scholarly journals Gender, Power, and Cricket Spectators in Calcutta, 1960s–1990s

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Souvik Naha
Keyword(s):  
Leisure Activities ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Gender Interaction ◽  
Gender Hierarchy ◽  
Urban Indian ◽  
Gender Power ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S

Abstract Historians of modern India have emphasized the reflexivity of men and women in the making of womanhood, paying attention to notions of gender difference emerging from both primordial, restrictive codes of behaviour and contrarian impulses towards what was popularly called progress. There have been relatively few attempts to trace gender interaction in outdoor leisure activities, public displays of femininity, and male regulatory anxieties in the post-colonial context. By studying the symbolism of women's presence in the Eden Gardens, the international cricket stadium in Calcutta, from the 1960s to the 1990s, this article reflects on the nature of power, authority, and gender hierarchy in urban Indian society. This study of questions of gender hierarchy, women's mannerisms, social identity, and informal resistance through a historical lens will enable us to understand the trajectory of women's outsider status in urban public spaces. Through a reading of the mediated parti pris impressions of female spectators, it will also map the transition in society's approach to sport from a structured homosocial community activity to a relatively unstructured field of shared experience.

scholarly journals The Formation of the Library System of India (19th - 20th centuries)

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-204
Author(s):  
Ekaterina A. Barysheva
Keyword(s):  
Information Science ◽  
Public Libraries ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Indian Culture ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Library System ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Intellectual Level ◽  
The 19Th Century

This article is devoted to the formation and development of system of public libraries in India and their place in the educational, social, cultural and informational space of the country. The formation of the library system in India occurred during the complex colonial and post-colonial periods of its history. It took place in the conditions of underdevelopment, the uneven social, political and cultural development of the regions, ethnolinguistic disunity, and mass illiteracy of the population, dominating in the society of caste, religious and gender prejudices. The article demonstrates that public libraries in India, beginning with their appearance in the first half of the 19th century, had a special mission. They were considered not only as repositories of books, but, first of all, as centers of education, aimed to spread the knowledge, fight with ignorance by introducing to the reading, to raise the cultural and intellectual level of Indian society, thereby contributing to its prosperity. The article describes the main stages and directions of state policy of India in the field of librarianship from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century, recounts the history of the founding of the National library, emphasized the role of Raja Rammohan Roy Library Foundation. In separate section there is considered the contribution to the library and information science of S.R. Ranganathan, the outstanding leader of Indian culture.

scholarly journals De-colonizing public spaces in Malaysia: dating in Kuala Lumpur

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 615-629
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Nawratek ◽  
Asma Mehan
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Global City ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Kuala Lumpur ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The City

This article discusses places and practices of young heterosexual Malaysian Muslims dating in non-private urban spaces. It is based on research conducted in Kuala Lumpur in two consecutive summers 2016 and 2017. Malaysian law (Khalwat law) does not allow for two unrelated people (where at least one of them is Muslim) of opposite sexes to be within ‘suspicious proximity’ of one another in public. This law significantly influences behaviors and activities in urban spaces in KL. In addition to the legal framework, the beliefs of Malaysian Muslims significantly influence the way they perceive space and how they behave in the city. The article discusses the empirical theme, beginning with the participants’ narratives of their engagement with the dominant sexual and gender order in non-private spaces of KL. Utilizing questionnaires, interviews and observations, this article draws upon a qualitative research project and questions the analytical usefulness of the notion of public space (as a Western construct) in the context of an Islamic, post-colonial, tropical, global city.

Caste–Gender Intersectionality and Atrocities in Haryana: Emerging Patterns and State Responses

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. C. Pal
Keyword(s):  
Public Institutions ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Sociocultural Context ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Civil Society Organisations ◽  
Gender Hierarchy ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Lower Castes ◽  
State Responses ◽  
Official Data

In the Indian society, the issue of gender and caste inequality has drawn considerable attention in the discourse of social exclusion. The complex relationship between these two culturally powerful identities in the context of violence and atrocities remains stubbornly in place. This article analyses the patterns and consequences of intersectional atrocities and the responses of state machinery in a specific sociocultural context, that is, in the state of Haryana. Despite showing faster economic development than other states, Haryana has been in the limelight for its traditions and customs conflicting with the freedom of lower castes (dalits) and women. The article draws evidence from the official data on crimes and information based on mainstream media reportage and documents of civil society organisations, to argue that a society, which culturally accepts caste and gender hierarchy and allows this culture to permeate in public institutions, accentuates the vulnerability of women from lower caste to structural, systematic and symbolic atrocities.

