This dissertation seeks to understand how democratic elections can coexist with a significant number of politicians implicated in criminal wrongdoing. Specifically, it seeks answers to three questions. Why do parties nominate candidates with criminal backgrounds? Why do voters vote for them? And what does their proliferation mean for democratic accountability? To address these questions, I draw on a wide body of quantitative and qualitative evidence from India, the world's largest democracy. I argue that parties are attracted to criminal politicians because they have access to financial resources that allow them to function as self-financing candidates. Whereas the prevailing consensus in political economy suggests that voters support "bad politicians" because they lack adequate information on candidate quality, I develop an alternate theory that suggests well-informed voters can display rational behavior by voting for such candidates. Specifically, in contexts where social divisions are highly salient, voters often desire a representative who they perceive can protect group-based interests most credibly. In such settings, criminality can serve as a useful signal of a candidate's credibility. As a result, parties selectively field criminal candidates in those areas where social divisions are most pronounced. The implications of this study are far reaching because they suggest that information about a candidate's criminality is not only available, but actually is central to understanding the viability of his candidacy. Thus, there are circumstances in which "bad politicians" can in fact be compatible with democratic accountability. Empirically, this dissertation makes use of a unique, author-constructed database of affidavits submitted by more than 60,000 candidates contesting state and national elections between 2003 and 2009. This dataset contains detailed information on candidates' financial and criminal records from 37 elections, which I analyze using state-of-the-art quantitative methods. I complement these quantitative analyses with qualitative fieldwork conducted in three states, including an in-depth exploration of the case of Bihar, a state in north India.

This dissertation focuses on low-income rural-urban migrant children and their families in Bangladesh, living in a severe poverty-stricken environment in the capital city, Dhaka. Specifically, it deals with the dilemma of so-called non-formal primary education (NFPE) programs aimed at providing alternative schooling opportunities to children who do not attend regular school in the city. It describes how such programs do not necessarily help children integrate into the country's formal school system, but instead continuously prepares them for the subordinate segment of the society. The study particularly addresses the state-sponsored Basic Education for Hard-to-Reach Urban Working Children (BEHTRUWC) project, and examines its three elements: 1) exclusive membership and the making of "working children," 2) distinction from formal schools and meaning of schooling, and, 3) an implementation model that reflects Bangladeshi social structure. First, the study looks at how the BEHTRUWC project labels its participating children as "working children" (not particularly as students), and provides them with only limited coverage of primary schooling. As a result, children become "working children," not only learning the concept, but also acquiring customs to "act out" as working children. Second, the study problematizes the unique goals and subjects taught at the BEHTRUWC project that ultimately draws clear distinction between its children and formal school students. The children and their parents also realize that their experience in the project would not assure the same level of education as formal schools, or provide them with more skilled and better-paid employment opportunities in the future. Finally, the study examines how the basic pattern of interpersonal relationships so common in Bangladesh is reflected in the daily practices of the BEHTRUWC project. The project's learning centers remain similar to any other places in Dhaka where children feel morally obligated to teachers and others, and thus, through the project, the children gradually recognize their assumed existing position in relation to other people in society. Through shedding light on the relationships, negotiations, and struggles of the people involved in the BEHTRUWC project, this study explores how these different elements of the project generate the unintended consequence for low-income migrant children in Dhaka.

The novel especially the realist novel has been generally understood as a secular, disenchanted form, but the history of the Indian novel complicates this view. A seminal trajectory of realist novels situated in India, by native and non-resident writers alike, presents a perception of God in the daily that is rooted in Indian religious traditions in contradistinction to the deus absconditus European realist novel which has generally restricted itself to the secular sphere. Despite the conspicuous and consequential enchantment of the Indian novel, even postcolonial literary critics have followed in the critical tradition that takes secularism to be the precondition of the novel and dismisses instantiations of religion as mere anomaly, symptom, or overlay. I contend that the powerful realism brought to India by the British novel was immediately injected with a strong dose of enchantment drawn from the popular religious and mythopoetic imagination. The novel invited God to come down to earth to become more real and more compatible with a self-consciously secularizing India unwilling to dispense with its spiritualism; reciprocally, God's presence in the naturalist novel engendered a radically new sense of both the genre and reality. Of all the existing art forms in India, it was only the realist novel with its worldly orientation that could give shape to the profane illumination in everyday life and provide a forum for the praxis of enchantment. The Indian novel was part of a larger phenomenon in which the enchanted worldview became the grounds for independence from England whose disenchanted ethos was understood as the underpinning and justification for its imperialism. Not surprisingly, the place namely, Bengal and that birthed the novel also sparked India's anti-colonial struggle and its religious revival and reform movements. The novel in particular was seen as a privileged form for preserving a spiritualized cosmology, renovating it in some ways, and using it to enable Indian sovereignty. Straddling both the British and the Indian, the worldly and the spiritual, the novel offered a unique opportunity for cultivating a modern religious sensibility. By analyzing the various literary techniques my novelists deploy to enchant a putatively disenchanted form in a (post)colonial context, I rediscover overlooked possibilities for the novel-writ-large. The trajectory I analyze teaches us that mimetic realism can offer a more congenial home to religious enchantment than the non-mimetic experimental modes, such as magical realism, usually considered more apt. My project charts the course of what I call the enchanted realist novel tradition via five seminal novels set in India and published between 1866 and 1980. In this arc, divinity is first made immanent in the phenomenal world, then it becomes internalized, only to meet with a birfurcated fate in the mid-twentieth century. The indigenous writers continue with realist first-order rendering of the divine in the daily, whereas the more international novelists formally distance themselves from the felt enchantment of the first order they struggle to represent. Another way to view that bifurcation: as the disenchanted, statist worldview comes to prevail in the national imaginary at Independence, the enchanted novel must henceforth either restrict itself to tiny local pockets of extant enchantment; or, if the novel still has ambitions to be a national allegory, it must register disenchantment as the nearly thorough-going a priori to what now can only be called a deliberate re-enchantment.

