Thesis (M.Archit.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, 2007. / Indian architecture has its unique place in the architectural history of the world. It constantly inspires its people. It continues to fascinate many a tourist and thinker. It has a multi-layered, 4000 year old history with the Indus valley civilisation (approx. 2500 BeE) boasting of highly sophisticated space planning concepts. The progressive evolvement of Indian culture since then has seen further refinement of all its art-forms. The remnants of the built forms of such bygone eras hold immense architectural merit that makes a walk through any traditional town a meaningful memory, even today. If architecture is the reflection of culture, what should have been the richness of the culture that gave rise to such splendour in architecture! Yet, "In order to understand a culture, it is not enough to describe its buildings, but one wants to know the impulses that drove people to build them." (Ballantyne, 2004, 30). So then what were these impulses that drove the Indian people to create the stupendous architecture, the representations of which are marvelled at today? The main proposition of the dissertation is that the ancient Hindu concept of "Art as Experience" on which much of the conscious place-making by the Hindu people was based, evolved from profound metaphysical seeds that addressed the very basis of man's existence on earth. The research hopes to partially prove that the greatness of traditional Hindu architecture lies in its metaphysical moorings of Ultimate Reality and Ultimate Truth and in doing so understanding what Ultimate reality was in Indian philosophy and what bearing it had on Hindu architecture and addresses the questions of how traditional Indian Hindu architecture housed man: body, being and all within his unique context? How does Hindu architecture with its unique perception of man and his environment converse with universal perennials? What is the currect architectural scene in India? And what are the lessons that such a comparative study might teach one? The research tries to answer the above questions by looking in depth at the ancient Hindu architectural concept of "Art as Experience" that is believed to have given rise to the ancient Hindu architecture of India. Starting with examining Indian metaphysical constructs and within it the perception of known and unknown entities of reality; further exploring its relevance to architecture in terms of the role of body in architecture, the concept of micro and macrocosms, contextual appropriateness and the unique place that thresholds held in life, the research moves on to the role of an architect and the way in which the architecture created lent meaning to the everyday life of people, attempting to understand how ancient architecture was weaved into the lives of people and their beliefs. Further, some parallels with non-Indian architectural thought are discussed following which the need for a sensate environment for human beings to live in, the need for identity and meaning in architecture, the concept of place and culture as a generating force for architecture are also explored. Finally the current state of architecture in India is discussed. In the end, some lessons that could be learnt from history are enumerated that could help in creating architecture that integrates both the universal principles and the particularities of culture to bestow meaning and identity to the people it purports to serve. This research tries to examine the past to look for clues to a future of identifiable and authentic architecture - to bring the ancient and contemporary into the same framework in order to look for lessons within. Abstract submitted by Kshama Chari. S.no: 0514479E to Dept. of Architecture. University of Witwatersrand on 18 lui 2007.

