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Descendants of indentured laborers brought from India to the Caribbean between 1845 and 1917 comprise more than forty percent of Trinidad’s population today. While many Indo-Trinidadians identify themselves as Indian, what “Indian” signifies—about nationalism, gender, culture, caste, race, and religion—in the Caribbean is different from what it means on the subcontinent. Yet the ways that “Indianness” is conceived of and performed in India and in Trinidad have historically been, and remain, intimately related. Offering an innovative analysis of how ideas of Indian identity negotiated within the Indian diaspora in Trinidad affect cultural identities “back home,” Tejaswini Niranjana models a necessary project: comparative research across the global South, scholarship that decenters the “first world” West as the referent against which postcolonial subjects understand themselves and are understood by others. Niranjana draws on nineteenth-century travel narratives, anthropological and historical studies of Trinidad, Hindi film music, and the lyrics, performance, and reception of chutney-soca and calypso songs to argue that perceptions of Indian female sexuality in Trinidad have long been central to the formation and disruption of dominant narratives of nationhood, modernity, and normative sexuality in India. She illuminates debates in India about “the woman question” as they played out in the early-twentieth-century campaign against indentured servitude in the tropics. In so doing, she reveals India’s disavowal of the indentured woman—viewed as morally depraved by her forced labor in Trinidad—as central to its own anticolonial struggle. Turning to the present, Niranjana looks to Trinidad’s most dynamic site of cultural negotiation: popular music. She describes how contested ideas of Indian femininity are staged by contemporary Trinidadian musicians—male and female, of both Indian and African descent—in genres ranging from new hybrids like chutney-soca to the older but still vibrant music of Afro-Caribbean calypso.
An innovative analysis of how ideas of Indian identity negotiated within the Indian diaspora in Trinidad affect cultural identities "back home" in India.
Religious nationalists and women’s activists have transformed India over the past century. They debated the idea of India under colonial rule, shaped the constitutional structure of Indian democracy, and questioned the legitimacy of the postcolonial consensus, as they politicized one dimension of identity. Using a historical comparative approach, the book argues that external events, activist agency in strategizing, and the political economy of transnational networks explain the relative success and failure of Hindu nationalism and the Indian women’s movement rather than the ideological claims each movement makes. By focusing on how particular activist strategies lead to increased levels of public support, it shows how it is these strategies rather than the ideologies of Hindutva and feminism that mobilize people. Both of these social movements have had decades of great power and influence, and decades of relative irrelevance, and both challenge postcolonial India’s secular settlement – its division of public and private. The book goes on to highlight new insights into the inner dynamics of each movement by showing how the same strategies - grassroots education, electoral mobilization, media management, donor cultivation - lead to similarly positive results. Bringing together the study of Hindu nationalism and the Indian women’s movement, the book will be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Religion, Gender Studies, and South Asian Politics.
India's over 200 million Dalits, once called "untouchables," have been mobilized by social movements and political parties, but the outcomes of this mobilization are puzzling. Dalits' ethnic parties have performed poorly in elections in states where movements demanding social equality have been strong while they have succeeded in states where such movements have been entirely absent or weak. In Mobilizing the Marginalized, Amit Ahuja demonstrates that the collective action of marginalized groups--those that are historically stigmatized and disproportionately poor ED is distinct. Drawing on extensive original research conducted across four of India's largest states, he shows, for the marginalized, social mobilization undermines the bloc voting their ethnic parties' rely on for electoral triumph and increases multi-ethnic political parties' competition for marginalized votes. He presents evidence showing that a marginalized group gains more from participating in a social movement and dividing support among parties than from voting as a bloc for an ethnic party.
Mobilizing Islam explores how and why Islamic groups succeeded in galvanizing educated youth into politics under the shadow of Egypt's authoritarian state, offering important and surprising answers to a series of pressing questions. Under what conditions does mobilization by opposition groups become possible in authoritarian settings? Why did Islamist groups have more success attracting recruits and overcoming governmental restraints than their secular rivals? And finally, how can Islamist mobilization contribute to broader and more enduring forms of political change throughout the Muslim world? Moving beyond the simplistic accounts of "Islamic fundamentalism" offered by much of the Western media, Mobilizing Islam offers a balanced and persuasive explanation of the Islamic movement's dramatic growth in the world's largest Arab state.
