Smita Tewari Jassal

This Study Adopts A Two-Pronged Approach Using Historical And Participatory Methods To Analyse The Processes By Which Women Have Been Denied Land For Ages. The Concerns Of The Naugarh (A Remote Forest Region Of Chanduli District Near Varanasi) Women Expressed During A Workshop Form The Crux Of The Study.

Women and Land in Uttar Pradesh

Daughters of the Earth

Based on anthropological field research, Unearthing Gender analyzes folk songs sung primarily by lower caste women in north India while labouring in the fields, at weddings, during travels, and in other settings. Smita Jassal uses these songs to explore how ideas of caste, gender, sexuality, labour, and power may be strengthened, questioned and fine-tuned through music. At the heart of the book is a library of songs, in their original Bhojpuri and in English translation, framed by Jassal's analytic insights into the complexities of gender and power. The power of these songs, Jassal argues, lies in hinting and suggesting themes rather than directly addressing them: women sing what they often cannot talk about. Women's lives, their feelings, their relationships, and social and familial bonds are persuasively presented in song, and for the ethnographer, the songs provide a safer, more natural language for these women to articulate opinions than the standard ethnographic interview. In this way, the songs offer an entry into the culture and everyday lives that produce them and embody the voices of a marginalized group that has rarely been the focus of systematic analytical inquiry.

Folksongs of North India

Unearthing Gender

Eyal Ben-Ari

This important book is a dialogue on the theme of partition and its far-reaching sociological implications for communal patterns, generational dynamics and individual lives. While the governing imagery of partition is drawn from the context of India and Pakistan, the analysis compares similar processes in the context of Israel and Palestine and East and West Germany. Developing the concept of 'partition-societies', the volume succinctly explains the social, economic and political implications of such divisions. The lens of partition is used to focus on how societies that have experienced breaks and traumas are organized and constituted and the ways in which they deploy their understanding of the past to reconstruct themselves. The book enquires into ways in which local communities as well as wider national entities use their knowledge of the past. The international contributors to this volume show how this separation was of significance not only in the strict political sense but formed the basis for long-term processes of identity, of memory and inspiration, and the very basis on which different societies were organized.

The Partition Motif in Contemporary Conflicts

Halil Turan

India and Turkey, Asia Minor and the Subcontinent of Hindustan, and the Ottomans and Mughals have had shared histories of contact, engagement, and dialogue over the centuries. Much of northern India was under the control of rulers from Central Asia since at least the thirteenth century. Startling glimpses of the presence of Turkic-speaking peoples from Central Asia are still visible, for example, in north Indian material cultures - languages, cuisine, religion, architecture, and medicine. This book places the Indian subcontinent side by side with the Turkic-speaking world, both past and present, in order to understand one geographical context in relation to the other. The juxtaposition of the two countries throws up some startling commonalities as well as considerable differences, and it is the variations as well as the similarities that allow for comparability. By exploring historical connections and providing a comparative perspective in terms of spirituality and religion, social movements, political economy, and foreign policy, the book initiates productive cross-cultural conversations, allowing concerns from one location to illuminate the other. The book is split into five parts: History and Memory, Nationhood and Leadership, Secularism, Debating Development, and claiming the City. The first comparison of the Subcontinent and present-day Turkey, the book emphasizes the importance of cross-regional comparative analysis in order to overcome some of the pitfalls of area-focused analysis. Filling a gap in the existing literature, it will be of interest to scholars in various disciplines, including politics, religion, history, urbanization, and development in the Middle East and Asia.

Smita Tewari Jassal

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