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CIS - Recent Issues (Sage)
CIS - Recent Issues (Sage)Pluralising the sociology of IndiaFocusing 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. view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Book Reviewview article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] China in BollywoodThis 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. view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Book Reviewview article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Book Reviewview article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Paths to knowledge are ways to learningview article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Sociology in India: Trajectories and challengesview article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Book Reviewview article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Book Reviewview article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Book Reviewview article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Manju Devi's martyrdom: Marxist-Leninist politics and the rural poor in BiharThe 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. view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Book Reviewview article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Fever epidemics and fever clinics: Institutionalising disease and cure in contemporary KeralaDuring 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 recent issues] Book Reviewview article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Book reviewview article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Book Reviewsview article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Book Reviewview article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Vishvajit Pandya, In the Forest: Visual and Material Worlds of Andamanese History (1858-2006). Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 2009. ix + 427 pp. Figures, plates, notes, glossary, bibliography, index.view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Ramaswami Harindranath, Audience-Citizens: The Media, Public Know-ledge and Interpretive Practice. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2009. vii + 272 pp. Tables, notes, bibliography, index. Rs.495 (hardback).view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Pramod K. Nayar, Seeing Stars: Spectacle, Society and Celebrity Culture. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2009. xiv + 195 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. Rs.295 (paperback).view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Thanh-Dam Truong, Saskia Wieringa and Amrita Chhachhi (eds), En-gendering Human Security: Feminist Perspectives. New Delhi: Woman Unlimited, 2006. xxx + 332 pp. Tables, maps, notes, references. Rs.450 (hardback).view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Sharmila Sreekumar, Scripting Lives: Narratives of 'Dominant Women' in Kerala. New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2009. xiii + 312 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. Rs.695 (hardback).view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Rochona Majumdar, Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009. xii + 343 pp. Figures, plates, notes, appendix, glossary, bibliography, index. Rs.750 (hardback).view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Kancha Ilaiah, Post-Hindu India: A Discourse on Dalit-Bahujan, Socio-Spiritual and Scientific Revolution. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2009. xvi + 302 pp. Glossary. Rs.295 (paperback).view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Jan Breman: Social anthropologist par excellenceview article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] B.S. Baviskar and George Mathew (eds), Inclusion and Exclusion in Local Governance: Field Studies from Rural India. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2009. xiv + 750 pp. Tables, notes, references, index. Rs.750 (hardback).view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Mahuya Bandyopadhyay, Everyday Life in a Prison: Confinement, Surveillance, Resistance. New Delhi: Orient Black Swan, 2010. xvii + 332 pp. Notes, glossary, index. Rs.845 (hardback).view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Mahar-Dalit-Buddhist: The history and politics of naming in MaharashtraBy examining practices of naming, especially the recent adoption of a ‘Buddhist’ identity by middle-class Dalits in contemporary Maharashtra, this article analyses the multiple, shifting, and contested meanings of being Dalit. Examining the politics of this plurality shows the varied concerns at work in applying and contesting different names, especially the social and psychological challenges inherent in such acts of self-identification. By in-vestigating the ambiguities and ambivalences of being Dalit and Buddhist, the article demonstrates that the strategies of naming struggle against the burdens of a stigmatised past as well as the challenge of exclusion and inclusion vis-à-vis different Dalit castes. view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Adjusting distances: Menstrual pollution among Tamil BrahminsThis article explores the continued relevance of menstrual pollution among the Vattima, a Tamil Brahmin sub-caste. Even as they are part of the