Ramachandran further documents that the authorities conducting inquiries did not merely question the rescued women, but also ‘counselled’ and censured them to lead a ‘dignified life’ and tried to extract the ‘truth’ from them by emphasizing their identities as wives, mothers, sisters and daughters.
Another major grouping of chapters focuses on public culture. The ability to access the public after figuring out where one can inhabit space emerges very well in Patrick Eisenlohr’s contribution on Twelver Shia Muslims and their engagements especially in media publics. The chapter by Raminder Kaur and Faisal Syed Mohammed looks at the Ganpati festival, a major Hindu festival which has become synonymous with the city. While it builds on earlier work, it provides a fascinating view of how festivals can often provide spaces of participation across religious boundaries
G Sreekumar’s essay deals with gold as a factor in money laundering which means cleaning the proceeds of crime. He says, in a heroic assumption of causality, that the high demand for gold in India leads to crimes in other countries. One must assume China, too, is responsible here because since 2009 its gold demand has exceeded that of India.
Women’s entry into the world of paid work is a theme tackled in chapters two and three. Islam highlights two crucial resources, using the respective tropes of ‘Madam’ and ‘Fast-Forward’, required by the women to gain access to, not without struggle of course, the new, globalized economic system; one the English language, and two, mobility. The former is contextually deployed to maintain the separate ethos and distinction between work and non-work place, while the latter is skilfully managed, lest its pace disturbs the work-leisure-home balance.
Mount’s study uncovers the bitter truth that though the emergence and visibility of the trans woman may translate as an increased acceptance of GNC people in India, it is at the cost of further discrediting, marginalizing and othering of the hijras. The rise of the trans woman has perhaps meant the decline of the traditional guru-chela dynamics of the hijra tradition, a further stigmatization of the sex work hijras are associated with,
he book asserts that anticolonial struggle also focused on the socio-economic aspects of national life, which give prominence to the idea of centralization. Gandhi’s alternative developmentalism had a fatal weakness because he hoped to create a decentralized polity on the basis of an anticolonial movement which had a strong centralizing feature. The author also presents a critique of other aspects of postcolonial economic changes: