J Devika
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 18909 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | J Devika |
| NOMBRES | J |
| APELLIDO | Devika |
| FIRMA | DEVIKA J |
| AFILIACIONES | Centre For Development Studies |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 30 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 133 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 30 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2003 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Debt, Discipline and Gender in Twenty-First Century Kerala
Examining the gendered nature of debt among economically vulnerable families in twenty-first-century Kerala, the article critically examines the new economic relationship forged between the state and lower-middle-class women in Kerala in the 2000s, based on low-interest self-help loans at a time when social reproduction called for greater resources for poor families. We treat Kerala as a special case in which the state appears as the mediator, as…
Tiding over socio-ecological vulnerabilities
Asia. The sharp knife of memory By Kondapalli Koteswaramma, trans. VB Sowmya New Delhi
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The Defence of Aachaaram, Femininity, and Neo-Savarna Power in Kerala
This paper examines the discourse of the Ready to Wait (RTW) campaign, led by highly-educated professional neo-savarna women in Kerala, against litigation to open the doors of Kerala’s Sabarimala shrine to women of menstruating ages, hitherto barred from the pilgrimage. The term savarna refers to the privileged caste-communities that, from pre-colonial times, controlled land and other material resources and ritual practices, and continued to do s…
Development and Gender Capital in India
"Development and Gender Capital in India: Change, Continuity, and Conflict in Kerala." The Journal of Development Studies, 55(8), pp. 1859–1860
Planning a ‘slum free' Trivandrum
This paper examines how India’s national urban development agenda is reshaping relationships between national, State and city-level governments. Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, the flagship programme that heralded a new era of urban investment in India, contained a range of key governance aspirations: linking the analysis of urban poverty to city-level planning, developing holistic housing solutions for the urban poor, and above …
Towards reparative readings
The present is a peculiar time for feminists in India. On the one hand, debates of over two decades now make us sharply aware of vital importance of the intersecting multiple axes of power in shaping patriarchy and hence of the need to acknowledge mutual differences and inequalities. On the other, the high-tide of Hindutva nationalistic jingoism sweeps us all together as ‘anti-nationalist’, as equally dangerous to the Hindutvavaadi nation. Not su…
Enacting participatory, gender-sensitive slum redevelopment? Urban governance, power and participation in Trivandrum, Kerala
Decolonizing Nationalist Racism? Reflections on travel writing from mid-twentieth century Kerala, India
This article examines the travel writing of the well-known author from Kerala state, India, S. K. Pottekkatt, who is now recognized as a national literary figure. Recent readings of his African travelogues have pointed to the deep racism that informs them. This article probes further, seeking to place Pottekkatt's ethnocentrism in the context of decolonization, which formed the backdrop of his travels and writing. I argue that Pottekkatt's ethnoc…
Surviving in Contemporary Kerala
This article is based on mixed-method field research in Adimalathura, a coastal village in south Kerala, India, which has been identified as one of the poorest communities in the area. Although this fishing community has been facing severe ecological challenges, including massive resource depletion, it has been able to put up stiff resistance to impending dispossession in the face of a large port project actively promoted by the government, most …
Participatory Democracy or ‘Transformative Appropriation’? The People’s Planning Campaign in Kerala
This article seeks to make sense of a widely acclaimed political experiment in decentralisation and people-centred development in Kerala of the 1990s, the People’s Planning Campaign, by placing it within a wider contemporary history of politics in the region. Much celebratory literature on this experiment has tended to view it as essentially an extension of pre-existing political initiatives in the state associated with mainstream left parties. M…
The ‘Kudumbashree Woman’ and the Kerala Model Woman
This paper reflects on women’s presence in politics in Kerala where neoliberalised welfare now targets a very large number of women and inducts them into local governance. Offering a brief sketch of the shifts in the region in women’s roles and responsibilities from the pre-liberalisation period to the 1990s and after, the paper draws upon two spells of field- work to probe the unintended consequences that neoliberalised welfare has generated, th…
Land, Politics, Work and Home-Life in a City Slum
This article is a limited attempt at sketching the history of a prominent slum in the city of Thiruvananthapuram, using mainly the memories of residents collected as oral narratives. It stops in the mid-1990s, when decentralisation and women’s self-help groups began a new phase of social change. It focuses mainly on changing vicissitudes of land, politics, work and domestic life in this urban slum to reflect on the specific form of marginalisatio…
Community, memory and migration in a globalizing world
