• Download Entire Issue

Articles

---

• Seams of Memory: Women Re-Mapping Partition in Graphic Space and Narrative Radhika M. Chakraborty

  This paper seeks to explore how women map and move through graphic space, in three short graphic narratives about the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. Partition was a deeply gendered experience. For many women it entailed moving out of the home and into workspaces; while for some, their bodies became sites of violence, and for the scripting of new national identities and borders. Women remember and imagine Partition through multiple lenses, and the form itself of graphic narrative enables new ways of imagining space – contributing depth and dimension to how Partition is imagined and represented. This form also opens up new "geographies of reading" - the reader is given a unique opportunity to view time and space in conjunction, through the visual plotting, spacing and movement of time through the panels of a graphic narrative. This paper explores how these narrators and the women in these stories, imagine and navigate graphic space, and grapple with the confines of borders, nations, texts and form – using and innovating with the form to subvert dominant historiography.

  Read More
• Social Security Measures for Workers of Unorganised Sector in Kerala Diti Goswami

  Kerala has a commendable history in its approach to reaching out to the vulnerable sections using a number of innovative social security measures. One of these is the Welfare Funds Model for informal sector workers. This paper evaluates the present scenario of this Welfare Fund Model in Kerala and its various implications. It also highlights the fact that even though this approach is palpable and can be visualised as an institutional innovation, it has many limitations which need to be solved.

  Read More
• Contested Times: The Politics of Gandhi Yug Krupa Shah

  This paper examines the early 20th century period known as ‘Gandhi Yug’ (1915-1945) in Gujarati literature. It revisits and delineates important historical and political events that shaped the ethos of its nationalist times such as the creation of a new public sphere with the arrival of Gandhi from South Africa; the salience of the peasant both in politics and literature; the establishment of the Gujarat Vidyapith in 1920; the first comprehensive dictionary in Gujarati in 1929, and the emergence of the ‘folk’ as a cultural category. This paper argues that although Gandhian thought was increasingly influential in early 20th century Gujarat, this was a contested age with a multiplicity of voices, competing imaginations and an array of conflicting intellectual positions often homogenised under a label like ‘Gandhi Yug’. The paper also examines the question of violent resistance and the competing conceptions of region and nation that shaped the politics of these writers and thinkers. Through these examinations, the paper attempts to complicate the canon of ‘Gandhi Yug’ and also show that Gandhism itself was assimilated in complex ways, not always uniformly, not always unanimously.

  Read More
• Implementation of Janani Suraksha Yojana: Mapping evidence based policy recommendations from implementation narratives of ASHAs Kavita Bhatia

  This paper reports an exploratory study that presents the implementation experiences of CHWs ASHAs from India in the flagship maternal health programme, the Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY). It attempts to infer evidence based policy recommendations. The study has a purposive sample of 100 ASHAs from Maharashtra, a high performing state (high rate of institutional deliveries). Mixed methods were applied with a participatory approach. A process analysis of the ASHA’s’ experiences lead to evidence based policy recommendations. The paper reports on the findings and discusses their import to policy.

  Read More
• Hidden Curriculum and the Need for Critical Pedagogy Salomi Snehalatha

  This paper argues that schools serve as agents in the reproduction of dominant social structures and in this process it is the hidden curriculum, which plays a more significant role than the formal curriculum. The paper also illustrates that learners do have an agency and carve out their own means of dealing with the different kinds of oppression that they come across in classrooms and schools. Given the impact of the hidden curriculum, the paper argues that there is a need for adopting a critical pedagogic approach and using discursive practices in the classroom to equip the learners with the knowledge to understand the various forms in which domination happens and the necessary skills to effectively face the challenges of the hidden curriculum.

  Read More
• Replacing Welfare Provisioning with Cash Transfer: Evaluation from the Perspective of Redistribution Sourindra Mohan Ghosh and Imrana Qadeer

  The proposition that direct cash transfer should replace the welfare model of subsidized goods and services because it is a more effective social protection strategy lacks merit. This paper argues that by switching to cash transfer, a section of the beneficiaries of the current system, especially those who depend on it the most, would be the worse-off. It is, the authors argue, a less-efficient system of redistribution compared to a need- based welfare regime of subsidised goods and services. Further, in a country that has a high level of absolute impoverishment, subsidised goods and services, which provide need-based social protection have to be further promoted.

  Read More
• Loanword Adaptation Across Time: Evidence from Midnapuri Dialect of Bangla Moumita Singha

  The aim of this paper is to analyze in some detail the linguistic behaviour of Indo-Aryan and English loanwords found in Bengali and Midnapuri Bengali. Reported here is a comparative study of these borrowed words known as loan words, and the original words, in terms of the structural and phonological differences,and the variations in syllabic structures, etc discussed in the framework of Generative Phonology. Bangla has borrowed a number of words from languages like Arabic, Assamese, Sanskrit and Hindi as also from English and from almost all the semantic fields and the words are further drawn into Midnapuri phonology. In order to fit the loanwords into their phonological system, all the loanwords have undergone various phonological changes so that the words can be nativized. The paper also compares old loanwords used in the Bangla society around 1930, as available in a very old Bangla-English dictionary, with the present generation and finds that a number of old loanwords have been replaced by new Bangla native words.

  Read More

Essays

---

• Research Ethics and English in India Nandana Dutta

  This essay is an attempt to think about ethics issues in research firstly, as about good practices in the discipline and then, drawing on these to evolve a specific research ethics for English in India. To that end it examines the prevailing scene of research ethics that has become normative and explores what might constitute specific ethics issues for researchers in English as it is studied and produced in India.

  Read More