Middle-class Women and Domestic Work in India and the United States: Caste, Race and Patriarchy

This study compares middle-class women’s experience of domestic work in India and the United States(US), highlighting similarities in how domestic work is organised in its paid and unpaid forms across both sites. The focus on middle-class women’s experience as unpaid workers and employers of domestic workers provides an insight into how the social and economic values of domestic work are determined. Despite social and political differences, the political economies of India and the US and interlocking systems of oppression including patriarchy, neoliberalism, caste and race have produced similarities in the undervaluation of domestic work at both sites.

Re-reading Do Haath as an Intersectional Text: Ismat Chughtai and Dalits

Even though scholars and feminists have accused intersectional theory for being superficial, inadequate, context bereft and fashionably more populist than academic, its applicability in addressing multi-layered forms of discrimination cannot be ignored. It is against this background that the article, through a deconstructive reading of an Urdu short story, Do Haath, highlights the challenges of the protagonist, the Dalit household, comprised primarily of women. Besides discussing the intersectional subjects of the story, this article questions the deliberate omissions of the multiply disadvantageous people such as the Dalit-Muslim women, also known as the Pasmanda women from feminist, Dalit and subaltern discourses. Furthermore, this article foregrounds intersectionality framework to understand the multiplicative nature of oppression and discrimination that Pasmanda women are subjected to, and how by excluding them from their respective agenda, feminist and Dalit activists have contributed towards their perpetual marginality. Finally, the article suggests that intersectionality framework should be used to understand moments of celebratory resilience in the lives of intersectional subjects.

Ethnicity, Self-Knowledge and Literary Sensitivity: A Sociological Reading of V. S. Naipaul’s First Four Novels

Taking a cue from G. S. Ghurye’s Shakespeare on Conscience and Justice (1965) this lecture in his memory explores the role of ethnicity in shaping the self-knowledge and literary sensitivity of V. S. Naipaul. Naipaul’s life traverses three distinct cultures: the Hindu culture brought by his ancestors who came as indentured migrants to Trinidad, the Creole culture of colonial Trinidad and the emerging modern culture of western civilisation. Much of Naipaul’s self-knowledge involved his engagement with these three cultures and his experience of the interplay between colonialism and ethnicity. In his first four novels— Miguel Street, The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira and A House for Mr Biswas—Naipaul describes the life and times of the descendants of Indian immigrants in colonial Trinidad and the making of a girmitiya diaspora there. The lecture delineates the rare sociological insights into this diaspora provided by these novels.

A History of Symbolic Violence: A Spatial Temporal Exploration of the Cultural Capital Legacy of Bengali Pedagogy

This study explores historic class-based obstacles in the dispensation of secular pedagogy in the Bengal region with the objective of presenting a better understating of the present pedagogical positioning of the British Bangladeshi diaspora of Tower Hamlets. This study charts the visitation of symbolic violence in the historical development of pedagogy under colonial rule and continues into the East Pakistan period. Through the application of Pierre Bourdieu’s primary thinking tools the discussion asserts Muslim Bengalis were educationally marginalised by both colonialists and local elites in the realisation of human capital consumption.

The Limits of Possibilities of Religious Politics: The Case of the Tehreek-i-Labbaik in Pakistani Punjab

Historically, despite the tremendous influence exerted by Islam on public life, religious parties and organisations have historically failed to do well at the ballot box, receiving an average of only 6% of votes cast in elections since the 1980s. Focusing on the case of the Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), a new Barelvi political party and social movement that has campaigned on the emotive issue of blasphemy since being formed in 2015, this article argues that the clientelistic, patronage-based nature of democratic politics in Punjab, coupled with factionalism and competition within the religious right, continues to play a role in limiting the electoral prospects of religious parties. Nonetheless, as was seen in the General Elections of 2018 in which the TLP outperformed expectations, there are particular circumstances in which the religious parties are able to make electoral breakthroughs. While the TLP was able to make effective use of populist rhetoric to garner some genuine support for itself, this article argues that the organisations sustained campaign of protests over the issue of blasphemy fed into broader efforts by the military establishment and opposition political parties to destabilise and weaken the government of the PML-N prior to the 2018 elections.

Of Passport and Politics: Faith and Politics Among the ‘Neo-Salafis’ of South India

There is a major assumption regarding the politics of the neo-Salafis in South India (especially in Kerala) widely shared in the political, media and academic circles; their everyday life and religiosity do not provide a conscious address to things such as state and politics and they are confined to the social and religious sphere rather than the political one . The recurring question in this study is, therefore, how to make sense of the political expressions of a group, which apparently shows no direct inclination towards the ‘mainstream’ politics. This study also tries to address the ambiguity about the role of Salafi ideology in everyday conduct of politics among the neo-Salafis. What is the position of Salafism in the scheme of political thinking and how it relates to the political imagination of neo-Salafis, are examined taking cues from the experience of some of the neo- Salafist groups, which keep a strong open disbelief in the secular polity.

Citizenship as Politics and Performance of Religious Identity: Hindu Refugees from Sindh

Drawing from the ethnographic insights and experiences of Pakistani Hindu refugees in Rajasthan, India, this article examines their agency, politics and dilemmas. It illustrates how they actively participate in the process of their ‘becoming citizens’ by making use of the majoritarian political space and nationalist ‘Hindu India’ imagery. Their expressions of a cohesive Hindu identity, however, remain illusionary and incomplete as they do not correspond with the lived realities of fractures, antagonisms and heterogeneities within various Hindu communities. These differentiations also lay open the hierarchies within Hindu refugees and enable an analysis of citizenship as a continued, contested and differentiated process based on caste and class locations of the refugees. For the lower-caste/-class refugees, their citizenship assertions go beyond the point of acquiring legal citizenship and merges with the struggles of native Dalits. Through these variegated expressions and claims of citizenship of Hindu refugees, this article foregrounds the idea of citizenship as performative and processual, and not necessarily contingent on legal status or state’s sovereignty logic of citizen/non-citizen binary.

Buddhist Majoritarianism and Ethnocracy in Sri Lanka

Majoritarianism rarely, if ever, accompanies good governance, and Sri Lanka is a case in point. Unwilling to build on a history of pluralism, the island’s post-independence elites manipulated ethnoreligious fissures for political gain. Besides leading to a civil war that lasted nearly three decades, it has also unleashed violence on Muslims and Christians even as the island has consolidated its status as a Sinhalese Buddhist ethnocracy. The ensuing political Buddhism has compromised Buddhism and democracy and placed the country on a militarised and authoritarian trajectory.

Educating ‘Temple Cultures’ Heterogeneous Worship and Hindutva Politics in Kerala

Contrary to the popular imagination of Kerala as a secular, rational left bastion, the state is witnessing Sangh Parivar’s active presence in the domain of temples and everyday culture. This study attempts to examine the anxiety of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its sympathisers about the ‘true’ knowledge on temple culture, and their efforts to teach everyday Brahmanical rituals and other forms of worship such as srividya and kuladevathas. I argue that Sangh Parivar is interested in heterogeneous worship practices in Kerala as part of their ideological expansion. Their obsession for the didactics of temple culture is a response to the modern secularisation process and ambition to educate the Other Backward Classes and Dalits in Brahmanical knowledge, for they are not traditionally inclined to the Brahmanical temples. Finally, the study aims to document the ethnographic details of Sangh Parivar activities in the world of worship and temple culture.