THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF INDIA AND SOUTH ASIA: AN INTRODUCTION

Lecture 1
COURSE OVERVIEW
• India and South Asia have been a very important subject of anthropological
interest resulting in a vast body of knowledge and the start of this production traces
back to thecolonial era
• In the postcolonial era, India and South Asia have remained a strong focus for
anthropology while topics of interest have shifted over time
• This course will provide you with key entry points into Indian and South Asian
societiesthat can illuminate some of their fundamental workings in the
contemporary era
• You will be able to build up on them and expand your knowledge on these
societies

COURSE OVERVIEW
The course will discuss ethnographies that illustrate important aspects of the
following:
• Religion (today): how religions (for example Hinduism) were transformed in
South Asiaunder the colonial regime and what it means to practice a religion
such as Hinduism?
• Caste: the most pervasive form of social organisation within South Asia (caste
as an endogamous group a person is born into and perpetuated by marriage
within the samegroup). Who is a caste person?
• Education: How processes of education have transformed lives in a much
deeper sense than merely gaining literacy, knowledge about different subjects
and a degree.What is the educated person in South Asia all about?

COURSE OVERVIEW
• Gender: what are the gender identities and roles about in this part of the
world? How do they differ from those we are more familiar with? What is this
difference about, what are the continuities?
• Youth: South Asia features is an incredibly young population.What does it mean
to begrowing up as young person in this part of the world?
• Marriage: this is a fundamental institution in South Asia. This is the
expectation for allyoung persons in the region.Why, how and what are the effects
of this?
• Migration: So many people have migrated out of South Asia and into the rest
of the world, in search of work, education and more. South Asian diasporas are
found virtuallyeverywhere.What are some of the most important effects of
migration?
 COURSE OVERVIEW
• Our discussions on religion, caste, gender, youth, marriage, education, and
migration should be seen as intersecting: that is, we might find all of them in the
same one readingfor example
• They are part of the experience of living in South Asia and of being from South
Asia andliving abroad

APPROACHING INDIA AND SOUTH ASIA

• India and South Asia have often been understood as sites of immobility,
timelessness,tradition and spirituality
• Drawing upon the experience of colonialism in this region, and focusing on
more recentand contemporary phenomena, this course considers India and
South Asia as historical products that continue to transform as much as any other
region of the world

THE QUESTIONS DRIVING THE COURSE

The course will ask:
• How have anthropologists contributed to the study of India and South Asia? How
andwhere have they deployed ethnographic methods?
• How have their contributions worked towards an understanding of India and South
Asiaas dynamics societies, beyond the stereotypes around ‘the Orient’
• How have anthropologists explained difference within India and South Asia?

OBJECTIVES OF THIS COURSE

After completing this course, you should be able to:
• critically approach India and South Asia through a body of ethnographic works
• understand both shared features and internal diversity within South Asia
• identify elements testifying to South Asian societies’ historical transformation
• place South Asian societies within global trends
• make connections between the readings and the media sphere

COURSE EXAM
• Multiple-choice examination26 January 2022
• 1 March 2022
• 1 April 2022
• 2 May 2022
• This examination will cover all the topics discussed in class
• It will assess the students’ thorough and critical understanding of the readings
MAP OF BRITISH INDIA IN 1914
• The East India Company in charge of the trade with India enters the subcontinent
at the beginning of the 17th century and starting
from theearly 18th century, it acts also as a political
actor of British imperialism
• The rule of the East India Company ends in 1858
and the British Crownstarts to administer directly
India: the British Raj (rule) begins
• British rule ends in 1947
• The massively violent event called the Partition of
India takes place in 1947: that year, India and
Pakistan become independent, Ceylon in 1948,
Burma in 1948, Bangladesh was created in 1971

SOUTHASIATODAY

UNDERTHE RULE OFTHE BRITISH EMPIRE UNTIL1947

• India is of great anthropological interest to the British Empire (in addition to her
resources that the Empire exploits)
• Colonial anthropologists collected a great deal of data and lay the foundations
of theknowledge structures about South Asian societies whose effects are still
felt today
• From 1800 a vast array of people in all disciplines start to document, classify and
domesticate ‘India’ and all her aspects – also using photography
• The British also began counting the population with the first census in 1872 and
then acomplete one starting from 1881
• Knowledge is power!

RELIGION AS AN ENTRY POINT INTO INDIA ANDSOUTH ASIAN SOCIETIES

• The British classification of the population in castes and religions among others
has left adeep mark in the subcontinent. This is not because castes and
religious traditions didn’t exist when the colonisers arrived but because of their
rigidification, consolidation and transformation that followed that clasffication
 • An important aspect of life in South Asia that attracted the attention of many
during thepast centuries is religion (we will introduce caste later and discuss it
more in details in the next lecture)
• Religion is also one of the aspects through which India is mostly ‘known’ around
theworld – think for example of forms of spirituality and religious symbols

INDIA AND RELIGION –THE HOLY CITY OFVARANASI

RELIGION IN INDIA AND SOUTH ASIA

Today: We enter the study of India and South Asia through religion
• Macro level and historical considerations: How religions were transformed
during thecolonial era
• Popular religion: religion, in particular Hinduism, as it is practiced on an everyday
basis –and what Hinduism practices tell about Indian society and its hierarchical
nature (caste)

RELIGION IN SOUTH ASIA

• van der Veer stresses the historical perspective to the study of religion in South
Asia and this is important tounderstand the nature of postcolonial state
• It is the approach/way of thinking that we call ‘Orientalism’ that turns religion as
key site of essentializeddifference between the religious East and the west
• In the 18th century,‘European Orientalism gradually systematizes knowledge
about the people of India andtheir various beliefs and practices into an
integrated, coherent religion called Hinduism
• This was part of a larger, empirical project to map India and its inhabitants: often
it is argued that Hinduism,as such, does not exist, but that there is instead a
great variety of heterogeneous practices of a devotional and ritual nature as well
as of metaphysical schools that were grouped together under the foreign term
Hinduism in the early 19th century
• However, van der Veer argues that this is an exaggerated claim because
these practices and doctrines can be considered as a tradition, but they don’t
have a central authority (the samecan be said about other religions in South
Asia, such as Islam, Sikhism, and Buddhism)
• So the traditions labelled as Hinduism in the nineteenth century are not
invented but they arenow understood as Hindu religion: so they have been
transformed
• However, in this process, Hinduism is understood as ‘Oriental wisdom or
irrationality’
• In short, religious practices found in India are turned into the ‘other’, and hence
stereotyped

• We also have to remember that:

• In British India, the colonial state attempted not to interfere with native
religions
• It tried to develop a neutral religious policy in a society where religious institutions
played an important political role
• However, Indians did not conceive the colonial state as secular but as
fundamentallyChristian
• When the colonial state started to use religion among its census categories, it
came itselfto be understood in religious categories
• If the colonial state discourse was about development, and evolution and meant
to besecular, they were understood as essentially Christian.There were also
missionaries activities, which is an important element
• The response both the state and the missionaries activities provoked was
religious: theestablishment of modern Hindu and Muslim schools, universities,
hospitals,
• The modernizing project secular colonial state resulted in strengthening modern
religionsin India and South Asia
• Besides the turning of religious traditions into religions and the secular
approach to themby the colonial state, we also should pay attention to religious
groups that have increasingly grown since the colonial era together with their public
manifestations
• This has also been accompanied by the progressive rise of a representation of
Hinduismas a majority religion and Islam as a minority religion, at least in India
• During the 20the century, a set of Hindu organisations have emerged that have
pushedthis agenda not only within South Asia but also abroad and they have
also been supported by political parties – religion and politics
• How do we capture the transformation of religion as anthropologists in these
contexts? Tostudy religion, its orders, institutions like temples for example?
• One way is to look into archives and find documents about temples, mosques,
gurdwaras(that is institutions), and looking into the building of temples,
patronage, property
• Ethnography helps us to understand religion but only to a certain extent
• We can also deploy oral histories, and other written documentation like
religious booklets
 • In short, we need to use more than one method to understand the legacy of
historicalphenomena around religious traditions in the present and their
contemporary transformations

POPULAR RELIGION
• From this historical view of religion, and macro trends and transformations, we
move to a more intimate understanding ofeveryday religion, of popular religion

• In the book ‘The Camphor Flame, Fuller introduces us into popular religion by
talking about a very simple gesture: NAMASKAR
• As a symbolic act, this gesture expresses two of the most important features of
Hindureligion and society

1.) Exactly the same gesture is made by people to deities, and by both deities
andpeople to each other
• This reflects a supremely important fact about Hinduism: unlike Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam, itstates no absolute distinction between divine and human
beings.
This is a cultural system that represents both deities and humans as ‘actors’
• To make the gesture of respect is to participate in a hierarchical world populated
by both deitiesand human beings
• If the two people are of markedly different status, then only the inferior is likely
to perform thegesture, and may even touch the superior's feet

1.) the Hindu gesture of respect expresses a asymmetry in rank, because it is made
by an inferior to a superior. The gesture points to the principle of hierarchical
inequality that isfundamental in Hindu religion and society
• A human worshiper, like a lower deity, gestures in respect to a superior deity, but
the same pattern is found in many more social interactions: for example, a wife
makes thegesture to her husband, children to their parents, a low-caste person to
a high-caste person, an employee to an employer, a student to a teacher, etc
• Here, the ‘superior’ individual usually makes no or little reciprocating gesture
• The gesture of respect or prostration, especially when made before a deity, often
signalsdevotion that is a central aspect of Hindu worship and not just inferiority
• But the deity is almost invariably superior to the worshipper
• The principle of hierarchical inequality, as well as the partial continuity between
divinityand humanity, is always symbolically present in greeting and respect
practices
• What is popular Hinduism? The beliefs and practices that constitute the living
religion,what is practiced by ordinary Hindus, their interaction with the many
deities through ritual
• Popular Hinduism is different from "textual Hinduism," the "philosophical"
religion whichis written up in sacred texts.These are studied by Indologists,
Sanskritists, and historians of religion
 • Anthropologists study popular Hinduism

HOW IS THIS HIERARCHICAL HINDU SOCIETYORGANISED?VARNA

• The fourfold varna system, emergent at the origin of the world, represents a
religious textualauthoritative, ideal religious model of Hindu society
• There are 4 "classes" or varnas of Hindu society: the Brahmans (Brahmins), the
Kshatriyas or Warriors, the Vaishyas or Merchants, and the Shudras or Servants.
In their origin from the parts of Purusha (man)'s body, the hierarchy of four
classes is directly as parts of the body of this ideal man
• This division in varna is the source of inequality, oppression and violence in
contemporary society!
• Use of ‘savarna’ in contemporary discourse

VARNA

HOW IS THIS HIERARCHICAL HINDU SOCIETYORGANISED? JATI

• The varna system is important because it is an ideal model for the caste system,
despite the latter is amore complex structure
• Within this varna/class, there are countless ‘jati’:The term jati translates as"caste"
: in all the main Indianlanguages, jati means "kind" or "species”
• For example within the Brahman varna, there are many different castes of
Brahman (especially acrossregions)
• In turn, jati or caste within a community is usually divided into subcastes

CASTE SYSTEM
• The caste system is pan-Indian (and global).The same basic structure applies
everywhereand it is fundamentally a hierarchical system
 • So all castes living in an area can be ranked within a single hierarchy (of course
thishierarchy is contested)
• At the top of the hierarchy are the Brahmans and at the bottom are the castes of
’former untouchables’ or Dalits.
• Dalits are defined as avarna, that is they are outside the fourfold system and
below theShudras.

CASTE
• Non-Hindus in India have castes too, but the caste system is fundamentally a
Hinduinstitution
• Every Hindu is born into one and only one caste, and remains a member of that
casteuntil death: that is castes are ‘ascriptive’ social groups
• Castes are endogamous, so that husband and wife belong to the same
caste, and theirchildren belong to the same caste
• There are also "love marriages"; however the vast majority of unions are
arranged byfamilies
• Arranged marriage is the strongest element ensuring the continuation of the
castesystem

CASTE SEPARATION
How are caste differences and separation maintained in a village, for example?
• The use of village wells, as well as access to public eating places, is
typically restricted by caste;the lowest castes are very often banned from
using the above (though there is a lot of variation depending on where these
occur).
• For example, when people of different castes eat together (at a wedding feast
for example)they sit in separate caste lines and served in order of rank
• Caste has very concrete effects on everyday life (esp. in rural India) : it is not
an abstract andhidden principle of social organization;
• It is very much part of someone’s identity
• Caste is the source of conflict and atrocities especially against Dalits (former
untouchables)

THE CASTE SYSTEM

• In theory, the caste system defines a division of labor, which reproduces in a
morecomplicated pattern the division of functions in the varna system
• In practice many occupations are caste-specific, especially in the service and
artisan sectors. For example, throughout India there are castes of washermen
and most of thelaundry business is actually done by members of these castes
• However, not necessarily all individuals belonging to a caste which traditionally
isassociated to a specific profession will perform this profession
PURITY AND IMPURITY
• One important principle underlying the caste hierarchy consists of the
opposition between ritual purity and pollution.The Brahmans are the
purest caste and the Dalits the most polluted; those in between are partially
rankedaccording to their relative purity
• Ritual pollution comes from many sources: all bodily emissions and waste are
sources of pollution (saliva, semen, menstrual blood, feces, urine, hair, and nail
clippings in particular)
• Organic life is the source of pollution, and this can be controlled through
bathing (except for that pollution that is attributed to former
‘untouchable’castes – that is believed to be of a more permanent nature
• Pollution is also controlled by assigning to specific, low-ranking castes duties
that involves practices by barbers,washermen, and sweepers (that remove
nightsoil) so that the purity of Brahmans and high-caste people is preserved
by others who perform polluting jobs for them
• So the division of labor among castes has a ritual dimension and is not
simply an ‘economic’ matter
• A caste's purity and its status in the caste hierarchy, are also preserved
through 1) endogamy 2) consumptionof food and water given by members of
lower castes
• Members of a caste members ensure that their own purity - which is
sometimes thought of as a quality oftheir blood and bodily substance - is not
compromised by either marriage or sex with lower-status caste individuals or
by taking food and drink that might be polluted by these lower-status others
• Caste boundaries are most often strictly policed

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF INDIA AND SOUTH ASIA: AN INTRODUCTION

LECTURE 2

TODAY: CASTE
Caste is the most pervasive form of social organisation within South Asia (caste as an
endogamous group a person is born into and perpetuated by marriage within the same
group). Caste exists also in diaspora communities!
How does it work?
Who is a caste person?

RECAP FROM THE FIRST LECTURE

RELIGION IN INDIA AND SOUTH ASIA
• Macro level and historical considerations: How religions were transformed
during thecolonial era
• Focus on popular religion (in particular Hinduism) as it is practiced on an
everyday basis (different from textual Hinduism) – and what Hinduism
practices tell about Indian societyand its hierarchical nature
MAIN TOPICS FROMTHE FIRST LECTURE
• We found that this hierarchical nature resides in caste or jati
• Caste is an endogamous group: its members marry people belonging to the
same caste
• We also encountered also the term varna which means ’category’ or class:
within varnas, we haveplenty of castes
• We also found that the varna system classifies Hindus into 4 categories: the
Brahmins on the top, followed by Kshatriyas (warriors),Vaishyas (business
communities) and Shudras (the labouring classes)
• Beneath the four varnas are the ‘former untouchables’ (also known as
achhoots) – Avarna - at the verybottom of the social order.Today these
communities are called Dalits. They used to be called also Harijans or ‘children
of God’ but this is not accepted anymore

HOW DOES ONE UNDERSTAND ANOTHERPERSON’S CASTE?

• Surname?
• Skin colour?
• Place of living?
• Education?
• Profession?
• Overall socio-economic status?
• Marriage?
• Number of children?

DIVERSE APPROACHES TO CASTE

Jodhka:
• Scholars: Caste is actually a relatively modern concept
• Caste as a uniform structure present everywhere in the Indian subcontinent
emergedonly during the British colonial period, towards the end of the 19th
century
• Their view: caste is at the basis of the difference between a traditional social
order ofIndia from the modern West
• In the West, class inequalities are produced in the economic structure while
castehierarchy functioned independently of material realities or political dynamics
• This view has been widely contested!
• The labelling of caste as a ‘traditional institution’ in contrast to the ‘modern
West’ alsopresupposes that Indian society is at an evolutionary stage different
from the West.
• The assumption was that that caste will eventually disappear on its own,
through theprocesses of economic development, modernization and
urbanization
• But caste has shown all its resilience! It has not disappeared, actually it
has become evenmore important in many spheres of life!
 • Caste has not disappeared both during the process of modernization of the
Indian subcontinent by the British in19th century, when they introduced the
railways, secular education, factories, mass communication, and a modern
administrative system AND afterindependence when India become a democracy
with a Constitution
• Caste has not disappeared when in an agrarian economy and even if 2/3 of the
populationlives in rural areas
• Caste has not vanished with the establishment and consolidation of a
democratic system
• One reason for its persistence is because has been very much part of India’s
electoralpolitics
• And also because state policy of caste-based quotas (reservations) for
Scheduled Castesand Other Backward Classes
• Already mentioned: caste is the source of much conflict
• Everyday caste violence and atrocities (that now we know much more about
through themedia today) where the low-castes are at the receiving end
• Spatial and social marginalities of some caste communities
• Importance of caste endogamy and reproduction of an unequal social order
of whichcaste remains an important component!
• Ideas of hierarchy and purity and pollution (last lecture) continue to produce
discrimination in contemporary Indian life
• But caste is not just about purity and pollution, it is a multidimensional
phenomenon!

CONCEPTUAL APPROACHES OF CASTE

Remember: India and South Asia as historical product

Not only does the life of caste change but also how we approach caste changes: we
don’t have an explanationthat is valid once and for all!

Jodhka: Conceptual approaches of Caste (in a historical trajectory)

• caste as tradition
• caste as power
• caste as humiliation

1.) Caste as tradition

• Tradition has always been the most common mode of conceptualizing caste
by Westernand colonial scholars and rulers
• Caste hierarchies existed also in the pre-colonial period. It is not the British
rulers orWestern theorists invented caste
• Varna, jati were present in some parts of the subcontinent, in a variety of
forms andstructures, for a very long time
 • The Western idea of ‘caste’ simplified the diverse and often contested realities
of the‘native’ social order as a neatly demarcated group: rigidification of
categories!
• The Western view of caste evolved over a period of time, through the
writings ofOrientalists, missionaries and colonial administrators.
• The Western world saw India as one of the ancient civilizations, the classical
Hindu textsassumed critical significance for understanding its ‘essence’
• The assumption was that 19th-century India was not very different from the
times duringwhich these texts were written!

But is this ever possible?

• By the late 19th century, British colonisers believed that caste was the
foundational fact of Indian society, key to Hinduism and to the Indian
subcontinent as a civilizational region
• In addition to being an institution that distinguished India from other societies:
caste asthe pivot of traditional Indian society, as a ‘closed system’, where
people had the same occupations and lives across the generations: an
immobile society
• In contrast,Western industrial societies were portrayed as ‘open systems’
whose socialstratification was based only on class and where individuals could
choose their occupations according to their preferences and abilities
• Mobility in the West vs immobility in the East!
• This Orientalist ‘book-view’ of caste is at the core of Louis Dumont in his
famous HomoHierarchicus (1966)
• Like the Orientalists, Dumont argued that caste represented the cultural
‘difference’between India and the West
• Caste was not linked to material circumstances: the perspective of political
economycould explain the inequalities in a Western society, he argued, but not
in India.
• The idea of inequality is central to Dumont’s notion of caste. By contrast, the
core ideology of the West, according to Dumont, is individualism and equality
and inequalityhere stems from material differences
• In India, inequality is a cultural fact, structures society and shaped by Hinduism
• West: a modern society established on the ideas of individualism and equality
• India: traditional culture where inequalities of status and hierarchy are more
critical thaneconomy or politics/ power. ‘Status encompassed power’ (Dumont)
• Example: the king was powerful, however the Brahmin’s status was superior to
him
• Enormous legacy of these arguments: for decades scholars have been
discussing his theses
• For Dumont caste is a hierarchical system rests on the distinction between
pure andthe impure (we have encountered this!)
 • The whole is founded on the necessary and hierarchical coexistence of the
twoopposites
• At the extremes of the system of caste hierarchy are the Brahmin on one
end andthe ‘Untouchable’ (Dalit, Harijan,Achoot as encountered in the
literature) on the other
• The pure and its logical opposite - the impure - form a complete system

Critiques:
• Providing a one-sided account of the caste system, the version of the
Brahmins
• Dumont’s sources were primarily texts, written and retained by Brahmins
• Critics said that he ignored empirical literature describing how caste works
in practice becausethis departs from his arguments
• Caste is a contested and shifting reality - and like other aspects of Indian
society - and itcontinues to change
• Overemphasizing the differences between India and the West: hierarchical vs
individualisticand egalitarian
• India has no agency
• Multiple notions of hierarchy and an absence of consensus among caste-
groups onwho is‘high’ and who is ‘low’ in the various status hierarchies

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF INDIA AND SOUTH ASIA: AN INTRODUCTION

LECTURE 3

CONCEPTUAL APPROACHES OF CASTE

Remember: India and South Asia as historical product

Not only does the life of caste change but also how we approach caste changes: we
don’t have an explanationthat is valid once and for all!