Cochin Creole and the perils of casteist cosmopolitanism
This article takes issue with prominent ways of interpreting the cosmopolitanism often attributed to Kerala State, India. By virtue of its geographical location, from medieval times Kerala developed deep historical connections with European, Arabian, and South-East Asian societies. However in contemporary evocations of Kerala’s cosmopolitanism, the historical connections to South-East Asian societies are conspicuous by their absence. Caste Hindu …
Making space for women in urban governance? Leadership and claims-making in a Kerala slum
This paper looks at the role of gender in the shaping and exercise of political authority. Its empirical focus is a slum in central Trivandrum, Kerala's capital city, which is undergoing a phased process of formalisation and rebuilding funded through a flagship Indian national programme, the JNNURM. The upgrade project should offer a dense network of 'invited' spaces for female participation within urban governance, both through women's presence …
Getting beyond the Governmental Fix in Kerala
This essay argues that the current crisis of feminism in Kerala State, India, has little to do with the hegemony of English. Rather, the difficulty arises partly from the difficulties that feminists encounter in translating feminism between different linguistic layers and partly from local feminism’s relative inability to generate an effective counterlanguage to the depoliticizing vocabulary of gender mainstreaming found in governmentalized femin…
Contemporary Dalit Assertions in Kerala
Caste inequality is a heatedly debated issue in contemporary Kerala, in stark contrast to an earlier time, when the idea that Kerala had overcome caste hierarchies through the twin strategies of social development and political mobilisation was still hegemonic. Post-1990s, political developments have pushed the question of caste back into the forefront of public debate, and ‘Dalit identity politics’ has been perceived as a serious threat by Keral…
Migration, transnationalism, and modernity
This article claims that the history of modernity in twentieth-century Kerala is inextricably bound up with the histories of migration and transnationalisms in the region. It argues that a distinction can be made between the earlier and later phases of the migratory and transnational experience. The former allowed for the 'cosmopolitanism of ideas' that imagined hitherto-non-existent communities across cultural boundaries and 'competing cosmopoli…
To Survive or To Flourish? Minority Rights and Syrian Christian Community Assertions in Twentieth-century Travancore/Kerala
The arrival of modernity not only constituted communities but also impelled them in competition against each other in Kerala. Modern politics of the state as a result is inextricably linked with intense community politics. The success of community politics for rights and resources varied across communities, so also did strategies of assertion. This article will focus on different instances of community assertions by the Syrian Christians in twent…
A Tactful Union’
Recently, researchers and activists in India have been calling for attention towards the rising numbers of women entering the labour force as domestic workers, who have remained at the rock-bottom of the working-class hierarchy here. SEWA Kerala’s union displays marked differences from mainstream unions. This article reflects upon the agency of the SEWA domestic worker in contemporary Kerala through the analysis of workers’ narratives, and the sp…
Mobility Towards Work and Politics for Women in Kerala State, India
In this paper, historical analysis and qualitative fieldwork are combined to question the belief that recent efforts in Kerala to induct women into local governance and mobilize poor women into self-help groups implies continuity with the earlier history of women's mobility into the spaces of paid work and politics. For a longer view, the histories of gender-coding of spaces and of women's mobility into paid work and politics are examined. In the…
Egalitarian Developmentalism, Communist Mobilization, and the Question of Caste in Kerala State, India
The article critiques the "Kerala model," which holds up Kerala State, India, as a model that may be emulated by other developing countries, on account of its remarkable advances in social development. The dominant left in Kerala has often claimed credit for such achievements, leading to its glorification as a model for social democracy. This uncritical adoration, which has acquired the status of national commonsense in Kerala, has reduced margin…
Bodies Gone Awry
The article attempts to probe the silence of mainstream development discourse on sexuality and reproductive and sexual rights. This seems to go against the fact that there is now greater admission in development literature on Kerala that gender imbalances in a number of crucial indices do mar the state's claims of high levels of human development. This question is approached through an examination of the ways in which developmentalism has inflect…
Escaping the Shadow Zone
This paper interrogates the historical contexts in which knowledge on ‘women’ has been produced in Kerala state, India, where the radical questioning of patriarchal knowledge-production has begun to acquire unmistakable momentum in the 1990s. Asking whether this indicates an occasion for unqualified celebration, it approaches an answer through critically examining two specific histories, those of discipline-centered, university based academic kno…
Egalitarian Developmentalism, Communist Mobilization, and the Question of Caste in Kerala State, India
