SOUTH ASIA: INTIMACY AND IDENTITIES, POLITICS AND POVERTY

Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery

India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and the other smaller Himalayan countries together

account for around one quarter of the world’s population, ranging from internationally

networked computer-savvy middle classes in the large metropolitan cities to villagers and

forest dwellers, from IT workers and Bollywood superstars to casual labourers in

agriculture, factories or mines − and those who move between or negotiate the

relationships among them. For the purposes of this Handbook, Pakistan is covered by

Magnus Marsden in the chapter on Central and Southwest Asia. Clearly, though,

Pakistan’s historical and contemporary links with India and Bangladesh (in particular)

impinge in many ways on our understanding of the South Asia, so the two chapters should

be read in tandem.

Reviewing ‘social anthropology’ in South Asia is made an additionally complex

and daunting task by the porosity of disciplinary boundaries. What passes for social

anthropology elsewhere is called sociology in India, with ‘anthropology’ largely reserved

for the study of so-called tribals (or Adivasis). Some scholars have training in both

disciplines, and ethnographic work is also conducted by human geographers and others.

Furthermore, anthropologists/sociologists of South Asia regularly engage with other

disciplines: for instance, the Subaltern Studies historians have provided one of the most

fertile cross-linkages (indeed, some anthropologists/sociologists are also trained in

history). But political science, economics and demography have also influenced debates

and research topics amongst anthropologists/sociologists working in South Asia today.

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 This chapter provides an overview of the fields in which we consider the most

exciting and innovative work is being conducted. Necessarily, we have been ruthlessly

selective. The resulting review is partial, and space constraints preclude detailed discussion

of specific items. To make our task more manageable, we have chosen to focus almost

exclusively on monographs and edited volumes (the latter often interdisciplinary). Of

course, much important work is being published in general anthropology journals, not to

mention journals that are primarily dedicated to work on South Asia. Amongst the latter,

we would direct readers to Contributions to Indian Sociology, interdisciplinary journals

such as Contemporary South Asia, Economic and Political Weekly, Indian Journal of

Gender Studies, Journal of South Asian Development, SAMAJ (South Asia

Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, http://samaj.revues.org/index142.html), South Asia

Research, and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. Other journals regularly

featuring the anthropology/sociology of South Asia include Comparative Studies of South

Asia, Africa and the Middle East (formerly South Asia Bulletin), Critical Asian Studies

(formerly Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars), Journal of Asian Studies and Modern

Asian Studies.

In addition, surveys on South Asia, or specifically on India, can be found in Fuller

and Spencer (1990) (dealing with the 1980s) and the 1,600+ pages of Veena Das’ edited

Companion to Sociology and Social Anthropology (Das 2003); see also Clark-Decès

(2011) and Das (2010). Several series are dedicated to compendia of publications on

specific topics: for instance, Oxford in India Readings in Sociology and Social

Anthropology (Oxford University Press, New Delhi) and Themes in Indian Sociology (Sage

Publications, New Delhi); other volumes reprinting previously published materials include

Jacobsen (2009) − which runs to nearly 1,800 pages − and Mines and Lamb (2010). In

addition, the University Presses of California, Chicago and Columbia (along with

835
Permanent Black) are collaborating in a new series for first monographs, ‘South Asia

across the disciplines’.

In their 1990 review, Fuller and Spencer noted that ‘even unromantic

anthropologists’ were saying ‘less and less about the social, political and economic factors

which mainly determine the “contemporary reality” of millions of ordinary people’s lives’

(Fuller and Spencer, 1990: 91). In the intervening period on which we focus, though, those

concerns have become much more salient in anthropological writing on South Asia. Whilst

Contributions to Indian Sociology still carried some papers debating ‘ethno-sociology’ and

the striving ‘for a sociology of India’, such interests have been eclipsed. Similarly,

conventional village studies no longer dominate ethnographic work in South Asia,

probably for several reasons, including the ‘postmodern turn’ and its associated

problematization of fieldwork, the often gruelling living conditions of rural life (that

anthropologists could opt out of, even if villagers themselves could not) and the growth of

interest in deploying ethnographic methods in other sites and on other topics. The bulk of

South Asia’s population − over 70% in most places − is still rural, so village studies still

have a key role to play in the anthropology/sociology of South Asia (see Madan, 2003;

Mines and Yazgi, 2010). Nevertheless, we welcome the growth in studies of factories and

schools, the street and the state. And the new emphasis on the politicized manifestations of

the hoary anthropological staples of kinship, caste and religion has been timely, for South

Asian societies have experienced profound political and economic changes on the regional

and global stages during the period under consideration: ethnic and communal conflicts,

economic liberalization and globalization (see Deshpande, 2003 for an overview). Taking

Fuller and Spencer’s 1990 review as a cut-off point, then, we discuss recent research under

four headings: Gender, intimacy and the body; Work and livelihoods; Religion, identities

and political conflict; and State and globalization.

