Dharmo rakshati rakshitah : Hindutva movements in the UK

This article explores the relationship between Hindutva networks in the UK and the growth of Hindu nationalism in India since the 1980s. The article begins with a critique of ethnicity-based paradigms in sociological and anthropological disciplines and argues that they can share much epistemological space with ethnic and religious absolutist tendencies that have arisen in South Asian communities. It explores the ideological orientations that were required in the Hindutva movement to ‘make sense’ of Hindu migration and settlement in the West. Detailed discussions are presented of Hindutva views about the role of Hinduism in the global diaspora. The essay focuses on the structure and ideology of the Hindutva movement in the UK, tracing its origins to the patterns of indenture and early migration to east Africa, and looks at the impact of the Hindutva movement in the reorganization of youth and religious communities in the UK.     

Alt-Right with the Hindu-right: long-distance nationalism and the perfection of Hindutva

In the 2016 US Presidential election, a small but vocal group of Hindu supporters of Donald Trump drew international media attention in India and the US for their political mobilizing for the Republican candidate. In this paper, I examine the political campaigns of “Hindus for Trump” and its affiliated groups to analyse the diverse ways in which these diasporic activists engage in and advance a number of distinct nationalist projects simultaneously. Tracing links between the “Hindus for Trump” platform, Hindutva ideology that seeks to redefine India as a Hindu nation, and the racist “alt-right” movement that forms the political base for President Trump in the US, I argue these diasporic activists enact a synergetic nationalism that has productive effects in both “home” and “host” countries. The result is the perfection of Hindutva on the global stage through the very activities that legitimize the isolationist xenophobia associated with the Trump administration.     

'Who the hell do you think you are?' Promoting religious identity among young Hindus in Britain

This article explores how Hindu activism in Britain challenges our understanding of the relationship between ethnicity and religion. It argues against the prevalent model in which Hindu identity is understood as a natural ‘product’ of ethnic identity development. Instead, this article calls for thinking about current religious activism as a response to multicultural politics, national belonging and the experience of being an ethnic minority. Based on anthropological fieldwork, the article examines the development of an organization that has successfully established Hindu societies across the UK, one that changed from initially being pro-Hindu to one that espouses Hindutva. The analysis of the rhetoric of a pro-Hindu speech reveals the aims of this group to distinguish themselves from other Asians, particularly the Muslim minority. Such examples of religious activism among “diaspora” youth require us to rethink our understandings of the connections between religion and ethnicity.     

“The world’s best minority”: Parsis and Hindutva’s ethnic nationalism in India

There is an assumption that nationalist movements which are constituted by an ethnic majority are hostile towards all minorities, so how does one account for such a movement’s affection for one minority and hostility for another? In this paper I explore this question using the case study of a Hindu nationalist movement in India called Hindutva which simultaneously expresses hostility towards Muslims and affection for another minority known as the Parsis. I argue in societies that imagine themselves as plural there is a type of nationalist thought premised upon the existence of both exemplary and threatening minorities. An exemplary minority is imagined as loyal and acculturating, illustrating both how a minority should relate to the majority and why other minorities are threatening. While an historical argument enables the distinction between the majority and minorities, a plural hierarchy of minorities is enabled by mythical stories of coexistence and conflict.     

Nationalism remixed? The politics of cultural flows between the South Asian diaspora and ‘homeland’

This article examines ‘Asian electronic music’, a generally progressive diasporic South Asian scene which fuses electronic dance music beats with instruments/sounds traditionally associated with the subcontinent, and how it became embedded into ‘majoritarian’ Indian nationalism. In India, the music's perceived ‘fusion’ aesthetic became emblematic of an emergent India which was economically prosperous while ‘respecting’ its cultural heritage. Using the case of an album which remixed India's national song, Vande Mataram, this article explores the convergences and divergences between Asian electronic musicians in Delhi and Hindu nationalists. The article concludes that the musicians in Delhi did not lend to Hindu nationalism. However, they perhaps gave secular Indian nationalism a ‘cool’ gloss. Ultimately, the production and consumption of Asian electronic music in Delhi raises significant questions regarding the scene's relationship to Indian nationalisms.     