The article critiques the "Kerala model," which holds up Kerala State, India, as a model that may be emulated by other developing countries, on account of its remarkable advances in social development. The dominant left in Kerala has often claimed credit for such achievements, leading to its glorification as a model for social democracy. This uncritical adoration, which has acquired the status of national commonsense in Kerala, has reduced margin…
Between ‘Empowerment’ and ‘Liberation’
Micro-finance and its (purported) capacity to empower women is by now a well-explored field all over the world. We now have several tools by which micro-finance programmes may be assessed. However, here we attempt to critically assess the claims of the Kerala government's poverty eradication programme, the Kudumbashree, which combines a micro-finance model with other elements through critical feminist lenses. Further, we attempt to place this pro…
The Aesthetic Woman
In late nineteenth century Malayalee society, the project of social reforming was caught up in the concern to evolve an alternative to established Jati-based mode of ordering human beings. The criticism by the missionaries of the CMS, LMS and the Basel Mission of the established order in Malayalee society as entirely unnatural and inimical to (universal) human values was heard right through the nineteenth century. At the turn of the century, the …
Mobility Towards Work and Politics for Women in Kerala State, India
In this paper, historical analysis and qualitative fieldwork are combined to question the belief that recent efforts in Kerala to induct women into local governance and mobilize poor women into self-help groups implies continuity with the earlier history of women's mobility into the spaces of paid work and politics. For a longer view, the histories of gender-coding of spaces and of women's mobility into paid work and politics are examined. In the…
Bodies Gone Awry
The article attempts to probe the silence of mainstream development discourse on sexuality and reproductive and sexual rights. This seems to go against the fact that there is now greater admission in development literature on Kerala that gender imbalances in a number of crucial indices do mar the state's claims of high levels of human development. This question is approached through an examination of the ways in which developmentalism has inflect…
Enacting participatory, gender-sensitive slum redevelopment? Urban governance, power and participation in Trivandrum, Kerala
The ‘Kudumbashree Woman’ and the Kerala Model Woman
This paper reflects on women’s presence in politics in Kerala where neoliberalised welfare now targets a very large number of women and inducts them into local governance. Offering a brief sketch of the shifts in the region in women’s roles and responsibilities from the pre-liberalisation period to the 1990s and after, the paper draws upon two spells of field- work to probe the unintended consequences that neoliberalised welfare has generated, th…
Negotiating women’s social space
The paper argues that the formation of modern gender identities in early‐twentieth‐century Kerala was deeply implicated in the project of shaping governable subjects who were, at one and the same time ‘free’ and already inserted into modern institutions. Because gender appeared both natural and social, both individualising and general, it seemed to be a superior form of social ordering compared to the pre‐existing order of caste. The actualisatio…
Contemporary Dalit Assertions in Kerala
Caste inequality is a heatedly debated issue in contemporary Kerala, in stark contrast to an earlier time, when the idea that Kerala had overcome caste hierarchies through the twin strategies of social development and political mobilisation was still hegemonic. Post-1990s, political developments have pushed the question of caste back into the forefront of public debate, and ‘Dalit identity politics’ has been perceived as a serious threat by Keral…
Migration, transnationalism, and modernity
This article claims that the history of modernity in twentieth-century Kerala is inextricably bound up with the histories of migration and transnationalisms in the region. It argues that a distinction can be made between the earlier and later phases of the migratory and transnational experience. The former allowed for the 'cosmopolitanism of ideas' that imagined hitherto-non-existent communities across cultural boundaries and 'competing cosmopoli…
A Tactful Union’
Recently, researchers and activists in India have been calling for attention towards the rising numbers of women entering the labour force as domestic workers, who have remained at the rock-bottom of the working-class hierarchy here. SEWA Kerala’s union displays marked differences from mainstream unions. This article reflects upon the agency of the SEWA domestic worker in contemporary Kerala through the analysis of workers’ narratives, and the sp…
The Defence of Aachaaram, Femininity, and Neo-Savarna Power in Kerala
This paper examines the discourse of the Ready to Wait (RTW) campaign, led by highly-educated professional neo-savarna women in Kerala, against litigation to open the doors of Kerala’s Sabarimala shrine to women of menstruating ages, hitherto barred from the pilgrimage. The term savarna refers to the privileged caste-communities that, from pre-colonial times, controlled land and other material resources and ritual practices, and continued to do s…
To Survive or To Flourish? Minority Rights and Syrian Christian Community Assertions in Twentieth-century Travancore/Kerala
