{"title":"Afghan Muslim Aunties and Their Queer Gifts","authors":"Ahmad Qais Munhazim","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2151784","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2151784","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Aunties in South Asia are known for their love, gossip and watchful eye. They are important actors in kinship circles, social fabrics and transgressive possibilities. As a murat/queer person, I always featured in aunties’ gossip and remained under their watchful eye whether I danced, flirted with their sons or crossed boundaries. In discussions of queerness, we oftentimes forget those Muslim Afghan aunties who risk their lives and become armour for queer and trans kids and adults. Through the autoethnography of three Muslim Afghan aunties who each bestowed upon me a gift—a doll, sex education and heels—I situate aunties as central to queer world-making and survival in times of war (and, more broadly, states of emergency and conflict), and I argue that war inadvertently gives aunties the agency to rebel against the heteronormative and masculinist culture of war and create queer worlds for their kinship circles and beyond.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"206 - 217"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45950333","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":"Introduction: Transnational Figurations of the South Asian Aunty","authors":"Kareem Khubchandani","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2164414","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2164414","url":null,"abstract":"In February 2016, Union Minister Smriti Irani delivered a torrential speech in India’s Lok Sabha, in which she refuted the need for an apology from her government for the death of Rohith Vemula (a Dalit student at Hyderabad University) or for the arrests and aggravation at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, where students had been arrested under specious accusations of sedition. Her melodramatic delivery and grand gestures recalled the theatricality of her soap operatic past as the protagonist of the hit series, ‘Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi’. The morning after this speech, The Telegraph newspaper printed coverage of Irani’s diatribe with an image of her staring widely at the reader; the headline read ‘Aunty National’. As wordplay on antinational, the moniker marked as harmful to the nation Irani’s alignment with Hindutva politics and her lack of culpability for the violence done to Dalit and Muslim students. This was a particularly pointed move as JNU students were simultaneously being accused of sedition, of being anti-national. The use of ‘aunty’ amplified disdain for Irani by tapping into the fatphobia, sexism and ageism that is often wielded against older South Asian women; it was meant to sting. One editorial criticising The Telegraph’s use of ‘aunty’ calls attention to the hypersexualisation of aunties—a large body of softand hard-core erotica circulates under the category of ‘Aunty Porn’. Despite the public contempt for The Telegraph’s punny headline, several months later, Irani herself signed off on a Facebook post with ‘Regards, Aunty National’, defanging the newspaper’s subversive moniker. The many uses and meanings of aunty in the Irani case stages how aunty becomes associated with negativity, sexuality and both subversive and suppressive politics. This special section of South Asia looks at the ubiquitous though undertheorised figure of the aunty not only as an object of study (an archetype, a relation, a role), but also a figuration (a representative form, an optic) that can provide alternative orientations for our field of study, certainly around questions of gender and sexuality, but also nationalism, kinship and disciplinary borders. Aunties appear constantly in South Asian public culture: Netflix’s Masaba Masaba features a song about her; listicles detail the characteristics of Tamil maamis;","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"71 - 94"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44833945","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":"Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh","authors":"Ritodhi Chakraborty","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2154020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2154020","url":null,"abstract":"Economics, where he completed a PhD in economic history, including entertaining portraits of former professors like Dharma Kumar and Sukhamoy Chakravarty alongside a description of institutional challenges. He also writes of his years studying, researching and teaching in France (where the discourse of solidarity butted heads with the reality of individualism), the USA (where the self-image of the country clashed with the Al Qaeda’s perception of it), and Portugal (where he fell in love with the language and culture). He is affectionate yet critical as he scatters parts of himself everywhere, and carries parts of these places with him. The arguments of connected history are more methodological than geographic, and ‘connection’ includes the importance of collaboration and affinity when producing work. Subrahmanyam has co-authored several books, including Textures of Time with V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman, and Writing the Mughal World with Muzaffar Alam. The individual does not operate alone, and ‘connectedness’ is perhaps ultimately an affective concept, a desire to bring discrete experiences into relation and give them narrative order, in both the personal and universal realms. This is the impulse of the historian as well as the novelist. The challenge is to retain loving attention to specificities without losing grasp of the bigger picture, neither getting bogged down in particularities nor succumbing to the ease of a catch-all narrative that ignores the exquisite detail.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"257 - 261"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"58928069","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":"Bad Brown Aunties, Fagony Aunts and Resistance Aunties: Centring Queer Desi Aunties in Diasporic Social Movement and Justice Work","authors":"M. Bhardwaj","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2143646","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2143646","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article offers an urgent complement to the trope of the South Asian aunty as an agent of discipline, shame, heteropatriarchy and tradition by exploring the counter-archetype of the resistance aunty—the radical feminist aunty who holds down social movements—in the South Asian diaspora. This article centres a queer lens on transgressive and activist aunties, and analyses digital and in-person queerings of the aunty in contemporary social and cultural movements. Examining resistance aunties in the writing, performances, interviews and other digital and in-person cultural work of four queer South Asians in the US and the UK, this article asserts the aunty as a core agent of resistance. It develops the notion of the resistance aunty in conversation with activist aunting in Black American organising and scholarship, and locates the legacy of the resistance aunty in queer and trans movements in the Global South and in the diaspora. By applying a new theoretics of resistance auntyhood to studies of aunty labour, this article argues for the importance of queer activist aunties in nurturing and propelling transformative social movements.