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Gender, intimacy and the body

The landmark report on the Status of Women in India (for a summary, see ICSSR, 1975)

provided a crucial impetus to women’s (and gender) studies in India and South Asia more

generally. The Centre for Women’s Development Studies in Delhi (http://www.cwds.ac.in)

has published material by anthropologists (and other social scientists) in its in-house

journal, the Indian Journal of Gender Studies, since 1994. Several presses publish on

gender issues (e.g. in Delhi Kali for Women − now Women Unlimited and Zubaan − and in

Kolkata, Stri), whilst Economic and Political Weekly publishes an annual Review of

Women’s Studies (plus frequent articles on gender themes). Gender Studies is now a

massive and diverse multidisciplinary field − and social anthropologists and sociologists

often develop their work in dialogue and/or collaboration with historians, political

scientists, human geographers, economists and demographers. Much early work

concentrated on topics such as women’s access (or lack of it) to productive resources,

dowry and dowry-related vulnerability to violence and women’s disempowerment more

generally (see Basu 2005). Over time, as gender studies became more fine-tuned, research

has increasingly explored other issues, particularly how gender intersects with other

socially defined identities, women’s agency as a counterpoint to portrayals of women’s

victimhood, masculinities, emotions and the body.

Women’s everyday lives entail a rich diversity of experiences as gender politics

interplay with caste, religious community and class, as evidenced in topics as varied as the

impact of the changing political economy of the fishing industry on Catholic Mukkuvar

women at the southernmost tip of India (Ram, 1992) and of gender hierarchy on Buddhist

nuns in Ladakh (Gutschow, 2004), the expression and creation of urban Tamil Brahmin

women’s subjectivities through ritual (Hancock, 1999); in Bangladesh, Muslim, Hindu and

837
Catholic women and their positioning in relation to communal boundaries (Rozario, 1992),

women, Islam and Islamist movements (Shehabuddin, 2008), and marriage and belonging

(Kotalová, 1993); and low-caste women in Nepal (Cameron, 1998). In addition, several

researchers have focused on the impact of ‘development’ − e.g. on poor women in

Rajshahi (Bangladesh) (White, 1992), (in India) on tribal women in Jharkhand (Rao, 2008)

and cashew workers in Kerala (Lindberg, 2004), and more generally (Kapadia, 2002).

Other work has focused on gender politics and the life cycle, often in ways that

spill over into medical anthropology. Several recent studies address the politics of

childbearing, including birthing and the changing roles of birth attendants and modern

medical institutions, among them Pinto (2008); see also Rozario and Samuel (2002),

several papers in Unnithan-Kumar (2004) and Van Hollen (2003); fertility and domestic

politics (Säävälä, 2001) and the harvesting of stem cells from infertility clinics in India

(Bharadwaj and Glasner, 2008). There is an abundance of ongoing research on the highly

politicized question of sex selection abortion and son preferences (see e.g. Patel, 2007;

Srinivasan, 2006) as well as the implications of imbalanced sex ratios for young men’s

marriage chances (Kaur, 2008). Rather little research details (leave aside problematizes)

women’s roles in childrearing, however: women are tacitly assumed to nurture children

and de facto their childrearing work has been largely naturalized. Yet it is clearly important

to address women’s (undoubtedly changing) experiences of socializing children through

childhoods marked by gender, class and so forth to transitions to very diverse adulthoods −

the focus of work by Seymour (1999) and Donner (2008) in urban Orissa and Kolkata,

respectively. At the other end of the life cycle, how elderly women in rural Bengal detach

themselves from the ‘net’ of ties that previously linked them into social life is the subject

of an account by Lamb (2000). A large-scale interdisciplinary study that included

ethnographic work focuses on the difficulties that widows experience in ensuring a place to

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live and access to livelihood resources (Chen 2000; see also Chen, 1998). Other

discussions address care for the elderly more generally (Rajan et al., 2009), whilst Cohen

(1998) focuses on the ageing body and the social and medicalized dimensions of senility in

urban India.

Some authors explicitly frame their discussions around women’s agency and

resistance against gendered (as well as other kinds of) domination. Among these are

women’s rituals as a source of power (e.g. Appadurai et al., 1994; Flueckiger, 1996); how

‘untouchable’ women in rural Tamil Nadu critique and challenge local Brahmin élites

(Kapadia, 1995); sex workers in Chennai (Sariola, 2009); how women’s songs articulate

critiques of adult women’s lives (Raheja and Gold, 1994; see also Raheja, 2003); life

stories, songs and moral tales (Jeffery and Jeffery, 1996; March, 2002; Narayan with

Urmila Devi Sood, 1997); how villagers in Uttar Pradesh − including women − ‘struggle

with destiny’(Wadley, 1994); and how Delhi slum women negotiate marital conflicts, often

through their natal kin or women-led informal courts (Grover, 2010). Several sources focus

on women’s mobilization, e.g. the implications of gender politics for women’s engagement

with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in rural West Bengal (Tenhunen, 2008),

women’s unionization and collective organization through SEWA (the Self-Employed

Women’s Association) in Gujarat (Rose, 1992), and how the differing ‘political fields’ of

Mumbai and Kolkata affect women’s capacity to mobilize successfully (Ray, 2000; see

also Fruzzetti and Tenhunen, 2006). And lest we romanticize the ‘weapons of the weak’,

there are stark reminders of how subaltern insubordination may be dealt with − for

instance, in media reports throughout the 2000s of caste-based (extra-legal) courts meting

out capital punishment to young people who dare to fall in love across caste and/or

religious lines, or against the wishes of their parents, and in Mody’s account of how the

legal provision for court marriages − the option taken by many eloping couples − is

839
subverted by the patriarchal prejudices of the court’s staff and other government

employees (Mody, 2008).

