Henrike Donner

One’s Own Marriage: Love Marriages in a Calcutta Neighbourhood

a wide range of topics such as caste, kinship, class and gender relations.’ More recently, discourses on racial difference and construction of acceptable and unacceptable marriages have been scrutinised in the context of colonial and nationalist politics in India.’ The upper-caste Hindu model of arranged, life-long marriages and the structural implications of these mostly caste-endogamous matches has dominated representations of marriage in the subcontinent. Even where it is acknowledged that marriage practices are subject to historical change, either through the impact of colonial law or the complex effects of urbanisation and new socioeconomic conditions, alternatives to arranged marriages are rarely discussed. The rising number of so-called ’love marriages’ and the related reformulation of con-

Ethnographies of activism: a critical introduction

Ethnography is like much else in the social sciences ... It is a multi-dimensional exercise, a coproduction of social fact and sociological imagining, a delicate engagement of the inductive with the deductive, of the real with the virtual, of the already-known with the surprising, of verbs with nouns, processes with products, of the phenomenological with the political. (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2003: 172)

New vegetarianism: food, gender and neo-liberal regimes in Bengali middle-class families

Introduction In the 1990s, as the lifestyle of the Indian middle classes underwent dramatic change, an emerging consumerist orientation challenged many of the certainties embedded in everyday practices. Amongst the arenas where these changes were played out, food consumption and the availability of new foods across India’s metropolitan areas were particularly prominent, but have been notably absent in the analysis of these new lifestyles. That changing food habits signify wider social transformations in the aftermath of neo-liberal reform has been documented in some detail in the case of other regions, e.g. China, but in spite of a rich literature on traditional understandings of food and food practices in South Asia there has been little interest in the way such important everyday activities as eating at home or in public, snacking and feasting have been transformed in contemporary India. Furthermore, where consumption has been identified as a hallmark of new middle-class lifestyles it has been largely viewed in terms of the ‘public modernity’ paradigm. Thus the focus of social scientists has been on the public sphere, i.e. the emerging youth

Doing it our way: Love and marriage in Kolkata middle-class Families

With the exception of a few anthropologists working on gender, much of the recent literature on emerging intimate modernities in South Asia, and the middle class in India in particular, seems to support a view of social relationships evolving in a kind of linear development towards free choice, individualism, and identities based on sexual preference. This imagery is particularly prominent in the representation and self-representation of metropolitan, educated middle-class youths, whose views dominate popular media representations and are associated with secularism, individualism, and independence from family and community. In this article I argue that apart from the ostensibly overwhelming transformations that discourses on coupledom, love, choice and self-realization bring in their wake, new ways of choosing a spouse and of conducting conjugal relations among middle-class urbanites have to be interpreted in relation to much more subtle and long-standing social transformations as well as existing institutional forms, in particular the practical implications of patrilocality and the ideology and reality of the joint family. Based on fieldwork with Bengali-speaking middle-class families in Kolkata spanning two decades, the article charts continuities and subtle shifts in the way ‘love’ and ‘marriage’ are related in conversations, and how young women and their parents negotiate marriage in the context of middle-class consumerism, status competition, and uncertainty.

Locating Activist Spaces: The Neighbourhood as a Source and Site of Urban Activism in 1970s Calcutta

This article analyses the meaning of urban neighbourhoods for the emergence of Maoist activism in 1970s Calcutta. Through ethnography the article highlights the way recruitment, strategies and the legacy of the movement were located in the experience and politics of the urban neighbourhood. As a social formation, the neighbourhood shaped the relationships that made Maoist subjectivities feasible and provided the space for coalitions and cooperation across a wider spectrum than the label of a student movement acknowledges. The neighbourhood appears here as an emergent site for Maoist epistemologies, which depended on this space and its everyday practices, intimate social relations as well as the experience of the local state in the locality.

