Rashmi Sadana | George Mason University (original) (raw)

Book by Rashmi Sadana

University of California Press, 2022

My ethnography of Delhi's Metro system, an analysis of the social and infrastructural impact of t... more My ethnography of Delhi's Metro system, an analysis of the social and infrastructural impact of the system on the city, is now out with the University of California Press. You can read the first part of the Intro here. A South Asian version of the book has been published by Roli Books with the title: Metronama: Scenes from the Delhi Metro.

The back cover blurb:
The Moving City is a rich and intimate account of urban transformation told through the story of Delhi's Metro, a massive infrastructure project that is reshaping the city's social and urban landscapes. Ethnographic vignettes introduce the feel and form of the Metro and let readers experience the city, scene by scene, stop by stop, as if they, too, have come along for the ride. Laying bare the radical possibilities and concretized inequalities of the Metro, and how people live with and through its built environment, this is a story of women and men on the move, the nature of Indian aspiration, and what it takes morally and materially to sustain urban life. Through exquisite prose, Rashmi Sadana transports the reader to a city shaped by both its Metro and those who depend on it, revealing a perspective on Delhi unlike any other.

English Heart, Hindi Heartland examines Delhi’s postcolonial literary world—its institutions, pri... more English Heart, Hindi Heartland examines Delhi’s postcolonial literary world—its institutions, prizes, publishers, writers, and translators, and the cultural geographies of key neighborhoods—in light of colonial histories and the globalization of English. Rashmi Sadana places internationally recognized authors such as Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, and Aravind Adiga in the context of debates within India about the politics of language and alongside other writers, including K. Satchidanandan, Shashi Deshpande, and Geetanjali Shree. Sadana undertakes an ethnographic study of literary culture that probes the connections between place, language, and text in order to show what language comes to stand for in people’s lives. In so doing, she unmasks a social discourse rife with questions of authenticity and cultural politics of inclusion and exclusion. English Heart, Hindi Heartland illustrates how the notion of what is considered to be culturally and linguistically authentic not only obscures larger questions relating to caste, religious, and gender identities, but that the authenticity discourse itself is continually in flux. In order to mediate and extract cultural capital from India’s complex linguistic hierarchies, literary practitioners strategically deploy a fluid set of cultural and political distinctions that Sadana calls “literary nationality.” Sadana argues that English, and the way it is positioned among the other Indian languages, does not represent a fixed pole, but rather serves to change political and literary alliances among classes and castes, often in surprising ways.

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Slush Pile

1 Reading Delhi and Beyond

2 Two Tales of a City

3 In Sujan Singh Park

4 The Two Brothers of Ansari Road

5 At the Sahitya Akademi

6 Across the Yamuna

7 “A Suitable Text for a Vegetarian Audience"

8 Indian Literature Abroad

9 Conclusion

Edited Volume by Rashmi Sadana

Table of Contents Chronology Introduction Rashmi Sadana and Vasudha Dalmia Part I. Cultural Cont... more Table of Contents

Chronology
Introduction Rashmi Sadana and Vasudha Dalmia
Part I. Cultural Contexts:
1. Scenes of rural change Ann Grodzins Gold
2. The formation of tribal identities Stuart Blackburn
3. Food and agriculture Amita Baviskar
4. Urban forms of religious practice Smriti Srinivas
5. The politics of caste identities Christophe Jaffrelot
Part II. Cultural Forms:
6. History and representation in the Bengali novel Supriya Chaudhuri
7. Writing in English Rashmi Sadana
8. Dalit life histories Debjani Ganguly
9. Three traditions in modernist art Sonal Khullar
10. Mass reproduction and the art of the bazaar Kajri Jain
11. Urban theatre and the turn towards 'folk' Vasudha Dalmia
12. Aesthetics and politics in popular cinema Ravi S. Vasudevan
13. Musical genres and national identity Amanda Weidman
14. Voyeurism and the family on television Amrita Ibrahim
Further reading
Index

Articles by Rashmi Sadana

The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty, 2023

In good anthropological fashion, Jonathan Boyarin's idea of an "ethnography of reading" posits th... more In good anthropological fashion, Jonathan Boyarin's idea of an "ethnography of reading" posits the written text as being in an always evolving relationship with the readers of that text. Further, reading is seen as a set of social practices, whereby texts are stories reaching out to the public and books are material objects in circulation. Or as he puts it, "textuality" is "a field of interaction" (Boyarin 1993, 2). Reading Boyarin in the early 2000s, when I was studying how novels from India were being read transnationally, the volume helped me to think anthropologically about texts. In my ethnographic case, it meant to see the languages of the text (written in English but describing lives lived in Hindi) as a way to document and analyze postcolonial language politics (Sadana 2012). Getting out of the text was my first real anthropological instinct-to unravel these novels' social and cultural contexts at regional, national, and international levels. This meant studying book reviewers, prize committees, translators, publishers, editors, lay readers and more. But then I realized I could go back

City and Society, 2022

This essay is in response to the question "What is 'critical' in critical urban anthropology?" My... more This essay is in response to the question "What is 'critical' in critical urban anthropology?" My answer to this question delves into my experience of doing ethnographic research at the ends of Delhi Metro lines, places that I came to see as critical sites of urbanism-ruralism and the intersecting mobilities of the National Capital Region. The "critical" is a method and position that both reveals and interrogates social inequity and power differentials on and through the urban-peri-urban and more rural landscapes.

