Everyday Life in South Asia, Second Edition , livre ebook

Everyday Life in South Asia
Everyday Life in South Asia
SECOND EDITION

EDITED BY
Diane P. Mines and Sarah Lamb
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS BLOOMINGTON INDIANAPOLIS
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Everyday life in South Asia / edited by Diane P. Mines and Sarah Lamb. - 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35473-0 (cl : alk. paper) -
ISBN 978-0-253-22194-0 (pb : alk. paper)
1. South Asia-Social life and customs. I. Mines, Diane P., [date]
II. Lamb, Sarah, [date]
DS339.E94 2010
306.0954-dc22
2009054114
1 2 3 4 5 15 14 13 12 11 10
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
MAP
Introduction
Part One The Family and the Life Course
Introduction
1 One Straw from a Broom Cannot Sweep: The Ideology and Practice of the Joint Family in Rural North India
Susan S. Wadley
2 Allah Gives Both Boys and Girls
Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery
3 Out Here in Kathmandu : Youth and the Contradictions of Modernity in Urban Nepal
Mark Liechty
4 Rethinking Courtship, Marriage, and Divorce in an Indian Call Center
Cari Costanzo Kapur
5 Love and Aging in Bengali Families
Sarah Lamb
Part Two Genders
Introduction
6 New Light in the House: Schooling Girls in Rural North India
Ann Grodzins Gold
7 Roadwork: Offstage with Special Drama Actresses in Tamil Nadu, South India
Susan Seizer
8 Breadwinners No More: Identities in Flux
Michele Ruth Gamburd
9 Life on the Margins: A Hijra s Story
Serena Nanda
10 Crossing Lines of Difference: Transnational Movements and Sexual Subjectivities in Hyderabad, India
Gayatri Reddy
Part Three Caste, Class, and Community
Introduction
11 Seven Prevalent Misconceptions about India s Caste System
12 God-Chariots in a Garden of Castes: Hierarchy and Festival in a Hindu City
Steven M. Parish
13 High and Low Castes in Karani
Viramma, with Josiane Racine and Jean-Luc Racine
14 Weakness, Worry Illness, and Poverty in the Slums of Dhaka
Sabina Faiz Rashid
15 Anjali s Alliance: Class Mobility in Urban India
Sara Dickey
16 Recasting the Secular: Religion and Education in Kerala, India
Ritty Lukose
Part Four Practicing Religion
Introduction
17 The Hindu Gods in a South Indian Village
Diane P. Mines
18 The Feast of Love
McKim Marriott
19 The Delusion of Gender and Renunciation in Buddhist Kashmir
Kim Gutschow
20 Muslim Village Intellectuals: The Life of the Mind in Northern Pakistan
Magnus Marsden
21 In Friendship: A Father, a Daughter, and a Jinn
Naveeda Khan
22 Vernacular Islam at a Healing Crossroads in Hyderabad
Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger
Part Five Nation-Making
Introduction
23 Voices from the Partition
Urvashi Butalia
24 A Day in the Life
Laura Ring
25 Living and Dying for Mother India: Hindu Nationalist Female Renouncers and Sacred Duty
Kalyani Devaki Menon
26 Political Praise in Tamil Newspapers: The Poetry and Iconography of Democratic Power
Bernard Bate
27 Mala s Dream: Economic Policies, National Debates, and Sri Lankan Garment Workers
Caitrin Lynch
28 Interviews with High School Students in Eastern Sri Lanka
Margaret Trawick
Part Six Globalization, Public Culture, and the South Asian Diaspora
Introduction
29 Cinema in the Countryside: Popular Tamil Film and the Remaking of Rural Life
Anand Pandian
30 Dangerous Desires: Erotics, Public Culture, and Identity in Late-Twentieth-Century India
Purnima Mankekar
31 A Diaspora Ramayana in Southall
Paula Richman
32 British Sikh Lives, Lived in Translation
Kathleen Hall
33 Examining the Global Indian Middle Class: Gender and Culture in the Silicon Valley/Bangalore Circuit
Smitha Radhakrishnan
34 Placing Lives through Stories: Second-Generation South Asian Americans
Kirin Narayan
35 Unexpected Destinations
E. Valentine Daniel
LIST Of REFERENCES
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank each of our contributors-from both the first and the second editions-not only for their rich essays, but also for their invaluable suggestions and advice as the volume unfolded. We would also like to thank our students who, using this reader, educated us about how best to present readings to interested but novice students of South Asia. Gloria Raheja offered specific feedback about the first edition that helped us think about how to rethink some important issues for the second edition. Priyanka Nandy, Ph.D. student in anthropology at Brandeis University, provided very welcome administrative assistance. We thank with great warmth and appreciation our editor at Indiana University Press, Rebecca Tolen, for her patience and encouragement. It was she who instigated this project, encouraged us to put together this new edition, and provided good critical feedback on the contents while also giving us a free hand to develop the reader as we pleased. Any errors or omissions are our own and no one else s. We would also like to thank Laura MacLeod, Miki Bird, Nancy Lightfoot, Peter Froehlich, and Dan Pyle of Indiana University Press and freelance copy editor Carol Kennedy for their support and editorial wisdom.
Members of our families contributed to this volume in various ways. Rick Rapfogel, Diane s husband, provided critical assistance with technical and photographic aspects of the book, and gave not only his time but also emotional support to the project. He and daughter Lucy spent a lot of solo time so Diane could hide away in the office to complete the work. Lucy let Diane have this time with only a few sad faces at bedtime. Ed, Rachel, and Lauren were wonderfully generous in their lasting willingness to grant Sarah precious time to write and work while still always welcoming her home.
Boone, North Carolina
D.P.M.
Waltham, Massachusetts
S.L.
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
South Asians speak well over twenty major languages and even more minor languages and dialects. In transliterating terms from this rich diversity of languages, we have for the most part used accepted conventions. We have allowed for some variation, however, to reflect distinctive local pronunciations and to accommodate contributors preferences. In most cases, terms appear in italics-with or without diacritics-only on the first usage in a chapter. Proper nouns-names of places, people, deities, and texts-have been left without diacritics. Some authors prefer to use diacritical marks in their translations to enhance accuracy. Others prefer not to use them at all, but rather use English spellings that closely approximate the term s pronunciation. South Asian terms are pluralized here in the English manner, by adding an s. The names of some major Indian cities have been changed to spellings that more accurately reflect indigenous names and/or pronunciations that preceded British Anglicization of those same names. Thus Mumbai replaces Bombay; Chennai replaces Madras; Varanasi replaces Benares; and Kolkata replaces Calcutta.
Everyday Life in South Asia

