A Gandhi
Biographic Data
| ID | 22861 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Gandhi |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Gandhi |
| SIGNATURE | GANDHI A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany, and University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0281-3748 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 37 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Translating transactions
In this Modern Asian Studies book symposium, scholars of South Asia analyse the political, ethical, and epistemic aspects of market life. They build on the 2020 Cambridge volume, Rethinking Markets in Modern India: Embedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction, edited by Ajay Gandhi, Barbara Harriss-White, Douglas Haynes, and Sebastian Schwecke. This interdisciplinary conversation approaches transactional realms from the disciplines of history, an…
Shock and shove
This essay examines the phenomenological and political dimensions of force in north India. Manifest as embodied experience, and as power and domination, force encompasses felt emotion and collective clout. Yet unlike other categories traversing the political and experiential, force has been comparatively understudied. This paper surveys ethnographic and historical examples where force is prevalent. We see it in urban life, as an idiom of moral st…
Archaeometric characterization of water jars from the Muslim period at the city of Pollentia (Alcúdia, Mallorca, Balearic Islands)
The Roman city of Pollentia was founded in 123 BCE in the northern part of the island of Mallorca (Balearic Islands, Spain). The city developed through the Republican and Imperial periods. At the end of the third century CE, a large fire destroyed parts of the city, although it survived through the Vandal and the Byzantine periods. At the beginning of the tenth century, the Balearics were conquered by the Muslim forces. Recent excavations of the …
The constrained circumference of Delhi Muslims
This article is part of a Book Forum review of Ghazala Jamil’s book Accumulation by Segregation (2017). The Book Forum consists of individual commentaries on this text by four interested scholars, followed by a response by the author. The article may be read individually or alongside the other contributions to the Forum, which together constitute a comprehensive discussion of the themes and arguments in the book
The sanctioning state
This article examines the Indian state's engagement with deportable foreign migrants. It draws on an ethnography of officials' responses in Mumbai to noncitizens from Bangladesh and countries in Africa. The conceptual focus is on the "sanctioning state": official powers that alternately permit or prohibit migrants' presence. At one level, the Indian state sanctions, or prohibits, unauthorized migration. Simultaneously, via authorities' discretion…
Delicious Delhi
This article examines how Old Delhi is represented and recreated in contemporary India. Delhi’s old city was once the locus of pre-colonial Mughal sovereignty. It is now often encountered via nationalist spectacles, mass-media images and consumption practices. Paralleling neo-liberalism’s onset in the 1990s, its street food, bazaar spaces and historical monuments have been avidly appropriated by reigning institutions and classes. Old Delhi sugges…
The language of the crowd
This essay details the fascination, apprehension, and ambivalence associated with mass crowds and public congregation in urban north India. Most studies of the crowd adopt a classed bourgeois or state planner’s perspective. As a result, the crowd is conceptually held at arm’s length, its complexities flattened as it is viewed from the outside. In studies of India, the popular and subaltern, made interchangeable with the crowd, is often viewed via…
The Hermeneutics of the Bazaar
This paper presents an ethnographic study of a redevelopment controversy in Delhi's old city. It considers the perspectives of traders, hawkers, politicians and officials on the proposed revamping of the Meena Bazaar. The paper illustrates how hermeneutic and aesthetic dimensions suffuse public and political life in India. Specifically, sincere intentions, evoked in speech and performance, are seen as a prerequisite of public presentation and as …
Provisional Relations, Indeterminate Conditions
In the introduction to this special section, we present six ethnographic articles that explore the sites and forms of ‘non-sociological sociality’ in South Asia. Set in urban spaces where the familiar vectors of relations, such as ethnicity, class, gender or age, may be attenuated, the articles examine how social and political entanglement is suffused with ambiguity, indeterminacy, provisionality and contingency. In these sites, opaque conditions…
Standing Still and Cutting in Line
The queue, or the line, is a defining feature of modern life. This paper examines this ubiquitous form in India as a species of comportment. It offers an ethnographic assessment of queues in Delhi. They are grouped into two types: the 'massified' queue, drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre's work; and the 'interactional' queue, framed by Erving Goffman's writings. The paper discusses heavily policed queues, whose linear and serial character is produced by…
Introduction to crowds and conviviality
In this introduction to the special issue of Ethnography, we argue that the South Asian city is not an inert backdrop to the lives of its various inhabitants. Living cities change and morph, their instability and transformation demanding a concomitant openness to change from its inhabitants. The open-endedness of the living city in South Asia requires an open and exploratory ethnographic approach unburdened by inflexible terminology, formats or c…
Catch me if you can
This article is a study of Delhi's monkey-catchers, municipal contractors who trap and relocate simians. I examine their perspectives, as well as those of planners and residents. Parallel but competing dispositions vis-à-vis monkeys - fascination and repulsion, piousness and annoyance - are detailed. In so doing, the article addresses the following themes: purification and displacement, the neighbour and stranger, multi-species cohabitation, plan…