This dissertation studies a group of twentieth-century plays from India, Ireland, Nigeria and Britain that have rarely been read together. Through close readings of dramatic texts by authors like Utpal Dutt, Brian Friel, David Edgar and Wole Soyinka and, I examine the significant place of translation figured as dramatic technique in contemporary drama and theatre. The dissertation, therefore, adopts a more formal rather than substantive logic of comparison. Translation, in drama and theatre studies, is usually invoked to either describe the transformation of a literary text from page to the stage, or by way of a more general understanding, as the literal transfer of plays from one language into another. I look at translation within rather than of a dramatic text. This approach allows me to address the insufficient attention that figurative uses of translation have received in drama and theatre studies, and make two critical interventions: first, to demonstrate how a dramatic technique figured in translation disrupts the assumptions of what appears to be a constitutive monolingualism in the writing and reception of drama and theatre. Since the ascendancy of performance studies in the nineteen sixties, critical work on drama and theatre has taken an anti-text, and by extension, anti-literary stance. By contrast, my reading is mindful of the performative aspect of these plays without necessarily privileging it at the expense of the literary in so far as such a distinction can be consistently sustained. The second critical intervention is to locate moments in the texts when acts of translation create new social collectivities and hence serve as a point of departure for a political reading. The emergence of social protest movements on the one hand, and the fall of communism at the end of the Cold War on the other frame the different imaginations of collectivity that I trace in these texts. The first and second waves of decolonization in Asia and Africa, and their subsequent postcolonial predicaments productively supplement this framework. My dissertation also relates to the category of translation as it organizes the prevalent concept of `world literature,' which in its focus on the novel has been insufficiently attentive to drama. I trouble as well as extend the logics of classification by recontextualizing the authors beyond their dominant national-literary configurations.

America has long been a nation of immigrants, but never before has it been as multiracial as it is today. This diversity coincides with an evolving political landscape, in which the role of political parties is declining, and nonprofits are increasingly more relevant in immigrant mobilization. In this multiracial and dynamic political arena, racial and ethnic groups are learning both how to build political power and how to negotiate for power across racial and ethnic lines. Among the many groups engaged in this process of political incorporation are South Asians, and this research looks at their political incorporation through a case study of New York City using elite interviews of nonprofit leaders, elected officials and political candidates. Often portrayed as a model minority, South Asians are perceived as well-integrated into American life. This study sought to assess whether in fact this perception applies to political incorporation, through the exploration of these questions: (1) In what ways do South Asians participate in electoral and non-electoral activities? What does their participation or nonparticipation indicate about their incorporation into the American polity? (2) How do socio-economic status and occupational sector influence and/or determine the ways in which South Asians are mobilized and the type of participation in which they engage? (3) What are the factors associated with South Asians' ability to achieve descriptive representation, particularly at the local level? and (4) What role do cross-racial and issue-based coalitions play in South Asians' ability to achieve their political goals such as representation and policy making? The findings indicate that there is no common South Asian agenda across socioeconomic status, that the community's electoral impact is limited by the small number of registered South Asian voters, and that low-income South Asians are increasingly likely to be mobilized by nonprofits and other political actors. Further, the results suggest that South Asians are likely to remain dependent on multiracial coalition building as a strategy for electoral and policy gains, including for electing descriptive representatives. The study concludes that contemporary immigrant incorporation must be examined within the following frameworks: nonlinear pathways of participation, differential emphasis on national and local descriptive representation, and coalition building as a measure of political success, particularly in multiracial contexts.

