Sovereignty over Time

One of the most important shifts in gender scholarship is the attention now being paid to discourses and practices of masculinity in the Global South. This issue of Men and Masculinities contributes to this growing field in three important ways. First, we foreground scholarship on masculinities in two interconnected, but understudied regions of the world, specifically the Middle East, which is also known as South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA), and its neighbor to the east, South Asia. In particular, we demonstrate the ways in which queer identities and communities are being formed across these two regions, connected as they are by historic trade routes, migration pathways, and transregional cultural flows. Second, we point to the vibrant masculinities scholarship that is emerging from these regions. But we focus specifically on non-normative masculinities—or the queer, trans, and other genderqueer masculinities—which have been historically present in these two regions, but which have been much less represented in masculinities literature. Third, we look to identity formation, or the ways in which young cis-gender, trans, and queer men come out in their communities and seek authentic lives of desire, pleasure, and participation. At the same time, we highlight the ever-present precarity within queer communities in the Middle East/SWANA and South Asia, especially given postcolonial nationalist and ethno-nationalist agendas, which promote normative heteropatriarchal masculinities and concomitant homophobia and transphobia.

Inflammatory bowel disease in south Asia: a scoping review.

This article explores ideas, discourses, and research on hygiene and sanitation as they manifest in South Asia in relation to childhood and children’s lived experiences. Hygiene and sanitation are concerned with the interactions between the physiology and metabolism of the human being and their environment and community. While hygiene is commonly defined as practices intended to preserve health and prevent the spread of diseases, the word sanitation describes the conditions, systems, and infrastructures that enable hygiene. Since the late nineteenth century, the individual, community, and structural aspects of hygiene and sanitation have been approached in South Asia as preventive public health issues eliciting political intervention into embodied behaviors and community spaces. Equivalent and regional state-led water infrastructures and pedagogic texts espousing hygiene are extant from earlier eras. However, this article follows texts that succeed the co-emergence of the Anglophone vocabulary of hygiene and sanitation and their imperial cognates within policy discourse alongside the geopolitical construct of South Asia. Scholars across the diverse fields of history; geography; anthropology of medicine, childhood, and infrastructure; critical postcolonial studies; literature; developmental economics; demographics; and population health have highlighted how hygiene and sanitation in relation to childhood and children’s experiences are negotiations between the biomedical, kinship, and the political. In saving, securing, and allowing the reproduction of life, hygiene and sanitation facilitate the reproduction of society on an everyday basis and across generations. For this very reason, hygienic practices and sanitation infrastructure are also biopolitical projects, or pathways to control, facilitate, and manage populations at large. Foucauldian ideas of biopolitics in Europe refer to large public health projects aimed at fostering life. In contrast, biopolitics within colonial relations of power has entailed technologies of governance that produce and sustain differential valuation of lives on race, gender, and sexuality. In the context of South Asia, thus, scholars have highlighted that hygiene and sanitation projects have been sites of negotiating power over public spaces and resources, often through children as conduits between the state and the community, from early colonial projects such as those to prevent the spread of Asiatic cholera in colonial Bengal province through contaminated water to more recent campaigns regarding menstrual hygiene management and COVID-19 prevention efforts. Institutions such as schools and hospitals; processes such as national surveys, urban planning, and birth and death registrations; and campaigns including those on disease awareness, well-being promotion, and environmental pollution have served to connect the colonial and postcolonial state with communities through governance and outreach centered on children. Such public-health projects and discourses are sites of significant transnational cross-pollination of expertise, funding, and technical assistance. Here, South Asia as a geographic category is relevant due to its contemporary nations’ shared colonial histories and continuing developmental projects implemented through transnational agencies and philanthropic efforts in the region, even though the geopolitical category of and the boundaries that determine South Asia remain contested. Within transnational developmental governance of sanitation and hygiene, organizations work with distinct categorizations of countries: countries in UNICEF’s (United Nations Children’s Fund) South Asia region partially overlap with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) larger South-East Asia region. The works listed in this article are organized according to thematic areas or analytical foci relevant to the South Asian context broadly and investigate how figurations of childhood and children’s lived experiences are entangled with conceptions of hygiene and sanitation in the region.

