Suchergebnisse

In this article, I explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lives of migrant cab drivers in the Indian city of Hyderabad. Drawing on ethnographic data collected before and during the pandemic, I unpack how cab drivers who have migrated to the city in the hopes of a better life for their families make sense of waiting as an experience that constitutes and undoes the notion of upward mobility. I analyse how my interlocutors relate to time in differing ways through the day and how the pandemic has altered their expectations around the mundane activity of waiting. Building on scholarship that pushes us to apply a temporal lens to migration along with a spatial one, I argue that the uncertainties and precarities created by the pandemic have reconfigured migrants' aspirations, their relationship to work, their imaginaries of the future and their articulation of hope and despair.

In this essay, the author explores the culture of bribes in India. Drawing on ethnographic data collected over seventeen months (2017-2019) in Hyderabad, the author turns the spotlight away from corruption as a "problem" to glean insight into how corruption is perceived and interpreted by citizens who navigate the literal and metaphorical mazes of Indian bureaucracy.

AbstractPublic expressions of sexual intimacy have often been subject to moral censure and legal regulation in modern India. While there is literature that analyzes the cultural‐political logics of censorship and sexual illiberalism in India, the discourses of sympathy towards public displays of intimacy has not received as much critical attention. In this paper, I take the case of one representative discursive space offered by a popular English newspaper and show how the figure of the 'kissing couple' became an important entity in larger discussions about the state of urban development, the role of pleasure in the city, and the imagination of a "modern" Mumbai.

This article attempts to present an understanding of the current discussions regarding religious nationalism in a global framework in order to solicit two themes in the case of Hindu Nationalism and revivalism. One, the conflict of interest that arises between globalization as a "means" and as an "end"; two, the implications of network societies and the politics of marginalization. Globalization is looked at from two ends of a spectrum—as an end product versus as a process in itself. This distinction between theorizing globalization as an end or as a means to an end has been made by scholars such as Robertson and White (2007). However, its implications for religious nationalism have not been explored exhaustively. Furthermore, the analysis of Hindu nationalism and revivalism as a peripheral dynamic in the Western nations needs to be problematized in this regard.