Department of History

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;

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Ashoka University

Cyanobacteria rely on photosynthesis, and thus have evolved complex responses to light. These include phototaxis, the ability of cells to sense light direction and move towards or away from it. Analysis of mutants has demonstrated that phototaxis requires the coordination of multiple photoreceptors and signal transduction networks. The output of these networks is relayed to type IV pili (T4P) that attach to and exert forces on surfaces or other neighboring cells to drive “twitching” or “gliding” motility. This, along with the extrusion of polysaccharides or “slime” by cells, facilitates the emergence of group behavior. We evaluate recent models that describe the emergence of collective colony-scale behavior from the responses of individual, interacting cells. We highlight the advantages of “active matter” approaches in the study of bacterial communities, discussing key differences between emergent behavior in cyanobacterial phototaxis and similar behavior in chemotaxis or quorum sensing.

World University root node

Department of Biology

mBio

Phototaxis in Cyanobacteria: From Mutants to Models of Collective Behavior

Department of English

Theatre and Metatheatre: Definitions, Problems, Limits

'Defining paratheatre, from Grotowski to antiquity'

Lal Ded, the fourteenth century Kashmiri female mystic, is revered as a spiritual exemplar by both the Hindus and the Muslims of Kashmir. She walked away from a difficult marriage at the young age of twenty-six to pursue the Śaiva path to spiritual liberation. Lal Ded records her long and arduous spiritual journey in a Kashmiri poetic form, vākh (a short poem of four lines with four stresses in each line), which is also one of the earliest genres of Kashmiri poetry. Even though most scholarship on Lal Ded’s vākhs does invoke her difficult life as a Kashmiri woman in a turbulent political milieu, it rarely poses the question of gender and politics in relation to her mystical poetry. My paper offers a close reading of selected vākhs to argue that the figures of loss (rāvan-tyol, loss-blister), shame (mandchhi hạ̄nkal, iron fetters of shame) and joy (nangaē natsun, dancing naked) in Lal Ded’s mystical poetry can be read not merely as stages on the path of a Śaiva liberation but also as a distinctive proto-feminist perspective on political self-transformation.&nbsp;

South Asian Review

“Dancing Naked”: Gender, Trauma and Politics in the Mystical Poetry of Lal Ded

Department of Philosophy

Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics: Proceedings of the 41st International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium

Link’s Revenge: A Case Study in Natural Language Mereology

This chapter explores the general characteristics of, and the role of law among, early Muslim communities of the Indian Ocean world in the seventh to the tenth centuries, a period usually understood as the formative and classical period of Islamic law. After dividing the oceanic littoral into five major zones on the basis of early Islamic settlements and identifying five functional groups of Muslim itinerants, I explore how the Muslims functioned within the existing physical and social structures, with or without following a particular legal paradigm. Did Muslims manage their own laws or did they operate under other legal regimes, and how did Islamic law appear in those places to administer a partly mobile and partly sedentary community?

Islamic Law in the Indian Ocean World

Zones of origins: The formation of Islamic law in the Indian Ocean littoral, c. 615–1000 CE

We study the impact of a consumption tax reform on firm capital and productivity by examining India's replacement of the sales tax with a value-added tax (VAT). Unlike the sales tax, the VAT allowed firms to offset their tax liability with VAT paid on capital inputs, effectively reducing the tax-related cost of capital. Exploiting the staggered adoption of the tax reform across Indian states, we show that VAT adoption increased firm capital by 3%. The effects are driven by financially-constrained firms – an important source of heterogeneity in a developing country context. We also document a corresponding improvement in the productivity of financially-constrained firms. Our findings thus suggest that beyond revenue generation, consumption tax reforms can have the additional effect of stimulating investment and productivity in resource-constrained environments.

Department of Economics

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies

Consumption Tax Reform and the Real Economy: Evidence From India's Adoption of a Value-Added Tax

In this essay I try to suggest a non-teleological way of reading the history of anthropology, by placing Veena Das’s Textures of the ordinary (2020) in relation to her previous books, beginning with Structure and cognition: aspects of Hindu caste and ritual (1977). Rather than a teleological movement from structuralism to “post-structuralism” or “self-reflexive” work, I point to the continuation and transfiguration of the concepts of structure and event across Das’s different books, as a way of also imagining movements within social theory more broadly, without each successive “paradigm” having to dialectically negate its predecessor. Further, I ask what it means to age or to “mature” within a body of scholarly work, and how we might take an author to be growing simultaneously older and younger, if we take aging in thought not necessarily to be solely a question of chronology or teleology. © 2021. Sociologia e Antropologia. All Rights Reserved.

Department of Sociology & Anthropology

Fulltext

Sociologia e Antropologia

“In your writing I am existed”: Reading the History of Anthropology via Textures of the Ordinary[“Na sua escrita eu sou existida”: len do a história da antropologia via Textures of the ordinary]

Semantics and the Ontology of Number

Examining high frequency national-level panel data from Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) on paid work (employment) and unpaid work (time spent on domestic work), this paper examines the effects of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic on the gender gaps in paid and unpaid work until December 2020, using difference-in-differences (D-I-D) for estimating the before (the pandemic) and after (the pandemic set in) effects, and event study estimates around the strict national lockdown in April 2020. The DID estimates reveal a lowering of the gender gap in employment probabilities which occurs due to the lower probability of male employment, rather than an increase in female employment. The first month of the national lockdown, April 2020, saw a large contraction in employment for both men and women, where more men lost jobs in absolute terms. Between April and August 2020 male employment recovered steadily as the economy unlocked. The event study estimates show that in August 2020, for women, the likelihood of being employed was 9% points lower than that for men, compared to April 2019, conditional on previous employment. However, by December 2020, gender gaps in employment were at the December 2019 levels. The burden of domestic chores worsened for women under the pandemic. Men spent more time on housework in April 2020 relative to December 2019, but by December 2020, the average male hours had declined to below the pre-pandemic levels, whereas women’s average hours increased sharply. Time spent with friends fell sharply between December 2019 and April 2020, with a larger decline in the case of women. The hours spent with friends recovered in August 2020, to again decline by December 2020 to roughly one-third of the pre-pandemic levels. The paper adopts an intersectional lens to examine how these trends vary by social group identity.

Economia Politica

The Covid-19 pandemic and gendered division of paid work, domestic chores and leisure: evidence from India’s first wave

In the present study, we examined whether clients’ perceptions of similarity to their therapists in terms of the Big Five personality traits were associated with the real relationship and, indirectly through the real relationship, to treatment progress. Data collected through an online crowdsource platform from 212 adult clients in individual psychotherapy were analyzed using polynomial regression and response surface analysis. Results indicated that clients who perceived greater similarity to their therapists at higher (vs. lower) levels of Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience reported stronger real relationships, as did clients who perceived greater similarity at lower (vs. higher) levels of Neuroticism. Similarly, clients reported a stronger real relationship when they perceived their therapists as similarly high in Extraversion, but the real relationship decreased slightly when the similarity was perceived at higher (vs. moderate) levels of this trait. Perceived similarity at high and low levels of Agreeableness was also associated with stronger real relationships. There was no evidence of an indirect association between client-perceived similarity and treatment progress via the real relationship. However, clients who perceived greater similarity to their therapists at higher (vs. lower) levels of Openness to Experiences and Conscientiousness reported more progress in treatment. Implications for theory, research, and practice are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)