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Papers by Garima Dhabhai
Economic and Political Weekly, 2024
Despite the dominance and centrality of a liberal-constitutional framework to understand democrac... more Despite the dominance and centrality of a liberal-constitutional framework to understand democracy in India, it is not enough to decipher its populist renditions. The myriad ways in which the "popular" is represented today in the Indian democratic context call for a thicker analysis, excavating India's many political pasts and their corresponding idioms of power. The anthropological turn in the study of Indian politics offers a way forward to decipher the lineages of popular sovereignty and its practices in India, which is not limited by the presumptions of a Eurocentric normative framing of democracy.
Pakistan journal of historical studies, 2017
Abstract:By employing the political economic logic of aesthetic fashioning of urban spaces, I exp... more Abstract:By employing the political economic logic of aesthetic fashioning of urban spaces, I explain how Jaipur, an erstwhile princely city, came to be known as ‘the pink city’ since the nineteenth century. Naming this colour ‘pink’, its standardisation over time, and its mutation from an ingredient in the recipe for a fermented plaster to a superficial and reproducible chemical formula, makes it an interesting entry point into understanding shades of colonial and postcolonial politics and the role of visual elements in political economic processes. In the market, the colour is circulated as a commodity and valued on the basis of historical (mis)perceptions. I argue that political and economic considerations and practices created perceptions about ‘Jaipur Pink’.
Home, Belonging and Memory in Migration, 2021
Metro Rail, an instrument for restructuring urban space in contemporary India into a mold of ‘wor... more Metro Rail, an instrument for restructuring urban space in contemporary India into a mold of ‘world class’ city, is beginning its journey in Jaipur’s walled enclave/old city. At this very moment, the material process of this birth is being written onto the land and built environment of the city. In Jaipur, this initial moment of spatial reordering has become an exercise in reading the possible ‘pasts’ that are strewn across the city. Through detailing contestations between varied stakeholders such as government departments, groups agitating against the metro, and popular histories of the city over metro construction, the chapter seeks to describe the process of valuation of the city’s past, filtered through the trope of heritage-laden development and thriving tourism industry.
Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies, 2017
Abstract:By employing the political economic logic of aesthetic fashioning of urban spaces, I exp... more Abstract:By employing the political economic logic of aesthetic fashioning of urban spaces, I explain how Jaipur, an erstwhile princely city, came to be known as ‘the pink city’ since the nineteenth century. Naming this colour ‘pink’, its standardisation over time, and its mutation from an ingredient in the recipe for a fermented plaster to a superficial and reproducible chemical formula, makes it an interesting entry point into understanding shades of colonial and postcolonial politics and the role of visual elements in political economic processes. In the market, the colour is circulated as a commodity and valued on the basis of historical (mis)perceptions. I argue that political and economic considerations and practices created perceptions about ‘Jaipur Pink’.
The Supreme Court of India released the Handbook on Combating Gender Stereotypes in late 2023. Th... more The Supreme Court of India released the Handbook on Combating Gender Stereotypes in late 2023. This paper traces the genealogy of this document to feminist jurisprudence, epistemologies and the social movements for gender justice. While the handbook reflects a crucial moment in its own right, its efficacy is contingent on a fractured and hierarchical judicial order, where patriarchal discourse is common in lower court deliberations and legal pedagogy is averse towards "non-law" courses. One wonders if it can make a real change in undoing the "familial" and "gendered" interpretations of judicial discourse. The authors would like to thank Sruti Basu and Sharanya Chowdhury for their research assistance.
Dimensions of Constitutional Democracy, 2020
Studies in Indian Politics, 2017
Urban History
This article focuses on Jaipur city, capital of the Kachhawa Rajput state of Jaipur in the Rajput... more This article focuses on Jaipur city, capital of the Kachhawa Rajput state of Jaipur in the Rajputana region of north-western India (present-day Rajasthan). It seeks to braid the narrative of modernity in Jaipur with the tripartite networks of capital, knowledge and infrastructure that were contemporaneous to different phases of the city's transformation. Through a genealogical analysis of Jaipur's modernity from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, the article will present three distinct periods of its urbanization.
