Uday chandra biography template

Avoiding confrontation can, ironically, reinforce the status quo. By contrast, by negotiating democratic claims and rights with the state, protesters can extract valuable concessions that are far more damaging to the status quo. While Gandhian non-violence may achieve such victories in some contexts, there is no good reason to believe that limited forms of well-directed violence cannot accomplish the same goals elsewhere.

A state that is compelled to concede defeat repeatedly is unlikely to sustain the existing social structures of capitalist accumulation. In sum, Holloway might have missed a trick here: for a weak opponent with strength only in numbers, wrestling the state to the ground holds greater promise than hoping futilely to destroy it or avoiding it altogether.

Lisa Bjorkman ed. Thirty-odd teenage men and women are awaiting a train o Thirty-odd teenage men and women are awaiting a train on the main platform at the busy Rajkharsawan station in the erstwhile princely state of Seraikela in southeastern Jharkhand. The train, which started in Kolkata more than six hours ago, will take them to Mumbai over a day and a half.

From afar, there is nothing to separate this Mumbai-bound group from the rest. But if you come closer, you cannot miss the rotund figure of Janu explaining to the group what will follow. Janu, whose real name is Sonam Purti, was once like these teen agers most of whom-like Janu-belong to the Ho tribe waiting with a mix of eagerness and trepidation to go to Mumbai.

Today, she is their sirdar boss as she directs them to board the train and then sit together inside the compartment. In Mumbai she will also be their didi older sister as she guides them through the intricacies of life on a construction site. Two de cades ago, Janu also worked on a construction site until she had developed enough contacts and courage to chart a new career as a labor recruiter.

In this new role she visited their villages, mobilized her contacts accumulated over the years, and explained to potential recruits what livelihood options and wage rates were on offer in a faraway megacity. The Elections from the Margins of Modern India. To those who watched and passed on the video throughout the eastern Indian states of Jharkhand, West Bengal, and Orissa, it summed up the plight of adivasi or "tribal" populations in the region as they battled an emerging state-corporate nexus whose plans for rapid industrialization in India relied on greater access to forest and mineral resources.

This paper critically interrogates the myriad lives of this video clip through a close study of the real and virtual arenas in which it came to be viewed and engaged by different audiences. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the forest state of Jharkhand in eastern India, I examine how developmental NGOs, indigeneity activists, and rural adivasi villagers came to view and interpret this video differently.

These different interpretations, I show, simultaneously perpetuate and destabilize established ideas of " primitivism " in postcolonial India, especially when some adivasi subjects talk back to their well-meaning patrons and critique representations of themselves. Might the production of " primitive " subjects be, I ask, paradoxically conjoined to processes of primitive accumulation in postcolonial India?

Additionally, the Any deficiencies that remain in this article are mine. Marxism, Postcolonial Theory, and the Specter of Universalism. Following recent debates between Vivek Chibber and leading postcolonial theorists, I probe into w I focus on the figure of the 'tribal' in modern India in Ranajit Guha's Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India and Alpa Shah's In the Shadows of the State, both of which claim to offer emic perspectives on subaltern politics and history.

In doing so, I question the stereotypical image of the adivasi as a hapless victim of modern political and economic processes, and offer nuanced, close-to-the-ground empirical accounts of different aspects of contemporary adivasi life in comparative perspective. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Tanika Sarkar eds. Insofar as caste is a system of organising labour on the basis of a hierarchical social logic, it is important to understand how distinctive "regional modernities" were built, quite literally, on the backs of labouring groups assigned the lowest ritual and socioeconomic status in these new regions.

Maoism refers to an ensemble of revolutionary ideas and practices inspired by the life and work o Broadly, these ideas and practices seek to deploy militant, even violent methods to install a new radical democratic regime that is committed to the collective pursuit of dignity, freedom, and equality. The Maoist Movement in Contemporary India. Indian Maoists dismiss parliamentary democracy as a sham insofar as it fails to address the concerns and aspirations of the majority of its citizens, nearly four-fifths of whom live below two dollars a day.

The CPI Maoist is active mostly in eastern and central India, where human development levels rank among the lowest in the world, forest cover and rugged terrain facilitate guerrilla tactics and protracted low-intensity insurgency, and tribal and lower caste groups are preponderant. According to the Indian prime minister, Maoist rebels pose the greatest internal security threat to India since independence.

In reality, however, Maoist cadres are estimated to be anywhere between 10, and 40, in a country of nearly 1. These thinly-spread cadres are concentrated chiefly in what journalists, policymakers, and scholars call the Red Corridor, running from the Nepalese border through the states of Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, and Andhra Pradesh.

