Sound Biting Conspiracy: From India with “Love Jihad”

Since 2013, India has seen a remarkable growth of a conspiracy theory known as “love jihad”, which holds that Muslim men conspire to lure Hindu women for marriage to alter India’s religious demography as part of a political takeover strategy. While earlier scholarship on “love jihad” emphasizes the Hindu nationalist propagation of this conspiracy theory, this article pays equal attention to its appeal among conservative Hindus. Making its point of departure in the generative effects of speech, it argues that the “love jihad” neologism performs two logical operations simultaneously. Firstly, it fuses the long-standing Hindu anxiety about daughters marrying against their parents’ will, with the equally long-standing anxiety about unfavorable religious demographic trends. Secondly, it attributes a sinister political takeover intent to every Muslim man who casts his eyes on a young Hindu woman. To bring out these points, this article pays equal empirical attention to marriage and kinship practices as to the genealogy of, and forerunners to, the “love jihad” neologism, and develops the concept of “sound biting” to bring out its meaning-making effect.

Snapshots of Indian Otherness in Aparna Sen’s Cinema

Aparna Sen turned to film directing in 1980 after a highly successful career as an actor. Her debut film, 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981) highlights the loneliness of an elderly Anglo-Indian woman. One of her best-known films outside India is Mr & Mrs Iyer (2002), in which an upper caste Hindu woman saves the life of a Muslim stranger in an act of personal commitment with the Other. In 15 Park Avenue (2005), a film that focusses on schizophrenia, Sen shows how the female members of a family struggle to cope with mental illness. In this article I discuss how Sen explores different ways of being Indian in these three films and how she draws attention to values such as personal commitment and tenacity in the face of disability, ageing and communalism

Degos disease: a case report and review of the literature

Background Degos disease is a very rare syndrome with multisystem vasculopathy of unknown cause. It can affect the skin, gastrointestinal tract, and central nervous system. However, other organs such as the kidney, lungs, pleura, and liver can also be involved. Case presentation A 35-year-old Hindu woman presented to our dermatology outpatient department with complaints of depigmented painful lesions. A skin punch biopsy taken from the porcelain white atrophic papules which revealed features of Degos disease. Conclusion The diagnosis of Degos disease is usually based on the presence of the pathognomonic skin lesions and a tissue biopsy demonstrating a wedge-shaped area of necrosis with thrombotic occlusion of the small arterioles. No specific treatment is currently available for this disease.

Premchand’s shifting portrayals of womanhood in colonial North India: Between conformity and resistance

This article examines the nuanced and open-ended representations of women in the fictional works of Premchand, one of the most versatile and popular Urdu-Hindi writers of the 1920s and 1930s. By looking into a wide range of his writings, it argues that Premchand’s literary engagement with the women’s question cannot be summarily understood through such binaries as ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal/radical’. While the virtuous and compliant woman is valorised as an ideal within the domestic sphere in certain stories, Premchand’s narratives in the nationalist mode foreground an alternative set of ideals for the urban, educated and middle-class Hindu woman. Far from being formulaic, Premchand’s portrayals of womanhood seem to be shifting, tentative and thematically contingent.

Vernacular Practice, Gendered Tensions, and Interpretive Ambivalence in Hindu Death, Deification, and Domestication Narratives†

This article focuses on a Tamil Hindu woman named Aaru, who embodied the Goddess in possession performances from age thirteen, resisted marriage through her twenties, and committed suicide at twenty--nine. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Aaru and her family conducted between 2006 and 2019, it analyses narratives concerning her untimely death, subsequent deification, and eventual domestication as a pūvāṭaikkāri. It highlights the hermeneutical challenges associated with three intersecting spheres: the dominant categories that shape the scholarly understanding of Hinduism; vernacular Hinduism as revealed in Aaru’s complex story; and the ethnographic research and writing process. I resist an arbitrary resolution of the gaps and seeming inconsistencies that abound in these accounts, arguing instead that we can enlarge and nuance our understandings of matters as diverse as ritual relationships with the dead, the nature of Tamil family deities, and the gendered tensions of the contemporary moment if we hold space for multiple interpretive possibilities. Indeed, Aaru’s case offers us significant resources for a fuller, more inclusive appreciation of the textures of vernacular Hinduism – Hinduism as it is experienced, lived, and practiced in particular places and contexts – and compels us to consider the limitations of prevailing interpretive paradigms and the fragmental and shifting nature of ethnographic knowledge.

Urdu-11 The Main Features of Woman in Hindustani Society

The women civilization in hindustani culture is very important role. There are two main civilization, Mulims and hindus in Hindustan. The main duty of Hindustani woman to serve and obey their husband. However some values are different between the Muslim and Hindu woman in this society. The main features are dresses, parda, marriages, customs, education, family terms and their self respect.