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ARMED CONFLICTS IN SOUTH ASIA 2008
This book examines the major armed conflicts in South Asia ? in India (with special reference to the Northeast, Jammu & Kashmir and the Naxalites), Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan. Designed as an annual series, the articles cover a set of issues across volumes. Each article provides a brief historical sketch of the emergence of armed conflict and outlines its various phases. The roles, objectives and strategies of the major state, non-state and international actors are critically evaluated.
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CHASTE WIVES & PROSTITUTE SISTERS
This book is an anthropological study of the unusual coincidence of prostitution and patriarchy among an extremely marginalized group in north India, the Bedias, who are also a de-notified community. It is the first detailed account of the implications of a systematic practice of familial prostitution on the kinship structures and marriage practices of a community. This starkly manifests among the Bedias in the clear separation between sisters and daughters who engage in prostitution and wives and daughters-in-law who do not. The Bedias exemplify a situation in which prostitution of young unmarried women is the mainstay of the familial economy of an entire social group. Tracing the recent origins of the practice in the community, the author goes on to explore the manner in which this familial economy manifests itself in the lives of individual women and the kind of family groupings it produces. She then examines the repercussion this economy has on the lives of Bedia men, how the problem of their marriage is resolved, and how the Bedia wives become repositories of female purity which otherwise stands jeopardized by Bedia sisters engaged in prostitution.
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CONTESTED COASTLINES
This book is about the tragic journeys and livelihood insecurities of coastal fisherfolk jailed by India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh for having entered each other’s territorial waters. While reflecting on national anxieties and the deleterious politics of boundaries, it reveals how these fisherfolk create alternative maps and a new world of ‘debordering’. These fish workers and coastal conflicts have been subjects of everyday news, but never a subject of serious study. A first of its kind, the present book breaks new ground by examining the journeys of these fisherfolk and coastal conflicts in South Asia from several overlapping but distinct perspectives: declining sea resources, security and border anxieties, suffering of the fisherfolk, their ambiguous identities and transnational movements. The book is also innovative in terms of methodology: it is fisherfolk-centric as it marginalizes the concerns of the state from the perspective of security; it questions the very basis of security and argues for a shift in its perspective.
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FILMING THE LINE OF CONTROL
Charts out the history of the relationship between India and Pakistan as represented in cinema, especially in light of the improved political atmosphere between the two countries. It is a penetrating study of films that carries the thematic brunt of attempting to construct a history of Indo-Pakistan relations as reflected in cinema. This book directs our holistic attention to the unique confluence between history and film studies.