{"title":"Refugee Cities: How Afghans Changed Urban Pakistan <b>Refugee Cities: How Afghans Changed Urban Pakistan</b> , by Sanaa Alimia, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022, 248 pp., US$39.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-5128-2279-3.","authors":"Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2272499","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2272499","url":null,"abstract":"\"Refugee Cities: How Afghans Changed Urban Pakistan.\" South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"14 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135539635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Going Wild on Instagram: Tiger Safaris and India’s Protected Areas in the Age of Social Media","authors":"Aileen Blaney","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2266934","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2266934","url":null,"abstract":"AbstractThrough the lens of tiger photography on Instagram, this paper investigates a desire for wilderness without the human footprint; based on a false separation between nature and society, this aspiration finds expression through visual aesthetics on the platform. Protected areas in India are increasing, but this has not halted nature’s financialisation. On the contrary, it has enhanced the availability of preserved nature for conversion to capital, mirroring earlier opportunities tied to resource extraction. Using insights from political ecology, I discuss how wildlife as hyper-spectacle on Instagram presents a natural world with the appearance of being untransformed by human intervention and available to tourism. Instagram offers a route into understanding the paradoxical stance of nature in contemporary tourism and conservation discourses.Keywords: EcotourismIndiaInstagramprotected areassocial mediatiger tourismwildlife photography Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).AcknowledgementsI would like to thank Spoorthi Niranjan, who was an undergraduate student at FLAME University at the time of writing, for assistance in the collection of Instagram posts. I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers and journal editor for their suggestions. These inputs were very helpful in reformulating an earlier version of this paper.Notes1. Büscher describes what he calls the ‘nontransformation of nature’ as a nature-based commodity whose value is tied up in appearing as entirely ‘natural’: Bram Büscher, ‘The Value and Circulation of Liquid Nature and the Emergence of Fictitious Conservation’, in Nature Inc.: Environmental Conservation in the Neoliberal Age, ed. Bram Büscher, Wolfram Dressler and Robert Fletcher (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014): 183–205.2. John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988): 47. In this period, the colonial regime attempted to eliminate the tiger population for the supposed benefit of the people. Killing tigers was economically advantageous: fewer wild animals meant more timber, leading to prodigious sales and conversion of forest to agricultural land.3. Nada Farhoud, ‘Royals’ Bloody Trophy Hunting Past when Queen Posed with Tiger Shot by Prince Philip’, Mirror, January 29, 2021, accessed April 12, 2023, https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/royals-bloody-trophy-hunting-past-23410242.4. Jim Corbett, Man-Eaters of Kumaon (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1944): 244.5. Radhika Govindrajan, Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018): 125.6. The Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 gave momentum to the conversion of hunting reserves belonging to maharajas into national parks.7. Ishan Kukreti, ‘Union Budget 2020–21: Big Chunk Goes to Tigers and Elephants’, Down to Earth, February 1, 2020, accessed May 13, 2022, https://w","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"18 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135221475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Shashank Chaturvedi, David N. Gellner, Sanjay Kumar Pandey
{"title":"The 2022 State Elections in Uttar Pradesh and the RSS-isation of the BJP","authors":"Shashank Chaturvedi, David N. Gellner, Sanjay Kumar Pandey","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2266289","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2266289","url":null,"abstract":"AbstractSince 2014, the BJP has become increasingly dominant in Uttar Pradesh, India, a state where, as recently as 2012, its vote share had slumped to 15 percent. This paper examines, through ethnographic field research with party workers and others, the reasons for the turnaround in the party’s fortunes. A large part of the answer lies in the increasing strength of BJP party organisation, modelled on an RSS template, as well as the increasing coordination between the RSS and the BJP, with RSS personnel frequently seconded to the BJP. This intense closeness between the RSS and the BJP is a new post-2014 feature, something that did not characterise earlier periods of the BJP in power. A second key factor, building on the BJP’s increased organisational capacity, and one long advocated by the RSS, is the mobilisation of state welfare benefits by the party and the concerted effort to convert welfare recipients, coming from all communities, into supporters. A third key factor, at which the BJP is increasingly adept and where RSS organisational skills provide a significant advantage, is the micromanagement of caste dynamics and religious polarisation as and when required to gain and maintain a political advantage.Keywords: BJPHindutvaIndian politicslocal electionsRSSUPUttar Pradesh AcknowledgementsWe thank the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust for their support through the BA’s Small Research Grants scheme (grant SRG21211342). Chaturvedi would also like to thank Professor Pushpendra Kumar and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Patna, for supporting the early phase of fieldwork; and for support in the field, Rahul Mishra (Gorakhpur) and Harinder Chowdhary (Bulandhshahar). Ethical approval was obtained from the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford (SAME_C1A_21_100). For helpful comments on earlier drafts, and assistance in sharpening our argument, we thank Ralph Schroeder, Amogh Sharma, Priya Chacko, and two anonymous referees.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes1. Cited in D. Thengadi, Karyakarta (Pune: Bhartiya Vichar Sadhna, 5th ed., 2011 [1995]): 106.2. To two decimal points, the BJP vote share in 2022 was 41.29 percent while that of the SP was 32.06 percent. Lok Dhaba Trivedi Centre for Political Data, accessed April 27, 2023, https://lokdhaba.ashoka.edu.in/browse-data?et=AE&st=Uttar_Pradesh&an=18.3. The BJP won 8 percent of the Muslim votes in the 2022 assembly election in UP: The Hindu Bureau, ‘The Hindu-CSDS-Lokniti Post-Poll Survey 2022: Welfare, Regional Factors Provided Ballast to BJP in Uttar Pradesh’, The Hindu, March 12, 2022, accessed September 29, 2022, https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/the-hindu-csds-lokniti-post-poll-survey-2022/article65215064.ece.4. N. Mehta, The New BJP: Modi and the Making of the World’s Largest Political Party (Chennai: Westland, 2022): Chap. 3.5. On the history of the RSS, see W.K. Anderson and S. Damle, The Brotherh","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"496 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135327143","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘ <i>Satrah Din, Satrah Saal</i> ’ <i>:</i> Media, Propaganda and Virtual Warfare in the India-Pakistan War of 1965","authors":"Meher Ali","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2262288","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2262288","url":null,"abstract":"AbstractThe 