Ethnic and Gender Hierarchies in the Crucible of War

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 710-722
Author(s):  
Kaitlyn Webster ◽  
Priscilla Torres ◽  
Chong Chen ◽  
Kyle Beardsley
Keyword(s):  
Civil Liberty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Reinforcing Effect ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Gender Hierarchy ◽  
Gender Hierarchies ◽  
Intrastate War ◽  
Gender Power ◽  
And Gender

Abstract Recent scholarship shows war can catalyze reforms related to gender power imbalances, but what about reforms related to ethnic inequalities? While war can disrupt the political, social and economic institutions at the root of ethnic hierarchy—just as it can shake up the institutions at the root of gender hierarchy—war is also prone to have either a reinforcing effect or a pendulum effect. Our project uses data from the Varieties of Democracy project to examine specific manifestations of changes in gender and ethnic civil-liberty equality (1900–2015). Interstate war, but not intrastate war, tends to be followed by gains in ethnic civil-liberty equality, and intrastate war tends to be followed by long-term gains in gender civil-liberty equality. Wars with government losses are prone to lead to improvements in civil-liberty equality along both dimensions. In considering overlapping gender and ethnic hierarchies, we find that when wars open up space for gains in gender equality, they also facilitate gains in equality for excluded ethnic groups.

scholarly journals Ein feministischer Blick auf Wasser

1997 ◽  
Vol 27 (108) ◽  
pp. 369-389
Author(s):  
Vathsala Aithal
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Period ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Gender Justice ◽  
Development Projects ◽  
Structural Element ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The People ◽  
The Commons ◽  
And Gender ◽  
And Control

Water is a structural element of Indian society. Colonial interventions not only destroyed the ecosystems but also disappropriated the rights of the people to use and control the commons. With no changes in the post-colonial period women in their productive and reproductive mies are the most affected by the consequences of waterscarcity and drought. Many development projects not only failed to address the longterm strategic gender needs but also failed to meet even the practical need of providing water. Initiatives of women's groups however do combine their struggle for water with issues of equity and gender justice.

scholarly journals Free

M/C Journal ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Trebor Scholz ◽  
Rachel Cobcroft
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Creative Commons ◽  
Angela Davis ◽  
Use Of The Internet ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
And Gender

This issue of M/C Journal reclaims the language of “freedom”. The selected articles demonstrate that today freedom is frequently overruled in the name of a permanent state of emergency. Present-day politics shows countless instances in which information, knowledge and culture are not seen as an inalienable right but are rather oppressed and distorted. Freedom is the freedom to say “no”, to withdraw your collaboration, to refuse friendly cooperation! To be “free” means to be able to enact your identity without having to capitulate to the ruling forces that dictate which discourses are and are not permissible in the public sphere(s). Citizens worldwide are armchair passengers on the nightly TV news train; they dream of their lives as being “free”. After all, to be free is a guaranteed human right, enshrined by the United Nations. Are freedom, independence and autonomy merely illusions, or are sociable media succeeding in empowering citizens for a participatory democracy as Yochai Benkler argues? If information “wants to be free”, the battle between intellectual “property” and creativity must be resolved. Technology does not make freedom inevitable: the on-the-ground-realities of network and hardware access make what seems to be “open” and “free”, closed and expensive for most people on this planet. The feature article for this issue of M/C Journal is a statement on the state of free speech in a free country: in “Depiction of Muslims in Selected Australian Media: Free Speech or Taking Sides”, Dr Nahid Kabir examines the publication of 12 cartoons depicting images of the Prophet Mohammad in 2005. In exploring the response of two Australian newspapers to the Danish controversy, the article considers whether the debate in the name of “free speech” has ended in a “form of attack” on Australian Muslims. In “Freedom, Hate, Fronts”, Patrick Lynn Rivers reflects on the use of the Internet by the predominantly Afrikaner “Vryheidsfront Plus” political party to construct whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa. The creation of a politics centred on racial “cyborgs” points to the facilitation of freedom of an “oppressed minority”, continuing the Afrikaners’ historical struggle for self-determination and independence. Problematising this approach, Rivers concludes that, like freedom, whiteness after apartheid is far from defined. Authors Amita Nijhawan and Sukhmani Khorana both address Deepa Mehta’s highly-acclaimed film trilogy Fire, Earth, and Water. As a female Hindu director, Mehta engages controversial issues for Indian society: the life of widows who are forced into prostitution, for example. As observed, the trilogy has been subject to critiques of too much freedom from inside the country, counterbalanced by those outside the country condemning the Indian body-politic for its lack of freedom. In exploring post-colonial discourses in India’s construction of nation and gender, Nijhawan and Khorana present complementary accounts of the director’s struggle to resist government censorship. Hegemonic power is played out in the definition of freedom in relation to contested questions of self-representation in Indian society. Freedom of use and the notion of “property talk” are discussed by Australian lawyer and academic Steve Collins, commenting on the revival of values from Blackstonian copyright, in which ownership is seen to preclude the rights of others. Collins observes that talk of “property” risks making transformative works an elitist form of creativity, available only to those with the financial resources necessary to meet the demands for license fees. The notion of “property” thus challenges the freedom to create and to transform. Collins notes that this is no longer a philosophical question, but a practical one, as he entreats courts to move beyond the propertarian paradigm. A further angle on the issue of freedom is put forward by Nadine Henley in “Free to be Obese?” Here, Henley tackles the boundaries of state governance in controlling the bodies of its citizens: Is it ethical for a government to enforce the health of its citizens, or should obesity, for example, be a rightful choice? Two emotive Freedom Poems by Kathryn Waddell Takara conclude this issue. The editors have selected “Angela Davis” and “Mumia Abu Jamal: Knight for Justice” from the larger body of Takara’s work, Root Tapping, as representing the desire to celebrate freedom. The expectation of Angela Davis’ arrival and the transcendent revenge for the imprisonment of political activist Mumia Abu Jamal speak of the power of radical opposition in the face of oppression. The cover image of this issue, “Free” by John Fairley (“Bostich”), has been derived from the photo-sharing Flickr.com, which supports the Creative Commons licensing scheme. Acknowledgments: The editors thank all contributors and reviewers involved in this issue for their continuing dialogue and critical reflection on the notion of “freedom”. We wish to kindly acknowledge the adept assistance of copy editors Laura Marshall and Donna Paichl, and the continuing guidance of M/C General Editor Dr Axel Bruns. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Scholz, Trebor, and Rachel Cobcroft. "Free." M/C Journal 9.4 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0609/0-editorial.php>. APA Style Scholz, T., and R. Cobcroft. (Sep. 2006) "Free," M/C Journal, 9(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0609/0-editorial.php>.

