Ravinder Kaur
Biographic Data
| ID | 3595092 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ravinder Kaur |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ravinder |
| FAMILY NAME | Kaur |
| SIGNATURE | KAUR R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Copenhagen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9382-2032 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 127 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Pipeline Dreams
The article traces the evolution of interests, choices and goals of high school girls in Delhi, India, as they pursue academic aspirations in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine (STEMM). It aims to understand the complex ways in which girls’ aspirations are shaped and translated into appropriate higher education choices, and if and how aspiration formation is gendered. Through in-depth case studies and thematic analysis, we…
Global South Redux
The idea of the Global South has been re-surging since the onset of the Ukraine War. Yet its renewed form is not a re-run of its twentieth century original. It draws from multiple bloodlines of anti-imperialist struggles, bureaucratic regimes of development, and the promise of capitalist markets. Once a name for the global ‘other’, the concept has been reconfigured as self-identification of an emerging geopolitical force by a coalition of postcol…
A foot in the door
Mapping the Linkage Between Financial Literacy and Financial Inclusion
In the era of the digital world, the revitalization of poor households' responses to the availability and usage of financial services is essential. Deprived individuals who possess financial literacy are able to make better financial decisions by learning about and comprehending the different financial services that are offered in the market. This research is an attempt to investigate the mediating effect of online banking and the moderating effe…
Waiting for the Miracle
Why do the dreamworlds of the economic miracle persist even when it fails to deliver? What might account for its resilience, its endless capacity to resurrect in ever-new forms in old and new territories? This essay explores the enduring enigma of economic enchantments: the modern belief in the power of capitalist growth to salve the humiliation of defeat in wars and colonial rule, to turn depressed economies torn by ethnic conflicts, external de…
Bhagat Dhanna Ji and His Contribution in Guru Granth Sahib
The Guru Granth Sahib, the holy scripture of Sikhism and the Eternal guru of the Sikhs, stands as a monumental text in the history of spiritual literature, embodying a wealth of philosophical wisdom, moral guidance and universal ideology. This article explores the role of Bhagat Dhanna in the Guru Granth Sahib and its significance as well. This article also tells us about the journey of transformation of a simple farmer into a great Bhakti Saint.…
Femtech apps and quantification of the reproductive body in India
This article examines datafication of the reproductive body in India through use of femtech mobile phone applications (henceforth, apps). Femtech apps quantify reproductive processes such as periods, conception, pregnancy and hormonal health and promise their users greater 'self-awareness' and 'control' through 'self-management'. Most studies on femtech refer to users in the Global North, while there are few studies on femtech adoption in the dev…
Safeguarding Children Living with Foster Carers, Adopters and Special Guardians
This 131-page companion Good Practice Guide from Coram BAAF provides, through its seven chapters, a detailed exploration of themes from fifty-two serious/significant case reviews carried out in England, Wales and Scotland between January 2007 and July 2019. The reviews related to ninety-eight children. Although the aim was to draw cases from the four nations, no reviews from Northern Ireland and only one from Scotland were accessed, due to differ…
Disrupting Caste Hegemony in Punjab
The idea of caste has always been debatable, contested and controversial. Since the time of its inception, it has been prevalent throughout India. Any Indian cannot define his or her identity without referring to his or her caste. However, it also became and still is a reason behind the marginalization and exploitation of millions of people. Various activists, scholars, thinkers, political leaders and literary writers have tried to fight against …
Crisis futures
Covid-19 was widely pitched as a potential turning point of history, a rare crisis-as-opportunity by political leaders and policymakers. This claim of being at a revolutionary threshold, an exceptional time in history, and capitalising upon that claim to reshape the political-economic landscape is at the core of the speculative politics of crisis, or what I call crisis futures . Critical in this future-oriented discourse, I argue, is how time is …
The Ukraine question
Gender regimes, reproductive strategies and child sex preferences
Much of the literature on sex ratio imbalances in India has focused on the North–South divide or exclusively on the North-western states of India. In this paper, we draw on ethnographic research on the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, where the child sex ratio (0–6 years) plummeted in the 2011 census. We study two villages in the Hindu dominated district of Jammu and two in largely Buddhist Leh (in Ladakh) to understand how the gender prefer…
Gendered parenting and returns from children in contemporary India
This article seeks to understand the modern-day value of children to middle class Indian parents. It examines parental strategies aimed at raising successful children by providing them with the best education possible. These strategies, involving 'concerted cultivation' and gendered 'educational labour', are analysed in relation to schooling and preparation for a highly competitive national entrance exam, for admission to an elite engineering col…
If I cannot give birth to a child, why would anyone accept me?”
