History and Sociology of South Asia

This article seeks to make sense of a widely acclaimed political experiment in decentralisation and people-centred development in Kerala of the 1990s, the People’s Planning Campaign, by placing it within a wider contemporary history of politics in the region. Much celebratory literature on this experiment has tended to view it as essentially an extension of pre-existing political initiatives in the state associated with mainstream left parties. Moving away from this view, the present analysis views it as a political response of the mainstream left to various challenges it faced in the early 1990s, to throw light on the many contradictions of political decentralisation in Kerala. Further, it reflects on ‘glocalisation’ of participatory democracy in Kerala and the subject-positions it has produced.

Focused on a historically evolved marketplace, Chauta Bazaar of Surat (Gujarat), this article looks at the question of trust and its contours. In the popular perception, this bazaar has a history of five centuries of continuous survival. This account of a marketplace reveals everyday practices, popular investments in terms of its historical embeddedness and the manner in which notions of trust circulate in this market. The study argues that the narratives of trust are spatial as well as transmitted through generations. The ethnography throws a number of issues pertaining to this marketplace, popularly considered as a women’s market. At a wider level, the article goes beyond exploring the historical trajectories of this marketplace and looks at the narratives in which history is mobilised as an active agency shaping the dynamics of trust in a marketplace.

The Indian prime minister’s clarion call for a ‘Swachh Bharat’ or ‘transparent India’ officially seeks to cleanse the image of a ‘squatting’ nation through building ‘toilets first, temples later’ (‘Devalaya Se Pehle Shauchalaya’)—a laudable slogan that sounds bizarre when heard from the member of a nationalist ‘Hindutvavadi’ political group that usually prioritises hardcore religious sentiments over civic issues. Keeping in mind the traditional Hindu discourse of ritual pollution, it is hard to believe that the Hindu mindset could bear the juxtaposition of the two sites within the space of one single sentence without considering the act as straightforward blasphemy! This article seeks to understand how—and under what sort of social circumstances—this kind of ideational somersault is being attempted today. This ingenious move is polysemic too, we argue, as the virtues of transparency and cleanliness could be rhetorically employed for a variety of purposes. We would examine whether a finer version of Hindutva is on its way to replace a cruder one by enfolding a series of tropes—from Shauchalaya to Mahatma Gandhi—that have never been within its order so far!

This article looks at how ‘indigenous’ medical systems, particularly Ayurveda figured in the official discourse of the Government of India in the post-independence period. In doing so, it studies the recommendations of the committees set up in the first few decades after independence to prepare reports on ‘indigenous’ medicines in India. By studying these reports, we may gain some insights on the paths that were cleared in the professionalisation of Ayurvedic medicine and its institutionalisation in colleges and hospitals. The focus here is on the recommendations and analyses of five committee reports. This article analyses the similarities and near consensus in their approach to the issue of research in Ayurveda. What accounts for such a consensus despite the constitution of different committees over a period of time? How are some of the differences in the recommendations and analyses of the reports resolved in ways that maintain an overall similarity? This article engages with these questions in its analysis of the committee reports.