Highlighting the complexities of higher education participation in a stratifi ed society, this article tries to understand the role that college contexts play in infl uencing the identities of socio-economically disadvantaged students. Drawing on data from fi ve lengthy interviews, the purpose is to explore the identity concerns of students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds in their experience of getting to and attending the University of Delhi, which has historically been home to middle and upper classes.
The appearance of the Assam Accord in the recent citizenship debates in India has a historical significance. Providing a critique of liberal citizenship, Assam’s journey shows how citizenship in a culturally diverse nation state like India evolved distinctively along with different identity questions. Assam, through a popular movement against “illegal” migrants, under the leadership of the educated (middle) class, asserted this identity question and tangled the Assamese nationality in the legal framework of Indian citizenship. The accord, which ended the protest, led to the first amendment of the Citizenship Act, 1955 in 1985, specifically addressing Assam’s case. Drawing from vernacular literature and archival records, this paper offers a fresh perspective on the political history of citizenship in Assam from pre-independence until the signing of the Assam Accord in 1985 and its immediate implementation.
What are the implications when one takes the individual as the basic unit of analysis? Specifically, how does such an analysis relate to notions such as caste and race? If human beings are assumed to be equal in value by virtue of the very fact that they are humans, then it is the individual that must be taken as the unit of analysis, and not blanket concepts such as civilisations or religions. An analysis based on civilisations, for example, fails to acknowledge humans as equals and potential agents of change, by default.
This reading list attempts to explore the new politics of belonging in India and intends to reflect on the present socio-political fractures that consequently arise, and explore alternative ways of looking at belonging.
While the repertoire of erotic performance of lavani has developed largely for male consumption, the recent emergence of women-only spectators of lavani is unusual and puzzling. How has lavani missed the moral outrage over the articulations of female sexual desire that pervades the public domain? This paper discusses how the possibilities for transgression of heteronormative desire in this phenomenon are complicated by caste and class divisions, the work–leisure binary, and the politics of the folk. It seeks to uncover the contested process of stigmatisation of lavani as vulgar and its simultaneous celebration as the folk which is embedded in the formation of lavani audiences.
Miya poetry is a genre of poems written by Bengal-origin Muslims that highlight the angst of a community that has struggled hard to integrate and assimilate with the larger Axamiya society. In this paper I argue that an analysis of Miya poetry must be placed within the larger context of identity contestation of Bengal-origin Muslims. Accordingly, Miya poetry seeks to stabilise the contested identity of this community by reappropriating the stigmatised social identity of Miya.
Identity upholds a symbol of privilege and purity on the one hand and, on the other, is also a label that represents the stigma of pollution and indignity. Both these forms of identity construct the idea of identity politics. Identity establishes an idea and idea constructs an identity, both become indistinguishable in a political discourse that works at different levels in society. This is the dichotomy of the theory of recognition that is explored in this article.
The Making of Regions in Indian History: Society, State and Identity in Premodern Odisha by Bhairabi Prasad Sahu, Delhi: Primus Books, 2020; pp xvi + 274, ₹1,095.
