Networks, Labour and Migration among Indian Muslim Artisans provides an ethnography of life, work and migration in a North Indian Muslim-dominated woodworking industry. It traces artisanal connections within the local context, during migration within India, and to the Gulf, examining how woodworkers utilise local and transnational networks, based on identity, religiosity, and affective circulations, to access resources, support and forms of mutuality. However, the book also illustrates how liberalisation, intensifying forms of marginalisation and incorporation into global production networks have led to spatial pressures, fragmentation of artisanal labour, and forms of enclavement that persist despite geographical mobility and connectedness. By working across the dialectic of marginality and connectedness, Thomas Chambers thinks through these complexities and dualities by providing an ethnographic account that shares everyday life with artisans and others in the industry. Descriptive detail is intersected with spatial scales of ‘local’, ‘national’ and ‘international’, with the demands of supply chains and labour markets within India and abroad, with structural conditions, and with forms of change and continuity. Empirically, then, the book provides a detailed account of a specific locale, but also contributes to broader theoretical debates centring on theorisations of margins, borders, connections, networks, embeddedness, neoliberalism, subjectivities, and economic or social flux.

Networks, Labour and Migration Among Indian Muslim Artisans provides an ethnography of life, work, and migration in a North Indian Muslim-dominated woodworking industry. It traces artisanal connections within the local context, during migration within India, and to the Gulf, examining how woodworkers utilize local and transnational networks, based on identity, religiosity, and affective circulations, to access resources, support, and forms of mutuality. However, the book also illustrates how liberalization, intensifying forms of marginalization and incorporation into global production networks have led to spatial pressures, fragmentation of artisanal labor, and forms of enslavement that persist despite geographical mobility and connectedness. By working across the dialectic of marginality and connectedness, Thomas Chambers thinks through these complexities and dualities by providing an ethnographic account that shares everyday life with artisans and others in the industry.

Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India looks at how religion provides an arena to make place and challenge the majoritarian, exclusionary, and introverted tendencies of contemporary India. Places do not simply exist. They are made and remade by the acts of individuals and communities at particular historical moments. In India today, the place for Muslims is shrinking as the revanchist Hindu Right increasingly realizes its vision of a Hindu nation. Religion enables Muslims to re-envision India as a different kind of place, one to which they unquestionably belong. Analyzing the religious narratives, practices, and constructions of religious subjectivity of diverse groups of Muslims in Old Delhi, Kalyani Devaki Menon reveals the ways in which Muslims variously contest the insular and singular understandings of nation that dominate the sociopolitical landscape of the country and make place for themselves. Menon shows how religion is concerned not just with the divine and transcendental but also with the anxieties and aspirations of people living amid violence, exclusion, and differential citizenship. Ultimately, Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India allows us to understand religious acts, narratives, and constructions of self and belonging as material forces, as forms of the political that can make room for individuals, communities, and alternative imaginings in a world besieged by increasingly xenophobic understandings of nation and place.

This book addresses South Asian Muslim women’s lived experiences, whilst questioning dominant concepts of agency. Negative, homogenising constructions of the ‘Muslim Woman’ are not the result of a knowledge deficit, but constitutive of Euro-American and Hindu nationalist forms of civilizational self-assurance. Portraying the richness and diversity of Muslim women’s voices and agency cannot, therefore, rectify discourses casting Muslim women as invisible or silent, so long as the vision of agency is shackled to dominant feminist precepts. Mindful of this problem, the book examines Muslim women’s legal agency with respect to the family, their claims-making upon the state, livelihoods, and the impact of male outmigration on ‘left-behind’ wives. Working across these domains of everyday life, contributors highlight how women’s vulnerabilities within their families dovetail with oppressions experienced in the local state, the labour market, and in the streets. Women’s economic locations continue to shape their agency in crucial ways, with upward mobility often entailing greater restrictions on women’s mobility and independence; yet the chapters caution against romanticising the ironic independence of poverty. Collectively, this volume showcases Muslim’s women’s diverse identities and desires that may be sidelined in dominant concepts of agency. This book will be beneficial for scholars and students of South Asian Studies interested in gender justice, politics and the intersection of religion, culture, and identity. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Contemporary South Asia.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working-class people across northern India found themselves negotiating rapid industrial change, emerging technologies, and class hierarchies. In response to these changes, Indian Muslim artisans began publicly asserting the deep relation between their religion and their labor, using the increasingly accessible popular press to redefine Islamic traditions “from below.” Centering the stories and experiences of metalsmiths, stonemasons, tailors, press workers, and carpenters, Pious Labor examines colonial-era social and technological changes through the perspectives of the workers themselves. As Amanda Lanzillo shows, the colonial marginalization of these artisans is intimately linked with the continued exclusion of laboring voices today. By drawing on previously unstudied Urdu-language technical manuals and community histories, Lanzillo highlights not only the materiality of artisanal production but also the cultural agency of artisanal producers, filling in a major gap in South Asian history.

