Media in conflict or conflict in media: examining media coverage of conflict in Northeast India

The paper looks at how media engages with the issue of framing movements in the northeastern state of Manipur. The focus of the paper is on the demand for Inner Line Permit in Manipur that landed the state into conflict between the communities of the state. The passing of the three bills, as discussed in the paper, by the state government has snowballed into ethnic tensions and re-opened the hill–valley divide in this northeastern state. By using frame analysis, the paper intends to explicate the issue of media framing within the socio-political context of the state. The paper then engages with the process in which local media frames movements that are diametrically opposed to one another. The study further reveals that the local media in Manipur are greatly influenced by the local politics and remain integral to it.     

Gender,tribe and development: a case study of the Reang tribal community in Tripura (Northeast India)

The article critically examines the gendered impacts of state-led development among the Reang tribal community in Tripura (Northeast India) and outlines causes of gender-based inequalities that affect Reang women’s ability to engage in livelihood, achieve financial independence and participate in political affairs of the state. The article outlines two interlinked arguments. First, gender-based inequalities are not adequately addressed by the postcolonial Indian state which tends to homogenise members of tribal communities through development policies by privileging ethnicity over gender. Second, gender-based inequalities are also not adequately addressed within the Reang community highlighting complex intra-tribal dynamics wherein differential notion of inequalities among the Reangs and position of certain influential actors within the community determines which issues are addressed and which are marginalised.     

Transnational ties and ethnic identities in the parental homeland: second-generation Indian Americans in India

ABSTRACT

This article explores the ‘return’ migration of high-skilled, second-generation Indian-Americans from the United States to India. Based on interviews with fifty-six respondents, it asks: What transnational ties do second-generation Indian Americans maintain with India prior to return? Upon return, what are their ‘reverse’ transnational linkages to the United States? How do these linkages shape their ethnic identities, if at all? Findings suggest that respondents’ transnational ties to India prior to return reinforce their identities as Indian Americans. Once in India, they maintain affective and civic ties to the United States, the country where they were born or raised. Further, American-inflected social ideas and norms shape returnees’ interactions with domestic workers in India. As they grapple with the disparities between Western and Indian norms on the treatment of domestic help, respondents privilege ‘American’ identities. These findings highlight the transnational ties and identity construction and negotiation of second-generation returnees.     

Citizenship Amendment Bill 2016: continuities and contestations with special reference to politics in Assam,India

ABSTRACT

This article is an attempt to unpack how the Citizenship Amendment Bill 2016 that proposed citizenship on the basis of religious affiliation trace its past from narrative rooted in partition and idea of religious identity in determination of citizenship status in India. The act proposes, persons belonging to minority community namely Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Parsi and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan who have either entered into India without valid travel documents or the validity of their documents have expired are eligible to apply for Indian citizenship by naturalisation in 7 years instead of existing 12 years. Building on existing scholarship, field experience and media reports this article argues proposed citizenship amendment bill that favours citizenship status for persecuted minorities defined primarily as Hindus leaving Muslims is not an attempt to redefine citizenship but reinforce logic that favours narrative of India for Hindus.     

Anti-development or identity crisis? Misreading civil society in Meghalaya,India

This paper discusses the complex relationship between civil society and development in Asia by examining the role of ethnic identity in anti-development movements. Local and transnational movements by civil society actors against dams, mines, and deforestation have gained increased attention in academia and activist circles in the last decade, often used as evidence in arguments that development as part of neo-liberalism and/or state-led socialism is faltering. Furthermore, tribal, indigenous, and minority communities are often portrayed as having a closer relationship to the environment, which is seen as instrumental in their opposition to development projects. While agreeing with these arguments to some extent, this paper examines the local context of anti-development movements using research from fieldwork in the Indian state of Meghalaya and argues that struggles over development projects are also struggles over ethnic identity. In Meghalaya, civil society actors from the Khasi ethnic group have opposed several large development projects on the +grounds that these projects will attract labourers from Bangladesh and other parts of India, threatening the survival of the Khasi ethnic group. Damage to the environment, livelihoods, and loss of land are rarely a concern. The failure to recognize the influence of ethnic identity politics in critiques of development raises the risk of misreading both the extent of anti-development sentiments in civil society and the potential for development projects to be reframed by proponents into an acceptable ethnic guise. Furthermore, the actors contesting development through identity politics are overwhelmingly from urban areas, leaving rural people with limited access to civil society. This paper attempts to add a critical perspective to current literature on development and civil society using empirical examples from one of the least researched regions in Asia.     

Collective and Elective Ethnicity: Caste Among Urban Muslims in India

This article explores how the significance of ethnic identity can vary within a stable population, using caste among Muslims in Hyderabad, India as a case study. While some Hyderabadi Muslims are still embedded in ethnic networks, most now experience ethnicity as elective and do not rely on a corporate caste group for their social connections. This reflects a decline in the value of caste identities, which no longer provide economic or political resources. Increasingly, Muslims seek status through education, profession, or income. Thus, most Muslims in Hyderabad experience caste membership, identity, and networks in a weakened or attenuated way.     