Developing compliance and resistance
In this article I conceptualize a conflict over the Narmada damming project in central India by highlighting particular spatial fields and larger trajectories of political interaction. The Narmada project's maintenance and destabilization is evinced in a range of processes, including conflict over afforestation in tribal villages, protest narratives over resettlement in regional centres, and transnational lobbying of donor agencies. The interpene…
The Indian diaspora in global advocacy
The activities of Indian diasporic activists in the subcontinent and North America are explored in order to question the simple dichotomies and categories through which advocacy networks are often understood. These dichotomies include West/non-West, violence/non-violence and local/global. The argument illuminates some of pressures, contradictions and fissures shaping the Indian diaspora's involvement in advocacy issues. There are culturally speci…
Introduction to crowds and conviviality
In this introduction to the special issue of Ethnography, we argue that the South Asian city is not an inert backdrop to the lives of its various inhabitants. Living cities change and morph, their instability and transformation demanding a concomitant openness to change from its inhabitants. The open-endedness of the living city in South Asia requires an open and exploratory ethnographic approach unburdened by inflexible terminology, formats or c…
Catch me if you can
This article is a study of Delhi's monkey-catchers, municipal contractors who trap and relocate simians. I examine their perspectives, as well as those of planners and residents. Parallel but competing dispositions vis-à-vis monkeys - fascination and repulsion, piousness and annoyance - are detailed. In so doing, the article addresses the following themes: purification and displacement, the neighbour and stranger, multi-species cohabitation, plan…
The sanctioning state
This article examines the Indian state's engagement with deportable foreign migrants. It draws on an ethnography of officials' responses in Mumbai to noncitizens from Bangladesh and countries in Africa. The conceptual focus is on the "sanctioning state": official powers that alternately permit or prohibit migrants' presence. At one level, the Indian state sanctions, or prohibits, unauthorized migration. Simultaneously, via authorities' discretion…
The language of the crowd
This essay details the fascination, apprehension, and ambivalence associated with mass crowds and public congregation in urban north India. Most studies of the crowd adopt a classed bourgeois or state planner’s perspective. As a result, the crowd is conceptually held at arm’s length, its complexities flattened as it is viewed from the outside. In studies of India, the popular and subaltern, made interchangeable with the crowd, is often viewed via…
Standing Still and Cutting in Line
The queue, or the line, is a defining feature of modern life. This paper examines this ubiquitous form in India as a species of comportment. It offers an ethnographic assessment of queues in Delhi. They are grouped into two types: the 'massified' queue, drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre's work; and the 'interactional' queue, framed by Erving Goffman's writings. The paper discusses heavily policed queues, whose linear and serial character is produced by…
Developing compliance and resistance
In this article I conceptualize a conflict over the Narmada damming project in central India by highlighting particular spatial fields and larger trajectories of political interaction. The Narmada project's maintenance and destabilization is evinced in a range of processes, including conflict over afforestation in tribal villages, protest narratives over resettlement in regional centres, and transnational lobbying of donor agencies. The interpene…
Archaeometric characterization of water jars from the Muslim period at the city of Pollentia (Alcúdia, Mallorca, Balearic Islands)
The Roman city of Pollentia was founded in 123 BCE in the northern part of the island of Mallorca (Balearic Islands, Spain). The city developed through the Republican and Imperial periods. At the end of the third century CE, a large fire destroyed parts of the city, although it survived through the Vandal and the Byzantine periods. At the beginning of the tenth century, the Balearics were conquered by the Muslim forces. Recent excavations of the …
The Hermeneutics of the Bazaar
This paper presents an ethnographic study of a redevelopment controversy in Delhi's old city. It considers the perspectives of traders, hawkers, politicians and officials on the proposed revamping of the Meena Bazaar. The paper illustrates how hermeneutic and aesthetic dimensions suffuse public and political life in India. Specifically, sincere intentions, evoked in speech and performance, are seen as a prerequisite of public presentation and as …
Provisional Relations, Indeterminate Conditions
In the introduction to this special section, we present six ethnographic articles that explore the sites and forms of ‘non-sociological sociality’ in South Asia. Set in urban spaces where the familiar vectors of relations, such as ethnicity, class, gender or age, may be attenuated, the articles examine how social and political entanglement is suffused with ambiguity, indeterminacy, provisionality and contingency. In these sites, opaque conditions…
The Indian diaspora in global advocacy
The activities of Indian diasporic activists in the subcontinent and North America are explored in order to question the simple dichotomies and categories through which advocacy networks are often understood. These dichotomies include West/non-West, violence/non-violence and local/global. The argument illuminates some of pressures, contradictions and fissures shaping the Indian diaspora's involvement in advocacy issues. There are culturally speci…
Developing compliance and resistance
In this article I conceptualize a conflict over the Narmada damming project in central India by highlighting particular spatial fields and larger trajectories of political interaction. The Narmada project's maintenance and destabilization is evinced in a range of processes, including conflict over afforestation in tribal villages, protest narratives over resettlement in regional centres, and transnational lobbying of donor agencies. The interpene…
