Self-management interventions enhance the health self-management techniques and physical and psychological health outcomes among people with long-term health conditions (LTHCs). Few individuals from South Asian backgrounds attended the pilot phase of one such intervention: the Expert Patients Programme (EPP), a community-based self-management course. This raised concerns about exacerbating health inequalities. South Asian people have increased prevalence and severity of certain musculoskeletal conditions, yet little is known about their experiences of living with and self-managing these. This research aimed to rectify these omissions, by describing Punjabi Sikh women's experiences of living with and self-managing arthritis, and identifying barriers and facilitators to EPP. Three studies explored White and Punjabi Sikh EPP tutors‟ experiences of delivering EPP to South Asian attendees, and Punjabi Sikh women's experiences of living with and self-managing arthritis, both before and after they attended a Punjabi-language EPP. White and Punjabi Sikh tutors' sometimes dichotomous experiences of delivering EPP to South Asians, captured barriers to South Asian people's attendance, engagement and self-management. Facilitators identified included the need for sensitive tailoring of the Course, involving the Punjabi Sikh community. The Punjabi Sikh women's vibrant experiential accounts revealed the detrimental psychological and physical consequences that arthritis had upon their lives. Highly versatile in their proactive arthritis self-management prior to attending EPP, participants' refined techniques encompassed combinations of medication and Indian remedies, empowered by their religious and spiritual values. Following EPP attendance, the participants reported psychological and physical improvements in their arthritis. Thus, this Study established Punjabi Sikh 4 Abstract women's inherent acceptance of the concept of self-management, and, notwithstanding its current limitations, the likely appropriateness of EPP. Every Study represents a novel contribution to knowledge. Meaningful engagement with Punjabi Sikh community-members may produce a culturally-competent intervention that could better improve this group's physical and psychological outcomes, thus addressing one small area of health inequalities.

Globally, cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a major cause for morbidity and mortality. Exaggerated postprandial lipaemia has been implicated in the development of atherosclerosis, and by lowering postprandial triacylglycerol (TAG) concentrations, atherogenic progression may be delayed. Many studies have revealed that exercise, in particular acute exercise, can attenuate postprandial TAG concentration. Most of this evidence relates to studies conducted in Western participants. South Asians are a population predisposed to CVD, and their adverse lipid profiles and physical inactivity may be among the underlying reasons. Hence, the studies described in this thesis examined the potential of acute bouts of exercise to favourably modify postprandial lipaemia and other CVD risk markers in young, healthy, South Asian men. The first experimental study described in this thesis compared the effect of 60 minutes of brisk walking on postprandial TAG concentration in 15 South Asian and 14 White European men. Trials were conducted over two days with exercise (or rest) taking place on day 1 and postprandial testing on day 2. A key finding from this study was that postprandial TAG, glucose and interleuklin-6 (IL-6) concentrations were elevated in South Asian compared with White European participants after consumption of high fat meals. This study also revealed a non-significant trend for brisk walking to reduce postprandial TAG concentrations in response to high fat meals in both groups. The second experimental study reported here examined the effect of 60 minutes of treadmill running at 70% of max on postprandial lipaemia and other CVD risk makers on the next day in 10 South Asian and 10 White European men. A significant main effect of trial was shown for postprandial TAG, IL-6 and soluble intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (sICAM-1), showing that TAG and IL-6 concentrations were lower on the exercise trial while sICAM-1 concentrations were higher on the exercise trial. In addition, ethnic group differences were observed for postprandial TAG, glucose and insulin concentrations indicating higher values in South Asians than White Europeans. A significant trial by group interaction effect was also observed for TAG, indicating a greater decrease after exercise in the South Asian men than the European men. In the third experimental study in this thesis the effect of 30 minutes of treadmill running on one day was compared with running for 30 minutes on three consecutive days in 11 South Asian men with regards to postprandial lipaemia. Neither a single bout of running nor three consecutive days of running influenced postprandial TAG in response to high fat meals when compared with the response on a control trial. It is not clear why exercise was ineffective in reducing postprandial lipaemia in this study but possibly the energy expenditure of exercise was insufficient to elicit change. The final experimental chapter described in this thesis combined the data from the first three studies. The objective of this chapter was to enhance the sample size in an effort to clarify the effects of acute exercise and to clarify the effects of ethnic group with respect to several fasting and postprandial CVD risk markers. The key findings were: 1) fasting and postprandial TAG and postprandial glucose concentrations were significantly reduced by exercise; 2) There were significant main effects of ethnic group for fasting high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), total cholesterol/ HDL-C, IL-6 and systolic blood pressure (SBP), indicating lower values of HDL-C and SBP and higher values of total cholesterol/HDL-C and IL-6 in South Asian participants. Additionally, there were significant main effects of ethnic group for postprandial TAG and IL-6 indicating higher values in South Asian participants. Taken together, these data indicate that South Asians have an adverse CVD risk factor profile in comparison with White Europeans and this may explain, at least in part, their elevated risk of CVD. Importantly, the data produced within this thesis show for the first time that acute bouts of exercise can be effective for lowering postprandial plasma TAG concentrations in South Asians, at least transiently. Thus, exercise has the potential to serve as a non-pharmacological medicine in South Asians.

