Economic and Political Weekly

Deepening Challenge in Climate Change

Vol - XLIX No. 17, April 26, 2014

Editorials

There is no more denying the fact of global warming; can India respond with appropriate policies?

Caste Publications

The Space for Upper Caste Subculture Politics

Vol - XLIX No. 17, April 26, 2014 | Sumit Chaturvedi

Insight

Modern political culture has given viable incentive for various castes to develop their respective subcultures to consolidate their power in a competitive social world. Print media becomes the basis of these subcultures as it provides a viable option both for the consolidation of a shared identity as well as its communication. This article tries to illustrate the role played by print culture in materialising upper caste subcultures and their respective organisational politics through an empirical study of various registered upper caste publications in Uttar Pradesh.

Commentary Rashomon Revisited Contending Narratives on a Gang Rape in West Bengal Uday Chandra The precise truth of what actually happened in the case of the recent gang rape of a Santal woman in Suri town in the district of Birbhum, West Bengal is obscured by the overlapping, self-interested narratives of different actors, like in Akira... Read more	Special Articles The 'Employing Workers Index' A Critique and Review Sukti Dasgupta This article reviews a prominent index in ongoing debates concerning labour regulations, the World Bank's Employing Workers Index. Drawing on research and studies on the EWI and its economic impact, it addresses three interrelated issues.... Read more
Editorials No Going Back The Supreme Court's rulings on sexual minorities have had a churning effect. Read more	Editorials Manifestos and Messiahs Elections are increasingly becoming contests over personalities and not of policies. Read more
Election Specials / Web Exclusives Maharashtra 2014 - A Two-and-a-Half Horse Race Abhay Datar The Raj Thackeray-led Maharashtra Navanirman Sena is once again set to determine the electoral outcome in the Lok Sabha elections this year in Maharashtra. The Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party alliance should be concerned, as the MNS polarised... Read more	Election Specials / Web Exclusives Status of Opinion Polls Media Gimmick and Political Communication in India Praveen Rai Election surveys are seen as covert instruments used by political parties for making seat predictions and influencing the electorate in India. It is high time opinion polls take cognizance of the situation to establish their credibility and... Read more
Commentary Nuclear Power in the Context of Global Warming Shankar Sharma Four American scientists have proposed giving nuclear power a chance to reduce fossil fuel pollution and mitigate global warming. But from all we know so far, it could be futile to address global warming by replacing one polluting electricity-... Read more	Review of Women's Studies / Review Issues Gender in Contemporary Kerala J Devika Read more
Review of Women's Studies / Review Issues Becoming Society An Interview with Seleena Prakkanam J Devika In this interview, central secretariat member of the Dalit Human Rights Movement, Seleena Prakkanam talks about struggles and leadership and caste issues. Read more	Review of Women's Studies / Review Issues Struggling against Gendered Precarity in Kathikudam, Kerala Parvathy Binoy Drawing on the struggles of the Nitta Gelatin India Limited Action Council at Kathikudam in Kerala, this article critically expands on Guy Standing's notion of the global precariat. Using feminist work on the politics of waste, it argues that... Read more
Review of Women's Studies / Review Issues Attukal Pongala: Youth Clubs, Neighbourhood Groups and Masculine Performance of Religiosity Darshana Sreedhar This article unravels the complex narratives which might counter the popular perception of the pongala festival as an "all-women space". The all-male groupings that have sprung up in and around the Attukal Bhagavathy temple during the... Read more	Review of Women's Studies / Review Issues You Are Woman Arguments with Normative Femininities in Recent Malayalam Cinema Aneeta Rajendran Malayalam cinema's constructs of femininity offer interesting insights into economies of gender in contemporary Kerala. Female self-fashioning in films has overwhelmingly centred around valorising a normative femininity, defined here as a... Read more
Review of Women's Studies / Review Issues Shifting Paradigms Gender and Sexuality Debates in Kerala Muraleedharan Tharayil This article attempts to conceive of a contemporary history of gender and sexuality in Kerala. As erotic intimacies remain a slippery terrain for historical explorations, the focus is on the paradigm shifts that distinguish its recent history in... Read more	Review of Women's Studies / Review Issues Child Marriage in Late Travancore Religion, Modernity and Change Anna Lindberg An examination of the child marriage system in Travancore - a princely state in Kerala before Independence - in the 1930s and 1940s finds that advocacy of child marriage has not been limited to communities considered traditional. There were... Read more