In this paper, we explore how women who are unable to conform to age-specific conventions of marriage and childbearing construct their adult identities in socio-cultural contexts that valorize fertility and mandate compulsory marriage and motherhood. Through a detailed ethnography of women’s experiences with menstrual anomalies and reproductive aging, this study examines Odia women’s negotiations with their seemingly “incomplete bodies” and “disr…
Entanglements of reproductive practices in India
Gender Imbalance, Marriage Squeeze and Multiple Biological Clocks
This paper maps the impact of gender imbalance on intergenerational relations in north India. It uses the idea of multiple biological clocks to understand the impact that gender imbalance and male marriage squeeze have on two categories of persons: 'overage' unmarried sons and their aging parents, and the inter-generational contract between them within the family-household. De-linking the idea of the biological clock from the female body, this pa…
Brand New Nation
A Financial Times Best Book of the Year The first book that examines India's mega-publicity campaigns to theorize the global transformation of the nation-state into an attractive investment destination. The early twenty-first century was an optimistic moment of global futures-making. The chief narrative was the emergence of the BRICS nations—leading stars in the great spectacle of capitalist growth stories, branded afresh as resource-rich hubs of…
Southern Futures
At the turn of the second millennium, the sign of the South underwent a dramatic reconfiguration. It no longer stands for just debt, deprivation, and dystopia in the eyes of the world. It is also seen as an emerging market—a place of hope, optimism, and possibilities, even the future of capitalism. Shaped in manifold contradictions, the South inheres both tantalizing visions of limitless economic growth and vast reserves of yet “untapped” natural…
World as Commodity
When and how did the third world transform into an emerging market in the global economy? Kaur addresses this ongoing reinscription of the old third world as market, unpacking new modes of imagination and knowledge at the heart of this historical shift. She argues that if the quest for valuable commodities led to the discovery of the new world in an earlier age, the early twenty-first century is characterized by the rediscovery of that familiar w…
Aesthetics of arrival
India’s celebrated ‘arrival on the global stage’ as a desirable ‘emerging market’ for global investors signals the spectacular moment that is said to have ruptured the barriers between the first and third worlds. If the notion of arrival anticipates the long-awaited acceleration in the pace of history, it also harnesses a euphoric India to the limitless future promised by the new. In this special issue, we set our focus on the aesthetics of arriv…
Post-exotic India
This paper examines the aesthetics of remixing history at the heart of the neoliberal project of India’s image makeover as the ‘land of limitless opportunity’ for global tourists and investors. I argue that the project of remixing India’s history is predicated upon the ontological fault line of how to retain and erase the original simultaneously while shaping the new in the contemporary global. Taking the Incredible India campaign as an example, …
The innovative Indian
The idea of jugaad, or frugal innovation, has gained wide popularity within policy circles and business schools as a breakthrough formula – from a quick-fix solution grown in adverse conditions to a six-point business principle – for economic growth generation. I argue that the new jugaad innovation narrative offers an uplifting, potentially emancipatory discourse of mobility in a setting where even after two decades of economic reforms, wealth g…
Snakes and ladders
The question of social mobility in a terrain of increasing inequality has gained particular urgency in post-reform India. We approach social mobility not as a one-way ascent toward the top, rather as a risk-laden enterprise prone to fluctuations that include both incremental gains and the possibility of sliding downwards. We argue that to ‘move up the ladder’ is not merely a matter of individual choice or hard work in the face of odds as free-mar…
I Am India Shining
This article is an against-the-grain reading of the highly publicized failure of the 2004 India Shining campaign. Aimed at the Indian publics, this mega-publicity spectacle sought to communicate the success of neoliberal reforms in transforming India from a developing nation to a lucrative emerging market in the global economy. Rather than uplift the mood of the nation, the campaign brought to the surface the underlying acrimony and exclusion exp…
