India Archives

Plantation Crisis

What does the collapse of India’s tea industry mean for Dalit workers who have lived, worked and died on the plantations since the colonial era? Plantation Crisis offers a complex understanding of how processes of social and political alienation unfold in moments of economic rupture. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Peermade and Munnar tea belts, Jayaseelan Raj – himself a product of the plantation system – offers a unique and richly detailed analysis of the profound, multi-dimensional sense of crisis felt by those who are at the bottom of global plantation capitalism and caste hierarchy.

Tea production in India accounts for 25 per cent of global output. The colonial era planation system – and its two million strong workforce – has, since the mid-1990s, faced a series of ruptures due to neoliberal economic globalisation. In the South Indian state of Kerala, otherwise known for its labour-centric development initiatives, the Tamil speaking Dalit workforce, whose ancestors were brought to the plantations in the 19th century, are at the forefront of this crisis, which has profound impacts on their social identity and economic wellbeing. Out of the colonial history of racial capitalism and indentured migration, Plantation Crisis opens our eyes to the collapse of the plantation system and the rupturing of Dalit lives in India’s tea belt.

The India Museum Revisited

The museum of the East India Company formed, for a large part of the nineteenth century, one of the sights of London. In recent years, little has been remembered of it beyond its mere existence, while an assumed negative role has been widely attributed to it on the basis of its position at the heart of one of Britain’s arch-colonialist enterprises.

Extensively illustrated, The India Museum Revisited provides a full examination of the museum’s founding manifesto and evolving ambitions. It surveys the contents of its multi-faceted collections – with respect to materials, their manufacture and original functions on the Indian sub-continent – as well as the collectors who gathered them and the manner in which they were mobilized to various ends within the museum.

From this integrated treatment of documentary and material sources, a more accurate, rounded and nuanced picture emerges of an institution that contributed in major ways, over a period of 80 years, to the representation of India for a European audience, not only in Britain but through the museum’s involvement in the international exposition movement to audiences on the continent and beyond.

Praise for The India Museum Revisited
‘The book and its companion website will become standard sources for studying European and American practices of visually “documenting” distant lands, the inescapable entwining of collections and displays with nineteenth-century imperial ambition and its rationalizing hierarchies of race and culture, while also affording opportunities to reassess the collection in ways that transcend the colonial constructs that shaped it.’
Journal of the History of Collections

‘As both scholarly and popular interest in the East India Company continues to develop, The India Museum Revisited will serve as both the basis and a significant inspiration for future research.’
The Antiquaries Journal

Viral Loads

Drawing upon the empirical scholarship and research expertise of contributors from all settled continents and from diverse life settings and economies, Viral Loads illustrates how the COVID-19 pandemic, and responses to it, lay bare and load onto people’s lived realities in countries around the world.

A crosscutting theme pertains to how social unevenness and gross economic disparities are shaping global and local responses to the pandemic, and illustrate the effects of both the virus and efforts to contain it in ways that amplify these inequalities. At the same time, the contributions highlight the nature of contemporary social life, including virtual communication, the nature of communities, neoliberalism and contemporary political economies, and the shifting nature of nation states and the role of government. Over half of the world’s population has been affected by restrictions of movement, with physical distancing requirements and self-isolation recommendations impacting profoundly on everyday life but also on the economy, resulting also, in turn, with dramatic shifts in the economy and in mass unemployment.

By reflecting on how the pandemic has interrupted daily lives, state infrastructures and healthcare systems, the contributing authors in this volume mobilise anthropological theories and concepts to locate the pandemic in a highly connected and exceedingly unequal world. The book is ambitious in its scope – spanning the entire globe – and daring in its insistence that medical anthropology must be a part of the growing calls to build a new world.

