Tag: India

Manual Scavenging in India: The Banality of An Everyday Crime

By Shiva Shankar and Kanthi Swaroop

Manual scavenging is the practice of ‘manually cleaning, carrying, disposing of, or otherwise handling, human excreta in an insanitary latrine or in an open drain or pit’, and its existence is a crime of genocidal proportions. The vast majority of people forced into this degrading occupation are women from Dalit castes. The Government of India has outlawed the practice through two Acts of 1993 and 2013, yet it continues everywhere in the country. This essay argues that the persistence of this crime is a consequence of the criminal indifference of a casteist society, and that resistance to it has largely been the heroic effort of the victims alone.

Read the full essay here.

Living the Body: Embodiment, Womanhood and Identity in Contemporary India

By Meenakshi Thapan

This book explores the development of a sociology of embodiment in the context of women’s lives in contemporary, urban India. Through a critical analysis of gender and class, the author unravels the complexities that are intrinsic to the multi-layered and fluid construction of a woman’s identity in relation to embodiment.

Living the Body: Embodiment, Womanhood and Identity in Contemporary India is the first book that unfolds an understanding of women’s experience of embodiment by a careful analysis of the facts gathered from an Indian metropolis. The author brings out numerous voices representing multiple subjectivities through interviews of working class slum women, professional upper class women, adolescent young women in secondary schools and in a slum, and the visual and textual representation of women in a women’s magazine in English.

Read the book here.

Pills That Swallow Policy: Clinical Ethnography of a Community Mental Health Program in Northern India

By Sumeet Jain and Sushrut Jadhav

India’s National Mental Health Program (NMHP) was initiated in 1982 with the objective of promoting community participation and accessible mental health services. A key component involves central government calculation and funding for psychotropic medication. Based on clinical ethnography of a community psychiatry program in north India, this article traces the biosocial journey of psychotropic pills from the centre to the periphery. As the pill journeys from the Ministry of Health to the clinic, its symbolic meaning transforms from an emphasis on accessibility and participation to the administration of a discrete ‘treatment’. Instead of embodying participation and access, the pill achieves the opposite: silencing community voices, re-enforcing existing barriers to care, and relying on pharmacological solutions for psychosocial problems. The symbolic inscription of NMHP policies on the pill fail because they are undercut by more powerful meanings generated from local cultural contexts. An understanding of this process is critical for the development of training and policy that can more effectively address local mental health concerns in rural India.

Read the article here.

Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India

By Mythheli Sreenivas

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonised some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe.

To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions-about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world.

Read the book here.

No Aging In India: Alzheimer’s, The Bad Family, and Other Modern Things.

By Lawrence Cohen

From the opening sequence, in which mid-nineteenth-century Indian fishermen hear the possibility of redemption in an old woman’s madness, No Aging in India captures the reader with its interplay of story and analysis. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic work, Lawrence Cohen links a detailed investigation of mind and body in old age in four neighborhoods of the Indian city of Varanasi (Banaras) with events and processes around India and around the world. This compelling exploration of senility—encompassing not only the aging body but also larger cultural anxieties—combines insights from medical anthropology, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial studies. Bridging literary genres as well as geographic spaces, Cohen responds to what he sees as the impoverishment of both North American and Indian gerontologies—the one mired in ambivalence toward demented old bodies, the other insistent on a dubious morality tale of modern families breaking up and abandoning their elderly. He shifts our attention irresistibly toward how old age comes to matter in the constitution of societies and their narratives of identity and history.

Read the book here.

