This article interrogates how a colonial monument, the Gateway of India in Mumbai, former Bombay, continues to carry and be endowed with a title that is a misplaced embodiment of Indian social histories. Built in the 1920s, this monument, definitely a work of architectural grandeur, continues to carry its erroneous rendition and confines India’s vast social histories to the colonial moment, with an anglo-centric focus. As the monument symbolises the memory of the colonial regime, it also signifies its oppression as well as its exit from the subcontinent, rather than witnessing anyone coming to India, except King George in 1911, as the monument’s title seems to suggest. A mnemonic device of colonialism, this misleading label needs to be seriously revisited, for it not only romanticises the colonial past but also fails to lead our memories back to certain crucial episodes in earlier social histories, from which the monument and its specific place, Mumbai, are more or less fully absent.
Development and environmental discourses are two sites that determine the Third world experience today. The paper maps the nuances associated with the emerging feminist narratives that are concerned with the degenerating ecologies and the feminine side of the same. While development feeds on the memories of underdevelopment it also creates nostalgias, protests, marginalizes subjectivities and a new time of degeneracy where environment is all over the discussions. The well-known Malayalam writer Sara Joseph’s novel “Aathi” is discussed here in order to understand how the feminist articulation of concerns around environmental degradation leads to new geographies to resistance.
Artha–the journal exclusively dedicated to Social Sciences and Humanities from Christ University, Bengaluru–has entered into its 15th year of life in 2016. It is indeed a long period considering the delicacy of the publishing industry in social science academia. This intervening period has also been quite turbulent and volatile, to say the least, for the paradigmatic changes it has seen in the domains of global politics and social thinking. There has been a rupture in the social existence of human beings as new technologies and ideas invade and occupy our surroundings on rampant scales. While economic reforms and neoliberal policies of states have a central role in generating these changes their impacts on the social, cultural, and political surroundings have been massive and clearly outside the immediate domains of economics. Mapping these social changes and structural realities then become a major task where other social science disciplines like Sociology, Anthropology, and Cultural Studies have a major stake. This is the larger background against which the current edition of AJSS is launched. As such it involves writings from the ‘twin disciplines’ of Sociology and Social Work and covers a wide range of issues. Having articles from these disciplinary platforms in the same space has its own merits and risks. Interestingly, when one of the editors of this volume had a discussion with a renowned professor, who, also happens to be the editor’s teacher, regarding the issue, the professor did not conceal his unhappiness over universities and higher educational bodies still treating these disciplines as two sides of the same coin. “Their differences are not sufficiently respected” was what he had to say. The statement is indeed problematic in an era of interdisciplinarity.
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