This dissertation is the first focused study of images of demons and how they were created and received at the turn of the Southern Song and Yuan periods of China. During these periods, China was in a state of dynastic crisis and transition, and the presence of foreign invaders, the rise of popular culture, the development of popular religion, as well as the advancement of commerce and transportation provided new materials and incentives for painting the supernatural grotesque. Given how widely represented they are in a variety of domains that include politics, literature, theater, and ritual, the Demon Queller Zhong Kui and his demons are good case studies for the effects of new social developments on representations of the supernatural grotesque. Through a careful iconological analysis of three of the earliest extant handscroll paintings that depict the mythical exorcist Zhong Kui travelling with his demonic entourage, this dissertation traces the iconographic sources and uncovers the multivalent cultural significances behind the way grotesque supernatural beings were imagined. Most studies of paintings depicting Zhong Kui focus narrowly on issues of connoisseurship, concentrate on the painter's intent, and prioritize political metaphors in the paintings. This study expands understanding of these images by contextualizing them within contemporary beliefs in the supernatural world, which are reconstructed through a heterodox array of thirteenth-century sources encompassing nuo exorcist rituals, physiognomy manuals, joke books, codes of law, and writings on weddings. This study also examines the psychological impact images of grotesque supernatural beings had on their pre-modern viewers by analyzing original translations of inscriptions written in response to these paintings. This study reveals that paintings depicting Zhong Kui are heavily influenced by religious, social, and cultural currents at the time, despite their better-known political readings; that images of demons share interesting iconographic traits with portrayals of humans of foreign origins and in abject conditions; that and that aside from provoking feelings of disgust and fear, demons served as comic relief and spectacles in paintings which had been largely interpreted as moralistic. This study fills a gap in Chinese demonology--which had focused largely on visual and textual sources before the Six Dynasties and after the Ming dynasty--by examining images of demonic creatures from the Song and Yuan periods. It enriches cross-cultural studies of monsters and the monstrous by offering an analysis of comparable Chinese examples. It contributes to studies of Song-Yuan painting by focusing on a category of images that have been understudied because they were at odds with literati taste. Finally, it adds to scholarship on Zhong Kui by offering new readings on three well-known paintings of the Demon Queller and synthesizing studies on him in literature, religion, and folklore.

The social scientific study of globalization's increasing flows of commodities, financing, knowledge, media, and people has been a productive ground for investigating changing connections among geographically distant people and their consequences. In spite of this recent focus on movement and flows, however, I suggest that our knowledge of globalization is incomplete without an understanding of the infrastructures of stoppage that underlie and determine the ongoing shape and directionalities of that movement. This dissertation lays out an argument for patents as one such critical legal infrastructure of global stoppage that provides unique insight into the changing roles and challenges confronting China and Taiwan within global systems of production, consumption, creativity, and copying. The dissertation's ethnography of patents in practice is based on 20 months of fieldwork on the production of technological knowledge and property in it within a Taiwanese LED (light emitting diode) company that produces patents between Taiwan and the United States and products between Taiwan and China. I argue that the processes by which knowledge is extracted and translated from the lab to the law decouples the knowledge from its origins in machines, materials, and engineers. This decoupling enables patents to circulate separately from these and provides owners with new control over global flows of engineers, tangible commodities, and usable knowledge. Alongside my Taiwanese interlocutors, I argue that patents are best understood as weapons of competition: more similar to non-disclosure agreements or aggressive pricing tactics than copyright or other forms of “intellectual property.” As weapons, the deployment of patents encourages the production of new patents much more than it does technological innovation. As they are currently practiced, patents therefore enable flows, but do so only in particular directions. It is through this stoppage that high tech patents create and maintain global divisions of labor, profit, and environmental risk.