As elsewhere, gender studies in South Asia have generated other interests, of which

we would mention just three here: masculinities, emotions and the body. Research that

problematizes masculinities, by pointing to the diversity of manhoods or by highlighting

how there is nothing natural or inevitable about becoming a man (e.g. Chopra et al., 2004;

Osella and Osella, 2006) provides a counterbalance to research on women. Normalized

domestic masculinity is addressed by Derné (1995). Caplan (1995) explores military

masculinity in relation to Gurkhas in Nepal. Research in western Uttar Pradesh focuses on

the truncated achievement of manhood among educated but unemployed young men

(Jeffrey, 2010; Jeffrey et al., 2008), whilst Alter (1992) focuses on the moral economy of

the wrestler’s regimen and its implications for the national character and the body politic.

The study of emotions has drawn particular attention from researchers in Nepal:

intimacy and affection in everyday family life among Gurungs (McHugh, 2001), love

letters and their implications for changing marriage practices and gender relationships in

western Nepal (Ahearn, 2001) and emotional distress and the body among the Yolmo

Sherpas (Desjarlais, 1992). For India, Addlakha (2008) considers the psychopathological

effects on women of their subordination. In respect of the body, Thapan (2009) focuses on

embodiment as experienced by young urban women from differing class backgrounds,

whilst Banerjee and Miller (2003) explore the diverse meanings of the sari (see also Tarlo

1996 for an account of the diverse uses of clothing − e.g. to hide or heighten identities and

to challenge or assert domination). Studies of the body easily segue into forms of medical

anthropology, (though there are few anthropological accounts of the social meanings of

body shapes other than those of the ‘third sex’ (see, e.g. Nanda, 1998 [1989]; Reddy,

2005). Staples (2007) considers lepers, one of India’s most marginalized (but fast

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disappearing) groups, in south India and Barrett (2008) analyses Aghor healers, who have

a reputation for treating leprosy patients (amongst much more). Cohen has written on

kidney selling, ‘bioavailability’ and ‘third sex’ (e.g. Cohen, 2004, 2005), whilst Copeman

(2009) analyses blood donation in the context of guru-worship. Wilce (1998) explores how

patients in Bangladesh express their complaints. How and why medicines are ingested

feature in several studies, including pill consumption by Tibetans in India (Prost, 2008),

and how Ayurvedic medicines are becoming part of consumer culture (Alter, 2005;

Banerjee, 2009) (see Bode, 2010 for a historical perspective). Others aim to address public

health practitioners as much as other anthropologists (e.g. Nichter, 2008).

Work and livelihoods

Discussions of class in South Asia have generally revolved around economists’ debates

about the mode of production in South Asia (now well behind us) or more cross-

disciplinary debates about the relationships between caste and class as organizing features

of social relationships at work (see Harriss-White, 2003). Barring the work of Béteille

(1972 and 2002 [originally published in 1966]), anthropologists played a small role in the

early debates. Perhaps (as Chibber, 2008 and Inden, 1990 argue, though in very different

ways), the centrality of caste and religion to the intellectual construction of South Asia

meant that anthropologists were for a time unwilling to engage with issues of work and

labour. Nevertheless, social and economic historians concerned with, say, industrial

workers and internal and overseas migration (e.g. Raj Chandavarkar, Nandini Gooptu,

Peter Robb, Burton Stein and David Washbrook) helped to highlight issues of work, class

and livelihoods in the 1980s and 1990s. And since 1990, some anthropologists have

explored wider notions of intersectionality − how class, caste, gender, religion, region and

residence interact in the forging of identities in South Asia.

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 Parry et al. (1999) took this process a step forward by arguing for a rapprochement

between studies of caste, kinship and ritual representations and values, and the study of

industrial labour. In his overview of economic anthropology in South Asia, Harriss (2006)

considers four main themes: the ‘jajmani system’ (a classic theme that has not received

attention recently); the commercialization and commoditization of the rural economy;

research on the environment (which we deal with in the final section); and the economic

implications of caste and religion (we consider caste in terms of politics and identity in the

next section). Here, we focus on how labour is organized and experienced, and on

relationships between workers and employers of various kinds.

Whilst anthropologically aware economists such as Jean Drèze have worked on

rural development (e.g. his paper in Lanjouw and Stern, 1998), few anthropologists since

1990 have engaged with the transformations of the working experiences of rural

populations, whether as landlords, farmers or labourers, perhaps because some major

technological changes (e.g. shifts to mechanized ploughing and crop processing) were

largely completed in most of the region by the 1980s. Nevertheless, some recent work

looks at how ‘local understandings of agriculture … were profoundly shaped by globally

and nationally circulating discourses of development’ (Gupta, 1998: 6) and the self-

perceptions of farmers as they negotiate new seeds and working practices, often described

as biotechnology (see also Assayag, 2005; Vasavi, 1994). Breman’s research on sugar cane

workers in Gujarat was largely completed in the 1970s (Breman, 1985) but more recently

he has worked on bonded labour (Breman, 2007; Breman et al., 2009) and on labour

circulation (Breman, 1996, 2010). Rural class relations − in which caste and social power

intertwine − have been addressed for Bihar by Chakravarti (2001), and in biographical

statements, such as by Viramma and Racine (1997), which present the labourers’

viewpoints. Ruud (2003) examines the growth of communism in rural West Bengal, whilst

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Pandian (2010) explores the labour of cultivating crops and virtuous people among the

low-caste Kallars in Tamil Nadu (see also Deliège, 1998; Mendelsohn and Vicziany,

1998).