Good Times, Brought to You by Brand Modi
The impending arrival of the long awaited “good times” emerged as a powerful meme in the 2014 general elections in India. The vague but exhilarating promise of good times was not only translated into catchy campaign slogans but also acquired its own fast-circulating hashtags, domain names, and strong everyday presence on social media. In this article, I open up the notion of good times through an account of #acchedin and locate it within the long…
Viewing the West through Bollywood
Since the 1990s, the popular film industry in India has succesfully renewed its popularity among the South Asian Diaspora and the globalised Indian middle class. Its recent films have undergone a thematic shift where the characters encounter the West in a variety of situations reached through travel and migration. The films sport a fantasy-like, rich look, trendy locations and designer clothes worn by young men and women. The present article loca…
The innovative Indian
The idea of jugaad, or frugal innovation, has gained wide popularity within policy circles and business schools as a breakthrough formula – from a quick-fix solution grown in adverse conditions to a six-point business principle – for economic growth generation. I argue that the new jugaad innovation narrative offers an uplifting, potentially emancipatory discourse of mobility in a setting where even after two decades of economic reforms, wealth g…
Narrative absence
The core of symbolic communities, like the community of Partition migrants, is formed through the discursive ownership of historical experiences—for instance, the loss of human lives, personal property and dismemberment of national territory; followed by the restoration of that loss through examples of successful refugee resettlement and national self-assertion. Within the master narrative of Partition migration history, however, the experiences …
Jat Sikhs
L'A., a la suite d'une enquete menee en 1981-82 dans un village du Punjab (Inde), a remarque que les Jat Sikhs, a l'inverse des autres castes ne respectaient pas le code de conduite commun a tous les Sikhs. D'apres l'A., cette attitude s'explique par le fait que dans un contexte villageois et rural l'identite sikh n'est pas menacee si bien que les gens ne se sentent pas astreints a respecter tous les preceptes religieux tandis que dans un milieu …
I Am India Shining
This article is an against-the-grain reading of the highly publicized failure of the 2004 India Shining campaign. Aimed at the Indian publics, this mega-publicity spectacle sought to communicate the success of neoliberal reforms in transforming India from a developing nation to a lucrative emerging market in the global economy. Rather than uplift the mood of the nation, the campaign brought to the surface the underlying acrimony and exclusion exp…
World as Commodity
When and how did the third world transform into an emerging market in the global economy? Kaur addresses this ongoing reinscription of the old third world as market, unpacking new modes of imagination and knowledge at the heart of this historical shift. She argues that if the quest for valuable commodities led to the discovery of the new world in an earlier age, the early twenty-first century is characterized by the rediscovery of that familiar w…
Snakes and ladders
The question of social mobility in a terrain of increasing inequality has gained particular urgency in post-reform India. We approach social mobility not as a one-way ascent toward the top, rather as a risk-laden enterprise prone to fluctuations that include both incremental gains and the possibility of sliding downwards. We argue that to ‘move up the ladder’ is not merely a matter of individual choice or hard work in the face of odds as free-mar…
Nation's Two Bodies
The idea of a post-1990s re-formed India is shaped by an imaginary of a fractured body of the nation—a ‘new’ nation in tune with the neoliberal desires of a structurally adjusted world and the ‘old’ nation constitutive of superfluous matter in excess of that seductive world. This imaginary is not only etched in popular discourses but also in the policy-making apparatus engaged in the task of creating a global identity for India. Taking the Brand …
Distinctive Citizenship
