Table of Contents
List of Table and Photographs vii
Introduction 1
Nivedita Menon, Aditya Nigam and Sanjay Palshikar
Section 1: Exploring Selfhood
1. Asuras Through the Ages 21
Sanjay Palshikar
2. Reading a Pilgrimage Site: ‘Other’ Routes to Dalit: Assertion in Contemporary Times 45
Navprit Kaur
3. The Ascetic Modality: A Critique of Communist Self-fashioning 67
Rajarshi Dasgupta
4. Addressing Religious Belief in Political Theory: Conversations with Shia Women in Delhi 88
Ambar Ahmad
Section 2: Spatiality and Power
5. Chronicle of a Death Untold: The Lethal Geographies of Delhi’s Periphery 131
Sunalini Kumar
6. In Pursuit of the Cultural Core at the Margin of India
G. Amarjit Sharma 184
7. Politics and Cultures of Cinema: Delhi 1920–40
Aarti Sethi 226
Section 3: State and Governmentality
8. Assault and Assuage: Identification Documents, Colonial Rationalities and Epidemic Control in British India 271
Tarangini Sriraman
9. Convict Labour and Economy in British Colonial India: Through the Lens of Prison Management and Private Industry 319
Jyoti Bhosale
10. Population Control in India: Politics of a Science Called ‘Demography’ 356
Hidam Premananda
11. An ‘Official’ Memory of India: Monuments, Memorials and Samadhis as Political Texts 389
Hilal Ahmed
Section 4: Reconfiguring Categories of Thought
12. Crisis and Critique: Diagnosis of the Present in the Nationalist Discourse in Hindi (1870–1908) 419
Mohinder Singh
13. Cooking up Nature: Science in the World of Politics 448
Nivedita Menon
14. ‘Molecular Economies’: Is There an ‘Outside’ to Capital? 482
Aditya Nigam
15. The Path Not Taken? Contesting Development in Newly Independent India 515
Janaki Srinivasan
Notes on the Contributors 555