Praise for Viral Loads

‘A significant contribution by medical anthropology to the understanding of a global health crisis as it unfolded in front of observers’ eyes.’
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

‘This collection of essays on the anthropology of an emergency is a captivating account of “the first digital pandemic”’
Medical Anthropology Quarterly

‘The scope of Viral Loads is admirable and informative…abounding in rich ethnographic insights, extended discussion of methodology is limited throughout. A significant strength of Viral Loads is that its authors, affiliated with institutions on 5 continents, draw their analyses from various parts of the global north and global south: a truly international effort… memorable chapters include Elisa J. Sobo and Elżbieta Drążkiewicz’s theorectically rich discussion of conspiracy theories in Ireland, Poland, and the United States of America … Marsland’s expansive and compelling chapter and Lasco’s vision of interdisciplinary and interspecies ‘convivium’ demonstrates that thick description can bring anthropologists into engagement with many others.’
The Polyphony

‘Viral Loads demonstrates anthropology’s power of description, analysis and theory to capture a global tragedy as it unfolds. This impressive volume brings together anthropologists from around the world, who draw on their own deep knowledge to trace COVID’s impact on social, economic and political life. The authors offer compassionate accounts of the power of the virus to exploit and magnify social and structural vulnerabilities, while they present impassioned arguments of the imperative to address underlying inequalities, local and global, that continue to threaten our very existence.’
Melissa Parker, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

‘This impressive collection of well researched and preciously substantiated essays shows that evidence-based scholarship has not gone to sleep despite the Covid-19 menace and its imposition of physical and social distancing. If anything, the pandemic has introduced an urgency to social enquiry informed by improvisation and complementarity between virtual and face-to-face encounters.’
Francis B. Nyamnjoh, University of Cape Town

‘In Viral Loads, the editors and contributors offer a penetrating analysis of how, worldwide, the COVID pandemic has exposed and exploited the racially, socioeconomically and globally uneven ways in which people live; it demands, in response, that we extend our rationales emergent from anthropological and interdisciplinary architectures. This broad and intensive work is as much a book of the academy as it is of the heart, with enormously important ramifications for humankind in the present and for the future. As the authors sort through the global mess our species has managed to create, they argue the urgency to address underlying social, political, and ecological dimension of inequality, acute stratifications, economic disjunctions, forced human migrations, and political lethargy; without this, we are doomed to face many more rounds of equivalent pandemic disasters. From the Amazon to the Sonoran Desert, and from Pretoria to Mumbai, the narrative is excruciatingly tragic yet ironically hopeful. All are immensely tired of seeing death visiting unequally, but none have permitted their exhaustion to diminish their commitment to enhance the lives of the communities and people whom they champion and to speak to power. This is a magnificent work of action and reflection that must be read carefully and with care. To not do so is to ensure the present as the continuing model for the future.’
Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez, Arizona State University

Labour, Nature and Capitalism

Labour, Nature and Capitalism traces how the alliance between labour and capital manifests in the form of conflicts between organised trade unions and a local environmental movement in the context of the much-acclaimed Kerala model of development. It explores the history of the area’s local industrialisation, the presence of varied economic interests and exposes the barriers to forming solidarity networks among the working classes.

Situated in the backdrop of the Eloor-Edayar industrial belt, this book delves deeper into the ways in which capitalism infiltrates and manipulates the social movement landscape in Kerala. It shows how the hegemonic coalition between the state, industries and institutionalised trade unions enable capitalist rationality to mediate and control social movements in postcolonial settings.

Using an ethnographic approach, the book seeks to embark on a journey to understand the tensions between two progressive social movements – a trade union collective and a local environmental movement – foregrounding the experiences of members of the respective groups. The analysis presented here shows how the contestations/conflicts between the movements stem from interpretive as well as ideological differences surrounding economic development and environmental justice.

Praise for Labour, Nature and Capitalism

‘Labour, Nature and Capitalism is a carefully researched as well as theoretically astute book on a subject of vital importance to India and the world. Based on fieldwork in Kerala, Dr Silpa Satheesh studies the tensions between grassroots environmental groups and trade unions, analysing how factory labour finds itself in opposition to other, even more vulnerable sections, of the working class. Importantly, she explores both the organizational as well as affective aspects of struggle, allowing activists to speak loud and clear in their own voices. Through her work, Dr Satheesh convincingly demonstrates that the conventional polarity of “environment versus development” is false and even pernicious.’

