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Ties that bind: fashion, textiles, and gendered labour in South Asia today South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2024-03-17 Melia Belli Bose
As in many parts of the world, throughout South Asia, the various steps in textile production have historically been gendered, with men and women performing their respective specialized jobs. The l...
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Correction South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2024-03-12
Published in South Asian History and Culture (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Gender, value, creativity and the marketplace South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Judy Frater
In the more than seven decades since Indian independence, the relationship between artisan and art in India has radically changed. Having lived in the Kutch region of Gujarat for thirty years and w...
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Unravelling gendered power structures: exploring the agency of young women in a pashmina weaving family in Militarised Kashmir South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Souzeina Mushtaq
This article examines the intricate dynamics of gendered power structures within the context of a Pashmina weaving family in the militarised region of Kashmir. In particular, the focus is on unrave...
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The garment industry under COVID-19: lessons from the Rana Plaza disaster on how we understand worker safety South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2024-02-11 Sanchita Banerjee Saxena
The ready-made garment (RMG) sector in Bangladesh was especially hard hit during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 as consumer demand for apparel plummeted, leading to global retailers cancelling order...
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Moving with rags: India’s second-hand clothes recycling trade South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2024-01-24 Dipti Bapat
Global North's Second-hand Clothing (SHC) is disposed to third world nations, giving birth to massive import-based informal markets. In India, these SHCs are illegally imported and often cater to o...
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Learning making: textile-craft, gendered pedagogy and philanthropy South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Annapurna Garimella, Santhosh Sakhinala
This essay focuses on recent developments in the pedagogy of craftspeople. Beginning with an overview of post-Independence national design institutions, the essay focuses on more recent textile cra...
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Beyond masters: women’s shifting roles in Nepal’s new neoliberal garment industry South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Mallika Shakya
The late 20th century saw a phenomenal integration of the production and consumption of clothing between the Global North and the Global South. While global integration of mass manufactured garment...
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Uncomfortable quilts: textile-based artivism in response to Bangladeshi garment factory disasters South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2024-01-04 Melia Belli Bose
Recently, two deadly garment factory disasters in Dhaka, Bangladesh – the 2012 Tazreen Fashions factory fire (117 killed; over 200 injured) and the 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza, an eight story compl...
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Spatial imagination in colonial Bengal South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Anindita Mukhopadhyay
This essay traces a changing geo-politics brought about by the forces of Western colonisation. It maps the intellectual pathways two Bengalis – Raja Rammohun Roy and Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar – chal...
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Oral-Written-Performed: The Rāmāyaṇa Narratives in Indian Literature and Arts South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-21 Aniket De
Published in South Asian History and Culture (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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The Bhasa of History—an essay for Dipesh Chakrabarty South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-09 Siddharth Satpathy
What value does a leading historian of modern South Asia ascribe to bhasa literature? Meant as an introduction to a volume of papers dedicated to Dipesh Chakrabarty, this essay proposes to read thr...
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South Asian migrations in global history: labour, laws and wayward lives South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2023-07-03 Supurna Banerjee
Published in South Asian History and Culture (Vol. 14, No. 3, 2023)
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Provincializing Bollywood: Bhojpuri Cinema in the Comparative Media Crucible South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2023-03-02 Sanjay K Bissoyi
Published in South Asian History and Culture (Vol. 14, No. 3, 2023)
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Rabindranath Tagore and James Henry Cousins: a conversation in letters, 1915-1940 South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2023-03-01 Abhishek Sarkar
Published in South Asian History and Culture (Vol. 14, No. 3, 2023)
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Sarala Mahabharata in the colonial Odia public sphere South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2023-02-20 Urmishree Bedamatta
The paper studies how Sarala Dasa’s Mahabharata was received in the colonial Odia public sphere in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It received the attention of early antiquarian schola...