No description available.

This dissertation is a genealogical study of the intersections between popular cinema, popular religion and politics in South India. It proceeds with a particular focus on the discursive field of Telugu cinema as well as religion and politics in the state of Andhra Pradesh from roughly the 1950s to the 2000s. By discursive field of cinema, I refer to not only filmic texts, but also disciplines of film making, practices of publicity, modes of film criticism as well as practices of viewership all of which are an inalienable part of the institution of cinema. Telugu cinema continued to produce mythological and devotional films based mostly on Hindu myths and legends many decades after they ceased to be major genres in Hindi and many other Indian languages. This was initially seen simply as an example of the insufficiently modernized and secularized nature of the South Indian public, and of the enduring nature of Indian religiosity. However, these films acquired an even greater notoriety later. In 1982, N.T. Rama Rao, a film star who starred in the roles of Hindu gods like Rama and Krishna in many mythologicals set up a political party, contested and won elections, and became the Chief Minister of the state, all in the space of a year. For many political and social commentators this whirlwind success could only be explained by the power of his cinematic image as god and hero! The films thus came to be seen as major contributing factors in the unusual and undesirable alliance between cinema, religion and politics. This dissertation does not seek to refute the links between these different fields; on the contrary it argues that the cinema is a highly influential and popular cultural institution in India and as such plays a very significant role in mediating both popular religion and politics. Hence, we need a fuller critical exploration of the intersections and overlaps between these realms that we normally think ought to exist in independent spheres. This dissertation contributes to such an exploration. A central argument this dissertation makes is about the production of the figure of the citizen-devotee through cinema and other media discourses. Through the use of this hyphenated word, citizen-devotee, this study points to the mutual and fundamental imbrication of the two ideas and concepts. In our times, the citizen and devotee do not and cannot exist as independent figures but necessarily contaminate each other. On the one hand, the citizen-devotee formulation indicates that the citizen ideal is always traversed by, and shot through with other formations of subjectivity that inflect it in significant ways. On the other hand, it points to the incontrovertible fact that in modern liberal democracies, it is impossible to simply be a devotee (bhakta) where one's allegiance is only to a particular faith or mode of being. On the contrary, willingly or unwillingly one is enmeshed in the discourse of rights and duties, subjected to the governance of the state, the politics of identity and the logics of majority and minority and so on. Religion as we know it today is itself the product of an encounter with modern rationalities of power and the modern media. Hence, we cannot simply talk about the citizen or the devotee, but only of the modern hybrid formation, the citizen-devotee. The first full length study of the Telugu mythological and devotional films, this dissertation combines a historical account of Telugu cinema with an anthropology of film making and viewership practices. It draws on film and media theory to foreground the specificity of these technologies and the new kind of publics they create. Anthropological theories of religion, secularism and the formation of embodied and affective subjects are combined with political theories of citizenship and governmentality to complicate our understanding of the overlapping formations of film spectators, citizens and devotees.

