This article engages with the sociology of education to interrogate how identities (caste, tribe, race and ethnicity) are read, constructed and contested within the classroom spaces of Northeast India. Through analysis of everyday acts of ‘reading identity’, I argue that the classroom is a microcosm of the sociopolitical realities and ongoing text to be decoded. Categories created by the British and Indian governments (Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, etc.) emerge throughout classroom conversations, teachers’ expectations, peer interactions and relationships, and in ‘hidden curriculum’, which reinforce symbolic boundaries between ‘in-group’ and ‘out-group’ or between ‘tribal’ and ‘caste’ bodies. The study concludes that educational institutions in Northeast India are socially embedded sites where colonial and historical legacies of missionaries and modern-day nation-building converge. It advocates a shift in emphasis in developing curriculum content, teacher training programmes and institutional policies to promote critical and reflective pedagogies and support inclusive learning environments.
Students often perceive gender and feminist studies as outside the scope of contemporary sociological theories. This article assesses the body of feminist scholarship while highlighting the realities faced by teachers and students in the classroom. It emphasises how gender permeates the classroom environment, potentially limiting students’ academic achievements and aspirations. Integrating feminism and gender theories into the curriculum can be challenging for students from tribal communities, who may encounter concepts like caste for the first time. However, discussions about stratification related to their experiences, such as being part of tribal or gender minority groups, are absent from the curriculum. Course materials, lacking these specificities, do not help students understand ‘differences’, especially in relation to Northeast India. This article addresses how feminism can be woven into the foundational curriculum and theories of sociology in a manner that resonates with all students, both theoretically and in their everyday.
In this article, we advocate for a context-specific approach to fieldwork that moves beyond standardised methodologies, recognising the unpredictability of violence and restricted mobility in perilous field sites, particularly in conflict-affected and politically sensitive regions. By and large, sociological traditions and inquiry have ignored areas and regions that are under conflict or politically unstable, despite many states from Central India to its borderland regions such as Jammu and Kashmir, and the majority of states in the Northeast reeling under conflict and violence. In writing about our experience, we aim to address questions about access to the field and the methodological challenges posed by state surveillance, militarisation, community mistrust and the researchers’ positionality.
This article revisits long-term ethnographic research in western Maharashtra to examine how rural families have engaged with changing media forms—from television to smartphones—across three decades. Drawing on longitudinal return visits conducted between 1995 and 2025, the study explores how villagers interpret these technologies not simply as instruments of modernisation but as sites of moral negotiation embedded in everyday life. Introducing the concept of mediated continuity, it describes how families integrate new media into ethical frameworks rooted in kinship, devotion and social obligation. Through intergenerational viewing practices, domestic conversations and commentary on media content, the article argues that modern technologies become woven into a moral universe that values relationality, restraint and respect. It contributes to media anthropology, moral sociology and the anthropology of modernity by showing how continuity persists as a moral practice of integration.
The article critically interrogates the assumptions and frameworks that underlie the concept of ‘cultural preservation’ among the Bhojpuri-speaking diaspora in Mauritius. Unlike considering culture as an inheritance preserved throughout the centuries, the article regards it as a dynamic terrain of negotiation, reinvention and performance. In terms of ethnographic fieldwork, semi-structured interview research and critical cultural theory, the article examines how ritual practices, culinary arts, language and festival celebrations are used, differentially recalled and in some instances commodified in line with the imperatives of modern-day state multiculturalisms, tourism economies and intergenerational politics of identity. Women are framed as the authors and transporters of cultural transmission, and youth are involved in symbolic but detached enactments of heritage. The article carries on the work of Stuart Hall (1990, In Identity: Community, culture, difference , pp. 222–237), Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983, The invention of tradition ) and Avtar Brah (1996, Cartographies of diaspora: Contesting identities ), in claiming that Bhojpuri identity in Mauritius is not an inherent continuity of the past but a variable and contested terrain constructed out of the terms of affect, labour, memory and power.
