Contributions to Indian Sociology

In the past decade, there have been an increasing number of academic articles on the dalit drum or parai. For the most part, they note the processes by which this once humiliating caste service has been re-symbolised as an art form and has become central to dalit struggles for liberation. In such articles, there is an easy assumption that the parai is an art that dalits can take pride in. In this article, I problematise such claims by pointing to dissenting voices and campaigns by people who claim that the celebration of the drum merely perpetuates degradation. This raises questions such as who speaks for a community, whether a symbol of oppression can truly become an icon of resistance and how marginalised communities can construct positive identities when their cultural memories and practices are inescapably associated with their subordination.

The article seeks to redraw some key discussions on death in Banaras by focusing on the subject matter of the ‘dead’ rather than that of death. Pitched in the shadow of select earlier works on anthropology of death pertaining to Banaras, the general probing centres on the query whether the three realms of dying, death and dead can be delinked and thus seen in a certain relative autonomy from each other. Further, how do the anthropological accounts of death get refracted when seen from the vantage point of the dead? Based on ethnographic fieldwork at intertwined field sites of the home and the hospital, manual and electric cremation ghat and the shaivite aghorashram (hermitage) in relation to the river Ganga, the descriptions involve discussion over declaration of death versus discovery of the dead, distinction between touching and handling of the dead and latent implications of the varied names of the dead. The core concern of the article is to explore the nature of the social vis-à-vis the dead. I show how, unlike the anthropology of death that very often reiterates communitarian restoration (pravah), an anthropology of the dead may haltingly resist such reading and seek a continual searching of the indefinite social (parvah).

This article addresses two questions: first, how do communities facing protracted displacement deal with the experience of migration and place-making? Second, how do notions of home mediate this relationship? I approach these questions by taking the case of Kashmiri Pandits, the upper caste Hindu minority of the Kashmir valley, who were displaced due to the outbreak of conflict in Jammu and Kashmir in 1989–90 and a significant section of whom were located in displaced persons’ camps during 1990–2011. The article draws upon discussions with Pandits who contrast nostalgia for life in Kashmir with experiences of re-establishing social and political relationships after displacement. Place and migration here are both treated as contexts and products of social activity that involve considerations of objects, physical environment and communal relationships. The article will argue that discussions of place and home are marked by a tension between desires for reclaiming home and security, and the condition of uncertainty faced by groups like Kashmiri Pandits in the present.

How do subalterns imagine their membership in India’s political community? Many scholars argue that they imbibe the egalitarian ideals in India’s political–economic sphere. Others suggest that subalterns identify the modernising impulses of the political–economic sphere as a greater threat to their ways of life.

 Intervening in this debate, recent research enlivens analysts to the perspective that the political–economic sphere of the state cannot be unambiguously mapped onto modernity. Nor, for that matter, can the socio-cultural sphere be regarded as singular realm of uninterrupted tradition. This article is offered as a contribution to this strand of the scholarship. By exploring endogenous egalitarian impulses among subaltern groups in India, I seek to interrogate the widely prevailing notion that ideas associated with modernity are the preserve of and emanate from elites in the political–economic sphere of the Indian state. Subalterns eschew notions of hierarchy and value ideas of equality and social justice without necessarily drawing on statist vocabularies in their assertions.