This book familiarises readers with a new way to treat the subject of gender, foregrounding the real voices of women, their experiences doing ethnographic work, and their courage in sharing their stories publicly for the first time in the context of India. A useful companion to more theory-based anthropological studies, the book connects ethnographic data to what eventually becomes theories formed from the field. Chapters by women from a variety of disciplines – Anthropology, Literary and Translation studies, Political Sciences – transcend the academic boundaries between social sciences and humanities. The book shows how the researchers navigate in the field, write in ways that defy their academic life and work, and call into question their narrative voice. The book presents a space for women to reflect on their individual themes of research and at partially filling the vacuum mentioned above, the silences of women’s voices and expressions. The experiences described in the chapters differ, both along the divide of a "native" and a non-"native" fieldworker and along different disciplinary fields, but they share the experience of a long-term fieldwork in India and the need to self-reflect on the impact of this experience on the way the field is represented, on the people encountered in the field, on the way the field impacted on the fieldworker. The book is a useful presentation of how female researchers act in the field as women and scholars. Filling a gap in the existing literature of ethnographic research methods, the book will be of interest to students and researchers interested in the fields of Gender Studies, Social Work, Sociology, Anthropology and Asian Studies.

‘Transdisciplinarity’ is a form of research and practice that synthesises knowledge from a range of academic disciplines and from the community. There is now global interest and a significant body of work on transdisciplinarity and its potential to address the apparently intractable problems of society. This creates the opportunity for a specific focus on its practical application to sustainability issues. Transdisciplinary Research and Practice for Sustainability Outcomes examines the role of transdisciplinarity in the transformations needed for a sustainable world. After an historical overview of transdisciplinarity, Part I focuses on tools and frameworks to achieve sustainability outcomes in practice and Part II consolidates work by a number of scholars on supporting transdisciplinary researchers and practitioners. Part III is a series of case studies including several international examples that demonstrate the challenges and rewards of transdisciplinary work. The concluding chapter proposes a future research pathway for understanding the human factors that underpin successful transdisciplinary research. As Emeritus Professor Valerie Brown AO notes in her Preface, this book moves transdisciplinary inquiry into the academic and social mainstream. It will be of great interest to researchers and practitioners in the fields of sustainability, qualitative research methods, environmental impact assessment and development studies.

‘Transdisciplinarity’ is a form of research and practice that synthesises knowledge from a range of academic disciplines and from the community. There is now global interest and a significant body of work on transdisciplinarity and its potential to address the apparently intractable problems of society. This creates the opportunity for a specific focus on its practical application to sustainability issues. Transdisciplinary Research and Practice for Sustainability Outcomes examines the role of transdisciplinarity in the transformations needed for a sustainable world. After an historical overview of transdisciplinarity, Part I focuses on tools and frameworks to achieve sustainability outcomes in practice and Part II consolidates work by a number of scholars on supporting transdisciplinary researchers and practitioners. Part III is a series of case studies including several international examples that demonstrate the challenges and rewards of transdisciplinary work. The concluding chapter proposes a future research pathway for understanding the human factors that underpin successful transdisciplinary research. As Emeritus Professor Valerie Brown AO notes in her Preface, this book moves transdisciplinary inquiry into the academic and social mainstream. It will be of great interest to researchers and practitioners in the fields of sustainability, qualitative research methods, environmental impact assessment and development studies.

This book brings together historical and ethnographic perspectives on Indian consumer identities. Through an in-depth analysis of local, regional, and national histories of marketing, regulatory bodies, public and domestic practices, this interdisciplinary volume charts the emergence of Indian consumer society and discusses commodity consumption as a main feature of Indian modernity. Nationalist discourse was shaped by moral struggles over consumption patterns that became a hallmark of middle-class identity. But a number of chapters demonstrate how a wide range of social strata were targeted as markets for everyday commodities associated with global lifestyles early on. A section of the book illustrates how a new group of professionals engaged in advertising trying to create a market shaped tastes and discourses and how campaigns provided a range of consumers with guidance on ‘modern lifestyles’. Chapters discussing advertisements for consumables like coffee and cooking oil, show these to be part of new public cultures. The ethnographic chapters focus on contemporary practices and consumption as a main marker of class, caste and community. Throughout the book consumption is shown to determine communal identities, but some chapters also highlight how it reshapes intimate relationships. The chapters explore the middle-class family, microcredit schemes, and metropolitan youth cultures as sites in which consumer citizenship is realised. The book will be of interest to readers from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, history, geography, sociology, South Asian studies, and visual cultures.