Jodhka: Conceptual approaches of Caste (in a historical trajectory)

• caste as tradition
• caste as power
• caste as humiliation

2.) Caste as Power:

• Prior to Dumont, many scholars in the West investigated caste from a
comparativeperspective.
• For example, Max Weber (1864–1920): he found nothing unique (or
particularly Indian)about caste
• He saw caste divisions as a special case of status-based divisions found in
almost allsocieties
 • But status groupings might ‘evolve into closed caste’, although not always and
everywhere!
• Even if caste is an extreme case of status group distinctions,Weber argued
that it is notunique to India!
• During1950s and 1960s: when sociologists, anthropologists and other
scholars began to study Indian village: they analysed caste and power,
and democratic and electoral process
• Importance of village studies
• A major contribution to empirical studies of caste was by Srinivas, who
introduced the concept of the ‘dominant caste’
• He observed while doing his fieldwork in southern India that the ritual status of a
caste-group became relevant only when it was accompanied by the other
forms of dominance, that is wealth
• When a caste enjoys one form of dominance, it is often able to acquire the
other forms overtime
• So a caste that is numerically strong and wealthy will be able to move up in the
ritualhierarchy if it Sanskritizes its ritual and way of life: acquiring the ritual
ways of the highercastes to ascend on the status ladder!
• The more forms of dominance which a caste enjoys, the easier it is for it to
acquire the rest

M. N. Srinivas’s work on Sanskritization shows how material success could change the
socialstatus of a group in the caste hierarchy
Such a process of group mobility could operate only when a ‘lower’ caste had
acquiredsome measure of material success
For ‘Dalits’ this process has limitations
• Several village studies also showed that the practice of untouchability was
about control over the lives of the untouchables — a relationship of power(like
slavery) that was reinforced through coercion, if necessary.
• ‘Untouchable’ means a cumulation of social, economic and political
deprivations
• Scholars started to conceive caste through power
• They also found out that religious institutions and the domain of power (ofthe king)
were completely intertwined
• For example, the king drew his power from religious worship

CONCEPTUAL APPROACHES OF CASTE

3.) Caste as humiliation and discrimination:

• A system that institutionalizes humiliation as a social andcultural practice
• It also develops a critique of the so-called Indian tradition as amode of
authority and domination
• The origin of this formulation can be traced in the writings of the 19th-century
reformers like the Dalit thinker B. R.Ambedka
DR. BHIMRAO AMBEDKAR (1891-1956)

DR. BHIMRAO AMBEDKAR (1891-1956)

• Chairman of the Constitution committee
• His representation tied to the Constitution
• Statues and images are found everywhere in India and abroad

CONCEPTUAL APPROACHES OF CASTE

• However, this approach to caste begins to acquire visibility and academic
respectability only in the late 1980s and 1990s: why?
• The 1970s and 1980s produced many new trends within Indian society
• The dominant discourse of nation-building and development framed at the
time of India’s independence from the colonial rule, began to disintegrate,
both morally and politically
• This triggers newer forms of politics, often identity-based, including ofthose
on the margins of Indian society
• Until the 1980s, the dominant political discourses and the State initiatives for
developmenthad largely remained ‘caste-blind’
• Scheduled Caste communities aligned with the mainstream political
formation, the Congress Party. An autonomous discourse of Dalit politics
and identity, in whatever form it existed, wasconfined to only a few pockets in
states
• It was a concern of the urbanized and upwardly mobile individuals from
Scheduled Castebackground who had benefited from ‘reservations’: need for
political representation!
• This need for representation leads to Dalits to embrace parties that they
themselves createand to enter local politics
• The size of the Dalit middle class grew, mainly because of the growing
effectiveness of theState policy of quotas in government jobs and educational
institutions
 • They created associations of Scheduled Caste employees and mobilized to
resist differentkinds of perceived discriminatory practices at their workplace or
outside in the society:one such association gives rise to the Bahujan Samaj
Party (BSP), possibly the most important Dalit party in independent India
• It was about this time that Ambedkar was rediscovered as a universal icon of
Dalitidentity and as someone who could symbolize their aspirations.
• Ambedkar has continued to grow in stature and significance and his critique
of Hindusociety is impossible to ignore
• Changes in caste relations on the ground
• Recent studies have pointed to a process of loosening of caste hierarchies
and traditionalstructures of power and domination
• The new class of political entrepreneurs capitalises on the idea of ‘Dalit
identity’ and mobilized the Scheduled Caste communities for example within
parties such as the BSP
• This party enjoyed a great deal of electoral successes and political power in
the 1990sand 2000s
• The third approach to caste frames the caste question differently
• A political critique of caste was developed and this institution could no
longer be seensimply as part of a traditional culture!
• The idea of caste as a source of conflict, discrimination and violence is put
forward
• Despite the increasing participation of the historically marginalized
communities in the electoral process, caste-based disparities have not
disappeared: participation is not enough!
• The presence of caste today in the public sphere as an object of critique is
quite pervasive
• The experiences of caste in contemporary India is tied to those of its critique and
contestation
• What is the status of caste today? An example of how it works in practice

CASTE OFTHE NATION

• On 26 December 2004 a tsunami, triggered by an earthquake, caused
massive death anddestruction in Asia, including the coast of the South Indian
state of Tamil Nadu
• Accounts of Dalits, formerly called ‘untouchables’, being forced out of relief
camps being deniedrelief provisions and of being too scared to approach
government shelters
• Even in the face of a massive humanitarian disaster, discrimination takes
place!
• Can post-disaster ad relief situation shed light on human relations?
• Discrimination of Dalits in post-disaster Tamil Nadu casts a shadow on ideas
of ‘nation’
• Can an Indian national consciousness exist when a divisive principle such as
caste is dominant?
The tension between nation and caste is immediately apparent:
• Are Dalits considered to be part of ‘nation’?
• Do they view themselves as part of it?
• The data in this article suggests otherwise for both the above questions
• Learning:There is an unfinished project of nation building

• Gorringe argues that there is an absence of caste in discussions on the

Indian ‘nation’
• This is even more surprising because because since as caste was a social
institutiondeployed by the British to justify colonialism as a civilising mission
• The first Prime Minister of India, Nehru viewed caste as being responsible for
India’s‘degeneracy’, and his party, the Congress Party aimed to remove
untouchability
• Hindu nationalists and others (such as Gandhi) critiqued caste inequalities
but wanted ahomogeneous nation of Hindus or a caste system devoid of its
iniquitous effects
• An elitist vision of Indianness that wanted the lower castes to assimilate into
a highercaste norm as a precondition for national membership

• Lower-caste leaders rejected these elitist views and and argued that colonial
rule waspreferable to Independence under the higher castes
• In the 1930s and 1940s,Ambedkar and the untouchable movement criticised
Congress’claim to represent the entire ‘Hindu nation’, and rejected the
Gandhian argument that untouchables should subordinate their cause to the
nation’s unity.

The view from below, over half a century after these event:
• Gorringe interviewed Dalits in Tamil Nadu (late 1990s) and argued that they
lackedpatriotic sense of Indianness
• At the time of these interviews, Dalits in both the villages the author worked
were each subject to a social boycott, the former for possible allegiances to
the Dalit Panther Movement (DPI), the largest and most active Tamil Dalit
movement, and forrefusing to perform ‘caste duties’
• Boycott, discrimination and continuing untouchability
• Critique of nationalist struggle for independence

Voice of Dalit respondent:

’Still we are suppressed! We haven’t been liberated or received our independence
yet. Howeverhigh we rise, when we go there (to the main village) we are slaves.
Under British rule all of us were suppressed, then it didn’t seem so bad ... Saying
we’re going to win independence and protesting and winning independence—they
haven’t given us any freedom. He (Gandhi) got everyone independence but didn’t
give any to us. It is fifty years since Independence, but we stilldon’t know what it
means’
Voice of Dalit respondent:
’They say we got Independence in 1947 from you—from the white people, but they
(dominant castes) are the only ones who gained independence and they seek to
suppress us just as much asyour lot did’

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF INDIA AND SOUTH ASIA: AN INTRODUCTION

LECTURE 4

TO RECAP SOME CLARIFICATIONS ON THE CASTESYSTEM

1.) The caste into which one is born determines one’s occupation. False!
• People in the same caste engage in many occupations (this is true also
historically)
• Confusion arises in part from the separation of activities contained in the
“varna” system
• Some caste points to occupations (Barber,Washerman, funeral attendant), but
it is notnecessarily true that individuals from these castes will engage in these
professions

SOME CLARIFICATIONS ONTHE CASTE SYSTEM

2.) Caste designations are changeless. False.
• There are many historical instances of castes changing (or trying to change)
their castenames and behavior in order to receive benefits
• Some of these efforts have been successful while some others haven’t
• The caste system is not a static system!

3.) Castes relate to each other in mutually accepted hierarchical patterns. Frequently
false
• There are ideas of local hierarchical patterns
• But there are also disputes regarding the “correct” local hierarchy so caste
rankings canalso change over time.
• Hierarchical ranking is not the first concern for many, and this also depends
also whetherwe take into consideration a rural or an urban setting

4.) Everyone called by the same caste name is related to everyone else called by that
same caste name. False.
Some people in India belong to a Brahman caste (and there are many such
castes). But itis not true that all Brahman castes in India are related

5.) Castes are uniquely Hindu. False.

In India, castes exist among Christians, Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Muslims.
And endogamyrules are as strict among the above as they are among Hindus.
6.) Castes have been abolished. False
India’s constitution declares that “untouchability” is abolished and anyone
discriminating against “untouchables” can be prosecuted (there are special legal
framework protecting ‘untouchables’, i.e. Dalits)
But the Indian constitution says nothing about abolishing castes. Similarly, in the
United States discrimination on the grounds of race or gender has been declared
illegal. However,the United States has no laws abolishing race or gender!

WOMEN’S EDUCATION
Trends in women’s education in India and South Asia
• In many parts of India, women don’t enter paid salaried employment
• Young women’s education is nevertheless important since parents usually
aim to marry theirdaughters to men with similar or slightly higher
qualifications. Hopes of a better marriage
• Girls’ formal education continues to lag behind that of boys (in Dalit communities
and not only,a gap across genders)
• Deciding to educate a girl in a poor family most often comes after the
decision of educating aboy

GIRLS’ EDUCATION IN RURAL BANGLADESH

Aspirations and self-hood: Exploring the meaning of higher secondary education for
girl collegestudents in rural Bangladesh
• Presence of shared gender roles and expectations – even across different
religions?

Larger trends:
• Bangladesh has performed particularly well as the only country in South
and West Asiabesides Sri Lanka to have achieved the Education for All
gender parity goal
• Increasing levels of education among females and so gender gap narrowing
• However: on the one hand education seems to have a role in postponing
marriage for girl(to some degree) but the drive towards marriage prevents
parents from investing morein their daughters’ education
• This causes drop out rates especially among girls
• The focus is on college-going girls.These are only a minority, but it is an
important group through which to show the importance of education
• Ethnography shows that unlike their younger counterparts who stop studying
in order toget married, girls who enrol at college develop more complex and
diverse aspirations for the future
• Education might lead to paid employment and it is instrument of personal
growth and self-affirmation that strengthens their self-confidence
• Fieldwork in villages and
colleges in districtof
Satkhira in South West
Bangladesh:
• Participant observation,
informal interviews and
conversations with
adolescent girls aged14–
20, some of whom were
studying and others
married or waiting to get
married; parents; teachers;
nongovernmental
organization (NGO)
officers and beneficiaries
• Education and marriage: The dowry the girl’s family has to pay to the
bridegroom’s familyincreases with the age of the bride and this is one of the
reasons why girls from poorer families tend to marry earlier (dowry is linked to
female foeticide in India)
• Ideals about the meanings of education shared with other SA contexts
• Education is perceived by adults as being positive and is valued for many
reasons irrespectiveof age and class. Being uneducated (oshikkito):
poverty and rural area
• Being educated (shikkito): possessing a quality that can make a real
difference in life
• Violence and antisocial behaviour are often associated with people who
are consideredoshikkito
• Educated people are believed to be better and able to bring about positive
changes in society.(shared discourse, also in India). However, gender
makes a difference between boys an girls’ education
• Few local employment opportunities discourages parents from investing
in girls’ education
• Matriculation and sometimes 9 years of schooling are enough to be
eligible for available jobs such asNGO worker
• During1990s and 2000s, work in garment factories has become an
important source of employment forwomen, but none of the adults or
young in this field site mentioned it as a possible employment opportunity
• This might be due to the considerable distance of the field site from
Dhaka and other export processingzones (EPZ)
• Working in garment factories is not perceived as something that would
suit an educated girl
Different family strategies to deal with girls’ education:
• For better off/barolok households: girl’s education enhances status, and
marriage can bepostponed till diplomas and university degrees have been
obtained
• For households of a lower socio-economic background, those defined as
majhari (middle level), sending girls to high school delays marriage with the
hope of finding a better partner in the future
• Girls belonging to more vulnerable households, such as those that have been
ranked as ‘poor’ or‘extremely poor’, they only go to school for a few years
because their parents will try to marry them as soon as possible because they
will have to give less dowry to the groom’s family. Even when education is
less expensive than dowry, still parents think that the latter is a better
investment
• Bangladesh Demographic and Health Surveys for 2004 and 2007 shows a
connection betweenhigher education and delay in marriage age and a longer
period of transition to adulthood
• Girls attending the last years of high school and not studying further know
that education isnot going to change their lives

All kinds of restrictions and obstacles in girls’ education:

• Unlike boys, girls are not usually allowed to move to town on their own,
because it is considered dangerous for their reputation and security: either
accompanied by a male relative or frequenting a lower-status local college
• Poorer girls face more difficulties in finding an occupation because of their
lack ofconnections
• Even when girls are aware of the difficulties in finding a job aligned with their
level ofeducation, they see themselves not only as mothers and wives
• In spite of all these difficulties: education leads to girls’ awareness of their
own wishes andneeds, and in turn they can better shape their roles within
society

LITERACY AND LOVE LETTERS IN NEPAL

Literacy, Power, and Agency: Love Letters and Development in Nepal
• From a more policy and development oriented perspective we move to
other uses ofliteracy (rather than education)
• The author asks:
• What happens when villagers acquire the power to write, and the power to
read whatothers write?
• How do conceptions of agency, gender, and development shape and reflect
new literacypractices?
 Village of Junigau, Nepal

Literacy leads to social change

• But this potential of literacy needs to be studied in context, because it is
always aboutsocieties and individuals that shape that potential
• The case from Junigau, Nepal shows that the increase in female literacy
rates in the 1990sengendered the emergence of new courtship practices
involving love letters and increased self-initiated marriages (rather than
arranged ones and abduction)
• Literacy is not a neutral, unidimensional technology, that has the same effects
everywherebut a set lived experiences specific to a community
• This article shows this argument really well!
• Love letters appear in the early 1990s as a result of increasing female literacy
rates in the village
• Love letters was a way for lovers to be in touch and get to know each other,
because it was notappropriate for young men and women to be together alone
• Creation of categories: sending and receiving of love letters marked someone
as a particular kind ofperson – a ‘developed’ (bikâsi) as opposed to a
‘backward’ (pichhyâdi) individual, also a person who was able to have a love
marriage
• Also in this case: the creation of a divide between people and the creation of
modern personae!
• Prior to the 1990s romantic love was something to be embarrassed about
 • In the 1990s, love became ‘desirable’ as well as desire itself: it was linked to
developmentand modernity among young villagers
• Steep rise of elopement over arranged and capture marriage since the 60s:
the first wasthe most common practice (very unlike other contexts)
• More emphasis on obtaining the woman’s ‘consent’ to the marriage
• Love letters need to be read against the circulation of a development
discourse by the 1990sin Junigau: through textbooks for example
• In these texts, new ideas about agency were formed: imbued with ideas of
self-sufficiency, hardwork, development, success, and individual responsibility
• Development discourse also propagated through magazines and novels,
Radio Nepal, soapoperas, Hindi movies, love-letter guidebooks, and everyday
conversations
• In the love-letter guidebooks: move away from illiterate ‘backwardness’
towards ‘civilised,refined’ expressions of ‘romantic communication’
• Migration of these ideas and guidelines into the love letters!
• Ideology cannot be separated from literacy: young villagers in the 1990s
acquired literacy skillsfollowing a discourse that stressed the importance of
formal education as part of becoming ‘modern’ and ‘developed’
• We find this in other locations in South Asia, though this ideology has
different impact onyoung people, according to gender, location, and socio-
economic status
• So it is not a blanket explanation though there is a recurrent pattern
• Overall, the encounter between literacy, education and young people speak
about aspirations,the work of the imagination and hopes

COMPARATIVETHINKING
How has your gender affected your education?
Are there obstacles to your education depending on your gender?
Did you connect the ability of read and write with being able to write love letters/texts to
your partners? Has your education affected your marriage choice?
Are there different expectations attached to your education according to your gender
identities?
Is there a particular view of the ‘educated’ person and expectations attached to a
specific gender in yourculture?
Do you think these are the product of a certain development discourse within Europe?
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF INDIA AND SOUTH ASIA: AN INTRODUCTION
LECTURE 5

EDUCATION
• How processes of acquiring literacy and education have transformed lives in
a much deeper sense than merely being able to read and write (though
important), knowledgeabout different subjects and a degree.
• What is the educated persona in South Asia all about?
• Caste study from South Asia (Bangladesh, and Nepal, Pakistan and India)
• Different aspects around literacy and education: from the constructen of the
educated persona to development-oriented concerns and interpersonal
relations and feelings (alsoinvolving marriage – more on gender, youth and
marriage lectures)

TRENDS IN WOMEN’S EDUCATION FROM LAST WEEK

• In many parts of India, women don’t enter paid salaried employment after
receiving aneducation
• Young women’s education is nevertheless important since parents usually
aim to marry theirdaughters to men with similar or slightly higher
qualifications. Hopes of a better marriage
• Girls’ formal education continues to lag behind that of boys (in Dalit communities
and not only,gap across genders)
• Deciding to educate a girl in a poor family most often comes after the
decision of educating aboy, issues of dowry
• Examples from Bangladesh and Nepal

TODAY
• Khurshid A. 2017. Does education empower women? The regulated
empowerment ofparhi likhi women in Pakistan.
• Ciotti M. 2006.‘In the past we were a bit “Chamar”’: Education as a self- and
community
• engineering process in northern India

DOES EDUCATION EMPOWER WOMEN?

• Idea of Pari-likhi women (also found among the Chamars in north India)
• Research on female teachers from rural and low-income communities
• Surely education is a transformative experience but how does education
transform deeplyentrenched gender roles and hierarchies in different contexts?
• Is education universally empowering? Need for nuanced accounts

GENDER AND EDUCATION IN PAKISTAN

• Pari likhi women enter the labor market as well as male-dominated public
domains that hadnot traditionally been available to women
 • However, these new roles are tied to parhi likhi women becoming subject to
new regulations,especially with regard to their sexuality.
• Parhi likhi women are allowed to take up new roles outside the home
because they areconsidered able to self-regulate their sexuality
• These women’s subjectivity is relational: it was constructed in relation to the
unparh (Urduterm for uneducated and or ignorant) women

The outcomes are always contradictory:

• The author defines the impact of women’s education as a form of regulated
empowerment
• Empowerment and regulation are interconnected rather than opposite: through
regulated empowerment, parhi likhi women are able to take up new
opportunities androles but only if they subject themselves to new
regulations: seemingly contradictory outcome
• Cross cultural evidence showing women’s empowerment through the
acceptance of newrules, i.e. on dressing and sexuality and avoid conflict with
families and communities: becoming ‘ideal Muslim women’– as opposed to
others
• These considerations need to be seen in light of the global stereotyping of
Muslimwomen, who are viewed ‘in need to be empowered’
• Women’s education has come to be associated either with the efforts of the
international development agencies or with the Taliban’s violent opposition to
girls’schools
• If this binary looks like a binary, the current situation imposes us to think of
the stop togirls’ education set in place
• Ethnographic research
• US-based Institute for Education
and Literacy (IEL)staff, teachers,
and community members
• Interview and participant
observation data collectedfrom 32
women teachers working at IEL
schools
• The interviewees worked at four
girls’ schools locatedin
Islamabad’s suburbs
• Schools catering to communities
living in four villagesof the Punjab
province
• These communities differed greatly in terms of theircaste, kinship, language

Experience of a teacher:
 • Whereas other women carried our household chores, her education enabled
her to have a job as a teacher and hence economic resources but also
resources for their intellectual and social development
• Similar experiences in India: women entering the male dominated public
sphere, leaving domestic workbehind, getting to know people, earning, going
around without too many restrictions
• Creation of differences between them and the un-parh women, through skills,
leadership andexperiences, confidence
• First generation learners who had to challenge restrictions against rules for
women in place in theircommunities
• Local norms according to which women from ‘respectable’ families neither
worked outside of their homes nor became visible in public spaces:
traditionally a family’s high status is marked by women’s seclusion, women’s
avoidance of activities in public
• Changing the discourse: Women present education as an Islamic right and
responsibility. Teaching is not just a job but rather a sacred service to the
community – rather than a meansto make money
• Women’s families responded positively to this narrative as it echoed the
Islamic andindigenous traditions: gaining acceptance
• ‘Sanitisation’ of activities
• However: these changes (that allowed mobility outside) are only for parhi
likhi women whoenter the male dominated sphere for a purpose viewed
important for the community. The latter’s values are aligned with those of their
families and communities.
• Through change in discourse, women teachers got the support of their
families
• Parhi likhi women as virtuous agents who did not need communal or family
surveillance toprotect the honor of their families
• Their agency is confined within this role
• This put stress and a burden on women to conform
• Women teachers had to help young girls understand that their presence in
public domains was possible only if they didn’t interact with men who are
unrelated to them. If they violatethis norm, their education can be stopped
and an early marriage can be arranged

Relational identities!
• Parhi likhi women was defined through their distinction from the unparh
women, who were seen aslacking the knowledge and morality of the parhi likhi
women
• Special privileges and opportunities obtained by the pari likhi women are in
place becauseeducation has provided them special qualities
• Parhi likhi women could travel to their school, visit a doctor, go on shopping
trips without being accompanied by a male relative, but unparh women were
 not allowed to leave home on their own

Why restricted mobility for the unparh women?

• They did not have the knowledge or confidence to commute, especially to
the city or to thedoctor, on their own
• They are viewed as lacking the virtue that parhi likhi women had gained
through education
• Parhi likhi woman are seen as able to behave, speak, and dress up
properly in public so that theydon’t constitute a danger for their families.
• All these opportunities are denied to the unparh women.
• Parhi likhi women’s empowerment takes place on the basis of the creation of
a hierarchy amongwomen!

