dynamics of urbanization and democracy.

After the Exodus
  • Gender and Belonging in Bangladesh's Rohingya Refugee Camps
  • Farhana Afrin Rahman
  • Published online:
    13 November 2024
    Print publication:
    23 January 2025
  • After the Exodus examines how forced migration of the Rohingya from Myanmar to Bangladesh has affected the gendered subjectivities and lived experiences of Rohingya refugee women, and transformed gender relations and roles in displacement. Based on 14 months of feminist ethnographic fieldwork in Bangladesh's Kutupalong-Balukhali refugee camp in 2017 and 2018, the book uncovers the everyday strategies employed by refugee women to create a sense of belonging and to make a life for themselves after forced migration. Rohingya women adapt to camp life by negotiating marriage and intimate experiences, adjusting to changing gender divisions of labour, and navigating encounters with humanitarian aid agencies and male camp leaders. These women strategically bargain shifting power relations to reconstruct their lives in displacement, thereby reclaiming agency and asserting their identity through the spaces they create, inhabit, and reshape; the coping mechanisms they employ; and the bonds of kinship and community they forge.

Syndicates and Societies
  • Criminal Politics in Dhaka
  • David Jackman
  • Published online:
    31 August 2024
    Print publication:
    31 December 2024
  • When you work on the streets of Dhaka, crime is part of everyday life. Rackets are ubiquitous, political muscle widespread, and territory often fought over. Locals refer to the syndicate that lie behind the façade of the city, controlling who works where, how services are delivered and who profits. Based on years of research Syndicates and Societies reveals how syndicates shape life in Kawran Bazar, the largest marketplace in Bangladesh, and offers a new approach to understanding the nexus of crime and politics. The book traces the bazar's history from a heartland of gangsters to being dominated by ruling party leaders and state officials. It follows a group of labourers as they seek a place in this world, aligning themselves to leaders, orchestrating bombings and fighting off rivals. Syndicates and Societies thus explores the relationship between crime and order, revealing a world of extortionists and informers, political muscle and union leaders.

Legalizing the Revolution
  • India and the Constitution of the Postcolony
  • Sandipto Dasgupta
  • Published online:
    07 May 2024
    Print publication:
    24 October 2024
  • Anticolonial movements of the twentieth century generated ambitious ideas of freedom. Following decolonization, the challenge was to give an institutional form to those ideas. Through an original account of India's constitution making, Legalizing the Revolution explores the promises, challenges, and contradictions of that task. In contrast to derived templates, Dasgupta theorizes the distinctively postcolonial constitution through an innovative synthesis of the history of decolonization and constitutional theory. The book traces the contentious transition from the tumult of popular anticolonial politics to the ordered calculus of postcolonial governance; and then explains how major institutions – parliament, judiciary, rights, property – were formed by that foundational tension. A major contribution to postcolonial political theory, the book excavates the unrealized futures of decolonization. At the same time, through a critical account of the making of the postcolonial constitutional order, it offers keys to understanding the present crisis of that order, including and especially in India.

Performing Sovereign Aspirations
  • Tamil Insurgency and Postwar Transition in Sri Lanka
  • Bart Klem
  • Published online:
    30 April 2024
    Print publication:
    21 November 2024
  • In a society that experiences secessionist conflict, many things are not what they seem. This book adopts a performative perspective to understand the peculiar institutional landscape the ensued around the Tamil separatist conflict in Sri Lanka, both during and after the civil war. It draws on two decades of fieldwork across towns and villages in northern and eastern Sri Lanka, ethnography within Sri Lanka's civil service, and privileged access to Norwegian-facilitated peace process. This yields a compelling analytical narrative that shows how political institutions are enacted and witnessed, rather than cataloguing them in the strictures of the law. This provides a fertile vantage point to address the to-be-or-not-to-be dilemmas that we face when seeking to interpret the legitimacy, legality, and validity of the institutions that separatist movements create in aspiration of sovereign status. And as such, this book provides food for thought for broader conceptual debates concerning armed conflict and insurgency. This title is available Open Access.