Turning to the urban economy, it is noteworthy that studies of entrepreneurs, or

managers more generally, are rare. An exception is Harriss (2003), whose revisiting of

Singer’s classic work (Singer, 1972) shows that Weberian debates over value systems,

religion and development are still relevant for understanding the motivations and work

practices of Tamil businessmen. The question of whether jobs in IT or call centres presage

new forms of social organization and ‘new workers’ has also recently attracted

considerable attention (Fuller and Narasimhan, 2007, 2008; Upadhya and Vasavi, 2007).

More work has been carried out on the urban working classes, both in the formal

and informal sectors (see e.g. Parry et al., 1999). Parry (e.g. 1999a; 1999b; 2003) has

focused on the workforce attached to the Bhilai steelworks in Chhattisgarh whilst De Neve

(2005) worked on weavers in Tamil Nadu (see also Chari, 2004) and Ciotti (2010) studied

Chamars, the largest Scheduled (or ex-Untouchable) caste in north India, as they moved

from rural to urban employment in and around Varanasi. Despite the well-known

demography of Muslims in India (disproportionately urban and industrial workers, usually

in the informal sector), few studies focus on Muslims (but see Mann, 1992; Venkatesan,

2009). The domestic workers studied by Ray and Qayum (2009) form an essential but

often ignored part of the urban economy, as do child labourers (Blanchet 2001). Other

studies of occupational groups include Doron (2008) on Ganges river boatmen and Bear

(2007) on railway workers. Furthermore, anthropologists have studied occupants of

religious positions through the lenses of ‘occupation’ − looking at the work they do, how

they learn the trade and what skills they transmit to their children (e.g. Fuller, 2003; Parry,

1994; Seneviratne, 1999).

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 In many industrial sectors, the old labour force has lost its relative security, and

new forms of employment have become dominant. Heuzé (1996), for instance, explores

the dilemmas of coalminers, workers from what some call the aristocracy of labour (with

permanent contracts and social benefits), facing the prospect of informalization, if not for

themselves, then for their children. Breman (2004) shows how textile-mill closures

transformed the lives of the urban working class in Ahmedabad as they struggled for

alternative work, usually informal and insecure, in the new economy. Studies of women

factory and home-based workers in Sri Lanka (Hewamanne, 2007; Lynch, 2007) and

Bangladesh contribute to debates around whether or not such employment has been

exploitative or has opened new avenues for self-expression and independence − or both

(see Kabeer, 2001for an account of garment work that examines both ends of the value

chain in Bangladesh and London).

In different ways, South Asia’s economies (especially in India, Sri Lanka and

Bangladesh) have been transformed by intense processes of globalization and economic

liberalization since the late 1980s. In a polemical attack on accounts based on South Asia’s

supposed ‘Otherness’, however, Gupta (2009) insists that understanding the processes that

underlie the ‘new’ jobs of ‘India Shining’ also entails exposing the close links between

growth in the high-technology sectors, on the one hand, and sweatshops, casualization of

labour and rural stagnation, on the other.

Religion, identities and political conflict

Caste and religion have been core preoccupations in anthropological studies in South Asia

in which debates about the contributions of Dumont (1980 [1966]) have been central.

Bayly (1999) and Dirks (2001) provide useful historical contextualization, whilst the

844
papers in Khare (2009) and Sharma and Chatterjee (1994) critically analyse Louis

Dumont’s contribution to understanding hierarchy, caste and pollution. Béteille’s work has

often been a more or less explicit dialogue with Dumont’s legacy (see, for example,

Béteille, 2001; Béteille et al., 2005).

There are also several ethnographic studies from India in the recent period, among

them: village Hindu rituals, including mourning rituals, by Clark-Decès (Clark-Decès,

2005; Nabokov, 2000) and the village temples of the socially weak (Mines, 2005); on Jains

(Laidlaw, 1995); accounts of ritual dance re-enactments of the Mahabharata (including

subaltern inversions of the conventional relationships between heroes and villains) and the

connections between ritual healing and social justice in Garhwal (Sax, 2002, 2009); and

religion in Ladakh (Mills, 2002; see also van Beek and Pirie, 2008). For Sri Lanka, recent

work includes discussions of sorcery among Sinhala Buddhists (Kapferer, 1997) and

Sinhala healing rituals (Scott, 1994). Studies in Nepal include Gray (2006), Kondos (2004)

and Ramble (2008).

If social anthropologists and sociologists have conventionally studied everyday and

relatively stable life, however, the period since the early 1990s has provided a particular set

of challenges for researchers working in South Asia. Sri Lanka was embroiled in a violent

civil war from the mid-1980s, whilst there was Maoist insurgency in Nepal from the mid-

1990s. And India has seen numerous outbreaks of violence and disorder − in particular

upper-caste unrest associated with the implementation of the Mandal Commission’s

recommendations to grant ‘reservations’ in state education and employment to the ‘Other

Backward Classes’ (OBCs) in 1990, the growing assertiveness and success in electoral

politics of the historically dispossessed Scheduled Castes (or Dalits), the rise of

organizations associated with Hindu Nationalism, and armed Maoist (or Naxalite)

movements in a swathe of eastern India. Throughout the region, religion, caste and

845
ethnicity have increasingly been studied in their politicized forms, heavily influenced by

these wider political developments.

