Articles by Meena Radhakrishna

The Indian state's policy regarding primitive tribal groups amounts to a "first wreck and then rescue" programme.

A section of the denotified, nomadic community of banjaras converted to Sikhism long ago, and has been settled in Delhi for over half a century. While tracing the recent history of this beleaguered community, this paper argues that escalating land prices were a major reason behind the massacres of Sikhs in 1984 in the resettlement colonies of Delhi. Communities such as the banjaras continue to be at the bottom of all social hierarchies in urban spaces. Their futile search for legitimate and dignified citizenship rights may lead to invention of new dangerous identities.

Ravinder Kumar will be remembered for many things, some at the personal level by his friends, others at the institutional level by a much wider circle. Perhaps his biggest contribution will be, however, in having demonstrated that liberalism can create a space for itself in Indian institutional and academic life.

Accounts in nationalist literature of the militant struggles of women tobacco workers in Guntur in 1938 led the writer to enquire into the social origins of these women. The trail led to a dramatic story of pre-colonial trade patterns, of a tribal community engaged in long-distance transport, of the destruction of this means of livelihood' by economic changes consequent upon the establishment of British rule, of the stigmatisation of the group as a criminal tribe, of the confinement of families in a penal settlement, of the recruitment of the women for work in a tobacco factory, of their organisation in a trade union under communist auspices and of the final success of the employer in splitting the men from the women on a hierarchical basis.