Haripriya Narasimhan
Biographic Data
| ID | 109338 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Haripriya Narasimhan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Haripriya |
| FAMILY NAME | Narasimhan |
| SIGNATURE | NARASIMHAN H |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 264 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 15 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Pandemic Memes and Tamil Health Narratives
This article analyses the Tamil COVID-19 memes as artifacts of humor and social commentary during Tamil Nadu's first pandemic wave. Drawing on a corpus of WhatsApp memes, cross-verified on Facebook and Instagram, we trace how Tamil cinematic iconography and anthropomorphism articulated health anxieties and negotiated therapeutic authority between Siddha and biomedicine. Using visual ethnography, we identify two narrative logics, namely, dissonanc…
Aadhaar, Adivasis, and forced migration
This paper analyses how India’s Aadhaar biometric system influences the everyday lives of the Gutti Koya, an indigenous (Adivasi) and forced migrant group in southern India. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it reveals that Aadhaar creates new vulnerabilities in accessing welfare entitlements, particularly health and nutrition services for women and children. The findings demonstrate a dual impact: Aadhaar operates as a state technology of surve…
Filtering for purity
The new middle class in contemporary India is dominated by anxiety about the quality of resources and infrastructures. Concentrating on water management in independent houses and gated communities in the South Indian city of Hyderabad, this study highlights concerns about “quality” manifesting in distrust of state-supplied water. This leads to the emergence of private water suppliers and water purifiers. Using the framework of “technopolitics,” t…
Placating Kin
Newlywed couples in Telangana perform various rituals to get blessed with children, which usually take place soon after marriage. In the absence of immediate conception, the couple is advised by the extended family to perform specific rituals to appease fertility gods. This article attempts to document fertility rituals in the Telangana region and the crucial ways in which they help men diagnosed with infertility. It will discuss in detail a comm…
Ki sambandha hoibe takhon he
Na_chni na_ch, a dance form of West Bengal, is going through a difficult time in its 500-year history. The woman dancer, who is known as a nachni, performs, often at night, along with her male partner, or rasik. Her life is intricately tied with that of her rasik, which includes her status as a woman performer at public events and the observance of proper rituals upon her death. Caught in a web of exploitation, the nachni essentially has no ‘kin’…
Birth in the Age of Aids
Reviewed by: Birth in the Age of AIDS: Women, Reproduction, and HIV/AIDS in India by Cecilia Van Hollen Haripriya Narasimhan Cecilia Van Hollen, Birth in the Age of AIDS: Women, Reproduction, and HIV/AIDS in India. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. 288pp. This important book is about the enormous challenges women with HIV/AIDS face as they become mothers and struggle to ensure good health for their children. Closely examining state healt…
The Best Laid Plans
This paper is a qualitative assessment of a public health insurance scheme in the state of Andhra Pradesh, south India, called the Rajiv Aarogyasri Community Health Insurance Scheme (or Aarogyasri), using the case-study method. Focusing on inpatient hospital care and especially on surgical treatments leaves the scheme wanting in meeting the health care needs of and addressing the impoverishing health expenditure incurred by the poor, especially t…
Tamil Brahmans
Marriage, Education, and Employment among Tamil Brahman Women in South India, 1891–2010
A hundred years ago, pre-puberty marriage for girls was the norm among South Indian Tamil Brahmans, and Brahman girls received little or no education. By the 1940s, child marriage had largely ended and girls’ education was improving gradually. Today, girls’ educational standards more or less match that of boys’, and many Brahman women are also employed outside the home. In relation to marriage and education in particular, the position of women ha…
Adjusting distances
This article explores the continued relevance of menstrual pollution among the Vattima, a Tamil Brahmin sub-caste. Even as they are part of the Tamil Brahmin diaspora, the Vattima Brahmins, a small, close-knit community, are in active contact with ancestral villages in the Kaveri delta region. Based on data gathered from Vattima in India and in USA, this article looks at the discourse surrounding menstruation and seclusion practices across genera…
Traditional vocations and modern professions among Tamil Brahmans in colonial and post-colonial south India
Since the nineteenth century, Tamil Brahmans have been very well represented in the educated professions, especially law and administration, medicine, engineering and nowadays, information technology. This is partly a continuation of the Brahmans' role as literate service people, owing to their traditions of education, learning and literacy, but the range of professions shows that any direct continuity is more apparent than real. Genealogical dat…
Reply to Mahalingam Narayanan
Companionate marriage in India
