Indica et Buddhica - Tabulae :: Tables of Contents for Indology and Buddhology

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Pluralising the sociology of India

Focusing on the gaps in the practice, methodologies, pedagogies, and texts related to the ‘Sociology of India’, this article locates key problems in the theoretical and methodological orientation of the discipline, analyses the tensions within and between the varied institutions responsible for the production of sociological knowledge, and notes the absence of linkages between the discipline and the larger society and nation. The article provides three sug-gestions to pluralise the discipline: facilitating wider and more diverse themes and issues in research including encouraging studies of the ‘vicinity’; developing and deploying multiple methodologies to study and represent a range of issues; and integrating Indian language writings into the pedagogical, textual, and theoretical apparatus of the discipline.

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Book Review

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China in Bollywood

This article engages sociologically with three different academic discourses. The first pertains to the field of international relations, referring specifically to an enduring aspect of India-China bilateral relations over the last half-century or more that is known in shorthand as the ‘trust deficit’. The second has reference to the field of cinema studies, in particular to the generic characteristics of the Hollywood/Bollywood ‘war film’. The third reflects on issues of territoriality in the modern world of nation-states: on national borders and the ‘borderlanders’ of the contact zones, and on sacred and secular carto-graphies. In attempting to understand the nature and mode of production and reproduction of the Indian public’s mistrust of China, the article takes up Chetan Anand’s iconic ‘war film’, Haqeeqat, released in 1964 very shortly after the disastrous 1962 India-China border war which formed its subject matter. Unlike many films of the last two decades on India-Pakistan and Hindu-Muslim relations, briefly referred to by way of comparison and con-trast, Haqeeqat’s stereotypes of Indians, Chinese, and borderlanders have yet to be over-written or complicated by countervailing images. They remain effectively frozen in time, leaving the dominant public perception of China as it was in the early 1960s––an image of both menace and duplicity.

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Manju Devi's martyrdom: Marxist-Leninist politics and the rural poor in Bihar

The All India Agricultural Labourers Association (AIALA) was formed in 2003 by the Communist Party of India-Marxist Leninist (Liberation) (CPI-ML Liberation), formerly an ‘underground’ Naxalite party, which adopted legal and democratic means in the early 1990’s. Focusing on its main stronghold in the countryside of Bihar, this article analyses the way the economic struggles, social aspirations and aesthetic values of the rural proletariat are being articulated with the party’s political goal of producing a revolutionary class at the subjective level. These goals are analysed in the context of the party’s evolution towards a mass movement and through a critique of the legitimist and populist approaches towards popular culture. The party’s recent emphasis on symbolic politics indicates a greater inclination towards the popular than implied by the Leninist model of intellectual authority, thus highlighting the cultural negotiations that underlie the making of class subjectivity.

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Book Review

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Fever epidemics and fever clinics: Institutionalising disease and cure in contemporary Kerala

During the mid-1990s, the state of Kerala witnessed a wave of ‘fever epidemics’, which the government tackled by establishing fever clinics. Based on an ethnography of these clinics, this article examines how, from being a symptom of the body’s defensive response, fever has itself become institutionalised as a disease. It argues that the institutionalisation of fever as a disease has occurred through two sets of practices: first, discursively at the societal level by interactions among health professionals, the media, organisations repre-senting various systems of medicine, and ordinary people; and second, curatively at the clinic while rendering fever care, including diagnosis and treatment. The article shows that, despite the discursive prevalence of a dominant system of allopathic medicine, the practices at the fever clinic are not consistently based on an allopathic understanding of physiology and pathology but rely on skilled trial-and-error which incorporates plural medical traditions. The article critically evaluates the effects of institutionalisation in terms of narrowing how fever is understood and how it may be treated.

view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology current issue]