The arrival of modernity not only constituted communities but also impelled them in competition against each other in Kerala. Modern politics of the state as a result is inextricably linked with intense community politics. The success of community politics for rights and resources varied across communities, so also did strategies of assertion. This article will focus on different instances of community assertions by the Syrian Christians in twent…
Decolonizing Nationalist Racism? Reflections on travel writing from mid-twentieth century Kerala, India
This article examines the travel writing of the well-known author from Kerala state, India, S. K. Pottekkatt, who is now recognized as a national literary figure. Recent readings of his African travelogues have pointed to the deep racism that informs them. This article probes further, seeking to place Pottekkatt's ethnocentrism in the context of decolonization, which formed the backdrop of his travels and writing. I argue that Pottekkatt's ethnoc…
Making space for women in urban governance? Leadership and claims-making in a Kerala slum
This paper looks at the role of gender in the shaping and exercise of political authority. Its empirical focus is a slum in central Trivandrum, Kerala's capital city, which is undergoing a phased process of formalisation and rebuilding funded through a flagship Indian national programme, the JNNURM. The upgrade project should offer a dense network of 'invited' spaces for female participation within urban governance, both through women's presence …
Beyond Kulina and Kulata
This article re-reads the writings of K. Saraswati Amma, 1 an author marginalised within the Malayalee literary universe and labelled as an incorrigible man-hater. The effort is to read her writing as an engagement with the positions taken in the debates around modern gender in the early 20th-century Malayalee public sphere. It attempts to trace out the specific sharing between her ideas and Malayalee radical reformism of the 1930s, and the criti…
Planning a ‘slum free' Trivandrum
This paper examines how India’s national urban development agenda is reshaping relationships between national, State and city-level governments. Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, the flagship programme that heralded a new era of urban investment in India, contained a range of key governance aspirations: linking the analysis of urban poverty to city-level planning, developing holistic housing solutions for the urban poor, and above …
Cochin Creole and the perils of casteist cosmopolitanism
This article takes issue with prominent ways of interpreting the cosmopolitanism often attributed to Kerala State, India. By virtue of its geographical location, from medieval times Kerala developed deep historical connections with European, Arabian, and South-East Asian societies. However in contemporary evocations of Kerala’s cosmopolitanism, the historical connections to South-East Asian societies are conspicuous by their absence. Caste Hindu …
Escaping the Shadow Zone
This paper interrogates the historical contexts in which knowledge on ‘women’ has been produced in Kerala state, India, where the radical questioning of patriarchal knowledge-production has begun to acquire unmistakable momentum in the 1990s. Asking whether this indicates an occasion for unqualified celebration, it approaches an answer through critically examining two specific histories, those of discipline-centered, university based academic kno…
The Malayali sexual revolution
In early debates in Kerala, artificial contraception was often presented in public discourse as hostile to the shaping of full-fledged modernity in Malayali society. By the 1960s, however, family planning had come to be identified with disciplined, abstemious, bourgeois domesticity. This article explores some dimensions of this transformation. Rather than see this shift as the continuous expansion of 'enlightened consciousness', we turn to less-n…
Towards reparative readings
The present is a peculiar time for feminists in India. On the one hand, debates of over two decades now make us sharply aware of vital importance of the intersecting multiple axes of power in shaping patriarchy and hence of the need to acknowledge mutual differences and inequalities. On the other, the high-tide of Hindutva nationalistic jingoism sweeps us all together as ‘anti-nationalist’, as equally dangerous to the Hindutvavaadi nation. Not su…
Land, Politics, Work and Home-Life in a City Slum
This article is a limited attempt at sketching the history of a prominent slum in the city of Thiruvananthapuram, using mainly the memories of residents collected as oral narratives. It stops in the mid-1990s, when decentralisation and women’s self-help groups began a new phase of social change. It focuses mainly on changing vicissitudes of land, politics, work and domestic life in this urban slum to reflect on the specific form of marginalisatio…
Community, memory and migration in a globalizing world
Beyond Kulina and Kulata
This article re-reads the writings of K. Saraswati Amma, 1 an author marginalised within the Malayalee literary universe and labelled as an incorrigible man-hater. The effort is to read her writing as an engagement with the positions taken in the debates around modern gender in the early 20th-century Malayalee public sphere. It attempts to trace out the specific sharing between her ideas and Malayalee radical reformism of the 1930s, and the criti…
The Malayali sexual revolution