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Disco Nazia: disarticulating female playback and the heroine in early ‘80s Hindi cinema South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2023-02-13 Ajay Gehlawat
ABSTRACT Though only fifteen at the time and originally from Pakistan, Nazia Hassan arguably reshaped female playback singing in popular Hindi cinema with ‘Aap jaise koi,’ the hit song she recorded for Qurbani (1980). Hassan’s song for this film, and her ensuing hit songs for the subsequent film, Star (1982), can be seen as ushering in a new type of female playback singing which corresponds in many
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Dangerous to auspicious: vernacular transformations of a Telugu epic South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2023-02-06 Ilanit Loewy Shacham, Harshita Mruthinti Kamath
ABSTRACT Nannaya, an eleventh century court poet, is revered as the first poet (ādikavi) of Telugu literature, and his Mahābhāratamu is considered the first classical Telugu text. This article explores the ways in which Nannaya transformed the Sanskrit Mahābhārata into a vernacular idiom. While the Sanskrit Mahābhārata is a dangerous text associated with the conflicts of kingship, Nannaya’s Telugu
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Om Puri in/and 1980s Hindi cinema: narrating the ‘nation’ and the ‘subaltern protagonist’ South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2023-02-02 Smita Banerjee
ABSTRACT This article focuses on analysing the 1980s Hindi cinema through Om Puri’s (1950–2017) text. Much awarded, feted and internationally known for acting in Hollywood and British productions, Puri’s text needs to be mapped critically. If Bachchan’s star text has acquired a metonymic status typifying the 1970s, then the 1980s can be termed as the Om Puri decade as his cinematic text navigated across
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Tea Environments and Plantation Culture: Imperial Disarray in Eastern India South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2023-01-18 Tathagata Dutta
Published in South Asian History and Culture (Vol. 14, No. 3, 2023)
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Jungle passports: fences, mobility, and citizenship at the Northeast- India Bangladesh border South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2023-01-12 Priya Bose
Published in South Asian History and Culture (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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The Murderer, the Monarch and the Fakir: A New Investigation of Mahatma Gandhi’s Assassination, South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2023-01-08 Abhijit Maity
Published in South Asian History and Culture (Vol. 14, No. 3, 2023)
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My son’s inheritance: a secret history of lynching and blood justice in India South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2023-01-08 Aakhya Isha
Published in South Asian History and Culture (Vol. 14, No. 3, 2023)
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Violent fraternity: Indian political thought in the global age South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2023-01-06 Bhadrajee S. Hewage
Published in South Asian History and Culture (Vol. 14, No. 3, 2023)
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Vernacular English: reading the anglophone in postcolonial India South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2023-01-06 Shwetha Chandrashekhar
Published in South Asian History and Culture (Vol. 14, No. 3, 2023)
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‘No one heard me!’: sexual self-fashioning and the child in ‘Lihāf’ South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2023-01-04 Anupama Mohan
‘Lihāf’ by Ismat Chughtai is widely read as a tale of feminist and queer rebellion but it also narrates a complex account of a young girl’s initiation into sexuality as a result of her molestation ...
