The use of labels such as ‘isolation’ or ‘assimilation’ to characterise tribal communities dwelling in the plains region of British Assam had a discursive history that took no notice of the region’s prolonged tradition of vibrant interfaith transmissions and cultural exchanges. This essay flags a disjuncture between early ethnographic literature on the ‘tribes’ of the plains region of Assam, and their

This article draws on a turn of events in the speaker’s long association with Papua New Guinea in the Pacific. Pacific Island academics have made it clear that anthropologists should be explicit about ‘knowledge exchange’. Knowledge transfers take innumerable forms; in the case of the anthropologist, however, it often seems that expert knowledge is more taken than given. Thinking comparatively about

Laura Dudley Jenkins. 2019. Religious Freedom and Mass Conversion in India. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. vi + 312 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, index. $89.95 (hardback).

Sameena Dalwai. 2019. Bans & Bar Girls: Performing Caste in Mumbai’s Dance Bars. New Delhi: Women Unlimited. x + 242 pp. Bibliography. ₹595 (hardback).

Jules Naudet (translated from French by Renuka George). 2018. Stepping into the Elite: Trajectories of Social Achievement in India, France, and the United States. New Delhi: Oxford University Press (with Institut français). xxii + 354 pp. Tables, appendix, references, index. Rs 995 (hardback).

Ajantha Subramanian. 2019. The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. x + 374 pp. Notes, references, index. $49.95 (eBook).

Panchali Ray. 2019. Politics of Precarity: Gendered Subjects and the Health Care Industry in Contemporary Kolkata. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. xii + 266 pp. Tables, appendix, bibliography, index. ₹1250 (hardback).

Yogesh Snehi. 2019. Spatializing Popular Sufi Shrines in Punjab: Dreams, Memories, Territoriality. London and New York: Routledge. xx + 256 pp. Maps, tables, figures, notes, bibliography, index. £115.00 (hardback).

Jinee Lokaneeta. 2020. The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. xiii + 250 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 (eBook).

Malvika Maheshwari. 2019. Art Attacks: Violence and Offence-Taking in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. xii + 373 pp. Notes, Bibliography, References, Index. ₹1195 (hardback).

Haley Duschinski, Mona Bhan, Ather Zia, and Cynthia Mahmood, eds. 2018. Resisting Occupation in Kashmir. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, vi + 302 pp. Maps, Figures, Notes, References, Index. $79.95(hardback).

Rahela Khorakiwala. 2020. From the Colonial to the Contemporary: Images, Iconography, Memories, and Performances of Law in India’s High Courts. New Delhi: Bloomsbury Publishing India Pvt. Ltd (Hart Imprint). xvi + 277 pp. Figures, Appendix, Bibliography, Index. ₹889 (hardback).

Parul Bhandari. 2020. Matchmaking in Middle Class India: Beyond Arranged and Love Marriage. Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. xii + 188 pp. References, Index. €67.40 (eBook).

During the 1920s and 1930s, Ram Charana, of the Mallah caste and a resident of Lucknow, led the campaign for his caste to secure a place in the plans for constitutional and electoral reform being drawn up by the colonial authorities. His objective was to ensure the inclusion of the caste within the administrative category of the Depressed Classes and subsequently as a Scheduled Caste even though it

In this article, I aim to show how Louis Dumont’s famous claim that ‘the condition for a sound development of Sociology of India is found in the establishment of the proper relation between it and classical Indology’ has become obsolete and was from the beginning a problematic postulate. I first develop the historical background of the denigration of anthropological approaches in India against the

Axel Michaels’s essay on Louis Dumont’s call for a new relationship between Indology and anthropology is detailed and thorough, though not shocking to many of us who have tilled these fields for some time. Dumont was a curiously influential figure, who stood at the crossroads of many important streams of thought, including French structuralism, British social anthropology, a certain sort of Indology

I am very grateful for the inspiring comments from these esteemed scholars and colleagues whose publications I owe so much to anyway. I especially appreciate the important additional information related to the history of the two disciplines, Anthropology and Indology (Appadurai, Mehta, Parry and Trautmann), to recent developments in the ‘Sociology of India’ (Parry, Vajpeyi), and to their refreshing

This article examines the nuanced and open-ended representations of women in the fictional works of Premchand, one of the most versatile and popular Urdu-Hindi writers of the 1920s and 1930s. By looking into a wide range of his writings, it argues that Premchand’s literary engagement with the women’s question cannot be summarily understood through such binaries as ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal/radical’

Dolly Kikon. 2019. Living with Coal and Oil: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India. Seattle: University of Washington Press. xiv + 189 pp. Maps, figures, notes, bibliography, Index. US$30 (paperback).