1965 India-Pakistan War, also known as the Second Kashmir War or the ‘Seventeen-Day War’, is usually understood through the lens of military history, regional geopolitics and the long-standing ‘Kashmir question’. This article looks instead to the construction of social and political meaning around the conflict through an examination of the war’s mediatisation in Pakistan. An analysis of different media forms—including radio broadcasts, news dailies, press photography and popular poetry—reveals how a war imaginary was shaped by both domestic crises and global ideological dissension, extending beyond the notion of a timeless Indo-Pak enmity. Taking place at a pivotal moment in the global Cold War, public narratives were built upon not only state agendas but also popular concerns regarding militarism, sovereignty and the politics of aid. These framings ultimately illustrate the deeper entanglements that exist between war, media and mass publics—extending beyond the goals of wartime propaganda alone to produce new national imaginaries and collective subjectivities.Keywords: Cold WarIndiaKashmirmass publicsmedianationalismPakistanphotographypolitics of aidpropagandaradiowar AcknowledgementsThe author would like to thank Gyan Prakash and Jeremy Adelman for comments on an early draft of this piece, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their rich and thoughtful suggestions. She would also like to thank Dawn and The Times of India for permission to reproduce select images, as well as the families of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi for their permission to translate the poems included in this article.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1. See, for example, the Pakistan Army’s official history, published by the ISPR Directorate: Indo-Pakistan War 1965: A Flashback (Rawalpindi: ISPR Directorate, 1966). While the Indian government’s 1992 official history is more tempered, it has also pushed its own revisionist narrative of victory: Nitin Gokhale, 1965, Turning the Tide: How India Won the War (New Delhi: Centre for Land Warfare Studies, 2015). 2. During the British transfer of power in 1947, the Hindu monarch of Kashmir chose to accede to India in exchange for military assistance against tribal incursions from the Northwest. This led to war with Pakistan, the resolution of which divided the province into Indian and Pakistani territories. United Nations resolutions in 1948 and 1957 called for a plebiscite in Kashmir on the basis of self-determination, which never took place.3. Paul McGarr, The Cold War in South Asia: Britain, The United States and the Indian Subcontinent, 1945–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013): 319.4. The Rann of Kutch is a largely uninhabited salt desert between the Pakistani province of Sind and the Indian state of Gujarat, the boundary of which became a source of territorial dispute soon after independence.5. Particularly in Pakistan, see Gulzar Ahmed, Pak","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"13 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135221287","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy and Saintly Affects in Pakistan <b>Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy and Saintly Affects in Pakistan</b> , by Omar Kasmani, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2022, 224 pp., US$26.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-4780-1803-2.","authors":"Nada Raza","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2272420","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2272420","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"10 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135221293","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Friendly Nations and Open Borders: Gender, Caste and Sacredness at the India-Nepal Border","authors":"Bhoomika Joshi","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2263261","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2263261","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"62 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135872246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Museums and the Fashioning of National History in Postcolonial Pakistan","authors":"Mrinalini Venkateswaran","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2265202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2265202","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"85 ","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135872748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Ungrudging Indian: The Political Economy of Salt in India, <i>c.</i> 1878–1947","authors":"Miles Taylor","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2245235","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2245235","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the long background to Mohandas K. Gandhi’s choice of salt as a symbol of protest against British colonial rule. Arguably the largest of all the colonial monopolies in India, the salt tax had the smallest effect on the lives of Indians when compared with other forms of deprivation and inequality. How was the salt monopoly different from other kinds of extractive colonialism? Why did salt never become part of the lexicon of protest against British rule until 1930? The article discusses the operation of the salt monopoly, its impact on consumption and health, the criticism it provoked, and the growth of support in the 1920s for protection for the domestic salt industry.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136235819","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Setting India on the Wrong Path: Robert McCarrison’s Goitre Research, 1906–35","authors":"Ashok Malhotra","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2246284","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2246284","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines how Dr. Robert McCarrison’s goitre research in British India in the early twentieth century established his credentials as a medical researcher. It argues that the recognition that McCarrison achieved in this field had more to do with the fact that his research was conducted in a colonial non-Western locale. McCarrison resisted the Iodine Deficiency Disease explanation for goitre and critiqued successful public health initiatives conducted in the USA and Switzerland that involved distributing iodised salt or iodine supplements to populations to prevent goitre outbreaks. Thus, he created a path dependency in British India for himself and other British researchers, as well as his junior and affiliated Indian researchers, which impeded effective public health initiatives to prevent goitre outbreaks in India.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135690397","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Monopoly, Excise and the Salt Supply Conundrum in British India","authors":"Neeta Sanghi","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2247268","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2247268","url":null,"abstract":"This paper relies on hitherto unexplored archival sources to understand the origin of differentiated systems for collecting salt revenue in different regions of colonial India. It finds that the government’s salt policies, both reactive and proactive, established its control over salt sources and supply, which resulted in higher revenue, replaced indigenous salt with British salt in Bengal and stifled the salt industry in many regions. In the process, salt, an everyday condiment, was transformed into a source of revenue, then into a commodity and, finally, into a political tool in the hands of the government and Indians.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135690634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}