Roads,tribes, and identity in Northeast India

ABSTRACT

Along with military expeditions and social and anthropological surveys, road-building projects were prominent strategies of the British in India when it came to dealing with tribes and territorialization of the frontier regions. Roads for territorial expansion and resource extraction were the core agenda of the colonial project in Northeast India. The post-colonial Indian state on the other hand built roads in the region for securing the borders, promoting national integration, and linking external markets. This article posits that road building has always been an act of power, which has at different times been aimed at smoothening relationships, securing borders, (dis)connecting people, enabling trade, creating spaces of contestation, or diluting boundaries between varied ethnic groups. The article analyzed the colonial state-making project through road construction and linked to the contemporary Indian state approach to infrastructure development in tribal-dominated areas of Northeast India.     

‘Between underground and over ground: narratives on the identity of women insurgents in Assam’

ABSTRACT

The Assam Movement (1979–1985) has been a turning point in the politics of Assam in India that has raised the question of identity and at the same time triggered the struggle to self-determination by the insurgent organization United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA). This paper aims to take identity as the point of departure to mark the transition of women’s role from the Assam Movement into their underground roles in ULFA. In such narratives of hero-making and patriotism, under-representation of women’s strategic involvement and self-sacrifices in the insurgent outfit often leaves the lives of the women members misrepresented and fails to highlight the in-betweens of life and death. This paper pushes the idea of identity assertion in Northeast India beyond citizenship and questions the way women’s presence in the insurgent organization gets narrated, documented, and established. Oral histories are crucial sources of data for this study.     

Black lives matter,capital, and ideology: Spiraling out from India

Piketty's propositions for arresting inequality are discussed through the lens of racism/casteism. We focus on the case of India's George Floyds—the persistence of caste and tribe oppression under economic growth in India—through the insights of our long‐term ethnographic research. We show that inequalities are intimately tied to dynamics of capitalist accumulation in which racial/ethnic/caste/tribe and gender difference is crucial. We argue for an analysis that truly integrates ideology and the dynamics of political economy. The wider implications, we argue are political; they lie in the question of what is to be done. Despite his ambitions to decenter economics, Piketty remains trapped in the logic of economics for what he proposes are essentially economic reforms within capitalism. Moreover, ideological change cannot be a matter of choice only, and cannot be challenged solely at the level of ideas around economic inequality. It will also have to be fought as a direct contest of oppressive ideologies such as racism, casteism, and patriarchy, leading to new counter‐hegemonic positions. We will argue that this takes us from a global history of ideology to a global anthropology of praxis. A first step is to genuinely center conversations with disciplines like anthropology, sociology, and subaltern history studying people and voices from below and from the margins, and the perspectives of scholars and activists from below and from the margins.     

State-initiated development and the Reang ethnic minority in Tripura (North East India)

This paper explores the wider implications of state-led development on the Reang ethnic minority in the North East Indian state of Tripura, and in doing so presents a critical view on such development endeavours. Basing itself on the study of the relationship between the state and the ethnic minorities, this research argues the following: – first, most state-led development programmes are formulated on a preconceived notion of ‘backwardness’ in the ethnic minorities. Second, state-led development projects create internal fissures and ruptures within ethnic minorities on issues of what constitutes development. Third, often, state-led development programmes create an image of oneself as inherently ‘backward’, whereby the conditioning of the mind plays an important role in extending the desire of the members of an ethnic minority to achieve this ‘imagined modernity’.     

Re-imaging everyday routines and educational aspirations under COVID-19 lockdown: Narratives of urban middle-class children in Punjab,India

Based on in-depth interviews with 24 middle-class Indian child participants, this is the first exploratory qualitative study, in India, to demonstrate the ways in which children as reflexive social actors re-negotiated everyday schedules, drew on classed resources at their disposal and made sense of the impact of the pandemic on their educational pathways and future aspirations. These narratives offer a unique lens on the politics of middle-classness and its constitutive relation to constructions of normative childhoods in contemporary India. Study findings contribute to the sociology of Indian childhood and more generally help enrich our understanding of southern childhoods and the reproduction of inequalities in contemporary India.     

Boundaries Exercise Power: Comparing Culture in the Keweenaw and Nickel Belt

Abstract

Examination of the Keweenaw peninsula, Michigan, and the Sudbury Basin, Ontario, offers an opportunity to assess the impact of the Canadian-American border. Both sites hosted various cultural activities shaped by ethnic heterogeneity, corporate influence, cultural elements challenging corporate influence, and isolation from major centres. Popular culture, in both cases, included standard spiritual and political institutions, music, dance, writing, and a growing sentiment of being ‘northern’. Examining these two northern, resource-industrial hinterlands reveals parallel roles as outliers of established culture and inflectors as outliers. This case study also examines linkages between two nations sharing a long boundary.     