The refugee, in India's Partition history, appears as an enigmatic construct – part pitiful, part heroic, though mostly shorn of agency – representing the surface of the human tragedy of Partition. Yet this archetype masks the undercurrent of social distinctions that produced hierarchies of post-colonial citizenship within the mass of refugees. The core principle of the official resettlement policy was self-rehabilitation, that is, the ability to…
Sacralising Bodies On Martyrdom, Government and Accident in Iran
In post-revolution Iran, the sacred notion of martyrdom has been transformed into a routine act of government – a moral sign of order and state sovereignty. Moving beyond the debates of the secularisation of the sacred and the making sacred of the secular, this article argues that the moment of sacralisation is realised through co-production within a social setting when the object of sacralisation is recognised as such by others. In contemporary …
Governing Difference in India and China
The Partition of Memory
1Centre for Development Research, Copenhagen The Partition of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India Suvir Kaul New Delhi Permanent Black 2001 301 81 7824 013 0
Crisis futures
Covid-19 was widely pitched as a potential turning point of history, a rare crisis-as-opportunity by political leaders and policymakers. This claim of being at a revolutionary threshold, an exceptional time in history, and capitalising upon that claim to reshape the political-economic landscape is at the core of the speculative politics of crisis, or what I call crisis futures . Critical in this future-oriented discourse, I argue, is how time is …
Gendered parenting and returns from children in contemporary India
This article seeks to understand the modern-day value of children to middle class Indian parents. It examines parental strategies aimed at raising successful children by providing them with the best education possible. These strategies, involving 'concerted cultivation' and gendered 'educational labour', are analysed in relation to schooling and preparation for a highly competitive national entrance exam, for admission to an elite engineering col…
Southern Futures
At the turn of the second millennium, the sign of the South underwent a dramatic reconfiguration. It no longer stands for just debt, deprivation, and dystopia in the eyes of the world. It is also seen as an emerging market—a place of hope, optimism, and possibilities, even the future of capitalism. Shaped in manifold contradictions, the South inheres both tantalizing visions of limitless economic growth and vast reserves of yet “untapped” natural…
Femtech apps and quantification of the reproductive body in India
This article examines datafication of the reproductive body in India through use of femtech mobile phone applications (henceforth, apps). Femtech apps quantify reproductive processes such as periods, conception, pregnancy and hormonal health and promise their users greater 'self-awareness' and 'control' through 'self-management'. Most studies on femtech refer to users in the Global North, while there are few studies on femtech adoption in the dev…
Disrupting Caste Hegemony in Punjab
The idea of caste has always been debatable, contested and controversial. Since the time of its inception, it has been prevalent throughout India. Any Indian cannot define his or her identity without referring to his or her caste. However, it also became and still is a reason behind the marginalization and exploitation of millions of people. Various activists, scholars, thinkers, political leaders and literary writers have tried to fight against …
The Ukraine question
Gender Imbalance, Marriage Squeeze and Multiple Biological Clocks
This paper maps the impact of gender imbalance on intergenerational relations in north India. It uses the idea of multiple biological clocks to understand the impact that gender imbalance and male marriage squeeze have on two categories of persons: 'overage' unmarried sons and their aging parents, and the inter-generational contract between them within the family-household. De-linking the idea of the biological clock from the female body, this pa…
The Other Side of Silence
BOOK REVIEWS Get access The Other Side of Silence: Voices From the Partition of India. By Urvashi Butalia. London: Hurst, 2000. xi + 308 pp. £35, ISBN 1 85065 5421 hb, £12.95, ISBN 1 85065 533 2 pb. Ravinder Kaur, Ravinder Kaur Universities of Roskilde and Copenhagen Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Anders Bjørn Hansen Anders Bjørn Hansen Universities of Roskilde and Copenhagen Search for other works by thi…
Jat Sikhs