India's over 200 million Dalits, once called "untouchables," have been mobilized by social movements and political parties, but the outcomes of this mobilization are puzzling. Dalits' ethnic parties have performed poorly in elections in states where movements demanding social equality have been strong while they have succeeded in states where such movements have been entirely absent or weak. In Mobilizing the Marginalized, Amit Ahuja demonstrates that the collective action of marginalized groups--those that are historically stigmatized and disproportionately poor — is distinct. Drawing on extensive original research conducted across four of India's largest states, he shows, for the marginalized, social mobilization undermines the bloc voting their ethnic parties' rely on for electoral triumph and increases multi-ethnic political parties' competition for marginalized votes. He presents evidence showing that a marginalized group gains more from participating in a social movement and dividing support among parties than from voting as a bloc for an ethnic party.
Women Mobilizing Memory, a transnational exploration of the intersection of feminism, history, and memory, shows how the recollection of violent histories can generate possibilities for progressive futures. Questioning the politics of memory-making in relation to experiences of vulnerability and violence, this wide-ranging collection asks: How can memories of violence and its afterlives be mobilized for change? What strategies can disrupt and counter public forgetting? What role do the arts play in addressing the erasure of past violence from current memory and in creating new visions for future generations? Women Mobilizing Memory emerges from a multiyear feminist collaboration bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, artists, and activists from Chile, Turkey, and the United States. The essays in this book assemble and discuss a deep archive of works that activate memory across a variety of protest cultures, ranging from seemingly minor acts of defiance to broader resistance movements. The memory practices it highlights constitute acts of repair that demand justice but do not aim at restitution. They invite the creation of alternative histories that can reconfigure painful pasts and presents. Giving voice to silenced memories and reclaiming collective memories that have been misrepresented in official narratives, Women Mobilizing Memory offers an alternative to more monumental commemorative practices. It models a new direction for memory studies and testifies to a continuing hope for an alternative future.
Mobilizing for Democracy is an in-depth study into how ordinary citizens and their organizations mobilize to deepen democracy. Featuring a collection of new empirical case studies from Angola, Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, this important new book illustrates how forms of political mobilization, such as protests, social participation, activism, litigation and lobbying, engage with the formal institutions of representative democracy in ways that are core to the development of democratic politics. No other volume has brought together examples from such a broad Southern spectrum and covering such a diversity of actors: rural and urban dwellers, transnational activists, religious groups, politicians and social leaders. The cases illuminate the crucial contribution that citizen mobilization makes to democratization and the building of state institutions, and reflect the uneasy relationship between citizens and the institutions that are designed to foster their political participation.
Examines the emergence of anti-imperialist internationalism during the interwar years from the perspective of India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
A vivid look at how India has developed the idea of entrepreneurial citizens as leaders mobilizing society and how people try to live that promise Can entrepreneurs develop a nation, serve the poor, and pursue creative freedom, all while generating economic value? In Chasing Innovation, Lilly Irani shows the contradictions that arise as designers, engineers, and businesspeople frame development and governance as opportunities to innovate. Irani documents the rise of "entrepreneurial citizenship" in India over the past seventy years, demonstrating how a global ethos of development through design has come to shape state policy, economic investment, and the middle class in one of the world’s fastest-growing nations. Drawing on her own professional experience as a Silicon Valley designer and nearly a decade of fieldwork following a Delhi design studio, Irani vividly chronicles the practices and mindsets that hold up professional design as the answer to the challenges of a country of more than one billion people, most of whom are poor. While discussions of entrepreneurial citizenship promise that Indian children can grow up to lead a nation aspiring to uplift the poor, in reality, social, economic, and political structures constrain whose enterprise, which hopes, and which needs can be seen as worthy of investment. In the process, Irani warns, powerful investors, philanthropies, and companies exploit citizens' social relations, empathy, and political hope in the quest to generate economic value. Irani argues that the move to recast social change as innovation, with innovators as heroes, frames others—craftspeople, workers, and activists—as of lower value, or even dangers to entrepreneurial forms of development. With meticulous historical context and compelling stories, Chasing Innovation lays bare how long-standing power hierarchies such as class, caste, language, and colonialism continue to shape opportunity in a world where good ideas supposedly rule all.