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Being Brahmin, Being Modern
There is clearly an academic and political obsession with the ‘idea’ of the Brahmin. There is also, simultaneously, a near-complete absence of engagement with the Brahmin as an embodied person or community. This book addresses this intriguing paradox by making available a sociological description of the Brahmins in today’s Karnataka. It pursues three distinct, yet enmeshed, registers of inquiry – the persona of the ‘Brahmin’ embodied in the agency of the individual Brahmin; the organised complexes of action such as the caste association and the public culture of print; and finally, taking off from a longer (yet, modern and contemporary) history of non-Brahminical othering of the ...
Being Brahmin, Being Modern
Political and academic interest in the idea of the Brahmin notwithstanding, there has been virtually no engagement with the Brahmin as an embodied person or community. This book seeks to address this intriguing paradox in the context of Brahmins in modern-day Karnataka. The book argues that the multivalent worlds of contemporary caste demand that we constantly innovate different modes of approaching it. With this intent, it positions itself against the monographic form and weaves together an ethnography with diverse research techniques such as archival documents, literary works and published writings of caste associations. The Brahmin today, the author argues, cannot be adequately understood as a caste-self that masks its casteness in order to present itself as a secular self. Neither can the Brahmin be seen as a subject that has successfully transcended casteness. As the title of the book suggests, the central tensions that animate the Brahmin self is that of being both Brahmin and modern.
Being Brahmin, Being Modern
There is clearly an academic and political obsession with the ‘idea’ of the Brahmin. There is also, simultaneously, a near-complete absence of engagement with the Brahmin as an embodied person or community. This book addresses this intriguing paradox by making available a sociological description of the Brahmins in today’s Karnataka. It pursues three distinct, yet enmeshed, registers of inquiry – the persona of the ‘Brahmin’ embodied in the agency of the individual Brahmin; the organised complexes of action such as the caste association and the public culture of print; and finally, taking off from a longer (yet, modern and contemporary) history of non-Brahminical othering of the ...
Spirals of Contention
This study examines the social and psychological processes that led to the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. It recognizes the long-term continuities in the idiom of conflict (as well as cooperation), and shows that, by 1900, the conflicts and animosities were gathering a self-aggravating momentum. The book moves back and forth between evidence and general, or theoretical, understanding. Separateness between Hindus and Muslims grew reciprocally, with hardening religious identities and the growing frequency of incidents of conflict. These skirmishes had several dimensions: symbolic (desecrating places of worship), societal (conversions), and physical (violence against women). As mutual trust declined, a quarter century of negotiations under diverse auspices failed to yield an agreement, and even the framework of the Partition in 1947 was imposed by the colonial rulers. A theoretically informed study, this book takes a comparative stance along several axes. Recognizing long-term continuities in the idiom of conflict (as well as of cooperation), it will be of interest to students of conflicts, Partitions, history, sociology, and South Asian studies.
Śiva's Saints
In Siva's Saints, Gil Ben-Herut challenges common notions about the Virasaiva tradition in its nascent phases. By closely reading the saints' stories in this text, Siva's Saints takes a more nuanced historical view than commonly-held notions about the egalitarian and iconoclastic nature of the early tradition, arguing instead that early bhakti (devotionalism) in the Kannada-speaking region was less-radical and more accommodating toward traditional religious, social, and political institutions than thought of today.
The Guru in South Asia
This book provides a set of fresh and compelling interdisciplinary approaches to the enduring phenomenon of the guru in South Asia. Moving across different gurus and kinds of gurus, and between past and present, the chapters call attention to the extraordinary scope and richness of the social lives and roles of South Asian gurus. Prevailing scholarship has rightly considered the guru to be a source of religious and philosophical knowledge and mystical bodily practices. This book goes further and considers the social engagements and entanglements of these spiritual leaders, not just on their own (narrowly denominational) terms, but in terms of their diverse, complex, rapidly evolving engageme...
Sirens of Modernity
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. By the 1960s, Hindi-language films from Bombay were in high demand not only for domestic and diasporic audiences but also for sizable non-diasporic audiences across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean world. Often confounding critics who painted the song-dance films as noisy and nonsensical. if not dangerously seductive and utterly vulgar, Bombay films attracted fervent worldwide viewers precisely for their elements of romance, music, and spectacle. In this richly documented history of Hindi cinema during the long 1960s, Samhita Sunya historicizes the emergence of world ci...
Experimental Times
Experimental Times is an in-depth ethnography of the transformation of Bengaluru/Bangalore from a site of "backend" IT work to an aspirational global city of enterprise and innovation. The book journeys alongside the migrant workers, technologists, and entrepreneurs who shape and survive the dreams of a "Startup India" knitted through office work, at networking meetings and urban festivals, and across sites of leisure in the city. Tracking techno-futures that involve automation and impending precarity, Hemangini Gupta details the everyday forms of experimentation, care, and friendship that sustain and reproduce life and labor in India's current economy.
Qualitative Research on Illness, Wellbeing and Self-Growth
This book examines the theoretical, methodological and practical dimensions of Qualitative Research in the study of illness, wellbeing and self-growth in the Indian context. Using wide-ranging narratives, interviews, group discussions, and cultural analyses, it offers a social and psychological understanding of health and therapy.
The Snake and the Mongoose
In The Snake and The Mongoose, Nathan McGovern turns the commonly-accepted model of the origins of early Indian religions on its head. Instead of assuming a fundamental dichotomy between Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical in ancient India, McGovern shows that there were many different groups who all saw themselves as Brahmanical, and out of whose contestation with one another the distinction between Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical emerged.