Tamil Brahmin diaspora, the Vattima Brahmins, a small, close-knit community, are in active contact with ancestral villages in the Kaveri delta region. Based on data gathered from Vattima in India and in USA, this article looks at the discourse surrounding menstruation and seclusion practices across generations. It highlights the ways in which changes in Vattima marriage practices, women’s access to education as well as migration to, and employment in, urban areas, have contributed to significant changes in attitudes to menstrual pollution. Observing menstrual pollution, however, is seen as crucial in sustaining notions of Brahmin-hood within their homes and among other Brahmins. This is made possible by constantly rede-fining the space and time that should be kept pollution-free. view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Vinay Lal (ed.), Political Hinduism: The Religious Imagination in Public Spheres. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009. vii + 287 pp. Plates, notes, references, index. Rs.650 (hardback).view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] 'Cleanliness is next to godliness': Religious change, hygiene and the renewal of Heraka villages in AssamThis article investigates the link between religious change and perceptions of and attitudes towards ‘hygiene’ and ‘order’ amongst adherents of Heraka, a religious reform movement among the Zeme Naga of Assam. It examines the problematic role of sacrifice, its relation-ship to the economy, and the consequent theological shift towards a monotheistic god, Tingwang, by focusing on the ritual of a Heraka village renewal. Not only does this ritual validate the abandonment of sacrifice, but also greatly diminishes disease-creating conditions—with blood equalling dirt—that traditional sacrifices had allegedly involved. Thus, while it can be said that ‘secular’ factors such as economic and health benefits explain the ‘conversion’ to Heraka, the article argues that theological beliefs, in particular Christian notions of ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’, also had an impact on the Heraka. view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Rethinking 'tribe' identities: The politics of recognition among the Zo in north-east IndiaThe encounter between the state and disparate tribal groups in India’s north-east or elsewhere not only affirms the state’s monopoly of material and symbolic power but also opens up a complex and shifting discursive space. This article examines how the state’s practice of recognising ‘tribes’ legitimises fixed and legible ‘locational dialectal identities’ among the ‘Zo’ in India’s north-east and successfully transforms them into receivers of the state’s largesse. At the same time, these practices also reveal the unsettled nature and fuzziness of ‘tribe’ identities as clans, dialects, and languages overlap and cross-cut each other. Although enlisting tribes among the Zo fits the state’s ‘classificatory’ and ‘serial-isation’ grid, it also highlights the ‘narcissism of minor differences’ among them. While such enlisting helps expedite the integration of ‘tribes’ into the Indian state–nation building projects, it also unleashes contentious politics that prevent the emergence of larger frameworks of unity and solidarity across ‘tribes’. Against this backdrop, the article ex-amines ongoing attempts among the Zo to redefine and rethink ‘tribe’ identities to tran-scend their ‘locational dialectal identities’. view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Verne A. Dusenbery, Sikhs at Large: Religion, Culture, and Politics in Global Perspective. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008. x + 337 pp. Notes, references, appendix, index. Rs.650 (hardback).view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] A letter to the editorview article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Rama Melkote and K. Sajaya (eds), Streevada Rajakeeyalu: Varthamana Charchalu (Feminist Politics: Contemporary Discussions). Hyderabad: Anveshi, 2008. 367 pp. (paperback).view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] S.V. Srinivas, Megastar: Chiranjeevi and Telugu Cinema after N.T. Rama Rao. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009. xxxi + 293 pp. Figures, plates, notes, references, index. Rs 695 (hardback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Amita Baviskar (ed.), Waterscapes: The Cultural Politics of a Natural Resources (Nature, Culture, Conservation). Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007. xi + 374 pp. Figures, notes, references. Rs 695 (hardback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Shubh Mathur, The Everyday Life of Hindu Nationalism: An Ethnographic Account. Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective, 2008. xv + 222 pp. Tables, plates, maps, notes, appendices, bibliography. Rs 275 (paperback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Manpreet K. Janeja, Transactions in Taste: The Collaborative Lives of Everyday Bengali Food. New Delhi: Routledge, 2010. xx + 185 pp. Plates, notes, references, index. Rs 695 (hardback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Purnima Mehta Bhatt (trans.), Reminiscences: The Memoirs of Shardaben Mehta. New Delhi: Zubaan, 2007. Translated from Gujarati and Introduction by Svati Joshi. 