King's India Institute

K K e desire for fusion or the desire to murder constitute the double modality of an essential trouble that agitates us in our nitude. To swallow, or to annihilate others-and yet at the same time wanting to maintain them as others, because we also sense the horror of solitude (which is properly the exit from sense, if sense is essentially exchanged or shared).

In this collection of essays, the editors ask: What, if anything, is 'new' about new sociology in India? In their reckoning, it is the work of the sociological imagination to capture-or even create-the work of transition, the politics that gives birth to the transitional and the new, and the politics that this transition in turn gives rise to. They remind us of the original sense in which C. Wright Mills used the term to speak about the new Cold War American society of the 1950s and state that the time is ripe for a 'new sociology' to explain the tumultuous changes Indian society finds itself in the midst of-and indeed, to assist in the rise of a new politics. A quick canter through the recent history of sociology in India and its concerns reveals that this is far from the case. This is because, Bandyopadhyay and Hebbar contend, disciplinary concerns have long stifled the research imagination in Indian sociology, keeping it away from paying attention to new formations and politics underway in India today. According to them, rigid systemic thinking and methods infelicitous for researching the contemporary have prevented fresh perspectives from emerging on enduring problems, as well as newer research questions from becoming available for inquiry. This volume then is an optimistic response to this crisis or stalemate that showcases new themes of investigation and provides fresh avenues for a politically engaged scholarship. The essays respectively take up terrorism and the maternal (Hameed), molecular and national life (Ray), the politics of friendship and religious violence (Savyasaachi), the (re)assemblage of the social in cinematic edits (Vakharia), expertise and institutions in policymaking (Ahmed) and community arts projects (Goswami). In themselves, these sites of investigation do not necessarily represent the

Nullius is an anthropological account of the troubled status of ownership in India and its consequences for our understanding of sovereignty and social relations. Though property rights and ownership are said to be a cornerstone of modern law, in the Indian case they are often a spectral presence. Kapila offers a detailed study of paradigms where proprietary relations have been erased, denied, misappropriated. The book examines three forms of negation, where the Indian state de facto adopted doctrines of terra nullius (in the erasure of indigenous title), res nullius (in acquiring museum objects), and, controversially, corpus nullius (in denying citizens ownership of their bodies under biometrics). The result is a pathbreaking reconnection of questions of property, exchange, dispossession, law, and sovereignty.

This thesis is an anthropological study of legal governance and its impact on kinship relations amongst a migratory pastoralist community in north India. The research is based on fieldwork and archival sources and is concerned with understanding the contest between 'customary' and legal norms in the constitution of public moralities amongst the Gaddis of Himachal Pradesh. The research examines on changing conjugal practices amongst the Gaddis in the context of wider changes in their political economy and in relation to the colonial codification of customary law in colonial Punjab and the Hindu Marriage Succession Acts of 1955-56. The thesis investigates changes in the patterns of inheritance in the context of increased sedentarisation, combined with state legislation and intervention. It examines the move from polygamous to monogamous marriage, and changes in everyday sexual moralities and notions of legitimacy. Analysing marriage and succession related litigation undertaken...

The afterword reflects on the generations of anthropological scholarship on the Gaddis of the Western Himalaya, and its import for anthropology itself. It takes up Roy Wagner's productive concept of "strategic relic" to understand the changing place of pastoralism and the enduring ideal of egalitarianism in the Gaddi worldview.

What is left when something is taken away? Anthropologists since Marcel Mauss have been fascinated by the hau of the gift, by the excess generated in giving, by that which exceeds the actual thing given in gift. This excess is generative of lingering relationality, of amplification or diminution of status, and of prompts that propel movement and exchange. But relatively little attention has been paid to the opposite of the gift-to what happens in the event of taking away. This book explores this obverse, the other excess that is produced in and through dispossession, and the relationality generated in its wake. Specifically, it presents an anthropological account of the dispossessing instincts of the Indian state as sovereignty-making and describes the relations that are created and cast anew in acts of erasure. At the heart of dispossession lies the question of ownership and any understanding of its erasure requires an understanding of owning, having, and holding, as well as what can and cannot be taken away. Who can take one's possessions away? And, when one's possessions are taken away, what indeed is left? *** "The local vegetable-seller's wife ran away with someone from Kullu two days ago," Ramana announces in a less than hushed tone as she walks up the stairs to my room. This was the first I have heard anything of it

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This article will argue that during the 1950s and 1960s a battle over the meanings of socialism took place in India. Exploring the ways in which the contending conceptions of socialism defended by Rammanohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan intersected and drifted apart during these decades, and the ways in which these were shaped in response to the gradual adoption of socialism by the Nehruvian state, it will be shown that during these years socialism emerged at the same time as a central part of the roadmap for socioeconomic development of the national state as well as a central category for doctrines and practices of protest and contestation. For this, it will focus on Narayan's insistence on a politics of the people, or lok niti, and his equating of socialism and Sarvodaya, as well as on Lohia's doctrine of equal equidistance and his critique of Third Worldism and the Nehruvian state. Moreover, it will be argued that this battle over meanings crated a space for the emergence of original conceptions of socialism wholly unrelated to anything known elsewhere by that name, and inaugurated a set of political trajectories central to the contemporary political horizon in India.