The Eighteen-Village Vattimas are a Tamil Brahman subcaste. They were formerly rural landlords, but today they mostly belong to the urban middle class. In recent decades, the Vattimas' marriage system has changed markedly. Child marriage has ended and the age of marriage has since risen further. Close-kin marriage is no longer preferred, although subcaste endogamy remains the norm. Nevertheless, the education and employment of individuals, and th…
From Landlords to Software Engineers
In south India's rapidly expanding information technology (IT) industry, the small, traditional elite of Tamil Brahmans is disproportionately well represented. Actually, no figures to confirm this assertion exist, but all the circumstantial evidence suggests that it is true, especially among the IT professionals and software engineers employed by the leading software and services companies in Chennai (Madras).1Since the nineteenth century, Tamil …
Information Technology Professionals and the New-Rich Middle Class in Chennai (Madras)
Since 1991, when the policy of economic liberalisation began in earnest, the size and prosperity of India's middle class have grown considerably. Yet sound sociological and ethnographic information about its social structure and cultural values is still sparse, and as André Béteille (2003a: 75) comments: 'Everything or nearly everything that is written about the Indian middle class is written by middle-class Indians...[who] tend to oscillate betw…
Companionate marriage in India
The Eighteen-Village Vattimas are a Tamil Brahman subcaste. They were formerly rural landlords, but today they mostly belong to the urban middle class. In recent decades, the Vattimas' marriage system has changed markedly. Child marriage has ended and the age of marriage has since risen further. Close-kin marriage is no longer preferred, although subcaste endogamy remains the norm. Nevertheless, the education and employment of individuals, and th…
Information Technology Professionals and the New-Rich Middle Class in Chennai (Madras)
Since 1991, when the policy of economic liberalisation began in earnest, the size and prosperity of India's middle class have grown considerably. Yet sound sociological and ethnographic information about its social structure and cultural values is still sparse, and as André Béteille (2003a: 75) comments: 'Everything or nearly everything that is written about the Indian middle class is written by middle-class Indians...[who] tend to oscillate betw…
Tamil Brahmans
From Landlords to Software Engineers
In south India's rapidly expanding information technology (IT) industry, the small, traditional elite of Tamil Brahmans is disproportionately well represented. Actually, no figures to confirm this assertion exist, but all the circumstantial evidence suggests that it is true, especially among the IT professionals and software engineers employed by the leading software and services companies in Chennai (Madras).1Since the nineteenth century, Tamil …
Marriage, Education, and Employment among Tamil Brahman Women in South India, 1891–2010
A hundred years ago, pre-puberty marriage for girls was the norm among South Indian Tamil Brahmans, and Brahman girls received little or no education. By the 1940s, child marriage had largely ended and girls’ education was improving gradually. Today, girls’ educational standards more or less match that of boys’, and many Brahman women are also employed outside the home. In relation to marriage and education in particular, the position of women ha…
Adjusting distances
This article explores the continued relevance of menstrual pollution among the Vattima, a Tamil Brahmin sub-caste. Even as they are part of the Tamil Brahmin diaspora, the Vattima Brahmins, a small, close-knit community, are in active contact with ancestral villages in the Kaveri delta region. Based on data gathered from Vattima in India and in USA, this article looks at the discourse surrounding menstruation and seclusion practices across genera…
Traditional vocations and modern professions among Tamil Brahmans in colonial and post-colonial south India
Since the nineteenth century, Tamil Brahmans have been very well represented in the educated professions, especially law and administration, medicine, engineering and nowadays, information technology. This is partly a continuation of the Brahmans' role as literate service people, owing to their traditions of education, learning and literacy, but the range of professions shows that any direct continuity is more apparent than real. Genealogical dat…
Reply to Mahalingam Narayanan
Information Technology Professionals and the New-Rich Middle Class in Chennai (Madras)
Since 1991, when the policy of economic liberalisation began in earnest, the size and prosperity of India's middle class have grown considerably. Yet sound sociological and ethnographic information about its social structure and cultural values is still sparse, and as André Béteille (2003a: 75) comments: 'Everything or nearly everything that is written about the Indian middle class is written by middle-class Indians...[who] tend to oscillate betw…
Companionate marriage in India
The Eighteen-Village Vattimas are a Tamil Brahman subcaste. They were formerly rural landlords, but today they mostly belong to the urban middle class. In recent decades, the Vattimas' marriage system has changed markedly. Child marriage has ended and the age of marriage has since risen further. Close-kin marriage is no longer preferred, although subcaste endogamy remains the norm. Nevertheless, the education and employment of individuals, and th…
From Landlords to Software Engineers