325 pp. Plates, notes, Rs 595 (hardback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Lancy Lobo and Shashikant Kumar, Land Acquisition, Displacement and Resettlement in Gujarat 1947-2004. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2009. xxiii + 303 pp. Tables, figures, bibliography, index. Rs 895 (hardback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Debashish Banerji, The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2010. xlvii + 136 pp. Plates, notes, bibliography, index. Rs 995 (hardback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Rohini Sahni, V. Kalyan Shankar and Hemant Apte (eds), Prostitution and Beyond: An Analysis of Sex Work in India. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2008. 369 pp. Tables, figures, notes, references, appendix, bibliography, index. Rs 395 (paperback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Vinay Gidwani, Capital Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. xxv + 337 pp. Tables, plates, maps, notes, index. $25.00 (paperback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Thin nationalism: Nature and public intellectualism in IndiaWhat has been the relationship of nationalism to nature in India? Starting with this basic yet hitherto unexamined question, this article examines the varieties of nationalism that can be associated with nature love and ideas of nature conservation in India through the 20th century. After identifying the limitations of the dichotomised approach that explains nationalism as either statist or culturalist, this article also examines the extent to which this dualist and oppositional view of nationalism informs and constrains public debate on ideas of nature and environmental management in India. A key argument made here is that nationalism that is thin and exclusive, and thereby inherently the source of conflict and confrontation, is not a new problem in India, and the tendencies for the emergence of thin nationalisms around ideas of nature and their relation to heritage and conservation were already present in the ecological debates and post-War conditions of the mid 20th century as the sun finally set on the British empire. view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Lloyd I Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, Explaining Indian Democracy: A Fifty-Year Perspective, 1956-2006. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008. Volume I (The Realm of Ideas: Inquiry and Theory). xv + 324 pp. Tables, plates, notes, references, index. Rs 695 (hardback). Volume II (The Realm of Institutions: State Formation and Institutional Change). xv + 344 pp. Tables, notes, references, index. Rs 695 (hardback). Volume III (The Realm of the Public Sphere: Identity and Policy). xvii + 435 pp. Tables, figures, notes, index. Rs 750 (hardback).view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Trade union movement in a princely state: Tradition, industrialisation and social changeThis article focuses on the emergence of the trade union movement upon the introduction of a capitalist industrial economy in the social and political milieu of a princely state, viz. Baroda. The article argues that the new class of industrial workers which emerged in the princely state did not passively accept their terms of work but actively mobilised to change their work conditions, form trade unions and select leaders while also negotiating with their traditional values of status, hierarchy, personal loyalty and community camaraderie. In this, the Baroda cloth mill labourers were influenced by the struggle and consequent gains of the industrial workers of the nearby cities of British India, like Bombay and Ahmedabad, which created a sense of relative deprivation among them. The article examines the organisational role played by trade union leaders from British India in fomenting similar struggles in princely Baroda. It describes the similarities between the trade union culture of British India and the Baroda movement and argues that the latter reflected the future image of industrial relations in a princely state, as was manifested in the gradual evolution of a legal framework governing the conditions of work and bargaining with the state. view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Lynn Welchman and Sara Hossain (eds), Honour: Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence against Women. New Delhi: Zubaan, 2006. xiv + 384 pp. Notes, references, index. Rs 595 (hardback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Kesavan Veluthat, The Early Medieval in South India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009. xii + 356 pp. Notes, references, index. Rs 695 (hardback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Beyond the impasse: 'Muslim feminism(s)' and the Indian women's movementSince its inception, the contemporary women’s movement has had a contentious relationship with religion. This was demonstrated most clearly in the debates around the cases of Shah Bano and Roop Kanwar during the 1980s, which sparked a period of reflection within the women’s movement over the question of representation. Since then, the movement has evolved considerably, becoming increasingly institutionalised at one level, and at the same time experiencing fragmentation and diversification. This article looks at the emergence of two networks advocating Muslim