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Choreographing the queer: Visual and textual stimuli in Mandeep Raikhy’s dance-making process South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2023-01-03 Shambhavee Sharma
ABSTRACT The article looks at the methodology used by dance-maker Mandeep Raikhy – for his works Queen Size and A Male Ant Has Straight Antennae - of using ‘stimuli’ in the choreographic process to incite and create appropriate movement principles. The usage of visual stimuli such as images, drawings, and observations, and textual or literary stimuli (fiction/non-fiction, words) can be said to hold
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Memory, history, and casteless consciousness: Tamil Buddhists in modern South India South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2023-01-03 Gajendran Ayyathurai
ABSTRACT The study of memory and caste-based oppressed communities in India and in the Indian diaspora is largely an unexamined field. If caste was an imposition of the self-privileging groups then, how do we understand the memory and history of the subalternized communities? Likewise, if those Indians who were oppressed by the brahminical invention of untouchability were actually not untouchables
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The dancing body: labour, livelihood and leisure South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2023-01-02 Urmimala Sarkar Munsi, Aishika Chakraborty
ABSTRACT In India, discourses around the dancing body have long been trapped within the historical studies in and around dancers and their dance practices. During the last few decades, however, significant scholarly inroads were made into the domain of dance by shaking up the stereotypes, assertions and labels, shaped and moulded by patriarchy, class, caste and power. In the current times, the body
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The power of Buddhist homelands: secularism, space and sovereignty South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-12-26 Sara Shneiderman
ABSTRACT This Afterword draws the essays in this special collection together by highlighting how the ‘Buddhist Homeland’ imaginary can be mobilized to advance the agendas of marginalized communities in non-Buddhist state and diasporic spaces. Buddhist practices and identities may be seen as acceptable forms of counter-hegemonic practice, which are not perceived to challenge sovereignty itself in the
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Building Ambedkar’s India: Nagaloka centre as a microcosm of Prabuddha Bharat South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-12-22 Mallory Hennigar
ABSTRACT Nagaloka Centre in Nagpur, Maharashtra is a community centre for local members of the Triratna Buddhist Community. Nagaloka hosts the Nagarjuna Training Institute (NTI) which provides free training and Bachelors’ degrees in Buddhism and Ambedkar Thought to Indian students from disadvantaged social backgrounds. In offering these courses, NTI’s administrators aim to build a pan-Indian Buddhist
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Indo-German exchanges in education: Rabindranath Tagore meets Paul and Edith Geheeb South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-11-29 Soumen Mukherjee
Published in South Asian History and Culture (Vol. 14, No. 1, 2023)
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Magadha to Chittagong Buddhist migration: the colonizer-colonized contestation over Arakanese and Bengali ethnic belonging South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-11-29 D. Mitra Barua
ABSTRACT Late medieval Mughal sources accuse the Arakanese of incest and label them as ‘Maga.’ The Mughal use of ‘Maga’ echoes its previous application: pre-Islamic Persians were accused of incest and called ‘Maga.’ Colonial officials, however, redefined ‘Maga’ as a derivative of Magadha (historical Buddhist homeland in North India) and argued that the term originally referred to Barua Buddhists living
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Utopias of the past: a reading of A. K. Forbes’ Ras Mala South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-11-17 dhārā k. chotāi
Alexander Kinloch Forbes, a British colonial official, wrote the Ras Mala, a history of Gujarat, in 1856. When he was looking for sources for writing this history, he received a response from his i...
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The body and the contagion: a symbiosis of yoga, dance, health and spirituality South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-11-14 Pallabi Chakravorty
ABSTRACT What are the connections between bodies, healing, and transcendence? I propose that by examining the intersections of the medical and the socio-cultural body with dance or the performative body, we can shine a critical light on this question. This paper brings Yoga and Indian dance together to explore how notions of health, spirituality, and morality came to be inscribed in particular kinds
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Buddhist homeland(s), memory and the politics of belonging in South Asia South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-11-13 David Geary, Douglas Ober
ABSTRACT In recent centuries, the concept of an ‘original’ Buddhist homeland located in India and Nepal has come to mark the aspirations, identities, histories, and memories of diverse Buddhist communities and nation-states. In this Introduction to the Special Issue, we examine some of the ways Buddhist homeland narratives are used to (re)build ties to physical and imagined landscapes of belonging
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Artistic labour in dance and painting: revisiting the theory-practice debate via mimesis (Anukrti) and the abject body South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-11-11 Parul Dave Mukherji
ABSTRACT This article will critically explore how the intersection of mimesis and labour may open up another perspective on the much-theorized relationship between practice (prayoga) and theory (śāstra) in dance and painting. Labour or śrama, a loaded term by itself, will be taken in its complex sense of not only involving labour as skill that informs acts of painting, acting-dancing but also as a
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Folk dance/vulgar dance: erotic lavani and the hereditary performance labour South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-11-04 Anagha Tambe
ABSTRACT Performed as hereditary labour by women artists of lower castes largely for male entertainment, the erotic dance of lavani seems to occupy two different bifurcated worlds. There is a licit world of festivals, television dance shows, and urban revivalist cultural shows where lavani is performed in its vernacularized codified form, and valorized as the folk art of Maharashtra. The nostalgia
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‘Alexa, was Buddha Born in Nepal?’: microcelebrity, citizenship, and digital diaspora on YouTube South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-11-04 Dannah Dennis
ABSTRACT The claim that ‘Buddha was Born in Nepal’ is pervasive in contemporary discourses about Nepali national identity. This article focuses on the ways in which the claim to Buddha’s birthplace is deployed by some Nepalis living beyond Nepal as both a means of maintaining a connection to Nepal as a diasporic homeland and as a means of building their own online celebrity. In particular, I analyse
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Reading Benjamin Franklin’s life story in Bareilly South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-11-02 Smita Gandotra
This essay follows the print history of Benjamin Franklin’s life story. It appears first in William and Robert Chambers’ The Moral Class Book (1839) in Edinburgh and later in the Bareilly Tattvabod...
