Abstract: . The book also has three suggestions for future research: examining the role of ideology in India ’ s foreign policy, examining the linkage between the electoral support bases of the two leading coalitions, and examining the linkage between electoral support bases and foreign policies pursued by the two leading coalitions. The book will be useful for students, researchers, policy analysts, diplomats, foreign service professionals, government o ffi cials, general readers, journalists and media experts.

Abstract: Like other conflict-torn societies, Sri Lankans have long sought to build peace through constitutional re-design with devolution of power and minority protections. However, the preoccupation with legal norms and institutions runs counter to the widely-held conviction that politicians routinely transgress norms and twist institutions. It is thus imperative to study the lived political realities of power-sharing arrangements, rather than their intended design. The 1987 Thirteenth Amendment devolved state power to the provinces to assuage Tamil separatism. The limited academic work that exists on the Provincial Council system outlines its shortcomings and failures, but there is little scholarship of the councils as a political arena in their own right. This article discusses the politics around the Eastern Provincial Council, especially the brief but unique period between 2015 and 2017 when it was run by Tamil and Muslim parties. More specifically, the empirical material pivots on three Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim Ministers in the Eastern Province and two lower-ranking Muslim politicians. The Provincial Council has very different meaning, legitimacy and utility to these diverse political figures. I argue that we must consider these diverse ethno-nationalist manifestations of provincial politics to understand what the Provincial Council system entails in Sri Lanka.

Abstract: ABSTRACT Transnational anti-trafficking networks seek to ‘rescue’ cisgender women who sell sex in India. This article puzzles out why cis female sex workers might narrate themselves as victims of trafficking in need of rescue despite making comfortable livings as independent sex workers who control their own labour. I draw data from my own ethnographic observations, interviews with 130 Telugu-speaking sex workers, as well as publicly circulating media clips, all from fieldwork conducted in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana between 2009 and 2018. The victim narratives analysed here were told by sex workers familiar with arguments in favour of decriminalising and destigmatizing sex work. My research suggests that many women who sell sex value the material goals of the sex workers’ rights movement while nevertheless longing for the immaterial moral security touted by anti-traffickers. I argue that publicly performing trafficking narratives allows women who sell sex to disavow moral agency in participating in what they often refer to as tappudu pani (bad work) while nevertheless accessing the material benefits of sex work. Participating in what Lindquist has called the aesthetic of trafficking, therefore, enables them to plead for sympathy from not only faceless donors but their own moral communities.

Abstract: ABSTRACT In this introduction, we first outline the background to this collection of papers and recall some of the conversations that were its genesis, before introducing the questions we wish to address through it. We then situate the collection within scholarship on Hindu majoritarianism and suggest that a nuanced understanding needs to take into account both its institutional and everyday dimensions. To do so, we focus on both jurisprudence and geography which, we argue, are crucial sites for the making of contemporary Hinduism but have not previously been brought together analytically. Through the work of six scholars of diverse disciplinary backgrounds (Law, Anthropology, Indology and Religious Studies) the special issue theorises the spatial and legal dimensions of contemporary Hinduism as cross-fertilising, and as crucial sites for the formation and functioning of Hindu majoritarianism.

Abstract: a strong review of literature, citing global case studies concerning livelihood issues of vendors and kinds of interventions deployed by the state in the region. The book includes documentation and analysis of oral narratives to access and theorize the urban poor ’ s lived experience. Apart from Muslim vendors, I feel that the inclusion of other ethnic minorities in the book ’ s analysis would add to the literature on socio-spatial segregation. The book contributes to decolonial literature, as well as the emerging scholarship on space and spatial justice, and will be a useful resource for city planners. It strongly uses the idea of counter-space to address the urban poor ’ s rights to access public space for vending activities in cities of the Global South in general

Abstract: ABSTRACT Taking exception to the persistent and recurrent exceptionalism of sex work within discourses on anti-trafficking, global health, brahmanical patriarchy and Indian nationalism, this special section comprises four articles. Originally conceived as part of a panel for a spring conference scheduled for summer 2020, the articles emerged in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and include research by Dr Gowri Vijayakumar, Dr Vibhuti Ramachandran, Dr Mirna Guha, and Dr Kimberly Walters. Through an analysis of the historical and contemporaneous experiences of marginalised cis women (dis)engaged in selling sex across diverse contexts, these articles deploy a range of conceptual and methodological approaches to interrogate longstanding institutional efforts to surveil, target and govern their bodies. In doing so, together, they delineate and challenge the enduring legacy of a long history of moral and public health panics that have framed the lives of people who sell sex in India since colonial times. This addresses structural and epistemic violence visited upon sex workers and strengthens ongoing efforts to forward an alternative, intersectional feminist reading of sex work in India.