L'A., a la suite d'une enquete menee en 1981-82 dans un village du Punjab (Inde), a remarque que les Jat Sikhs, a l'inverse des autres castes ne respectaient pas le code de conduite commun a tous les Sikhs. D'apres l'A., cette attitude s'explique par le fait que dans un contexte villageois et rural l'identite sikh n'est pas menacee si bien que les gens ne se sentent pas astreints a respecter tous les preceptes religieux tandis que dans un milieu …
South Asian films at the London film festival
The Other Side of Silence
BOOK REVIEWS Get access The Other Side of Silence: Voices From the Partition of India. By Urvashi Butalia. London: Hurst, 2000. xi + 308 pp. £35, ISBN 1 85065 5421 hb, £12.95, ISBN 1 85065 533 2 pb. Ravinder Kaur, Ravinder Kaur Universities of Roskilde and Copenhagen Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Anders Bjørn Hansen Anders Bjørn Hansen Universities of Roskilde and Copenhagen Search for other works by thi…
Viewing the West through Bollywood
Since the 1990s, the popular film industry in India has succesfully renewed its popularity among the South Asian Diaspora and the globalised Indian middle class. Its recent films have undergone a thematic shift where the characters encounter the West in a variety of situations reached through travel and migration. The films sport a fantasy-like, rich look, trendy locations and designer clothes worn by young men and women. The present article loca…
The Partition of Memory
1Centre for Development Research, Copenhagen The Partition of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India Suvir Kaul New Delhi Permanent Black 2001 301 81 7824 013 0
Effect of Supplementation of Spirulina on the Haematological Profile and Intellectual Status of School Girls (7-9 years)
A sample of sixty girls aged between 7-9 years belonging to low middle income group were selected from Government senior secondary school, P.A.U., Ludhiana. The subjects were equally divided into two groups viz. Experimental (E) and Control (C) group. The mean per capita monthly income was Rs. 837/- and Rs. 869/- in group E and C respectively. Subjects of E group were supplemented with two capsules (1g) of spirulina daily after mixing in one serv…
Locating the Humanities and the Social Sciences in Institutes of Technology
Cover
Missing women and brides from faraway
Narrative absence
The core of symbolic communities, like the community of Partition migrants, is formed through the discursive ownership of historical experiences—for instance, the loss of human lives, personal property and dismemberment of national territory; followed by the restoration of that loss through examples of successful refugee resettlement and national self-assertion. Within the master narrative of Partition migration history, however, the experiences …
Distinctive Citizenship
The refugee, in India's Partition history, appears as an enigmatic construct – part pitiful, part heroic, though mostly shorn of agency – representing the surface of the human tragedy of Partition. Yet this archetype masks the undercurrent of social distinctions that produced hierarchies of post-colonial citizenship within the mass of refugees. The core principle of the official resettlement policy was self-rehabilitation, that is, the ability to…
Sacralising Bodies On Martyrdom, Government and Accident in Iran
In post-revolution Iran, the sacred notion of martyrdom has been transformed into a routine act of government – a moral sign of order and state sovereignty. Moving beyond the debates of the secularisation of the sacred and the making sacred of the secular, this article argues that the moment of sacralisation is realised through co-production within a social setting when the object of sacralisation is recognised as such by others. In contemporary …
Ethik und Werte
Nation's Two Bodies
The idea of a post-1990s re-formed India is shaped by an imaginary of a fractured body of the nation—a ‘new’ nation in tune with the neoliberal desires of a structurally adjusted world and the ‘old’ nation constitutive of superfluous matter in excess of that seductive world. This imaginary is not only etched in popular discourses but also in the policy-making apparatus engaged in the task of creating a global identity for India. Taking the Brand …
Governing Difference in India and China
Good Times, Brought to You by Brand Modi
The impending arrival of the long awaited “good times” emerged as a powerful meme in the 2014 general elections in India. The vague but exhilarating promise of good times was not only translated into catchy campaign slogans but also acquired its own fast-circulating hashtags, domain names, and strong everyday presence on social media. In this article, I open up the notion of good times through an account of #acchedin and locate it within the long…
