What happens when the legacy of a father collides with the dreams of his son? Widow Jeeto Gill has spent her life working hard and making sacrifices for her children. Now she looks forward to going back to her land in the Punjab, eating saag and roti on a verandah and letting her tired eyes rest on green fields. Her son Pal seems to have it all but he’s restless. He’s got big plans for his Daddy’s business and a taste for Johnny Walker Black Label. However his kind-hearted wife Liz has her own ideas about what’s best. Meanwhile Pal’s sharp-tongued sister Cookie runs the tackiest beauty salon in town and harbours a dark secret. When their cousin’s destitute wife, Reema, arrives from back home, the Gills propose to take care of her. Little do they know that her arrival will change the course of their family’s destiny forever.

Study on the family structure and socioeconomic status of Hindu family, with special reference to Patna City, Bihar.

What happens when the legacy of a father collides with the dreams of his son? Widow Jeeto Gill has spent her life working hard and making sacrifices for her children. Now she looks forward to going back to her land in the Punjab, eating saag and roti on a verandah and letting her tired eyes rest on green fields. Her son Pal seems to have it all but he's restless. He's got big plans for his Daddy's business and a taste for Johnny Walker Black Label. However his kind-hearted wife Liz has her own ideas about what's best. Meanwhile Pal's sharp-tongued sister Cookie runs the tackiest beauty salon in town and harbours a dark secret. When their cousin's destitute wife, Reema, arrives from back home, the Gills propose to take care of her. Little do they know that her arrival will change the course of their family's destiny forever.

Five decades of independence have produced dramatic increases in womens’ educational achievements in India; but education for girls beyond a certain level is still perceived as socially risky. Based on ethnographic data and historical documents, this book explores the origins of that paradox. Contributors probe the complex relationships between traditional Indian social institutions the joint family, arranged marriage, dowry, and purdah, or sexual segregation and girls schooling. They find that a patrifocal family structure and ideology are often at the root of different family approaches to educating sons and daughters, and that concern for marriageability still plays a central role in womens’ educational choices and outcomes.

Pakistani migrant families in Denmark find themselves in a specific ethno-national, post-9/11 environment where Muslim immigrants are subjected to processes of non-recognition, exclusion and securitization. This ethnographic study explores how, why, and at what costs notions of relatedness, identity, and belonging are being renegotiated within local families and transnational kinship networks. Each entry point concerns the destructive–productive constitution of family life, where neglected responsibilities, obligations, and trust lead not only to broken relationships, but also, and inevitably, to the innovative creation of new ones. By connecting the micro-politics of the migrant family with the macro-politics of the nation state and global conjunctures in general, the book argues that securitization and suspicion—launched in the name of “integration”—escalate internal community dynamics and processes of family upheaval in unpredicted ways.

With the prominence of one-name couples (Brangelina, Kimye) and famous families (the Smiths, the Beckhams), it is becoming increasingly clear that celebrity is no longer an individual pursuit-if it ever was. Accordingly, First Comes Love explores celebrity kinship and the phenomenon of the power couple: those relationships where two stars come together and where their individual identities as celebrities become inseparable from their status as a famous twosome. Taken together, the chapters in this volume interrogate the ways these alliances are bound up in wider cultural debates about marriage, love, intimacy, family, parenthood, sexuality, and gender, in their particular historical contexts, from the 1920s to the present day. Interdisciplinary in scope, First Comes Love seeks to establish how celebrity relationships play particular roles in dramatizing, disrupting, and reconciling often-contradictory ideas about coupledom and kinship formations.

The series Islamkundliche Untersuchungen was founded in 1969 by the Klaus Schwarz Verlag. Since then, it has become one of the most important venues for publications in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies. Its more than 350 volumes cover a wide range of topics from the history, culture and societies of the Middle East and North Africa as well as neighboring regions in central, south and southeast Asia.

The postcolonial experience, as explored by the authors of this volume, focuses on the complex set of cultural and ethnographic processes and strategies of resistance that are the diasporic or migrant Irish experience. As a minority inhabiting the margins of society, Irish Travellers frequently found themselves excluded to the periphery of those unitary constructions of Irishness that accompanied the early decades of Irish independence. Straddling the Traveller/Settled divide, Johnny Doran, whose career reached its zenith in the 1940s, was one of the foremost Irish Traveller artists to have influenced the development of the Irish cultural and musical tradition. As a primarily non-literate group, Irish Travellers, have, in the postcolonial era at least, had very little input into the way in which they have been constructed or represented in the Irish cultural imaginary. This book is a small attempt to redress this imbalance. In exploring the Traveller historical experience through the musical oeuvre of one man, it outlines the importance of human agency, cultural hybridity and cross-cultural borrowing and appropriation within the context of the shifting power relations and images that defined postcolonial Ireland.

This book presents the oral testimony of Subhashini (1914–2003), the woman head of a well-known Arya Samaj institution devoted to women's education in rural north India. Subhashini's narrative unfolds a story, within a sea of stories, which has remained silent in the dominant historical discourse. Her memory evokes contrasting images of violence, martyrdom and Partition. Not 1947 but 1942—the year of her father's 'martyrdom'—is recalled as a violent rupture in her memory. Partition is a moment of celebration, revenge, divine retribution, empathy, remorse, tragedy and fear. Translating Subhashini's oral testimony, Nonica Datta recreates the memory of a colonial subject, living in postcolonial times, as a historical narrative. Moving beyond a historical event and well-established historical facts, Violence, Martyrdom and Partition is a parallel history of events and non-events, memory and history, testimony and experience. Breaking the silence of an oral testimony and presenting memory as history, this work opens up the historians' territory. This testimony defies the opposition between subject and agent, victim and victimizer, witness and survivor, aggressor and spectator, perpetrator and bystander. Subhashini's candid, repetitive narrative suggests a remarkable interplay of individual and collective remembrance, and reveals the shifts, ambiguities, silences and contradictions in an individual memory.

"This book serves as a window into the rich and revealing lives and self-representations of the particular individuals who have produced the life histories. In so doing, it makes very important broader points about the use of life histories in social science research in general and in the study of South Asian social-cultural life in particular." -- Sarah Lamb Life histories have a wide, if not universal, appeal. But what does it mean to narrate the story of a life, whether one's own or someone else's, orally or in writing? Which lives are worth telling, and who is authorized to tell them? The essays in this volume consider these questions through close examination of a wide range of biographies, autobiographies, diaries, and oral stories from India. Their subjects range from literary authors to housewives, politicians to folk heroes, and include young and old, women and men, the illiterate and the learned. Contributors are David Arnold, Stuart Blackburn, Sudipta Kaviraj, Barbara D. Metcalf, Kirin Narayan, Francesca Orsini, Jonathan P. Parry, Jean-Luc Racine, Josiane Racine, David Shulman, and Sylvia Vatuk.