Roadsides, 2021

This multimedia essay explores how the Delhi Metro has created a new sensory ecology of mobility ... more This multimedia essay explores how the Delhi Metro has created a new sensory ecology of mobility that reflects and reforms the hierarchies of mobility in the city. The essay illustrates how infrastructure serves as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion from “sensory modernity” by immersing readers in the sounds, sights and feel of the high-speed Metro. In the process new relationships between self and technology emerge between the lines of belonging and nonbelonging in the city.

Crowds: Ethnographic Encounters, 2019

City & Society, 2018

To what extent is Delhi's metro rail system a social leveler and a global emblem of middle-class ... more To what extent is Delhi's metro rail system a social leveler and a global emblem of middle-class modernity—in idea and practice? This essay illustrates how the language and aims of planning and infrastructural development achieve class-based goals in a city of deep social inequalities. Based on fieldwork in Delhi, the essay details architects' visions and work practices on the Metro, and how they interact with new forms of technocratic governance instituted by the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation. By breaking down the broader development-based ideology that the Metro represents, the essay tracks how architects and planners are involved in diverse forms of " aspirational planning " that ultimately privilege and enact a notion of upward mobility rather than social equality. The urban extends through space, which it modifies. —Henri Lefebvre (2014), The Urban Revolution The Metro as idea and object D elhi's metro rail system extends into geographic space—with its 8 lines and 184 stations to date—and concretely into people's lives. Like much transport infrastructure in the world, it is meant to intervene and fix—not only traffic, but also pollution, stress, and social inequality itself—as it modernizes life and instills national pride. But to what extent can the system be a social leveler and a global emblem and enactment of middle-class modernity? The Metro is about the movement of people—nearly three million a day—but in the larger schema of city-and nation-building, it is also a premier symbol of capital interests. It is both a form of transport and an urban plan. The Metro serves mostly working-, lower-, and middle-class commuters, alongside land and property developers and global financiers; it has multiple constituencies. In the process of making and running the system, a host of questions arise about what a city is and who this city is for. These questions are addressed in the planning and construction of the Metro, in its everyday operations , and in a larger symbolic realm that goes beyond this city and its people.

Anthropology and Humanism, 2018

Meeting runaway intercaste couples hiding in a safe house in Delhi led me to reflect on the kinds... more Meeting runaway intercaste couples hiding in a safe house in Delhi led me to reflect on the kinds of mobility at work in their lives and in the city today. By highlighting the social and physical parameters of their mobility in a single ethnographic frame, I argue that it is the quest for mobility rather than an expression of individual choice that is most significant about their flouting of social norms.

A reflective essay on applying anthropological fieldwork methods to the study of literary languag... more A reflective essay on applying anthropological fieldwork methods to the study of literary language, and more recently the new circuits of mobility and sociality in Delhi's metro rail system.

The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism, Feb 2016

Sanskritization is a theory of social change advanced by the sociologist M. N. Srinivas in 1952 t... more Sanskritization is a theory of social change advanced by the sociologist M. N. Srinivas in 1952 to describe how upward mobility occurs in India's caste society, previously thought to be static. It is the process by which lower caste groups attempt to raise their status and position within the caste hierarchy by emulating upper caste social norms, such as the adoption of vegetarianism and the worship of Brahminical gods. The theory of Sanskritization recognizes the great regional variation of caste groups across linguistic, ethnic, and geographical boundaries, and the local power struggles that may shift a subcaste group's position in the hierarchy, even if it does not lead to any structural change in the overarching caste schema. The theory also reinforces the idea of a Brahmin-centric society that relegates the lower castes to the role of imitators, thereby making it out of step with contemporary caste politics.

In "A History of the Indian Novel in English," edited by Ulka Anjaria. Cambridge University Press, 2015: pp. 147-161.