Revisiting urban property in India

Over the last three decades, processes of economic transformation and market liberalization have had far-reaching consequences for property regimes across the world.1 These transformations are felt particularly strongly in urban areas, where land and housing have been turned into real estate. Discourses on private property are also part of emerging subjectivities and urban policies,2 which are redefining citizenship in terms of property ownership. In many contexts, including urban India, property has enhanced both monetary gains and social status for those individuals and communities benefiting from post-liberalization ownership regimes. Thus, what Shatkin argued for Southeast Asia in the late 1980s holds true in India today, that ‘real estate development and speculation in real estate products have become a major means for wealth accumulation by propertied people in many cities’ (2010, p. 272). While wealth accumulation per se is neither new nor necessarily problematic, the accumulation of capital through real estate enabled by liberalization policies has certainly not benefitted all social groups in equal measure. Even though marginalized groups are equally exposed to glowing media representations of urban renewal and homeownership, many continue to be subjected to evictions and exclusions, struggle to claim basic rights as citizens and can only dream of participating in the emerging consumer culture (Baviskar, 2010; Dey, Samaddar & Sen, 2013; Rao, 2010). Transformations of urban areas under regimes of millennial capitalism have renewed scholarly interest in questions of urban politics, urbane culture and urban power dynamics in the post-liberalization era (Shatkin, 2010; 2014). Many transformations affect the appropriation of land beyond the city, as the burgeoning literature on land grabbing and the commodification of agricultural land across and beyond the subcontinent shows (Adnan, 2013; Feldman & Geisler, 2012; Levien, 2011). However, a key question about urban property markets concerns the role Journal of South Asian Development 10(3) 255–266

Conclusion: Fragile Facts On Scholarship and Activism

... no factual statement can ever be beyond doubt ... It is this fragility that makes deception so very easy ... and so tempting. It never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could indeed have been as the liar maintains they were. Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear.

Domesticating Markets: Early Years Education and Middle-Class Parenting in India

Over the last two decades, much has been written about India’s new middle classes and their lifestyles, but little attention has been paid to the way liberalisation policies and the attending neoliberal ideology is transforming the family. In this chapter I will discuss some of the changes pertaining to the way children are brought up in this social strata based on two decades of fieldwork in Calcutta/Kolkata, India.

‘Daughters are Just Like Sons Now’ Negotiating Kin-work and Property Regimes in Kolkata Middle-class Families

This article draws on two decades of fieldwork with middle-class families in Kolkata, India. It addresses property regimes with reference to inter-generational and gender relations, which leave women in an ambiguous situation with regard to ownership rights. Focusing on genealogies of different middle-class homes, the article examines how women’s rights in housing continue to be mediated through the joint family ideal and patrilocality. Whilst new influence the middle-class imagination, talk about ‘homeownership’ does not necessarily reflect the realities of middle-class family life. Paying particular attention to the role of women at different lifestages, I argue that the current re-imagining of middle-class femininity through ‘modern homes’ remains deeply embedded in earlier discourses of the ideal family, the related residential patterns and modes of property transmission as well as domesticities. This draws attention to the way women can gain as demographic change favours single daughters as heirs to homeowners. Focusing on the family and women’s roles within it allows us to study how real estate markets are experienced from the bottom up and provides genealogical depth to an understanding of different forms of ‘modern’ middle-class homes in the city.

Book Reviews : Parimal Ghosh, Colonialism, Class and a History of the Calcutta Jute Millhands: 1880-1930, Hyderabad, 2000, pp. viii +281

control exercised through laws governing housing, hours of work, age and sex of workers to the history of colonial formations in the countryside. Through an analysis of the ’landlord-state-millowner nexus’, he explores the particular form colonialism took and the impact it had on the formation of the working class. Consequently he embarks in his first chapter on a journey to the interior, namely the peasant ’self of the jute mill hand’, and the systematic exploitation and impoverishment that turned indebted peasants into ‘millhands’. The links between the rural origins of the Bengal jute mill-worker, which are mostly presented as signifiers of the ’primordial ties’ that prevent workers’ organisation on the basis of class,