Banaras is often recognized today through popular media and even scholarly discourse as a metonym for Hindu India, ignoring its substantial Muslim presence and socio-cultural contributions to the city. My translation of Mirza Ghalib’s (1797–1869) Persian long poem in praise of the city, Chiragh-e-Dair (1826), as Temple Lamp (Penguin, 2022) has been a humble attempt […]
Read More… from The Indo-Persian Religious Urbanity of Mirza Ghalib’s Banaras
General Zia-ul-Haq’s military dictatorship in Pakistan during the late 1970s ushered a period of strict state surveillance and media censorship. During this period, Zia’s authoritarian regime introduced the Motion Pictures Ordinance which was a series of censorship laws meant to regulate onscreen depictions of violence, sexuality, and anti-establishment sentiments. Cinemas in Pakistan would often get […]
Read More… from Rethinking Subversive Cinephilia: Audience and Spectatorship in Pakistan (1979-1999)
This paper examines how the exceptional governance’ of Industrial Model Township, emergence of residential associations—legitimized through claims of democratic participation and self-representation of local community—and technologies of neoliberal governmentality combine to produce “localized forms of sovereignty” that are “nested within higher sovereignties”. In post-liberalization India, emergence and proliferation of resident associations on the urban landscape […]
Tribal farmers in the Central Indian upland regions grew a range of crops adapted to the short growing season and itinerant lifestyles in the nineteenth century. Away from the institutional authority of imperial kingdom, though not in isolation from trade routes, such communities experienced a transition mid-nineteenth century, when land was enclosed, as farms and […]
“…The Congress party aides were highly corrupt in their dealing with the Delhi refugee camp… (Vimal, 2018).” “…The corrupt policeman forcibly removed my street food stall and arrested me…he and other refugee dwellers did not want me to set up an independent market in the [Kurukshetra] refugee camp… (Madan, 2018).” “…Survivors were unwilling to discuss […]
Performance of death rituals occupies a significant place in the life-course of a Hindu. Making funerary offerings to the deceased ancestors, piṇḍadāna, is surviving from a tradition that is said to date back to the Vedas. The tradition revolves around the idea of ritual transmigration of the deceased to the next world- the world of […]
Read More… from Gender, Religion and Agency: Kinnars Claiming Death Rites
Women’s participation in public or private protests (also sometimes referred to as ‘overt’ or ‘covert’ forms of resistance) has often been linked to livelihood concerns, such as access to state benefits, agricultural land and affordable food, or clean drinking water. But in postwar contexts, their contributions to and shaping of political movements tackling structural injustice […]
Recent years have seen an increase in the number of Bollywood films that touch upon the culture of Punjab in a variety of ways. From films that are set in Punjabi cities and discuss the local way of living, such as Manmarziyan (2018, dir. Anurag Kashyap), to films that are concerned with depicting the lives […]
Read More… from “Punjabi Bollywood” and its Punjabi audiences
This paper conceptualizes the making of ‘listening publics’ by foreign broadcasting radio stations during the Cold War in India. It focuses on the competitive acoustic registers utilized by radio stations to sketch how ‘bloc’ politics was played out in 1960s-80s, when radio’s presence was ubiquitous. Stations like Radio Berlin International (GDR), Deutsche Welle (FRG), BBC […]
Read More… from Radio’s ‘global’ listening publics in India during the Cold War