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Kashmir in the aftermath of partition South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-10-18 Priya Bose, Haroon Rashid
Published in South Asian History and Culture (Vol. 14, No. 1, 2023)
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Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Vande Mātaram and the Patriotic Song Tradition in India South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-10-04 Suddhaseel Sen
Bankimchandra Chatterjee wrote Vande Mātaram when the genre of the patriotic song started to flourish in Bengal in the decades following the Revolt of 1857, a time which also saw Bengali literature...
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Reading the Margins as Central: Representations of domestic servants in Nazir Ahmed and Ismat Chughtai’s literary works South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-09-20 Jamal Ali Bashir
ABSTRACT This paper revisits the Urdu literary works of Deputy Nazir Ahmed and Ismat Chughtai to unravel the changing ways in which they depicted the servants and servant-like characters in their description of the north Indian middle-class urban Muslim household in the late 19th and first half of the twentieth century. It argues that fiction writers like Ahmed had a conception of the respectable household
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Remembering Malan: reading representations of domestic servants in colonial Bihar South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-09-05 Ufaque Paiker
ABSTRACT This paper will discuss the construction of the ashraf identity through the representation of servants by a nineteenth-century Urdu poet of Bihar, Shad Azimabadi (1846–1927). Shad considered exclusivity of language and the distinctiveness of the master–servant relationship as a part of the adab culture (code of conduct) and the exclusivity of the ashraf. This exclusivity, however, underwent
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Between trust and mistrust: master-servant relationships in Urdu writings of the 1860s–early 1900s South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-09-05 Christina Oesterheld
ABSTRACT Based on texts dealing with life in North Indian Muslim households of the second half of the nineteenth century, covering genres such as didactic tales, letters, guidebooks, and an autobiographical narrative, this essay looks at the representation of master-servant relationships as presented in these texts from the perspective of the master/mistress. As this was a period of transformation
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Local states in an imperial world: identity, society and politics in the early modern Deccan South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-09-05 Shounak Ghosh
Published in South Asian History and Culture (Vol. 14, No. 1, 2023)
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Nature of slavery and servitude in Mughal India South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-09-02 Lubna Irfan
ABSTRACT The nature of service and submission in Mughal India was starkly different from modern times. The rhetoric of complete submission to the person of the Emperor guided the social relations of all orders. A reflection of this must have been experienced at the level of the household service gentry. Important elements in this service class were chelas (freed male slaves), sahelis (freed slave-girls)
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Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long Decolonization South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-08-22 Anais Da Fonseca
Published in South Asian History and Culture (Vol. 14, No. 1, 2023)
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Meat, Mercy, Morality: Animals and Humanitarianism in Colonial Bengal 1850-1920 South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-08-21 Amanda Lanzillo
Published in South Asian History and Culture (Vol. 14, No. 1, 2023)
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The award-wapsi controversy in India and the politics of dance South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-08-11 Anurima Banerji
ABSTRACT In 2015, a coalition of artists in India launched a protest against the ruling establishment, returning their awards to the government in response to a series of attacks on minorities and dissident thinkers that had remained unacknowledged or insufficiently condemned by the state. Known as “Award Wapsi” (award return’ in Hindi), this was notably the first artist action of its kind in independent
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Political hazard: misinformation in the 2019 Indian general election campaign South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-24 Syeda Zainab Akbar, Anmol Panda, Joyojeet Pal
ABSTRACT Misinformation on social media in the 2019 general election not only reached people through forwarded WhatsApp messages, but often circulated online through legitimate political entities. Our research utilizes social media posts from an archive of fact-checked articles , circulated widely and classified as fake or dubious by fact-checking organizations, in the campaign period from early March