Cogealing divinity: time, worship and kinship in South Indian Hinduism

Daily worship in Hindu temples is characterized by regular repetition. This article juxtaposes iconography and mythology; field data on worship in a Murukan temple in Kalugumalai, South India; and analytic concepts from western and Indian metaphysics, to examine what Gell termed the 'ritual manipulation of time'. In Hindu cosmology, the materialization of divinity – a prerequisite for worship – is inseparably linked not only to the emergence of time but also to the devolution of divinity into gendered forms. Because gender differences play a central role in iconography, mythology and worship, Hinduism provides a rich cultural resource for debating the morality and practice of human kinship, sexuality and procreation. Not only are there significant homologies between human and divine kinship behaviour, but human marriage patterns in South India display the same blend of repetitive yet changing oscillation as do daily and annual temple liturgies.     

Revisiting the dimensionality of biological diversity

Biodiversity can be represented by different dimensions. While many diversity metrics try to capture the variation of these dimensions they also lead to a ‘fragmentation’ of the concept of biodiversity itself. Developing a unified measure that integrates all the dimensions of biodiversity is a theoretical solution for this problem, however, it remains operationally impossible. Alternatively, understanding which dimensions better represent the biodiversity of a set of communities can be a reliable way to integrate the different diversity metrics. Therefore, to achieve a holistic understand of biological diversity, we explore the concept of dimensionality. We define dimensionality of diversity as the number of complementary components of biodiversity, represented by diversity metrics, needed to describe biodiversity in an unambiguously and effective way. We provide a solution that joins two components of dimensionality – correlation and the variation – operationalized through two metrics, respectively: evenness of eigenvalues (EE) and importance values (IV). Through simulation we show that considering EE and IV together can provide information that is neglected when only EE is considered. We demonstrate how to apply this framework by investigating the dimensionality of South American small mammal communities. Our example evidenced that, for some representations of biological diversity, more attention is needed in the choice of diversity metrics necessary to effectively characterize biodiversity. We conclude by highlighting that this integrated framework provides a better understanding of dimensionality than considering only the correlation component.     

Symbol and Sustenance: Cattle in South Asian Culture

Domesticated Indian zebu cattle were present on the western margins of the South Asian subcontinent as early as 6000 B.C. Cattle were important in the agricultural economy of the Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley, but archaeological evidence suggests the bull was also assuming a symbolic or religious role in this culture during the third millennium B.C. There is, however, little to suggest that the cow was viewed as sacred. Following the decline of the Harappan civilization, northwestern India was settled by Aryan-speaking peoples who laid the foundations of modern Indian society. The Aryans were pastoral by nature and the economic importance of cattle to this society is mirrored in the role of cattle in ritual, in the pastoral symbolism of the Vedic literature (the ancient religious literature of Hinduism), and also in the association of the cow with various Vedic deities. Yet, again there is nothing to suggest the cow was viewed as sacred at this time. It is not until the appearance of the ahimsa philosophy at the end of the Vedic period, and the acceptance of this belief in the major religious philosophies of the region (Jainism, Buddhism, and later Hinduism), that the concept of the sanctity and inviolability of the cow began to crystallize. The “sacred-cow concept” appears as established doctrine in Hindu literature by the end of the medieval period (ca. fourth century A.D.), although popular practice appears to be at variance with this doctrine. A variety of historical, political, religious and social factors appear to have contributed to the general acceptance of the sacred cow doctrine by the Hindu population at large. During the 1960s, the “sacred cow” was at the center of a controversy in the social sciences concerning whether the concept was essentially religious in nature or reflected the ecological realities of the cattle economy of the Indian subcontinent. This debate notwithstanding, cattle remain central to the Indian economy, but also play a significant role in the religion and rituals of modern Hinduism, particularly those related to the worship of Krishna. Cattle have also assumed a political role in contemporary India, with anti-cow-slaughter legislation and the protection of the cow being identified with the emerging Hindutva movement. No understanding of South Asian culture can be complete without an awareness of the economic, historical, political and religious dimensions of cattle in the Indian subcontinent.     