This article examines how caste hierarchy is spatially reorganised through state-led religious infrastructure development in an Indian pilgrimage town. It argues that sacred infrastructure functions not merely as economic investment but as a sociological mechanism that reorders ritual authority, property relations and everyday access to urban space. Drawing on qualitative political sociology and spatial ethnography, it analyses Tuljapur, a major Hindu pilgrimage town in India, undergoing state-led infrastructure expansion centred on a historic temple complex. The study shows that sacred infrastructure functions as a critical mode of regional political economy, organising economic activity, settlement morphology and access to institutional authority. Rather than producing inclusive growth, temple-centred development consolidates spatial hierarchies by embedding caste-based regimes of access within the material fabric of planning and infrastructure. The article further demonstrates how state actors mobilise sacred space as a site of governance and legitimacy, rescaling state power through selective infrastructural investment while reproducing existing inequalities. By foregrounding religion and caste as spatial and political–economic forces, the article advances debates in regional and spatial theory on hierarchy, governance and uneven development. It argues that sacred towns are not exceptional or marginal spaces but key sites through which contemporary state and regional transformation are enacted.
Through ethnographic exploration at different sites and time periods, along with a critical review of literature, the article examines how diet, wages and workday are embedded in the reproduction of plantation life. It attempts to unpack the meaning of diet and work in the plantations of Assam and Darjeeling and asks what, how and when workers eat as it unravels how the workday and wage relations structure the diets of workers. The article places special emphasis on women workers and their diets as it explores the pertinence of skipping meals and how the condition of lack of food, along with the health ailments of workers, emerges. Epistemologically derived from plantation parlances such as kharcha (wages) and darma katile (wage cutting), the article raises implications for food security, health and nutrition, where the burden on women remains unchanged despite the changed plantation labourscape.
This article critically examines the conceptual and empirical challenges of caste enumeration in India, arguing that the lack of clarity about caste’s fluid, regionally diverse and politically contested nature has led to inconsistent data and inequitable policy outcomes. Through a myth-deconstruction framework, it identifies six persistent misconceptions—such as caste equals surname, caste is homogeneous or exclusive to Hinduism—that distort understanding and governance. Drawing on sociological theory, policy documents and previous enumeration efforts like the SECC 2011, the article demonstrates how flawed assumptions hinder reliable data collection and social justice interventions. It calls for a methodologically rigorous and ethically grounded caste census that integrates ethnographic insight, regional specificity and transparency to strengthen democracy and inclusive development in India.
Drawing insights from the past and different countries, I revisit the role of academicians as public intellectuals in contemporary societies to better understand the contours of academic freedom. Central to this quest is examining academicians in a teaching–learning environment: do they provide students with the freedom to learn? The article introduces the imagery of ‘running mates’ and ‘Trojan horses’, grounded in the communicative dynamics between the instructor and the learner. After that, I argue that spokespersonship or Trojan-horse tactics must be discouraged to avoid compromising academic freedom and democracy. Against this backdrop, I finally gesture particular possibilities for academicians in a teaching–learning environment.
The focus of the lecture is on certain extraordinary learning experiences in the four sites where I conducted fieldwork. These experiences are extraordinary because they stirred my conscience as a citizen of India and revealed that I was living in a deeply flawed society. They pertain to caste discrimination, the power of tradition to subvert the rule of law, the betrayal of the actual tillers in India’s land reform programme, the ugly face of capitalism, and the miserable plight of the poor. Included, in addition, is my analysis of agrarian class. Underlying these experiences is my debt to Professor Srinivas, who inspired me to adopt fieldwork as a mode of generating data for sociological analysis. In particular, I learnt from him the value of empathy for an in-depth understanding of a field situation. To conclude, I argue that because empathy is a unique tool in sociological research, the discipline is the queen of the social sciences.
P. C. Saidalavi, Seeking Allah’s Hierarchy: Caste, Labor, and Islam in India , 2025, University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN: 13 9781512828498.