Surinder S. Jodhka and Jules Naudet, eds. 2019. Mapping the Elite: Power, Privilege, and Inequality. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. xvi + 304 pp. ₹1495 (hardback).

This article investigates the ways in which state and non-state laws become intricately intertwined in practices of conflict resolution in rural Bangladesh. Instead of inhabiting separate legal universes, I show how state and non-state laws become entangled in what I call the logic of non-enforcement. People in rural Bangladesh frequently appeal to state courts—yet they frequently do so not in order

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this article focuses on how public order and authority is produced in ‘middle Bangladesh’ by investigating the political emergence and political persona of a bus labour federation (BLF) leader in Rajshahi city. The BLF is an important source for ‘muscle’ and ‘money’ power and is commonly denoted as ‘labour mafia’. Its leaders, often referred to as mastan (gangster

The study of the Bangladesh state continues to be a path less travelled for scholars of South Asia. The articles in this special issue aim to offer fresh perspectives based on recent ethnographic work on a variety of aspects of the state by new young national and international scholars. Overall, there is a pressing need to pay closer attention to the state and to think about it in new ways, and in

Nosheen Ali. 2019. Delusional States: Feeling Rule and Development in Pakistan’s Northern Frontier. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. xiv + 304 pp. Maps, figures, notes, bibliography, index. ₹795 (hardback).

Sidharthan Maunaguru. 2019. Marrying for a Future: Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War. Global South Asia. Seattle: University of Washington Press. xii + 188 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, index. US$30 (paperback).

Ester Gallo. 2017. The Fall of Gods: Memory, Kinship, and Middle Classes in South India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. xiii + 338 pp. Tables, figures, notes, bibliography, glossary, index. ₹1195 (hardback).

Sadan Jha. 2016. Reverence, Resistance and Politics of Seeing the Indian National Flag. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. xxviii + 268 pp. Plates, figures, bibliography index. £64.99 (hardback).

Gita Chadha and M. T. Joseph, eds. 2018. Re-Imagining Sociology in India: Feminist Perspectives. Oxon and New York: Routledge. xii + 348 pp. References, index. ₹1095 (hardback).

This article expands Akhil Gupta’s (1995, American Ethnologist, 22(2), 375–402) thesis of ‘blurred boundaries’ between ‘the state’ and ‘society’ in South Asia to incorporate the impact of historic labour migrations, which complicate established conceptions of the state in Bangladesh. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in an area of high migration to the UK, the article draws attention to a class of transnational

This article explores the complex role of political ideologies in everyday politics and for urban middle-class Bangladeshis’ evaluation of political parties. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research and, more specifically, conversations and contentions around the removal of ‘Lady Justice’ from the front of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh in 2017, I show that although the Awami League continues to

It is a common view that power in Bangladesh is exercised through patron–client forms of exchange. These patron–client relationships are held together by moral proximity and intimacy and are diffused and multidimensional. Most recently, Basu et al. (2018, Politics and Governance in Bangladesh: Uncertain Landscapes, 1–16. London: Routledge) argue for the persuasive presence of patron–client relationships

This article examines the historical, social and political legacies of the Information and Communication Technology Act (ICT Act) (2006–2018, amended in 2013) and the Digital Security Act (DSA) (2018–) in the Bangladeshi state’s attempt to control the ‘virtual streets’ of Bangladesh. The application of ICT and DSA has become an increasingly visible and controversial means to provide the spectacle of

While the #MeToo movement inspired many women to share their stories of sexual harassment on social media, the impact of the movement in India remains limited as it did not reflect the voices of subjects who have been historically marginalised. This note discusses the ways in which the erasure of dalit women’s testimonies of sexual violence happens by reflecting on a few central aspects of Satyabhama’s

