A Hygienic City-Nation: Space, Community, and Everyday Life in Colonial Calcutta by Nabaparna Ghosh, New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2020; pp xvi + 224, `795.
Dust and Smoke: Air Pollution and Colonial Urbanism, India, c1860–c1940 by Awadhendra Sharan , Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2020; pp xxiv + 319, ` 895.
Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay by Sheetal Chhabria, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019; pp 235, $30 (paperback) . Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City by Debashree Mukherjee, New York: Columbia University Press, 2020; pp 420, $30 (paperback).
Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c 1850–1900 by Jessica Hinchy, Cambridge, New York, Port Melbourne, New Delhi and Singapore: Cambridge University Press, 2019; pp xviii + 305, price not indicated.
While “natural disasters” such as cyclones cause widespread and indiscriminate devastation, their impact is much worse for vulnerable communities. Such groups face the brunt of not only the cyclone but also of inefficient government planning, caste discrimination, health problems and apathy.
This article aims to historicise the experiences of nomadic and denotified communities with respect to their encounter with colonialism, and maps their attempt at gaining political visibility and representation in Uttar Pradesh. Based on archival material and ethnographic accounts from various districts of UP, the article delineates the ways in which DNT communities have been stigmatised and excluded historically. The politics of appropriation is at work and they are being lured by the Hindutva and welfare politics of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Continued violence and non-recognition of basic rights have marked the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. The self-governed Gaza Strip has faced “collective punishment” and “retaliation” by Israel in response to Palestinian resistance to occupation. The international community’s failure to hold Israel to account is marked by the non-recognition of the Palestinian claims to justice.
Several gaps exist in the study of the colonial economic history of India’s North East. A comprehensive analysis of the archival material reveals the politics of coinage in the early colonial Brahmaputra Valley, and how it worked to strengthen the rule of the East India Company.
Chandalika constructs a “nationalist subject” capable of annihilating caste, while simultaneously implementing new standards of morality rooted in casteist and sexist ideologies.
