Ira Raja

The cultural politics of shit: class, gender and public space in India

In this article we seek to interrogate the cultural, political and economic conditions that generate the crisis of sanitation in India, with its severe implications for the poor and the marginalized. The key question we ask is how to interpret and explain the spectre of ‘open defecation’ in Indias countryside and its booming urban centres. The discussion is divided into three parts. Part one examines the cultural interpretation of ‘shitting’ as symbolic action underpinned by ideas of purity, pollution and ‘the body politic’. Part two takes the political economic approach to gain further insights into contemporary discourse, performance and cultural politics surrounding toilets and open defecation in India. Part three examines civil society activities, state campaigns and media accounts of open defecation to explore the disruptive potency of everyday toilet activities, and how these interplay with issues of class, caste, and gender. Drawing on interviews and a review of ethnographic work, we seek to interrogate the idiom of modern sanitation, with its emphasis on cleanliness, progress and dreams of technology, as a constitutive idea and an explanatory force in Indian modernity.

Ageing Subjects, Agentic Bodies: Appetite, Modernity and the Middle Class in Two Indian Short Stories in English

Hindu literature and ideals, especially the model of life stages or ashramadharma, recommend renunciation of worldly pursuits in old age. According to Manu Smriti,1 when the householder, or the mature, economically active adult male on whom all others in society depend for sustenance, “sees his skin wrinkled and his hair white and the sons of his sons”, he should turn over the management of household affairs to his heir and retreat to a forest where, in order to disentangle himself from physical and emotional bonds of interdependence developed during the previous life stages, he will devote himself to contemplation, the performance of sacred rites and bodily self-mortification. If he succeeds in this, he is ready to enter the last stage, which involves the complete renunciation of the material world and its pleasures and ties. This is the manner in which ideally he should end his days, fully absorbed in the quest for spiritual perfection.2 Although Hindus in contemporary India may not subscribe to the idealized, four-stage life cycle in literal detail, they are nonetheless guided by the belief that life is made up of distinct developmental stages, each with its own normative code of conduct. Irrespective of the degree of direct familiarity with the classical texts, the idea that it is appropriate for old people to withdraw from active economic, productive or managerial involvement with household affairs and to renounce sensual in favour of Ageing Subjects, Agentic Bodies

Subtle Technology: The Design Innovation of Indian Artisanship

Craft culture is human culture. The impulse to shape by hand objects of everyday needs and rituals, or those things whose role it is simply to delight us, is an innately human quality, and one that may be traced to human prehistory. If we accept that crafting objects by hand is one of the defining traits of being human, then our present state of culture—in which craft has disappeared in the “overdeveloped” world and is rapidly disappearing in the developing world—should cause us to pause and think about what it is that has been lost or is about to disappear. Craft in the industrialized nations is defined by preciousness, and an extraordinary value is attributed to the handmade as an exotic species. In the developing world, it is either considered to be lowly hand-work, or a resurrected practice for the poor to gain access to valuable foreign exchange. Caught between a rock and a hard place, we in the West fetishize the object, while in the developing world we romanticize the humble craftsman and his poor condition. But neither of these approaches really looks past the artifact (as either fetish or commodity) to the role of craft as a catalyst for spurring thought and innovation in society. We may lament the loss of the beautiful objects we now view in museums, but what if the ultimate value of craft lies not in the artifact but rather in the process by which it comes to be? Looking closely at craft-driven cultures still alive in the world can provide remarkable insights into contemporary problem-solving. For models of sustainability and economy, nothing could improve on the working methods of the craftsman, sourcing his materials locally, wasting nothing, delivering custom goods made to order—again, locally. Innovation and adaptability are the two skills most required of a craftsman to sustain his livelihood, and so we see simple and useful innovations introduced to age-old functions as society’s needs and its materials change. Tools are simple and multi-functional. Knowledge transfer is direct, from generation to generation. But most importantly, the process of shaping materials into objects, of meeting functional needs, and of fulfilling simultaneous longings for beauty and creativity involves an expression of fundamental human agency that is manifested not only as an artifact or a commercial object but equally as stimulus to innovation. This paper pursues the idea of craft as stimulus. It does this through an exploration of the element of design thinking in everyday craft practice in India.