Writing History in a Paperless World
The rapid expansion of the seemingly limitless digital universe invites us to rethink the question of archives. If information in the time of high-speed Internet connectivity is easily produced, searched, circulated and consumed, it is as easily deleted and effaced from the public domain too. The digital content (especially user-generated) on blogs, websites, and social media platforms is both plentiful – often expressed as ‘information overload’…
Aesthetics of arrival
India’s celebrated ‘arrival on the global stage’ as a desirable ‘emerging market’ for global investors signals the spectacular moment that is said to have ruptured the barriers between the first and third worlds. If the notion of arrival anticipates the long-awaited acceleration in the pace of history, it also harnesses a euphoric India to the limitless future promised by the new. In this special issue, we set our focus on the aesthetics of arriv…
Post-exotic India
This paper examines the aesthetics of remixing history at the heart of the neoliberal project of India’s image makeover as the ‘land of limitless opportunity’ for global tourists and investors. I argue that the project of remixing India’s history is predicated upon the ontological fault line of how to retain and erase the original simultaneously while shaping the new in the contemporary global. Taking the Incredible India campaign as an example, …
The innovative Indian
The idea of jugaad, or frugal innovation, has gained wide popularity within policy circles and business schools as a breakthrough formula – from a quick-fix solution grown in adverse conditions to a six-point business principle – for economic growth generation. I argue that the new jugaad innovation narrative offers an uplifting, potentially emancipatory discourse of mobility in a setting where even after two decades of economic reforms, wealth g…
Snakes and ladders
The question of social mobility in a terrain of increasing inequality has gained particular urgency in post-reform India. We approach social mobility not as a one-way ascent toward the top, rather as a risk-laden enterprise prone to fluctuations that include both incremental gains and the possibility of sliding downwards. We argue that to ‘move up the ladder’ is not merely a matter of individual choice or hard work in the face of odds as free-mar…
I Am India Shining
This article is an against-the-grain reading of the highly publicized failure of the 2004 India Shining campaign. Aimed at the Indian publics, this mega-publicity spectacle sought to communicate the success of neoliberal reforms in transforming India from a developing nation to a lucrative emerging market in the global economy. Rather than uplift the mood of the nation, the campaign brought to the surface the underlying acrimony and exclusion exp…
Southern Futures
At the turn of the second millennium, the sign of the South underwent a dramatic reconfiguration. It no longer stands for just debt, deprivation, and dystopia in the eyes of the world. It is also seen as an emerging market—a place of hope, optimism, and possibilities, even the future of capitalism. Shaped in manifold contradictions, the South inheres both tantalizing visions of limitless economic growth and vast reserves of yet “untapped” natural…
World as Commodity
When and how did the third world transform into an emerging market in the global economy? Kaur addresses this ongoing reinscription of the old third world as market, unpacking new modes of imagination and knowledge at the heart of this historical shift. She argues that if the quest for valuable commodities led to the discovery of the new world in an earlier age, the early twenty-first century is characterized by the rediscovery of that familiar w…
Brand New Nation
A Financial Times Best Book of the Year The first book that examines India's mega-publicity campaigns to theorize the global transformation of the nation-state into an attractive investment destination. The early twenty-first century was an optimistic moment of global futures-making. The chief narrative was the emergence of the BRICS nations—leading stars in the great spectacle of capitalist growth stories, branded afresh as resource-rich hubs of…
Sociology (26 works) · Political science (23 works) · Law (15 works) · History (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Politics (12 works) · Economics (10 works) · South Asian Cinema and Culture (10 works) · South Asian Studies and Conflicts (10 works) · Art (9 works)