Some political scientists (e.g. Christophe Jaffrelot, Paul Brass) and historians (e.g.

Mushirul Hasan, David Ludden) draw on ethnographic sources on ethnic and communal

politics in South Asia. Among anthropologists, Spencer (2007) and Tambiah (1996)

provide overviews, whilst several edited collections examine riots, insurgency, violence,

lower caste and Adivasi (‘tribal’) mobilization and their causes and consequences, often

with papers about different parts of South Asia and contributors from a range of disciplines

(e.g. Chatterjee and Jeganathan, 2000; Das, 1990; Gellner, 2009; Price and Ruud, 2010;

Shah and Pettigrew, 2010); others provide a gendered window onto these themes (Hasan,

1994; Jayawardena and De Alwis, 1996; Jeffery and Basu, 1998; Sarkar and Butalia, 1995;

Skidmore and Lawrence, 2007).

Béteille (1991) argued that family was more important to the reproduction of

inequality in contemporary India than caste, though he acknowledges the social importance

of caste, for instance in relation to arranging marriages. Yet the politics of caste has

continued to attract considerable attention. Fuller, in his introduction to an edited

collection, specifically addressed the relevance of anthropological and other academic

contributions to the debates over whether (and if so how) to implement the Mandal

Commission report (Fuller, 1996: 2). Accounts of a ‘second democratic revolution’ with

subordinate castes demanding an equal place at the political table owe much to the work of

Yogendra Yadav (2000) and to Christophe Jaffrelot (2009), whilst Jodhka (2001) discusses

how inter-caste relationships are more often characterized by fission and competition than

interdependence (for a general overview, see Jaffrelot, 2003). More general

anthropological discussions of caste and politics can be found in Assayag (1995),

Bhattacharyya (2010), Rao (2009) and Shah (2001, 2004). Studies focusing on Dalit

846
politics include Deliège (1999), Dube (1998), Gorringe (2004) and Mendelsohn and

Vicziany (1998); studies addressing Adivasi politics include Froerer (2007) on the rise of

Hindutva-inflected schooling for Adivasi children in Chhattisgarh and Shah (2010) on how

the appropriation of global discourses of indigeneity inadvertently perpetuates Adivasis’

economic and civic marginalization. Studies of dominant castes in north India, like the Jats

(Gupta 1997) and Yadavs (Michelutti 2008), are matched by Rutten (1995) on Patidars in

Gujarat, and Upadhya (in Rutten 1997) on Kamma Naidus in Andhra Pradesh.

Since 1990, communal politics (or the politics of religious community), have also

been very prominent, reinvigorating discussions of secularism (Madan, 2009). In India, the

increasingly aggressive tactics of the Hindu Nationalists (variously called the Hindu Right,

the Hindutva Brigade and the Sangh Parivar) have been crucial in relation to both

national/state politics and the everyday lives of India’s religious minorities (Muslims in

particular). An early overview is provided by van der Veer (1994), whilst Appadurai

focuses on Hindu Nationalist paranoia about the threat posed to India’s integrity by its

minority populations (Appadurai, 2006) and an edited volume addresses Hindu ideas about

violence (Vidal et al., 2003). Several anthropologists have conducted ethnographic studies

amongst groups associated with the Hindu Right, among them Eckert (2003), Hansen

(1999, 2001), Mathur (2008), Menon (2009) and Sen (2007). Brosius (2004) focuses on the

media and Hindutva mobilization, Kaur (2005) on Hindu nationalist politics and public

spectacle, and Harlan (2003) examines hero worship and masculinity in Rajasthan in the

context of right-wing Hindu activism. Another strand of Hindutva politics has been the

efforts to inflate the numbers of ‘Hindus’: for instance, by trying to draw the not always

compliant Dalits into their ambit (Narayan, 2006, 2009).

The centrality of caste in the social anthropology of India has meant that rather

little ethnographic attention was paid to Muslims (but see Metcalf, 2004, 2009 for

847
anthropologically relevant historical accounts). To Hindutva sympathizers, Muslims are a

pampered minority whose patriotism is in doubt − but a recent government report indicated

that India’s Muslims are economically and socially marginalized in much of the country

(Sachar, 2006). Ethnographies both endorse and complicate this picture through accounts

of Muslims located in varied social niches and practising Islam in differing ways. Four

edited collections examine, respectively, Islamic reformism (Osella and Osella, 2008),

‘lived Islam’ (Ahmad and Reifeld, 2004) and Muslims’ kinship (Ahmad, 2003), whilst

Madan (1995) includes papers on a range of topics. Accounts that give a window onto

Muslims’ diversity include studies of the Meos of Rajasthan (Jamous, 2003; Mayaram,

1997), portraits of individual Muslims (Banerjee, 2008/2010), Muslims in rural north India

grappling with their marginalization (Jeffery and Jeffery, 2006), the maritime culture of

Muslims in western India (Simpson, 2006a), and madrasas and the Muslim reform

movement, the Tablighi Jama’at (Sikand, 2002, 2005). Other studies focus on the fluidity

of communal boundaries (Flueckiger, 2006) and the everyday lives of Hindus, Dalits and

Muslims living in a neighbourhood of a north Indian city (Frøystad, 2005).