Ramachandra Guha, author of Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism

‘This work is an important contribution to an understudied and weakly understood arena, the relationship between trade unions and environmental movements. While anecdotal accounts of the tensions (and sometimes complementarities) between the two movements are common, detailed and systematic studies are not. Given the urgent need to bring these movements together to challenge capitalist exploitation and unsustainability, this study is very timely.’

Ashish Kothari, environmental activist and author

‘There are many environmental grassroots movements in the state of Kerala. This fascinating book focuses on the Periyar River gravely and persistently polluted by discharges of “company water”. Competent activists have denounced the environmental and public health damages for many years, counting on support from farmers and fishers. However, another section of the working class, smaller in number but more powerful politically, the industrial trade unions – together with factory owners and the state administration- accuses them of being at the service of “anti-national” interests. By poignant, long outspoken interviews with members of both opposite groups and thorough documentation, the sociologist Silpa Satheesh brilliantly answers a question of world relevance – is there an environmentalism of the working class?’

Joan Martinez Alier, Autonomous University of Barcelona

‘Silpa Satheesh’s book is a very welcome addition to environmental labour studies for many reasons. It adds a case from the Global South to the growing literature on labour and the environment; it examines the dynamics between labour and environment through an ethnographic approach that provides nuance and empathy; and demonstrates that labour is not homogeneous as workers are central to both the labour and environmental side of her story. In that sense it alerts us to the fact that workers, people who need to work to reproduce themselves, are not just one category amongst others but the largest category, short of human beings and citizens of one country or another. From such a starting point the tensions between labour and environmental priorities are not solely conflicts between categories of people but, also, within the very broad category of labour. As a result of the above, Dr Satheesh’s well-written book broadens and enriches environmental labour studies and should be read widely and productively.’

Dr Dimitris Stevis, Colorado State University, USA

‘Strong alliances between the labour and the environmental movement are an essential precondition for combatting the climate crisis. At the same time, they are far from being easy to build. Labour, Nature, and Capitalism brilliantly demonstrates why this is the case. Based on deep empirical insights and sound theoretical reflections, it illuminates labour-environment relationships and explores how they can be turned into a force of socio-ecological transformation.’

Markus Wissen, Berlin School of Economics and Law

The Wild East

The Wild East bridges political economy and anthropology to examine a variety of il/legal economic sectors and businesses such as red sanders, coal, fire, oil, sand, air spectrum, land, water, real estate, procurement and industrial labour. The eleven case studies, based across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, explore how state regulative law is often ignored and/or selectively manipulated. The emerging collective narrative shows the workings of regulated criminal economic systems where criminal formations, politicians, police, judges and bureaucrats are deeply intertwined.

By pioneering the field-study of the politicisation of economic crime, and disrupting the wider literature on South Asia’s informal economy, The Wild East aims to influence future research agendas through its case for the study of mafia-enterprises and their engagement with governance in South Asia and outside. Its empirical and theoretical contribution to debates about economic crimes in democratic regimes will be of critical value to researchers in Economics, Anthropology, Sociology, Comparative Politics, Political Science and International Relations, Criminologists and Development Studies, as well as to those inside and outside academia interested in current affairs and the relationship between crime, politics and mafia enterprises.
Praise for The Wild East
‘This volume is a useful corrective to narratives, oriented on the corporate sector and national politics, which do not tell the full story of the Indian economy. The Wild East reminds us, forcefully, that India’s economy and politics have regional and local aspects that need to be kept in view.’ Commonwealth & Comparative Politics

‘This grimly fascinating book showcases cutting-edge research on the close links between criminality and capitalism in contemporary South Asia. These searing accounts of “the normalization of criminal accumulation” need to be read and understood as much by citizens as by those claiming to represent them.’
Jayati Ghosh, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

‘A fascinating grasp of the symbiosis of state and criminal power. Eleven case studies across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh allow us to delve into unwritten rules and open secrets of everyday criminal economies and political machineries of the Wild East. Conceptual framing of the book, reminding the Wild West of its own trajectories, will certainly appeal to those disenchanted with normative, top-down, Washington consensus based discourses.’
Alena Ledeneva, Founder of the UCL Global Informality Project

Teaching India–Pakistan Relations

The rivalry between India and Pakistan began on British withdrawal from the British Indian Empire in 1947, and with the sudden partition of India immediately afterwards. It has proven remarkably resilient. While the countries share a long history and have considerable social–cultural affinity, relations since Partition have been marked by three wars, constant border skirmishes and a deep distrust that permeates both societies. In each, teaching about those relations is weighted with political and cultural significance, and research shows that curriculums have been used to shape the mindset of new generations with regard to their neighbouring state.