This chapter highlights translated texts in a volume that would otherwise only discuss literature... more This chapter highlights translated texts in a volume that would otherwise only discuss literature written originally in English. I argue that translations should also be seen as contributions to Indian English, both the literary corpus and the language itself. In doing so, I frame translation itself as part and parcel of the understanding and forging of an Indian literature. To illustrate these points, I compare Tagore's "Gora", Ananthamurthy's "Samskara", and Omprakash Valmiki's "Joothan" to talk about issues of language, caste, and the form of the novel. I detail how notions of caste as expressed in translated texts in particular have been central to Indian modernity and self-formation.

Economic & Political Weekly, Jan 1, 2010

Public Books, Sep 2012

An article adapted from my book, English Heart, Hindi Heartland, about the publisher Ravi Dayal a... more An article adapted from my book, English Heart, Hindi Heartland, about the publisher Ravi Dayal and his role in the post-1970s 'boom' in Indian fiction in English. Why is global Indian literature represented by works originally written in English rather than translations from Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, or a host of other languages that are spoken by many more people? I argue that we need to study literary production in order to understand the historical and political dynamics that led to the flourishing of English after the British left India in 1947.

Economic and Political Weekly, 2010

Public Culture, Jan 1, 2007

This essay is based on ethnographic research of Delhi's literary field and looks at competing lan... more This essay is based on ethnographic research of Delhi's literary field and looks at competing language ideologies of English, Hindi, and other languages as played out among writers, translators, critics, and others. It reveals several layers of obfuscation (relating to caste, especially) in a controversy that erupted over the Hindi translation of Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy.

Interventions, Jan 1, 2009

This essay is about the place of English in the multilingual literary consciousness and the work ... more This essay is about the place of English in the multilingual literary consciousness and the work it does as a mediator in the Indian linguistic landscape. It links the transnational production of literature, especially the framing of Salman Rushdie in Granta in 1980 versus in the New Yorker seventeen years later, to a comparison of Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi and Anita Desai's In Custody.

A four-part series exploring Delhi's changing landscape, public vs. private space, the politics o... more A four-part series exploring Delhi's changing landscape, public vs. private space, the politics of urban design and issues of inequality, all in relation to the Delhi Metro, which has now been running for ten years.

University of California Press, 2022

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Slush Pile

1 Reading Delhi and Beyond

2 Two Tales of a City

3 In Sujan Singh Park

4 The Two Brothers of Ansari Road

5 At the Sahitya Akademi

6 Across the Yamuna

7 “A Suitable Text for a Vegetarian Audience"

8 Indian Literature Abroad

9 Conclusion

Table of Contents Chronology Introduction Rashmi Sadana and Vasudha Dalmia Part I. Cultural Cont... more Table of Contents

The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty, 2023

City and Society, 2022

Roadsides, 2021

Crowds: Ethnographic Encounters, 2019

City & Society, 2018

Anthropology and Humanism, 2018

The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism, Feb 2016

In "A History of the Indian Novel in English," edited by Ulka Anjaria. Cambridge University Press, 2015: pp. 147-161.

Economic & Political Weekly, Jan 1, 2010

Public Books, Sep 2012

Economic and Political Weekly, 2010

Public Culture, Jan 1, 2007

Interventions, Jan 1, 2009

South Asian History and Culture, 2024

Between searing oral histories and complex political ones, there has been a plethora of important... more Between searing oral histories and complex political ones, there has been a plethora of important scholarship on the Partition over the last few decades. Rotem Geva’s book, Delhi Reborn, is distinctive for the way it focuses entirely on Delhi as a political and cultural staging ground for the Partition and emergence of the newly independent Indian nation-state. Geva’s is a story of how a secular and democratic India comes into being and how it is challenged at every step by communalism and the unravelling and then reconstituting of religious identities.

PoLAR (Political and Legal Anthropology Review), 2021

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 2020

American Ethnologist, 2018

In Landscapes of Accumulation, Llerena Guiu Searle expertly peels back the narratives that made G... more In Landscapes of Accumulation, Llerena Guiu Searle expertly
peels back the narratives that made Gurgaon rise and (now)
stagnate by rendering a specific story of how Indian real
estate became a transnational commodity in the 2000s ...