▪ Abstract This article examines the relationship between history and anthropology in South Asia during the past two decades, a relationship that has done much to shape the emerging intellectual practices of postcolonial anthropology. After locating the current conjuncture in an earlier moment of American anthropology in South Asia—village studies of the 1950s—the article reviews a body of interdisciplinary scholarship published during the 1980s and 1990s, paying specific attention to the impact of debates in Indian historiography generated by subaltern studies. The article goes on to identify five interlinked sets of themes in the literature for discussion: the “problem” of Europe, the interpenetration of power and knowledge in the colonial archive, the search for indigenous forms of knowledge, the phenomenon of violence and ethnic conflict, and the specific concerns of gender and feminist criticism. It argues that it is no longer feasible to do anthropology in South Asia without attending to one or more of these five themes. Any concern with contemporary transnational or cultural configurations in South Asia, or with the future of the postcolonial nation state, must be considered in relation to colonial history and the specific formations of modernity it generated.

The grimmest sordid state of affairs of being a refugee in the contemporary world has attained a new terrain of crisis depicted by the emergence of ‘climate refugees’ produced by climate change. People do not move on a whim or megrim rather sociopolitical, economic and environmental factors compel them to migrate from their homelands. Almost seventy years ago, European Jews were deprived of asylum and hounded by the Nazis. Similarly, the climate change and ‘climate refugees’ are making news daily due to the calamities and catastrophes surrounding them with unprecedented visibility. South Asia is one of the regions where states do not afford effective legal protection to refugees or climate refugees. However, the international protection to political refugees was institutionalized in the 1951 UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (UNCSR) with its 1967 Additional Protocol and its lodger the UN High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR). In South Asia, no country has acceded to UNCSR except Afghanistan, and there are no national refugee laws and no legal guarantees. Refugees, as well as ‘climate refugees’, have been enduring insecurity and condemnation in the SAARC region. The present chapter tries to examine the South Asian state practices to deal with the climate refugees. Unfortunately, climate refugees are completely deprived of any legal protection due to the gaps in the national laws in South Asia. The chapter further evaluates the reception of international climate change law in South Asia that is flagrantly ineffective, and climate change migration governance in South Asia that fallibly revolves around national security narratives.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Nabobs Revisited: A Cultural History of British Imperialism and the Indian Question in Late‐Eighteenth‐Century Britain

The evolution of migration policymaking across the Global South is of growing interest to International Relations. Yet, the impact of colonial and imperial legacies on states’ migration management regimes outside Europe and North America remains under-theorised. How does postcolonial state formation shape policies of cross-border mobility management in the Global South? By bringing James F. Hollifield’s framework of the contemporary ‘migration state’ in conversation with critical scholarship on postcolonialism, we identify the existence of a ‘postcolonial paradox,’ namely two sets of tensions faced by newly independent states of the Global South: first, the need to construct a modern sovereign nation-state with a well-defined national identity contrasts with weak institutional capacity to do so; second, territorial realities of sovereignty conflict with the imperatives of nation-building seeking to establish exclusive citizenship norms towards populations residing both inside and outside the boundaries of the postcolonial state. We argue that the use of cross-border mobility control policies to reconcile such tensions transforms the ‘postcolonial state’ into the ‘postcolonial migration state,’ which shows distinct continuities with pre-independence practices. In fact, postcolonial migration states reproduce colonial-era tropes via the surveillance and control of segmented migration streams that redistribute labour for the global economy. We demonstrate this via a comparative study of post-independence migration management in India and Egypt, which also aims to merge a problematic regional divide between scholarship on the Middle East and South Asia. We urge further critical interventions on the international politics of migration that prioritise interregional perspectives from the broader Global South.

The concept of duty is overrated (Fire) The swamiji's testicles have grown too big for his loincloth (Fire) It's a dyke thing (Junky Punky Girlz) Eswar Allah tero Naam (Junky Punky Girlz) Before ex...

By reviewing the case of the Rohingya, a marginalized community in the postcolonial state of Myanmar, this article (as part of a special section on South Asian border studies) explores the perspective of Rohingya refugees and conceptualizes social borders from the voices of the refugees. Juxtaposing postcolonial borders with narrations of Rohingya in India brings out the politics of the marginalized communities in the country’s borderlands. The article shows how borderscapes are shaped for refugees that articulate ideas of social justice and recognition. Building on international studies of the Rohingya, I conducted fieldwork into the situation of the Rohingya in India. The resulting interviews add to our understanding of Rohingya refugees and address a scarcity of literature on the Rohingya in border studies. Through the analysis, I discover the history of the Rohingya identity in Myanmar, which contextualizes their statelessness. Social borders and state legislation reinforce barriers to citizenship and sharpen the exclusion of migrants, refugees, and other stateless peoples in South Asia. 
 Keywords: South Asia, Refugees, Rohingya, post-colonial states, boundaries, borders, margins, Southeast Asia, marginal communities.

Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-figurations of the Postcolony

I seek answers to my research question: why do refugee studies emphasize repatriation yet overlook problems of integration in post-repatriation context? And, what are the problems of belonging of refugees in exile? What factors determine whether or not refugees in South Asia will be repatriated to their countries of origin? After a careful analysis of policies and citizenry rights, I argue that the uniqueness of state formation in South Asia dictated a particular trajectory of citizenry rights that excluded non-citizens and cultivated a politics of belonging based on nationality. I use the term ‘postcolonial state’ in South Asia to explore different forms of state, ‘stateness’, and governance that perpetuated a particular sense of alienation among the minority groups.

In 1905, Viceroy Nathaniel Curzon applied well-worn principles of imperial order to reorganize northeastern regions of British India, bringing the entire Meghna-Brahmaputra river basin into one new administrative territory: the province of Eastern Bengal and Assam. He thereby launched modern territorial politics in South Asia by provoking an expansive and ultimately victorious nationalist agitation to unify Bengal and protect India's territorial integrity. This movement and its economic programme (swadeshi) expressed Indian nationalist opposition to imperial inequity. It established a permanent spatial frame for Indian national thought. It also expressed and naturalized spatial inequity inside India, which was increasing at the time under economic globalization. Spatial inequities in the political economy of uneven development have animated territorial politics in South Asia ever since. A century later, another acceleration of globalization is again increasing spatial inequity, again destabilizing territorial order, as nationalists naturalize spatial inequity in national territory and conflicts erupt from the experience of living in disadvantaged places. Remapping 1905 in the long twentieth century which connects these two periods of globalization, spanning eras of empire and nation, reveals spatial dynamics of modernity concealed by national maps and brings to light a transnational history of spatial inequity shared by Bangladesh and Northeast India.

Architectural history informed the colonial government in their creation of an Indian empire, helped the self‐fashioning of the princely states, and eventually became the source of national narratives for the countries of India and Pakistan as they were carved from British India. The historiography of architecture in South Asia is therefore significant as a tool to understand political processes. Several studies on architecture in South Asia are limited to debates about built forms and their chronology, and not as reflections of society at large. The reception of architecture through time is at least as important as the creation of architecture, and the scholarship on architecture is a societal index of this reception. This essay reviews the study of architectural history in South Asia in order to trace the trajectory of the field. South Asia commonly includes the present‐day nations of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives and was largely congruous with British India in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Authoritarianism in South Asia has taken myriad shapes: regular military rule in Bangladesh and Pakistan; a twenty-five-year civil war in Sri Lanka; and a short-lived 1975 self-coup as well as a contemporary period of shrinking civil liberties in India. This chapter argues that South Asia’s authoritarianism patterns are best explained by the combination of politicized militaries and ascriptive nationalisms. Military rule is South Asia’s most common form of authoritarianism. But dominant national narratives have also enabled systemic forms of authoritarianism. This happens when ethno-religious definitions of the nation power the deprivation of minority rights, as has consistently occurred in Pakistan’s history, throughout the early decades of Sri Lanka’s history, and is increasing today in both India and Bangladesh. These two modalities of authoritarianism can also combine because direct military intervention in democratic politics has often been legitimated through the protection of that ascriptive national core.

South Asia is one of the epicenters of the global diabetes pandemic. Diabetes in south Asians has certain peculiar features with respect to its pathophysiology, clinical presentation, and management. This review aims to summarize some of the recent evidence pertaining to the distinct diabetes phenotype in south Asians. South Asia has high incidence and prevalence rates of diabetes. The progression from "pre-diabetes" to diabetes also occurs faster in this population. Pancreatic beta cell dysfunction seems to be as important as insulin resistance in the pathophysiology of diabetes in south Asians. Recent evidence suggests that the epidemic of diabetes in south Asia is spreading to rural areas and to less affluent sections of society. Diabetes in south Asians differs significantly from that in white Caucasians, with important implications for prevention, diagnosis, and management.