This article focuses on legal learning and a specific type of protest that emerged in the aftermath of the police shoot-out at Batla House, New Delhi in 2008. Following the shooting, there was an atmosphere of fear in the locality, as doubts began to emerge about the police’s version of the story. What exacerbated the situation was a series of arrests from the locality, often without proper documents

The recent explosion and changes in camera technologies has had a bearing on state surveillance, amateur photographic practices, and people’s involvement with camera cultures. Much of urban life is now mediated by photography in different forms—from being caught, often unaware, on CCTVs, to a far more self-conscious engagement with some of the more readily available camera forms. This article is an

While much has been said about the historicity of the Kashmir conflict or about how individuals and communities have resisted occupation and demanded the right to self-determination, much less has been said about nature of everyday life under these conditions. This article offers a glimpse of life in the working-class neighbourhood of Maisuma, located in the central area of the city of Srinagar, and

While there is a long tradition of interpellating poor rural women to carry out the state’s development and modernising goals in local communities, neoliberal development has greatly expanded the remit of this subjective call but without accompanying material changes. In this article, I consider the precarious category of female workers produced by an NGO in West Bengal, out of a surplus population

This article considers the gift as a medium of politics in two parallel domains, namely the electoral and the ritual. Juxtaposing the material transactions during a rural election campaign and the distribution of meat after a sacrifice in a vernacular polity, it traces the continuing interpenetrations between philanthropy and politics in lubricating political associations. The properties of the political

At this historical juncture, when digital governance is fundamentally re-forming social relations, we need critical knowledge about the emerging texture of society. This text responds to Reetika Khera’s important intervention about the need for more timely studies of Aadhaar. Building on Angelia Chamuah’s and Lawrence Cohen’s comments, I argue for the need to ask broader questions about the changing

This article revolves around the fuzzy nature of land titles within and around the ‘Lal Dora’ (literally, ‘red thread’) ringing the urban villages of Delhi to understand how property ownership gets mediated through documents. Through a close look at three kinds of documents—land records, a particular notification over construction in the Lal Dora region and the General Power of Attorney, it pries open

Surrogacy has always been contested and much debated in India since its legalisation in 2002, and the recent Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2016, has led to a renewed engagement with it. The advent of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) provided an opportunity for the medical establishment, market and infertile couples to come together in a mutually beneficial arrangement, which is made possible

If sociology is ‘missing’ from the Aadhaar debate, to take Reetika Khera’s provocation seriously, the absence may reflect a disciplinary reluctance to accede to normative terms of contest in which the biometric identity platform must be rendered as boon or blight. Though a refusal of such normative formulations may be necessary, it carries its own ethical limit. Beyond the question of normative assessment

This article examines the circumstances in which the tasks performed by professional labour contractors may be passed on to worker-agents. It does so by critically engaging with the experience of migrant workers from the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand as they travel to work in the Peermade tea belt in the South Indian state of Kerala. Specifically, we identify shifts in economic and political contexts

Focusing on the Delhi gang rape of 16 December 2012, the article describes the force of two aggregations by which the violence is carried out and represented—the raping mob and the mourning and protesting crowd. Even though all six members of the mob are arrested within three days of the rape, we find disparate and spontaneous crowd formations across the city, expressing their anger at police apathy

In this article, I provide a detailed analysis of a case in which an eight-year-old girl was abducted, tortured and raped. She was recovered under somewhat mysterious circumstances. In my analysis, I knit together events inside the court as reflected the judgment and related events outside the court. I try to show, first, how legal technology produced ‘facts’ in court. I then take up what seemed like

This article is an ethnographic exploration of a promiscuously present and instantly recognisable legal and cultural artefact in India, the stamp paper document under the Indian Stamp Act, 1899. The ‘stamp paper’ is a documentary form that is constantly escaping from its legal moorings in revenue and evidentiary law, and is being replicated, mimed and recommissioned, both in form and in substance,

This article examines the relationship between law and the police in the Special Protection Unit for Women and Children (Unit), Delhi. It explicates how women police officers negotiate meanings of ‘domestic cruelty’ under the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961, read with Section 498-A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), in a milieu where narratives of violence they encounter from women complainants often challenge