The Partition of British India in 1947 that created independent India also produced

the two ‘wings’ of Pakistan; in 1971, the Pakistan civil war resulted in the creation of

Bangladesh. These events have left a continuing legacy in contemporary South Asia:

several scholars have explored memories of the 1947 Partition in north-west India (see

Butalia, 1998; Kaul, 2001/2002; Kaur, 2007; Menon and Bhasin, 1998), as well as of

people’s memories of later communal violence, like the sexual violence perpetrated during

Pakistan’s civil war (Mookherjee, 2011) in what became Bangladesh. Punjab has seen

considerable inter-religious and political tension, not only during the Partition but also in

later political struggles. Conflicts over Sikh identity have attracted recent attention (e.g.

Shani, 2008), as have emigration and the violent struggle for an independent Sikh state

848
(Chopra, 2010) and the anti-Sikh riots after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira

Gandhi in 1984 (Das, 1995). Kashmir, a region where the legacy of Partition is highly

contested, has not been the subject of much contemporary ethnography (but see Butalia,

2003).

In Nepal, recent research has been heavily coloured by the Maoist insurgency.

After 1996, Maoists gradually extended their hold from the west of the country to other

regions, with far-reaching effects on people’s everyday lives. There is now a wealth of

volumes addressing various facets of the insurgency (e.g. Adams, 1998; Gellner, 2003,

2007, 2010; Hutt, 2004; Lawoti and Pahari, 2009; Lecomte-Tilouine, 2009; Lecomte-

Tilouine and Dollfus, 2003; Pettigrew, under review).

Even more so in Sri Lanka have the violence, suffering and displacement

associated with the civil war dominated social science research since the early 1990s.

Seneviratne (1999) and Tambiah (1992) approach these issues through accounts of the

changing roles of Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka, highlighting their increasing engagement

with politics and violence. A recently reissued edited volume tackles related issues of

identity politics, nationalism and violence (Jeganathan and Ismail, 2009). Others have

addressed these topics from more specific research sites: for instance, Spencer (1990)

examines how Buddhism and Sinhala nationalism played out in a village in southern Sri

Lanka, whilst Argenti-Pillen (2002) focuses on how women in southern Sri Lanka dealt

with the culture of violence associated with the recruitment of local men to be soldiers in

the fight against the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). From the other side, there

are accounts of the situation of Tamils − for instance, of Tamil estate workers (Daniel,

1996), of children recruited into the LTTE (Trawick, 2007) and of Tamil-speaking

Muslims and Hindus (McGilvray, 2008).

849
State and globalization

Conventionally, the massive changes that came with economic liberalization are dated in

India from 1991, with slightly different dates for the other South Asian countries (see

Corbridge and Harriss, 2000, for an anthropologically informed account). Changes at the

level of the state in South Asia were highlighted by Fuller and Spencer (1990: 97) in their

assessment that ‘the relationship between state and locality’ was one of ‘the most pressing

problems in the region. The challenge for anthropologists is to find culturally sensitive

ways of analysing these problems, and such analyses must start from the quotidian

experience of life in towns and villages.’

Since 2000 in particular, attention has been paid to the state and its development

agendas. The new interest in the state, governmentality and governance as well as in local

constructions and discourses around the state can be seen most clearly in the edited

collection from conferences in London in 1998 and 1999 (Fuller and Bénéï, 2000). In the

introduction, Fuller and Harriss (2000) note that the modern state is central to India’s

society (and only slightly less so elsewhere in South Asia) and that, despite the difficulty of

studying it ethnographically, the fruits of such efforts make the endeavour worthwhile.

New overview work on the state in South Asia includes Gupta and

Sivaramakrishnan (2010). Sharma (2008) discusses the impacts of an Indian government-

funded agency (Mahila Samakhya, or Women’s Equality) on women’s lives and identities

and on gender relations. Many of the developmental activities of the state enter spheres

where private and non-governmental actors are significant, and the state is not just a

provider but also a regulator and sometimes partner. Education is a prime example, with

recent books exemplifying different approaches to schools as sites for nation-building.

Srivastava (1998) focused on the Doon School, an influential élite private school, to tease

out aspects of its own ideology and its contribution to national ideology, whilst Bénéï

850
(2008), on schools in Maharashtra, provides schoolroom ethnography, amongst much else

(see also Thapan, 1991). Anthropologists have also studied electoral politics: the fruits of

early work under the direction of M.N. Srinivas and A.M. Shah have recently been brought

together (Shah, 2007), and Banerjee has coordinated a multi-sited ethnography of the 2009

Indian national elections (Banerjee, 2011), building on her argument on ‘sacred elections’

(Banerjee, 2007). The activities of aid agencies have increasingly attracted the

ethnographic attention of anthropologists, partly because many now have insider

knowledge of development agencies (governmental, inter-governmental and non-

governmental): Mosse (2004), for instance, highlights the ethical and political issues that

confront anthropologists who work as development consultants. Other studies of

development processes from an anthropological perspective, with a focus on South Asia,

include Crewe and Harrison (1999) and Gardner and Lewis (1996).

States, of course, do many things, are fractured in different ways and engage with

the citizenry (and others) coercively as well as developmentally. The state in its coercive

roles has been addressed in several places (e.g. Das, 2007), but there has been little

anthropological work on the police in South Asia and their relationships with everyday

criminality (but see Fauregui, 2010). Work on the state’s role in fomenting as well as

controlling riots has, however, come from anthropologically minded political scientists

(e.g. Brass, 1997), whilst Jasani (2011) focuses on the rehabilitation of Muslims forced to

relocate after that ethnic cleansing in Ahmedabad (Gujarat) in 2002. Anthropological

studies of other aspects of coercive state action include work on slum clearance and

resettlement programmes carried out in Delhi during the Emergency of 1975−77 and their

linkages with the family planning programme (Tarlo, 2003).