This book explores the attitudes and pedagogical decision-making of teachers in India and Pakistan when teaching India–Pakistan relations. Situating teachers in the context of reformed textbooks and curriculums in both countries that explicitly advocate critical thinking and social cohesion, Kusha Anand explores how far teachers have enacted these changes in their classrooms. Based on data collected from teachers via semi-structured interviews and classroom observations in India and Pakistan she argues that, despite whole-nation policies and texts, teaching of India–Pakistan relations is dependent on the socio-economic status of schools. While there is progress towards the stated goals, teachers in both countries face pressures from the interests of school and state, and often miss opportunities to engage with multiple perspectives and stereotypes in their classrooms.

Praise for Teaching India-Pakistan Relations
‘This book reflects a deep appreciation for historical complexity’
National Identities

Statecraft and Foreign Policy

Statecraft and Foreign Policy provides an in-depth understanding of India’s rise as an economic and political power and its role in addressing global challenges, from climate change to international trade, security, health and energy. It focuses on India’s statecraft and foreign policy from its independence in 1947 to current politics and policies in 2023 – 75 years later.

The book has three main sections, focusing on the evolution of India’s foreign policy after Independence, its transformation after the Cold War and as India’s economic and political power grew, and India’s engagement with major powers (like the US, China and Russia), neighbouring countries, and international institutions. The analysis draws on International Relations Theory, Foreign Policy Analysis, and the work of classic Indian thinkers like Kautilya. It combines evaluating domestic and international influences on India’s statecraft and foreign policy.

The authors introduce a ‘toolbox’ for studying the making and the outcomes of Foreign Policy based on an analysis of interests, perceptions, and values. This analytical framework goes beyond the Indian case study and can be applied to International Relations, Comparative Politics, and Foreign Policy Analysis.

Praise for Statecraft and Foreign Policy

‘Mitra, Schottli, and Pauli have crafted a remarkably deep analysis of India’s foreign policy. They have not only reviewed the details of India’s foreign affairs, itself no small task, but they have done so in an analytic framework grounded in a profound evaluation of the intertwining of domestic and foreign policy choices and compunctions. As contemporary India has emerged as one of the world’s great powers – great in every sense of that term – this book is essential reading for policymakers, diplomats, scholars, and students of Indian affairs and world affairs. Statecraft and Foreign Policy is a tour de force that will define how we think of India in global politics for decades to come!’ Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Julius Silver Professor of Politics, New York University, USA

‘A sweeping overview, in holistic perspective. Covers independent India’s 75 years, narrating policy development and diplomatic actions. Incisive, balanced, and insightful.’ Kisan S. Rana, Emeritus Professor and Former Ambassador of India to Germany

‘This book offers both a wide compass of Indian foreign policy across its 76 years but also a focused lens that assesses change and continuity across different periods and varied dimensions of foreign policy. Domestic and international variables are brought together in the analysis with a focus on how the Prime Ministers think about and visualize their foreign policies. Each chapter provides a synoptic assessment including additional readings making it an excellent reference that brings analysis of foreign policy up to date. The discussions of India’s multilateral engagements on trade, climate change and international negotiations is a valuable addition to usual bilateral discussions of foreign policies.’ Aseema Sinha, Wagener Chair of South Asian Politics and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College in California, USA

‘The authors have done the almost-impossible – they have provided a synopsis of the most important phases, relationships, and issues that mark the country’s policies beyond its borders. And they have done it engagingly and with sophistication…free of jargon and abstruse theorizing, and yet with a penetrating point of view.’ Professor Kanti Bajpai, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore

Social Theory after the Internet

The internet has fundamentally transformed society in the past 25 years, yet existing theories of mass or interpersonal communication do not work well in understanding a digital world. Nor has this understanding been helped by disciplinary specialization and a continual focus on the latest innovations. Ralph Schroeder takes a longer-term view, synthesizing perspectives and findings from various social science disciplines in four countries: the United States, Sweden, India and China. His comparison highlights, among other observations, that smartphones are in many respects more important than PC-based internet uses.