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Disco flamboyance, performative masculinities and dancer heroes of Bengali cinema South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-22 Spandan Bhattacharya
ABSTRACT In this paper, I attempt to study the different determinants of cinematic masculinities, the gendered bodies of male performer figures and their changing patterns with reference to film dance from the 1980s-1990s period of Bengali popular cinema. This paper explores how the inclusion of performative male bodies in the dance numbers brought a distinct imagination of masculinity and flamboyance
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Political communication and campaigning in India: opportunities for future research South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-14 Holli A. Semetko
ABSTRACT This concluding essay begins with a discussion of how the evolution of communication technologies has shaped perceptions of professionalism in political campaigning in India and elsewhere. Highlights from the empirical case studies in this volume are discussed, setting the thematic case studies on political campaigning in the comparative cross-national context of research on political marketing
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The phantom of history: figurations of the dancing body and the ‘Sitara Devi problem’ of Indian cinema South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Madhuja Mukherjee
ABSTRACT This paper is an attempt to reimagine the function of the dancing body of Sitara Devi in the topography of Hindi popular films from the 1930s to 1950s. A legendary Kathak dancer, Sitara Devi started performing in films during her teens, and essayed multiple roles as an actor, singer and dancer. Her film career was on high tide during late ‘30s and ‘40s as she acted in a number of films including
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INHERITING caste: the judicial construction of Bengali Kayastha caste identity in inheritance settlements in colonial Calcutta South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-05 Nabaparna Ghosh
ABSTRACT In early twentieth-century legal settlements over inheritance disputes in Calcutta, Kayasthas, a socio-ethnic group formerly considered upper caste, came to be identified as Shudras, the lowest of the four castes. These inheritance settlements, taking place at the Calcutta High Court, deployed caste as a legal category to determine the lawful transfer of property between claimants. Both British
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Provincial victorians: global capital and literary taste in colonial Odisha South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-05 Siddharth Satpathy
Published in 1902, Fakir Mohan Senapati’s famous novel Six Acres and a Third sets up a parallel between the import of English commodities and English literary taste into Odisha in late nineteenth c...
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The erotic power of the dancer: labour of the erotic and the bodies of the sensory in the Arkestra of North India South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-04 Brahma Prakash
Abstract This article analyses the erotic power of the dancer in relation to the performance of arkestra girls in the Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. From the discursive lens of body, agency and identity, I move to the visceral presence of a dancer who foregrounds the labour of the erotic and the bodies of sensory in a live performance. I argue that the existing binary between dance and sex
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Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-01 Pratichi Priyambada (Mahapatra)
Published in South Asian History and Culture (Vol. 14, No. 3, 2023)
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Political campaigning in India: changing contexts of political communication South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-06-29 Anil M. Varughese, Holli A. Semetko
ABSTRACT This volume focuses on the dynamic, distinctive and diverse aspects of political campaigning in India’s varied information ecosystems during the 2019 Lok Sabha election. This introductory essay reviews important research in the field of political communication and campaigning, and distinctive forms of campaigning in historically important Indian elections, before discussing innovations and
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Political campaigning and party strategies: the importance of rallies in the northern states South Asian History and Culture Pub Date : 2022-06-27 Anup Kumar
ABSTRACT The rise of populist welfare politics with the distinct flavour of Hindutva-inspired nationalism seems to have replaced pluralistic and class-based politics. However, Hindutva has been around for decades now, and until 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had never won a majority on its own in the Lok Sabha. The 2014 election outcome cannot be explained by Hindutva-inspired new caste alliances