Contributions to Indian Sociology

Since 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.

This 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.

The 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.

What 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.