Politics of the Poor: Negotiating Democracy in Contemporary India by Indrajit Roy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, New York, US, Melbourne, Australia; New Delhi and Singapore: 2018; pp xxi + 521, price not indicated.
Shrines of Sufi saints in Kashmir are an important public space in the larger vacuum of spatial avenues for Kashmiri women. Shrines provide demarcated spaces and roles for women in its property and rituals, and facilitate religious education, socialisation, as well as political mobilisation. Despite being steeped in piety and devotion, mystic legacies and practices still pose as a relatively liberal alternative to the male-dominated public sphere in the valley. Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper seeks to unpack the gender politics in a religious public space and its ramifications for our larger understanding of the public sphere itself.
Public culture is a mental and physical space where basic ideas of the self and world view get crystallised. It is the main space to form varied communicative lines. These communicative lines discipline person’s behaviour. Since the Dalit’s ideas about self and consciousness were largely shaped by their everyday experience, Ambedkar thoughtfully evolved the Dalit’s public culture towards conscientising mental and physical space. A number of nodal points in varied communicative lines were generated to cultivate the autonomous Dalit assertive self and emancipatory world view. It produced an atmosphere where social discursive engagements were developed along with Ambedkarite praxis. As Mumbai happens to be the place where Ambedkar conceived, started and developed the key emancipatory movements, the city turned out to be a precursor for the “Ambedkarite public culture.”
How do we as a society view the act of breastfeeding? It is essential to provide necessary infrastructure which are private, safe and clean, for mothers to breastfeed their infants in public buildings.
The pointed finger of Ambedkar statues symbolically conveys the meaning of lecturing, or teaching the nation about democracy and fraternity. The politics of proliferating Dalit iconography is one of seeking visibility and asserting one’s right to access public spaces. However, clashes routinely erupt over such iconography given the upper castes’ fear of their threatened hegemony.