This dissertation explores the transmission of Western medicine for women in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. It starts from the fundamental presupposition that one cannot reach a proper understanding of the medical knowledge available at the time without investigating the practical experience of doctors, medical students, and their female patients. Focusing on the practice of Western and Chinese missionary practitioners (male and female), including the hospital buildings they erected, the texts they translated, the ways they manipulated their senses in diagnosis and treatment, and the medical appliances they employed for surgery and delivery, I reconstruct these people’s daily-life experiences, while reassessing the broad issues of professionalization and gender, colonial medicine, translation, knowledge making, and interactions between the human body and inanimate materials in a cross-cultural context. This dissertation first highlights daily life’s contributions to the history of professionalization by examining the on-the-ground, material circumstances of women doctors’ work at the Hackett Medical Complex in the southeast treaty-port city of Canton (Guangzhou). The physical conditions of the missionary hospital and its built environment embodied the multi-layered process through which the concrete elements of Western medicine were circulated, applied, and localized in China’s pluralistic medical landscape. Foregrounding Western missionary physicians and their Chinese students as practitioners who were practicing and learning medicine in a specific medical setting, I argue that the professionalization of medicine for women was not defined through a set of abstract theoretical criteria but was rather embedded in concrete daily practice, in observing, diagnosing, and treating patients. Drawing evidence from translated medical treatises and manuals, I demonstrate in the second part of the dissertation (Chapter Two) how craft-based, material-centered medical knowledge from the West was disseminated in China via the vehicle of words. Missionary doctors integrated the topic of manual skills into their medical discourse and, hence, could monopolize the realm of pragmatic knowledge generated exclusively from the hospital setting. Here, I underline the role that text played in mobilizing female healing techniques. By doing so, I show how Western-trained physician-translators derived their authority not only as practitioners of women’s reproductive health but also as interpreters of female bodies. Whereas published words served as a powerful vehicle in spreading speculative ideas, it was not the only channel through which Western medical knowledge was transmitted and acquired. Rather, an account of doctor–patient encounters at the Hackett Medical Complex clarifies the non-discursive modes of knowledge exchange that prioritized the interactions of skills, body, and instruments in translating technical know-how. As I show in this dissertation’s third part (Chapters Three and Four), missionaries created their new norms of medical practice by placing touching and handling at the center of diagnostic practice. Moreover, the apprenticeship approach and potential linguistic barrier between the missionary teachers and their Chinese students meant that a large body of knowledge passed from one to the other more by observation and imitation than by the study of books. Whereas most scholars in this field have characterized the Chinese encounter with Western science as a translation practice relying on texts, I broaden this assessment by exploring a gendered mode of knowing that emphasizes the role of clinical practice and sensory experience. My fundamental aim in this dissertation is to foreground knowledge transmission and the nature of the women doctors’ work at the level of practice, which was based mostly on their experiences and bodily labor. By focusing this history of profession-in-the-making in the multifarious exchanges between China and the West, I demonstrate how the “expertise” in women’s medicine was generated by doing—that is, by the technical dimension of the social practice of medicine.

This dissertation examines Deccan India’s earliest surviving stone constructions, which were founded during the 6th through the 8th centuries CE and are known for their unparalleled formal eclecticism. Whereas past scholarship explains their heterogeneous formal character as an organic outcome of the Deccan’s “borderland” location between north India and south India, my study challenges the very conceptualization of the Deccan temple within a binary taxonomy that recognizes only northern and southern temple types. Rejecting the passivity implied by the borderland metaphor, I emphasize the role of human agents—particularly architects and makers—in establishing a dialectic between the north Indian and the south Indian architectural systems in the Deccan’s built worlds and built spaces. Secondly, by adopting the Deccan temple cluster as an analytical category in its own right, the present work contributes to the still developing field of landscape studies of the premodern Deccan. I read traditional art-historical evidence—the built environment, sculpture, and stone and copperplate inscriptions—alongside discursive treatments of landscape cultures and phenomenological and experiential perspectives. As a result, I am able to present hitherto unexamined aspects of the cluster’s spatial arrangement: the interrelationships between structures and the ways those relationships influence ritual and processional movements, as well as the symbolic, locative, and organizing role played by water bodies. The project therefore reimagines the Deccan’s sacred centers not as conglomerations of disjointed monuments but as integrated environments in which built structures interact with, and engage, natural elements, and vice versa.

This dissertation presents an ethnography of market dynamics in India, following state-directed economic liberalization during early 1990's. The decade of the 90's convulsed Indian society deeply through an aggressive and top-down economic reform program, while at the same time, militant Hinduism and lower caste movements sought violently to capture and dominate social space. Engaging this social context my dissertation looks at the market forces, which hitherto were a subordinate partner to the paternalist Indian state in the cultural production of meaning and identities, take the center-stage and move out of the shadows of a tactically receding Indian state, and strive to re-establish hegemony in a highly contested, fraught and charged politico-cultural field. The dissertation then analyzes the corporatist understanding and viewpoints of contemporary India's economic standing and prospects, highlighting their own projects and ambitions that appear uniquely tied to their self-imagination of the role they are poised to play in the emerging shape of economy and society in India. In the process, I show that the concepts, frameworks and classificatory schemas used by corporate houses to understand, capture and represent the Indian social, which first and foremost involved constitution of an immense ethnographically based epistemological cartography of Indian society, are neither neutral, nor transparent, but rather, inflected and laden with a desire to conquer a social field that is already ideologically rife with neo-liberalism and Hindu fundamentalist motifs. I suggest that the aforementioned strategies of publicity and advertising - and the advertising industry is the focus of this dissertation- are not averse to symbolically borrowing and encoding neo-liberal and religious faith as everyday commonsense. By extension I show how the production of their vision of the `new India' quite undermines the Nehruvian vision of secularism and its juridical schemas of inter-religious tolerance and co-existence, of socialism and its ethic of labor and production, displacing it with a late-capitalist, neo-liberal, middle class conceptions of consumption and enjoyment.