‘IN THE PAST WE WERE A BIT ‘CHAMAR’’

Keep on building comparisons across these case studies, in terms of:
• What education means in the context analysed (besides the mere fact of an
individual gettingeducated)
• The different ways in which education works together with gender (what is
an educated youngman for vis a vis what is an educated young woman for)
• Links between education and politics (if any): which possibilities are opened
up by educationand for whom

‘In the past we were a bit “Chamar”’:

Educationengineering process in
northern India

Fieldwork in Uttar Pradesh, near

Varanarasi, participant observation,
interviews, householdsurveys

MORE ONTERMINOLOGY
• Caste names: i.e. Chamar (Chamra, skin, association to leatherwork)
• Very few people perform the traditional occupation, also historically
 • Chamar: derogatory, term of abuse in north India (Jatav is usually used in
Western UttarPradesh instead of Chamar)
• ‘In the past we were a bit ‘Chamar’’ refers to the ways people from this
caste use their owncaste name (in the derogatory sense of it) to speak of
themselves in the past

‘IN THE PAST WE WERE A BIT ‘CHAMAR’’

• Strong influence of Ambedkar among the community analyzed
• Strong emphasis placed by Ambedkar on education and mobilization activities
: educate,agitate, organize (a very pervasive slogan)
• Ambedkar himself was a highly-educated individual

DR AMBEDKAR’S STUDIES
• Ambedkar studies abroad (1913-1923, masters, PhD)
• Studies at Columbia University
• Studies at London School of Economics (LSE)

AMBEDKAR ABROAD

Ambedkar’s bust at Columbia University ‘Ambedkar Ambedkar’s bust at LSE

is said to have described his time in New York as
his first experience of social equality’

‘IN THE PAST WE WERE A BIT ‘CHAMAR’’

• Positively reviewing their social change
• When they speak about their own community and society, Chamars speak of
sudhar (improvement, social reform) and vikas (development)
• This terminology refers to an idea of progress
• This idea of progress is embraced even in the face of unemployment of
educated youth also in.other parts of the state of UP
‘IN THE PAST WE WERE A BIT ‘CHAMAR’’
Deeper consequences of education:
• Valuing the present over the past
• Chamars define their past in negative terms to live better in the present
• The key to social change is education: however the education as a civilizing
resource is acommon discourse across caste communities not just among
Dalits

BANARS HINDU UNIVERSITY (BHU)

Context: Varanasi , famous
place for learning (both for
traditional skills such as
priesthood and for secular
education, Banaras
Hindu University andmany
more)

EDUCATION AND CASTE

• Education is viewed by Manupur Chamars as leading to the acquisition
of a substance, often ofa moral nature, which is seen as collectively shared
(even though educated people might be only a minority ) and believed to act
upon an inherited Chamar substance
• The work and meanings of caste!
• ‘Chamar’ carries derogatory characteristics, historically assigned to the caste
as a result oftheir association with ritual pollution
• Shedding polluting selves through education!

THE COMMUNITY’S PAST

• ’We used to live like animals’.To make his words understood, while he talked,
he mimicked thegesture of eating food straight from large cooking pans,
suggesting a rather unrefined eating etiquette
• ’In the past, we were a bit “Chamar”’
• The Brahmans in their role of educators have failed the Chamars!
• Think of the relation between Brahmans and ‘former untouchables’ in
Dumont’s book-view of thecaste system: a holistic system where the two co-
exist (harmoniously!), pure and impure
‘IN THE PAST WE WERE A BIT ‘CHAMAR’’
• Celebrating the virtues of education and its civilizing nature
• Caste knowledge is implicitly worth less, despite its usefulness to the
community in a number ofsignificant ways
• What is learned at school and university appears to go largely
unquestioned, and appears as amonolithic construct.
• The contents of education do not come into play when the Chamars speak,
whether or not oneobtained a Bachelor of Commerce, or a Masters in
Chemistry, or simply attended high school.

‘IN THE PAST WE WERE A BIT ‘CHAMAR’’

• Meaning of parha likha: both literate and educated vs angutha chap (thumb-
print) – one whocan only sign with a thumb-print
• When this expression is used, the degree of education attained by the
educated person in question is not explicit and could range from secondary
school attendance to a college degree
• Chamar educate people (in the article) are often first generation of learners

MANY CONSEQUENCES OF EDUCATION

• Political mobilization
• Religious roles and relation between Chamars and Brahmans
• Aiding others who lack literacy
• Rewriting history
• Rethinking colonial history and their community past

POLITICAL MOBILIZATION
• With increased visibility from the 1990s onwards, Dalit-educated generations
have led politicalmobilization against the upper castes and proselytized
among the masses of rural poor from within the folds of a Dalit-led political
party, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP)
• They persuaded most of their community to abandon their longstanding
allegiance to the Congress Party – an expression of the dominant upper
castes in leadership positions and largely voted to power by Dalits and
Muslims.

RELIGIOUS ROLES
• Literate/ educated young Chamar men in Manupur are deployed to
celebrate rituals thatrequire the recitation of texts, which at times require
knowledge of Sanskrit
• The ability to read ritual texts – and the availability of religious literature in local
markets – hasallowed them to substitute the new literate and educated
Chamar for the traditional knowledgeable Brahman priest
RELATIONS BETWEEN CHAMARS AND BRAHMANS
• Amongst Manupur Chamars, ritual culture and practices have been the
domain of uneducated members of the community, such as male ritual
specialists who celebratemarriages
• Brahman priests used to be called upon for their services to perform a few
rituals prior to themarriage ceremony, as well as for the recitation of devotional
stories
• The Chamars’ decision to stop calling the Brahman priests is a political and
symbolic statement in their strategy of challenging hierarchical relations and
touches on essentialrules of Hinduism.

CONDUCTING PUJA (WORSHIP)

• Saraswati puja – the worship of the goddess of knowledge performed every
year by students – had consisted of a private occasion in a better-off
household with children inhigher education.
• Since 2002, this worship had become a collective event within the Chamar
community.
• On that occasion, Chamar Sanskrit students read out ritual booklets in
Sanskrit

HELPING OTHERS
Another consequence of education:
• Educated people help the uneducated to navigate the bureaucratic
procedures and paperwork
• Coaching younger students
• They help with the ‘knowledge transfer’ from state institutions onto them
(for example withapplications etc)

REWRITING HISTORY AND MYTHS

Education and the rewriting of history and myths, not only among Dalits
• The ‘thirst for history’ amongst a number of castes – and not only Dalits but
also among middle-ranking castes – has led to their rewriting the past in order
to be part of the nation’s history
• Creation of supra-local political communities
• Existing myths of origins have been questioned by low-caste communities
and replaced withversions of historical subjection and symbols of self-respect
and dignity.

RETHINKING COLONIAL HISTORY

We became insan (human beings) only because of the British.
‘When the British came to India, they were fond of eating pork and meat in general.
But the Brahmins were not supposed to cook pork so the job of cooking pork was
given to this biradari (caste). Ambedkar’s father, Ramjirao, usedto serve the British.
A few years after Ambedkar’s birth, the British officer who was served by
Ambedkar’s father noticed that the child wasvery brilliant. So he asked Ramjirao the
reason why he had not sent his son to school. Ambedkar’s father said that he could
not send him as studying is pap (sin) for his caste.The officer asked him to get his
son enrolled into school. So Ramjirao and Ambedkar went to the school, and there
they were asked to write the child’s name on the register.
At that moment, people came to know that the child was a Chamar. Ambedkar
was abused and sent back home with the excuse that studying was sin for him.
Father and son returned home and reported what happened to the officer.The
British went to that school, shouted at the school staff and threatened to dismiss
them all from their duty if the child was not registered. At that time untouchability
prevailed within the Hindu community (Middle-aged literate Chamar male
informant, my field note 1998).’

RETHINKING COLONIAL HISTORY

• Remember quotes by Dalits in Tamil Nadu, about nation and caste!
• Here there is a difference: Chamars don’t speak of the oppression by the
British but offellow (higher caste) Indians
• British colonisers fostering their ‘humanity’

INNER DIVISIONS
• Not all is well with education within the village…….
• Education is used as an idiom to express social divisions brought about by
processes ofupward mobility
• Educated people espouse the ‘right lifestyle’: an emphasis on respectability,
a higher marriageage for both sexes, a degree of sanitization of cultural
performances. They critique the ‘classic’vices of the under-classes: excessive
alcohol consumption, gambling, illiteracy, large numbers ofchildren, money
mismanagement, the use of abusive language, and the display of private
affairs in publi
• Many of the caste’s shortcomings are attributed to lack of education

GENDER CONSIDERATIONS
• Gender: a great deal of this article is about young men
• Who are mobilized in politics
• Conduct the rituals
• Get the government jobs
I deal with women’s education in this community in another piece: 2010.‘‘The
bourgeois woman and thehalf-naked one’: Or the Indian nation's contradictions
personified’, Modern Asian Studies 4: 785-815
 COMPARATIVETHINKING
Continuities and similarities that you can identify:
• Does it make a difference between being educated at high school level or
studying towardsa university degree?
• Thinking of yourself as a different person as you are getting a university
education?
• Do you think there are differences between uneducated and educated people
(in general)?What kind?
• Does getting educated lead to the re-thinking of history in your home country?
• Does education lead to involvement in politics and fighting for rights?
• Any other?

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF INDIA AND SOUTH ASIA: AN INTRODUCTION

LECTURE 6

TODAYAND NEXT LECTURE

Gender in South Asia:
• Deeper structures: how genders are constructed
• Expanding on the gender spectrum: beyond binaries of women and men, and
intotransgender
• Intersectional identities: identities that are made through the combined
effects of gender,age, religion, class among others

QUESTIONS
• What are the gender identities and roles about in India and South Asia?
• How do they differ from those we are more familiar with? Emphasis on
difference andunderstanding it
• What is this difference about and are there also continuities?

PREVIOUS LECTURE: GENDER AND EDUCATION

The different ways in which education works together with gender:
• What is the educated persona in South Asia all about? Shared idioms of
civilisation, progress,proper manners, self confidence, ideas of morality etc
• However, the conditions and effects of education vary according to gender
• Caste studies from the north India, Pakistan Bangladesh and Nepal do
illustrate this difference: what is an educated young man for vs what is an
educated young woman for
• Only in Nepal, acquiring literacy led to more egalitarian gender relations
• Readings that point to the relation between gender and sexuality in North India
(Alter)
• Gender and motherhood in Bangladesh (Nahar and Richters)
BRAHMACHARYA (CELIBACY)
• Women teachers in Pakistan or high-school girls who have to control/self-
regulate theirsexuality (i.e. not entertaing relations with men who are
unrelated to them, embody notions of honour, piety)
• Alter shows another kind of self control of sexuality, that around the figure
of thecelibate man
• High status of celibacy in India till today (i.e.politicians)
• How to practice brahmacharya (celibacy) is an important concept in Hindu
notions ofmale identity
• The focus is on the problem of semen control which is acknowledged to
have religious,social, political, and psychological dimensions

METHODS
• Analysis of the self-help literature on brahmacharya (celibacy) in North India
• Using "ethnographic reading" of the literature and field research
• Research at Yog Sansthan (Indian Yoga Society) in Delhi where a version of
this literatureis put into practice
• Brahmacharya as part of Hindu sexuality
• Hindu men view sex as a medical problem and as a biomoral issue with
strongreligious overtones that must be scientifically analyzed
• Celibacy becomes an integral part of a medical regimen not only to stay
healthy,but to exercise control over both public and private morality

BRAHMACHARYA AND SELF

• Brahmacharya is fundamentally about a knowledge of the transcendental Self,
which is only partially realized in any particular individual – larger entity
• This Self is different from the sexually objectified secular self of the west and
its individualistic notion of it
• In the West, the self has generally viewed as indivisible, a singular, a
holistic unitthat cannot be subdivided into smaller parts

THE HINDU SELF

McKim Marriott has developed an ethnosociology of Hindu society: within this the
individual is notprimary or indivisible, but is the contingent result of "dividual"
elements
These are things as water, fire, and air; goodness, darkness, and passion; and
dynamics such as advantage, coherence, attachment, and release: these come
together to compose a fluid sphere ofa psychosomatic reality, and determines the
position of the self within particular social contexts
• The person is a contingent, changing product of forces
• It is a porous self

SEMEN AND MALE BRAHMACHARI

 • It goes without saying that: a rigid Western concept of self is not suitable for
understandingbrahmacharya
• Rather than begin with the self, Alter proposes to begin with semen in order to
understand the malebrahmachari
• Biomoral concept:Truth as semen, this is where "real" selfhood is thought to
be biologically located
• What about female sexuality? This is could be read as attempt to control female
sexuality by defining it as not only dangerous but as antithetical to truth
• This views however needs to be placed in the picture where there is not one
"Hindu sexuality" butmany different expressions and experiences of sexuality
given one’s position in the hierarchies of class, caste, and gender
• Pervasive patriarchal Brahmanic view

BOOKS ON CELIBACY
• Alter looks into books on celibacy and those dealing with the problems
associated with malesexuality circulate among urban lower-middle-class and
middle-class boys and men
• Young boys and men between the ages of 16 and 45 read this literature when
they felt they were suffering from semen loss, or when they simply wanted to
look and feel more energetic
• Guides to love letter writing, books on celibacy….

CELIBACY AND YOGA: GENDER AND CASTEORIGINS

• Many of the books on celibacy are written by Brahman men
• Many of the yoga centers where celibacy is upheld reflect a Brahmanical bias
• Brahmacharya men from a broad spectrum of caste backgrounds
• Strong link between celibacy and the widespread devotional cult of Hanuman,
which alsocrosscuts many social hierarchies in North India

YOGA
• Yoga was propagated as a scientific form of universal public health and physical
fitness.The emphasis at theexpanding number of yoga institutes is on the
beneficial medical effects of asanas, breathing technique and personal hygiene
• The past 70 years has seen a virtual explosion in the number of books on yoga
(Alter’s year of publication 1997)
• UN: international day of yoga on 21 June
• In the past 30 years or so, however, there has been a further proliferation of
relatively cheap self-help guides in many regional Indian languages (time of
writing)
• Alter has collected approximately 200 in Hindi and English. If this literature does
not always focus on the issue of celibacy, brahmacharya is always explained
as one of the key biomoral practices upon which yogais based
• Majority of authors are men, but address both men and women
EXAMPLES ON CELIBACY FROM A BOOK:
Example on celibacy from the relevant literature:
‘Celibacy improves the condition of your semen. However much semen you are
able to retain, you will receive in that proportion greater wisdom, improved action,
higher spirituality and increased knowledge. Moreover, you will acquire the power
to get whateveryou want. [Yogacharya Bhagwandev 1992:15]

Biomoral qualities!
• Many of the men who write about celibacy have also written numerous books
on yogaand naturopathy
• Some of the "scientific" literature on celibacy is written by men who teach and
practiceyoga as a form of spiritual self-realization
• The pioneers of the yoga renaissance have popularized yoga as an international
andtranscultural form of more or less spiritual physical therapy

THE BHARATIYA YOG SANSTHAN IN DELHI

• Established in 1968 by two young middle-class men from Delhi who react to
sensuality,tension, and violence of modern life
• Inspired by Mool Raj Anand, a moral reformer who advocated nonviolence,
raw natural foods,and yoga discipline
• They began to do yoga asanas in a public park near their homes
• Everyone feeling sick, angry, nervous, and consumed by desire would
practice yoga: in thisway society would improve - link between individual
practice and the rest
• BYS Members are well educated, are in government service occupations,
professionals inprivate companies.
• BYS has grown into over 250 centers in 12 states in India

WHAT IS BRAHMACHARYA?
• Brahmacharya is regarded as a lifestyle and not simply a condition of
abnegation
• Brahmacharya means total control over the flow of one's semen: an
immunity fromsexual desire
• Behavior is subdivided into three categories: diet, exercise, and work or
business
• Truth diet (simple food), truth exercise (simple walking) and truth work
(simple living)
• A person who eats simple food, walks or 'goes simply,' and lives simply
is called abrahmachari
• Brahmacharya is a way of life based on simplicity
• Its goal is to bring all faculties under control so as to embody truth. Kama, or
lust, is theaspect of experience that is most unstable, and sexual desire in
particular is thought to be volatile and dangerous to control
 • Here the difference with western sexuality appears more striking (but sexual
abstinenceis attached to many religious roles)

ON DESIRE
• While desire is hard to control, one does not seek to control it on moral
grounds simply because it is wrong
• Sensual passion, of which sex is one manifestation, is not evil or sinful. It is one
of the "four aims of man" andtherefore contextually legitimate. No notion of sin
attached to sex as in Catholicism for example
• But this aim is considered to be inferior compared to the three aims of
dharma (right action), artha (advantage), andmoksha (release, or
nonattachment)
• In Bramacharya, controlling desire is primarily significant as a way to protect
semen
• It is psychosomatic defensive mechanism, devoid of a discourse of virtue or
vice
• Controlling desire is not an end in itself. It is a practical program for healthy
living: drifting away from desire andone’s psychosomatic essence is directed
towards the truth.

FOOD AND SEMEN

• Calculation of food intake, transformation into blood and flesh and semen
• Food quality and quantity has a direct and measurable effect on the
production and flow ofsemen
• When food is eaten it takes 5 days to become blood. Blood is then "digested”
for another 5 days,at which time it becomes flesh. After another 5 days flesh
is made into fat, fat into bone, bone into marrow, and finally, after another 5
days and a total of 30, marrow is made into semen.
• A yoga teacher would suggest that ejaculation is a waste of energy
• Attention to these notions of how the body is central to the constitution of the
self and the rolethat sex plays in it

THE PLACE OF SEMEN

Different notions of the constitution of the body:
• According to most authors of books, semen is concentrated in the testicles,
but there is also areservoir in the head
• Authors also think that semen in fact permeates the whole body "like oil in
an almond; butterin milk; juice in raisins; scent in flowers; and fire in an ember”
• Again diverging massively from western notions

THE POWER OF SEMEN

• A person who has an orgasm is changed into a less-perfect form of his
previous self: therepresentation of this is that of a dried up lemon
 • If semen remains within the body, writers describe a body glowing with the
energy of semen
• Semen is embodied as the essence of life.
• Semen a psychosomatic virtue wherein truth and beauty are given substantial
form
• A brahmachari is virtuous not only because of his behaviour but also because
his bodycontains semen

DEPICTIONS OF THE BRAHMACHARI

• A brahmachari is "hammered full" of divine aura
• Brahmachari's eyes shine with a special light, his cheeks glow like roses,
and his expressionabsolutely devoid of desire or lust
• As one yoga teacher put it, "your cheeks will glow like Kashmiri apples."
• ”His chest is firm and his stride determined"; and then to intellect and ability:
• ‘He is at the head of his class and wins in sports; he does everything he sets
his mind to.With asingle, well chosen word, he can silence others.With his
melodious and influential voice he incorporates the good logic of wise men into
his own discourse.’
• Semen is implicated in all of these description: think comparatively!

ALL KINDS OF CONSEQUENCES FROM SEMEN LOSS

• The symptoms associated with semen loss: perspiration, "watery semen,"
indigestion, and acne but also a lack of respect, anger, irritability, and general
mood swings, laziness, and anxiety
• These symptoms not only affect the individual body but the entire society:
social and biomoral degeneration follows!
• Strong connection between individual and society
• Punishment is almost totally absent from the discourse on brahmacharya
• Books on celibacy offer help on how semen loss can be treated
• Focus on digestion and circulation because healthy blood builds up semen,
while poor digestion can cause semen to flow out of the body
• Prevention is better than cure!

MAIN DIFFERENCES WITH THE WEST ….

• Sex is not a secret: in the discourse on brahmacharya, sexuality is part of
everyday life
• This is not an erotic sexuality: it is more about the everyday routine and
part of themanagement of personal health
• For the brahmachari, sexuality is an open, public issue. It is about his whole
identity.
• Comparison with monks who observe chastity
• The difference between the secular brahmachari and a monk is that the
former’s regimeis part of public health, it is not secretive or mystical
 • In the history of Western European truth about self and sex is connected to
who doeswhat to whom, and when, how, and why he or she does it
• Sex involves someone else, it is about sexual interaction - mostly
• In North India, there is only the Brahmachari!

CHILDLESSNESS AND WOMEN

• From the male articulation and cultivation of the virtues of the semen for the
body of the individual and society, and the construction of the celibate, we
move to another dimension ofgender within South Asia: childless women
• The article is on Bangladesh but this is clearly a global problem
• Focus on how rural childless women experience strong stigma in society, as
their identity is devalued due to their inability to produce children (in India this is a
very important phenomenon)
• Women suffer from guilt, role failure, loss of self-esteem, abandonment by the
family, socialisolation, and impoverishment
• Because of their relatively high socio-economic status and good educational
background, urban childless women are in a better position because they can
take up other social identities and avoidsocial isolation.

METHOD
• The main method was gathering life histories of illiterate rural poor childless
women andeducated urban middle-class childless women: comparative angle
• Rural respondents were selected from ten different villages of a central north
district ofBangladesh
• Group discussions were conducted in the rural areas, each with ten childless
women, tovalidate the data collected through the individual life histories

INSIGHTS
• Childness women face marital abandonment, social isolation and domestic
violence:
1.) Childlessness may result either in disruption of the marital situation, or in fear
of thispossibility. Marriage is a must for Bangladeshi women (similarly in much
of South Asia)
2.) Stigmatisation of women
3.) Loss of privacy: painful scrutiny of childless couples occurs in both urban and
rural settings. People quite frequently ask about the ‘number of children’ and
the ‘reason for nothaving a child’
4.) Economic considerations; children, particularly boys, are considered to be
additionalearners.Thus, childless households are deprived of that earning
5.) Emotional consequences of childlessness involve crisis and a stressful
experience
6.) Blame, role failure and guilty feelings about not fulfilling the societal
expectations for‘normal women’
 7.) In rural areas people avoid childless women, because they are viewed as
degraded peoplewho can cause harm

COMPARATIVETHINKING
• We saw differences between a Hindu male view and the practice of sexuality
in north India andin the west: would you say there are also continuities?
• Do you find a stigma associated to childless women in the west?
If yes, what does that entail?

