The central problematic of this essay, the process of caste identity formation, is explored here with a focus on the fishing and riverfaring group of castes, the Mallah or Nishad, of the Bhojpuri-speaking region in eastern UP and Bihar. The process is analysed with reference to different sources of information, both colonial and post-colonial, which include the census, the system of scheduling whereby the Mallah/Nishad was labelled as both a criminal tribe and a backward caste, and finally, through voices from within the community. The essay is concerned with both the emergence of the Nishad identity as a result of and in reaction to the interventions of the colonial state and with the effects of the latter on identity-formation in the post-colonial era.
As Islam moves to the center of Turkey’s public life, an opportunity emerges to explore how Islamic knowledge is transmitted through the discursive practice of pious reading circles known in Turkish as sohbet (conversation). Constituting a ritualistic practice of Turkish Muslims who are inspired by the influential faith community leader, Fethullah Gülen, this article investigates how sohbet is practiced by a group of middle class housewives in Ankara. In so doing, the article addresses the meanings and interpretations that pious women ascribe to the reading of religiously oriented texts, and to discussions on prayer, family, and community that take place at sohbet. It also explores how new Islamic subjectivities are fashioned, how Islamic knowledge is reclaimed, and how spirituality is integrated by women into their roles as mothers and wives. Methodologically anchored upon ethnography, this article concludes that the distinctive features of sohbet in the so-called Gülen community, among other effects, facilitate social coherence, and subsequently, a greater capacity for women to synthesize their experience with modernity and tradition.
The annual emergence of Holi cassette recordings in north India functions as the starting point for an investigation into issues of culture and social change, gender constructs, kin-ship norms, lower-caste assertion and a range of caste, class and gender concerns. Publicly characterised as obscene (ashlil) or, more appropriately, ‘transgressive’, the dominant motif in these recordings is the ‘joking’ relationship between a woman and her younger brother-in–law (the bhabhi–devar bond). This article explores how themes and forms characteristic of folk traditions change when the means of communication change. The cassette recordings hint at the existence of women's spaces within the culture of Holi. However, the appropriation of a genre that was essentially a space for rural women's innovation and improvisation has modified women's song traditions and commercialised them in such a way that monetary rewards accrue to the appropriators while the women are silenced and remain objects of the male gaze.
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