Laurent Gayer

‘PRINCESSES’ AMONG THE ‘LIONS’: THE MILITANT CAREERS OF SIKH FEMALE FIGHTERS

Most Sikh militants who picked up the gun against the Indian state in the aftermath of Operation Bluestar (June 1984) were male, but a handful of women also took part in the armed struggle for an independent Sikh state, Khalistan, between 1984 and 1995. Throughout the insurrection, possibly a few hundreds of women guerrillas (compared to thousands of male recruits) enrolled in the militancy. Although most of these women did not directly participate to the military operations of the insurgents, they all received a military training and took part in encounters with the security forces. This study relies upon a series of extensive interviews with ten former female Sikh fighters, who joined the militancy after Operation Bluestar. The life stories uncovered through these interviews focused on the family antecedents of these women combatants, their socialisation and politicisation process, as well as their concrete experience of the armed struggle and later on of decommissioning. This study of women recruits’ militant careers tends to downplay the role of individual beliefs and motivations in the dynamics of women’s activism, as these motivating factors were neither sufficient nor even necessary to sustain such high risk activism. Rather than in these women’s ‘agency’, it is paradoxically in their subjection to the movement’s male leadership and patriarchal values that the source of their (relative) empowerment should be looked for.

The Need for Speed: Traffic Regulation and the Violent Fabric of Karachi

As a domain of political intervention, speed is a meeting ground for projects of domination and tactics of emancipation, for logics of exclusion coexisting with various forms of collisions, intersections and amalgamations. Instead of reducing the ‘need for speed’ to a linear and unequivocal process, this article makes the case for thinking about speed as an arena of conflict, subject to brutal accelerations but also to at least momentary decelerations. Taking the example of Karachi, where road accidents and larger controversies around transport played a prominent role in the violent postcolonial transformations of the city, it argues that from these collisions emerged a form of political power premised on the regulation of traffic flows. It concludes that moving-power always exceeds the initial intentions of those setting it in motion as it simultaneously builds on and disrupts the forces that give every city its vitality, that is, on the vitalism of speed.

Derrière le rideau de bambou : le coût social des Commonwealth Games de Delhi

Apres moult peripeties (rachats successifs, mise en liquidation judiciaire...), la Franc-Comtoise Industrie (Lons-le-Saunier – Jura) est reprise, le 19 fevrier 2010, par le fabricant d’eoliennes Alizeo en vue de lui confier la fabrication des soubassements d’eoliennes rabattables. C’est un nouveau defi a relever pour les salaries de l’entreprise de Lons-le-Saunier qui, cinquante ans apres, vont continuer a vivre l’aventure de la production d’energie, mais cette fois-ci, au travers de l’energie eolienne, apres des annees d’experience acquises dans le nucleaire, la chimie et la petrochimie.

Reviews: Constructing India: Roland Lardinois, L’Invention de l’Inde. Entre ésotérisme et science. Paris: Editions du CNRS, 2007, 493 pp., ISBN 9782271065902, 35.00

665 Sukant K. Chaudhury is Reader in Sociology at the University of Lucknow, India, co-editor of The Eastern Anthropologist and convener of Research Committee-07 (Rural, Peasant and Tribal Communities) of the Indian Sociological Society. He gained an MA and a PhD at the University of Delhi. His publications include: Myopic Development and Cultural Lens, Tribal Identity and Indian Tribes and the Mainstream. Address: Department of Sociology, University of Lucknow, Lucknow, Pin226007, India. [email: sukantkchaudhury@gmail.com]