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF INDIA AND SOUTH ASIA: AN INTRODUCTION

LECTURE 7

PREVIOUS LECTURE AND TODAY

Gender in South Asia:
• Deeper structures: how genders are constructed
• Expanding on the gender spectrum: beyond binaries of women and men, and
intotransgender
• Intersectional identities: identities that are made through the combined
effects of gender,age, religion, class among others

QUESTIONS
• What are the gender identities and roles about in India and South Asia?
• How do they differ from those we are more familiar with? Emphasis on
difference andunderstanding it
• What is this difference about and are there also continuities?
• The relation between gender and sexuality thorugh the notion of
brahmacharya(celibacy) centered around semen as biomoral substance in
North India
• Gender and motherhood : how ‘childlessness’ reshapes women’s identities in
Bangladesh

TODAY
• Gender within the ‘Muslim world’ in South Asia, how they shape each other,
and the waysin which this world allows for fluidity, change and traffic with
itself and other religions
• 1st reading on the relation between gender, space and religious movements in
Pakistan
• 2nd reading on ‘Third gender’ or Hijra everyday life in Bangladesh

WOMEN’S SPACES IN ISLAMICMOVEMENTS IN PAKISTAN

A study of gender, space and agency in two organisations part of piety movements in
Pakistan(part of a larger Islamic Revival movement)
 • Main participant observation at a total of three Al-Huda sites and five Tablighi
Jama’at sites andwomen’s gatherings in Islamabad
• These sites were distributed through the sectors of the city commonly
identified as middleand upper-middle
• Conducted participant observation research at sites of these movements
also in Lahore andKarachi

GENDER, RELIGION AND SPACE

• Piety movements aims to recover an slam from the prophetic past, and the
interiors of themovement spaces are changed in order to reflect this claim
• The Tablighi Jama’at and Al-Huda transform household spaces

MOVEMENTS
• The Tablighi Jama’at and Al-Huda are both transnational movements with
large followingsin Pakistan
• The Tablighi Jama’at was founded in 1927 in India and incorporates
women as adjuncts tomale activities
• Al-Huda was founded relatively recently in 1994 in Pakistan and is led by and
catersprimarily to women
• Women within these movements: as students of movement leaders

WOMEN’SAGENCY
• Rather than victims of an externally imposed patriarchal order, we look at
women as agents whonegotiated these systems as a form of resistance
• Analysis of the spaces of the Tablighi Jama’at and Al-Huda show that
movement teachings alter aswomen transmit them and live by them

CREATION OF SPACE
• While the ideological guidelines for space are given by movement leaders, it
is the members who bring space into being both by creating it on a material
level and through the act of living nthe space
• Women’s authorship over movement spaces is not immediately apparent
because, unlike infeminist models of resistance, it does not explicitly oppose
movement goals

GENDER AND SOCIETY IN PAKISTAN

• Wide ranging question:What role should women play in urban Pakistani
society? Who is asking this question and providing answers?
• Since the formation of Pakistan in 1947, when reformers shaped women’s
sartorial, educational, and spatialpractices to demarcate and protect the
boundaries of the emergent nation
• Some aspects of purdah, a system of institutionalized gender segregation
followed by middle- and upper-class
 • Creation and maintenance of separate spaces for women as well as women’s
donning of various forms ofveiling when leaving these segregated spaces
• Over time, women have had increasing access to education and employment in
Pakistani cities, although thereis a widespread social consensus that their
domestic responsibilities to their families (cooking, cleaning, and organizing the
household) come first

THE VEIL
• Contemporary Islamic movements in Pakistan tell women to segregate
themselves and refrain from enteringpublic space except when necessary
• The growth of urban women veiling their hair and/or faces by adopting
headscarves and abayas has been tied by a number of analysts to the growth
of these movements, which promote new standards of religious practicefor
women
• The increase in the number of urban women veiling and adopting spatial
segregation has led to an large publicdiscourse amongst the Pakistani elite
concerning Islam and gender segregation
• Teaching and preaching within these movements relies largely on unpaid
volunteers who take upthe act of da’wa (proselytization) and recruiting for the
movement as a religious responsibility superseding “worldly” attachments and
duties

REFORMING ONE’S OWN LIFE

• Prioritizing personal religious activities over household work, and refusing to
attend “mixed” gatherings in whichmen and women socialize, and sometimes
abstaining from popular forms of recreation such as watching TV or listening to
music
• As they enter piety movements, female members move from implementing
these reforms in their own lives tobringing them to their households and
extended families
• Stories of women refusing to attend family gatherings, or throwing out TVs in
the face of their children andhusbands’ oppositions, are often told in
relationship to Al-Huda

DARS, OR LESSON
• Women learn these behaviors in introductory settings designed to recruit
them into Islamic pietymovements.These gatherings resemble religious
gatherings offered to women known as dars (lesson), religious study groups
historically unaffiliated with specific piety movements
• Attending dars is generally considered a virtuous act,
• The author met a number of women who were often unaware that there was a
specific religiousmovement sponsoring the event but had come because they
had heard that there was a dars in thelocal area
THE DRAWING ROOM AS SPACE FORTHESEEVENTS
• Most events are held in the drawing room of a house, and that the space of
this room is altered toconform to movement-specific guidelines
• Al-Huda and the Tablighi Jama’at leadership draw on the drawing rooms of
wealthy members inorder to hold women’s gatherings.
• Drawing rooms in middle- and upper-middle class houses in Islamabad are
situated near theentrance of the house
• The use of the drawing room for an Islamic movement’s gatherings is the
result of negotiationwithin families and takes into consideration the degree to
which women in a movement have supportive husbands and families

HOME AND MOSQUE

• Women’s participation in Islamic revivalist movements in Egypt, Indonesia,
Malaysia, and Iran oftentake place in mosques. By contrast, most Pakistani
women’s religious gatherings are based in houses, schools, colleges,
hotels, and municipal buildings, a move that speaks to the representational
needs of movement leaders
• In contrast, most activities of the male wing of the Tablighi Jama’at are based in
mosques, both inPakistan and internationally

SACRIFICING ONESELF
• Sermons in Tablighi Jama’at space call on women to go on extended
missionary tours lasting up to a month, leaving behind small children. Both the
male sermonizers and female members emphasize thatleaving children with
in-laws or other family members is a virtuous sacrifice
• The idea that mothers leaving their children could be virtuous would be
unthinkable in nearly anyother Pakistani context.
• Women’s responsibility to perform the “work” of Tablighi (i.e., go on tour).
A sermon recites:“Thework ofTablighi is not only for men …Women and men
are partners’

THE TABLIGHI JAMA’AT AND THE TOUR

• The Tablighi Jama’at was founded in 1926
• It has grown into one of the largest contemporary transnational Islamic
movements and has over two million male members in Pakistan alone.
• The main mission of the Tablighi Jama’at is to engage in da’wa, which
literallymeans “to call”. Da’wa tours are also known as jama’ats

SPATIAL FEATURES
• After attending a number of Tablighi gatherings in Islamabad, the author
identifies features common across women’s Tablighi events in the city.The most
ubiquitous feature of these gatherings was the gender segregation, which was
 ensured through fabric barriers cordoning offthe door to the drawing room from
the outside
• Another common element of space was the white cloth covering the floor
• A third element was the large loudspeaker, through which the sermon, was
delivered to thewomen by a male speaker

HOMES AS MOSQUES?
• Creating Tablighi space requires significant modifications to the usualmiddle-
class Islamabad drawing room
• At times bedrooms and inner lounges are furnished and drawing roomsare
maintained to represent Tablighi space
• These spaces recall the mosque spaces in which Tablighi men operate
• These features set Tablighi women’s spaces apart from space in Al-Huda
settings, and from thoseof middle-class Islamabad domestic spaces
• The mosque-like nature of Tablighi domestic space shows the movement’s
commitment to radical social change and the commitment to the equality of
men and women as agents of Tabligh

MEETINGS, SPACE AND DRESS

• With its focus on segregation, these spaces encourage women to take off their
face veils, headscarves, and burqas, contributing to themovement-encouraged
sense of friendly neighborhood mosque space
• The absence of men and the segregated space encourages womento relax their
veiling in other settings in Pakistan

AL-HUDA SPACE
• The Al-Huda Welfare Trust was founded in 1992 and is focused oneducating
women in the Qur’an and Hadith.
• Appeal to middle- and upper-class Pakistani women
• The movement offers “classes”
• Any woman who completes the diploma courses can, with theapproval of
the institute, start teaching in private houses

AL-HUDA SPACE
• The Al-Huda institute offers administrative support, teachers commit their
time, and the womanwho hosts contributes the use of her family’s drawing
room and recruits from her circle
• Drawing rooms maintain their pre-Al-Huda style and undergo subtle
modifications to reflecttheir status as movement space

THE CLASSROOM MODEL

• The class’ use of the drawing room has constrained families
• The leadership of Al-Huda presents the movement and its at-home classes as
a place wherethe “truth” about Islam is conveyed to women
MODIFYING THE DRAWING ROOM FORCLASSROOM
• The Al-Huda movement claims to reject only those aspects of Pakistani
culture thathave been contaminated by “theWest”
• Most Pakistani upper- and middle-class drawing rooms and living spaces
contain pictures of family members, and statues and paintings are also
common decorations
• Drawing rooms which hosted Al-Huda classes did not contain pictures of
people, statues, orpaintings with human faces on them
• These changes to Al-Huda living spaces respond to Islamic prohibitions
against depicting faces.The decoration in these rooms was limited to
paintings and calligraphy featuring Qur’anic verses or the Names of Allah

COMPARATIVETHOUGHTS ACROSSTHESEMOVEMENTS
• Female members of religious movements in Pakistan receive a historically
unprecedented degree of access to Islamic sacred texts, the Qur’an and
Hadith.
• For the Tablighi Jama’at, movement guidelines call for an egalitarian space
• Al-Huda constructs a “modern” classroom in private space for women who
don’t have freedom of mobility

HIJRA FROM BANGLADESH

• Hijra, third sex/gender’ in South Asia, are feminine-identified male-bodied
people who desire men andwho are devotees of a goddess and sacrifice
their male genitals to a goddess in return for spiritual prowess
• A focus on these communities over time
• Usually called at children’s birth, marriages, for their blessings but found
working in the sex industry,begging and trying to survive in several ways
• Usually one can also spot them on the streets, at traffic lights
• Scholarly interest in hijra starts in colonial times and challenged to the
classificatory imperatives ofthe colonial administration
• Recent scholarship has complicated our understanding of hijras, and
challenged the over-romanticised representations
• The tolerance and practical accommodation of so-called third gender people
in India emanates froma Hindu veneration of androgyny
• Influence of locality, kinship, globalisation, religion, language, gender and
class, through which hijrasubjectivities are produced
ARDHANARISHVARA: SHIVA AND PARVATI

Contribution of this article concerns two underexplored aspects: emasculation and

Islam
• The article shows a more complex picture: there are both emasculated and
non- emasculated hijra, hijra who are householding men and those who are
exclusively feminineidentified
• Hijrahood is processual and emerges in practice

COLONIAL ERA
• British colonial imaginary strategically juxtaposed the hijra with Islam and
emasculation in a bidto claim a superior moral position over the Muslim rulers
to substantiate British colonial governance
• British colonisers viewed the institution of eunuchdom and emasculation
under the Muslimrulers as the direct consequence of Muslim libertine behaviour
• The paper calls into question the centrality of emasculation in the production of
hijrahood.

A MORE COMPLEX PICTURE

• In the literature emasculation remains the most important criterion by
which ‘‘real’’ hijradifferentiate themselves from false ones
• While in public hijra in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, often invoke the
trope of being ‘‘born that way’’ – i.e. born without discrete male genitalia – in
reality there are both hijra with a penisand those without
INTERNAL CATEGORIES
• Hijra with penises and those without, known as janana and chibry
• Neither janana nor chibry are accorded more authentic status within the hijra
community
• it is not on account of emasculation but rather one’s ability to learn and
subsequentlyconduct hijragiri that on becomes, and is publicly recognised as,
a hijra, regardless of one’s genital status

HINDU-MUSLIM
• In Bangladesh, hijra observe both Hindu-identified and Islamic beliefs
and practices
• Yet Muslim-born hijra in Bangladesh do not identify themselves as Hindu but
they take pride in beingMuslim
• There are also Hindu-born hijra in Bangladesh, they generally adhere to and
identify with their religionof birth
• Hindu hijra don’t become Muslim because of their initiation into the hijra
community
• Muslim hijra in Bangladesh often situate their Hindu-marked cosmology and
practices within anidea of open Islam
• Syncretistic practice enacted through hijra performative appropriations of
both Islam and Hinduism
• No oppositions of Hindu versus Muslim but hijra religiosity includes both in terms
of both faith andpraxi

HIJRAGIRI
• Janana hijra in Dhaka perform hijragiri in a location away from their
heterosexual householdswhere they have wives and children
• In South Asia, there are initiation rituals for people who want to be recognised
as legitimate members of the hijra community.The most important is asla, a
rite that establishes the relationship between a hijra disciple and her/is guru
and marks her/is entry into a hijra house

PILGRIMAGE TO MECCA (HAJ)

The case of Sonia:
• Sonia performed hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, and since her/is return has been
working with the local mosque as a volunteer in weekly Islamic preaching.
• Sonia dresses like a man during her/is service for the mosque. S/he also works
as the branch manager of anNGO working on the sexual health of the hijra in
the area. In the office and house s/he stays dressed like a woman in line with
the hijra lifestyle.
• Like Sonia, many hijra in Bangladesh aspire to perform hajj, though only a few
can manage it due to financial constraints
• Once they come back as hajji, their status in their community and the wider
society increases
THIRD GENDER IN INDIA. HIJRAS,THE KINNARSDAUGHTERS
• Hijras more in Hindu realm
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O3gqFvhIiU
• Comparative thinking:Transgender in South Asia and in Europe?

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF INDIA AND SOUTH ASIA: AN INTRODUCTION

LECTURE 8

TODAY: YOUTH
• A topic that is closer to you and you have the opportunity to look at how ways of
beingyoung in India and South Asia have been explored anthropologically
• We have already encountered ‘youth’: for example in education but also
gender
• South Asia features is an incredibly young population: what does it mean to be
growing up asyoung person in this part of the world?
• What does the anthropology of India and South Asia have to say on this?
• How do your lives compare with those of young people we will be discussing?

DEFININGYOUTH
One of the most explicit and crucial aspects that define youth is by age group
• For statistical purposes, the UN establishes that ‘youth’ those persons between
the agesof 15 and 24 years. But they say that ‘There is no universally agreed
international definition of the youth age group’
• For example in India, youth are defined as those aged 15 to 29. In 2014,
this age-groupconsisted of 27.5% of the India’s population
• Pakistan defines “youth” as people between the ages of 15 and 29
• Nepal: defines ‘youth’ as people between the ages of 16 to 40 years
• Thus in India, Pakistan and Nepal there is a longer period for youth

THE READINGS
The exploration of different dimensions of youth in South Asia in 2 lectures:
• The micropolitics of interpersonal relations such as friendship and flirting
• The encounters with tourists and the imagery of other countries, drug abuse,
class and youthcultures

FLIRTING AND FRIENDSHIP IN KERALA

• Writing love letters in Nepal, wanting to become ‘modern’ following
discourses of development,and resulting increased rate of consensual
marriage
• Kerala is a conservative society: highly segregated, while female
involvement in public life islow (year of writing 1998: things might have
 changed but not in the sense of an increasing co-existence of young people
across genders!)
• The authors use youth and gender to discuss cases of personal interaction
where the principle ofhierarchy is subverted, reversed, denied and re-affirmed
• Remember Dumont (lecture on caste): hierarchy at the centre of Indian social
life and this centrality is expressed by endogamy and ranks of castes or
communities, and continued in relations between young and old, men and
women
• However hierarchy is not always at the center of social interaction: how and
why?
Sites where to these dynamics have been explored:
• Young men in single-sex groups, joking, sharing and making friendships
with each other inegalitarian modes which are in apparent denial of principles of
caste hierarchy
• Encounters between young men and young women and the modalities of
harassment, flirtingand romance. Here hierarchy is intensified, negated and
reversed

CENTRAL TRAVANCORE, KERALA

• The location is a rural settlement with a few Muslim families and some
higher castecommunities, as well as Christians and the low castes
• There are areas inhabited by single communities or mixed
• However Dalits live in segregated areas at the edges of the paddy-fields
where they arestill overwhelmingly employed as labourers.
 • There are also class divisions as the result of the effects of migration to
Persian Gulfcountries and by economic liberalization
Marriage patterns
• By the 1990s, arranged, dowried, hypergarmous (the woman ‘marries up’) has
become themost common and preferred form of marriage
• Young men and women alike, marrying for the most part in their 20s, and are
expectednot to have had any pre-marital relationships
• But some engage in illicit pre-marital affairs and even elopements, some
engage inflirtations and romances
• These relationships are found among and cut across, all sections of this
fieldwork site
• Youth obviously cuts across caste and community!

MALE SOCIALISING
• Young men often appear to subvert or escape caste and, indeed, hierarchy, in
theirrelations with each other
• Free from the domestic chores and relative seclusion which are the lot of
their teenagesisters: thus boys are freer
• Segregated from girls and socialising in all male gangs
• School or college allows most youths time, space away from home.They have
pocketmoney, and they engage in regular group outings and movie-watching
• The popular view of these youths, especially by girls and women, is that they
go aroundlooking at girls and do nothing useful

A CULTURE OF SHARING
• Youths share money, clothes, cassettes, cologne and other goods among
themselves
• While youths from the 'highest' and 'lowest' Hindu castes are under-
represented: but a small cross-community mixing occur while cross-class
mixing between the sons of the wealthy and those of the poor is very common
• Among groups young men, intense physical contact and sharing point to
egalitarian principles andthe breaking down of social distance
• The authors read some of wider society's disapproval of and hostility towards
gangs of youths lying precisely in the fact that their behaviour poses to the
hierarchical values of the society andhence they oppose such behaviour: no
disruption

LIMINAL STATE
• The intense involvement of youths in close relations, and the other practices
are seen bysociety as behaviour by those who are not yet adult or serious
• They are not yet prepared to take on their full caste social identities required by
adult maleswho need to uphold societal values in order to gain respect and status
• In this liminal status, young men cross the caste and class barriers that
however rigidify later onin their adult life
HARASSMENT
• Single-sex colleges and segregated buses are common throughout Kerala
• No co-education and interrelations across the sexes creates many problems
throughoutIndia
• In public spaces, young men verbally and physically harass girls and
women
• In town, boys may try to touch a girl, for example in crowded situations
• Performance of powerful heterosexuality which builds on a gender hierarchy:
young menperform the role of the powerful and penetrating male, who is
able to dominate the girls
• However, in a segregated society and strong pre-marital virginity beliefs, the
penetrating,potent male is a fantasy
• The opposite of this is romance – great influence of movies on this
• Aspirations towards heroism and romance are played out among young men
• Cultivation of the artistic side: music etc
• A young man can be both a sensitive and an aggressive person
• The authors argue that the links between harassment and flirting, aggression
and love,and the difficulties in identifying the differences, are not easy to
understand!
• Predicament of anthropologists!

GOAL FOR BOYS

• Young men want to persuade an unmarried young woman to flirt (tune) or to
romancewith them: exchange glances, photographs and letters, as well as
going to the movies, coffees etc.
• The romantic and artistic efforts of youths often fail to find an object or an
audience: on the other hand, it is less risky for a girl to admire a young man’s
poem or drawing than todirectly admire the youth himself
• With social media, possibly all of this has become more pervasive and
maybe easier(remember year of publication of the article)

ANATOMY OFTHE GIRL/BOY INTERACTION

• Against their families’ prohibitions, young men and women manage to talk to
each other at weddings,festivals, bus-stops, temples
• ‘Tuning’ is the beginning of the approach and often it doesn’t go behind this
point because the girldoesn’t respond to the youth’s questions
• If she is ready to speak and take things further, the two establish a ‘line’,
they can chat, exchangeletters etc
• If conversations and correspondence continue, they might lead to ‘romance
or love’, including secretmeetings
• All the tuning conversations (both actual conversations and their
representations in films) followed analmost stereotyped form: influence of
cinema
 • Very interesting vignettee of how a boy approaches a girl in public: gestures,
movements,language
• The advantage of ethnographic research capturing these details and their
repetitions
• The overall effect, is to disrupt physical and social distance, and bringing the
girl and theyouth into the same space
• Eventually, a girl will choose whether to interpret the remarks as undesired
harassment oras an attempt to trigger communication
• Somehow she comes across as more in control of the next steps

THE GIRL’S REACTION

• If a girl decides to respond, she will appear then deferent, ashamed, a
performance of ‘passive’and chaste girls’ roles
• Ambivalence: impossible to assess if the above are unconscious reactions to
dominance bornstemming from the (embodied) habitus, or a conscious
performance
• Patterns of dominance and submission in a couple together with hierarchic
heterosexualitythough the male youth is not always in control
• 20 years on, this might have changed a bit

HOW DO YOUTHS FLIRT?

• A ‘verbal duel’
• Flirting may consist of posing riddles, or mock-insulting each other
• If the boy starts to harass the girl, or if the pair begin to exchange insults,
the interactionmight end
• If direct visual and verbal contact take place within accepted limits, the boy
and girl nowhave a ‘line’
• Many couples stay on this level, trading glances and smart remarks when
they run intoeach other
• Flirtation can be seen as a particular type of joking which hints at sexual
possibilities
• Flirtation as an activity which disrupts hierarchy
• That flirting can be recognized as a source of aesthetic value. So these
cross-gender relationshipsmust be understood as play, and as art
• In Kerala, as in Tamil Nadu, innocence and prudery form part of most
women's public persona;privately, women do talk or joke about sexual
matters and flirt with men – this is a common experience

THE POWER TO REACT: AVIGNETTE

‘A boy called out to a passing girl, 'I will take you into an alley and fuck you!' From
a literalist point of view, this might be interpreted as a threat of rape and as
reinforcing gender hierarchy.The girl, in the spirit of tuning in which victim becomes
aggressor, retorted to the boy, 'Your father already did!',effectively refusing his
overture while shaming and insulting him, simultaneously claiming erotic power for
 herself and implying that she, a mature woman, was out of reach of this ineffectual
small boy. In cases where a girl is willing to tune, aggressive backchat or initial
refusal is still the order of the day, but it will be calculated just this side of serious
insult or repulsion: flirtation is a dangerous and difficult game to play.The hostility
and aggression are mock, and must be carefully bounded lest they descend into
serious insult.’

