While covering only 14% of the cultivated area in the South Indian state of Karnataka, maize is the predominant crop choice of farmers residing in a pocket of arable land between two wildlife reserves, B.R.T and M.M. Hills, near the Karnataka-Tamil Nadu border. The crop’s popularity arose following the arrival of some 3,000 Tibetan refugees […]
Papers
Agricultural diversification in Rural North-West India: Understanding Transitions and Its Socio-Ecological Implications
Transformation through agricultural diversification, in particular crop diversification, is considered as one of factors to check whether agricultural development and economic growth in a region has happened or not (Rahaman 2021). This paper investigates farmers’ perspectives and experiences of moving towards alternate approaches to agriculture and the changing character of farming in Haryana (India) villages. […]
Changing the narrative – moving beyond ‘proto-indica’ debates to think about the complexity of early rice use in India.
The mosaic nature of the South Asian subcontinent make it one of the richest settings for studying changing human lifeways across the Quaternary Period. One debate that remains constant within this is the nature of early agriculture and the shift between hunter-gatherer-fisher-forager and farming lifeways which developed in numerous forms at numerous times within South […]
Becoming Community – the development of mental ecology as the prerequisite to the architecture of a desire to live well and make homes together
This paper takes its primary thrust from Felix Guattari’s notion of mental ecology (The Three Ecologies, 2000), of equal importance to but actually derived from respect for the intersection between environmental, social and domestic ecologies. Countering readily recognisable formations of community malaise, this paper will frame psycho-ecological practices from three examples of home-making and living […]
Sharing spaces and living (well) together on Indian campuses
This paper looks at university campus spaces as shared living spaces or homes. But also, as semi-closed/-open spaces (with)in a city. The aim is to understand how the living situation of students influence their everyday life and the ways students form a relation to the campus space. Doing so, metropolitan public university campus spaces are […]
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Reimagining Housing, Rethinking the Role of Architects in India: Documentary Explorations
The paper looks at some of the documentary practices that are currently deployed to provide awareness and knowledge about the built environment in a way that is accessible to non-experts and thereby creates a new space for debate. Related to this is the question how architects reflect on their own role and contribution to society. […]
Where did the Mohalla’s go: Addressing the question of resistance and resilience in the old city neighbourhoods of Srinagar
This paper looks at the resilience and resistance towards changing modes of political and social belonging in Mohalla’s of Srinagar city in the Kashmir valley. The challenges come from the state and private sectors both and engulf the fragile architecture, infrastructure, ownership, demographic composition and the lived heritage of the city. As the mode of […]
“… but this is a huge city. So I like it here.”: Exploring transient home-making amongst the ‘rurban’ circular migrants in Hyderabad, India.
Migration has been deemed as a process of alleviating ambient distress and striving for livelihood, through a flight from rural to rural or rural to urban locales in search of jobs, opportunities and resources. Taking a cue from Vinay Gidwani and K Sivaramakrishnan’s formulation of ‘Rural Cosmopolitanism’, this paper looks at the rural migrants from […]
“You have meals to live together”: Co-habiting of Bengali-speaking migrant workers in a trans-local Mumbai
In urban areas, migrant workers cohabiting together is often seen through the lens of materiality and informality of infrastructure. This paper explores how the informality of housing reveals the process of dwelling and cohabiting of marginalized Bengali-speaking Muslim migrant workers from India’s Northeast state of Assam living in precarious, albeit, provisional makeshift arrangements like one-room […]
On the Problems of Being Happy Together: Bengali Comedy after Partition and the Crisis of Dwelling
My paper looks at popular Bengali comedy after Partition of India in 1947 and how these comedies often staged a crisis of dwelling endemic to post-Partition Bengal. Many of these comedies would take place in a messbari (boardinghouse) or bharabari (rented apartment)- two spaces of temporary collective cohabitation commonly used by East Bengalis who had […]
