Department of Sociology & Anthropology

Ashoka University is a private university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India, focusing on liberal arts and sciences. It was established in 2014.&nbsp;It is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars from around the world. The council sets the university&#39;s academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring and research.&nbsp;

Ashoka University offers a full-time 3 (+ 1) year undergraduate programme. The University comprises of&nbsp;2500 plus students, with a mix of both national and international students.&nbsp; &nbsp;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Ashoka University

What makes a place remote? Is remoteness a factor of geography and topography, is it a construct of connectivity, or is it an outcome of politics and history? For the Monpas of Arunachal Pradesh in North East India, inhabiting the Indo-Tibetan borderlands, remote denotes multiple aspects: lack of material infrastructure and transport, improper communication and geographical isolation. Living an enclave existence far away from centres of commerce, governance and industry, Monpas consider themselves to be backward. Yet, Monyul, the traditional homeland of the Monpa communities, is of high strategic importance in the still unresolved India–China border conflict. Its present remoteness is woven into the politics of borders and frontiers. Through a focus on the particular history and politics of Monyul, I show how colonial and postcolonial policies transformed the region into a remote periphery. While infrastructure and connectivity can lead to the economic and political integration of a region, the withholding of the same makes a region appear remote. I bring the concept of selective connectivity to understand how road infrastructure is a particular form of exercising state control. © 2019 European Association of Social Anthropologists

Social Anthropology

Selective access: or, how states make remoteness

This paper examines the ritual and everyday practices of a family of buffalo-keeping Yadavs in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. Water buffalo and indigenous Indian cattle are described as biologically and socially distinct beings: buffalo are economic animals, favoured for milk production, but ritually devalued and legally killable; cattle are sacred, protected from slaughter. Cows have historically been the animals central to public imaginations of Hindu belonging in scholarship and popular politics. But buffalo, not cows, are the animals central to Yadav self-making. This paper shows how heterodox bovine beliefs and everyday practices knit buffalo into a capacious Hindu interspecies world that subverts contemporary cow politics. © 2019, © 2019 South Asian Studies Association of Australia.

South Asia: Journal of South Asia Studies

Provincialising the Cow: Buffalo–Human Relationships

We live in a world of military metaphors. Military images, symbols, and technologies have invaded all aspects of public life and consumption practices. War-time terminology such as “collateral damage” and “engage the enemy” have entered popular jargon (Van Dongen 2015). 1 Security technologies such as surveillance cameras and metal detectors are now used by prisons as well as schools, shopping malls, and the tourist industry. Popular culture plays on military-themed entertainment and patriotic images (Weaver 2011: 684; Schepher-Hughes 2014: 645). © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Alexander Horstmann, Martin Saxer, and Alessandro Rippa; individual chapters, the contributors.

Routledge Handbook of Asian Borderlands

Introduction

This chapter goes beyond the common notion of borderlands as hybrid zones of movement, fusion, and fluidity by exploring the particular dynamics in a special kind of border region, namely, the disputed border region. By disputed border, I mean not only a linear boundary line whose 446exact position is contested, but an entire border region that is claimed by both the nation states between which it lies, and which remains highly militarized. Based on my research in a disputed border in the northeast frontier of India, namely the Eastern sector in the India-China border conflict, I show how social relations and practices in the disputed border complicate the notion of borderlands as spaces of flows. Subjected to surveillance and cultural integration programmes, people in disputed borders adopt different strategies for adapting and negotiating daily lives and identities. Rather than defying the state, people in disputed areas accommodate and compromise with the “state effect”. I focus on a political struggle for autonomy in the disputed border of west Arunachal Pradesh in northeast India to show how in such a region, a proposal for territorial change is also a negotiation with and adaptation to constitutionally circumscribed goals. © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Alexander Horstmann, Martin Saxer, and Alessandro Rippa; individual chapters, the contributors.

Bordered spaces: Spatial strategies in a “disputed border”

In the years following the India-China War (1962), Tawang underwent a significant makeover. In 1964, the Indian government sanctioned the construction of the Nehru Gompa monastery to commemorate Jawaharlal Nehru's visit to Tawang. Nehru Gompa is a symbol of the new relations between the Indian state and the Tibetan Buddhist institutions that were forged in the early postcolonial period in India's North East Frontier. This paper looks at the changing dynamics between the Tawang Monastery, the local population, and the state in this context, and focuses on how the Tawang Monastery negotiated with the local administration through the medium of official correspondence.