• Being in control of the situation: no powerless South Asia girls, breaking the
stereotype
• But also risk of violence today
• In Kerala boys and girls alike openly boast to intimates about the number of
lines theyentertain
• A girl's submissive postures as well as the possibility of replying as in the
vignette and keeping control over the situation point to a breaking down of
normality, distance andhierarchy
• It is a girl who decides when she is not in danger of loosing her reputation
and hencedecides to move on with communication and romance

PASSAGE INTO ROMANCE

• When a girl decides to move from the line and into romance, the male youth
stops teasing and more aggressive behaviour and moves to the use of poetry
and love songs
• The male youth will invest a lot of energies and hopes in this romance
• Movie plots and songs show this familiar trajectory: from harassment to tuning
andgetting a line, through romance to love proper
• The woman becomes an unpredictable goddess and her lover a supplicant or
devotee!

ROMANCE/MARRIAGE?
• Romance rarely turns into marriage. Romance in this context most likely will
fail because families don’t agreeto marriage
• Tuning and romance continue, sometimes for years and generally do not lead
to consummation or marriage,apart from rape, consensual pre-marital sex and
love- marriage (whether by elopement or agreed by the families concerned)
• These three possibilities are rare….
• Couples engaged in romance generally have no intention of going against
parental wishes and trying totransform the relationship into something more
permanent
• Unlike Nepal, in India (especially north but not only) many inter-caste love
marriages are seriously opposed,leading to violence
• As we will see in love-jihad next class, this continues to be a problem
especially with inter-faith relations andmarriages (especially a Muslim man with
a Hindu woman)
PLAY GENDER
• Hierarchy is played with in friendships, lovers among youth. However these
roles and playare temporary and limited
• In mainstream society, subversion of hierarchy is limited to youth, because
‘they don’tcount much’ and they are expected to return to hierarchical principles
when they become adults
• The reversals of gender hierarchies in romance offer a vision of the world
turned upsidedown.

OTHER YOUTH’S ENGAGEMENT

• The context: a capital city,
Kathmandu and itsThamel tourist
district which is the centre ofa tourist
flow bringing in touch the local
Nepali youth with many foreigners
• Thamel often called as “kuire
country”—usinga derogatory term for
fairskinned foreigners
• Emergent imageries from these
encounters, fostering imaginations,
nurturing desires andexpectations

KATHMANDU
ENCOUNTERS
Between:
• Those who view Nepal’s “adventure tourism, hinterlands, each carrying with
them imagesof Nepal—mediated memories of an “exotic” and “mysterious”
place they have never known outside magazines, books, films, and travelers’
tales
And
• Nepalis—often young people on the margins of society—come to Thamel
with their ownmediated images of foreignness. For them the streets of Thamel
provide the chance to imagine modernity through magazines, books, films, and
travelers’ tales

WHO ARE THE SUBJECTS OF THESE ENCOUNTERS?

Different classes of Nepali
• Nepalis in Thamel are mostly young men, from rural districts around the
city.They work hard forlow wages as cooks, waiters, and dishwashers in the
tourist cafes and restaurants
• On the streeets two types of Nepali young men: : tourist hustlers (often drug
users) and“*punks*”1—middle-class young men
• Most of the city’s middle- and upper-middle-class young people gather in
other parts of Kathmandu
• Hanging out in Thamel requires this youth to be tough and show it to the rest
• Thamel as a performative space

SHIFTING NATURE OF KATHMANDUASA DRUGSCENE

• In the past, it would be foreigners but now the drug market is driven by local
demand, with all kinds of‘products’
• The author establishes a link between the tourists and local drug use: the
former are the very people whohelp finance local users (they consume
cheaper heroin from India and Afghanistan)
• A skilled hustler can make enough for a daily fix of drug in a short time
• Vicious circle engendered by international tourism….

VIGNETTE OF RAMESH,A DRUG USER

What the anthropologist didn’t see and Ramesh showed it to him
‘Sitting together in a Thamel garden cafe that I had frequented for years, Ramesh
opened my eyes to aparallel reality: drug transactions, police surveillance, schoolboys
drinking codeine cough syrup, a junkie tottering out of the bathroom, his face flushed
from retching, unable to keep down any food.
Here was a kind of violence— usually quiet and self-destructive—that, once seen,
shattered the tranquil image that I and other foreigners imposed on that place: our
imaginations rendered this violence invisible and inaudible. Ramesh introduced me to
friends and fellow street hustlers. For these young men supporting addictions meant
maintaining the precarious balance between presenting a “clean” and nonthreatening
image to potential tourist clients, and successfully procuringa daily fix. Losing one’s
composure meant losing customers, which meant missing a fix and further damaging
one’s ability to make money’
• By the early 1990s Ramesh had been in and out of drug rehabilitation ……………..

THEWORK OFTHE IMAGINATION

• Ramesh wasn’t born poor however….youth trajectory
• Being from a middle-class family, the product of an English-medium
school, and a heavy consumer ofimported Hindi and English mass media
• This consumption however ‘had shown’ Ramesh aware of the limitations of his
life as a Nepali
• Ramesh constantly evaluated his Nepaliness through his media awareness
of life in the West and FarEast.The term of comparison would be ‘America’
• This consumption of media is also key to trigger migration waves

TRAVELING WITHOUT MOVING

• Strong fascination with New York
• Ramesh knew all about the city, but he was especially intrigued by “the Bronx
gangs –comparing that with Kathmandu’s street life
• His ultimate goal was to move to New York
• Ironically, it seemed sometimes as though Ramesh already lived in New York
• Building the knowledge of a place without never having been there….

THE ROLE OF MEDIA

• Ramesh and other young men in Kathmandu, when speaking in English
constantly referred totheir life as “out here.”
• “Out here in Kathmandu” shows ‘self-peripheralization’, a result of global
media

HIGHER CLASS GANGS

• Thamel has a reputation for “toughness” and danger, drug culture and gang
activity and violence.
• Thamel is known for having more, an more serious, violence
• In west,“gangs” are usually associated with lower- or working-class
backgrounds. In Nepal it is the opposite!
• Interestingly: the poor do not have the luxury of becoming part of these gangs
while being a *punks* is the privilege of a kind of “leisure class.” These are
middle class educated youth who don’t engage in the activities of the rural
Nepali youth who engage in manual labour for for low-wages
• Not much employment for this youth section, so young people are idle for
years
HOW IDENTITIES ARE FORGED IN THE COLONIAL ERAAND THEIR
LEGACIES CARRY ON IN THE PRESENT
• Thamel is where these middle-class youth stage their fights
• There is an historical dimension to the “toughness” of this section of Nepali youth
• British colonizers identified several populations in west-central and eastern
Nepalas among the subcontinent’s innately warlike “martial tribes”
• Nepali Gurkha fighters
• From Gurkha soldiers to Sherpa mountaineers (expeditions): global image of
thefearless, robust, and tireless Himalayan hill man

CRAFTING TOUGH-GUY PERSONA OR PUNKS

• Fashioned bodies and fashionable clothing, young ‘punks’, cultivating postures
andactions (like smoking), cosmopolitan sophistication
• Also cultivating fantasies of sexual relations between Nepali men and
foreign women
• A lot of their performance is aimed to attract foreign in bars, music cafes,
and hotels
• So Thamel is also a site for sexual fantasies
• The young men are not the only ones who have these fantasies
• Euro-American women also cultivate these romantic fantasies
• They are after a “local experience” like a friendship with Nepalis. And this
happens in Thamel where the punks hang out
• if these women might entertain a local friendship, for the young men
involved,this relation can be very sexually charged (but surely this can
happen on the other side too!)

NOT EVERYBODY WANTS TO ESCAPE KATHMANDUFOR A GLOBAL MEDIA-

PORTRAYED LOCATION
• Not everybody though wants to leave Nepal : wealthy Pradip’s girlfriend
assumed that he would eventually move to the United States. Pradip doesn’t
want to
• Pradip realized that while Western women were good to engage in a Thamel
restaurant (and maybe in a hotel room), a Nepali woman (considered to be
‘obedient’) was better to have at home
• For Pradip different kinds of imagined women belonged in different imagined
places

TRAFFIC OF IMAGINED OTHERS

• Ramesh dreams of NewYork
• For Pradip and the punks,Thamel (in their own country) represents a place to
escapefrom local dramas into the mediated fantasies of a foreign modernity
embodied by the tourist
• Thamel was a fantasy space: images of traditional Nepal and foreign
“modernity”come together also reformulate one another
 • In Thamel, both tourists and locals find the “others” they have imagined

DISCUSSION
Think of your own lives and how you organise your sociality
• Do you hang out in groups and are these mixed not only in terms of gender
but also class,religion, age?
• Does flirting and romance take place along similar lines?
• Does life mirror cinema?
• Is there an expectation of marriage on you?
• Do your parents have a say in the people you are going to marry?
• If in the relevant age group, do you consider yourself as part of ‘youth’ or as
adults?

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF INDIA AND SOUTH ASIA: AN INTRODUCTION

LECTURE 9

GENDER…..
• Deeper structures: how genders are constructed
• Expanding on the gender spectrum: beyond binaries of women and men, and
intotransgender
• Intersectional identities: identities that are made through the combined
effects of gender,age, religion, class among others

TODAY:YOUTH 2
The exploration of different dimensions of youth in South Asia:
• Youth’s involvement in politics in local elections
• Love-Jihad (Muslim Sexual Seduction) and ched-chad (sexual
harassment): challenges for youngpeople from different religions who want to
get married love-jihad as a result of fresh laws

YOUNG PEOPLE’S POLITICAL INVOLVEMENT INLOCAL ELECTIONS

• As we have already learnt in the lecture on education, educated young Dalit
men have takento politics and joined a Dalit party
• But they also got involved in local politics
• The article is an ethnographic account of a local election for the village
headman
• The position had been declared as ‘reserved’ for a member of the Dalit
community
• However the account is not just about elections, it is about deeper social and
political changealso within the caste system
• It starts with this narrative on disruption or even collapse of hierarchy and respect
EASTERN UTTAR PRADESH,VARANASI DISTRICT

THE “WHEEL OF DISRESPECT”

A middle-aged man in the village:
• There is a Brahman and a Harijan [“untouchable”] man.The Brahman has a
ten-year-old son studying in fifth grade and the Harijan has a twenty-year-old
son who is pursuing a BA.The young Brahman boy does not respect the
Harijan young man.The Harijan father resents the Brahman boy as the boy’s
forefathers were considered by his own forefathers as their gurus. So why
should his son consider the Brahman boy in the fifth grade as his guru? If the
Brahman boy paid respect to the Harijan young man, then the Harijan father
too would respect the Brahman father.This goes on in the whole of society and
as a result, nobody respects anybody.The young educated Harijans do not
respect the Brahmans, they do not respectfully greet them or touch their
feet, and they cannot be made to do so. Members of the new generation,
irrespective of caste, do not respect their parents either. My own generation
still respects the elders but my own son is not very respectful himself.
Among the rest of the Harijans there has also been a change.They do not
respect Brahmans as they used to and a feeling of hatred exists among them
and is increasing by the day. I blame the Brahmans for this social
degeneration, because theyare the leaders and should therefore show the
path.”
• Political mobilization is highly responsible for disrupting the hierarchy
• The middle-aged interlocutor points to the perceived inter- and intra-
generational social entropywithin a multi-caste
 • His narrative reflects the transformation in the grammar of sociality in this
village setting: adisrupted economy of respect between lower and upper castes
• We need to see this historically in the history of the low-caste
emancipation trajectory, fosteredby a Dalit party since the 1980s
• When official politics are so closely interwoven with the culturalpolitics of
caste, the newly acquired consciousness comes to haveprofound implications
for the texture of social life
• Extensive fieldwork in a village in eastern Uttar Pradesh between 1998and
2005, I focus on young Chamar men’s participation in village politics
• This happens in absence of long-lasting inter-caste friendship (Kerala,liminal
stage of youth)

DIFFERENCE TAKES ON THE PERSISTENCE OFUNTOUCHABILITY - AGE

• Generally speaking members of most castes discriminate against the Chamars
• Assessing how discriminatory practices have changed over time depends on
the ageand gender of the Chamar narrators, as well as the circumstances in
which episodes of untouchability took place.
• The older Chamar generation sees a decline in the practice of untouchability;
for this reason, elders might be more tolerant of discriminatory behavior
• Youngsters argue that there is indeed discrimination

DIFFERENT VIEW OF CASTE SOCIETY ACCORDINGTOAGE

• Young Chamars held the view that people in the village live in isolation, they
donot mix and relationships between castes are formal: they themselves keep
separate from higher castes to avoid discrimination
• The elders think that interaction among different castes takes place.This reflects
the fact that elders are more integrated into the village’s rural economy of
Manupur and so they have moreinter-caste relations than than theyounger
generation

TAKING CONTROL OF ELECTORAL DEMOCRACY

Vinod, a postgraduate Chamar man, commented on this situation:
• “Jativad [casteism] is increasing day by day. Earlier there were no
educated persons and that is why we were weak. Now with education, we
have become more powerful and sowe use virodh [resistance] in society. For
this reason, people are more against us nowadays.That is why the SCs
created the BSP. Even for small issues, we protest and we demand. Now
we interfere on every issue of the village.We are against the Brahmans,
whether we get any results or not. But we stand up against them’
• Several years later, young Chamar men wove an alliance with a section of
Brahman community where the above young man would emerge as winner of
the election of village head
 • The gram panchayat elections in 2005 became the turning point within local
politics: thevillage head seat was announced as reserved for an Scheduled
Caste (SC) candidate.
• This triggered a revival of inter-caste and intra-caste rivalries in the village.
• Two rival Brahman sections each supported two different SC candidates the
28 year-oldpostgraduate Vinod, and a middle-age uneducated village Dhobi
(washerman) man who had been involved in his traditional profession all his
life

EDUCATION,YOUTH AND POLITICS

• Education as electoral banner: the paralikha or educated Vinod was pitted
against the angutha chap or “thumb print” Dhobi.
• The campaign among Chamars was a young men’s affair: gender
dimensionof the involvement of youth in local politics

CAMPAIGNING
• Campaigning meaning for the young candidate to go into spaces of the village
that dalits hardly goto. In the process,Vinod touched the feet of every
Brahman voter in the village
• One of the Brahmans greeting Vinod publicly addressed the Chamars as
people with whom one eats and drinks! (usually an unthinkable statement
given the caste divisions in the village and thefact that very few people would
share or take food with/from Chamars)
• The elections were held and Dalits made sure that everybody from their
community voted early morning

VINOD WINS!
• Vinod won by a large majority, with the help of a section of the Brahman votes
and villageinter-caste alliances
• When the winner was announced, unprecedented scenes of “caste love”
followed Vinod’s victory.This was the highest inter-caste physical contact I have
ever seen in thevillage
• The large crowd from all communities embraced, congratulated, and smiled at
each other
• Interruption of caste hierarchy rules!

POLITICS OVER SOCIALITY

• In the absence of lasting inter-caste friendships, politics appeared as the site
whereChamar and Brahmans cultivated inter-caste relations and pursued their
interests
• If friendships might be short-lived, because of the need of maintaining caste
divisions, politics appeared as a “unifying force” giving birth to various long-
standing relationships
 • Compare the degree of friendships and male young hanging out in Kerala with
the settingup of another arena of sociality: politics

NEW HIERARCHY?
• As Vinod was announced as the new village head, the ten-year-old son of the
outgoing Brahman head touched the feet of Vinod’s uncle, obviously a
Chamar, a man in his early 40s. This is a verysurprising gesture (compare
with the above mentioned ‘wheel of disrespect’!
• Was this gesture a mise-en-scène staged for the elections?
• Most likely, it was a normal gesture of respect the boy had been instructed to
perform by hisparents vis-à-vis members of th older generations
• However, symbolically, it was very important; did politics subverted caste
hierarchy?

EPILOGUE
• How do we interpret a young Brahman boy paying respect to a Chamar
elder?
• Did the “wheel of disrespect” turned into one of “political correctness”?
• We will never know to know what crossed the young Brahman boy’s mind
when he didthat, especially on the day when a young Chamar man became
village head for the very first time in the village’s history

LOVE-JIHAD
• “Love jihad” is a term used by the political and religious right to describe an
alleged phenomenon where Muslim men lure Hindu women, into marrying
them and converting to Islam. Right-wing propagandists claim that this is an
organised racket rooted in a widespreadconspiracy.”
• No evidence for this of course
• Forced conversion or marriage that is entered into under false pretences or
coercion, is alreadya punishable offence ( so need for fresh legislation) unless
it is needed for political propaganda!
• Uttar Pradesh has just announced a law against Hindu women’s forced
conversion by Muslimmen through marriage that further demonize Muslim
population and control Hindu women
• Love-jihad is not a new issue
• It adds to already existing troubles with inter-caste marriage
IN THE MEDIA

Not a light offence:

The Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of

Unlawful Conversion ofReligion
Ordinance, 2020 (28 Nov)

The legislation makes religious

conversion a non-bailable
offence, inviting penalties of up
to 10 years in prison if found
guilty.
https://time.com/5915579/love-jihad-uttar-pradesh/

IMMEDIATE CONSEQUENCES…..
IN THE MEDIA

HADIYA’S LEGAL BATTLE

In 2017, the case of a marriage of a 24-year old, urban-educated woman
Hadiya, to a man she met on an Islamic matrimonial website. Born into aHindu
family in Kerala, Hadiya converted to Islam of he own accord when she moved
away from her small town home to study medicine in one of the bigger cities in the
neighboring state of Tamil Nadu.

HADIYA’S LEGAL BATTLE

• Referring to the marriage as a classic case of ‘Love Jihad’, the investigating
agency tried to prove that the conversion was part of aterrorist plot that
threatened the nation.
• This notion of ‘Love Jihad’ acquired an obscure but important place inthe
contemporary discourse of Hindutva or Hindu nationalism, especially via the
Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP)
• Hadiya’s father, the NIA, and even the judicial bodies in India, questioned her
choiceof religion and marriage
• The SC finally heard Hadiya’s plea on November 27, 2017, and despite her
repeatedrequests to cohabit with her husband, the court sent her back to her
student accommodation to ‘complete her studies’.The apex body was clear
that Hadiya required ‘guardianship’ (assumed male)
• And even though Hadiya wanted her husband to be her guardian, the court
awardedher guardianship to her college dean
• Her father questioned her mental health
 • It was claimed that her ‘case’ was part of a terrorist network, and the
judiciary blatantlyinfantilised her. By conflating the personal matter of religious
conversion and marriage with ‘Love Jihad’ and terrorism, politico- legal
opinions surrounding the Hadiya case wasused to stifle the basi constitutional
rights of a young Indian woman
• After a 15-month battle, the Supreme Court of India passed a judgement in
favour ofHadiya, overturning the lower court’s annulment of the marriage.The
judgment laid significance on the role of consent in the marriage between two
adults
• Love Jihad’ was also a regulatory mechanism to control the choice and
mobility of youngurban women identified as subjects of the imagined Hindu
Rashtra (the Hindu nation).
• This article examines the conceptualisation of thediscourse of ‘Love Jihad’:
right-wing organisations attempted to realign the urban public sphere in
accordance with a gendered Hindu civil order
• Young women’s socialisation into the ideology ofperfect Hindu subjecthood

A LONGER HISTORY OF THE IDEA,

• In the 1920s, for example, Hindu revivalist organisations produced similar
narratives around love-jihad around the sexual exploitation of Hindu women
inthe form of rape/ abduction/forced marriage by Muslim men.
• These organisations distributed pamphlets, books, written testimonies, myths
andrumours, with a similar imagery of the ‘passive victimised Hindu woman at
the hands of inscrutable Muslims’.
• Such allegations fuelled riots
• The idea resurfaces at later historical junctures….

FOCUS ON TWO RIGHT WING ORGANISATIONS

• Specific conntexts not give attention, the modaliteis of how this unfolds was
given pre- eminence
• Focus on Specific actors: Shiv Sena Mahila Aghadi (the female wing of a
regional, right- wing political party in Mumbai) and the Rashtra Sevika Samiti
(the women’s front of a pan-Indian Hindu nationalist organization)
• research projects are based on participant observation and in-depth interviews
with Hindu nationalist women, and their young, dominantly female supporters
• Residential camps attended by young women in Delhi and Meerut

MUZAFFARNAGAR RIOTS 2013

• The immediate cause of the Muzaffarnagar riots was attributed to a case of
‘Love Jihad’–
• Riots, killing sexual violence
• For waging ‘Love-Jihad’, the claim is that money comes from the Gulf
nations.They providemoney and motorcycles to lure girls and this has been
happening across the country.
 • Not far from this location, in Meerut, the Hindu right hold its camps

ATTHE CAMPS IN MEERUT (UP)

• Before the riots in Meerut, girls as young as 8 were enlightenedby camp
leaders about the modus-operandi of ‘Love Jihad
• The alleged perpetrator traps the girl, uses marriage for religiousconversion,
and then sells the victim to an old, Muslim man for money

SHIV SENA MAHILA AGHADI IN MUMBAI

• The case from Mumbai
• A match maker militanting within the Shiv Sena Mahila Aghadi
• In recent years,Aartitai was concerned that young inhabitants in the chawl,
especially those whofound regular work in the city, chose their own wives and
husbands, and would bypass the unwritten rule in the chawl, that even self-
selected partners needed to be vetted by the Aghadi leader. She worried about
her loss of respect.
• She worried about Hindu and Muslim youth coming together and held a
meeting.At thismeeting, she introduced love-jihad

Aartitai used simple, accessible language and illustrations to explain the financial
politics of‘Love Jihad’.
She argued that. young Muslim men are being mobilised and heavily funded to
seduce andconvert young Hindu women
‘Muslim men get money and training to do this,’ she said pointing at the poster,
overtlywarning young girls against this

BACKTOTHE CAMPS – IDEASTRAVEL

• Financial rewards idea present in Meerut years later: monetary benefits
received by thoseMuslims who converted vulnerable Hindu girls, and then
pushed them into illegal trafficking
• Reflecting on the pervasive nature of the ‘network’, the member said,‘They
(the Muslimmen the girls are sold to) can be within their family, their religion;
they can even be among us

MARRIAGE WITH A MUSLIM

• She asked:‘Why would you want to be beaten up by a Muslim husband?’
• ‘Running away from your parents with Muslim boys only makes you more
vulnerable to violence. Save yourselves by marrying Hindu men,’
• ‘So many of you are now educated, earning money and supporting your
families, why throw that away, bear a burqa (veil) and sit at home?’ she
asked
DIFFERENT SHADES OF LOVE-JIHAD IN MUMBAI
• In a chawl in Mumbai,‘love Jihad’ was less related to the global threat of
Islam, but more closelytied to domestic violence, familial honour, and loss of
mobility
• Hindu women’s freedom as earning, mobile but respectful daughters and
mothers in the citybecame far more important to Aartitai
• ‘Women already have so much trouble travelling to work,….. why getting
friendly with Muslimmen?’ asked Aartitai
• Love Jihad became quite rampant in conversations with both old and young
women who hadHindu nationalist affiliations
• Love jihad even preceeds this.After the Gujarat communal riots in 2002,
which was concentratedin the city of Ahmedabad in western India, a new
version of ‘Love Jihad’ became prevalent in the media
• Construction of Muslim as the other

ULTIMATELY, AN ECONOMY OF CONTROL

• Regular sexual union between Love Jihadists and these free women could
potentially lead to a decline in the numbers ofHindus
• Love Jihad reinforced historical stereotypes of Muslim men asthe sexually
charged ‘Other’
• Creating an illusion of feminine choice but also restrictingwomen’s mobility in
the city.