In these areas, regular elections are held, state and non-governmental organizations routinely participate in rural development, and state police and forest officials coexist with armed rebels and their rural supporters. Since , the state has deployed paramilitaries to supplement state police forces in combating Maoist guerillas, which has intensified state-sponsored violence and led to widespread human rights abuses, yet it has been incapable of establishing anything akin to a monopoly of legitimate violence.

Shared sovereignty is thus the norm, not the exception, as in other insurgent zones in India such as Kashmir and the northeastern frontier. This state of affairs also suggests that the everyday realities of Indian Maoism are somewhat different from its ideological self-image as a vanguardist revolutionary movement. Townsend Middleton's The Demands of Recognition is an invitation to think through the everyday di Through an extended case study of Nepali-speaking groups that are collectively known as 'Gorkhas', Middleton shows how late liberal governmentality and what he calls the 'ethno-contemporary' make and remake each other.

As the postcolonial state has devised affirmative action policies to redress the historical disadvantages of socially marginalized groups, a new kind of 'ethnopolitics' has emerged to claim the loaves and fishes offered by the state. In turn, this new ethnopolitics has compelled the state to rethink its classificatory schemas and mechanisms in order to decide which groups ought to be considered as 'tribes', and hence, merit affirmative action.

In most cases, the primary aim of ethnopolitics in contemporary India is to enter official lists or 'schedules' that record castes and tribes as well as other groups deemed to be 'backward' enough to warrant affirmative action. The situation with the Gorkhas was no different after their demand for a separate state of Gorkhaland went unmet a generation ago.

By undertaking a fine-grained ethnographic exploration of the Gorkhas' ethnopolitics and the travails of their interlocutors within the postcolonial ethnographic state, Middleton challenges us to interrogate our received notions of ethnicity and about the place of anthropology in our world. Sanal Mohan's Modernity of Slavery is an outstanding contribution to an emerging body of inter Sanal Mohan's Modernity of Slavery is an outstanding contribution to an emerging body of interdisciplinary scholarship on Christianity and caste relations in modern South Asia.

Sanal Mohan shows how these Protestant missions took up the cause of men and women in agrarian servitude in this part of modern-day Kerala, and in turn, how the slave castes crafted new selves in the cauldron of colonial modernity with and without the aid of their missionary patrons. Besides bringing new evidence to bear on the relationship between colonial modernity and socio-religious change, the book offers a novel anthropological understanding of this relationship by reading archival sources against the grain and in the light of the lived experiences of ex-untouchable or Dalit castes such as the Parayas and Pulayas.

By doing so, it shows how, after the formal abolition of slavery in , these ex-slave castes remade themselves in their everyday lives and sought equality in a social field shaped by Protestant missions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Christianity and the politics of caste in modern India are connected intimately, though scholarly and public discourse has typically failed to acknowledge this.

To be sure, Sanal Mohan is careful to distinguish between landowning Syrian Nestorian Christians from dominant castes and those historically oppressed and landless groups whose struggles he documents. British Protestant missions made their deepest impact in southern India on the latter, whose enslavement by dominant landowning castes had stripped them of their humanity over centuries.

It mattered, of course, that the new Anglican churches shared affinities with the British Raj, but that fact cannot be taken to imply that the Raj was particularly keen to overturn what it saw as " traditional " social hierarchies. Indeed, the missionaries themselves were divided on agendas of social reform. Accordingly, there is no necessary relationship between conversion to Christianity and Dalit emancipation, though they came to be linked in contingent circumstances in Travancore in the late nineteenth century.

The historical specificity of missionary discourses and their reception by ex-slave castes thus lies at the heart of the book. As elsewhere, Anglican missionaries prescribed personal hygiene, a monogamous family, and a disciplined life free from sin. In the context of Travancore, however, these prescriptions came to be reworked by ex-slaves, regardless of whether they converted to Christianity, into a new consciousness that claimed equality in the public sphere after removing all markers of servitude.

This process of reworking missionary discourses, the book argues, ought to be seen as one of modernization, but it was far from seamless: older ritual practices that invoked spirits and magic persisted alongside the new lessons taught by missions. In other words, we cannot assume a one-to-one correspondence between the aims of the missions and the world that the ex-slaves remade.

Christianity revitalized the ritual lives of Dalits and paved the way for modern emancipatory politics, but it neither set out to do so nor dictated the eventual historical path taken by Dalits in Kerala. Anastasia Piliavsky ed. These myths, much like the groups that inhabit the Andamans, are varied, ranging from colonial anthropological assumptions about the " primitive " lifestyles of forest-dwellers to recent nationalist folktales about the socio-cultural mosaic on these islands mirroring the diversity of the Indian mainland.

