Sociology of South Asia

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

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2. Sociology of South Asia: In Waiting for the Revolution

   • Gowri Vijayakumar, Smitha Radhakrishnan

   Pages 1-33

3. State-Led Modernization Projects

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 35-35

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   2. Between Women and the State: Rights Brokers and Capital Accumulation in West Bengal

      • Poulami Roychowdhury

      Pages 37-66

   3. Degrees of Freedom: Strategic (Non)engagement in Land Markets

      • Beth Prosnitz

      Pages 67-91

   4. “(Hindu) Workers of India, Unite!”: How Class Politics Shape the Consolidation of Right-Wing Hegemony in India

      • Smriti Upadhyay

      Pages 93-119

   5. Traditional Genders, Modern Sexualities: Struggles over Sexual and Gender Nonconformity in Postcolonial India

      • Chaitanya Lakkimsetti

      Pages 121-150

4. Diasporic Mediations

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 151-151

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   2. Veiled Sociology: The Epistemologies of Purdah and Two-Boat Ethnography

      • Fauzia Husain

      Pages 153-176

   3. Interweaving Afro-Asian Solidarity: A Global Textile Factory Floor in Ethiopia

      • Manjusha Nair

      Pages 177-204

   4. “Give In, Cut Your Hair … Or It Makes You a Very Strong Person”: Diasporic Sikhs, Transnational Racialization, and Embodied Identity

      • Shruti Devgan

      Pages 205-231

5. Place-Making/Identity-Making

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 233-233

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   2. Of Tigers and Temples: The Jaffna Caste System in Transition During the Sri Lankan Civil War

      • Prashanth Kuganathan

      Pages 235-265

   3. Experiencing the City as Workers: The Spatial Practices of Women Beauty and Retail Workers in Karachi, Pakistan

      • Sidra Kamran

      Pages 267-292

   4. Caste-ing Space: Mapping the Dynamics of Untouchability in Rural Bihar, India

      • Indulata Prasad

      Pages 293-322

   5. Following the Prophet’s Sunnah: Class, Piety, and Power in a Pakistani Bazaar

      • Umair Javed

      Pages 323-350

   6. “Bodybuilding Does Not Need American Certifications”: Cultural Entrepreneurship in Times of Globalization in Contemporary Bengal

      • Jaita Talukdar

      Pages 351-376

6. Back Matter

   Pages 377-382

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This edited volume moves the study of South Asia to the center of sociological analysis, bringing together recent scholarship across sites in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Pakistan, as well as in Ethiopia and the USA. This book situates the project of decolonizing the discipline within a rich transnational intellectual legacy and reveals how South Asia offers a uniquely generative site from which to rethink sociological practice. Recognizing local and global influences at their specific sites, the contributing authors highlight the historical ravages of colonialism and imperialism, modernization projects of the postcolonial era, and the kaleidoscopic ways in which gender, caste, class, and sexuality structure everyday life under neoliberalism today. The sociology of South Asia centers the voices and experiences of those marginalized by local and global systems of power in order to produce knowledge that advances interconnected projects of liberation.

• sociological methods
• ethnography
• global sociology
• sociology of development
• social anthropology
• South Asian studies
• empirical studies
• diaspora
• caste system
• Sri Lanka
• India
• Pakistan

“This feels like the book I have long been waiting for!! Thoughtful, provocative and timely, this much-needed volume opens up new conceptual possibilities both for the study of South Asia and for American Sociology. It provides a nuanced critique of the parochial lens of American Sociology even as it offers powerful examples of how the study of South Asia can profoundly alter our understanding of key sociological concepts of tradition/modernity, class, nationalism and neoliberalism. It also makes evident that the study of colonialism is necessary to understand the contemporary social world, thus leading the way to creating a sociology that is both historically grounded and global in its possibilities.” (Raka Ray, University of California, Berkeley)

“The cutting-edge scholarship in this volume revitalises classic themes in sociology by injecting a fresh post-colonial sensibility into richly grounded research. By critically engaging with disciplinary legacies and going beyond them, it illuminates how keywords like identity, inequality, intersectionality, and agency can be reimagined through a commitment to locally-anchored global subjects.” (Amita Baviskar, Ashoka University (Sonipat)) 

“This call to arms offers readers a powerful rethinking of sociology on South Asian—its questions, theoretical frameworks, answers, and audiences. But Radhakrishnan and Vijayakumar's contributions go much farther. They challenge all sociologists interested in the world—which is everyone of us—to fundamentally rethink what we do. A much needed, provocative reframing of what sociology can and should be.” (Peggy Levitt, Wellesley College and Harvard University)

• Department of Sociology, Wellesley College, Wellesley, USA

  Smitha Radhakrishnan

• Department of Sociology, Brandeis University, Waltham, USA

  Gowri Vijayakumar

Smitha Radhakrishnan is LuElla LaMer Professor of Women’s Studies and Sociology at Wellesley College, USA. She is the author of Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class (2011) and Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India (2022), both from Duke University Press.  

Gowri Vijayakumar is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University, USA. She is author of At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Crisis (Stanford University Press, 2021) and has published in World Development, Qualitative Sociology, Social Problems, and Gender & Society, among other journals. 

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