This dissertation sheds new light on the nature and development of Hindu devotional religiosity (bhakti) by drawing attention to bhakti's understudied historical relationships with Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism. Specifically, this thesis explains the phenomenal rise of bhakti in early modern north India as a process of identity and community formation fundamentally connected to Sufi-inflected critiques of tantric and yogic religiosity. With the advent of the Mughal Empire in the sixteenth century, new alliances--most notably Akbar's with the Kacchvaha royal clan of Amer--led to the development of a joint Mughal-Rajput court culture and religio-political idiom in which Vaishnava bhakti institutional forms became key symbols of power and deportment, and thus bhakti communities became beneficiaries of extensive patronage. Through a study of the life and works of the important but little-known bhakti poet-saint Agradas, this thesis offers insight into how these bhakti communities competed for patronage and followers. If the rise of bhakti was inseparable from Mughal socio-political developments, it was also contingent upon the successful formation of a new bhakti identity. This thesis centers on the Ramanandi community at Galta, comparing them with the Nath yogis to show the development of this bhakti identity, one defined especially in opposition to the "other" of the tantric yogi and shakta. It also contributes a broad study of early modern bhakti poetry and hagiography demonstrating the rise of new, Sufi-inflected, exclusivist bhakti attitudes that stigmatized key aspects of tantric and yogic religiosity, and that therein prefigured orientalist-colonialist depictions of bhakti as "religion" and Tantra as "magic."

This study of mural painting in southern India aims to change the received narrative of painting in South Asia not only by bringing to light a body of work previously understudied and in many cases undocumented, but by showing how that corpus contributes vitally to the study of South Indian art and history. At the broadest level, this dissertation reworks our understanding of a critical moment in South Asian history that has until recently been seen as a period of decadence, setting the stage for the rise of colonial power in South Asia. Militating against the notion of decline, I demonstrate the artistic, social, and political dynamism of this period by documenting and analyzing the visual and inscriptional content of temple and palace murals donated by merchants, monastics, and political elites. The dissertation consists of two parts: documentation and formal analysis, and semantic and historical analysis. Documentation and formal analysis of these murals, which decorate the walls and ceilings of temples and palaces, are foundational for further art historical study. I establish a rubric for style and date based on figural typology, narrative structure, and the way in which text is incorporated into the murals. I clarify the kinds of narrative structures employed by the artists, and trace how these change over time. Finally, I identify the three most prevalent genres of painting: narrative, figural (as portraits and icons), and topographic. One of the outstanding features of these murals, which no previous scholarship has seriously considered, is that script is a major compositional and semantic element of the murals. By the eighteenth century, narrative inscriptions in the Tamil and Telugu languages, whose scripts are visually distinct, consistently framed narrative paintings. For all of the major sites considered in this dissertation, I have transcribed and translated these inscriptions. Establishing a rubric for analysis of the pictorial imagery alongside translations of the text integrated into the murals facilitates my analysis of the function and iconicity of script, and application of the content of the inscriptions to interpretation of the paintings. My approach to text, which considers inscriptions to be both semantically and visually meaningful, is woven into a framework of analysis that includes ritual context, patronage, and viewing practices. In this way, the dissertation builds an historical account of an understudied period, brings to light a new archive for the study of art in South Asia, and develops a new methodology for understanding Nayaka-period painting. Chapters Three, Four, and Five each elaborate on one of the major genres identified in Chapter Two: narrative, figural, and topographic painting. My study of narrative focuses on the most popular genre of text produced at this time, talapuranam (Skt. sthalapurana), as well as hagiographies of teachers and saints (guruparampara). Turning to figural depiction, I take up the subject of portraiture. My study provides new evidence of the active patronage by merchants, religious and political elites through documentation and analysis of previously unrecorded donor inscriptions and donor portraits. Under the rubric of topographic painting I analyze the representation of sacred sites joined together to create entire sacred landscapes mapped onto the walls and ceilings of the temples. Such images are closely connected to devotional (bhakti) literature that describes and praises these places and spaces. The final chapter of the dissertation proposes new ways of understanding how the images were perceived and activated by their contemporary audiences. I argue that the kinesthetic experience of the paintings is central to their concept, design, and function.