Signifying the Nation: Identity, Authenticity and the Ageing Body in the Post-Independence Hindi Short Story

It is now a commonplace of postcolonial theory that the nation is always embodied and that the idealized body within any nationalistic discourse is always gendered. The trope of gendering the nation, which entails a denial of subjectivity and agency to the woman except insofar as she upholds the idea of nation, has been the subject of numerous critiques in the past two decades.1 Historians of colonial India in particular have devoted a great deal of attention to ways in which the colonized nation has been allegorized as the female figure.2 The main intellectual inheritance of the last two decades which has paved the way for such critiques has been the challenge to the essential categories of identity formation, most notably gender, but also race, class, ethnicity and sexuality. Under the sign of postmodernism and through a discourse of hybridity, these categories have been disrupted within critiques of various forms of social and political organization, such as the nation and the family. There is, however, another essential category which is as complex, fragmented, dispersed, multiple, contested and conflictual as any of the above, and which is, moreover, as important to the formation of the nation and the family, but which has not been subjected to the same scrutiny: the category of age. Using Partha Chatterjee’s division between the inner and the outer spheres as a paradigm for the way in which the nation is imagined within the nationalist discourse, I argue that in post-Independence India the middle-class woman as the representative of the inner sphere becomes Signifying the Nation

Can the subaltern eat?: modernity, masculinity and consumption in the Indian family

This article looks at three post-Independence Indian short stories to do with masculine guilt about eating. Looking to alleviate the boredom of their clerical existence, the male protagonists in this fiction seek refuge in a fantasy of consumption focused on foods such as milk, ‘chicken fry’ and sweets. Right when their desires look to be met, however, a clamour of alternative claims on the food compels them to forego fulfilment. What does this narrative pattern say about the postcolonial experience of modernity for lower-middle-class men? Does the inability to consume signify their inability to be subjects in their own right? Or can we see the stories as offering an alternative model of agency located in self-denial? This article examines the complex relationship between masculinity, modernity and consumption to argue for the significance of a provincial masculinity as a subaltern position.

Contractarianism and the Ethic of Care in Indian Fiction

Through close readings of recent fiction from English, Hindi and Kannada sources, this paper analyses the feminist ethic of care with reference to adult daughters caring for their critically-ill or dying mothers. The discussion focuses on problems associated with the care ethic and examines some of its assumptions, particularly its inability to account for the emotional complexity of adult caregiving relationships, which can make the invocation of relationality difficult; its focus on responsiveness to needs, such as those of helpless infants, which prevents adequate engagement with ideas of reciprocity; and, finally, its extraction of the caregiving relationship from the network of social and familial relationships in which it is embedded. Alongside my critique of the ethic of care, I will also examine the extent to which mainstream moral concepts, such as rights and contracts, may continue to be relevant to the dynamics of intergenerational relations in old age.

Media and mediated popular cultures in India

We live in worlds of signs and wonders. Nowhere is this more evident than in the contemporary mega-cities of India. For over a century now, urban sociologists, flaneurs, ethnographers, psycho-geographers, and semioticians have been pointing to the power of the visual media and publicity of the city street – not just the street lights, signboards, posters, and graffiti, but the very design of the motor car and the tram, of shopfronts and sidewalks. The new century has brought a whole host of new technological artefacts within hand’s reach of all but the poorest denizens of the city street – the cell phone, the iPad, and attendant applications that help us navigate the city and connect and network cyber and physical spaces. These technologies are creating new cultures, material and aesthetic, cyber and physical space-making of new kinds that do not simply alter older traditions but transmogrify them into new shapes and flows. Older forms of social theorization of structure-agency, objectivity-subjectivity, human being and technological artifice are in turn being rethought afresh in new material contexts, even as we have yet to absorb what the dominant media technologies of the past century – the book, the photograph, the neon sign, television and cinema – mean for understanding human society. In recent issues, Thesis Eleven has been exploring these themes of the ways our new, globalized technological social worlds are mediating our social worlds and annihilating time. Peter Murphy and others explored a post-discursive social theory of knowledge in Issue 89: ‘Medium Theory and Social Knowledge’ (2007). As Murphy himself states: ‘The key insight of medium theory is that linguistic acts (signs, symbols, codes, grammars, justifications, writings, and so on) are only a tiny aspect of the way in which

The unruly city Signs, streets, and democratic spaces

Many questions concerning the future of the urban Indian landscape have at their core the conflict of a modernist design aesthetic, which privileges uniformity and predictability, with what many consider to be the unsightly presence of a chaotic local aesthetic. The hand-painted signboard, a hallmark of Indian urban experience, is largely disdained by modernist planners, who became especially vocal in the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games in 2010, when the goal of transforming Delhi into a ‘world class city’ envisioned, among other measures, a reining in of the city’s frenetic signboard culture. This paper examines the ingenuity of the hand-painted signboard which employs complex visual strategies such as three-dimensional depth cues, typographic innovation and visual metaphor, while assessing the unique ways in which hand-painted signage shapes the experience of public space in an urban environment. Against ideas of uniformity and order which underpin liberal modernist visions of the city both in relation to its visual cultures and the use of public spaces, this paper proposes what we call an ‘aesthetic of accommodation’: the visual and the social order here become sites for the expression of an ‘adjustment’ ethic visible in the hybrid art practice of hand-painted signboards and the multiple rather than single usage of public spaces evident in the manner in which signboards spill onto sidewalks and sidewalks onto streets.