Parallel cousin marriages in Madras, Tamil Nadu: new trends in Dravidian kinship

The frequency distribution of various consanguineous marriages was studied in the city of Madras, Tamil Nadu, South India. Parallel first cousin marriages (PFC) were found to occur in appreciable frequencies in all caste groups of Hindus. While it has been generally believed that PFC marriages among Hindus are mere exceptions and are usually not tolerated, our data show that they can no longer be treated as exceptions. The high frequency (27 per cent) of PFC marriages in some Hindu communities necessitates in-depth studies to elucidate the forces at work which go against the very fundamentals of Dravidian kinship.     

Everyday Encounters in the Shopping Mall: (Un)Making Boundaries in the Divided Cities of Johannesburg and Mostar

ABSTRACT

The many studies that see shopping malls as places of power, control and exclusion have often neglected the potential of malls as places of encounters. Drawing on ethnographic data from the divided cities of Johannesburg in South Africa and Mostar in Bosnia–Herzegovina, we examine the ways in which urban dwellers who enter the mall from a marginalised position – poor black urban dwellers at a regional, middle class and white-dominated mall in Johannesburg and Bosniak city dwellers at a mall located in the Croat part of Mostar – use the mall, what kind of relations they build to others and how they rework boundaries of race, class, religion and ethnicity at the mall. Rather than being spaces that strengthen and reproduce centre–margins relations, urban dwellers appropriate them as places where these relations become reworked.     

Paperwork,patronage, and citizenship: the materiality of everyday interactions with bureaucracy in Tamil Nadu,India

This article explores the material practices through which lower-caste and poor villagers engage with bureaucracy in contemporary India. We take documents and paperwork – such as ration cards and community certificates – as a ‘lens’ through which to explore how paper materiality is infused with the politics of power, patronage, and identity. The article brings ethnography from rural Tamil Nadu, South India, in conversation with two bodies of literature: one on the materiality of bureaucracy and one on the nature of political mediation in contemporary India. We demonstrate how everyday engagements with paperwork as well as processes of applying, form filling, and securing recommendations are constitutive of social and political relationships and, ultimately, of citizenship itself. Political mediation around paperwork and bureaucracy generates a hierarchy of citizens rather than equal citizenship for all, yet ordinary villagers transpire as anything but passive. Drawing on patronage networks, engaging in affective performances, and navigating a politics of identity, they actively negotiate access to the state in an attempt to claim their rights as citizens.     

Parallel cousin marriages in Madras,Tamil Nadu: New trends in Dravidian kinship

Abstract

The frequency distribution of various consanguineous marriages was studied in the city of Madras, Tamil Nadu, South India. Parallel first cousin marriages (PFC) were found to occur in appreciable frequencies in all caste groups of Hindus. While it has been generally believed that PFC marriages among Hindus are mere exceptions and are usually not tolerated, our data show that they can no longer be treated as exceptions. The high frequency (27 per cent) of PFC marriages in some Hindu communities necessitates in‐depth studies to elucidate the forces at work which go against the very fundamentals of Dravidian kinship.     

Towards understanding: antisemitism and the contested uses and meanings of ‘Yid’ in English football

This article addresses an omission in the currently brief body of work on antisemitism in football and contributes to and advances wider sociological debates in the sub-disciplines of race and ethnicity, religion, linguistics and sport. The article examines antisemitic discourse in English football and in doing so, explains the different uses and meanings of ‘Yid’ in the vernacular culture of fans. While many conceive of ‘Yid’ as an ethnic epithet, fans of Tottenham Hotspur – Gentiles and Jews – have appropriated and embraced the term, using it to deflect the antisemitic abuse they are targeted with due to their ‘Jewish identity’. The study maps the contested uses of ‘Yid’ on a continuum to explain and demarcate between the nuanced forms of antisemitism in football. It makes central the cultural context in which ‘Yid’ is used, together with the intent underpinning its use, since epithets and slurs are not simply determined by their lexical form.     

