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  3. South Asia in the Social Sciences

This series will features monographs incorporating innovative social science research on contemporary South Asia. The emphasis will be on understanding contemporary developments through empirically grounded research that uses unconventional and new sources of information and innovative methods. It will aim to open up new fields and methods of investigation and theoretical construction.

  • General Editors: Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University
  • Editorial Boards: Pranab Bardhan, University of California, Berkeley, Stuart Corbridge, Durham University, Satish Deshpande, University of Delhi, Christophe Jaffrelot, Centre d’etudes et de recherches internationales, Paris, Nivedita Menon, Jawaharlal Nehru University

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32 results in South Asia in the Social Sciences

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Simultaneous Identities
  • Language, Education, and the Nepali Nation
  • Uma Pradhan
  • Published online:
    30 April 2020
    Print publication:
    03 December 2020
  • The recent socio-political changes in Nepal have brought assimilationist notions of Nepali nationalism under a tight scrutiny and drawn attention to more plural, inclusive, and diverse notions of Nepaliness. However, both assimilationist and pluralist visions continue to remain normative in their approach, and often posit ethnic and national identity in opposition to each other. Drawing on the everyday practices in the two schools, this book illustrates that social actors in minority language education did not necessarily select between minority identity and national identity, but instead made simultaneous claims to more than one social identity by discursively positioning 'ethnic identity' as 'national identity'. It builds on the notion of 'simultaneity' to illustrate that it is through the 'unresolved co-presences' of apparently contradictory ways that people maintain their multi-layered identities. By arguing for an analytical necessity to adopt relational approach, it aims to complicate the neat compartmentalisation of identities.

Dynamics of Caste and Law
  • Dalits, Oppression and Constitutional Democracy in India
  • Dag-Erik Berg
  • Published online:
    24 December 2019
    Print publication:
    06 February 2020
  • Dynamics of Caste and Law breaks new ground in understanding how caste and law relate in India's democratic order. Caste has become a visible phenomenon often associated with discrimination, inequality and politics in India and globally. India's constitutional democracy has had a remarkable goal of creating equality in a context of caste. Despite constitutional promises with equal opportunities for the lower castes and outlawing of untouchability at the time of independence, recurring atrocities and inadequate implementation of law have called for rethinking and legal change. This book sheds new light on why caste oppression persists by using new theoretical perspectives as well as Bhimrao Ambedkar's concepts of the caste system. Focusing on struggles among India's Dalits, the castes formerly known as untouchables, the book draws on a rich material and explains, among other things, mechanisms of oppression and how powerful actors may gain influence in institutions of law and state.

Politics of the Poor
  • Negotiating Democracy in Contemporary India
  • Indrajit Roy
  • Published online:
    03 August 2019
    Print publication:
    04 October 2017
  • This book challenges the ongoing scholarly debates on poor people's negotiations with democracy. It demonstrates the varied ways in which the poor engage with their elected representatives, political mediators and dominant classes in order to advance their claims. Roy explains the variations by directing attention to the dynamic interaction between the opportunity structures available to the poor and the social relations of power in which they are embedded. He analyses these intersections as 'political spaces' which both enable and constrain popular practices. Through examination of the 'political spaces' available to the poor in four different localities, Roy outlines a new analytic framework to understanding poor people's politics. Based on these observations, the book makes a strong case for an approach to democracy that appreciates people's ambivalences towards democracy. Roy urges researchers of democracy to step beyond either enthusiastic narratives - the inevitability of democracy or apocalyptic accounts of democracy's impending death.