This book offers interdisciplinary perspectives on nationalism in India and examines the ways in which literary-textual representations intervene in debates regarding Hindu, Muslim and other forms of Indian nationalism. The book interrogates questions of nationalism and nationhood in relation to literary and cultural texts, historic-linguistic contexts and new developments in queer nationalism and ecological nationalism. It adopts a nation-wide emphasis, including chapters on Northeast India and other regions that have been historically underrepresented in studies of Indian nationalism. Moreover, the volume explores a rich variety of literary works by various writers over the past two centuries that have created, enshrined and contested ideas pivotal to the development of Indian nationalism. Located in a range of disciplines, contributors bring extensive expertise in Indian literature, language and culture to the question of nationalism. The chapters challenge many of the accepted ideas on nationalism and critically examine the politics behind such nationalisms. Moving beyond an approach to Indian nationalism based exclusively in the historicist-political paradigm, this timely book challenges established ideas in Indian nationalism and critically examines the politics of nationalisms in terms of textual representations. The book will be of interest to researchers working on South Asian studies, including Indian culture, history, literature and politics.

This book analyses the role of women in the films of one of the leading filmmakers of the ‘Third World’ in the 1950s, Satyajit Ray, a national icon in filmmaking in India. The book explores the portrayal of women in the context of the creation of national culture after India became independent. Gender issues were very important to India under Jawaharlal Nehru in the 1950s – with the enactment of inheritance and divorce laws. Ray’s portrayal of women and his films anticipate much of the theorizing of later-day feminism. This book analyses cinematic texts with special reference to the women characters using feminist film theory and representation along with a study of the socio-political and economic conditions pertinent to the times – both relevant to the film’s making and its setting. The primary texts studied are films spanning over four decades from Pather Panchali (1955) to his last trilogy and are based on a categorization of the broad feminine ‘types’ represented in the films – based on the socio-political situations in which they are placed – and their relationships with the other characters present. Ray’s portrayal of women has an enormous bearing on our understanding of how modern India evolved in the Nehru era and after, and this book explore just that: the place of the woman as it is and should be in a young nation encumbered by patriarchy. Gendered Modernity and Indian Cinema will be of interest to academics in the field of World cinema, Indian and Bengali cinema, Film Studies as well as Gender Studies and South Asian culture and society.

This book analyses diasporic literatures written in Indian languages written by authors living outside their homeland and contextualize the understanding of migration and migrant identities. Examining diasporic literature produced in Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam, Indian Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Marathi, and Tamil, the book argues that writers in the diaspora who choose to write in their vernacular languages attempt to retain their native language, for they believe that the loss of the language would lead to the loss of their culture. The author answers seminal questions including: How are these writers different from mainstream Indian writers who write in English? Themes and issues that could be compared to or contrasted with the diasporic literatures written in English are also explored. The book offers a significant examination of the nature and dynamics of the multilingual Indian society and culture, and its global readership. It is the first book on Indian diasporic literature in Indian and transnational languages, and a pioneering contribution to the field. The book will be of interest to academics in the field of South Asian Studies, South Asian literature, Asian literature, diaspora and literary studies.

This book examines the historical trajectory of the growth of the television news and critically analyzes the role of private television news in framing the nature of public discourse in contemporary India. Set in the context of a transformed media landscape, the book attempts to understand and analyze the role of two private national news channels, NDTV 24×7 and Aaj Tak, in producing mediatized narratives that offer a commentary on the various social, political, cultural, religious and economic issues in the public domain. This is achieved by critically examining the process and techniques of production, representation and consumption of current affairs programs such as studio debates, panel discussions, audience talk shows and documentaries aired on both the channels. Highlighting some of the key trends that impinge on the structure and mode of operation of television news media in contemporary India, the book offers a simultaneous examination of how the production, representation and consumption of the mediatized discourses shape the nature of public discourse and have social-political ramifications for the functioning of Indian democracy. The book will be of interest to researchers in sociology, media and communication studies, popular culture and South Asian Studies.

The Gravity of Hope is a non-fictional account of women’s lives who sometimes endured, often resisted and ultimately coped with marital violence as best as they could in an informal settlement in northeastern Mumbai. It uses anthropological methods and two decades of research-driven insights to analyse the role of gender, marriage, structural violence, family, informal and legal institutions in tackling wife abuse in India. In conclusion, there are many reasons why domestic violence in India continues unabated; the most important is the social norm that views marriage as the primary, and often the only, path to securing women’s financial futures.

This book analyzes the practice of local-level participatory planning and budgeting and its impact on gender responsive budgeting (GRB) in Bangladesh. The book offers a conceptual framework that brings into focus the contribution of successful participatory budgeting practice to ensure GRB – the examination of whether men and women fall under existing income and expenditure patterns differently. It suggests that the ideas of participatory budgeting and GRB should be evolving together to provide a concrete idea to address gender needs. The book provides a theoretical explanation that contributes to the consolidation of the practice of GRB at the local government level through participatory budgeting. Conceptualizing the process of participatory budgeting and GRB in the context of Bangladesh, the book will be of interest to researchers in the field of Development Studies, Political Science, Public Administration, and Gender, as well as Asian Studies, in particular, South Asian Studies.