The conference “The Future of the Rural World? Africa and Asia” was hosted by SOAS, University of London during October 2015. The event marked the end of a major project funded by the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) on “restudying” village India. It also coincided with the launch of an exhibition and film installations at the Brunei Gallery at SOAS, which emerged from the same project. At
The celebration of Bengali history in East End conjures up a picture different to how we imagine the community gleaned from the pages of a widely read fiction Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, where the nostalgic memory of Bangladesh’s paddy fields fuses with life’s chores in the East End. Amidst the iconic curry houses marking out the generation of food entrepreneurship and labour of Britain’s Bangladeshi community, the streets near the
Shashi Tharoor’s recent op-ed for The Guardian, where he charged PM Modi with damaging India’s reputation worldwide by waging a ‘war on Muslims’ and on tolerance, was slammed by Modi’s fans, accusing him of tarnishing India’s image, and of a PM who works tirelessly to lift India to a position of prosperity and world leadership. To them it amounted to washing the national dirty laundry in the land of the
This article first appeared on the Development Studies at SOAS blog, on 6 December 2015. Please click here to view the original article. Social science wisdom has long held that Indian elections are determined by ‘primoridial’ collective identities of caste, religion and region. Certainly, all political parties combine these elements in their election calculus, from the choice of candidate to election promises, campaign speeches and historical references which signal to the electorate who