LGBTQ Activist Organizations as ‘Respectably Queer’ in India: Contesting a Western View

This study contests the distinction of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) organizations suggested by earlier scholars as ‘respectable’ — i.e. normalizing, professionalizing and conforming to the dominant cultural and institutional patterns — and ‘queer’, meaning challenging the cultural and institutional forces that ‘normalize and commodify differences’. Using Bernstein's model of identity deployment, it is found problematic to distinguish LGBTQ organizations this way because when the actions of LGBTQ organizations are more complex to describe, it is not warranted to conflate identity goals with identity strategies — whether normalizing (respectable) or differentiating (queer). To examine these concerns, a qualitative inquiry was used to study five LGBTQ organizations in India where the intersections of post‐colonial ethnicity, gender, social class and sexuality offer an intriguing context through which to study queer activism. Based on the findings, it is argued from a post‐colonial perspective that when the socio‐cultural and historical existence of non‐homonormative queer communities and practices is strong, LGBTQ organizations challenge the heteronormative and/or other forms of domination to become ‘queer’. But they may simultaneously become ‘respectable′ by conforming to the diversity politics of non‐profit business, donors, and social movement organizations they seek support from, and turn out as ‘respectably queer’.     

Identity,dislocation and belonging: Chinese/European narratives of mixedness in Aotearoa/New Zealand

With over 10% of the population identifying with multiple ethnic groups, identities in New Zealand are increasingly complex. This article explores identifications of individuals of mixed Chinese and European descent: the ways in which personal location, classification and race influence feelings of belonging within and between multiple ethnic groups. The fluidity and diversity of the New Zealand context and the resulting positioning of ‘mixed race’ provide an interesting counterpoint to the comparatively well-studied American and British contexts. Drawing on 20 interviews with individuals of mixed descent, this research highlights how individual identity diverges from official classification and how this dissonance is understood through experiences of dislocation and belonging. ‘Mixedness’ is negotiated and enacted in many ways, as individuals find ways to belong in the face of wider dislocation, intertwining aspects of heritage, experience, community and nation.     

Infancy and Childhood in India: A Critical Review

Empirical studies of childhood in India have been rare. Guided by universalistic theories of child development, developmental psychologists have seldom examined cultural variations in child-rearing patterns with Indian samples. Psychoanalytic studies of Hindu childhood have been influenced by therapeutic observations with segmented middle-class populations that are generally Westernized and educated, inviting a lively debate about the transferability of psychoanalytic individualism to non-Western contexts. Anthropological studies, invariably focused on cultural variation, have not searched for consistent cultural patterns in ethnographic materials on Hindu socialization. Based on fieldwork conducted in a village near Delhi, this article presents one of the first systematic quantitative and ethnographic studies of patterns of child care in Hindu extended families during the preschool years. The findings are discussed in terms of achieving a consensus between developmental, psychoanalytic, and anthropological observations of Indian childhood.     

Migration,insecurity and identity: The Nepali dairymen in India's Northeast

The migration of the Nepalis to Northeast India for cattle grazing and dairy farming since the last years of the nineteenth century evolved as a mainstay of later Nepali migrations in the twentieth century. It is significant that this group of migrants enjoyed active colonial patronage, along with the labourers and Gurkha soldiers in the army, but was among the first to face the impact of changing colonial land and taxation policies. Government policies of exclusion and nativist attitudes in post-independence India caused them considerable insecurity about their status in the region. This paper highlights the evolution of the Nepali dairy farmers as an important economic group within the larger group of Nepali migrants in Northeast India, and looks at the issues that led to a redefinition of their relations in the host country and articulations for reassertion/or search for an identity in India.     

Women in India: The Context and Impact of HIV/AIDS

ABSTRACT

The response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic on the Indian subcontinent has been hampered by several factors, including societal stigma, lack of educational resources, lack of economic opportunities, and the competing priorities for a nation just growing and developing an infrastructure for education, industry, and health. In particular, Indian women are silent victims in this epidemic because they do not readily have a respected voice in decision making and priority setting for the government. The epidemic is increasingly affecting and infecting Indian women (e.g., female commercial sex workers, married women, and pregnant women). The status of Indian women has placed them at extreme disadvantage because India is a country with socially progressive laws but has been slow to change its social norms. The reported HIV prevalence is low although many researchers agree a large amount of underreporting occurs. For India to address this emerging epidemic among women appropriately, it should focus on three intervention areas: (1) short-term solutions such as treatment options for those already infected with HIV to prevent further infection to sexual partners and children; (2) intermediate solutions such as education for those who are uninfected but engaging in behaviors that may put them at risk, such as injection drug use, engaging in commercial sex work, engaging in extramarital sexual relations, and having sexual partners who are not monogamous; and 3) long-term solutions such as addressing the root causes of inequality (e.g., disparities in education and employment and unwillingness to change social norms).