Review of Women's Studies / Review Issues Home-Based Work and Issues of Gender and Space Neethi P This article studies the experiences of a group of women workers involved in home-based work for a food processing unit in Kerala, where membership to Kudumbashree, the state-centric civil society organisation, is necessary for participation. The... Read more	Special Articles All Dressed Up with Nowhere to Go Transitions to (Un)Employment for Lower Middle Class Young Men Andrew Deuchar This article draws upon the theoretical framework of Pierre Bourdieu to examine the capacity of lower-middle-class young men in Dehradun to gain employment. Despite having tertiary-level education, their search for employment is an extended one,... Read more
Special Articles Two Conceptions of Morality A Political Reading Gopal Guru Deepening democracy is premised on the moral capacity to, first, overcome illegitimate prejudice with the force of reason, and second, to genuinely follow the principle of radical rotation of political ositions. Failureto follow such a principle... Read more	Commentary Lockout at Toyota-Kirloskar The Future Space for Labour Sobin George The lockout at Toyota-Kirloskar Motors in Karnataka was a strategy by the management to silence the workers who put forth their demands and raised fears about their job security. Such actions challenge the ability of unions to negotiate workers... Read more
Commentary The Politics behind Jharkhand's Domicile Policy Anant Kumar The cynical manipulation of the state's people by Jharkhand's political class on the domicile policy issue is leading to resentment and distrust, especially between the tribals and non-tribals. These leaders are raking up the "... Read more	Commentary Employment Trends among Religious Communities of India Sunita Sanghi, A Srija Looking at the National Sample Survey Office data on employment and unemployment by major religious groups, this article finds that the Muslim community remains worse-off compared to all other religious groups on almost all indicators. It is... Read more
Commentary West Bengal's Election Story The Caste Question Praskanva Sinharay The new politics of caste in West Bengal has the potential to dislodge the traditional bipolar political discourse in the state. While bhadralok politics is still dominant, the question of caste is growing in importance; whether it finally comes... Read more	Commentary An Analysis of the Poll Scene in Tamil Nadu V Krishna Ananth The 2014 elections in Tamil Nadu are a point of no return for the Congress much like the 1967 general elections. But the consolidation of the Other Backward Classes that led to the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam's emergence is now over and... Read more
Notes One-Dimensional Cinema India’s New Imaginary Spaces Sarunas Paunksnis This article addresses the transformation of dissent in Indian cinema over the past decade. In analysing two films by Vishal Bhardwaj and Dibakar Banerjee, the author argues that the incorporation of critical ideas on society and politics into... Read more	Economic Notes Reverberations of the US Fed's Taper o n Currency and Stock Markets Bipin K Deokar, Anita B Shetty The US Federal Reserve's March 2014 decision to continue with tapering off of its asset purchases indicates that this may continue until the end of 2015. The effects of the gradual winding down of the quantitative easing programme in the... Read more
Book Reviews 'Sindhiness beyond Sindh' Experiencing Borders in Banni, Kutch Aparna Kapadia Memories and Movements: Borders and Communities in Banni, Kutch, Gujarat by Rita Kothari (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan), 2013; pp 200, Rs 745. Read more	Book Reviews The Politics of Dispossession Shelley Walia Dispossession: The Performative in the Political by Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou (Cambridge: Polity Press), 2013; pp 240, Rs 1,229. Read more

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Vol - XLIX No. 17
April 26, 2014

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POSTSCRIPT

Postscript is a back-of-the-book section on the arts, culture and society that will be a compendium of short pieces of reportage, commentary, criticism, travel writing, cartoons, satire and more.

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Review of Rural Affairs: June 29, 2013
With Indian agriculture growing slowly, employment in agriculture too has been increasing at a low rate. Urban employment has not expanded rapidly enough to provide work for the growing rural population. So, is the rise in non-agricultural employment in recent years driven more by distress than demand? Three articles in this edition of the Review of Rural Affairs look at aspects of this issue.
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Swadeshi in the Time of Nations
A set of five articles revisit themes from Sumit Sarkar’s book, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal and find resonances across time and space for both the themes the book raised as well as for the politics and ideologies of the movement it studied.

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