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"113 - 134"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46946105","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":"Auntyness in a Beauty Parlour: Relaxation, Conversation, Labour and Care","authors":"Tarishi Verma","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2147662","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2147662","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Interactive service work in various middle- and upper-class settings has created visible disparities between those who seek the work and those who provide it. In addition to beauty work, beauty parlours require emotional/affective work, widening the class gap between sellers and consumers by requiring further labour on the part of the worker. However, within the smaller beauty parlours existing in the by-lanes of larger Indian markets, there is the possibility of creating shared space through conversations and care through a mobilisation of ‘auntyness’. In this paper, I explore how the conversations in a New Delhi beauty parlour lead to the creation of aunties that challenges the limits of interactive service work and enables temporary communities of kinship and care that hinge upon the participants’ performances of the styles, affects and values associated with aunties.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"170 - 186"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46090826","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":"Why Do Rich Sindhi Women Need a Kitty Group? Space, Sociality and Status Production among Upper-Class Housewives in Singapore","authors":"M. Kumar","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2152997","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2152997","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Since the 1970s, a network of Sindhi housewives in Singapore has met monthly to feast and socialise. At every meeting, each member pools in cash to form the ‘kitty’—the prized sum won by a lucky recipient of the draw. The size of the contribution is a measure of the group’s exclusivity. Indeed, these are affluent women who seem to have no apparent need for the money. Rather, they indulge in incessant bickering over car-pooling, consumption practices and about how to break down the lunch bill. Though members are regularly absent, exiting the group is a rarity. But why stay, and why have a kitty? This essay probes into the social value of the kitty group, identifying it as a critical space for the women’s independence beyond the household where they actively engage in status production. Their participation secures their identities as upper-class Sindhi women, as ‘housewives’ and as ‘aunties’.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"187 - 205"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41966080","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":"Mourning a Queer Aunty: Kinship, Creative Resilience and World-Making","authors":"Rohit K. Dasgupta","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2150446","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2150446","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Indian queer and trans activist Agniva passed away in 2016. This article draws on memoir, anecdote, research interviews and digital ethnography to explore the impact that Agniva had on a range of queer and trans people. The author details experiences he shared with Agniva and analyses virtual memorials and obituaries for her in order to account for the emotional labour that queer aunties do for their kin. This article thus explores the aunty-niece relationships that exist as a form of queer kinship, especially in the context of heteronormative homo/transphobic social systems and structures. It is also a narration of queer grief, exploring creative resistance and public mourning for a person who was variously a mother, a trans activist, a human rights warrior and a mashi (aunt) to the author.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"234 - 251"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42883194","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":"State Spectacles of Yoga: Invisible India and India Everywhere","authors":"Shameem Black","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2135847","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2135847","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay investigates competing visibilities within a cultural practice that India has promoted as a privileged image of national identity: yoga. These competing perceptions, in which yoga can be seen as at once iconically and yet not uniquely Indian, pose a challenge for the Indian state in its management of yoga’s symbolic value. Analysing rhetoric from India’s nation-branding pursuits in the context of Western popular culture, I argue that the state manipulates visual regimes of yoga in ways that turn this spectre of Indian invisibility into a testament to Indian ubiquity. Invisibility as a problem is thus transformed into invisibility as a privilege, revealing how the potential fluidity across two different regimes of identity and power can render state fantasies more resilient.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"1 - 17"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41338067","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":"Anti/Aunty as Critical Method: From Gendered Resistance to Soft Grace","authors":"Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2141449","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2141449","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article chronicles the author’s transformation from an anti-aunty Tamil South Asian socialisation to a more critical acceptance of aunty–ness as a queer ethnographer. Committing to reflexive ethnographic methods, I contemplate on the figure of the ‘invisible aunty’ as a way of disrupting the field while also being self-serving to one’s queer body and psyche. Particularly, in drawing from the nourishing strain of critical aunty dialogue, especially around discourse and subversion, I share how my own research and personal identities have coalesced, allowing for a radical reimagination of once-distant terms and concepts. This return to past discomfort and resistance with soft grace and new ability, I argue, is at the core of the critical aunty—or anti/aunty—method.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"135 - 151"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42976590","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}
I. Javed, M. Yasin, M. Hayat, M. Raza, Shahbaz Ahmad, D. Q. Gilani
{"title":"Determinants of Agricultural Credit Utilization among Small Farm Holders: An Evidence from Southern Punjab, Pakistan","authors":"I. Javed, M. Yasin, M. Hayat, M. Raza, Shahbaz Ahmad, D. Q. Gilani","doi":"10.33687/jsas.010.03.4431","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33687/jsas.010.03.4431","url":null,"abstract":"The agricultural credit has a significant impact on agricultural productivity. Credit constraints should be reasonably minimized so that small farmer can easily get loans. This study investigates the determinants of utilization of agricultural credit among small farm holders in southern Punjab, Pakistan. A total sample of 200 small farmers is selected for data collection. An appropriate pretested questionnaire was used for data collection. The data collection was done by tanking direct interviews by using a convenient sampling technique. District Multan was selected from the southern Punjab of Pakistan. A binary logit model was used to examine the effect of various factors on the adoption of agricultural credit utilization among small farm holders. The binary logit model's results showed that the variables of farmers' qualification, farming experience, family members, agricultural income, and tenant cum owner positively and significantly impact agricultural credit utilization. Agricultural land has a negative and significant influence on agricultural credit utilization. The study's results suggest that government should educate small farmers about the positive impact of credit utilization on their agricultural production.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88744698","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}