Protean defence by prey animals

Summary Attention is drawn to the widespread occurrence ofprotean phenomena, in which the appearance and behaviour of prey animals are rendered variable and irregular, as a weapon in the biological arms race between predators and their prey. Protean behaviour is defined as that behaviour which is sufficiently unsystematic to prevent a reactor predicting in detail the position or actions of the actor.Single prey animals frequently flee from a predator in an irregular manner, zigzagging, spinning, looping, or bouncing. Thissingle erratic display occurs widely in the Animal Kingdom, and may also be utilised in everyday movements of potential prey as insurance against possible attack. Examples are given.In a group of prey animals the protean aspect of escape is enhanced by the effect of numbers. In scatter reactions the effect is of multiple choice and of the simultaneous operation of several single erratics. In mobbing displays there are also successive changes in the actors' behavioural role. In protean deterrence the shuffling of individuals within a tightly packed group prevents a predator from singling one out for attack.In many species the confusing effect of changes in movement and behavioural role is enhanced by rapid changes in appearance, particularly colour.It is suggested that those prey individuals which employ escape patterns unfamiliar to the predator will tend to be at a selective advantage. During phylogeny this is likely to lead to intra-specific and inter-specific increase in the number and diversity of escape behaviours. Apostatic polymorphism is seen as a special case of protean variation within populations.There is evidence that protean displays operate by arousing neurological conflict, thereby delaying the predator's reactions and reducing the effectiveness of predatory mechanisms. Also they insure against learned countermeasures by incorporating irregularities as a basic principle. It is stressed that the irregular variability of protean displays is not accidental but has been selected for in phylogeny. A number of poorly understood behavioural aspects of the ecology of predator-prey relationships are thus united in a single theory.     

The Uto‐Aztecan premolar among North and South Amerindians: Geographic variation and genetics

The Uto‐Aztecan premolar (UAP) is a dental polymorphism characterized by an exaggerated distobuccal rotation of the paracone in combination with the presence of a fossa at the intersection of the distal occlusal ridge and distal marginal ridge of upper first premolars. This trait is important because, unlike other dental variants, it has been found exclusively in Native American populations. However, the trait's temporal and geographic variation has never been fully documented. The discovery of a Uto‐Aztecan premolar in a prehistoric skeletal series from northern South America calls into question the presumed linguistic and geographic limits of this trait. We examined published and unpublished data for this rare but highly distinctive trait in samples representing over 5,000 Native Americans from North and South America. Our findings in living Southwest Amerindian populations corroborate the notion that the variable goes beyond the bounds of the Uto‐Aztecan language family. It is found in prehistoric Native Americans from South America, eastern North America, Northern and Central Mexico, and in living and prehistoric populations in the American Southwest that are not members of the Uto‐Aztecan language stock. The chronology of samples, its geographic distribution, and trait frequencies suggests a North American origin (Southwest) for UAP perhaps between 15,000 BP and 4,000 BP and a rapid and widespread dispersal into South America during the late Holocene. Family data indicate that it may represent an autosomal recessive mutation that occurred after the peopling of the Americas as its geographic range appears to be limited to North and South Amerindian populations. Am J Phys Anthropol, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Automixis: its distribution and status