women’s rights, the Muslim Women’s Rights Network (MWRN) and the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA), and contextualises their emergence within the wider context of the women’s movement and the evolution of feminism in India. MWRN and BMMA are indicative of the growing assertion of ‘minority feminisms’ in India and aim to represent women’s multiple identities, including their religious identities, while also struggling for gender justice. Both networks differ in the way they approach religion ideologically and strategically as well as in the way they position themselves vis-à-vis the women’s movement. However, their appearance marks an important shift both within the women’s movement as well as in the formulation of community identities in India, with ‘Muslim women’ being positively reformulated by these networks as a category that asserts political agency rather than passivity and victimhood. view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Felix Padel, Sacrificing People: Invasions of a Tribal Landscape (new and updated version with a new foreword by Hugh Broody). New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2009. xxxvii + 465 pp. Maps, notes, glossary, bibliography, index. Rs 750 (hardback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Sudipta Kaviraj, The Imaging Institutions of India: Politics and Ideas. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2010. 299 pp. Figures, notes, references, index. Rs 695 (hardback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Conjuring a river, imagining civilisation: Saraswati, archaeology and science in IndiaThe depiction of the river Saraswati as an empirical centre of the Harappan civilisation has been marked by intense debate in recent years. Taking the short-lived Saraswati Heritage Project (2002–04) initiated by the Archaeological Survey of India as a case study, this article examines the epistemological emergence of the river and interrogates its historical and ideological relationship to the Harappans and the Aryans. It argues that the epistemic trajectory of Saraswati from a literary entity to an empirical category followed four phases. First, it emerged as a mythical river of colonial Indology; then, as a civilisational river of colonial archaeology; subsequently, as a hydrological body of postcolonial geology and, finally, as an empirical fact of postcolonial archaeology and history. Contrary to historians who attribute the resurrection of the Saraswati solely to the growing influence of Hindutva ideologies, this article argues that the Saraswati is also an epistemic product of the disciplinarian discourse of colonial Indology and postcolonial science. It contends that its ideological and political valence has to be located in the larger discursive universe of colonial and postcolonial scientific practices and not solely attributed to Hindutva. view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and Politics of Modern India. California: California University Press, 2009. xxii + 392 pp. Plates, map, notes, index. $65.00 (hardback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Jonathan Spencer, Anthropology, Politics and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xiii + 203 pp. Plates, notes, bibliography, index. $29.99 (paperback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Print communalism: The press and the non-Brahmin movement in early Mysore, 1900-30The emergence of a modern public sphere is attributed, in part, to the expansion of the print media, with newspapers playing a key role in the formation of an ‘imagined community’, usually imagined as a national unity. However, the role of the press in the non-Brahmin movement in princely Mysore shows that rather than shaping the formation of a homogenous and expandable rational public, newspapers identified themselves with and promoted the causes of particular caste groups. This article examines the social and political conditions under which this distinct form of journalism evolved. By doing so, it engages with and extends the post-colonial critique of Habermas’ idea of the ‘public sphere’ and modern notions of civil society. view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Manu Bhagavan and Anne Feldhaus (eds), Claiming Power from Below: Dalits and the Subaltern Question in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008. x + 222 pp. Notes, references, appendix, index. Rs 625 (hardback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Urmila Pawar and Meenakshi Moon, We also made History: Women in the Ambedkarite Movement (translated by Wandana Sonalkar). New Delhi: Zubaan, 2008. 366 pp. Tables, plates, notes, references. Rs 595 (hardback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] History and sociology of central Gujarat: Ideology and realityview article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Geert de Neve and Henrike Donner (eds), The Meaning of the Local: Politics of Place in Urban India. London/New York: Routledge/Francis Taylor, 2006. xi + 238 pp. Tables, plates, maps, notes, references, index. {pound}75.00 (hardback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Pranab Bardhan and Isha Ray (eds), The Contested Commons: Conversations between Economists and Anthropologists. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008. x + 289 pp. Notes, references, index. Rs 695 (hardback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] A bibliography of the writings of David F. Pocockview article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] The point of death: A comparative anthropological approachDavid Pocock’s previously unpublished Inaugural Lecture on ‘The point of death’ marked his promotion to a Personal Chair at the University of Sussex and was delivered on 3rd May 1977. Pocock generously gave Parry a copy of his text while the latter was writing up material on death in Banares, and as far as we know, this is the only hard copy that has survived (though an audio recording of the lecture itself is listed in the Sussex University Library catalogue). It was written for verbal presentation and, at points, has a somewhat elliptical quality (though that is also true of much that Pocock published). The main text has been edited as lightly as possible and only with a view to occasionally clarifying its meaning. The comments and references in the footnotes have all been added by us. We are grateful to David Pocock’s executors, Paul and Susan Yates, for permission to include his lecture alongside our own appreciation of him. The justification for doing so is its enduring interest—both as a still highly suggestive contribution to the comparative study of mortuary practices and of ideas about death, and as an historical document that evokes a number of Pocock’s intellectual preoccupations and something of his intellectual style. As our own contribution to this issue of the journal has suggested, death was a topic on which he had long reflected; and here, he addresses it with characteristic erudition and an impressively catholic range of reference to literary and historical sources. But the resonances with his other writings go much further than that. These include: his continuing concern with the way in which uncontrollable biological occurrences and the effects of duration are subordinated to society (showing here that ‘the point of death is not the point of death’); and his related concern with the way in which unrepeatable historical events that unfold in linear time are accommodated to a theory of endlessly repeated cyclical time. Thus, the classical Hindu theory of the kaliyug is invoked to argue that the ‘good death’ of the householder is not really so ‘good’ after all. It is merely a kind of ersatz kaliyug version of the ideal, which supposes that by the time of his death, the householder will have taken sanyas. This fudge, Pocock intriguingly suggests, is associated with the fuzziness and contradictoriness of the eschatology. And that’s another of his recurring themes—the vague and tentative nature of religious belief. But perhaps, the most important message of his lecture has to do with the contrast it sets up between the ‘traditional complex’, with which the first part of the article is concerned and for which Hindu India stands, and the ‘modern complex’ exemplified by the contemporary and significantly secularised West, where the values of individualism are associated with ‘a maximal denial of death’—and indeed, of society itself. The contrast looks, on the face of it, highly Dumontian; but on closer reading, it is distinctly ambiguous. Though the ‘imperative insistence’ of Christian doctrine on the survival of the individual soul precludes the assimilation of the individual personality into a general category in a way that no other culture has done, and though the individual’s death is represented as being as unique as his birth and subsequent life, elements of the ‘traditional complex’ nevertheless persist. Rumours about mixing up bones and ashes in the crematorium recur, the standardised depersonalised coffin comes to stand for the deceased and Lily Pincus’s advocacy of a renewed intimacy with death and the dying is welcomed as a modern transformation of the older complex. It is the open-endedness and his sense of the complex ambiguity of social and intellectual life that makes Pocock both so frustratingly elusive and so attractive as a thinker. Editorial note by Jonathan Parry and Edward Simpson view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] David Pocock's Contributions and the legacy of LeavisDavid Pocock (1928–2007) co-founded this journal with Louis Dumont, and it is easy to assume that they were intellectually more ‘like-minded’ than we believe was really the case. In the first part of this appreciation, we offer some biographical and intellectual context for Pocock’s career. In the second, we identify the principal ways in which his sociological project did converge with Dumont’s and the respects in which it seems fundamentally different. Both were deeply influenced by Evans-Pritchard; but much of their difference is explained, we suggest, by Pocock’s prior loyalty to the teachings of the literary critic, F.R. Leavis. For good or ill, Pocock’s more reflexive preoccupations and his concern with the moral complexity of social life chime better with, and indeed anticipate, subsequent theoretical trends in the discipline. view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Jyotsna Jha and Dhir Jhingran, Elementary Education for the Poorest and Other Deprived Groups: The Real Challenge of Universalization. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2005. 