Eighteenth-century paintings depicting the courtly culture of Udaipur have been widely described as iconic images representing the decadent "voluptuous inactivity" of Indian princes within idyllic palaces. More recently, scholars have interpreted such paintings as royal portraits constituting meaningful assertions of political and cultural power. Yet scholars have overlooked a topographical genre of painting in which Udaipur artists not only portrayed the ruler's face but also captured the charisma of Udaipur's urban space. This dissertation examines the means by which artists pictured Udaipur and its environs for multiple patrons and mixed audiences, thereby constructing the city's memory and mapping diverse territorial claims of regional kings, courtly elites, and merchants, as well as religious institutions and the emergent British Empire. Central to this account is a corpus of large-scale paintings, scrolls, drawings, and maps made in a time period of transitions in northwestern India, marked by several new courtly and non-courtly alliances, between the decentralization of the Mughal Empire in the early 1700s and the proclamation of British rule at the Ajmer Durbar in 1832. I argue that itinerant artists practiced their arts literally and metaphorically in between empires, and thus formulated their subjective, and, at times, subversive interpretations of urbanity, territoriality, and history as they circulated among various domains. By tracing the critical role played by artistic practices in the British Political Agent James Tod's political and historical creation of "Rajasthan"--the land of kings--this dissertation challenges the dominant narrative that has mediated this region's architecture, landscape, and history. Separate chapters are devoted to shifts in artistic practice, from the painting of genealogical and poetic manuscripts to large-scale topographical paintings, relating them to tropes of praise, pleasure, and commemoration in the court's literary culture, mediation of urban memory, emergent forms of mapping, and spatial practices of processions. Udaipur's artists like Ghasi, who was also a "native" artist-assistant to Tod, the region's first British colonial agent, rendered Tod's explorations in the form of courtly processions while also adapting drafted architectural drawings for the depiction of Udaipur's princely domains. I compare the works of Ghasi and Tod, among several others, with those of artists working for the Jain religious and mercantile community. These little-studied paintings suggest the paradigmatic ways in which local artists reevaluated established pictorial genres and tropes for the purpose of mapping environs in relation to the emerging presence of the British Empire and reconfiguration of regional polities, religious sects, and mercantile communities. The visualization of South Asia's urban environs has largely been understood through the lens of the nineteenth-century British colonial archive of images and maps. Systematic studies of alternate imaginings found in contemporaneous pre-colonial Indian art have been all but absent. Addressing this lacuna, this dissertation cumulatively highlights a largely unknown visual archive of images of pre-colonial Indian cities to examine how both Indian and British artists imagined their urban environs for varied patrons. It contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the importance of affect in understanding epistemic practices and the nature of political, cultural, and artistic transitions in the long eighteenth century in the Indian subcontinent.

This dissertation studies the politics of 'Public Interest Litigation' (PIL) in contemporary India. PIL is a unique jurisdiction initiated by the Indian Supreme Court in the aftermath of the Emergency of 1975-1977. Why did the Court's response to the crisis of the Emergency period have to take the form of PIL? I locate the history of PIL in India's postcolonial predicament, arguing that a Constitutional framework that mandated a statist agenda of social transformation provided the conditions of possibility for PIL to emerge. The post-Emergency era was the heyday of a new form of everyday politics that Partha Chatterjee has called 'political society'. I argue that PIL in its initial phase emerged as its judicial counterpart, and was even characterized as 'judicial populism'. However, PIL in its 21st century avatar has emerged as a bulwark against the operations of political society, often used as a powerful weapon against the same subaltern classes whose interests were so loudly championed by the initial cases of PIL. In the last decade, for instance, PIL has enabled the Indian appellate courts to function as a slum demolition machine, and a most effective one at that - even more successful than the Emergency regime. A recurring sentiment in these recent PIL cases is a deep impatience with the populism that is believed to characterize political life in India, and with the illegalities fostered by it. However, I argue that the enormous powers of PIL stem from its own populist character, which allows the appellate courts great flexibility in being able to maneouvre themselves into positions of overweening authority. With little or no procedure to regulate it, it is increasingly difficult to locate PIL within the conventional rubric of adjudicatory practice. With radical departures from legal norms that further empower the Courts, I argue, PIL has emerged as the vanishing point of jurisprudence. As a weapon of civil society, PIL appears to be a mere legal tool and therefore a classic example of associational activity. But it is really a mirror image of the populist contemporary politics it assails, just without any of the protections that populist political mobilisation regularly requires in a liberal democracy like India. Just as the practices of illegality rampant among India's white-collared denizens make its civil society uncontainable within any conventional notions of civic behaviour, its favourite weapon, PIL, too, has only a thin veneer of legality. The judicial populism of PIL allows for a radical instability that continually pushes the limits of what a court can do. This dissertation, after examining the why and the how of the rise of PIL, will focus on the most intensive laboratory of PIL in recent times - the city of Delhi. I foreground PIL's role in the radical reconfiguration of the city in the 2000s, and go on to critique the limitations of the existing critical discourses on PIL: their obliviousness to its materiality and their insistence on purely ideological and consequentialist understanding of recent trends in PIL. Lastly, I address the conundrum of the enduring appeal of 'debased informalism' in contemporary India, particularly the self-conscious and opportunistic adoption and celebration of it by the most formal of judicial institutions. If the Weberian account of the emergence of modern law was anything to go by, legalism's stock in India should have risen to its highest with the growth of capitalism in the post-liberalisation era. Instead 'legalism' has decisively acquired a negative connotation in India precisely in this same period. PIL is the most striking illustration of this peculiar historical trajectory.

