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SAR - Latest Issue (Sage)Book Reviews: The Hindus: An Alternative Historyview article | [South Asia Research current issue] Book Review: Global South Asians: Introducing the Modern Diasporaview article | [South Asia Research current issue] Transnationality, Hope and 'Recombinant Locality': Knowledge as Capital and ResourceThis article searches for sustainable methods of handling the stresses of globalising existence and contrasts two strategies of using knowledge as a form of capital or resource in different forms of ‘packaging from above’ and ‘packaging from below’. Taking the examples of appropriation of Vastuvidya in Europe and of Hindu worship of the Hawaiian Healing Stones, it is argued that such methods of re-packaging and the concept of ‘recombinant locality’ are strategically useful tools and devices to understand better how people may preserve glocalised spaces while opposing uniformising globalisation and capitalist domination. The article suggests that, in this way, structurally disadvantaged but hopeful and enterprising transnational individuals and groups may empower themselves to improve their ‘lifeworld’ in diaspora. view article | [South Asia Research current issue] Book Review: An Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial Indiaview article | [South Asia Research current issue] Cosmopolitan Tribals: Frontier Migrants In DelhiBased on fieldwork, this article examines various aspects of tribal migration from the Northeast frontier of India to Delhi, a phenomenon which increased rapidly in the last half decade or so. This offers insights into four important interlinked processes. First, such migration indicates significant changes taking place in the Northeast itself. While many migrants leave the region to escape conflict, many more simply seek to find work, pursue education and fulfil changing aspirations. Second, tribal migration to Delhi reveals the ways in which the city itself has been changing. While tribal migrants search out employment opportunities in neoliberal capitalist spaces, employers in such spaces have specific reasons to desire tribal labour, particularly in shopping malls and call centres. Third, tribal migrants encounter racism and discrimination in Delhi and their experiences reveal how racial issues function and are debated today within India. Fourth, tribal migrants themselves embody the dramatic discord between the ways tribals see themselves and the ways they are perceived in India. view article | [South Asia Research current issue] Book Review: The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asiaview article | [South Asia Research current issue] Mystic Rites For Permanent Class Conflict: The Bauls Of Bengal, Revolutionary Ideology And Post-CapitalismLocating itself amidst current debates on post-modern analyses of mysticism, particularly academic debates on the Bauls of Bengal, this article discusses issues of cultural transformation as a result of gentrification and globalisation. It combines the author’s ethnographic research and a methodology mainly derived from Italian Marxist critique (Antonio Gramsci, Ernesto de Martino, Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno). The article examines the reification of mysticism and the process of ‘rehab’, as imposed by Bengali bourgeoisie via the Tagorian archetype and the Western show business on the Bauls, to cleanse their image from inconvenient traits. Suggesting an interpretation of radical materialist mystics as ‘multitude’ and viewing professional Bauls as ‘people’, this research explores how the construction of a myth has ultimately penetrated contemporary society at all levels, including academic circles. view article | [South Asia Research current issue] Although the Preamble of the Constitution proclaims that ‘We the People’ have solemnly adopted and enacted it, there is almost no further mention of ‘the people’ in the constitutional text itself. Asking who are ‘the people’ in whose name the Indian Constitution was drafted, this article re-examines the Constituent Assembly Debates (CAD) and highlights the fragmented image of ‘the people’ as a multivocal, multivalent reflection of imaginations and expectations attributed to people within and behind the Constituent Assembly. It becomes obvious that the aspirations of the actual Constitution makers find clearer expression in the constitutional text than the perceptions of ‘the people’ in whose name such law making takes place. Using the lens of the social revolution that the Constitution was to bring about, the article clarifies the implications of this multiplicity of visions, distinguishing ‘We the People’ seeking to claim such unfulfilled constitutional promises today, on the one hand, and the functionaries obligated to translate constitutional promises into reality and to enforce them, on the other. Asking why it is that the ambitions of the latter find clearer expression in the constitutional text than those of the former, the article also poses deeper questions about representativeness of political institutions and about the strength and depth of Indian social reform agenda. |