In south India's rapidly expanding information technology (IT) industry, the small, traditional elite of Tamil Brahmans is disproportionately well represented. Actually, no figures to confirm this assertion exist, but all the circumstantial evidence suggests that it is true, especially among the IT professionals and software engineers employed by the leading software and services companies in Chennai (Madras).1Since the nineteenth century, Tamil …
Traditional vocations and modern professions among Tamil Brahmans in colonial and post-colonial south India
Since the nineteenth century, Tamil Brahmans have been very well represented in the educated professions, especially law and administration, medicine, engineering and nowadays, information technology. This is partly a continuation of the Brahmans' role as literate service people, owing to their traditions of education, learning and literacy, but the range of professions shows that any direct continuity is more apparent than real. Genealogical dat…
Reply to Mahalingam Narayanan
Adjusting distances
This article explores the continued relevance of menstrual pollution among the Vattima, a Tamil Brahmin sub-caste. Even as they are part of the Tamil Brahmin diaspora, the Vattima Brahmins, a small, close-knit community, are in active contact with ancestral villages in the Kaveri delta region. Based on data gathered from Vattima in India and in USA, this article looks at the discourse surrounding menstruation and seclusion practices across genera…
Marriage, Education, and Employment among Tamil Brahman Women in South India, 1891–2010
A hundred years ago, pre-puberty marriage for girls was the norm among South Indian Tamil Brahmans, and Brahman girls received little or no education. By the 1940s, child marriage had largely ended and girls’ education was improving gradually. Today, girls’ educational standards more or less match that of boys’, and many Brahman women are also employed outside the home. In relation to marriage and education in particular, the position of women ha…
The Best Laid Plans
This paper is a qualitative assessment of a public health insurance scheme in the state of Andhra Pradesh, south India, called the Rajiv Aarogyasri Community Health Insurance Scheme (or Aarogyasri), using the case-study method. Focusing on inpatient hospital care and especially on surgical treatments leaves the scheme wanting in meeting the health care needs of and addressing the impoverishing health expenditure incurred by the poor, especially t…
Tamil Brahmans
Birth in the Age of Aids
Reviewed by: Birth in the Age of AIDS: Women, Reproduction, and HIV/AIDS in India by Cecilia Van Hollen Haripriya Narasimhan Cecilia Van Hollen, Birth in the Age of AIDS: Women, Reproduction, and HIV/AIDS in India. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. 288pp. This important book is about the enormous challenges women with HIV/AIDS face as they become mothers and struggle to ensure good health for their children. Closely examining state healt…
Ki sambandha hoibe takhon he
Na_chni na_ch, a dance form of West Bengal, is going through a difficult time in its 500-year history. The woman dancer, who is known as a nachni, performs, often at night, along with her male partner, or rasik. Her life is intricately tied with that of her rasik, which includes her status as a woman performer at public events and the observance of proper rituals upon her death. Caught in a web of exploitation, the nachni essentially has no ‘kin’…
Placating Kin
Newlywed couples in Telangana perform various rituals to get blessed with children, which usually take place soon after marriage. In the absence of immediate conception, the couple is advised by the extended family to perform specific rituals to appease fertility gods. This article attempts to document fertility rituals in the Telangana region and the crucial ways in which they help men diagnosed with infertility. It will discuss in detail a comm…
Pandemic Memes and Tamil Health Narratives
This article analyses the Tamil COVID-19 memes as artifacts of humor and social commentary during Tamil Nadu's first pandemic wave. Drawing on a corpus of WhatsApp memes, cross-verified on Facebook and Instagram, we trace how Tamil cinematic iconography and anthropomorphism articulated health anxieties and negotiated therapeutic authority between Siddha and biomedicine. Using visual ethnography, we identify two narrative logics, namely, dissonanc…
Aadhaar, Adivasis, and forced migration
This paper analyses how India’s Aadhaar biometric system influences the everyday lives of the Gutti Koya, an indigenous (Adivasi) and forced migrant group in southern India. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it reveals that Aadhaar creates new vulnerabilities in accessing welfare entitlements, particularly health and nutrition services for women and children. The findings demonstrate a dual impact: Aadhaar operates as a state technology of surve…
Filtering for purity
The new middle class in contemporary India is dominated by anxiety about the quality of resources and infrastructures. Concentrating on water management in independent houses and gated communities in the South Indian city of Hyderabad, this study highlights concerns about “quality” manifesting in distrust of state-supplied water. This leads to the emergence of private water suppliers and water purifiers. Using the framework of “technopolitics,” t…
Sociology (11 works) · Political science (8 works) · Tamil (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (5 works) · Caste (5 works) · Economics (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works)