This dissertation comprises an investigation into the conditions and contemporary implications of an historical event, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insurrection of 1971. At the broadest level, it revisits the insurrection and its aftermaths to reframe the contemporary question of emergency in Sri Lanka. This dissertation poses emergency, a defining feature of Sri Lanka's postcolonial experience, as a problem native to the emergence of democracy in Sri Lanka. It resituates emergency rule and the concept of necessity which subtends it on the terrain of the secularizing political rationality, which has constituted the emancipatory raison d'etre of the postcolonial state. The visibility of this rationality has been obscured by liberal constitutionalism's ideological narrative of Sri Lankan constitutional history, and I recover and explore the anticolonial, nationalist contexts of its formation, first in the demand for a constitutional bill of rights, then in the movement toward constitutional autochthony, and finally in the creation of the sovereign republic in 1972. I show how this political rationality incorporates certain secular-political assumptions, fundamental to the colonial inauguration of democracy in Sri Lanka. One such assumption is that democracy is a matter of naturally occurring majorities and minorities, and that the political rights of minorities are best addressed through the concession of constitutional protections or safeguards, rather than any more generative solution at the level of political representation. I suggest this finding should cause us to radically revise the normative ethical-political coordinates which implicitly orient a greater part of the social scientific study of Sri Lanka. That conventional question has revolved around the transgression of secular norms by the force of ethnicity and nationalism, and hence much work has taken up the challenge of deconstructing and explaining the cultural force of Sinhala nationalist ideology. My dissertation asks that we set aside this problematic and instead foreground the question of the secular inheritances of the state as the target of our critical strategies.

This dissertation focuses on a seventeenth-century (so-called) Malwa manuscript that illustrates the story of Krishna, and the copy manuscripts that were produced after it. It explores how the story is transformed in its incarnations as the vernacular text inscribed on the manuscript, the cycle of illustrations depicting that text, and then the copies made from what appear to be the initial illustrations. The claim is that narrative variations which find their way into these different embodiments should almost never be considered "mistakes," even when an act of misunderstanding seems to be clearly implied. Rather they are moments when the artist's or author's engagement with contemporary sectarian concerns, literary trends, artistic strategies and popular culture is manifest. The first three chapters of the dissertation are devoted to an analysis of text, illustration and copy illustration respectively, while the fourth presents the broader context in which such Krishna manuscripts were circulating.The underlying objective is to re-evaluate the conventional narrative of North Indian illustrated manuscripts. This is cast as the teleology of court styles where political history is used to decide important and influential ateliers. Visually compelling and historically important illustrated manuscripts such as the ones I study, but whose patronizing court is undecided, are largely ignored. This dissertation showcases an alternative, interdisciplinary approach that undertakes thorough visual and textual analyses alongside an examination of the broader socio-religious trends that impacted artistic production. It advocates that every illustrated manuscript should be studied individually, rather than as just a member of a predetermined stylistic group.