Thesis advisor: Arthur Lewbel / A person's health not only influences her chance of surviving to adulthood and her life expectancy, but also her economic decisions, her productivity, and her well-being. Since a healthy population is a major factor in economic development, it is important to understand the determinants of individuals' health-related decisions and outcomes. The three essays that comprise this dissertation make advancements in this direction and focus on the Indian subcontinent. The first and second essays analyze how intra-household decision making affects individuals' health outcomes and welfare, with a special attention towards within family gender inequality. The third essay studies how exposure to historical medical facilities affects individual health outcomes across generations. From a methodological point of view, this dissertation highlights the advantages of combining economic models with data from a wide range of sources, theory with empirics. I employ both quasi-experimental and structural estimation methods, using the former to uncover relevant causal links and policy levers, and the latter to estimate deep parameters, overcome data limitations and perform counterfactual policy analysis. More broadly, with this work I stress the importance of research in development economics being open to a variety of methodologies and empirical approaches. The ratio of women to men is particularly low in India relative to developed countries. It has recently been argued that close to half of these missing women are of post-reproductive ages (45 and above), but what drives this phenomenon remains unclear. In the first essay, titled “Why Are Older Women Missing in India? The Age Profile of Bargaining Power and Poverty”, I provide an explanation for this puzzle that is based on intra-household bargaining and resource allocation. I use both reduced-form and structural modeling to establish the critical connections between women's bargaining position within the household, their health, and their age. First, using amendments to the Indian inheritance law as a natural experiment, I demonstrate that improvements in women's bargaining position within the household lead to better health outcomes. Next, with a structural model of Indian households, I show that women's bargaining power and their ability to access household resources deteriorate at post-reproductive ages. Thus, at older ages poverty rates are significantly higher among women than men. The analysis indicates that gender inequality within the household and the consequent gender asymmetry in poverty can account for a substantial fraction of missing women of post-reproductive ages. Finally, I demonstrate that policies aimed at promoting intra-household equality, such as improving women's rights to inherit property, can have a large impact on female poverty and mortality. The first essay contributes to a wide literature showing that a relevant determinant of the household decisions and outcomes is the relative bargaining position of the decision makers. Although this link is well-accepted in this literature, intra-household bargaining power is de facto an unobserved variable. In the second essay, joint with Arthur Lewbel and Denni Tommasi and titled “Women's Empowerment and Family Health: A Two-Step Approach”, we propose a novel two-step approach to overcome this data limitation and to directly assess the causal link between women's empowerment and family health. In the first stage, we structurally recover a dollar-based measure of women's intra-household empowerment, with a clear interpretation provided by economic theory; in the second stage, we identify the causal effect of women's decision power relative to men's on household members' health. We demonstrate that women's bargaining power improves their own health outcomes, while not affecting their spouses'. When we turn to children, we find that improvements in women's position within the family does not affect their weight or height, but it increases their likelihood to receive vaccinations. The determinants of individuals' health, however, go beyond the family, and trace back to historical developments. In the third essay, joint with Federico Mantovanelli and titled “Long-Term Effects of Access to Health Care: Medical Missions in Colonial India”, we examine the long-term effect of access to historical health facilities on current individual health outcomes. To this aim, we construct a novel and fully geocoded dataset that combines contemporary individual-level data with historical information on Protestant medical missions. We exploit variation in the activities of missionary societies and use an instrumental variable approach to show that proximity to a Protestant medical mission has a causal effect on individuals' health status. The investigation of potential transmission channels indicates that the long-run effect of access to health care is not driven by persistence of infrastructure, but by changes in individual habits regarding hygiene, preventive care and health awareness, which have been bequeathed over time. Important policy implications can be drawn. First, policies aimed at promoting gender equality within families, such as improving women's property and inheritance rights, can have positive spillovers on women's health, poverty and mortality, and can boost health investments in children. Second, as the population in India and in other developing countries ages, gender asymmetries among the elderly need to be further investigated and promptly addressed by the development practitioners. Third, intra-household inequalities, between genders and across ages, should be taken into account when measuring poverty and evaluating the effect of policies to alleviate it. Finally, in light of the existence of long-run effects, the expansion of health care access in India should become an even more prominent goal for policy makers, as it can beneficially affect both current and future generations. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