Sovereign Atonement
  • Citizenship, Territory, and the State at the Bangladesh-India Border
  • Md Azmeary Ferdoush
  • Published online:
    30 April 2024
    Print publication:
    21 November 2024
  • The former border enclaves of Bangladesh and India existed as extra-territorial spaces since 1947. They were finally exchanged and merged as host state territories in 2015. Sovereign Atonement focuses on the protracted territorial exchange and experiences of the newly accepted Bangladeshi citizens. It grapples with one broad question: why did the state assume an active role in smoothing the once excluded population's experiences into their inclusion within the sovereign project? The book dives deep into an ethnographic and historical reading of the everyday state, land and territory, informality, (non)state actors, and performance of sovereignty. Furthermore, it troubles the often taken-for-granted understanding of exception, governance, and citizenship. As such, Ferdoush offers a retake on the two seemingly contradictory concepts -'sovereign' and 'atonement'- to demonstrate that bridged together these concepts as sovereign atonement enables a novel way of appreciating geopolitical narratives, political geographies, and nationalistic discourse in South Asia and beyond.

Memories in the Service of the Hindu Nation
  • The Afterlife of the Partition of India
  • Pranav Kohli
  • Published online:
    25 October 2023
    Print publication:
    16 November 2023
  • This book is based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with Partition survivors from west Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province, in Delhi and its surroundings between 2017–18. It locates the global rise of far-right nationalism within globalisation and memories of victimhood. Focussing on Hindu nationalism in India, this book is an important and timely contribution to the literature on South Asian Partition Studies that shows how tragedy begets tragedy. It tries to answer an urgent, provocative but nevertheless necessary question: 'What does it mean to remember the Partition in the time of fascism?' The author shows what makes up cycles of violence by connecting the reinscription of trauma in Partition memories to the self-serving justifications of the contemporary violence of Hindu nationalism. It analyses how the hegemony of Hindu nationalism has structured the narratives of Hindu Partition survivors and recruited them in service of a putative Hindu nation.

Freedom in Captivity
  • Negotiations of Belonging along Kashmir's Frontier
  • Radhika Gupta
  • Published online:
    10 January 2023
    Print publication:
    11 May 2023
  • How do borderland dwellers living along militarised frontiers negotiate regimes of state security and their geopolitical location in everyday life? What might 'freedom' mean to those who do not resist captivity engendered by borders? Focusing on the predicaments of a double-minority, Freedom in Captivity examines the affective attachments, political imaginaries, and ethical claims-making among the Shia Muslims of Kargil. In contrast to calls for freedom in the Kashmir Valley, Shias on the frontiers of Kashmir have sought belonging to India. Yet they do not entirely succumb to its hegemonic ideological boundaries. Departing from the dominant focus on physical cross-border mobility, this book is an invitation to reimagine borderlands as cartographies of ideas, cutting across spatial scales. Based on original ethnographic research conducted between 2008 and 2021, this monograph offers a unique long durée insight into the lives of people residing at the intersections of the biggest states in Asia.

Founding Mothers of the Indian Republic
  • Achyut Chetan
  • Published online:
    27 September 2022
    Print publication:
    05 January 2023
  • The book 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. It traces the genealogies of several constitutional provisions to argue that, without the interventions of these women framers, the Constitution would hardly have a much poorer 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, the book shows that the women members of the Indian Constituent Assembly were much more than the 'founding mothers' of a republic.