Abstract: a distinctive viewpoint on the multifaceted dynamics of medical education and healthcare delivery in postcolonial contexts. Anna Ruddock provides an in-depth anthropological and ethnographic analysis of AIIMS New Delhi based on fieldwork conducted between

Abstract: ABSTRACT Indian men who migrated circularly from their village homes to Delhi to pedal cycle rickshaws for work practiced intimate relationships with their wives, sex workers, and middle-class female customers. While the intimacy practiced by South Asian men who migrate is, in popular discourse, often framed as deviancy or assumed to be only about physical gratification, this article’s ethnography demonstrates that rickshaw men’s heterosexual/erotic intimacies took multiple forms which were variously characterized by sexual exchange, physical closeness, emotional connections, and/or the denial of gender and sexuality. The intimate practices were informed by intersecting identities and systems of social hierarchy, and it is argued that they had considerable bearing on the men’s migration decisions and labor performance. Although neither intimacy studies nor South Asian labor migration studies are in the habit of analyzing industries like the cycle rickshaw industry through the same lens as, for example, sex work or surrogacy and fertility work, a case is made that such industries that rely on South Asian male migrants’ manual labor and migration may, too, be profitably understood as intimate industries.

Abstract: This viewpoint delves into the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) determined efforts to transform itself into a prominent political force in Tamil Nadu, a state dominated by Dravidian parties for over half a century. Despite the formidable stronghold of regional parties, the BJP has strategically undertaken a series of measures to position itself as a credible alternative. As a Hindu nationalist party, it has navigated the complex political landscape by adopting innovative strategies. This viewpoint examines the BJP's journey, highlighting its nuanced steps to gain a foothold in a historically challenging environment. By scrutinising these measures, the viewpoint sheds light on the party's evolution, emphasising its determination to emerge as a viable option amidst the enduring influence of Dravidian politics.

Abstract: This article explores change and continuity in the institutional objectives and actions of the British Geological Survey across independent South Asian countries, namely India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Ceylon/Sri Lanka, and Burma/Myanmar. By focusing on this geographical space from the 1960s, the article tells a political tale of adjustment, in which the colonial background of the British presence in the region was overlain by the Cold War foreground of international competition. The Geological Survey had the required pedigree to prolong the British presence in important technical arenas of these emerging nation-states, albeit within the redefined parameters of development, overlapping interests, and competing benefits. The article sketches the Survey's history of exchange and collaboration across South Asian countries (except Bhutan), as its projects adapted to national preferences and global pressures. It traces how and why its proposals prioritised certain interactions over others and tracks the ways-and-means through which it pursued geological and attendant commercial aims. The article also attempts to situate these interplays within regional and ideological frames, within which politically conscious technocrats sought capital and influence to reorient earth science objectives so that these could simultaneously accrue national products and generate neo-colonial prestige.

Abstract: Abstract In February 2023, the Manchester Museum opened its new South Asia Gallery. Co-curated by a collective - 'individuals from British Asian communities in and around Manchester and fellow experts', the gallery encapsulates a unique curatorial spirit, and challenges traditional spatial juxtapositions in museum spaces. This review explores the collection and spatial experience of the gallery, examining the relationship between content and curatorial priorities. The gallery stands out in its unique telling of a people's history of large-scale global events, in the ways it traces the relationship between the everyday and empire, and between belongings and artefacts. This however brings with it certain lacunas in the 'global' connections of South Asia, and the need for future opportunities to explore under-represented voices.

