In this thesis, I explore the use of copulas in non-copula constructions in the languages of South Asia to establish possible genetic and areal tendencies in the distribution. Using materials – language descriptions and data – from Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, I examine the phenomenon in 206 languages from four families (Munda, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan and Sino-Tibetan). It is found that the languages of South Asia appear to be more likely than the world-wide average to use the copula in non-copula constructions and that at least Munda, Dravidian and Indo-Aryan use it in the same way with regards to tense, namely in the past and present but not the future. Finally, I argue that there is some evidence supporting that the use of the copula in non-copula constructions is an areal feature, though more work is needed to make any definitive conclusions.

Hindu Indian Bengalis as an ethno-linguistic and transnational group have negotiated their social locations historically, contemporaneously, and transnationally. In this dissertation, I examine and argue how transnational migration is the most recent in a long line of Bengali strategies to negotiate their social location vis-à-vis other populations in India. Since the early years of the nineteenth century, in Bengal specifically, a series of socio-political dynamics have reshaped and reconstituted Bengali social status. These dynamics can be observed across various geographic scales - national, regional, and local -- and have continued to inform their contemporary gender relations. En route to this examination, the dissertation exposes assumptions about who constitutes families, problematizes "family" centrally en route to examining spousal relations among Indian-Bengalis. I have examined the lived realities and experiences of migrant spouses in the U.S. and their family living in India amidst differing—and often conflicting-- imaginaries and practices of families. Through my work, I thus illustrate that family and marriage relations can be, and often are, strategic and fluid even as many people view them as structural and enduring. Over time, representations of the idealized Bengali family, of manhood and of womanhood have all shifted, reflecting sociopolitical and economic changes. A constant, however, has been the central role of gender in all these imaginaries and realized configurations. In this dissertation, I employ a "gendered optic," a heightened sensibility to what they communicate about gender. As I examine in my work, gendered boundaries amid the Bengali population can be found in a deeply rooted history, a colonial legacy, and one, although repackaged, that continues to be seen contemporaneously. Bengalis' transnational negotiations in family and marriage expand our understanding of transnational gender relations across broad social and historical scales, particularly the transnational. In this vein, the dissertation contributes significantly to the field of gender studies, specifically the field of feminist theorizing and intersectionality studies, postcolonial and South Asian studies, and to the scholarship on migration and transnational migration studies.

This thesis contains a critical edition, translation and study of the Amanaska, which is a medieval Sanskrit yoga text of one hundred and ninety-eight verses in two chapters (adhyāya). Seventy-five manuscripts have been consulted for this edition and thirty-two were selected for the full collation on the basis of stemmatic analysis on a sample collation of all the manuscripts. The critical apparatus contains references to parallel verses in other works and the notes to the translation provide further information on the content, terminology and obscure passages of the text by citing other Sanskrit works, in particular, earlier Tantras and medieval yoga texts, as well as a Nepalese commentary on the Amanaska. The first part of the Introduction contains a summary of the text and an examination of the colophons of all the available manuscripts in order to establish the proper titles of the text and each of the chapters. Unlike previous editors, I have adopted the title Amanaska because it is found in the great majority of manuscript colophons. The title of previous printed editions, Amanaskayoga, appears to derive from nineteenth-century manuscript catalogues. The authorship of the text has been discussed in light of the claim made in recent Indian scholarship that it was written by Gorakṣanātha, the pupil of Matysendranātha. I conclude that the author is unknown. Discrepancies between the chapters, in particular, various incongruities in content and differences in the limits of dating, strongly suggest that both chapters were originally composed as separate works. Unlike previous editions, this one is based on the north-Indian recension. There is evidence that the north-Indian recension has preserved a more coherent version of the first chapter. The additional verses of the south-Indian recension have been edited and included separately in appendix A. The first part of the Introduction also includes fourteen sections on the content of the Amanaska. The first six of these sections are on absorption (laya), the practice of eliminating reality levels (tattva) and Layayoga, and the following sections cover yogic powers (siddhi), Śāmbhavī Mudrā, the term amanaska and the Amanaska's known sources for verses on the no-mind state. The final section called, 'Amanaska: the Effortless Leap to Liberation' examines the salient teachings of the Amanaska in light of previous ascetic, yogic and tantric traditions, in an attempt to answer questions about whom its intended audience may have been and its place within India's history of yoga. The first part of the Introduction concludes with a discussion of yoga texts which have been either directly or indirectly influenced by the Amanaska. Seeing that many of these texts have not been critically edited or translated, I have discussed their date of composition and their content in addition to the material that derives from the Amanaska. The second part of the Introduction provides essential details on the seventy-four manuscripts consulted for this edition, brief comments on the shortcomings of the previous printed editions and an explanation of the editing methodology. The recensions of the text are discussed in this section as well as my editorial policy. The critical edition and translation of the Amanaska are presented together. Each Sanskrit verse is followed by the translation and its critical apparatus is at the bottom of the page. The endnotes to each verse are located at the end of its respective chapter. Appendices B-E include four stemmatic diagrams along with brief descriptions of each hyparchetype, a list of symbols and abbreviations and an outline of the conventions used in the critical apparatus.