Contributions to Indian Sociology, 2017

American Ethnologist, 2016

Infrastructure has been a somewhat recent revelation in anthropology. Urban ethnographers have lo... more Infrastructure has been a somewhat recent revelation in anthropology. Urban ethnographers have long analyzed cities from the ground up; now many are viewing them from the entrails out. This approach is on exacting display in Lisa Björkman's account of the flows and stoppages of water in Mumbai's M-East Ward. What, she asks, is the relationship between the marketization of water in an era of economic liberalization and the actually existing material networks and social processes of water distribution? And what kind of politics does this distribution produce? As Björkman explains early on, Mumbai does not have a water shortage, nor does its sewage department have insufficient funds; rather, its distribution is erratic in both rich and poor neighborhoods. Hers is not a simple story of the lawn mowering of a city by global investment capital, nor is it a celebration of urban informality or resistance politics in the face of planned, state-led modernity. Rather, drawing on Karl Polanyi's notion of embedded markets, Björkman seeks to address Mumbai's changing built space by deciphering water networks and markets for what they are and not viewing them as parables of something else. The central structures in Björkman's tale are the pipes—who controls them, who monitors them, where they go and at what elevation. This book shows how infrastructure itself becomes a site for politics, which Björkman reveals in her granular analysis of how water moves in the city. She describes pipe politics as " the new arenas of contestation " in the business, brokerage, secondary markets, and sociopolitical networks around water distribution vis-à-vis the project to remake Mumbai into a world-class city (3). Central to pipe politics is the question of land, a puzzle that Björkman identifies as a need to reconcile soaring land values with social projects such as infrastructure. This leads us to the book's metanarrative on the world-class city, specifically, how to square the imperative to attract global investment capital with the needs of the local citizenry. Björkman challenges the neat boundaries of this narrative by documenting the regimes of knowledge and authority that water inhabits and tracking the way flows are configured

American Anthropologist, Jun 2016

This engaging and skillful ethnography of young deaf people in Bangalore marks a critical contrib... more This engaging and skillful ethnography of young deaf people in Bangalore marks a critical contribution to disability studies as well as to scholarship on language ideologies and neoliberal India. The book's five chapters follow the linear development of young people from family to school to church to NGO and business worlds. However, the chapters are also arranged as a constellation of urban institutions and thus demonstrate how key concepts in deaf worlds circulate among them. The ethnography begins when Michele Friedner identifies another deaf woman on a crowded Bangalore bus using a phrase common among " deafs " in India: " deaf deaf same " (p. 2). This idiom and moment of recognition become a central concept in the book, which is indeed about " deaf worlds, " how they are created, the value that may be extracted from them, and how these worlds are inextricably linked to " normal " ones, another local idiom used throughout to great analytical effect. From the start, Friedner identifies sites, practices, and structures of feeling that are vital to " deaf development, " an idea that encapsulates the desire to be part of deaf worlds and to communicate among and between them. Being in and of these worlds and the moral imperatives of such a life are key to this rich text. Chapter 1 is compelling for the author's attempt to understand and reconceptualize the meaning of family for young, deaf Bangalurus. In short, as Friedner shows, family is an impediment to deaf kids in terms of the development of their deaf sociality. The families she gets to know , while well meaning, want their deaf children to be normal, and so they push them toward oral learning, which, it turns out, is a terrible way for deaf people to learn, resulting in " not-learning " or learning in a " half-half-half " way. Curiously, the most respected deaf schools in India also promote oral education, and Friedner takes us to Chennai, where those schools are located. Part of the problem is that oral education is not matched with the appropriate technologies and expertise to align each deaf person's disability with the proper hearing aid (or implant) and its monitoring. In addition, oralism not so subtly denigrates the use of sign language, which is the mother tongue of the deaf, although not recognized by the Indian state. As a result, deaf Indian kids don't learn much in school, which becomes a lifelong condition leading to normalized practices such as copying (first exams, later CVs), which in turn homogenizes deaf experience in the workplace. What deafs do gain in deaf schools are friends, real friends, because even though sign language is looked down upon by normals and even by most deaf educators in the Indian context (who are rarely deaf

Anthropology Quarterly, 2014

Wasafiri, vol. 28, issue 1

The Journal of Asian Studies, Jan 1, 2005

Somehow I thought that if I ever went to Pakistan, I would perhaps cross the Wagah border and mak... more Somehow I thought that if I ever went to Pakistan, I would perhaps cross the Wagah border and make my way to Lahore and then Gujranwala, where my four grandparents came from. It was an idealist vision, fuelled partly by another generation's nostalgia, and my years of teaching colonialism, Partition, and all the rest. Instead, as it turned out, I landed at Jinnah International Airport in Karachi on an Emirates flight from Dubai. I went there to give a keynote address on Delhi at a conference on megacities organised by my university in the U.S. and the University of Karachi.

DNA (Daily News and Analysis), Oct 10, 2014

DNA (Daily News and Analysis), Jun 11, 2014

DNA (Daily News and Analysis), Feb 25, 2014

DNA (Daily News and Analysis), Indian national newspaper, Jan 31, 2014

Cities and Globalization, Nov 18, 2013

DNA (Daily News and Analysis), Indian national newspaper, Nov 6, 2013

DNA (Daily News and Analysis), Indian national newspaper, Oct 7, 2013

A reflection on changes in India's social sphere over the last 35 years - as part of India Today'... more A reflection on changes in India's social sphere over the last 35 years - as part of India Today's special anniversary issue.

The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture, 2011