Social Theory after the Internet focuses on everyday uses and effects of the internet, including information seeking and big data, and explains how the internet has gone beyond traditional media in, for example, enabling Donald Trump and Narendra Modi to come to power. Schroeder puts forward a sophisticated theory of the role internet plays, and how both technological and social forces shape its significance. He provides a sweeping and penetrating study, theoretically ambitious and at the same time always empirically grounded.

The book covers key contemporary debates in a clear and accessible way. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of digital media and society, the internet and politics, and the social implications of big data.

Praise for Social Theory after the Internet‘Schroeder reveals some interesting facts concerning interaction with content posted on social media [in] Tethered togetherness, The spread of social media, Sociability and social divides, Visual copresence, Alone or together and Globalizing sociability.’
Medijske Studije
‘A highly ambitious contribution that allows us to take a step back and to systematically think of digital media’s contribution to social change in different social systems and its boundedness on country-specific contexts…. Schroeder’s book is a highly valuable addition to the literature’
The International Journal of Press/Politics

Ruptures

Ruptures brings together leading and emerging international anthropologists to explore the concept of ‘rupture’. Understood as radical and often forceful forms of discontinuity, rupture is the active ingredient of the current sense of a world in turmoil, lying at the heart in some of the most defining experiences of our time: the rise of populist politics, the corollary impulse towards protest and even revolutionary change, as well as moves towards violence and terror, and the responses these moves elicit.

Rupture is addressed in selected ethnographic and historical contexts: images of the guillotine in the French revolution; reactions to Trump’s election in the USA; the motivations of young Danes who join ISIS in Syria; ‘butterfly effect’ activism among environmental anarchists in northern Europe; the experiences of political trauma and its ‘repair’ through privately sponsored museums of Mao’s revolution in China; people’s experience of the devastating 2001 earthquake in Gujurat; the ‘inner’ rupture of Protestant faith among Danish nationalist theologians; and the attempt ex nihilo to invent an alphabet for use in Christian prophetic movements in Congo and Angola.

Ruptures takes in new directions broader intellectual debates about continuity and change. In particular, by thematising rupture as a radical, sometimes violent, and even brutal form of discontinuity, it adds a sharper critical edge to contemporary discourses, both in social theory and public debate and policy.

Networks, Labour and Migration among Indian Muslim Artisans

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.

Praise for Networks, Labour and Migration among Indian Muslim Artisans

‘a beautifully written ethnographic account…The attention to individual lives and the struggle to live a decent life is one of the book’s most obvious strengths. In recent years, the bodily acts of craftwork and descriptions of manual skills have gained increasing attention within anthropological research. What has been missing from academic publications are individual stories of artisans in a small urban setting. This book renders craftworkers as central, rather than marginal, and thereby represents an important contribution.’
The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI)

‘A revealing book. In addition to its usefulness as a critical survey of the theoretical and historical models currently in use to understand artisanship in contemporary India and elsewhere, and the ethnographic detail it offers of the Indian woodworking industry, by insisting on the local and the particular as its unit of analysis it offers a challenge to universalising accounts of the experience of contemporary South Asian artisans.’
The Journal of Modern Craft

‘Chambers’ research on how women’s labour is devalued and underpaid lays the ground for future researchers on how women offer care and strength to each other within patriarchal settings.’
moneycontrol.com

‘Networks, Labour and Migration among Indian Muslim Artisans by Thomas Chambers is a substantial ethnography of Muslim artisan woodworkers in the northern Indian city of Saharanpur that admirably evokes the “human actuality” of their working worlds.’
ILR Review

Blog Archives