The post-partition reconfiguration of the walled city of Jaipur that had originally been dominate... more The post-partition reconfiguration of the walled city of Jaipur that had originally been dominated by Hindu and Jain merchants is explored. Sindhi refugee retailers and traders were given space during the 1950s and 1970s by creating new markets. The spatial and physical mapping of competing communities, like the Sindhis, Muslims and Bania Hindus, in the walled city was also undergirded by contending claims to the city's past defined as " heritage. " In the case of the refugees, this was articulated through the trope of purushartha. T his article seeks to understand the spatial arrangement of refugee groups within the walled city of Jaipur in the period after 1947, marked by the braided histories of partition and the merger of princely territories with the newly formed state of India. It focuses on the Hindu Sindhi refugees who had come to Jaipur, traversing the urban centres around the Rajasthan border, in the late 1940s and early 1970s. 1 The process of incorporating the Sindhi community, mainly comprising trading groups, in the narrative of urban regeneration of the new provincial capital of Jaipur, was carried out through the trope of purushartha, which roughly translates to " hard work " with Hindu cultural undertones. However, this did not ensure their absolute inclusion in the representational matrix of the city, which is dominated by the image of Rajput royalty or Jain and Bania traders. This makes the Sindhi purusharthi a specifi c category for the purposes of governance, but not a legitimate enough identity within the burgeoning discourse of heritage in Jaipur. The city wall also played a metaphorical role in this " inclusive exclu sion " (Agamben 1998: 12) of the community. While the " walled city " absorbed them in the retail economy and benefi ted from their entrepreneurial practices, the recent resignifi cation of the wall as " heritage " by the state authorities has also made the position of Sindhi retailers rather precarious in the new regime of valuation of urban infrastructure. The subsequent sections would further delve into these dimensions of the spatial arrangement of the " walled " enclave of Jaipur in relation to the Sindhi refugees through an ethnographic exploration of Indira Bazar, one of the market spaces created in the 1970s for rehabilitating this group.
Book Reviews by Garima Dhabhai
Economic and Political Weekly, 2024
Despite the dominance and centrality of a liberal-constitutional framework to understand democrac... more Despite the dominance and centrality of a liberal-constitutional framework to understand democracy in India, it is not enough to decipher its populist renditions. The myriad ways in which the "popular" is represented today in the Indian democratic context call for a thicker analysis, excavating India's many political pasts and their corresponding idioms of power. The anthropological turn in the study of Indian politics offers a way forward to decipher the lineages of popular sovereignty and its practices in India, which is not limited by the presumptions of a Eurocentric normative framing of democracy.
Pakistan journal of historical studies, 2017
Abstract:By employing the political economic logic of aesthetic fashioning of urban spaces, I exp... more Abstract:By employing the political economic logic of aesthetic fashioning of urban spaces, I explain how Jaipur, an erstwhile princely city, came to be known as ‘the pink city’ since the nineteenth century. Naming this colour ‘pink’, its standardisation over time, and its mutation from an ingredient in the recipe for a fermented plaster to a superficial and reproducible chemical formula, makes it an interesting entry point into understanding shades of colonial and postcolonial politics and the role of visual elements in political economic processes. In the market, the colour is circulated as a commodity and valued on the basis of historical (mis)perceptions. I argue that political and economic considerations and practices created perceptions about ‘Jaipur Pink’.
Home, Belonging and Memory in Migration, 2021
Metro Rail, an instrument for restructuring urban space in contemporary India into a mold of ‘wor... more Metro Rail, an instrument for restructuring urban space in contemporary India into a mold of ‘world class’ city, is beginning its journey in Jaipur’s walled enclave/old city. At this very moment, the material process of this birth is being written onto the land and built environment of the city. In Jaipur, this initial moment of spatial reordering has become an exercise in reading the possible ‘pasts’ that are strewn across the city. Through detailing contestations between varied stakeholders such as government departments, groups agitating against the metro, and popular histories of the city over metro construction, the chapter seeks to describe the process of valuation of the city’s past, filtered through the trope of heritage-laden development and thriving tourism industry.
Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies, 2017
Abstract:By employing the political economic logic of aesthetic fashioning of urban spaces, I exp... more Abstract:By employing the political economic logic of aesthetic fashioning of urban spaces, I explain how Jaipur, an erstwhile princely city, came to be known as ‘the pink city’ since the nineteenth century. Naming this colour ‘pink’, its standardisation over time, and its mutation from an ingredient in the recipe for a fermented plaster to a superficial and reproducible chemical formula, makes it an interesting entry point into understanding shades of colonial and postcolonial politics and the role of visual elements in political economic processes. In the market, the colour is circulated as a commodity and valued on the basis of historical (mis)perceptions. I argue that political and economic considerations and practices created perceptions about ‘Jaipur Pink’.
The Supreme Court of India released the Handbook on Combating Gender Stereotypes in late 2023. Th... more The Supreme Court of India released the Handbook on Combating Gender Stereotypes in late 2023. This paper traces the genealogy of this document to feminist jurisprudence, epistemologies and the social movements for gender justice. While the handbook reflects a crucial moment in its own right, its efficacy is contingent on a fractured and hierarchical judicial order, where patriarchal discourse is common in lower court deliberations and legal pedagogy is averse towards "non-law" courses. One wonders if it can make a real change in undoing the "familial" and "gendered" interpretations of judicial discourse. The authors would like to thank Sruti Basu and Sharanya Chowdhury for their research assistance.
Dimensions of Constitutional Democracy, 2020
Studies in Indian Politics, 2017
Urban History
This article focuses on Jaipur city, capital of the Kachhawa Rajput state of Jaipur in the Rajput... more This article focuses on Jaipur city, capital of the Kachhawa Rajput state of Jaipur in the Rajputana region of north-western India (present-day Rajasthan). It seeks to braid the narrative of modernity in Jaipur with the tripartite networks of capital, knowledge and infrastructure that were contemporaneous to different phases of the city's transformation. Through a genealogical analysis of Jaipur's modernity from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, the article will present three distinct periods of its urbanization.
The post-partition reconfiguration of the walled city of Jaipur that had originally been dominate... more The post-partition reconfiguration of the walled city of Jaipur that had originally been dominated by Hindu and Jain merchants is explored. Sindhi refugee retailers and traders were given space during the 1950s and 1970s by creating new markets. The spatial and physical mapping of competing communities, like the Sindhis, Muslims and Bania Hindus, in the walled city was also undergirded by contending claims to the city's past defined as " heritage. " In the case of the refugees, this was articulated through the trope of purushartha. T his article seeks to understand the spatial arrangement of refugee groups within the walled city of Jaipur in the period after 1947, marked by the braided histories of partition and the merger of princely territories with the newly formed state of India. It focuses on the Hindu Sindhi refugees who had come to Jaipur, traversing the urban centres around the Rajasthan border, in the late 1940s and early 1970s. 1 The process of incorporating the Sindhi community, mainly comprising trading groups, in the narrative of urban regeneration of the new provincial capital of Jaipur, was carried out through the trope of purushartha, which roughly translates to " hard work " with Hindu cultural undertones. However, this did not ensure their absolute inclusion in the representational matrix of the city, which is dominated by the image of Rajput royalty or Jain and Bania traders. This makes the Sindhi purusharthi a specifi c category for the purposes of governance, but not a legitimate enough identity within the burgeoning discourse of heritage in Jaipur. The city wall also played a metaphorical role in this " inclusive exclu sion " (Agamben 1998: 12) of the community. While the " walled city " absorbed them in the retail economy and benefi ted from their entrepreneurial practices, the recent resignifi cation of the wall as " heritage " by the state authorities has also made the position of Sindhi retailers rather precarious in the new regime of valuation of urban infrastructure. The subsequent sections would further delve into these dimensions of the spatial arrangement of the " walled " enclave of Jaipur in relation to the Sindhi refugees through an ethnographic exploration of Indira Bazar, one of the market spaces created in the 1970s for rehabilitating this group.