New Perspectives on Pakistan's Political Economy
  • State, Class and Social Change
  • Edited by Matthew McCartney, S. Akbar Zaidi
  • Published online:
    26 April 2019
    Print publication:
    12 September 2019
  • This volume makes a major intervention in the debates around the nature of the political economy of Pakistan, focusing on its contemporary social dynamics. This is the first comprehensive academic analysis of Pakistan's political economy after thirty-five years, and addresses issues of state, class and society, examining gender, the middle classes, the media, the bazaar economy, urban spaces and the new elite. The book goes beyond the contemporary obsession with terrorism and extremism, political Islam, and simple 'civilian–military relations', and looks at modern-day Pakistan through the lens of varied academic disciplines. It not only brings together new work by some emerging scholars but also formulates a new political economy for the country, reflecting the contemporary reality and diversification in the social sciences in Pakistan. The chapters dynamically and dialectically capture emergent processes and trends in framing Pakistan's political economy and invite scholars to engage with and move beyond these concerns and issues.

Crafty Oligarchs, Savvy Voters
  • Democracy under Inequality in Rural Pakistan
  • Shandana Khan Mohmand
  • Published online:
    26 April 2019
    Print publication:
    16 May 2019
  • How does democracy empower marginalized voters under conditions of inequality? The author probes into this question grounding her research in the context of Pakistan, an emerging democracy whose voters have actively been involved in defining its political history but about whom we know very little. They turn up in sizeable numbers to vote during elections, even under military rule, prompting all kinds of contradictory stereotypes about how Pakistani rural voters behave as electoral cannon fodder. But no one has looked very closely at why they vote as they do, or why they vote at all when their political agency is severely limited by high socio-economic inequality. By using original data collected across different villages and households in rural Pakistan, this book finds that electoral politics enables even the most marginalized voters to strategically further their interests vis-à-vis elite groups, but that persistent inequality limits their ability to organize or compete.

Maoist People's War and the Revolution of Everyday Life in Nepal
  • Ina Zharkevich
  • Published online:
    28 March 2019
    Print publication:
    09 May 2019
  • By providing a rich ethnography of wartime social processes in the former Maoist heartland of Nepal, this book explores how the Maoist People's War (1996–2006) transformed Nepali society. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with people who were located at the epicentre of the conflict, including both ardent Maoist supporters and 'reluctant rebels', it explores how a remote Himalayan village was forged as the centre of the Maoist rebellion, how its inhabitants coped with the situation of war and the Maoist regime of governance, and how they came to embrace the Maoist project and maintain ordinary life amidst the war while living in a guerilla enclave. By focusing on people's everyday lives, the book illuminates how the everyday became a primary site of revolution of crafting new subjectivities, introducing 'new' social practices and displacing the 'old' ones, and reconfiguring the ways that people act in and think about the world through the process of 'embodied change'.

Nationalism, Development and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka
  • Rajesh Venugopal
  • Published online:
    01 November 2018
    Print publication:
    31 July 2018
  • This book examines the relationship between ethnic conflict and economic development in modern Sri Lanka. Drawing on a historically informed political sociology, it explores how the economic and the ethnic have encountered one another, focusing in particular on the phenomenon of Sinhala nationalism. In doing so, the book engages with some of the central issues in contemporary Sri Lanka: why has the ethnic conflict been so protracted, and so resistant to solution? What explains the enduring political significance of Sinhala nationalism? What is the relationship between market reform and conflict? Why did the Norwegian-sponsored peace process collapse? How is the Rajapaksa phenomenon to be understood? The topical spread of the book is broad, covering the evolution of peasant agriculture, land scarcity, state welfarism, nationalist ideology, party systems, political morality, military employment, business elites, market reforms, and development aid.

Adivasis and the State
  • Subalternity and Citizenship in India's Bhil Heartland
  • Alf Gunvald Nilsen
  • Published online:
    01 November 2018
    Print publication:
    30 September 2018
  • In Adivasis and the State, Alf Gunvald Nilsen presents a major study of how subalternity is both constituted and contested through state-society relations in the Bhil heartland of western India. The book unravels the historical processes that subordinated Bhil Adivasi communities to the everyday tyranny of the state and investigates how social movements have mobilised to reclaim citizenship. In doing so, the book also reveals how collective action from below transform the meanings of governmental categories, legal frameworks, and universalising vocabularies of democracy. At the core of the book lies a concern with understanding the dialectics of power and resistance that give form and direction to the political economy of democracy and development in contemporary India. Towards this end, Adivasis and the State contributes a sustained and nuanced Gramscian analysis of hegemony in order to interrogate the possibilities and limits of subaltern political engagement with state structures.

