The idealistic values that a stable democratic government embodies- political competition, democratic institutions, free and fair elections, freedom of the press, and fundament rights to every individual- are under threat globally. India’s democracy is comparable to that of the rest of the globe. Indian democracy under Indira Gandhi and currently under Narendra Modi is being […]
Read More… from A Tale of Two Leaders: Autocratic Transition of India’s Two Greatest Leaders
The violence women are victims of in South Asian societies can be understood as a reaction to men’s frustration and anger as they see their dreams and expectations turned down as a consequence of uneven social dynamics. In Pakistan, as in India and Bangladesh, the subordination of women to men is justified and supported through […]
Read More… from Representing Women’s Bodies in Pakistani Anglophone Fiction
Research on manual scavenging in South Asia presents a difficult to resolve question on scholarly accountability. Writings that trace the caste-to-occupation consolidation to colonial logics of governance bring out histories of occupational mobility and reveal the contingent formations of so-called ‘scavenger castes’ through the clumping together of groups. However, scholarship continues to be written through […]
The Indian Education Reform Movement (Ball 2016) is a multi-sited network of non-government organisations (NGOs) aiming to ensure the provision of ‘quality’ schooling across India. At the forefront of the Movement are university-educated middle-class individuals who launch ‘start-up’ social enterprises to partner with the government and counter specific ‘problems’ with universal education provision. Here, social […]
Read More… from Moral Neoliberals? Social Entrepreneurship in Indian Education Development
This paper traces the development of two unorganised industries in late colonial India (1870-1940), namely ‘bidi’ (or native cigarette) making in the Central Provinces and cotton ginning in the Bombay Presidency. The paper is based on my PhD research on the emergence of unorganised industries in rural India in the late colonial economy. Through an […]
Read More… from ‘From Farm to Factory’: Rural Industries in Late Colonial India, 1870-1940.
The Urdu writer, critic and historian Aziz Ahmad (1913- 1978), Hyderabadi born and bred, is possibly one of the most urbane and cosmopolitan figures of the subcontinent to have been consigned to relative obscurity, both in the city where he first made his name (Hyderabad) and in the literary-critical world in general. This is not […]
Read More… from Cities Old and New: the Urban Worlds of Aziz Ahmad
My paper delves into the transformation of Calcutta, the erstwhile capital of the British Empire in India in the decade of 1940s through a series of cataclysmic events— World War II, the famine and the 1947 Partition. By engaging with a range of literary and artistic works, the paper analyses the city’s contested negotiation with […]
Read More… from Modernity and its Discontents: The Colonial City and its Imaginations in the 1940s
By observing the development of the discourse on security as opposed to interreligious riots in Gujarat (Western India), the paper investigates how this narrative gave shape to new spaces and interacted with processes of valorization through heritage conservation and promotion (‘heritigization’) in Ahmedabad, the main city of the state. The state government reaction to the […]
Drawing on longitudinal research in Banaras (Varanasi), this paper unpacks the genesis and implementation of the ambitious Kashi Vishvanath Corridor to examine Hindu majoritarian projections of urban future. The Corridor is promoted in government narratives as both an urban rejuvenation and a heritage conservation project and features as a prominent achievement in the so-called vikas […]
As the bureaucratic custodian of centrally-protected monuments, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) seeks, in the first decades after independence (1947-72), to establish a firmer control over heritage sites in order to check rapid urban development, antiquities theft, and vandalism through a variety of security measures: fences, floodlighting, guards, forced expulsions, etc. In this respect, […]