The long-running sagas of dam-building (Nehru’s ‘temples of modernity’) have

generated huge forced population movements and resistance: the best known is the

851
complex of dams on the River Narmada in western India (see, in particular, Baviskar,

1995). More recently, earthquakes and reconstruction programmes have also generated

new insights into the transformation of the state (e.g. in Gujarat; Simpson, 2006b), whilst

da Costa (2009) discusses the popular protests in West Bengal against state acquisition of

land for industrial development and Padel and Das (2010) provide an account of the global

ramifications of bauxite mining and local resistance to it in Orissa (Odisha). These studies

reveal much about the workings of the Indian state as well as the strategies employed by

poor people in negotiating and resisting its efforts. For Sri Lanka, the papers in de Alwis

and Hedman (2009) on the 2005 tsunami provide ethnographic accounts and case studies

of aid, activism and reconstruction (see also McGilvray and Gamburd, 2010).

Considerable attention has been paid to the anthropology of the environment, and

especially of forests and the state’s role in their management, with anthropological work

that spans the colonial and post-colonial worlds being especially prominent

(Sivaramakrishnan, 1999; Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal, 2003; Sundar, 1997). Sundar et

al. (2001) look at the processes through which the Indian government established

‘participatory’ mechanisms for forestry governance (see also Linkenbach, 2007; Madsen,

1999). Guha − an anthropologist and historian − produced an early discussion of

environmental protest movements (particularly Chipko, in Uttarkhand) (Guha, 1989) and a

later intellectual biography of Verrier Elwin, an anthropologist who wrote on forest-

dwellers in Central and North-East India from the 1930s to the 1950s (Guha, 1999). Other

anthropological work on the environment includes Gold and Gujar (2002) on Rajasthan

and Jalais (2009) on the Sundarbans in Bengal.

The interrelationships between local and global processes and the movement of

ideas, people and cultural resources have attracted the attention of sociologists, economists

and political scientists for many years, and global products of many kinds travel from, to,

852
through and within South Asia. South Asia has, of course, been integrated into global

social, economic, political and cultural flows for many centuries, as the anthropologist-

turned-novelist Amitav Ghosh reminds us (1992). Distinctly anthropological approaches to

globalization in South Asia now include research on discourses and identities, and on

material and symbolic consumption. Contemporary globalization was the focus of a large

study coordinated from the LSE (Assayag and Fuller, 2005). Several authors examine the

cultural impact of the creative industries within South Asia and beyond, looking at

Bollywood in particular, but also at other regional film industries, soap operas and music

videos (e.g. Dickey, 1993; Dwyer and Patel, 2002; Kaur and Sinha, 2005; Mankekar,

1999). Liechty (2003) looks at the cultural practices of Nepal’s new middle class,

examining their consumption of cinema and video, popular music, film magazines, local

fashion systems and advertising. These products are central to middle-class consumption in

South Asia, and Kaur and Mazzarella (2009) show how the state’s efforts to control these

changes through censorship also have productive consequences. Some work addresses

local understandings of the ‘modernity’ that such consumption promises (Appadurai, 1996;

Breckenridge, 1995; Gupta, 2000). Mazzarella (2003) shows how the advertising industry

in Mumbai contributes to the construction of consumerist globalization through particular

aesthetics and visual representations. Srivastava (2007) addresses sexuality and modernity,

and how a particular heterosexual imagination has been established in India, whilst Warrier

(2004) focuses on the middle-class devotees of a female guru. Studies focusing on young

people include Favero (2005) on young men in Delhi, Lukose (2010) on youth and

consumption in Kerala and Nisbett (2009) on young people and the IT industry in

Bangalore. Other discussions of the middle classes cover diverse topics related to leisure,

cultural politics and consumption: see for instance Brosius (2010), Jaffrelot and van der

Veer (2008) and Ray and Baviskar (2011).

853
 Fernandes (2006) discusses how the new Indian middle class and older élite groups

vie for dominance, and how consumption patterns, their associated socio-political positions

(such as membership of NGOs) and their related discursive activities also link the middle

class with state power. One aspect of middle- class involvement in local politics is

engagement with environmental issues: for instance, the transformation of urban settings

such as Delhi in the interests of middle-class consumption and politics (Baviskar, 2007).

Yet middle-class consumption also produces prodigious quantities of waste, whose

processing provides an employment niche for some sectors of the urban poor (Gill, 2009)

and which even enters a global market in textile recycling (Norris, 2010). For Nepal, Bista

(2008 [1991]) examines how conflicts between the urban classes and other groups in the

Kathmandu Valley affect how the local environment is being transformed, and Ortner

(1999) discusses how Nepali Sherpa identities are being affected by their work with

climbing expeditions (see also Adams, 1995).

Globalization also raises issues about social relationships across national

boundaries. There is, for instance, a very substantial literature on South Asians migrants in

many other parts of the world that we are not covering here. Several scholars, however,

have specifically focused on the impact of these current migrations on their sending

societies (e.g. in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Kerala: see Gamburd, 2000; Gardner, 1995;

and the comparative collection in Osella and Gardner, 2004). For a study exploring the

implications of globalization for the elderly, see Lamb (2009). State boundaries are

problematized in a rather different fashion by van Schendel (2005) in a study of the Bengal

borderlands − between India and Bangladesh − that highlights the porosity of national

borders and unsettles people’s relationships to place and identity.