Regulations may end up harming the very people they are intended to protect, and an unexpected windfall may lead to upheaval rather than prosperity. In three chapters, I discuss how rents and regulations can affect lives and welfare in the developing world. In the first chapter, I examine employment protection legislation (EPL), which is intended to promote security for workers by placing restrictions on firing. Using India as a setting, I argue that EPL shifts jobs from the young to older workers. The identification strategy is based on Rajan and Zingales (1998), and relies on heterogeneity between manufacturing sectors. The impact of EPL is strongest in those manufacturing sectors where international evidence suggests employers most like to fire workers. Finally, I present suggestive evidence that the shift from young to old employment induced by EPL reduces total factor productivity of plants. The second chapter, coauthored with Eric Werker, demonstrates how rents slow down productivity growth. The negative effect is strongest in poor countries, suggesting that high profits stymie economic development rather than enable it. Consistent with the rent-seeking mechanism of our theory, we find that high rents are associated with a slower reduction in tariffs. We also provide evidence that a country's average mark-up in manufacturing is a strong negative predictor of future economic growth. The third and final chapter, which is based on joint work with Faisal Ahmed and Eric Werker, examines foreign aid and oil rents in the Middle East. Aid from oil-rich autocrats created unearned rents for many developing countries in the 1970s. We provide a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon, whereby autocrats experiencing a windfall in unearned income may find it optimal to donate some of it to other countries in order to make their own state a less attractive prize to potential insurgents.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

This dissertation examines psychoanalysis in a colonial context, tracing its history in early to mid-twentieth century India. A rich, neglected archive of diaries, letters, administrative documents, as well as psychoanalytical and literary writing in Bengali and English, are drawn on to offer an account of the Indian Psychoanalytical Society (est. 1921), and the anthropologists, doctors, army officers and political figures who were in different ways intimately involved with psychoanalysis. Reconstructing these narratives, and by means of a close reading of texts by Freud, I suggest that the understandings of temporality, sexuality and authority in Freudian psychoanalysis resist colonial discourses of progress and civilisation, notably in relation to the category of the 'primitive', thus frustrating attempts to appropriate the theory for colonial endeavours. In this thesis, psychoanalysis is both an object of historical study, and a form of questioning, part of colonial history and a body of writing and theory available for contested readings. I discuss writing by two colonial psychoanalysts, Lt. Colonel Claud Daly, and Owen A.R. Berkeley Hill, which combines an investment in psychoanalysis with commitment to Empire, based on a desire for all-knowing psychic and political mastery. In contrast, the memoirs of renowned psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, recounting his childhood in India, are read for their more complex psychic register and anti-colonial strain. Records left by dream-collecting colonial administrators in the Naga Hills, and documents relating to the trial and 'insanity plea' of revolutionary nationalist Gopinath Saha, show us the historical operations of psychoanalysis in collective life. In addition, literary writing by the modernist poet H.D., Temsula Ao, Bankimcandra Chatterji, and Rabindranath Tagore, offers another template for examining the issues raised by both the historical and psychoanalytical writing.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / Illiterate women have high levels of fertility and mortality, poor nutritional status, low earning potential, and little autonomy within the household. Yet, large populations of women in many developing countries continue to be illiterate. In India over 11 million girls do not go to school at all and 18 million drop out after grade five. As a result 151 million mothers are likely to be uneducated or minimally educated. Thus the problem is very acute. Issues related to effective demand are widely recognized among policymakers in India as being critical to ensuring the existence of effective demand for education. However, there have been few efforts to analyze the impact of these factors. This study attempts to fill this gap. This study examines the views and beliefs of those who make or influence decisions on behalf of girls that impact continuation of the girls in schools when they reach the age of adolescence. Set in a village in the eastern state of Orissa in India, the study analyzes the opinions of mothers, fathers, village elders, teachers and the girls themselves, and identifies the factors that influence the girls' continuation in the education cycle. The study finds that education and educational decision-making are family matters, and parents are the key decision-makers. While most parents support children going to school, negative parental attitudes toward educating daughters constitute a significant barrier to girls' education. Many parents report that sending daughters to school and educating them above a certain level results in problems finding a suitable groom. Further, educated girls would need to marry educated boys, thereby increasing expectations and demand for dowry. Some also report that girls should be taken out of school at the onset of menarche since then they need closer supervision and parental control. The study findings highlight the importance of effecting changes in parental attitudes about girls' education if meaningful improvements have to be brought about, and offer valuable insights for consideration in developing strategies related to girls' access to and retention in primary schooling. / 2031-01-01

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