South Asian folk and vernacular art practices have invariably been presented in scholarly writings as ‘tradition-bound’ with fixed conventions of image-making and iconography embedded in ritual and cultural life. This article proposes a shift by drawing attention to the lifeworlds and painterly practices of young women artists from the Mithila region of Bihar in India. Relatedly, then, I foreground

This article begins by examining multiple drafts of a parliamentary legislation that aims to provide rights and reservations to transgender persons in India, so as to trace the ways in which hijras have been absorbed into the discourse of nationalism. The most current draft of this bill, ‘The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill of 2016’ shows that despite claims to protect transgender citizens

How do we imagine the place of courtrooms in relation to society? There have been two dominant ways that ethnographers have viewed trials. The first treats trials as ways of understanding social structures and political power. In relation to terrorism trials, the courtroom becomes the arena in which nationalist politics can be re-enacted. There is the space of a pre-existing society—with all its hierarchies

In an overcrowded court on a sultry afternoon in August 2018, I was surprised when the Delhi High Court’s education bench had to repeatedly remind an insistent lawyer, ‘this is a court, not a panchayat1’. The lawyer had not filed an application for his client’s plea, yet wanted an order citing the last date of admission in the medical college as a ground of urgency. Only urgent admission matters were

The Aadhaar project which aims to provide all residents in India with a unique identity number requires much more attention from sociologists of India. There are several areas of research where sociologists can help: one, the implications of new technologies of surveillance for (a) privacy and (b) society; two, the repercussions of the desire for social ordering and control and technocratic solutionism

This companion piece to Reetika Khera’s account above is an attempt to situate some of the key aspects of the Aadhaar debate within a sociological field of enquiry, looking into just how and in what ways a sociologist might contribute to the study of India’s Aadhaar.

Contributions to Indian Sociology 52, 3 (2018): 351–379 that the ghost of dead children will haunt us because we survived. I once stole some marbles from Mehr ...’ (p. 222). Likewise the story of Jhuria in Badri Narayan’s chapter is both poignant and powerful, as she describes the hardships they faced when they decided to leave their traditional caste occupation (p. 175). There is much to learn from

The post-1984 situation in Punjab indexes the importance (and fascination) of the symbol of the shahid (martyr) and shahadat (martyrdom) in the Khalistani political project. Through the examination of the narratives of a widowed informant, this article attempts to relate the concept of martyrdom to that of widowhood. The widow Bibi’s ‘militant’ husband was killed in police encounter almost a decade

The notion of an urban frontier involves the idea of a border between areas based on differences along various axes such as the nature and degree of development and what constitutes the urban. Cities often draw upon such frontier regions for a variety of resources, of which, land is perhaps the most crucial. This article focuses on a ‘frontier’ in the city of Kolkata in eastern India—the East Kolkata

The Indian Ocean tsunami (2004) devastated the Nicobar archipelago, a remote tribal reserve in the Indian Ocean, which the Nicobarese indigenes have traditionally inhabited. The catastrophe attracted a massive humanitarian response from the Government of India (GoI), leading to a sociocultural crisis among the Nicobarese that is inextricably linked to the post-tsunami humanitarian government in the

Drawing upon the court case of one woman sentenced for killing her infant in the early decades of the last century, this article reads Pierre Bourdieu’s insight on how the trial stages conflicts produced in the social realm as a paradox for explaining how British administrators and Indian village officials negotiated non-conflicting codes of sexual and moral conduct on the basis of colonial ideology

Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Hyderabad, South India, this article explores the relationship between charity and disability. Despite a stereotype of philanthropic aid as reproductive of existing power structures or symptomatic of state failures to eliminate poverty, closer investigation exposes a more multi-layered picture. Disjunctures in donor and recipient perspectives on charity

This article, based on a study conducted in a tea plantation of Upper Assam, documents and analyses the struggle for Scheduled Tribe (ST) status by the Adivasis in Assam, which is linked to a larger demand for indigeneity and tribal recognition in the state and in the Northeast. It examines the nature of this struggle in recent times through both its contestations of indigeneity and claims upon citizenship