Biologists have conclusively failed to arrive at a generally acceptable definition of sexual reproduction. Because of this, several reproductive processes are seen as sexual by some authors but as asexual by others. Included among these are automictic methods of reproduction. Automixis describes several reproductive processes whereby a new individual derives from a product or products of a single meiotically dividing cell. Several forms involve an episode of nuclear fusion and it is argued that, because of this, they should be seen as sexual processes irrespective of whether the fusing bodies are differentiated as gametes or are simply meiotic tetrad nuclei. Other forms involve no episode of nuclear fusion and it is argued that, because of this, they should be seen as asexual processes. These latter forms involve the generation of diploid eggs either by restitutional meioses, or by an endomitotic event preceding or following a reductional meiosis, or involve the generation of a diploid embryo by the fusion of cleavage division nuclei in a haploid embryo; in each case the egg develops parthenogenetically. In addition to the disagreement that exists over the reproductive status of automixis, considerable confusion exists over its taxonomic distribution. It is often described as being restricted to a few species of insects, where it is parthenogenetic, but in factde range of taxa, including both isogamous and anisogamous plants and fungi, where it may be either parthenogenetic or non-parthenogenetic. This confusion results both from a failure of many biologists writing on this subject to adequately consider the variation in life-cycles existing between major taxa and from a general failure by botanists and mycologists to distinguish between automixis and autogamous forms of self-fertilization (in which the fusing nuclei derive from different meioses). It is further compounded by a proliferation of synonyms for automictic processes. Thus in a number of publications automictic processes are variously described as being matromorphic, thelytokous, parthenogamic, autogamic or apomictic rather than as being automictic.     

Whiteness and loss in outer East London: tracing the collective memories of diaspora space

Abstract

This paper explores collective memory in Newham, East London. It addresses how remembering East London as the home of whiteness and traditional forms of community entails powerful forms of forgetting. Newham's formation through migration – its ‘great time’ – has ensured that myths of indigeneity and whiteness have never stood still. Through engaging with young people's and youth workers' memory practices, the paper explores how phantasms of whiteness and class loss are traced over, and how this tracing reveals ambivalence and porosity, at the same time as it highlights the continued allure of race. It explores how whiteness and class loss are appropriated across ethnic boundaries and how they are mobilized to produce new forms of racial hierarchy in a ‘super-diverse’ place.     

The “secularization” and ethnicization of migration discourse: the Ingrian Finnish Right to Return in Finnish politics

Finland’s Right to Return policy for Ingrian Finns (1990–2010) presented Russian and Estonian citizens who qualified as having Finnish ancestry the legal means to resettle in Finland. The policy was initially driven by Finnish President Mauno Koivisto, who spoke publicly of his belief that the Ingrian Finnish minority in Russia was Finnish because it was Lutheran rather than Orthodox. However, Finnish politicians increasingly abandoned the view of a common Lutheran identity between Ingrian Finns and Finland, and shifted the discussion to language, ancestry and historical memory, which were used to both endorse and disendorse Ingrian Finns’ Finnishness. We argue that the disappearance of religion from the Right to Return discourse was a strategic – if not necessarily conscious – choice that emphasized the more primordial aspects of Finnish identity (and the Ingrian Finns’ lack of those), which in turn enabled stricter restrictions and, ultimately, the discontinuation of the policy.     

Small acts,Big Society: sewa and Hindu (nationalist) identity in Britain

This paper examines developing Hindu identity in a British context. It focuses on a recent initiative known as Sewa Day, an annual day dedicated to the provision of sewa, or service, as small-scale social action in local communities. Hindu nationalist organizations such as the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh have been central to promoting and taking part in Sewa Day. The paper asks what purpose is served by the drive to promote social action in this way, arguing that it represents a significant attempt to project Hindus as model citizens, contributors to what the UK government has termed the ‘Big Society’. The paper explores the implications of this project in terms of its ability to re-situate the politics of Hindu nationalism in relation to dominant registers of civic virtue.     

Public Protest and Popular Style: Resistance from the Right in Northern Ireland and South Boston

Popular political demonstrations often feature the use of theatrical and symbolic actions and artifacts. These are drawn from a repertoire that resembles and overlaps with festive public events. In this article I examine parades, murals, and other popular forms of public protest in Northern Ireland, where I have been conducting field research since 1991. I compare these to demonstrations of resistance in South Boston to school busing and the inclusion of gay and lesbian people in the St. Patrick's Day parade. Regardless of the political allegiances or intentions of the protesters, they tend to draw upon the same repertoire of images and actions for public display. This results in a genuinely popular style of protest. In the cases of political resistance from the Right, the use of popular styles of protest distinguishes the protesters along class lines from those whose rule they are supporting, [politicalprotest, Northern Ireland, street theater, resistance, public display events]