An Uneasy Hegemony
  • Politics of State-building and Struggles for Justice in Sri Lanka
  • Shyamika Jayasundara-Smits
  • Published online:
    29 July 2022
    Print publication:
    10 November 2022
  • Sri Lanka has been regarded as a model democracy among former British colonies. It was lauded for its impressive achievement in terms of human development indicators. However, Sri Lanka's modern history can also be read as a tragic story of inter-ethnic inequalities and tensions, resulting in years of violent conflicts. Two long spells of anti-state youth uprisings were followed by nearly three decades of civil war, and most recently a renewed upsurge of events are examples of the on-going uneasy project of state-building. This book discusses that state-building in Sri Lanka is centred on the struggle for hegemony amidst a kind of politics that rejects individual and group equality, opposes the social integration of marginalised groups and appeals to narrow, fearful and xenophobic tendencies among the majority population and minorities alike. It answers the pressing questions of - How do the dynamics of intra-Sinhalese class relations and Sinhalese politics influence the trajectories of post-colonial state-building? What tensions emerge over time, between Sinhalese hegemony-building and wider state-building? How did these tensions manifest in majority and minority relationships? 

The Odds Revisited
  • Political Economy of the Development of Bangladesh
  • K. A. S. Murshid
  • Published online:
    30 June 2022
    Print publication:
    10 November 2022
  • This book looks at Bangladesh at and beyond its fifty years since its formation in 1971. A comprehensive, holistic narrative is constructed to track key development dynamics at the sectoral, sub-sectoral and macro levels. This much-needed exercise dispels the notion that the 'Bangladesh surprise' can be reduced to singular dimensions such as the trauma of the 1971 war or women's empowerment and micro-credit. The mixture of economic history, political economy and institutional and actor analysis provide fresh insights to the themes addressed. A well-argued case to view emerging Bangladesh as the newest member of the Flying Geese club, The Odds Revisited includes a detailed review of macro and sectoral developments over the last fifty years and provides new material and insights into the rise of Bangladesh's capitalist class; a socio-economic perspective of the role of Dhaka-based urbanization; and the rise of a new middle class.

Bureaucratic Archaeology
  • State, Science, and Past in Postcolonial India
  • Ashish Avikunthak
  • Published online:
    20 August 2021
    Print publication:
    09 December 2021
  • Bureaucratic Archaeology is a multi-faceted ethnography of quotidian practices of archaeology, bureaucracy and science in postcolonial India, concentrating on the workings of Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). This book uncovers an endemic link between micro-practice of archaeology in the trenches of the ASI to the manufacture of archaeological knowledge, wielded in the making of political and religious identity and summoned as indelible evidence in the juridical adjudication in the highest courts of India. This book is a rare ethnography of the daily practice of a postcolonial bureaucracy from within rather than from the outside. It meticulously uncovers the social, cultural, political and epistemological ecology of ASI archaeologists to show how postcolonial state assembles and produces knowledge. This is the first book length monograph on the workings of archaeology in a non-western world, which meticulously shows how theory of archaeological practice deviates, transforms and generates knowledge outside the Euro-American epistemological tradition.

Colossus
  • The Anatomy of Delhi
  • Edited by Sanjoy Chakravorty, Neelanjan Sircar
  • Published online:
    31 July 2021
    Print publication:
    09 December 2021
  • The National Capital Region of Delhi is a diverse and unequal space. Its more than 30 million people are sharply differentiated by economic class, religion and caste, education, language, and migration status. Its 45,000 square kilometres is a tapestry of spaces - ghettoes, slums, enclaves, institutional areas, planned and unplanned and authorized and unauthorized colonies, forests and agricultural fields. In some ways it is a dynamic society aspiring to global city grandeur; in other ways it is a bastion of tradition, sectarianism and hierarchy. Colossus details these realities and paradoxes under three themes: social change, community and state, and inequality. From the material condition of the metropolis - its housing, services, crime and pollution - to its social organization - of who marries whom, who eats with whom, and who votes for whom - this book unpacks the complex reality of a metropolitan region that is emblematic of India's aspirations and contradictions.

In Search of Home
  • Citizenship, Law and the Politics of the Poor
  • Kaveri Haritas
  • Published online:
    24 July 2021
    Print publication:
    07 October 2021
  • 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.