Protestants and American Conservatism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillis J. Harp
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Moral Agent ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
American Conservatism ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Federal Authority ◽  
The Family ◽  
Conservative Beliefs ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S

Protestant beliefs have made several significant contributions to conservatism, both in the more abstract realm of ideas and in the arena of political positions or practical policies. First, they have sacralized the established social order, valued and defended customary hierarchies; they have discouraged revolt or rebellion; they have prompted Protestants to view the state as an active moral agent of divine origin; and they have stressed the importance of community life and mediating institutions such as the family and the church and occasionally provided a modest check on an individualistic and competitive impulse. Second, certain shared tenets facilitated this conjunction of Protestantism and conservatism, most often when substantial change loomed. For example, common concerns of the two dovetailed when revivals challenged the religious status quo during the colonial Great Awakening, when secession and rebellion threatened federal authority during the Civil War, when a new type of conservatism emerged, and dismissed the older sort as paternalistic, when the Great Depression opened the door to a more intrusive state, when atheist communism challenged American individualism, and, finally, when the cultural changes of the 1960s undermined traditional notions of the family and gender roles. Third, certain Christian ideas and assumptions have, at their best, served to heighten or ennoble conservative discourse, sometimes raising it above merely partisan or pragmatic concerns. Protestantism added a moral and religious weight to conservative beliefs and helped soften the harshness of an acquisitive, sometimes cutthroat, economic order.

Datta Bhagat’s Routes and Escape Routes and Vijay Tendulkar’s Kanyadaan: Critiquing the Dalit

2021 ◽  
pp. 2455328X2199573
Author(s):  
Joydeep Bhattacharyya
Keyword(s):  
Indian Society ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Large Segment ◽  
Art And Literature

This article seeks to understand Indian theatre’s take on Dalit politics of our time through a critical reading of two post-independence plays—Datta Bhagat’s Routes and Escape Routes and Vijay Tendulkar’s Kanyadaan. Politically, ‘Dalit’ becomes important only after 1947 in post-independence and post-colonial India or more specifically from the 1970s. In the post-Ambedkar phase of Dalit re/configuration, they begin to self-assert through politics, art, and literature, most effectively and convincingly, only with the rise of Dalit Panthers and in the aftermath of the implementation of Mandal Commission’s recommendation for Other Backward Classes (OBC) reservation. The article tries to examine the fresh critique of the Dalit vis-à-vis the upper caste-centric society, undertaken in this crucial context of reconfiguration and from beyond any traditional parameter of understanding, and map, through the plays, the plurality hidden within the perceived monolith of Dalit consciousness. Consequently, Dalit experiences against the backdrop of their struggle are laid bare, and unfamiliar realities come out to upset our comfortable knowledge about this large segment of Indian society.

«Get in Your Theatres; the Street is Not Yours»: The Struggle for the Character of Public Space in Tunisia

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-69
Author(s):  
Heather Harrington
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
And Gender

Abstract How people move and appear in public spaces is a reflection of the cultural, religious and socio-political forces in a society. This article, built on an earlier work titled ’Site-Specific Dance: Women in the Middle East’ (2016), addresses the ways in which dance in a public space can support the principles of freedom of expression and gender equality in Tunisia. I explore the character of public space before, during, and after the Arab Spring uprisings. Adopting an ethnographic and phenomenological approach, I focus on the efforts of two Tunisian dancers – Bahri Ben Yahmed (a dancer, choreographer and filmmaker based in Tunis, who has trained in ballet, modern dance and hip hop) and Ahmed Guerfel (a dancer based in Gabès, who has trained in hip hop) – to examine movement in a public space to address political issues facing the society. An analysis of data obtained from Yahmed and Guerfel, including structured interviews, videos, photos, articles and e-mail correspondence, supports the argument that dance performed in public spaces is more effective in shaping the politics of the society than dance performed on the proscenium stage. Definitions and properties of everyday choreography, site and the proscenium stage are analysed, along with examples of site-specific political protest choreography in Egypt, Turkey and Tunisia. I engage with the theories of social scientist Erving Goffman, which propose that a public space can serve as a stage, where people both embody politics and can embody a protest against those politics.

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