scholarly journals The Devadasis, Dance Community of South India: A Legal and Social Outlook

Author(s):  
Shreya Shankar ◽  
Pranav Ganesan

Abstract The devadasi community of south India are originators of a popular dance form called bharatanatyam. This paper explores several dimensions of this community including legal and social angles. A misjudged and misunderstood community, the modern-day devadasi’s circumstances can be described as fraught with social disabilities ranging from a lack of economic opportunities and the resultant poverty to an increased propensity for delinquency. The paper presents an unbiased view of the history of the devadasi system that attempts to use a varied range of sources so as to paint a clear narrative. The paper proposes a mechanism to move forward through truth commissions as a form of restorative justice that is likely to help both policymakers as well as artists.

2021 ◽  
Vol 149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leeberk Raja Inbaraj ◽  
Sindhulina Chandrasingh ◽  
Nalini Arun Kumar ◽  
Jothi Suchitra ◽  
Abi Manesh

Abstract Varicella infection during pregnancy has serious and/or difficult implications and in some cases lethal outcome. Though epidemiological studies in developing countries reveal that a significant proportion of patients may remain susceptible during pregnancy, such an estimate of susceptible women is not known in India. We designed this study to study the prevalence and factors associated with susceptibility to varicella among rural and urban pregnant women in South India. We prospectively recruited 430 pregnant women and analysed their serum varicella IgG antibodies as surrogates for protection. We estimated seroprevalence, the validity of self-reported history of chickenpox and factors associated with varicella susceptibility. We found 23 (95% CI 19.1–27.3) of women were susceptible. Nearly a quarter (22.2%) of the susceptible women had a history of exposure to chickenpox anytime in the past or during the current pregnancy. Self-reported history of varicella had a positive predictive value of 82.4%. Negative history of chickenpox (adjusted prevalence ratio (PR) 1.85, 95% CI 1.15–3.0) and receiving antenatal care from a rural secondary hospital (adjusted PR 4.08, 95% CI 2.1–7.65) were significantly associated with susceptibility. We conclude that high varicella susceptibility rates during pregnancy were noted and self-reported history of varicella may not be a reliable surrogate for protection.


2000 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 250-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
S Newmann ◽  
P Sarin ◽  
N Kumarasamy ◽  
E Amalraj ◽  
M Rogers ◽  
...  

A retrospective study was conducted on 134 HIV-infected females evaluated at an HIV/AIDS centre in south India to characterize their socio-demographics, HIV risk factors and initial clinical presentations. The mean age was 29 years; 81% were housewives; 95% were currently or previously married; 89% reported heterosexual sex as their only HIV risk factor; and 88% reported a history of monogamy. The majority were of reproductive age, thus the potential for vertical transmission of HIV and devastating impacts on families is alarming. Nearly half of these women initially presented asymptomatically implying that partner recruitment can enable early HIV detection. Single partner heterosexual sex with their husband was the only HIV risk factor for the majority of women. HIV prevention and intervention strategies need to focus on married, monogamous Indian women whose self-perception of HIV risk may be low, but whose risk is inextricably linked to the behaviour of their husbands.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 193-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Melvin-Koushki

Abstract This essay reviews a major new study of European Renaissance Arabist-humanist philology as it was actually practiced, humanist neoclassicizing anti-Arabism notwithstanding. While definitive and philologically magisterial, that study nevertheless falls prey structurally and conceptually to the very eurocentrism whose ideological-textual genesis it chronicles. Situating it within the comparative global early modern philologies framework that has now been proposed in the volume World Philology and the present journal is a necessary remedy—but only a partial one; for that framework too still obscures the multiplicity of specifically genetically Western early modernities, thus hobbling comparative history of philology. I therefore propose a new framework appropriate to the study of Greco-Arabo-Persian and Greco-Arabo-Latin as the two parallel and equally powerful philosophical-philological trajectories that together defined early modern Western—i.e., Hellenic-Abrahamic, Islamo-Judeo-Christian, west of South India—intellectual history: taḥqīq vs. taqlīd, progressivism vs. declinism. But a broadened and more balanced analytical framework alone cannot save philology, much less Western civilization, from the throes of its current existential crisis: for we philologists of the Euro-American academy are fevered too by the cosmological ill that is reflexive scientistic materialism. As antidote, I prescribe a progressivist, postmodern return to early modern Western deconstructive-reconstructive cosmic philology as prerequisite for the discipline’s survival, and perhaps even triumph, in the teeth of totalitarian colonialist-capitalist modernity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (30) ◽  
pp. 2751-2756
Author(s):  
Jeenu Babu ◽  
Reeba George Pulinilkunnathil ◽  
Bindu R. Kumar

BACKGROUND Endometrial cancer (EC) is also the second most common gynaecologic malignancy in developing countries, with an incidence of 5.9 per 100,000 women. Due to the multiple modifiable factors, a better understanding of the prognostic indicators can lead to early detection and treatment. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the frequency and the distribution of various risk factors, epidemiological factors, and histological patterns of patients diagnosed with endometrial carcinoma in a tertiary teaching hospital in south India and compare them with similar studies. The compiled findings of 60 consecutive cases that presented to our tertiary care teaching hospital in Kerala, south India, over oneand-a-half-year period were studied. METHODS This study was essentially an ex post facto retrospective study done on 60 patients for one and half years. Retrospective data collection and compilation were done with previously prepared structured questionnaires in patients with histologically proven endometrial carcinoma. All cases were subjected to hysterectomy with post-surgical histopathology correlation. A study of the risk factors, general epidemiological characteristics, endometrial biopsy findings, and post-surgical histopathology was done. RESULTS The mean age at presentation was 59.83 years. The mean age of menarche was 13.72 years, and menopause was 49.42 years. The majority of patients were married, multiparous, and presented with bleeding per vaginum (77 %). 61.7 % of the patients had a history of hypertension, 31.7 % had a history of hypothyroidism, and 43.3 % had a history of diabetes mellitus in the study population. The most common histopathological type by endometrial biopsy and histopathological correlation was endometrioid adenocarcinoma (88.3 %). CONCLUSIONS Postmenopausal age group, with early menarche and late menopause, high body mass index (BMI), thickened endometrium on ultrasound, and atrophic uterus were some of the features associated with endometrial carcinoma. The most common histological subtype was found to be endometrioid carcinoma KEYWORDS Endometrial Carcinoma, Risk Factors, Prognostic Indicators


Author(s):  
Claire Whitlinger

This chapter explores the relationship between the 2004 commemoration in Philadelphia, Mississippi and the Mississippi Truth Project, a state-wide project initially modelled after South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. After reviewing the history of transitional justice efforts in the United States and the social scientific literature on how civil society-based truth commissions emerge, the chapter demonstrates how the 2004 commemoration and subsequent trial of Edgar Ray Killen precipitated the formation of a state-wide truth commission when previous efforts had failed. In short, this research finds that the commemoration mobilized mnemonic activists; concentrated local, state, and global resources; broadened political opportunity; and shifted the political culture of the state. Despite these developments—and years of project planning—the Mississippi Truth Project changed course in 2009, abandoning a South African-style truth commission in favour of grassroots memory projects and oral history collection. The chapter thus sheds lights on the possibilities and perils of pursuing non-state truth commissions.


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