Articles by Ravinder Kaur

A contemporary exploration of two spatially contiguous villages of Jammu reveals persisting intra-household gender discrimination. While in both the villages, sons continue to be preferred over daughters, it is the local political economy and culture that dictates whether a preference for sons would mean the elimination of daughters before birth, their relative deprivation post birth, marrying them off early as a mobility strategy, or simply differential allocation of resources within the household.

The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are widely acknowledged as premier academic institutions both in India and across the world.

Wounds are expected to heal. Our very conception of victims and victimhood is based on this hopeful axiom. But not all wounds heal, some remain in a constant state of decay, degenerate, and ultimately risk turning into waste too. It is this possibility of waste that this article explores. The 1984 violence is one of those historical wounds that has neither faded from public memory nor fully healed. At the heart of this unhealing wound is the question of justice that has long been denied to the victims. The judicial affidavits prepared in early 1985 not only narrate the violence that unfolded systematically, but three decades later testify to the inability of the state apparatus to help heal its wounded citizens.

This article is a look at the subtext of the transition from the politics represented by the United Progressive Alliance government to that represented by the Bharatiya Janata Party. On another level, an ethnographic reading of the voters' mood before the polls in parts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh showed calm confidence and clarity in looking at the choices before them; few of them were emotional about the step they were about to take. Narendra Modi's catchy slogans were on the lips of many but this was no motional wave; it was more like contracting a new service provider to see whether he would deliver.

Attempting to ascertain whether the skewed sex ratio in three northern districts of India has led to a change in sex-selective behaviour and related practices, this study finds that a shortage of brides is associated with willingness to compromise on rules of clan exogamy, and with a reduced demand for dowry. There is also a shift in inheritance patterns and increased societal acceptance of husbands living with their wives' parents in uxorilocal residence. In addition, more women are likely to be aware of their legal entitlement to a share of their parents' property, and to give less importance to the cultural construct of a son preference. It has to be seen whether all this will bring about a long-term change in patriarchal social structures.