This study is centrally concerned with young people's capacity to identify and realise promising educational and occupational pathways. Whilst it is now well established among social scientists that young people have agency, much less is known about what types of agency young people might demonstrate. Based on field research conducted in 2011-2012 with a group of young people studying, working, and living in Nepal's capital city, Kathmandu, the present study scrutinises Western-inspired approaches prevalent in the scholarship on youth which equate agency to resistance and individuality. It does so, by bringing the literature on youth agency into conversation with theoretical work on the concepts of aspiration and mobility. Through an in-depth analysis of young people's time-space-strategies, the thesis contributes to existing literature in three ways: First, it shows that young people may grow in power as they learn to fulfil social obligations and foster stronger relationships with other people. Second, it illustrates that young people's agency may not only take the form of observable practices, but may also reside in young people’s active efforts to think through their options for improving their own and other people's situation. Third, it highlights the importance of young people's spatial mobilities and immobilities in negotiating various social pressures and in developing a sense of themselves as competent, educated, and successful people. The findings of this thesis are, therefore, of relevance to the interdisciplinary field of youth studies as well as to emerging debates in geography about the apparent need to produce 'aspirational citizens' and about the meanings attached to spatial (im)mobility in contemporary societies.

Understanding local perceptions of disease causation could help public health officials improve strategies to prevent bloody diarrhoea. A cross-sectional survey was conducted in Dhaka, Bangladesh to elicit community beliefs about the causes of and prevention strategies for bloody diarrhoea. Between March and June 2003, we interviewed 541 randomly selected respondents. Overall, 507 (93%) respondents perceived that a vaccine could prevent bloody diarrhoea. If a vaccine provided lifetime protection, 445 (83%) respondents stated that they would opt to get the vaccine and would pay a median of $0·05 (range U.S.$0·01-0·15) for it, equivalent to <1% of their median weekly income. There was almost universal perception that an effective vaccine to prevent bloody diarrhoea was highly beneficial and acceptable. While respondents valued a vaccine for prevention of bloody diarrhoea, they were only willing to pay minimally for it. Therefore, achieving a high rate of Shigella vaccine coverage may require subsidy of vaccine purchase.

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During the latter part of the 20th century, a transition away from coal as a major energy source in developed countries was accompanied by a notable decrease in air pollution-related deaths in those countries. Currently the same phenomenon is being observed in developing nations like China and India. However, many areas that do still rely on coal for their energy production or industrial needs also reflect a gap in research on the effects of those specific processes on local populations. Located in Nepal at the foot of the Himalayan Plateau, Kathmandu represents one such location. The local economy of Kathmandu and the surrounding area relies heavily on the production of bricks using coal-fired kilns, which produce large amounts of particulate matter. This particulate matter contains a characteristic mix of metals. This unique fingerprint can be used to identify and track kiln emissions in ambient samples. We collected hourly samples of ambient metal concentrations over a period of three months at the start of 2019. We then used these data to perform positive matrix factorization (PMF) to identify several factors contributing to the ambient air pollution of the sampled area, each representing a source type. The PMF output included the chemical ‘fingerprint’ of each factor as well as hourly variation of each factor. We were able to isolate the fraction of PM2.5 contributed by coal and estimate the health effects attributable to this fraction using a modified risk ratio of 1.05 to reflect the higher toxicity of coal emissions. We found that the current estimates of health impacts in Nepal underestimate the true impact of coal by 416 deaths per year.

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This thesis examines the impact of environmental regulations on trade competitiveness for South Asian countries. The study further investigates whether South Asian countries have become a pollutive haven of industrial exports to OECD countries during 1984-2004. The thesis also analyses whether tariff walls created by the governments to offsets stringent environmental regulations negatively affect pollutive industrial trade flows. This study has identified gaps in the literature after critically reviewing both competing trade theories and empirical literature surrounding the subject. Firstly, most of the empirical literature on the subject has focused on developed countries while ignoring less developed regions like South Asia. Second, several studies concluded trade competitiveness impact of environmental policy following a single estimation method when results are sensitive to the choice of the method used. Hence, for robust results, cross-methods analysis was imperative. Thirdly, the empirical literature on the subject focused on most pollutive industries and ignored the research on somewhat pollutive and least pollutive sectors as well as comparative analysis between those industries. This study has contributed to the literature by filling these gaps. Following the neo-classical theory, the central hypothesis of this thesis is that environmental regulations negatively affect different categories of pollutive industrial export competitiveness. By using the highest dis-aggregated ISIC level trade data and incorporating other socio-economic variables, this study has deployed comparative advantage trade models by Balassa (1965), competitiveness indicator by XU (1999), and bilateral RCA model by Grether and de Melo (2004). The study used the gravity model to control for un-observed effects over time on trade flows while capturing environmental regulations impact on pollutive industrial trade competitiveness. Accordingly, to avert endogeneity/data sensitivity issues and to ascertain robust estimates, the present research has among others computed Random Effect and Newey-West standard error models. The statistical modeling results show that while India gained trade competitiveness in most pollutive industrial trade, Pakistan and Bangladesh lost their trade competitiveness in the same category. The research finds evidence of most pollutive industries of South Asian countries increasing their bilateral RCAs and exports with OECD countries and reset of the world. A comparative analysis between most pollutive to less pollutive industries showed a lack of support for any systematic specialization patterns of trade for South Asia during 1984-2004. Nonetheless, this study findings based on gravity modeling clearly depicted a statistically significant negative impact of environmental regulations on total exports, most pollutive exports, and less pollutive industrial exports for South Asia and OECD countries. This study rejected the pollution haven hypothesis between South Asian pollutive industrial exports with OECD. It further concluded that tariff barriers created by countries to offsets environmental regulation costs would prove counterproductive to competitiveness. At the policy level, instead of lobbing for protectionism to balance out environmental regulatory costs, the governments in both developed and developing countries need to focus on forming better environmental policies fostering both competitiveness and environmental quality. Also, trade-offs between environmental regulations and competitiveness are challenging situations for South Asia and OECD countries. Therefore, sustainable production and trade policies combined with innovative and cost-effective environmental policies are needed to accomplish environmental gains and competitiveness.