Conclusion

854
As can be seen, the body of work by anthropologists and ethnographically inclined

scholars from cognate disciplines in the past two decades is impressive, wide-ranging and

with some outstanding examples that have used South Asian material to advance the

development of anthropology well beyond the regional literature. In conclusion, we want

to pick out just four issues that will, we think, be increasingly important in the work that is

done over the coming decades:

 diaspora as a source of social change

 the ongoing dynamics generated by the tussles over poverty and affluence,

environment and economy

 the political implications of these conflicts

 and the changing character of those likely to be doing ethnographic writing.

South Asian diasporas are small in comparison with the populations they have left behind

− but they are increasingly significant in terms of their impact on what happens in South

Asia. For several decades, rural migrants − for instance from Punjab, Kerala and

Bangladesh − have sent back substantial remittances. These have funded investments in

housing, land and children’s education, aside from assisting with the daily subsistence

needs of their relatives. Some emigrants have endowed schools, hospitals or religious

buildings; others have returned and established businesses in commercialized farming or

transport. More recent migrants, often students and professionals, have also played their

part in disseminating new ideas and values, exposing their friends and neighbours to

consumer goods that the middle classes − and others too − are coming to regard as

essentials, or investing in new ventures such as IT industries and private hospitals that

resemble five-star hotels. Others have attempted to draw on their new expertise to foster

‘development’, or have funded religious and political organizations. The cultures and

855
economies of South Asia, then, are not hermetically sealed. To a lesser − but also

significant − extent, such processes are also sparked by internal migration, to small towns,

cities and the metropolises such as Mumbai, Dhaka, Colombo or Kathmandu. These

migrations and the social, economic and political links that flow from them serve to

underscore the globalizing character of people’s social worlds. The village − its isolation

and timelessness always a figment − will be even more likely to be recognized by

anthropologists for what it is: a social world tied in numerous and complex ways to the

global, even if these links are less obvious and overt than in cities with their shopping

malls and multiplex cinemas.

Yet the rural and the urban stand in complex relationships, sometimes overlapping

and sometimes not with other categories, such as agriculture, industry and services, or

poverty and affluence. The dynamism of knowledge-based economic changes sits side-by-

side with enduring mass poverty both in the rural areas and in urban slums. Economic

liberalization is continuing to undermine state provision of affordable education and health

care and facilitates the development of income-generating activities for the urban middle

classes in the increasingly competitive markets in private schooling and medical facilities −

with complex implications for gender politics, religious and ethnic minorities and the poor

in general. Yet new state initiatives − in poverty alleviation, public health or schooling −

appear to be trying to stem the tide. Local industrialists and national governments engage

in extractive quarrying and mining or infrastructural works that threaten the environments

on which the poor depend. In the face of such competition over public goods, the politics

of identity will not evaporate: indeed, South Asia seems perfectly capable of ‘modernizing’

at the same time as apparently time-hallowed ascribed statuses, far from eroding, morph

into new and often politically pernicious forms.

856
 Since 1990, anthropologists have been engaging more with these highly politicized

aspects of life in South Asia, paying attention to negotiations over economic resources, to

struggles over access to democratic institutions, to how the powerful exclude the poor from

the fruits of ‘progress’ or to popular insurgency in the face of state complicity with

powerful economic interests and failure to protect the most vulnerable. Such political

engagements are likely to be a central feature of anthropology in South Asia. The growing

involvement of anthropologists outside academia − in NGOs and civil rights organizations,

and as consultants in donor agencies with poverty alleviation agendas − reflects a more

general shift in anthropology as a discipline with a greater willingness to address questions

of power and social and economic inequalities that engages more directly with the inter-

penetrations of the local and the global.

Increasingly, South Asians themselves will be leading the anthropological work on

South Asia. Some have travelled abroad for higher education, some are children of the

diaspora, some have obtained academic posts outside South Asia, and some have studied

and worked abroad and returned to academic positions in South Asia. Their rising numbers

will generate important questions, for instance, about the tensions between the statuses of

‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ for anthropologists from South Asian backgrounds trained overseas

and about the impact of training abroad on the directions that anthropology and related

disciplines will take within South Asia. How these tensions play out will inevitably be very

productive, if sometimes uncomfortable, as anthropologists engage differently with their

local interlocutors. Moreover, informants themselves are engaging with anthropological

production, interrogating the anthropologist’s web presence or extending Facebook

invitations, before, during and after fieldwork. But if anthropologists of South Asia,

whether based within the region or beyond, can maintain their engagement with

ethnography and fieldwork in their old and new forms and can meet the challenges posed

857
by rapid social and economic change, they will continue to produce exciting and

innovative accounts that speak beyond the region to the discipline as whole.

Acknowledgement

Several colleagues kindly provided useful feedback on this chapter: Mukulika Banerjee,

Jacob Copeman, Martin Fuchs, Christopher Fuller, Ian Harper, Lotte Hoek, Helen

Lambert, Antje Linkenbach, Jonathan Parry, Santi Rozario, Geoffrey Samuel, Alpa Shah,

Jonathan Spencer and Susan Wadley.

858
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