Malini Sur

Mixing methods, tasting fingers: notes on an ethnographic experiment

This article reports on an ethnographic experiment. Four finger eating experts and three novices sat down for a hot meal and ate with their hands. Drawing on the technique of playing with the familiar and the strange, our aim was not to explain our responses, but to articulate them. As we seek words to do so, we are compelled to stretch the verb “to taste.” Tasting, or so our ethnographic experiment suggests, need not be understood as an activity confined to the tongue. Instead, if given a chance, it may viscously spread out to the fingers and come to include appreciative reactions otherwise hard to name. Pleasure and embarrassment, food-like vitality, erotic titillation, the satisfaction or discomfort that follow a meal—we suggest that these may all be included in “tasting.” Thus teasing the language alters what speakers and eaters may sense and say. It complements the repertoires available for articulation. But is it okay? Will we be allowed to mess with textbook biology in this way and interfere, not just with anthropological theory, but with the English language itself?

Through Metal Fences: Material Mobility and the Politics of Transnationality at Borders

Abstract This essay explores the changing material configurations of the India–Bangladesh border, the longest international boundary in South Asia. Following the entanglements of commodities and people, I engage in a dialogue with scholarship on informal transnational circuits, material cultures and sovereignty at borders. The interplay of sovereign violence, and what I call forms of sovereign indulgence, guides the politics of transnationality. Such politics transcend the well-investigated dichotomy of the privileged/deprived and articulate how commodities, people and border landmarks are ascribed with differing meanings. This essay shows how motifs of circulation derive meanings from a simultaneously fluid and dangerous border and expose the overlaps between historical formations, commercial trajectories and the paradoxes of militarisation.

The blue urban: colouring and constructing Kolkata

Since 2012, Kolkata’s ruling political party has mobilized the colours blue and white in a concerted effort to rejuvenate the city by referencing big urban ambitions, corporate capital and cheerfulness. Opponents, however, assert that as a state imposed colour, blue limits freedom and makes the city un-alluring. This article suggests that Kolkata’s contemporary blue urban gathers momentum as a political force. Colour mediates political power, creating new constituencies via construction and maintenance. Through a close correspondence between the state’s blue (colours of government offices, public infrastructures, urban lattices), the real estate’s blue (promising middle class residential living) and the widespread use of blue as an everyday urban colour (in slums, shutters, tarpaulin and corrugated boundary walls), the city’s contemporary colours undoes its prior forms. Following blue’s differing shades, patterns, and textures, in public spaces, elite residences, construction sites, and slums, I demonstrate how landed families, resettled artisans, and slum dwellers embrace blue as a colour of hope, while grappling with its corrupt and exclusionary forces.

Battles for the Golden Grain: Paddy Soldiers and the Making of the Northeast India–East Pakistan Border, 1930–1970

This essay explores the fragmentation of provincial rice fields into warring postcolonial territories in mid-twentieth-century South Asia. I focus on rice as a powerful grain that connected the shifting borders of British colonial Assam and Bengal, and later Northeast India and East Pakistan (1930–1970). I show how state repression and competing claims to rice harvests contended with shifting terrains. At important historical junctures, rice came to link cultivation and territorialization, state violence and food, and dispossession and espionage. I engage with the powerful symbolism attached to rice by colonial and post-colonial officials, border guards, and cultivators who were variously conceived of as peasants and adivasis , as they sought to settle, cultivate, demarcate, and govern new national boundaries in a radically changing landscape. This paper situates rice battles within current discussions on Asias borderlands to show how rice established the border as a space for alterity and to expose the blurred boundaries between static peasants and mobile adivasis , and between cultivation and soldiering.

Women’s Right to Education—A Narrative on International Law

Placing women’s right to education within an essentially androcentric international legal framework, this article underpins various legal and social constraints that deter the translation of this right into a lived experience. Though international law illustrates education lucidly, especially in conjunction with non-discriminatory provisions and emphasises non-derogability, its implementation is dampened by feeble state obligations. Contrasts are drawn between the human rights discourse, which largely propounds claims on behalf of the dispossessed and the neo-liberal regime, which distances human agency and action. Drawing briefly on constitutional provisions, progressive judicial interpretations and people’s movements for education, this article nevertheless cautions that despite assertions to the contrary, India is still slotted ‘at risk’ in not reaching minimal thresholds in gender parity. Claims are made to retain the hegemony of this right as an agentive discourse, rather than as one which slots marginalised women as mere statistical references, discounting their subjugation and struggles.

Constructing Asia: An introduction

I n 2015, a landslide devastated the Chinese city of Shenzhen. The slide destroyed 33 buildings, ruptured a 400 m section of gas pipeline and left approximately 80 people dead or missing. The debris covered an area of around 10 hectares. The source of disaster was an unstable, 20-storey mountain of construction waste. The detritus from the city’s building frenzy of the last 30 years had become a geologically significant mass capable of decimating a part of the city (How a Hill of Dirt and Debris Became a Landslide 2015). From Singapore to Mumbai, and Phnom Penh to Beijing, intensive construction is not only reshaping city environments, but also redefining their economies, politics, and social lives. Concrete, sand, heavy construction equipment, and hard-hatted labourers evoke a specific ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams 1977) that is reflected in everyday life across Asia. These workers, companies, materials, and capital are deeply implicated in state institutions, national and regional economies and emerging regional political dynamics. Construction is fundamental to Asia’s economy. Industry statistics project that construction spending will grow from 36% of the global market in 2005 to 46% in 2020. In the three years between 2011 and 2013, China used more cement than the US did during the whole of the 20th century (How China used more cement in 3 years than the U.S. did in the entire 20th Century 2015). In India, the construction industry is a major contributor towards the GDP, employing 33 million people and impacting 250 associated industries such as cement, coal, and technology (India’s construction sector to boom 2016). The construction industry in Singapore employs 326,000 foreign construction workers from across Asia, accounting for about a third of the one million work permit holders engaged in manual labour in the city-state of five and a half million inhabitants. Booming real estate markets in Ho Chi Minh City, Yangon, and Phnom Penh, have resulted in massive evictions and expanding concerns over land grabbing (Nam 2011; Harms 2013, 2016). Whether it is the Japanese ‘construction state’ (McCormack 1995; see also Moore 2013), China’s ‘ghost cities’ (Shepard 2015) or Thailand’s ‘ruins of progress’ (Johnson 2014), construction-related industries and their failures have been fundamental forces behind the imaginary and ruptures of the so-called ‘Asian century’ (Mahbubani 2008; Roy and Ong 2011; Gillen 2014). Scholars have shown how urbanization is rapidly transforming Asia as a region and repositioning its cities as critical spaces for 21st century urban theory (Jones and Douglass 2008; Ong and Roy 2011; Goh, Bunnel, and Van Der Veer 2015). Yet, construction has been curiously absent from many discussions of urbanism and remains relatively opaque as an industry. This is surprising given the centrality of the industry to the region’s post-war reconstruction and its Cold War economies (e.g. Chaleomtriana 2007). The nine papers in Constructing Asia aim to address this gap. We ask: how does construction shape the social, economic and