Tag Archives: Sociology and Anthropology

Narratives about lives popularly regarded as successful or marked by significant achievements, written by celebrities or eminent public figures, have always been eagerly received by a wider reading public. However, writings by those at the margins have visibly toppled the conventions of this genre in the twentieth century…

Reverence for the Prophet of Islam through an affirmation of his exceptionality has a contested legacy and an emotional salience that has captured the imagination of the political landscape of South Asia. Recently, the National Assembly of Pakistan was pressed to debate its infamous blasphemous laws in the context of the demand…

Abiochemist and a health journalist come together to write about what happens when biology and history come together—the field of archaeogenetics opens up and lets the human story unfold in exciting new ways. In fact, the authors state that genetics must become an essential element of historical writing…

The book by Debal K SinghaRoy provides an exquisite illustration of the situational reconstruction of new, fluid and layered identities in collective mobilizations, along the axis of caste, class, tribe, nationality, ethnicity, citizenship and social movements, resulting from the unprecedented social transformation caused by the spread…

In the existing scenario whereby the literature on urban life in India has almost reduced urban neighbourhoods to abstract monolithic entities embodying human settlements, and the ecology thereof, to the utter neglect of the embeddedness of these settlements in different communitarian identities and categorical values…

This work, an important contribution to the gendered history of colonial Indian labour migration, offers a fresh perspective on coolie women’s everyday experiences and their contribution as producers and reproducers of labour to the plantation economy of Federated Malaya States (FMS) in British Malaya…

The book under review is Nabaparna Ghosh’s crisp treatise about the para or the neighbourhood in colonial Calcutta. The book has four chapters apart from a very well laid out introduction and a tight epilogue. The introduction outlines the plan of the book and raises a number of questions…

Undermining Racial Justice is an archival exploration of the movement for racial justice that gripped the University of Michigan (henceforth UM) from the 1960s. Divided into eight lucidly written chapters complemented by an introduction and a discerning epilogue…

In the book under review Nazima Parveen looks at the transformation of Shahjahanabad, which later became Old Delhi, between 1850 and the 1970s to understand the deep segregation that has emerged between the city’s Hindu and Muslim populations in terms of residential living…

(Hi)Stories of Desire is set to be a landmark publication on culture in modern India. It maps this via the route of sexualities and draws upon a diverse set of disciplinary locations and research to do so. In addition to a very comprehensive introductory chapter co-authored…

Ever since I had started listening to rock music in my early teens, one of the most unusual figures I have come across is Henry Rollins. Rollins began as a front man for Black Flag, a band that is part of the canon of punk rock in its later period, and later made a name as the founder of Rollins Band…

India is a land of diverse opinions, interpretations and debates. It is a land of pluralistic but protean ethos. Herein history and hagiography, anecdotal and ideological, secular and sacred continuously coalesce and collide to configure and reconfigure its constitutive icons. In the process the icons often lose their existential/embodied moorings…

In rapidly urbanizing India the book Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India’s Urban Slums by Adam Auerbach is an important contribution to the existing corpus of political economy literature engaging with the themes related to development in urban India…

Mobilizing the Marginalized by Amit Ahuja is an important contribution to the literature on social movements, party and the party system, ethnic politics and public policy. The book fills a vital theoretical gap in the literature on social and electoral mobilization…

In 1899, George Curzon started from Shimla on his first tour of India as the Viceroy and, made Delhi his first halt. He spoke at a ceremony at the Town Hall, the office of the Municipal Department of Delhi, and extolled them for the ‘great and remarkable development’ done in the city…

In the year 1974, when the womenfolk and children of village Reni, under the leadership of the gutsy Gaura Devi were chasing away labour contractors and their crony forest officials bent upon felling trees for commercial exploitation, writing perhaps the most glorious chapter in the history …

Studies on tribes range from colonial misrepresentation to critical processes of identity formulation against forces of dispossession. The most recent trend, however, is that of self-representation and search for adivasi epistemology[1]. Though tribes of India are no longer considered a stagnant community…

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.- Italo Calvino, Invisible CitiesDo the cities with their sensorial excesses of sights, sounds, smell, and touch shape the way writers experience their quotidian lives or do the bodily experiences of writers as inhabitants…

A spectator’s reach from the gallery of a circus tent into its colourful and complex world of amusement and action is simply thin and tiny like an ant’s eye view. Given the most common experience of the viewer to connect with the excitement of circus remains within a narrow line of sight…

There is a certain caricature of Mumbai that is constantly evoked in popular representations—‘the city of dreams’ that came up from the sea, doting on the city’s unique heritage that remains severed from a history of its origin, where a rich sensation of the present prevails over…