AFTER THE RAPE OF 2012….

• While discussing this incident, Samiti officials said that in theevent of rape, the
girl was equally at fault.
• Other members of the Samiti also cited reasons that wouldinevitably lead to
rape – the late night, sense of misadventure,not having presence of mind…..

THE GIRLS’ VOICE

Howver things didn’t go according to plan:
• Challenging the dominant discourse of shaming the victim, many young women
at the camp more bluntly referred to sexual violence as a socialdeprivation,
not a feminine imperfection.
• Showing their displeasure at the Samiti’s stand on urban rape, the girls
debated their own reading of the incident, supported by newspaper and
television sources.

GIRLS’ ‘REBELLION’
• Many young attendees recounted their negative experience of being in the
public sphere, andsympathized with the deceased girl
• Several girls argued that such events were rarely linked to external factors
such as women’s clothingor the time of the day
 • ‘If girls are preoccupied with the fear of travelling alone, then I don’t think we
can ever dream of becoming the Prime Minister.’ The girls accused ‘Indian
society’ of fuelling hyper-masculine identities,and undermining the worth of
young girls
• Compare with Kerala’s flirting framework

FINAL POINTS
• Creation of an idea of the ‘self’ (as a good Hindu) by identifying, dehumanizing,
andstereotyping the ‘other’ (Muslims, women who love them) as the deviants
• Unleashing ‘good male violence’ in the name of women’s security
• Marking out desirable and undesirable bodies in the urban public sphere

'LOVE JIHAD' OR LOVE? INTERFAITH COUPLES SHARETHEIR EXPERIENCES

‘At least five BJP-led states have talked about bringing in laws aimed at curbing the
alleged trend of 'love jihad'. It is a term cited by BJP leaders, alleging conversion of
Hindu women toIslam under the garb of love and marriage. However, it founds no
mention in the current Indian laws. In this episode of We The People, interfaith
couples take on the atmosphere of hate and speak about their experiences.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miqHjuwobxU

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

• What are the views on inter-faith marriages among debate participants?
• Can marriage or relations be/should regulated?
• Is it only agency of (Hindu) women who is not capable of decide for herself,
that needs to beprotected?
• How are seen inter-faith marriages in Austria?

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF INDIA AND SOUTH ASIA: AN INTRODUCTION

LECTURE 10

YOUTH 2
The exploration of different dimensions of youth in South Asia:
• Youth’s involvement in politics in local elections
• Love-Jihad (Muslim Sexual Seduction) and ched-chad (sexual harassment):
challenges for youngpeople from different religions who want to get married
love-jihad as a result of fresh laws
TODAY
Marriage
• A fundamental institution in South Asia
• The expectation for all young persons in the region
• Why, how and what are the effects of this?
• 2 readings that focus on marriage in two very different communities:
Brahmans in SouthIndia and Dalits in north India
• Very interesting comparison!

MARRIAGE IN SOUTH INDIA

• Historical approach to changes in marriages practices in an elite community,
Brahmans inTamil Nadu, who practiced child marriages till the 1940s (some
still till the 1970s)
• Relation between education and marriage age
• Changes in the status of women in terms of education,employment and
gender equality
• Strong social mobility trajectories among Tamil Brahmans
• In general, gender inequality was, and is, more pronounced among high
castes. Hence the conduct of daughters, wives, mothers, and widows is most
severely constrained by purityand pollution rules, seclusion practices, moral
rigidity, and obsessive control of female sexuality among Brahmans and other
high-ranking castes.
• Low-caste women, by contrast, are more relaxed about purity, commonly
work outside the home so they cannot be secluded, are less influenced by
Brahmanical norms, and are often less subject to male authority, although
these features themselves contribute to thelow status o their families and
communities.

•
Brahmins and migration
• Migration of middle-class English educated Brahmins began as a protest
against anti-Brahminmovement in the 1940s and 50s
• In the 1950s and 60s, very few young Indians who migrated to America for
higher studies settled there.And hardly any women students went for higher
studies. Shyamala Gopalan, Kamala Harris’mother, went there for higher
studies in science in 1958
• Gopalan with her two girls — Kamala and Maya — continued her life as a
Black civil rights activist, carrying on her husband’s legacy. In the 1960s, the
civil rights movement was at its peak with MartinLuther King leading the
agitation across the US. Shyamala became an activist for it.’
https://theprint.in/opinion/kamala-harris-journey-from-brahmin-to-blackhood-is-rarest-
of-the- rare/540624/

FEATURES OFTAMIL BRAHMANS

• Since the 19th century, Brahmans have migrated in large numbers from village
to towns andcities,.
• 100 years ago, gender hierarchy was extreme among Tamil Brahmans
• Brahman girls received little or no education at that time

THE CHANGE
• By the 20th century, child marriage had largely ended and thestandard of girls’
education was improving
th
• By the end of the 20 century, Brahman girls’ educational standardsmore or
less matched that of boys
 • Many Brahman women are also employed outside the home, whichwas
previously uncommon
• In tracing the modern history of Tamil Brahman women, the end of pre-
pubertymarriage and the associated improvement in female education were
crucial developments!
• In Tamilnadu, unlike many other regions of India, pre-puberty marriage was
mainlyconfined to Brahmans
• A girl went to live with her husband and the marriage was consummated
after shecame of age

EXCEPTION AMONG A TAMIL BRAHMAN SUB-CASTE

• The majority of Tamil Brahmans had given up child marriage by the 1940s: no
ethnographic material about it
• However in one Tamil Brahman subcaste—the Eighteen-Village Vattimas—
(Vattima is aTamil Brahman sub-caste) child marriage continued until the 1970s
• Vattima men moved to towns and cities for education and employment later than
otherBrahmans of comparable economic standing, and Vattima landlords
tended to stay in their villages until the 1960s or 1970s
• The 18-Village Vattimas are also a fairly small subcaste with a very high
rate ofendogamous marriage
• Different social mobility trajectory here
• The ethnographic data in this paper mainly concern the Vattimas, but the
authors discussthem against the historical background of Tamil Brahmans
collectively.
• We also look at how the difference between Vattima women and other
Brahman womenhas practically disappeared in very recent times.

A BIT OF HISTORY
• Laws passed since the19th century to fight child marriage
• In the Madras PResidency (tamil nadu) the elites of Tamil Brahmans
divided over the issue
• Much of the opposition to the law of the minimum marriage in the colonial
era age came fromBrahmans
• Child Marriage Restraint Act, popularly known as the Sarda Act after its
principal sponsor.This Act, which was passed in 1929 and came into force in
1930, fixed the minimum age for marriageat 14 for girls and 18 for boys
• This key custom among Tamil Brahmans was eradicated
• Very high status families in TN in early 20th century would marry their
daughters before puberty
CLASS WITHIN BRAHMANS
• The majority of post-puberty marriages were almost certainly not occurring in elite
progressive families, but in poor families who were unable to pay large dowries
and wedding expenses.
• Sometimes, too, desperate parents would try to pass girls off as pre-pubertal,
eventhough they had started to menstruate
• For poor Brahmans especially, post-puberty marriage was usually a misfortune,
not aprogressive choice.

UNEVEN PICTURE
• In 1911, 80.0 per cent of girls in the 12–15 age cohort were married or
widowed, but in 1921 the proportion had fallen to 60.5 per cent, so that the
frequency of child marriage was declining and a large minority of girls reached
14 without being married.
• By 1931, 84.1 per cent of girls in the 7–13 age cohort, as well as 13.1 per cent
in the 14– 16 cohort, were recorded as being unmarried.
• Unfortunately, developments after 1931 cannot be traced, because the relevant
data were not provided by subsequent censuses.
• 1931: last census where caste was recorded

DISAPPEARANCE OF CHILD MARRIAGE AMONGBRAHMANS

• By the late 1940s child marriage had largely disappeared
• However, the explanation for the disappearance of pre-puberty marriage
among the massof Tamil Brahmans isn’t clear

• In contrast with other Tamil

Brahmans, pre-puberty marriage
continued amongthe Eighteen-
Village Vattimas until the 1970s,
notwithstanding the Sarda Act
• The fieldsite is a village near the
templetown of Kumbakonam
• Visits to Vattimas in their other
villages and interviewed them in
Chennai and other Indian towns
and cities, as well asin the US

• The majority of elderly Vattima women whom the authors met in Chennai and
othercities were born and raised in villages, had pre-puberty marriages, and
experienced thesame restricted schooling as women
• Fieldwork with elderly women
 • There is a wealth of stories in the article, about personal trajectories
• Kamala Harriss’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan (arrived in the U.S. as a 19-
year-old student in1958 and became a scientist) might well be one of these
stories

ELEMENTS THAT SHAPED CHANGE: A BUNDLE

• For these women born in the 1930s or 1940s, support from a father, father-
in-law orhusband with unconventionally progressive views about female
education was critical
• Some men opposed pre-puberty marriage of secluding young wives after
menarche.
• Fathers and fathers-in-law had the authority to enforce their will
• New ideas about female education and child marriage slowly began to
circulate from the cities to the Vattima community during the first two decades
after Independence
• By the 1960s, pre-puberty marriage had not disappeared among theEighteen-
VillageVattimas, but it was no longer so prevalent.
• Growing importance of girls’ education
• As a result, for Vattima girls born after about 1950, secondary educationhas
increasinglybeen regarded as desirable and even necessary before marriage
• parental responsibility for daughters was now prolonged until each girl had
completedher education

VATTIMAWOMEN ASTHE OTHERTBWOMEN INTERMS OF EDUCATION

• Among Vattima women born in the 1950s or later, the majority have hadat
least some secondary schooling
• In terms of women’s marriage and education, as well as employment, thereis
no longer any divergence between the Eighteen-Village Vattimas and other
Tamil Brahmans
• Thus Vattima women have caught up, so to speak, with other Brahmanwomen
for whom child marriage had ended a generation earlier, in the 1940s rather
than the 1970s
• Among Vattimas and Tamil Brahmans in general, male and female
standards of education have been converging and in the youngest
generation, especially in cities, they are almostequal.
• By the 1970s, completed family size was diminishing among middle class
Tamil Brahmans.
• Preference for sons over daughters has quickly vanished
• by the 1970s, well educated Vattima men usually insisted on wives who had
at least completedtheir Secondary School Leaving Certificates
• By the 1980s or 1990s, they wanted wives who were graduates
WHERE TAMIL BRAHMANS AND OTHER CASTES ININDIA MEET….
• Educating daughters therefore became a strategy for parents hoping to
arrange goodmarriages for them
• If sons studied engineering, law, and accountancy—the paths to well-
paid, high-statusprofessional jobs—daughters pursued general arts, science
or commerce degrees
• This is exactly the same pattern that we see among Chamars in the piece on
the Bourgeoiswoman and the half naked one!
• Despite rising standards of education, until recently Vattima womenrarely
took paid employment outside the home.
• More recently, so that many more women now than in the past seehigher
education as a path to professional employment
• This is partly because young women brought up as equal to theirbrothers
and as well educated as them

THE ROLE OF THE IT INDUSTRY

• IT has been critical in altering young women’s perceptions. Since the mid-
1980s, numerous private professional colleges, especially engineering
colleges, have opened in Tamilnadu. In private colleges, unlikegovernment
colleges
• private-sector employment has rapidly expanded in urban South India,
especially in service industries,including IT
• Some of these colleges provide high quality education and graduates from the
top colleges are recruitedin large numbers by India’s leading software and
services companies
• As the IT sector has expanded, it has encouraged growing numbers of girls to
study engineering
• Although the majority of IT professionals are non-Brahmans, Brahmans are
disproportionately wellrepresented in South India’s IT companies
• Employment in IT has become the ambition of many young women, as
well as men, among Vattimas andTamil Brahmans in general
• IT women professionals almost always put their family responsibilities ahead
of their careers, andwhen children arrive they often leave their jobs or take career
breaks
• female IT professionals, because they have become role models for many
young women—especially among middle-class Tamil Brahmans, including
Vattimas
• The dramatic changes seen across five generations of women

CASTE SUPERIORITY AND PRE-PUBERTY MARRIAGE

• Pre-puberty marriage was a primary constitutive element of gender hierarchy
amongTamil Brahmans.
• It was also a powerful symbol of the ritual purity and Sanskritic orthodoxy that
enabledthe Brahmans to assert their social superiority over non-Brahmans
 • That’s why many Brahmans opposed to marriage reform
• Today,Tamil Brahmans rarely claim superiority on traditional grounds of purity
andorthodoxy

FINAL POINTS
• Brahmans refer to their ‘superior intelligence and intellect,’ hence their high
standards of educationalachievement and their success in the modern
professions, and IT
• For contemporary Tamil Brahmans, caste values are still important, but they
have been modified
• Caste inequality is more deeply rooted than gender inequality
• Among Tamil Brahmans, it is the contrast between persisting ideas of caste
superiority and diminishinggender inequality in the modern era that is noticeable

INTOVERY DIFFERENT WORLDS

• Comparison of education and marriage experiences between the Vattimas
and Dalits
• Accumulated social, economic and cultural capitals of the Tamil Brahmans and
inparticular, the Vattimas, vs low-caste status

CLASS FORMATION IN EASTERN UP THROUGH THELENS OF EDUCATION,

GENDER,AND MARRIAGE
• When I talk about village: education, local elections….come from the same
village, so weare able to assemble this in an ampler ethnographic portrait
• Here we also see education and gender nexus very important for marriage
• Social mobility involves getting educated brides who get married at a later age
thanuneducated ones
• An educated husband now needs an educated bride – only available in urban
areas

• EASTERN UTTAR PRADESH,VARANASI DISTRICT

• The bourgeois woman and the half-naked one is an exemplification of
internal ‘conflict’ within a Chamarcommunity and processes of differentiation
• Women are being affected by changing political economies (differently from
men), of the gap betweenthe elite and the rest of the Chamars is widening
• One way to look at social mobility, political mobilization and changes within
India society is to focus onhow the gender and caste and class nexus manifest
itself
• Same caste women’s increasing internal difference taking place through
education, marriage and‘bourgeois’ living
• Pros and cons of internal socio-economic differentiation processes within the
same caste community seen through the lens of women: mobility restrictions,
more education, but no back breaking work in the field
• Process of becoming ‘other’ through education, proper marriage and
modern motherhood
• Upper caste trajectory
• The Chamar community has also seen changes in the marriage
economy: a number of educated brides from nearby urban areas were
suitably married to the nascent class of rural politicised educated young men
in Manupur.These men’s families expected their children to secure
government employment, and a number of them managed to obtain the
much coveted jobs overthe years
• Amongst the Chamars, as well as other communities in their socioeconomic
position, marriage toa man with a government job is the most sought-after
alliance.
• Following post-marriage virilocal rules, educated young women shifted from
urban areas to thevillage rural environment and some of them entered the
small group of aspiring middle-class Chamar families.
• The presence of young, urban-educated Chamar women revitalised notions
of women’s honour, and strengthened gender regimes inspired by
respectability and other distinctionsforged during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries
• As a result, Chamar women were often confined to the home and to
attending to their children’s education, following a known, and accepted, path
of social reproduction in Indianhistory. But things have changed there too
• As a result of women’s transition from an urban to a rural milieu, the
conditions for women’s agency register a further obstacle to the often
disempowered status of newly-wed daughters in- law. In the village, these
women might find themselves in a socioeconomic and political cul-de-sacas a
result of the more restrictive gender regimes in place in a rural area as
compared with an urban environment.
• Also, the village does not provide women with the same range of
opportunities as does the city.Secondly, the home, as the place for seclusion
and reinvention of respectable domesticity in opposition to the outer world, is
accorded different meanings according to different classes of Chamar
 women, and serves different purposes in their respective socio-economic
trajectories.
• Landscape, that of the economic liberalisation of globalizing India in which
pressures of heightened consumption and class status have gradually altered
the marriage economy and caused an exponential increase in costs and
spiralling dowries, a trend which, in veryrelative terms, has affected the
Chamars.
• Dowry marriages
• Education amongst Chamar urban brides instilled them with the desire for
respectableemployment, a rather different prospect if compared with the
menial occupations and agricultural labour their caste womenfolk had
historically been associated with.
• As a result, the practice of pardah amongst Chamar educated brides
gradually took up new meanings: their process of embourgeoisement shifted
the definition of respectabilityfrom the idea that womenfolk should not perform
any outside (menial) work to a moremiddle-class oriented image of the
‘working woman’, similar to the ‘new middle-class career woman’
• Moreover, educated women’s appropriation of middle-class gender roles did
not draw ona local community history but rather on a national history and
repertoire which offeredstrategies, idioms and roles for class reproduction.
• In Manupur, it is only when Chamar men have secured education and
employment for themselves that they pay attention to the ‘condition’ of their
female relatives and spouses.Educated women are often supported in their
upward-mobility process by male relatives and husbands who are both
knowledgeable and relatively financially sound.
• These women, however, still depend on their husbands and in-laws for
decisionsregarding their careers.
• Same as among Vattimas
• The influx of urban wives stretches back approximately two decades – with
varying levelsof education: 2 waves
• The postgraduate wives married into the village a few years before the first
ManupurChamar girl had started her postgraduate degree.
• The Manupur Chamar community has only recently been ‘producing’
educated girls. Thegap between the first male and the first female graduate
(born in the village) is about fifteen years.

COMPARISON
• This is a transformation that we can all trace back, from both lines
• Education of women (and men) and marriage in your family
• How many generations can you go back?
• What are the trends?
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF INDIA AND SOUTH ASIA: AN INTRODUCTION
LECTURE 11

LAST LECTURE: MARRIAGE

• A fundamental institution in South Asia
• The expectation for all young persons in the region
• Why,how and what are the effects of this?
• 2 readings that focus on marriage in two very different communities: Brahmans
in South India and Dalits in north India
• Very interesting comparison!

TODAY & NEXT LECTURE

• Migration: one of the most exciting dimensions of South Asian societies
• Tamil Brahmans’ migration to cities from the countryside in India and their
migration abroad
• Through migration, we look at religion, caste, education, youth, marriage and
gender seen sofar, as ‘transported’ into a different context
• But also, the preparation for migration (in search for work), and the
experience of migrationfor both those who leave and those who stay behind
(how relations are maintained)
• Transformation of identities and practices as a consequence of migration

MIGRATION
• Migration needs to be seen historically
• Processual nature of migration
• Historical transformations within South Asian societies, often understood as
sites ofimmobility, timelessness and tradition
• Different kinds of migration: internal and global
https://www.striking-women.org/page/map-major-south-asian- migration-flows
• The link contains essential information about the different waves of
migration
• Migration needs to be seen spatially and temporally
• Diasporas in these new countries
THE READINGS

Readings speak about both internal and global migration

• Internal migration (within India, Mumbai)
• Combination of both (Bangladesh)

CHILLIA TAXIMEN OF BOMBAY/MUMBAI

CHILLIA TAXIMEN OF BOMBAY/MUMBAI

• Hereditary taxi drivers known as chillia through the 20th century and into the
present
• They have been in the trade for over 100 years
• Mourning a car, a symbol of this trade and history: My Padmini has been
killed.’ ……‘My taxihas been cut into many pieces, but my heart is broken into
many more
• Important symbol of identity
THE ICONIC PADMINI (KAALI-PEELI, BLACK AND YELLOW)

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOVXL5ErqYE

WORKERS ANDTECHNOLOGY
• Fiat manufactured the Fiat 1100 Millecento out of asuburban Bombay plant.
• This was one of the first models of cars to be mass produced in India. It was
marketed as a luxury car. By the1970s, Premier automobiles started
producing the Indianbrand, Premier Padmini.
• Drivers had to get on waitlists to get one.

WORKERS,TECHNOLOGY AND RELIGION

• Successful purchase of the Padmini consolidated drivers’ standing in the
community. Chillia drivers purchased Padminis either via pooling resources of
extended families or special loansfrom the Bombay Mercantile Bank—a
Muslim-owned cooperative bank that provided loans with no interest
• This model of car has become the iconic kaalipeeli
• For chillia drivers, history of its acquisition, the acceptance in the community
that the purchase conformed to Islamic rules against interest, and
embeddedness of this car in dailylives inflect their experiences as urban
transporters.
• Padminis were manufactured until the plant closed in 2000.