In her compelling journey with a government-aided, Muslim-majority school of (old) Delhi, a manager discovers structures of power, politicking, conflict and harmony. This book explores how teachers, administrators and students of low-income and disadvantaged communities navigate limited opportunities and resources. It examines the socio-economic-cultural background of students, institutional rituals and practices, and the impact of power relations in neo-liberal contexts on the worker-children. It uncovers the power and privilege of those in authority and elucidates how bureaucratic systems in state-run schools tend to overlook the interests and circumstances of students, thus perpetuating their subalternity. Education in a “Ghetto” will be of interest to educationalists, sociologists, historians, political scientists, developmentalists or just about anybody interested in the interface of state, society, and education.

The Handloom Industry of Begampur in Transition: Technology, Disjuncture and Development provides an ethnographic description of the handloom industry of the Begampur region, Hooghly district, West Bengal, India. While explaining the process of transformation within the industry, Abhradip Banerjee explores the uneasy relationship between technology, disjuncture, and development that has impacted the lives of this particular group of artisans for more than two decades. The novelty of this book lies in Banerjee’s approach, which allowed him to perceive and analyze the process of transition within the handloom weaving tradition of Begampur region from a more inclusive perspective, miles away from the pitfall of gross “technological determinism.” The “sociotechnical approach allowed him to gauge, analyze, and incorporate several important but neglected dimensions of this transformation, which were otherwise missing in many historiographic or empirical accounts regarding the process of industrialization, deindustrialization, and class formation in India.

Bringing together emerging ethnographies on kinship in South Asia, this book explores the idea of kinship as ‘fiction’ in intimate relationships. Fictions and fictive kinship within anthropology are contested ideas. Increasingly, research suggests the idea of intimate relationships has to extend beyond the biological assumption of kinship relations. The idea of fiction is also not free from the biological imagination or the persistent dichotomy of nature-culture/nurture-nature. This edited volume resurrects the idea of fiction and fictive-ness to understand how intimate relationships may use these particular labels, translate into practices, or create an experiential understanding around relationships. The chapters in this book reengage the idea of fiction by exploring the ambiguity within household relationships, the process of making and engaging with a craft and skill, and the intricacies of making children through IVF and third-party involvement. They challenge societal norms of marriage and being married by reframing shared substances and the relationality they carry and by remembering deceased ties through acts of resurrection. Through vivid illustrations of life and living in South Asia, each chapter contributes to an understanding of how fiction and reality are mutually creating each other. This book will be beneficial to students, academics and scholars of anthropology, particularly those interested in kinship and the sociology of the family. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Contemporary South Asia.

Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan is the first ethnographic monograph on migration in Tajikistan, one of the most remittance-dependent countries in the world. Moving beyond economistic push-pull narratives about post-Soviet migration, it foregrounds the experiences of those who ‘stay put’ in the sending society and struggle to reproduce their moral communities. Elena Borisova examines the role of mobility in historical and cultural ideas about the good life and how it becomes entwined with people’s efforts to become good, moral and modern subjects. Addressing the complex relationship between the economic, imaginative and moral aspects of (im)mobility, she shows that mass migration from Tajikistan is as much a project of navigating ethical personhood as it is a quest for economic resources. This book reveals how transnational regimes and structures of mobility, citizenship and histories map out in the intimate spheres of the body, the person and the family. It is a contribution to contemporary migration research, which is mostly centred on Europe and North America, and to the field of Central Asian studies. It will be of interest to researchers of migration, (im)mobility and citizenship, and to scholars of all disciplines working on Central Asia. Praise for Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan ‘In this vivid and poignant ethnography, grounded in an intimate portrait of life in northern Tajikistan, Borisova shows how migration is much more than a response to economic necessity...Taking us from homes and wedding halls to passport offices and border posts, Borisova illuminates migration as an ethical project inseparable from the search for a good life – an argument of profound relevance for scholars of migration, as well as for students of anthropology.’ Madeleine Reeves, University of Oxford ‘This deeply researched account of the lived experience of migration between Tajikistan and Russia is a must-read for all those interested in Central Asia and the migratory experience more generally. This remarkable book is a testament to anthropology’s relevance for understanding some of the most pressing issues and sensitive world regions of the present era.’ Magnus Marsden, University of Sussex ‘Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan is a masterful account of migrants’ mobility between Tajikistan and Russia. Carefully examining how people live their lives on the move under difficult conditions, Borisova’s lucidly written book is set to become a landmark study in the anthropology of migration.’ Till Mostowlansky, Geneva Graduate Institute 'An amazing book. Borisova offers a rich fieldwork-based account of life in the North of Tajikistan, which is also a delightful read. This work requires a substantial rethinking about how we conceptualise and think of mobility and migration. Paying attention to the politics of care and ethical struggles the book helps a reader to understand what migration is and how it is weaved into everyday fabric of life in Tajikistan.' Malika Bahovadinova, University of Amsterdam

People (employees and investors) are the strength of the organizations and the leader who integrates this understanding creates an environment where people can use their full potential, feel appreciated and grow in the process. Organizations need to promote leadership that is able to nurture the spirit of each employee in order to create happy and harmonious workplaces. Such a nurturing and liberating environment will trigger social energy, which is not only a sufficient condition for innovation but the precondition for creating collective pride.