When Ideas Matter
  • Democracy and Corruption in India
  • Bilal A. Baloch
  • Published online:
    30 June 2021
    Print publication:
    07 October 2021
  • Comparativist scholarship conventionally gives unbridled primacy to external, material interests–chiefly votes and rents–as proximately shaping political behaviour. These logics tend to explicate elite decision-making around elections and pork barrel politics but fall short in explaining political conduct during credibility crises, such as democratic governments facing anti-corruption movements. In these instances, Baloch shows, elite ideas, for example concepts of the nation or technical diagnoses of socioeconomic development, dominate policymaking. Scholars leverage these arguments in the fields of international relations, American politics, and the political economy of development. But an account of ideas activating or constraining executive action in developing democracies, where material pressures are high, is found wanting. Resting on fresh archival research and over 120 original elite interviews, When Ideas Matter traces where ideas come from, how they are chosen, and when they are most salient for explaining political behaviour in India and similar contexts.

Deceptive Majority
  • Dalits, Hinduism, and Underground Religion
  • Joel Lee
  • Published online:
    15 February 2021
    Print publication:
    15 April 2021
  • The idea that India is a Hindu majority nation rests on the assumption that the vast swath of its population stigmatized as 'untouchable' is, and always has been, in some meaningful sense, Hindu. But is that how such communities understood themselves in the past, or how they understand themselves now? When and under what conditions did this assumption take shape, and what truths does it conceal? In this book, Joel Lee challenges presuppositions at the foundation of the study of caste and religion in South Asia. Drawing on detailed archival and ethnographic research, Lee tracks the career of a Dalit religion and the effort by twentieth-century nationalists to encompass it within a newly imagined Hindu body politic. A chronicle of religious life in north India and an examination of the ethics and semiotics of secrecy, Deceptive Majority throws light on the manoeuvres by which majoritarian projects are both advanced and undermined.

Simultaneous Identities
  • Language, Education, and the Nepali Nation
  • Uma Pradhan
  • Published online:
    30 April 2020
    Print publication:
    03 December 2020
  • The recent socio-political changes in Nepal have brought assimilationist notions of Nepali nationalism under a tight scrutiny and drawn attention to more plural, inclusive, and diverse notions of Nepaliness. However, both assimilationist and pluralist visions continue to remain normative in their approach, and often posit ethnic and national identity in opposition to each other. Drawing on the everyday practices in the two schools, this book illustrates that social actors in minority language education did not necessarily select between minority identity and national identity, but instead made simultaneous claims to more than one social identity by discursively positioning 'ethnic identity' as 'national identity'. It builds on the notion of 'simultaneity' to illustrate that it is through the 'unresolved co-presences' of apparently contradictory ways that people maintain their multi-layered identities. By arguing for an analytical necessity to adopt relational approach, it aims to complicate the neat compartmentalisation of identities.

Dynamics of Caste and Law
  • Dalits, Oppression and Constitutional Democracy in India
  • Dag-Erik Berg
  • Published online:
    24 December 2019
    Print publication:
    06 February 2020
  • Dynamics of Caste and Law breaks new ground in understanding how caste and law relate in India's democratic order. Caste has become a visible phenomenon often associated with discrimination, inequality and politics in India and globally. India's constitutional democracy has had a remarkable goal of creating equality in a context of caste. Despite constitutional promises with equal opportunities for the lower castes and outlawing of untouchability at the time of independence, recurring atrocities and inadequate implementation of law have called for rethinking and legal change. This book sheds new light on why caste oppression persists by using new theoretical perspectives as well as Bhimrao Ambedkar's concepts of the caste system. Focusing on struggles among India's Dalits, the castes formerly known as untouchables, the book draws on a rich material and explains, among other things, mechanisms of oppression and how powerful actors may gain influence in institutions of law and state.

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