SHIFTING RULES
• By 2006 the city began its taxi-modernization project that mandated that all
Premier Padminismore than 20 years old must be retired.
• This produced heated debates and organized efforts to stall this mandate
among chillias
 • Experiences of hereditary work linked to car models
• Work shifts around the car among family members

CHANGING LIVES WITH CHANGINGTECHNOLOGY - NARRATIVES

• ‘The car would need to be handed over to the state to be destroyed ‘they
have decided it’s too old, only because it looks old, and has no place in the
new Mumbai; they want us to eitherbuy new cars or give up our family
business and join a fleet-taxi company.Where will we get the money to buy a
new car?’
• After being a public servant my whole life, who wants to become a Ghulam
[slave] of theprivate sector? What happens to workers?’
• My family, we were Bambai’s original taxi drivers but there is no place for
anything original…..We are old taxi-drivers and our taxis are old cars.There
is no place for us in this new Bombay.
• They are ‘old taxi drivers’ because chillias drive taxi as an hereditary
profession following internalmigration from Gujarat
• In 2006, Mumbai’s city and state government introduced what became
known as ‘taxi modernization’
• Taxi fleets model
• Bedi, the author, began to study Chillias just as this change was being
heavily debated

STANDARDISATION OF CAR AND DRIVERS

• Pressure from urban elite groups and corporate investors in taxi fleets, the
state government’s calls to ‘modernize’ cars and regulate and rationalize roads
expanded toefforts to formalize and manage motoring labour
• By encouraging drivers to learn English, receive etiquette training, and wear
standardizeduniforms, it disciplined motoring labour to conform to aesthetic
dimensions of an ordered city.
• It also introduced new pollution control

MUSLIM IDENTITY OF CHILLIA AND EXCLUSION

• Chillia are poor Muslims in a city where Muslims have been violently
excluded,circumscribed, and policed.
• Labour practices have been fundamentally shaped by these exclusions rooted
in caste,religion, and nativism
• Inclusions and exclusions of labour in the taxi trade were no exception and were
vital towhy different drivers were affected differently by taxi modernization.
• Chillia drivers often viewed contemporary taxi modernization as a way to
disenfranchiseminorities and erase Muslim labour in a city that has seen both
spectacular anti-Muslim violence and everyday forms of exclusion of Muslims
from public life
MIGRATION AND HEREDITARY PROFESSION
• Rahim (the informant Bedi follows closely in this article), part of the chillia
community ofhereditary drivers, has driven taxis in Bombay since the early
twentieth century
• Like his, chillia working lives have been closely connected to Bombay’s political,
cultural, andeconomic history
• His father and grandfather also drove taxis for over five decades before
returning to their nativevillage near Palanpur, in Gujarat, so they could die
auspiciously in their small ancestral home

FAMILY AND ANCESTRAL PLACE

• His great-grandfather was the first to migrate to the city as a teenager. He
followed his maternal uncles to colonial Bombay in the early twentieth century to
drive a horsedrawnhackney, very similar to those driven in England at the time
• Importance of family links
• Importance of ancestral place and returning there to die

CRAFTING AN IDENTITY THROUGH MIGRATIONAND HEREDITARYASSOCIATION

WITHTAXIS
• This long and hereditary association of chillia with Bombay’s taxi trade led to
claims that they wereBombay’s original taximen
• Throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, chillia drivers
adapted to regulatory,economic, political, and technological shifts in the taxi
trade
• This resilience ensured that the chillias remained in the trade even when
other ethnic communitiesassociated with taxis moved into other professions

MIGRATION FROM GUJARAT: BUILDING UP SKILLS

• Chillia identify as Sunni Muslims of the Momin caste

• In Gujarat, the bulk of Momins are found in Banaskantha district, in and around
the area of Palanpur,which was a former princely state of India.
• By 1800, the importation of horses from the Persian Gulf became a significant
part of the maritime trade in Western India. Prominent families, particularly
princely families, kept stables as marks of theircosmopolitanism and upper-
class status.
• The stables were important places of employment for Muslim labour
otherwise employed in marginalfarming and petty trades.
PALAMPUR, GUJARAT

Gujarat is historically a state

from where a great deal of
migration has taken place:
gulf countries, South and
East Africa, UK, Canada and
US

USING THE SKILLS LEARNED AT HOME FORMIGRATION

• Many of those employed in the stables took their knowledge of horses with them
and followed otherfamily members into Bombay’s transport trade as drivers of
horsedrawn Victoria taxis
• By around 1911,Victoria taxis began to share the road with motorized taxis
• Victorias disappeared and many Palanpuri carriage drivers moved to the
motorized taxi tradetogether

PROFESSION, RESIDENCEWITHINTHE CITY, FAMILYAND MIGRATION

• Most lived in and around South and Central Bombay in areas that provided
stablesand water spots for their horses.
• Close spatial arrangement where families and extended family migrated to
drivehorse-drawn taxis made it desirable for men to migrate with their families.
• Women and children were surrounded by extended kin and remained
integratedwithin networks of support and piety that carried over into Bombay.
• Care and grooming of horses required several members of the community.
Driversbenefitted from assistance of close relatives with these duties.

AN INTEGRATED SYSTEM
• When drivers moved to motorized cars, many families responsible for
servicing carriages andgrooming horses started small spare-parts
businesses, tyre, and mechanic shops
• The social, economic, and cultural dependence on others from the same
community meantthat residential communities made up entirely of taxi labour
emerged
• These close spatial arrangements have persisted throughout the twentieth
and twenty-firstcenturies
BOMBAY AND MUSLIMS HISTORICALLY
th
• By the 19 century, Bombay hosted several Muslim communities who
travelledfrom around the world
• Rise of new Muslim working classes and customary community boundaries
• Spatial topography of the city through shrines and religious festivals
anchored inparticular neighbourhoods: significance of the city in shaping
Muslim identities
• Momin (where the chillia come from) broadly translates to mean ‘true
believer’
• During early decades of the twentieth century, Muslim weavers and other
similar occupationalgroups in several parts of India mobilized politically
against higher-status Muslim elite under a single community that called
themselves Momins.
• For Palanpuri Momins in colonial Bombay, this low-status position—what they
see as a ‘caste’intersected with circumscribed possibilities of labour in the city
• The emergence of chillia as caste identification for Palanpuri-Momin, Gujarati-
speaking taxidrivers

WHAT HAPPENS TO THIS IDENTITY OUTSIDEMUMBAI

• When the author visited the Palanpur region where most of her informants still
havestrong family roots, she was instructed not to refer to the term ‘chillia’:‘
• ‘No one in Palanpur will know what you are talking about; ‘at home we are
Momin, inBambai we are chillia.’
• Palanpuri Momins who migrate elsewhere are not known as chillia—it is only
Bombaymigrants who are!
th
• As Palanpuri Momins migrated into Bombay in the early 20 century in
search ofemployment, they monopolize three important trades in the city

HOTEL-MOTOR-TABELA – THE TRIO OFPROFESSIONS

• In the words of Yusuf, a veteran driver:‘For chillia in Bambai, you can say our
dhandha (business) is H-M-T. Hotel-Motor-Tabela. H-M-T.’ Palanpuri Momins
migrated into Bombay inthe early twentieth century in search of employment,
they used ethnic and kin networks to monopolize three important trades in the
city.
• The term ‘hotel’ in the Indian context refers to an eatery rather than a hotel
• Many chillia men run and work in small eateries that cater to working-class
neighbourhoods
• Motor refers to the trade of taxi driving and auxiliary functions.Tabela is the
horse-and-stableindustry—more recently, cow and buffalo stables of Mumbai’s
dairy industry
CHILLIA’S DIFFERENCEVIS AVIS OTHER MIGRANTGUJARATIS
• Differences in the labour market for Palanpuri Momins also made chillia
experience of the city distinct from that of other, Gujarati Muslim communities
(who now identify as Shia) such as Bohras, Khojas and Memons.
• These well-known trading groups started to migrate into Bombay in the 19th
centuryfrom Kathiawad, Cutch, and Sind regions of Gujarat.
• Their powerful and visible position in Bombay’s capitalist development is
significant. However, it makes invisible the experience of other Gujarati
Muslims who migrated intothe city as labour but who were nonetheless
significant actors in the city’s economy

DIFFERENCE ALSO FROM OTHER TAXI-DRIVINGCOMMUNITIES

• By the early post-colonial period, three minority communities dominated
Bombay’s taxitrade: Palanpuri Momins, Konkani Christians from Mangalore, and
the Sikhs.
• By the 1960s, most Sikh drivers moved into heavy motoring such as truck
driving.
• Due to higher literacy than others in the taxi trade, Mangaloreans gave up on
motoringand moved into white-collar occupations
• Chillia stayed on

MIGRATION AND SKILLS: FROM MUMBAI TOBANGLADESH

• From charting how the acquisition of skills with horses – following their import
from abroad – ledto long-term taxi professional skills and the crafting of an entire
community
• Moving to Bangladesh – another country from where strong global migration
flows have originated
• Here globalization processes have helped alternative forms of learning gain
wider social acceptance,something that state policies were unable to do –
apprenticeship and acquisition of skills

GLOBALISATION, APPRENTICESHIP AND MIGRATION

Why is this the case?
• This is because globalization manifests locally in the contraction of public sector
employment requiring formal credentials and an expansion of production and
services in export-oriented sectors based on cheap labor with some basic
literacy and technical skills
• Those involved in such global markets are engaged in ongoing learning
processes through apprenticeship, language learning, or constant movement,
taking what is appropriate for them inparticular contexts and then using it
strategically in other situations.
BANGLADESH
• The export-oriented garments industry and overseas migrants’ remittances
comprise 20 percent of Bangladesh’s GDP
• Employment in the factories, and in manual jobs overseas, involves adjusting to
harsh working environments, long working hours at low wages, cheating,
harassment, and lack of security.
• Farid, 23, one of the authors’ informants quit a garment factory due to the poor
working conditions and lack of respect and was currently unemployed.
Speaking of his brother Karim, working in Saudi Arabia for four years, he said:
He now gets a good salary of 35,000 taka monthly.When he first went to Saudi
Arabia, he was cheated and remained unpaid for five months. He works very
hard, from 8am till 1pm, and again from 3pm to 10pm.
• What kind of qualifications should young men have?

GLOBALISATION LEADING TO INCREASE INDESKILLED JOBS

• We discussed the issue of education in South Asia and its civilisational
properties: people becomebetter persons!
• In these contexts, education seeems not to be relevant in terms of getting a
job (but for the childrenthey envision a different future)
• The construction of Karim’s identity is linked to his labor power, toughness,
and sacrifice for the family rather than his skills or qualifications, as jobs
are increasingly deskilled and standardized in acontext of globalization.
Embedded in formal education, considered a pillar of modern society, is a
hierarchy of power relations that devalue manual work
• Focus on men’s perceptions of learning through apprenticeship in a context
where white-collar jobsrequiring formal educational degrees are hardly
available.

WHAT DOES ONE NEEDTOWORK INTHESECONTEXTS

• In the current context of globalization, learning is associated with an expansion
of capabilitiesand skills that facilitates participation in different work environments
• The poor opt for a combination of educational forms and employable skills
from apprenticeship.
• Movement to a new land necessitates adapting to new cultures

METHODOLOGY
• Ethnographic research in Achingaon, a Bangladeshi village, exploring how
young, working-class men makeeducational choices based on their
assessment of alternative livelihood options and pathways for mobility.
• Following a preliminary village census between July and December 2006, 16
men and women, differentiated byage, migration status, and educational level,
were interviewed in depth between March and May 2007.
• The village census and informal conversations helped build rapport and
simultaneously identify potentialinterviewees, a process enabled by the prior
familiarity of the second author with the village.
 • Shorter interviews were conducted with their spouses and other family
members.
• Between April and June 2008, follow-up interviews with the 16 interviewees
were conducted to deepen insightsfrom the data collected in the first phase.

MANIKGANJ DISTRICT

INTERNAL AND GLOBAL MIGRATION

• Achingaon is a poor remote village in Manikganj district with 310 Bengali
Muslims households.Thirty-five percent of the households have very small
land-holdings and 48 percent are landless.
• Although previously many worked on their own farms and as agricultural
labor, less than a third of menare now actively engaged in cultivation
• Women largely work at home
• In the past 15 to 20 years, with the rapid expansion of employment
opportunities in the Export Processing Zones (EPZ) and overseas,
especially to the Gulf countries, a shift is visible in people’semployment
choices.
• Nearly 27 percent of men are now migrant, working in the garment factories
and welding workshops in the city or as unskilled laborers abroad.This has
impacted lifestyles and attitudes toward education and learning.
• Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, is no longer feared by villagers as a
distant unknown place, butseen as a source of work opportunities
• Improvements in transport and communications have facilitated information
flows on opportunitiesin manufacturing and services
 • People aspire to occupations that could give them some flexibility, higher
returns, status, and morecontrol over their own labor

NARRATIVES OFTWO MEN, KAMRAN ANDMUZAFFAR

• They belonged to different generations, to highlight the similarities and
differences intheir life trajectories and how learning opportunities and
aspirations for the future have changed over time
• Kamran in Dhaka and Muzaffar in Saudi Arabia: gender dimension
• When Kamran started work in the late 1970s, the option of migration
overseashardly existed, while presently it is the preferred form of mobility.

LEARNING A PROFESSION: BIOGRAPHY

Two men from two generations: Kamran
• ‘In 1979 my cousin advised me to learn welding in Dhaka. I worked as a
“helper” for three years, receiving only food and accommodation, and no salary.
I slept on the shop floor with three other apprentices, observing the master’s
activities, learning the skill andthe trade from him, and talking and sharing with
each other. In 1982, I moved to another welding shop for taka 290 monthly. By
then, I was known as a good welder, so I switchedshops to increase my
earnings and also learn the more difficult aspects of welding work. By 1992, I
was earning taka 7,000 monthly.’

BIOGRAPHY
• In 1993, he quit his job to set himself up as a contractor. He continued his
narrative, talking about his strategies and skillsacquisition in managing the
business:
• ‘I employed 10–12 workers to make the items and received payment on
delivery. I told my workers that they would be remunerated only when I was
paid, as I lacked sufficient capital for advances. As a contractor for 11 years, I
saved sufficiently to fulfill my dream of setting up my own welding shop in
Dhaka in 2003. Close to 250,000 taka was needed for the purchase of land,
construction of shed, and equipment. I now employ five permanent staff,
drawing in other labour as required.Their salary is based on experience, with
newcomers wanting to learn welding starting with food andaccommodation as
I had done. If there are delays in receiving payments, then salaries too get
delayed, but my staff accommodate.They have the faith that I will not cheat
them. I have helped over 20–25 boys from Achingaon learn welding.They are
now employed in different workshops across Dhaka. Some have migrated
overseas.Turnover is high, asthe boys strive continuously to improve both their
earnings and working conditions. I too did this. Accessing different opportunities
is the only way to become a master in the trade. But given my experience and
reputation, I can get workers when I need.‘
A SUCCESSFUL STORY
• In 13 years, Kamran developed sufficient contacts with builders to feel confident
to set up his own enterprise.There are no tests or certificates, but the links to
one’s own future make the motivation for learning strong.
• Though not formally educated, Kamran has developed accounting and
managerial skills too. Retaining overall control, he allocates certain
responsibilities to his foreman (head mechanic).This is crucial for the
sustainability of his enterprise
• Kamran seeks to retire in Achingaon, where he has built a new masonry
house. He has worked hard, and his constant attention to work quality has
yielded results. But his technicalskills alone would not have sufficed

NOT JUST MOBILITY:THE ENGINEER

• His vision of mobility goes beyond accumulating wealth to include social
respect and status. In his village he is called “engineer”
• The term “engineer” is significant in a village because becoming a doctor or an
engineer is an aspiration among school children but rarely fulfilled, because the
process is expensive

EDUCATION FOR HIS CHILDREN

• Despite his success, Kamran does not want his children to be welders. He
says: I want them tostudy hard and pursue professional degrees
• For his children he wants them to be “socially included” in terms of
acquiring particular linguisticand cultural competencies, and connections

PREPARING TO MIGRATE OVERSEAS: MUZAFFAR

• Despite the ideological domination of formal education, apprenticeship now
has an added practical valuein preparing men to migrate overseas.
• Muzaffar, 25, an overseas migrant to Saudi Arabia for four and half years,
stopped his education in 1999when, after passing Class 8 from the alia
madrasa, his parents could not afford his fees or books.
• Internal migration first and then abroad!
• He decided to learn welding and went to Dhaka to work as a helper for one
year. Like Kamran, he got no salary but was provided with food and
accommodation. He worked in different welding shops for twoyears, yet his
monthly salary of taka 1,500 was insufficient for supporting his aging parents.
He decided tomigrate overseas

MIGRATION NARRATIVES ARE IMPORTANT

They show the difficulties and obstacles once there:
• ‘I was not earning enough to support my old parents. I changed shops a few
times. In November 2003, my cousin, who works in Saudi Arabia, suggested I
came there.The ticket and papers cost taka 190,000.We sold some land and I
also borrowed money from my aunt. I went to Riyadh and was employed as a
welder.The payments were irregular and lower than what I had been promised.
 • Several times I asked for my salary, but to no avail. I was desperate as my
passport and akama (work permit) were with the employer.Without my
documents, I couldn’t change jobs.The employer refused to return them. I went
to the labor court, but they were taking their own time.
• So I quit. Some Bengali laborers in that firm, who knew Arabic, and were my
friends, helped mefind another job.
• I went to Al Khariz, 60 kilometers from Riyadh, and joined a bathtub
manufacturing enterprise.’
‘Two months later the police caught me as I didn’t have my documents. Fortunately
my cousin paidthe fine for my release. I worked there for 18 months at 800 riyal a
month. After meeting all my expenses on food, telephone, and other things, I could
still send home 500 riyal every month. By this time I had myself learned some Arabic
and learned through local company gossip of the high demand for welders. I
returned to Riyadh to a job at a salary of 1,100 riyal per month, with an overtime
payment of ten riyal per hour. My payments were regular. I worked in that firm for a
year.’
• ‘I got news from home that my sister had died of cancer. I had no passport or
work permit, so decided to surrender to the police, reporting a loss of
documents due to theft. I was jailed for two weeks and then sent to
Bangladesh with 60 other people. Over 600–700 Bangladeshis werein jail at
that time; all illegal migrants. I had already sent home about taka 450,000 from
Saudi Arabia which was spent on building a beautiful, two-storied brick house,
apart from repaying debts incurred for my travel. I was happy to come home.
• Soon after returning in February 2008, almost five years after he left, Muzaffar
got married, as following his sister’s death his mother needed both
companionship and help at home. But this hasnot changed his decision to
emigrate again. He said: Any day I would prefer working in my own country
rather than migrating abroad. Life there is hard and lonely, yet currently in
Bangladesh, the best way of accumulating capital is by earning I “bidesh’
(overseas).“ I want to save enough forsetting up a business or even my own
welding shop.’

EDUCATION FOR HIS CHILDREN

• Like Kamran, he too would like his children to have formal education, but he
is moreprepared to take a middle path given the context of globalization and
expanding employment opportunities in the Gulf countries. He said:
‘If I have a son, I would like him to study in a madrasa. Students here get
familiar with theArabic language through learning the Quran.This can help
them in Arabic-speaking countries like Saudi Arabia. I struggled in my initial
years, taking the help of friends to communicate, but once I learned some
Arabic, I was able to negotiate a better deal for myself.’
• Son: gender considerations
• Despite his own financial and social success without the benefit of formal
education,Muzaffar, like Kamran, wants his children’s success to be based on
education.
 • But they, too, may need to migrate overseas; for this reason, he stresses they
learn Arabicand the cultural nuances embedded in Islam that could help them
adapt and succeed. Further, madrasa education is cheaper and, in the
Bangladesh it is equivalent to secular schooling

MOBILITY AND RESPECTABILITY

• Muzaffar and Kamran, as they were pushed out of school into manual labor
due to householdpoverty, seek entry into the elite classes for their children
• They also want to transform social values by pointing to the diversity in
experience andopportunities

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF INDIA AND SOUTH ASIA: AN INTRODUCTION

LECTURE 12

EXAM FIRST DATE: 26 JANUARY, 1:15-2:45PM

• Multiple choice
• 1.5 hrs
• 36 questions
• Each question has 4 answers (1 is right)
• 2 open questions that you need to answer with 1 or 2 sentences
• The questions cover all the syllabus materials
• The MC test will take place on Moodle

TODAY LECTURE
• Migration: one of the most exciting dimensions of South Asian societies
• Tamil Brahmans’ migration to cities from the countryside in India and their
migration abroad
• Through migration, we look at religion, caste, education, youth, marriage and
gender seen sofar, as ‘transported’ into a different context
• But also, the preparation for migration (in search for work), and the
experience of migrationfor both those who leave and those who stay behind,
how relations are maintained and challenged
• Transformation of identities and practices as a consequence of migration
where people comefrom

MIGRATION
• Migration needs to be seen historically
• Processual nature of migration
• Historical transformations within South Asian societies, often understood as
sites ofimmobility, timelessness and tradition
• Different kinds of migration: internal and global
Two cases:
 • Internal migration (within India, from Palampur – Gujarat – to Mumbai): the
chilliataximen of Bombay/Mumbai
• Combination of both (within Bangladesh and from Bangladesh to Saudi
Arabia)”trajectories of male migrants from different age groups

THE READINGS
They speak about global and seasonal migration:
• Simpson E. 2003. Migration and Islamic reform in a port town of western India.
Contributions to Indian Sociology 37(1-2): 83-108
• Material and immaterial connections established through the exchange of
gifts, ideas and socialpractices among Sunni Muslim ship owners, sailors and
their kin as they return with the monsoon from the ports of the Persian Gulf
• Zharkevich I. 2019. Money and blood: Remittances as a substance of
relatedness in transnational familiesin Nepal.American Anthropologist 121(4):
884-896
Money as a material and symbolic way to keep a society going

MANDVI - GUJARAT
WHERE MIGRANTS GO FROM MANDVI

MIGRATION AS HISTORY AND MATERIALEXCHANGES

• Maps where different though interrelated phenomena take place
• The town of Mandvi and the village of Salaya lie on opposite banks of an
estuarine port onthe southern shores of Kachchh in the western part of Gujarat
• Archaeology indicates that western India has been cosmopolitan for millennia
• The social, architectural and religious fabric of the region is constructed out of
exchanges oftrade goods, ideas and populations
• Closer to today: From the 16th century, if not earlier, Mandvi was a departure
point for pilgrims bound for Mecca; and throughout the 19th and early half of
the 20th century it wasthe port of embarkation for migrants destined for
Bombay, East Africa, Zanzibar and Muscat

WHO LIVES IN MANDVI?