INTRODUCTION

Everyday Life in South Asia centers on the daily lives and experiences of people living in South Asia. Inspired by the focus on practice and everyday life in the work of social theorists, 1 we maintain that one can learn much about social-cultural worlds by examining the daily acts performed by ordinary people as they go through their lives. The book explores the ways people live, make, and experience their worlds through practices such as growing up and aging, arranging marriages, exploring sexuality, going to school, negotiating caste distinctions, practicing religion, participating in democracy, watching television, enduring violence as nations are built, and moving abroad for work. By focusing on the everyday life practices and experiences of particular people, the book conveys important dimensions of social-cultural life in South Asia that could not be imparted solely via abstract theoretical accounts or generalities.
South Asia has witnessed a great deal of social change over recent years, and this new, second edition of Everyday Life in South Asia highlights these changes. To design the first edition (2002), we approached leading scholars of South Asian studies (from the United States, Great Britain, and South Asia) to ask them what they would like, and find important, to contribute to a book on everyday life in South Asia. For this new, second edition, we kept many of those first papers-inviting the authors to update them when relevant-and solicited new ones from scholars whose work focuses on the kinds of critical contemporary issues that have impacted the region and grabbed the media over recent years, and attracted scholars attention in new ways. These new essays, and the volume s new section introductions, explore topics such as the participation of young, middle-class workers in the flourishing call center industry; the impact on local gender systems of the massive out-migration of Sri Lankan housemaids to the oil-producing nations of the Middle East; the force and flavor of new Hindu natio