In early debates in Kerala, artificial contraception was often presented in public discourse as hostile to the shaping of full-fledged modernity in Malayali society. By the 1960s, however, family planning had come to be identified with disciplined, abstemious, bourgeois domesticity. This article explores some dimensions of this transformation. Rather than see this shift as the continuous expansion of 'enlightened consciousness', we turn to less-n…
The Aesthetic Woman
In late nineteenth century Malayalee society, the project of social reforming was caught up in the concern to evolve an alternative to established Jati-based mode of ordering human beings. The criticism by the missionaries of the CMS, LMS and the Basel Mission of the established order in Malayalee society as entirely unnatural and inimical to (universal) human values was heard right through the nineteenth century. At the turn of the century, the …
Negotiating women’s social space
The paper argues that the formation of modern gender identities in early‐twentieth‐century Kerala was deeply implicated in the project of shaping governable subjects who were, at one and the same time ‘free’ and already inserted into modern institutions. Because gender appeared both natural and social, both individualising and general, it seemed to be a superior form of social ordering compared to the pre‐existing order of caste. The actualisatio…
Escaping the Shadow Zone
This paper interrogates the historical contexts in which knowledge on ‘women’ has been produced in Kerala state, India, where the radical questioning of patriarchal knowledge-production has begun to acquire unmistakable momentum in the 1990s. Asking whether this indicates an occasion for unqualified celebration, it approaches an answer through critically examining two specific histories, those of discipline-centered, university based academic kno…
Between ‘Empowerment’ and ‘Liberation’
Micro-finance and its (purported) capacity to empower women is by now a well-explored field all over the world. We now have several tools by which micro-finance programmes may be assessed. However, here we attempt to critically assess the claims of the Kerala government's poverty eradication programme, the Kudumbashree, which combines a micro-finance model with other elements through critical feminist lenses. Further, we attempt to place this pro…
Bodies Gone Awry
The article attempts to probe the silence of mainstream development discourse on sexuality and reproductive and sexual rights. This seems to go against the fact that there is now greater admission in development literature on Kerala that gender imbalances in a number of crucial indices do mar the state's claims of high levels of human development. This question is approached through an examination of the ways in which developmentalism has inflect…
Egalitarian Developmentalism, Communist Mobilization, and the Question of Caste in Kerala State, India
The article critiques the "Kerala model," which holds up Kerala State, India, as a model that may be emulated by other developing countries, on account of its remarkable advances in social development. The dominant left in Kerala has often claimed credit for such achievements, leading to its glorification as a model for social democracy. This uncritical adoration, which has acquired the status of national commonsense in Kerala, has reduced margin…
To Survive or To Flourish? Minority Rights and Syrian Christian Community Assertions in Twentieth-century Travancore/Kerala
The arrival of modernity not only constituted communities but also impelled them in competition against each other in Kerala. Modern politics of the state as a result is inextricably linked with intense community politics. The success of community politics for rights and resources varied across communities, so also did strategies of assertion. This article will focus on different instances of community assertions by the Syrian Christians in twent…
A Tactful Union’
Recently, researchers and activists in India have been calling for attention towards the rising numbers of women entering the labour force as domestic workers, who have remained at the rock-bottom of the working-class hierarchy here. SEWA Kerala’s union displays marked differences from mainstream unions. This article reflects upon the agency of the SEWA domestic worker in contemporary Kerala through the analysis of workers’ narratives, and the sp…
Mobility Towards Work and Politics for Women in Kerala State, India
In this paper, historical analysis and qualitative fieldwork are combined to question the belief that recent efforts in Kerala to induct women into local governance and mobilize poor women into self-help groups implies continuity with the earlier history of women's mobility into the spaces of paid work and politics. For a longer view, the histories of gender-coding of spaces and of women's mobility into paid work and politics are examined. In the…
Contemporary Dalit Assertions in Kerala
Caste inequality is a heatedly debated issue in contemporary Kerala, in stark contrast to an earlier time, when the idea that Kerala had overcome caste hierarchies through the twin strategies of social development and political mobilisation was still hegemonic. Post-1990s, political developments have pushed the question of caste back into the forefront of public debate, and ‘Dalit identity politics’ has been perceived as a serious threat by Keral…
Migration, transnationalism, and modernity
This article claims that the history of modernity in twentieth-century Kerala is inextricably bound up with the histories of migration and transnationalisms in the region. It argues that a distinction can be made between the earlier and later phases of the migratory and transnational experience. The former allowed for the 'cosmopolitanism of ideas' that imagined hitherto-non-existent communities across cultural boundaries and 'competing cosmopoli…
