Contributions to Indian Sociology

This article discusses the formation and distinctive evolution of the Malayalee public sphere in Malabar from the second half of the 19^th century. When the press was introduced, versions of Malayalam, such as Arabimalayalam, Suriyani-Malayalam, and Aryanezhuthu/modern-Malayalam, were seen to be associated with different communities. The varied community and religious orientations of Malayalam were reflected in the newly emerging Malayalee public sphere. The tensions that racked the public sphere on this count compelled the Mappila intelligentsia to turn to modern Malayalam in order to contest claims alluding to their criminality. It led to their withdrawal from Arabimalayalam which was the language of their community. The waning of Arabimalayalam had an impact on Mappila women annihilating the possibility of their voices being heard in the newly emergent public sphere.

Tombs of gurus and religious leaders are central to the consolidation of religious communities through memorialisation and the public performance of rituals. In Hindu and neo-Hindu religious movements, the guru’s samadhi is one such important sacred space. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article focuses on one Ashram in India and the importance of the Samadhi shrine in the life of its members. The article argues that the Samadhi constitutes the spatial heart of an otherwise spatially dispersed Ashram. It is at the Samadhi that the devotees become present to the gurus and one another, creating a community of devotees through both a linear ‘chain of memory’ and lateral ‘intimacy grids’. At the same time, the creation of such a community grapples with the wider locational specificities of the Ashram and the politics of making it a home.

The contiguity of the divine, the human, and the object is routinely noted in scholarship on South Asia. In this article, I re-examine this model of contiguity by focusing on the vandalism of what I term a caste-iconic statue in 2008 in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, and track the effects of this incident in a village and on its caste groups until 2015. Beyond contiguity, I here offer a relational approach to studying space, caste, and statues.

By the end of March 2021, 10 districts of western Odisha, bordering Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, were badly hit by the second wave of COVID-19. Stock-taking of the public health infrastructure in the adivasi pockets of Odisha is pivotal as the state is duty-bound to improve public health. The NGOs fighting for rights of adivasis find it contradictory that Odisha state boasts of exporting oxygen from western Odisha to 10 other states while maintaining the position that it has surplus oxygen, whereas on the ground, commoners in the hospitals were dying due to a lack of oxygen. The silent deaths of adivasis are not due to the deadliness of the virus but a consequence of systemic neglect by the state. If poverty and low standards of living imperilled their lives slowly, lack of public provisioning of COVID-19 treatment triggered mass deaths, did not find media coverage, and officially these are not esven counted as ‘data’ to be mourned.

David N. Gellner and Sondra L. Hausner, eds. 2018. Global Nepalis: Religion, Culture, and Community in a New and Old Diaspora. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 540 pp. Maps, tables, figures, references, index. £51 (hardback)

Farhana Ibrahim and Tanuja Kothiyal, eds. 2021. South Asian Borderlands: Mobility, History, Affect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. x + 286 pp. Maps, tables, figures, notes, references, index. £75.00 (hardback)

Ranjita Dawn. 2021. The Social Model of Disability in India: Politics of Identity and Power. New York: Routledge. xvi + 199 pp. Notes, references, index. $53.35 (eBook)

Sangeeta Dasgupta. 2022. Reordering Adivasi Worlds: Representation, Resistance, Memory. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 368 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, index. ₹1450 (hardback)

Gowri Vijayakumar. 2021. At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Crisis. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 280 pp. Appendix, Notes, bibliography, index. $85 (hardback)

Lucas Chancel. 2020. Unsustainable Inequalities: Social Justice and the Environment. Translated by M. B DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. viii + 176 pp. Notes, tables, illustrations, index. $29.95 (hardback - PDF read by book reviewer)

Rashmi Sadana. 2022. The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. x + 252 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 (eBook)