Settlers, saints, and sovereigns : an ethnography of state formation in western India

This book is an anthropological study located along India's western border with Pakistan. The core arguments are situated within the context of contemporary religious nationalism, communal strife, and border politics in the Indian state of Gujarat. It seeks to understand how, within these contexts, a region becomes a meaningful place for its inhabitants and how different peoples relate to locality through time. Theoretically, the book builds on available anthropological literatures on state formation and border politics to interrogate the presumed impermeability of nationalist discourse and territorial boundaries. Previously issued in print: 2009. The notion of modernity hinges on a break with the past, such as superstitions, medieval worlds, and hierarchical traditions. It follows that modernity suggests the disenchantment of the world, yet the processes of modernity also create their own enchantments in the mapping and making of the modern world. Straddling a range of disciplines and perspectives, the essays in this edited volume eschew programmatic solutions, focusing instead in new ways on subjects of slavery and memory, global transformations and vernacular and vernacular modernity, imperial imperatives and nationalist knowledge, cosmopolitan politics and liberal democracy, and governmental effects and everyday affects. It is in these ways that the volume attempts to unravel the enchantments of modernity, in order to approach anew modernity's constitutive terms, formative limits, and particular possibilities. This book gives a detailed account of the ‘communal riots'between Hindus and Muslims in Mumbai in 1992-93. It departs from the historiography of the riot, which assumes that Hindu-Muslim conflict is independent of the participants of the violence.Speaking to and interacting with the residents of Dharavi, the largest shanty town in the city, the authors collected a wide range of narrative accounts of the violence and the procedures of rehabilitation that accompanied the violence. The authors juxtapose these narrative accounts with public documents exploring the role language, work, housing and rehabilitation have on the day-to-day life of people who live with violence. This book gives a detailed account of the communal riots between Hindus and Muslims in Mumbai in 1992-93. It departs from the historiography of the riot, which assumes that Hindu-Muslim conflict is independent of the participants of the violence. Speaking to and interacting with the residents of Dharavi, the largest shanty town in the city, the authors collected a wide range of narrative accounts of the violence and the procedures of rehabilitation that accompanied the violence. The authors juxtapose these narrative accounts with public documents exploring the role language, work, housing and rehabilitation have on the day-to-day life of people who live with violence. Settlers, Saints and Sovereigns Part - I Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of Photographs List of Maps Note on Transliteration List of Abbreviations Glossary Foreword Preface Acknowledgements 1. Imagining a Region 2. Migration, Memory and Affect: Counter-Perspectives to Asmitā 3. Defining a Border: Religion, Region and Nation Settlers, Saints and Sovereigns Part - II 4. Pastoralists, Islam and the State: Religion and Settlement of the Border 5. Settlement, Sovereignty and History Epilogue Bibliography Index "This book provides an ethnography of love-marriages in the late 1990s in Delhi, identifying the ways in which marriage is ever more a pitch of intense political contestation. It bears upon anthropological understandings of marriageability, urban morality, gender, kinship and the study of the individual and the couple in contemporary India."--Jacket Presents an anthropological study located along India's western border with Pakistan. This book contains arguments that are situated within the context of contemporary religious nationalism, communal strife, and border politics in the Indian state of Gujarat. Account Of The Hindu Muslim Riots In Dhārāvi, Bombay During December 1992-january 1993. Roma Chatterji And Deepak Mehta. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [181]-193) And Index. Study Of The History And Ethnography Of The Kachchh Region. Farhana Ibrahim. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [202]-211) And Index. Contributed Articles Previously Published In Several Journals.