The inhabitants of the islands too are a varied lot that reflects the layered and chequered history of the place: descendants of convicts in the infamous jail there, partition refugees from eastern Bengal, Adivasis from the Chotanagpur region, and Telugu-and Tamil-speaking migrants from southern India. In deconstructing myths about the Andamans, Zehmisch relies on a mix of historical and ethnographic research.

He reads secondary historical sources closely and fills in crucial gaps with his own oral-historical research. He also pursues in-depth, multi-sited ethnographic research among different segments of Andamans society in order to present a complex portrait of everyday life and politics on these islands. In Zehmisch's work, the past and the present are braided together in richly textured narratives, which vividly capture the social conflicts and divisions in his fieldsites as well as the ways in which ordinary people struggle to impart meaning to their lives.

His long engagement with individuals and communities living in the Andamans has enabled him to take advantage of a wide network of friends and informants who have made fieldwork not only possible, but insightful and enjoyable. By candidly describing his interactions with his interlocutors, Zehmisch offers a personal account of what it is like to do research in the islands, what challenges and rewards it brings, and how the data we generate as fieldworkers is inevitably entangled with the social ties we forge in the field of study.

Central to Zehmisch's dissertation is the claim that subaltern agency ought to be placed at the centre of our understanding of Andaman history, society, and politics. The agency of subaltern actors may be seen, firstly, in the human mobilities that settled the Andamans in response to modern state policies over successive phases, during the past century and a half.

These settlers from various parts of South Asia crafted new lives for themselves on these islands, often transforming both the landscape and themselves in order to generate new notions of belonging and community in relation to each other. Subaltern agency, Zehmisch shows, may also be seen in the forging of an " island mentality, " a kind of hybrid popular consciousness that reflects the processes of cultural creolization that successive waves of migration have generated in the Andamans.

Angela Hobart and Bruce Kapferer eds. Vibha Joshi, A Matter of Belief. John Gaventa and Rajesh Tandon eds. ISS offers a cautionary tale of what can go wrong when activists pretend to know what is best for Alpa Shah demonstrates persuasively that the best antidote to misguided activism is a critical ethnographic understanding of the joys and sorrows, trials and tribulations, aims and aspirations of those poorest individuals and groups whose voices rarely get heard in academic and policy circles.

Such a close-to-the-ground understanding of subaltern politics paves the way for a truly radical politics that seeks to transform the structures of power and profit that entrap adivasis in India today. In the typical commentary on Maoism in India, tribals Adivasis and ex-untouchables Dalits are According to a former-Maoistturned-civil-society-activist, Maoism in India is 'not a movement of landless peasants and tribals seeking to overthrow state power.

Uday chandra biography template

It is a project defined as such by those who are neither peasants nor workers nor tribals, but who claim to represent their interests' Simeon Against these armchair condemnations of Maoist revolution, George Kunnath's Rebels from the Mud Houses [henceforth RMH] is a whiff of fresh air from the rebel strongholds of rural south Bihar. Kunnath reaches his conclusions after a painstaking ethnographic study of the relationship between Dalits and Maoists, and emphasizes the agency of Dalits in making war on their landed superiors in an intensely polarized caste society.

He neither romanticizes their predicament nor represents them as hapless victims. Instead, he carefully chronicles the changing circumstances of Dalit labourers, and their contingent choice to participate in a violent class conflict and then. Review - David N. Gellner ed. Review - James C. Freshman Seminar: The Country and the City. Is it true that modernity denotes the extinction of the rural?

Does the rural necessarily imply t Does the rural necessarily imply traditional ways of life in idyllic landscapes? This course raises these two interrelated questions in order to challenge much received wisdom in the social sciences as well in popular culture that equates the "modern" with the city and the "traditional" with the countryside.

Senior Seminar in International Politics. This capstone course is meant for IPOL majors in their senior year. It builds on prior coursework It builds on prior coursework in comparative politics, international relations, regional studies, and research methods. The primary purpose of the course is to bring together diverse intellectual strands of the major in order to provide students with a coherent and comprehensive overview of international politics.

Resistance, Rebellion, and Revolution. This course is a semester-long introduction to politics and society in the Indian subcontinent, n In doing so, we shall inquire into the nature of the postcolonial state and its institutions, state-society relations, modernization, secularism, the politics of identity, and the political economy of development in South Asia.

Circulation and Sovereignty in the Indian Ocean. This interdisciplinary seminar aims to introduce students to the sociocultural worlds of the Indi Although the Indian Ocean rim has a history of interconnectivity and exchange spanning millennia, it has only recently started to attract scholarly attention. Close Inactive Modal. Skip to main content.

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