Abstract: Childlessness in Bangladesh is an important contribution to the study of childlessness and infertility in South Asia. The relevance of this monograph emerges from the need to look beyond population rhetoric in South Asia and in Bangladesh, and to focus on the lived everyday violence that accompanies women who are unable to bear and birth children. Through its 10 chapters, Nahar conveys an image of a pronatalist culture that is di ffi cult for childless women to navigate. In seeking to prioritize the term ‘ childlessness ’ over infertility, Nahar privileges the varied experiences that women navigate in embodying this particular cultural and social lack. The major highlight of Nahar ’ s research in this book is in providing a deeper understanding of how childlessness is felt across rural, urban and di ff erent social classes. Identifying these social cleavages is also important to focus on the ways in which childlessness can be an alienating and violent experience for women. Each of Nahar ’ s ethnographic chapters chronicles the varied experiences that rural poor and urban middle-class Bangladeshi women undergo in achieving conception. The levels of social exclusion and violence faced, the access to the kinds of treatment available and the forms of resistance that childless women endure and create are di ff erent amongst the poor and middle classes. Thus, assisted reproductive technologies such as in-vitro fertilization are not available to rural poor women

Abstract: Reading Kashinath Singh's Apna Morcha (Personal Front 1985), and Alka Saraogi's Jankidas Tejpal Mansion (2015), this article explores if and how cognitive, volitional and intersubjective relationships forged among people across caste, communal and gendered divides could lead to shared politics. While Saraogi's fiction problematises the quest of Nehruvian developmentalism after independence, Singh's novel engages with students' politics and youth activism that dominated the revolutionary activism of the 1970s, India. Even as these novels interrogate the ascriptive hierarchies and bourgeoisie compromises that affected post-independence India, they also provide a road map whereby moments of comradeship and solidarities based on ethics of care could renew the extant civic imagination. Such an approach highlights aesthetic and 'aesthesic reconstitutions' (Mignolo, W. D. 2021. The Politics of Decolonial Investigations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press) of collectivities, challenging differential access of differential collectivities to the nation-state. Walter Mignolo (2021. The Politics of Decolonial Investigations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press) rightly describes aesthesic restitutions as tools of 'epistemological decolonization […] to clear the way for new intercultural communication, for an interchange of experiences and meaning, as the basis of another relationality in opposition to the universalist projections of the western civilization' and nation states (4).

Abstract: The concerns of urban informality, spatial justice and sustainable development goals are addressed in the book. The author delves into governance questions regarding the appropriation of urban space for livelihood by the urban poor in cities of the Global South. Space and spatial practices are the central focus of the book, which focuses on the spatial contextualization of the lived experiences of male and female vendors in Sattola, Dhaka. The book is divided into seven chapters, including the introduction and conclusion. Chapter one introduces the problem and contextualizes the research. The second chapter deals with space and spatial segregation by utilizing Lefebvre ’ s conceptual triad to interpret planning and development in Dhaka. Chapters three and four expand on the discussion of formal and informal governance and discuss the relation between governance, planning and space. The author argues that the state and its apparatus, such as the Capital Development Authority, produce conceived spaces that implement state-centric, elite-centred planning and policies and ignore poor people ’ s right to the city (88 – 89). Further, state o ffi cials in Dhaka ‘ play by the rules ’ to evict or ‘ play with the rule ’ on the backstage to serve their own interests through mastans (middlemen) and linemen, thereby imposing socio-spatial sanctions and promoting bribery towards the urban poor (97 – 99). Chapter fi ve examines men ’ s access to urban spaces, and the strategies they use to produce counter-spaces to earn an income. Chapter six focuses on women, and compares them to their male counterparts. The author strongly argues that resistance and rebellion are costly for the poor. Thus, the urban poor avoid overt resistance and practice every-day politics such as quiet encroachment

Abstract: In recent decades, subaltern communities have initiated and sustained significant social reforms and movements, challenging the nation's social hegemonies and political configurations. Since the 1990s, mutual solidarities between subalterns, demonstrated during combative socio-political movements, have played pivotal roles in reasserting their space within the nation's legal and political landscape. Besides social movements and momentary alliances, subaltern solidarity forms the basis of their everyday existence. This essay examines contemporary Indian short stories to explore how solidarities are expressed in the everyday affective alliances between communities, particularly Dalits and Muslims. It intervenes by bringing the notions of belonging and space into the debates of solidarity in postcolonial India. It analyses short stories by four contemporary authors–Skybaba, Noor Zaheer, Razia Sajjad Zaheer, and Hansda Sowvendra Shekar–whose writings focus on the quotidian lives of subalterns. Reading the narratives in the context of debates on belonging and nationhood, the essay addresses the following questions: how does solidarity cut across caste and class in the case of Dalits and Muslims? How is affective solidarity expressed through spatial and dietary solidarity? How do unstructured and unorganised spaces felicitate expressions of solidarity? Lastly, can affective alliances between subalterns be viewed as an unwritten, uncodified solidarity contract?