South Asian Governmentalities
  • Michel Foucault and the Question of Postcolonial Orderings
  • Edited by Stephen Legg, Deana Heath
  • Published online:
    28 October 2018
    Print publication:
    08 August 2018
  • This volume analyses the ways in which the works of one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Michel Foucault, have been received and re-worked by scholars of South Asia. South Asian Governmentalities surveys the past, present, and future lives of the mutually constitutive disciplinary fields of governmentality - a concept introduced by Foucault himself - and South Asian studies. It aims to chart the intersection of post-structuralism and postcolonialism that has seen the latter Foucault being used to ask new questions in and of South Asia, and the experiences of post-colonies used to tease and test the utility of European philosophy beyond Europe. But it also seeks to contribute to the rich body of work on South Asian governmentalities through a critical engagement with the lecture series delivered by Foucault at the Collège de France from 1971 until his death in 1984, which have now become available in English.

Courting the People
  • Public Interest Litigation in Post-Emergency India
  • Anuj Bhuwania
  • Published online:
    23 July 2017
    Print publication:
    09 November 2016
  • Based on empirical research, this book shows how public interest litigation (PIL) grants the appellate courts enormous flexibility in procedure, allowing them to manoeuvre themselves into positions of overweening authority. While PIL cases are usually politically analysed solely in terms of their effects, whether beneficial or disastrous, this book locates the political challenges that PIL poses in its very process, arguing that its fundamentally protean nature stems from its mimicry of ideas of popular justice. It examines PIL as part of a larger trend towards legal informalism in post-Emergency India. Casting a critical eye over these institutional reforms that aimed to adapt the colonial legal inheritance to 'Indian realities', this book looks at the challenges posed by self-consciously culturalist juridical innovations like PIL to ideas of fairness in adjudication, as well as democratic politics.

Development after Statism
  • Industrial Firms and the Political Economy of South Asia
  • Adnan Naseemullah
  • Published online:
    21 January 2017
    Print publication:
    15 December 2016
  • How can industrial production be managed without the guidance of the state? Adnan Naseemullah discusses industrial development in a new era of drastically constricted state capacity, from the perspective of the manufacturing firm. India's manufacturing economy has been growing after state promotion has receded. How, then, does Indian manufacturing develop in this context? Naseemullah argues that Indian firms must create production structures themselves, investing in networks of capital and labor without signals from above. Depending on manufacturers' backgrounds, these relationships are based either on formal rules or through personal ties, creating a patchwork of institutions that crosscut region and sector. As a result, many firms have been able to regain some certainty for investment, but at the cost of national coherence and the possibility of broader transformation. As a mirror case, this book also explores Pakistan's industrial trajectories, in which similar dynamics suggest the broader applicability of this framework.

Government as Practice
  • Democratic Left in a Transforming India
  • Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya
  • Published online:
    05 March 2016
    Print publication:
    08 January 2016
  • The democratic Left in India is in crisis. During the first decade of this century it slid from its highest parliamentary presence to virtual irrelevance. A key to its retrieval, this book argues, lies in its ability to imagine a new popular politics for reinventing its democratic credentials beyond electoral posturing. In this respect, much can be learnt from the Left's governmental practices as they have evolved since the late 1960s, crafting a unique blend of politics, policy, idealism, practicality, vision and delivery. By looking at the problematics of government from the days of deft land reforms to messy land acquisition, this book situates 'government as practice' as a prism for critical thinking on democratic politics in postcolonial India. Grounded in empirical and archival research, the book will be useful for those who are passionate as well as sceptical about the revival potentials of a new Left in India's fast-changing political economy.

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