The gay guru

Fallibility, unworldliness, and the scene of instruction

By Lawrence Cohen

This chapter of The Guru in South Asia describes guru as an ideal type in the understanding of an emergent historical situation, and reviews ancient story of Ekalavya and some of its recent glosses. Ekalavya is refused the legitimacy of studying under the greatest teacher of his age: he responds by retreating into the forest and creating an image or copy of the teacher, toward which he directs his discipline and respect. Ekalavya journeys to Hastinapura to join the boys learning the great martial art of archery from Drona. The story of Ekalavya concludes with a different exemplar of the total gift to the guru, the guru-dakshina, than that will be demanded of Aijuna. The gurukul princes and Drona are wandering close to where Ekalavya practices. The chapter discusses the vexed relation of several modern Hindu gurus to the accusation and promise of homosexuality. Baba Ramdev’s challenge is to homosexuality as a particular kind of promise emergent with late twentieth-century Indian neoliberalism and its global milieu.

Read the full chapter here.

Ek Jagah Apni – A Place of Our Own

Ek Jagah Apni (‘A Place of Our Own’) is a film set in the city of Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh, India) and offers a glimpse into the lives of the transgender community in the city. Part of the Museum of Art and Photography’s exhibition ‘Visible/Invisible: Representation of Women in Art through the MAP Collection’, the movie follows the journey of two trans women in their quest for an apartment as well as for a space in society.

Presenting a slice of reality and shot in a realistic style, it is a story of an artistic expression of people who are the subjects of the film as well as the tellers of their own story as actors, co-writers, and the cast and crew that comprise the filmmaking process.

Read more and explore the museum’s website here.

Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India

By Dolly Kikon

Photo: Dexter Fernandes

The nineteenth-century discovery of oil in the eastern Himalayan foothills, together with the establishment of tea plantations and other extractive industries, continues to have a profound impact on life in the region. In the Indian states of Assam and Nagaland, everyday militarization, violence, and the scramble for natural resources regulate the lives of Naga, Ahom, and Adivasi people, as well as migrants from elsewhere in the region, as they struggle to find peace and work.

Anthropologist Dolly Kikon uses in-depth ethnographic accounts to address the complexity of Northeast India, a region where boundaries and borders are made, disputed, and maintained. She mainly explores the social bonds established through practices of resource extraction and the tensions these relations generate, focusing on peoples’ love for the landscape and for the state, as well as for family, friends, and neighbors. Living with Oil and Coal illuminates questions of citizenship, social justice, and environmental politics that are shared by communities worldwide.

Read the book here.

Ashish Kothari

Image: By A. Kothari, “A touching moment with a Bonnet macaque baby”, Athirapally Falls, Kerala, Nov 2023.

Ashish Kothari is, in his words, “an Indian environmentalist working on development”, passionate about the environment and wildlife. In 1978-79, he helped found Kalpavriksh, a non-profit organisation in India which deals with environmental and development issues. From that time onwards, he has been associated with peoples’ movements like Narmada Bachao Andolan and Beej Bachao Andolan. He also helps coordinate national and global networks like Vikalp Sangam and Global Tapestry of Alternatives, and has been a member of different international commissions on environmental protection.

Kothari is the author/co-author and co-editor of about 30 books, and writer/co-writer of about 600 articles, most of which are available on his blog. He worked on a plethora of topics, including biodiversity, energy and climate, education, COVID-19, and social justice – complementing them with a wide range of artworks.

Explore Kothari’s works on his blog here.

Histories of Health and Materiality in the Indian Ocean World

Medicine, Material Culture and Trade, 1600-2000

Edited by Anne Gerritsen and Burton Cleetus

Introducing materiality into the study of the history of medicine, this volume hones in on communities across the Indian Ocean World and explores how they understood and engaged with health and medical commodities. Opening up spatial dimensions and challenging existing approaches to knowledge, power and the market, it defines ‘therapeutic commodity’ and explores how different materials were understood and engaged with in various settings and for a number of purposes.

Offering new spatial realms within which the circulation of commodities created new regimes of meaning, Histories of Health and Materiality in the Indian Ocean World demonstrates how medicinal substances have had immediate and far-reaching economic and political consequences in various capacities. From midwifery and umbilical cords, to the social spaces of soap, perfumes in early modern India and remedies for leprosy, this volume considers a vast range of material culture in medicinal settings to better understand the history of medicine and its role in global connections since the early 17th century.

Read more here.

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