348 pp. Tables, figures, notes, appendices, bibliography, index. Rs 895 (hardback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Saraswati Raju, M. Satish Kumar and Stuart Corbridge (eds), Colonial and Post-Colonial Geographies of India. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2006. 368 pp. Tables, figures, maps, notes, references, bibliography, index. Rs 695 (hardback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Charles Miller Leslie, 1923-2009view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Veronique Benei, Schooling Passions: Nation, History, and Language in Contemporary Western India. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2008. xix + 346 pp. Plates, map, notes, glossary, bibliography, index. $24.95 (paperback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Gyanesh Kudaisya, Region, Nation, 'Heartland': Uttar Pradesh in India's Body Politic (Sage Series in Modern Indian History-X). New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2006. xxvi + 471 pp. Figures, plates, maps, notes, glossary, bibliography, index. Rs 595 (paperback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Andrea Cornwall, Elisabeth Harrison and Ann Whitehead (eds), Feminisms in Development: Contradictions, Contestations and Challenges. New Delhi: Zuban, 2008. vii + 253 pp. Notes, references, index. Rs 595 (hardback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Ujjwal Kumar Singh, The State, Democracy and Anti-Terror Laws in India. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2007. 345 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. Rs 695 (hardback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] 'Committed, Opportunists and Drifters': Revisiting the Naxalite narrative in Jharkhand and BiharWho are the Naxalites today? What drives them to take on a life that, even given the adversity of their prior life conditions, seems very bleak? What are the real tenets of the ideology that make it possible for them to kill? Why are they prepared to die for it? This article is an attempt to bring out the standpoint of foot soldiers of the Naxalite movement. It categorises a sample of forty Naxalite armed cadre met with across Jharkhand and parts of Bihar in 2003 into three motivational profiles: Committed, Opportunists and Drifters. The Drifters make up most of the Naxalite armed cadre and reflect their changing spirit. view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Claude Levi-Strauss, 1908-2009view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Hostile witnesses, judicial interactions and out-of-court narratives in a north Indian district courtThis article examines the argument that people in India are strongly oriented towards litigation in court as against other forms of negotiation or advising. In spite of the centrality of the court system to Indian public life, the flow of cases arriving at court does not reflect any such fixed preference. Going to court may simply be a choice which the parties make in the first instance, but which will eventually be abandoned in favour of private forms of compromise. By drawing on the ethnography of a court case followed in a district court of Himachal Pradesh, this contribution will show how even in serious criminal cases where no private compromise is allowed, it often happens that all the prosecution witnesses deny before the judge what they are supposed to have previously stated to the police. The analysis of court interactions and out-of-court narratives will show how nonofficial forms of conciliation may internally unsettle the rules of evidence followed in criminal proceedings. view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Justice is a secret: Compromise in rape trialsThis article draws attention to the culture of compromise that underwrites rape prosecutions. This aspect of rape prosecutions has not been sufficiently discussed either within the women’s movement, the judiciary or the contemporary discourse on judicial reform in India. I argue that the socio-legal process encapsulated in the word ‘compromise’ (or samadhan, the coexisting Gujarati usage) is an exposition of how secrecy may be thought of as ‘indispensable to the operation of power rather than as an abuse of power’ (Taussig 1999: 57). Unlike other forms of out-of-court settlements described as mechanisms of alternate dispute resolution, plea-bargaining or mediation in courts of law, compromise is not legal in rape cases in India. The term ‘culture of compromise’ emphasises how a criminal trial becomes a site for contestation between the accused, the complainant and the prosecuting agencies over how to monopolise the framing of an out-of-court settlement. view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Sujata Patel and Kushal Deb (eds), Urban Studies (Oxford in India Readings in Social and Cultural Anthropology). New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006. x + 486 pp. Tables, notes, references. Rs 595 (hardback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Saurabh Dube (ed.), Historical Anthropology (Oxford in India Readings in Sociology and Social Anthropology). New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007. xiv +427 pp. Notes, index. Rs 595 (hardback)view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] Anjan Ghosh, 1951-2010view article | [Contributions to Indian Sociology recent issues] |