• As a result of this town being a crossroad: the resulting Muslim population
forms betweenone-quarter and one-fifth of the town’s 38,000 population
• They variously claim to be descended from mercenaries, slaves, traders, saints
and warriors,including the armies of Alexander the Great
• Coming from elsewhere! none of the Muslims in Mandvi claim to be
autochthonous; their origins range from mainland Gujarat, Rajasthan, Sindh and
Punjab, to Afghanistan,Turkmenistan,Iran, ’Arabia’ and ’Africa’
SOCIETY IN MANDVI
• There are around thirty hierarchically ordered Sunni Muslim jamats
(endogamous socialgroups) in Mandvi
• They all have their origins and their descendance decides over their status like
the high statusone of the Saiyeds, from the Prophet Mohammed.They are not
really part of this jamat hierarchy
• Devotees do not consider the pir (saint), and often the living Saiyed, as normal
human beings.They are viewed as inhabiting a realm that is closer to the
divine, from where they have power to work miracles and to transcend the
boundaries between the living and the dead

HIERARCHY BASED ON ORIGINS CLAIMS

• The vast majority of Muslims ranking below them are members of jamats,
although the degreeto which such organisations are elaborated and formalised
varies
• At the bottom:The lowest-ranking Muslims are the descendants of slaves,
brought fromZanzibar and Muscat in previous centuries
• Different lands are accorded different values in the modem social order.The
Gulf states and those who claim to originate from them are held in high
esteem; ’Africa’ and ’Africans’ rank lowest, and all other areas fall somewhere in
between
• There also notions of purity and impurity that permeate this hierarchy

HIERARCHY AND EMPLOYMENT

• Traditional hierarchy is also a grading of employment. In descending order,
ritual specialists, theologians, merchants, administrators, warriors, craftsmen
and agriculturalists, and labourersrank over slave populations
• While this hierarchy clearly reflects the division of labour, with spiritual and
commercial activitybeing valued over physical labour, it is the purity of
regional and ancestral origins that orders the potential for particular kinds of
labour
• The most potent theologians, clerics and mystics are generally attributed
with originsthat link them to Saudi Arabia and to one or other of the Prophet
Mohammed’s companions
• Religious specialists of a lower order also generally claim to have come from
lands with strong links to ancient Islam.Those who clearly display talents for
rule and commerce aregenerally associated with the lands to the west of
Kachchh, ranging from Sindh to Afghanistan.
• Artisans and agriculturalists are generally attributed with Indian origins, while
the slaveclasses and one former mercenary group are viewed as having
African origins
CHALLENGING THE HIERARCHY
There are two, more or less effective, forms of social action open to those
competing for statuswith this social order:
• The first strategy involves making claims to a prestigious ancestry, to
companions of theProphet Mohammed or a notable successor.This method,
while seldom being rejected outright, is of limited efficacy
• For example, those who at some unknown point in the past adopted the
name ’Qureshi’ are today known as ’Kachchhi Qureshi’, a designation implying
they are home-grown aspirants andtherefore inauthentic.’
• The second strategy involves denying the authenticity and morality of this
hierarchy andsuggesting an alternative: the Bhadala

THOSE WHO CHALLENGE THE HIERARCHYEFFECTIVELY

• The Bhadala used to live in Mandvi (part of the town still carries their name),
but over the last century have migrated over the river to settle in
Salaya.There they live in dependent isolation from Mandvi’s Muslims, but are
incorporated into Mandvi’s social hierarchy as ’mixed bloods’ oflow rank
• In the last few decades of the 20th century, Bhadala men, traditionally humble
sailors, made vastfortunes from ’predatory capitalism’ and started to devise
ways of countering a social hierarchy that continues to deny them the status they
feel to be their due
• They own 60 ships

HIERARCHY AND WORK

• None of the strategies the Bhadala have adopted, such as emphasising
their knowledge of Urdu and Arabic, or changing their dress or religious
practices, have automatically betteredtheir social position in the eyes of the
wider Muslim community
• Rather, their persuasive powers come from the hundreds of young men
bonded to labour intheir shipyards and on their ships.
• Many such apprentices are drawn from groups that generally consider
themselves to be ofhigher status than the Bhadala

BHADALATRAJECTORIES
• Over the last 30 years, however, the Bhadala have prospered.Traditionally
sailors on the vessels ofShia merchants, they now own the fleet and employ
hundreds of client sailors, the majority of whom are recruited from Mandvi.
• Rather than attempting to move within the hierarchy, as in the Qureshi
example, the Bhadala areattempting to undermine its legitimacy by questioning
the principles on which it is based
• The focus of their attack are the Saiyeds, the majority of whom they regard as
profane fraudsterswho practise magic before devotees blinded by ignorance
BHADALA TRAJECTORIES AND BIOGRAPHY
• Bhadala have disposable wealth with which to construct religious institutions
andpatronise religiously learned personalities in Salaya
• The biography of a Muslim from Mandvi who was apprenticed onto a Bhadala
shipshows the connections between Muslim social hierarchy in Mandvi and
Bhadala attempts at religious reform
• Mandvi and Salaya stand on opposite sides of the river estuary; these
places and their differing social ideologies converge in the actions of apprentice
sailors who make the journey across the river from Mandvi to work on Bhadala
ships

THE BIOGRAPHY OF A SAILOR: HOW THE DIFFERENTSTRANDS CONVERGE

IN ONE MAN’S LIFE HISTORY
• Majid’s biography is a clear account of the migration process between India
and the Gulf statesand the changes of status it entails
• He was born into a poor family belonging to a high status mercantile jamat.
Leaving school at the age of ten, he took on a variety of poorly paid jobs
throughout India in businesses owned by otherKachchhis, before returning to
Mandvi to start an apprenticeship in a Bhadala-owned shipyard
• This transformation, from poverty to relative affluence, is common to many
families who sent their sons to sea. Despite the obvious comforts it has
brought them, the decision to allow Majidto become a sailor had been a difficult
one for his family

DECIDING ABOUT AND SHAPING LIFETRAJECTORIES

• His parents regarded, and still do, the Bhadala as a dirty and corrupt people.
• Majid’s employer decided that he would make a suitable sailor and in the end
he starts to work ona ship carrying onions, cattle fodder, bamboo and goats
back and forth between India and the Gulf states

MAJID’S TRAJECTORY
• With the passing of each season Majid’s network of contacts developed and in
1995 he left theBhadala’s ship and signed a contract to work on a supply
vessel in the oilfields of Bombay High
• Such a career leap is common and a great many men who start work on the
Bhadalas’ fleet
• He crewed the Bhadalas’ ships, Majid slowly adopted the political and religious
attitudes of hisemployers, which were increasingly at variance to those of his
family

MAJID CHALLENGES THE SAIYEDS

• But the most notable difference between Majid and his family was their
relationship to the Saiyeds’ cults. His family are regular clients of a shrine
which owned the house in which Majid was born.Thesedays Majid refuses to
visit this shrine or have any dealings with its patrons.
 • However, as Majid’s remittances increased, his mother started to send daily
parcels of food to the Saiyeds.The constant tension between Majid and his
family on this issue provoked some remarkableexchanges
• Majid’s mother would frequently accuse him of ’forgetting where he came
from’ and of ’ignoring thosehe owed’
• Majid’s mother, among others, also respects Majid’s ’new’ religious ideas
because they carry the seal ofGulf authenticity

EXCHANGE OF GOODS
There are more ways in which seasonal migration to the Gulf transforms people and
places:
• Ships return to Mandvi before the seas begin to grow rough in June.This is a
period of greatexcitement in both Mandvi and Salaya, as loved ones return with
new goods and fashions
• Sailors return with soaps, perfumes, clothing, electrical items, cassettes, watches
and cameras.Alsoextravagant imports, such as an ambulance, a sunbed and
a racing Honda motorcycle.

THE MEANING OF THESE COMMODITIES

What does it mean to possess such a commodity?
• Such goods are explicitly about claiming standing over others who do not
have the resources to possess and, more importantly, to procure such goods.
Broadly, such extravagant goods are publicrepresentations of less tangible
forms of wealth, but they also display an individual’s power to extract booty
from a world economic system of which they can claim to be a part
• ’Worth’ is not the monetary value of the ’commodity’, but the qualities
inherent in these goodsthat reveal the individual’s power to procure them

WHAT’S IN A TV SET
• A highly prized Sony television bought without tax or duty surcharges in
Dubai can be obtained inexchange for the same amount of currency as an
India-made television with similar features from a local dealership
• With the liberalisation of the Indian economy and the reduction of once prohibitive
import dutieson foreign goods, Sony televisions are now available from
specialist import shops in Bombay.
• but, the same model from Bombay is less valued than one from Dubai.Those in
possession of a Sony may well make reference to the quality of the parts and
workmanship, and the longer serviceguarantee offered by an agent in Dubai

GOODS FROM THE GULF

• Every Muslim the author met in Mandvi has at least one personal connection
overseas.Thosedistant figures are inundated with requests for foreign goods and
services.
• Very few such requests are honoured because of the time, expense and
bureaucracy involved.
 • Those who work on ships have the time and the resources to secure,
transport and personally oversee the execution of such demands.Thus men of
low status on ships embodyan enviable degree of power in the eyes of those who
do not travel
• Ships may be kept waiting in port for many weeks, giving sailors time to secure
goods knowing that they can accompany their purchases home, minimising the
possibility that theywill be stolen or damaged

THE VALUE OF IMPORTED GOODS, BEYOND THEIRPRICE

• Two apparently similar goods cost the same, but are evidently not worth the
same because they are not substitutable, and this is where the life of objects
perhaps begins to differ from that of cash
• Unquantifiable exogenous power in the ’thing
• However, the value of the good cannot be given in strict monetary terms
because the value is given by access and control over such goods, via people

GOODS AND BIG MEN

• The power in imported goods is translated into a variety of different forms
of relationship, whichtogether reveal what makes ’big men’
• Returning sailors bring with them a series of items to ’gift’ relatives, friends,
allies and potential allies.These goods actualise and modify social relations
• The presentatio of gifts beholds the receiver to the giver, although this
relationship is not withoutmoral peril or commitment because it will need to be
continues

WHAT GIVING AND TAKING MEAN

• Thus, most gifts represent escalating long-term investments in the loyalty of
particular constituents. In short, the more the sailor gives, the more status
he attracts but the more he willhave to give in the future
• Sailors not only meet the demands of relatives and friends for goods
• As they aim to become ’big men’, objects are resold within client networks
and potential clientnetworks
• The sailor acts as a guarantor of the commoditised gift, standing for a
verifiable and prestigiousorigin
• Some sailors sell their personal cargo directly to a wholesaler rather than
relying on word ofmouth and networks of personal influence
• Role of Muslim women negotiators
• Widely thought of as prostitutes, they were in the business of commercially
transacting commodities better known as ’gifts’.They seldom handled large
or expensive items, restrictingthemselves to soaps, perfumes, batteries,
cigarettes, watches, etc
TRANSACTION OF GOODSWITH RELIGIOUSWORTH
• Images and ideas of Islam are imported and commoditised through these
models of exchange.
• The Bhadala ship owner is dependent on his ability to appear as patron and as
exclusive source ofreligious gifts
• Ships mainly call in to the ports of the United Arab Emirates, especially Dubai,
where the majorityof Mandvi’s Muslim labour migrants also work.
• Importantly, the ‘Gulf’ region (not explicitly Saudi Arabia) is also held to be the
cradle of Islam, thelocation of the life of the Prophet Mohammed and his
successors.Thus it is that when religious goods and practices are imported
from the ‘Gulf’, they too carry with them elevated status and efficacy
• Skullcaps, robes, slippers, prints and rose-water imported by the ship owners
are never sold to a commodity agent. Ship owners gift and frequently sell such
items to sailors and apprentices in theirshipyards.

RELIGIOUS ITEMS
• Copies of the Quran, items of clothing and prestigious ways of performing
rituals can beimported by any number
• of sailors. However, the status of the individual whose biography attests to the
authenticity of the good also plays a role in the value attached to it.
• Simply, goods imported by men of high standing are imbued with a greater
value thanthose brought home by humble sailors
• The power and the quasi-magical qualities ascribed to foreign lands and the
things brought from them are not entirely divorced from the social relations and
position ofthose who import them

OVERALL STRATEGY
• The Bhadala are attempting to transform their ranking into one premised on the
ability topresent ‘gifts’ and ’commoditised gifts’
• For ship owners, what makes men is their ability to consume and reproduce
loyal crews of menlike Majid based on contact with the ’Gulf’ and access to
the prestigious commodities available from its bazaars
• Ultimately, the dominant patterns of gifting and giving reveal how short-term
cycles of exchangeare being used by ship owners to transform the long-term
reproductive cycle of social order

NEPAL (BUT ALSO A TYPICAL PICTURE OFMIGRANTS’ FAMILIES)

• From the exchange of commodities to cash flows and how relationships are
madethrough them
• The husbands of all three women were abroad: they are among the thousands
of Nepalimen who have left their families in order to toil in foreign countries,
mostly in the Gulf states or Malaysia
• The three young women are among the thousands of Nepali wives who see the
departure of their husbands shortly after marriage, while their babies are
 among the many children who do not see their father until the age of two or
three—the time whenfathers return home before yet another journey abroad.

THABANG, MIDWESTERN HILLS OF THE NEPALIHIMALAYAS

UNEMPLOYMENT…AND REMITTANCES
• Nepal is the third-biggest receiver of remittances in the world (as a share of
GDP),after Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and it also has one of the highest
rates of absentee nationals in the world. Large-scale international migration
from
• Nepal is a relatively recent phenomenon, associated with the democratization
andliberalization of the Nepali state in the 1990s, accompanied by high levels
of unemployment and parallel process of rapid monetization of previously semi
subsistence rural communities
• Over the last two decades, Nepal has transformed from a nation that supplied
“global warriors” for the Gurkha regiments of the British and Indian armies to one
supplying “global workers” for the international capitalist economy, especially
at its fringes in the Global South

WHO AND WHERE: SOME NUMBERS

• In 2010, every fifth Nepali was absent from the household, and 73 percent of
these absentees were men
• Around fifteen hundred people leave Nepal on a daily basis. Nepalis who
migrate abroad are predominantly men (88 percent) from rural areas (85 percent)
 who are married (62percent) and who belong to the most productive age group,
fifteen to twenty-nine years old (50 percent).
• Only 12 percent of international migrants from Nepal are women with many
womenmigrating through irregular channels.While India used to be a major
destination for Nepali migrants, over the past decade the trend has changed.
• At present, 37 percent of Nepali migrants go to the Gulf states, 37 percent to
India, and13 percent to Association of Southeas Asian countries—with
Malaysia being the main destination.

MORAL PANIC BEYOND THE NUMBERS

• This situation, where almost half of the rural households in Nepal have at
least one person who is abroad or who has recently returned, has led to
the popular and media discourse on the breakdown of the family and on
villages being depopulated, with elders, women, and children having to
shoulder the burden of male absence
• Her interlocutors in midwestern Nepal complained about the decline of
morality: migrants’ wives dreaming of swapping the hazards of rural life for
the amenities of urban areas and, in the worst-case scenarios, eloping
• while their husbands are away

HOWTO MAINTAIN RELATIONSHIPS

• Despite moving across borders and not seeing their families for years on end,
Nepali migrants from rural areas remain embedded in kinship networks and
rural localities, which they physically leave behind but with which they maintain
relationships through media
• In a situation where long-distance families are increasingly becoming a norm
not only in Nepal but also in man parts of the world, the question of
whetherkinship ties and family relations should necessarily entail an embodied
dimension becomes critical

CENTRALITY OF REMITTANCES AND THE ROLETHEY PLAY

• Remittances have become a substance central for maintaining and re-creating
kinship tiesin transnational family networks
• Viewing money as a substance of relatedness allows one to get at the
materiality of affective relations, at the centrality of money in prioritizing
some kinships relations overothers, and at money’s role in delineating the
boundaries of contemporary families that often depart from conventional
norms of physical copresence.

MONEY AND BLOOD: REMITTANCES AS A SUBSTANCEOF RELATEDNESS

• Focus on money-sending and money-receiving practices—that is, observing
who receivesmoney and benefits from remittances in transnational families in
midwestern Nepal
• Tracing the role of remittances in sustaining and disrupting kinship ties and
money’s power to become a substance that acts both as a binding and
 dividing force in transnational family networks, for it is not only the act of
sharing but also of excluding kin from the monetary flow

METHODOLOGY
• Fieldwork in the village of Thabang, in the midwestern hills of the Nepali
Himalayas, where she conducted several fieldwork trips in the 2000s
• over a period of almost a decade allowed in-depth discussions with several
generations of family members—with migrants in and out of the village—which
returned a dynamic rather than a static view of the migration process.
• participant observation, life stories, in-depth interviews, and a survey of one
hundred migrant households: research limitation, not multisited
• The author has not done fieldwork in the Gulf or Malaysia, where most of
the migrants go.
• But talked to many returnee migrants as well as conducted periods of fieldwork in
thedistricts of Rukum, Dang, Kathmandu, and, more recently, in the United
States.
• All of the fieldwork, across three districts in Nepal and in the US, was done
with the KhaMagars, an ethnic group speaking aTibeto-Burman language
Kham

MIGRATION VECTORS OUT OF A REMOTE PLACE

Despite being a physically remote place (with the road reaching the village only in
2015 and an unreliable Internet connection arriving around the same time) Thabang’s
residents have been traveling beyond South Asia to engage in the global capitalist
economy as labor migrants for almosta decade, in particular to the Gulf states,
Malaysia, Iraq Afghanistan, and Japan

CHANGING MIGRATIONS PATTERNS

• In the past, when only the poorest villagers, mostly Dalits, migrated for
temporary labor to India, andwhen several dozen villagers became Indian
and, in fewer cases, British Gurkha soldiers.
• We saw youth migration from rural areas to Kathmandu
• Migration to the Gulf was virtually nonexistent until the very beginning of the
People’s War (startedby the Maoists in 1996), and it has increased in the war’s
aftermath

THE SUBSTANCE OF REMITTANCES

• Remittances, as a distinct form of money, are relationaland generative
• Remittances are often earned through hard physical labor

THE SUBSTANCE OF REMITTANCES

• Remittances earned by “breaking sweat” or by “blood” are too dear to be
shared widely.
 • In contrast to the circulation of gifts, which are habitually brought by Nepali
migrants to different categories of kin, the circulation of money within
transnational family networksis usually confined to a more limited circle of kin

GENDER AND MIGRATION

• The situation is markedly different for women. In Thabang, as in most of rural
Nepal, migration is highly gendered: it is the job of men to go abroad, while
the job of women isto stay
• Despite women being disadvantaged at many levels by the absence of their
husbands,they also—primarily in their role as wives—receive a major share of
remittances

MONEY CONFLICT
• Not surprising that money was one of the most common causes of disputes
in transnationalfamilies, second only to jealousy
• When remittances do not flow smoothly, conflicts between spouses are
common because ofthe underlying assumption that it is the obligation of men to
provide
• Most of the arguments happened over the phone

CALLING FOR REMITTANCES

• For phone calls to be productive, at least some remittances, even if token in
sum, should comethrough
• The results of the author’s survey show that there was a high degree of
congruence betweenthe regularity of monetary flows, however meager, and
the frequency of phone calls from abroad

SENDING THE MEN BACK

• Rather than waiting for the return of their husbands from abroad, a lot of
women were waiting for remittances, used no for personal purposes but for
maintaining thehousehold, raising children and providing them with costly
education
• Instead of asking their husbands to return sooner, some of the women asked
their husbands to not return so often (every two years) but rather wait for an
extra yearbefore returning home and thus save more money
• Others asked their husbands to return to the Gulf, even when their spouses
had nomore wishes to go abroad, especially after reexperiencing the
conviviality of social life in the village

NO HEARTBROKEN WIVES
• Unlike in many parts of Nepal, most marriages in Thabang are love marriages
by elopement (literacy and writing love letters – leading to changing in
marriage practices, no longer arrangedmarriages)
• The author was surprised to learn that despite all the difficulties of living without
their husbands, women in Thabang appeared to be content with their lot.
 When asked the wives ofinternational migrants how they felt about their
husbands living abroad for years on end and whether they missed them, a lot
of the time women laughed and asked why they should miss their husbands.

NO HEARTBROKEN WIVES
• For most Thabangis, the emphasis in family life was less on conjugality
(the husband–wiferelationship) and more on children and posterity
• Most of the author’s attempts to solicit the stories of heartbroken wives waiting
for thereturn of their husbands failed
• The author realized that quite a few of migrant wives were happy with, and
evenpreferred, their long-distance marriages
• Adding more dimensions to our discussion on marriage!

VIOLENT RELATIONSHIPS
• A young pregnant woman, explained to the anthropologist that thereasons
for preferring physical distance are quite pragmatic
• Rather than enduring the fighting with her husband and his bouts of
drunkenness, she would rather he go abroad and earn money

REMITTANCES AND RELATIONSHIPS

• The role of remittances as a substance of relatedness becomes clear in
situations when nomoney is sent.
• In many contexts around the world, and certainly in Nepal, the denial of
commensality when itcomes to remittances signifies not only the exclusion
from affective ties but often a de facto end of the conjugal union
• As long as remittances are there then the marriage is there

REMITTANCES AND RELATIONSHIPS

• The critical role of remittances in maintaining relationships between husbands
and wives in long-distance families indicates that where kinship is not based
on “blood,” the exchange of other substances, including money, becomes
particularly important
• In Nepal, and certainly in many other contexts, the creation of one body in
couples has as muchto do with sharing money as with the exchange of bodily
substances
• Notions of conjugality

SHARING SUBSTANCES
• If one could not share money with one’s spouse, how could they share
anything at all, an informantasked?
• So what happens when no money is shared and when spouses cannot share
bodily substancesbecause of physical distance?
PROXIMITY, EMOTIONAL CLOSENESS AND MONEY
• Physical distance does not have a serious impact on people’s perception of
emotional closeness andsupport
• In a survey done by the author, 35 women named their husbands as next of
kin to whom the feelemotionally closest, and most of these women also ranked
their husbands as closest in terms of financial help

CLOSENESS AND MONEY

• Emotional closeness would not be there without remittances
• The case of Nepali transnational families demonstrates that money constitutes
a substance of relatedness vital for theorizing kinship relationships in the
contemporaryworld, where an increasing number of families are living apart
without any possibility of embodied presence.
• Remittances stand for the ability of money as a substance to transport value
acrosstime and space and between people