Introduction to crowds and conviviality
In this introduction to the special issue of Ethnography, we argue that the South Asian city is not an inert backdrop to the lives of its various inhabitants. Living cities change and morph, their instability and transformation demanding a concomitant openness to change from its inhabitants. The open-endedness of the living city in South Asia requires an open and exploratory ethnographic approach unburdened by inflexible terminology, formats or c…
Catch me if you can
This article is a study of Delhi's monkey-catchers, municipal contractors who trap and relocate simians. I examine their perspectives, as well as those of planners and residents. Parallel but competing dispositions vis-à-vis monkeys - fascination and repulsion, piousness and annoyance - are detailed. In so doing, the article addresses the following themes: purification and displacement, the neighbour and stranger, multi-species cohabitation, plan…
Standing Still and Cutting in Line
The queue, or the line, is a defining feature of modern life. This paper examines this ubiquitous form in India as a species of comportment. It offers an ethnographic assessment of queues in Delhi. They are grouped into two types: the 'massified' queue, drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre's work; and the 'interactional' queue, framed by Erving Goffman's writings. The paper discusses heavily policed queues, whose linear and serial character is produced by…
Delicious Delhi
This article examines how Old Delhi is represented and recreated in contemporary India. Delhi’s old city was once the locus of pre-colonial Mughal sovereignty. It is now often encountered via nationalist spectacles, mass-media images and consumption practices. Paralleling neo-liberalism’s onset in the 1990s, its street food, bazaar spaces and historical monuments have been avidly appropriated by reigning institutions and classes. Old Delhi sugges…
The language of the crowd
This essay details the fascination, apprehension, and ambivalence associated with mass crowds and public congregation in urban north India. Most studies of the crowd adopt a classed bourgeois or state planner’s perspective. As a result, the crowd is conceptually held at arm’s length, its complexities flattened as it is viewed from the outside. In studies of India, the popular and subaltern, made interchangeable with the crowd, is often viewed via…
The Hermeneutics of the Bazaar
This paper presents an ethnographic study of a redevelopment controversy in Delhi's old city. It considers the perspectives of traders, hawkers, politicians and officials on the proposed revamping of the Meena Bazaar. The paper illustrates how hermeneutic and aesthetic dimensions suffuse public and political life in India. Specifically, sincere intentions, evoked in speech and performance, are seen as a prerequisite of public presentation and as …
Provisional Relations, Indeterminate Conditions
In the introduction to this special section, we present six ethnographic articles that explore the sites and forms of ‘non-sociological sociality’ in South Asia. Set in urban spaces where the familiar vectors of relations, such as ethnicity, class, gender or age, may be attenuated, the articles examine how social and political entanglement is suffused with ambiguity, indeterminacy, provisionality and contingency. In these sites, opaque conditions…
The sanctioning state
This article examines the Indian state's engagement with deportable foreign migrants. It draws on an ethnography of officials' responses in Mumbai to noncitizens from Bangladesh and countries in Africa. The conceptual focus is on the "sanctioning state": official powers that alternately permit or prohibit migrants' presence. At one level, the Indian state sanctions, or prohibits, unauthorized migration. Simultaneously, via authorities' discretion…
The constrained circumference of Delhi Muslims
This article is part of a Book Forum review of Ghazala Jamil’s book Accumulation by Segregation (2017). The Book Forum consists of individual commentaries on this text by four interested scholars, followed by a response by the author. The article may be read individually or alongside the other contributions to the Forum, which together constitute a comprehensive discussion of the themes and arguments in the book
Archaeometric characterization of water jars from the Muslim period at the city of Pollentia (Alcúdia, Mallorca, Balearic Islands)
The Roman city of Pollentia was founded in 123 BCE in the northern part of the island of Mallorca (Balearic Islands, Spain). The city developed through the Republican and Imperial periods. At the end of the third century CE, a large fire destroyed parts of the city, although it survived through the Vandal and the Byzantine periods. At the beginning of the tenth century, the Balearics were conquered by the Muslim forces. Recent excavations of the …
Shock and shove
This essay examines the phenomenological and political dimensions of force in north India. Manifest as embodied experience, and as power and domination, force encompasses felt emotion and collective clout. Yet unlike other categories traversing the political and experiential, force has been comparatively understudied. This paper surveys ethnographic and historical examples where force is prevalent. We see it in urban life, as an idiom of moral st…
Translating transactions
In this Modern Asian Studies book symposium, scholars of South Asia analyse the political, ethical, and epistemic aspects of market life. They build on the 2020 Cambridge volume, Rethinking Markets in Modern India: Embedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction, edited by Ajay Gandhi, Barbara Harriss-White, Douglas Haynes, and Sebastian Schwecke. This interdisciplinary conversation approaches transactional realms from the disciplines of history, an…
Sociology (11 works) · Political science (10 works) · Law (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (6 works) · South Asian Studies and Conflicts (6 works) · Anthropology (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Ethnography (5 works) · Media studies (5 works)