Getting beyond the Governmental Fix in Kerala
This essay argues that the current crisis of feminism in Kerala State, India, has little to do with the hegemony of English. Rather, the difficulty arises partly from the difficulties that feminists encounter in translating feminism between different linguistic layers and partly from local feminism’s relative inability to generate an effective counterlanguage to the depoliticizing vocabulary of gender mainstreaming found in governmentalized femin…
Land, Politics, Work and Home-Life in a City Slum
This article is a limited attempt at sketching the history of a prominent slum in the city of Thiruvananthapuram, using mainly the memories of residents collected as oral narratives. It stops in the mid-1990s, when decentralisation and women’s self-help groups began a new phase of social change. It focuses mainly on changing vicissitudes of land, politics, work and domestic life in this urban slum to reflect on the specific form of marginalisatio…
Community, memory and migration in a globalizing world
Cochin Creole and the perils of casteist cosmopolitanism
This article takes issue with prominent ways of interpreting the cosmopolitanism often attributed to Kerala State, India. By virtue of its geographical location, from medieval times Kerala developed deep historical connections with European, Arabian, and South-East Asian societies. However in contemporary evocations of Kerala’s cosmopolitanism, the historical connections to South-East Asian societies are conspicuous by their absence. Caste Hindu …
Making space for women in urban governance? Leadership and claims-making in a Kerala slum
This paper looks at the role of gender in the shaping and exercise of political authority. Its empirical focus is a slum in central Trivandrum, Kerala's capital city, which is undergoing a phased process of formalisation and rebuilding funded through a flagship Indian national programme, the JNNURM. The upgrade project should offer a dense network of 'invited' spaces for female participation within urban governance, both through women's presence …
Participatory Democracy or ‘Transformative Appropriation’? The People’s Planning Campaign in Kerala
This article seeks to make sense of a widely acclaimed political experiment in decentralisation and people-centred development in Kerala of the 1990s, the People’s Planning Campaign, by placing it within a wider contemporary history of politics in the region. Much celebratory literature on this experiment has tended to view it as essentially an extension of pre-existing political initiatives in the state associated with mainstream left parties. M…
The ‘Kudumbashree Woman’ and the Kerala Model Woman
This paper reflects on women’s presence in politics in Kerala where neoliberalised welfare now targets a very large number of women and inducts them into local governance. Offering a brief sketch of the shifts in the region in women’s roles and responsibilities from the pre-liberalisation period to the 1990s and after, the paper draws upon two spells of field- work to probe the unintended consequences that neoliberalised welfare has generated, th…
Surviving in Contemporary Kerala
This article is based on mixed-method field research in Adimalathura, a coastal village in south Kerala, India, which has been identified as one of the poorest communities in the area. Although this fishing community has been facing severe ecological challenges, including massive resource depletion, it has been able to put up stiff resistance to impending dispossession in the face of a large port project actively promoted by the government, most …
Planning a ‘slum free' Trivandrum
This paper examines how India’s national urban development agenda is reshaping relationships between national, State and city-level governments. Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, the flagship programme that heralded a new era of urban investment in India, contained a range of key governance aspirations: linking the analysis of urban poverty to city-level planning, developing holistic housing solutions for the urban poor, and above …
Towards reparative readings
The present is a peculiar time for feminists in India. On the one hand, debates of over two decades now make us sharply aware of vital importance of the intersecting multiple axes of power in shaping patriarchy and hence of the need to acknowledge mutual differences and inequalities. On the other, the high-tide of Hindutva nationalistic jingoism sweeps us all together as ‘anti-nationalist’, as equally dangerous to the Hindutvavaadi nation. Not su…
Enacting participatory, gender-sensitive slum redevelopment? Urban governance, power and participation in Trivandrum, Kerala
Decolonizing Nationalist Racism? Reflections on travel writing from mid-twentieth century Kerala, India
This article examines the travel writing of the well-known author from Kerala state, India, S. K. Pottekkatt, who is now recognized as a national literary figure. Recent readings of his African travelogues have pointed to the deep racism that informs them. This article probes further, seeking to place Pottekkatt's ethnocentrism in the context of decolonization, which formed the backdrop of his travels and writing. I argue that Pottekkatt's ethnoc…
Sociology (28 obras) · Political science (26 obras) · Social and Economic Development in India (25 obras) · Law (23 obras) · Politics (21 obras) · Law (18 obras) · Gender Studies (17 obras) · Gender Studies (14 obras) · Economics (11 obras) · Economic growth (8 obras)