Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2005. Graduate Programme in Social Anthropology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves160-169). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url%5Fver=Z39.88-2004&res%5Fdat=xri:pqdiss &rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR11765

This dissertation investigates how stories about the Marathi sant-poet Eknath of Paithan (1533-1599) interacting with untouchables changed over the course of three centuries of textual repetition and dramatic representation. In tracing memories of Eknath over such time and through various Marathi public spheres, the dissertation sheds light on why Eknath has come to be viewed in complicated and conflicted ways in the present. This examination of stories, particularly as they pertain to inter-caste relations and the expression of a bhakti social outlook, offers a chance to view how understandings of devotional religion and caste changed in Maharashtrian society between 1700 and the present. At the heart of these stories is a narrative tension between Eknath's boundary-transgressing actions that are presented in spiritually egalitarian terms, and societal expectations about ritual purity and brahman-ness. I show that although the details of the stories change through various repetitions and renditions, this tension endures and produces an ambiguity in the narrative that (perhaps intentionally) makes Eknath's social allegiance impossible to determine. My sources for this study include hagiographical texts (ca. 1650-1800), biographical books and essays (1880-1925), and six major dramas and films (1903-2005) -- all of which richly portray aspects of Eknath's life, and nearly all of which are in Marathi. In the course of preparing this historiographical analysis, I introduce many Marathi sources to the English scholarly world for the first time and call attention to several historical texts and plays that have been forgotten or overlooked by Marathi scholars as well.

This dissertation examines the formation of urban poverty and slums which have long stigmatized South Asian cities. It focuses on the emergence of markets in housing through the 19th and early 20th centuries in Bombay primarily, and Karachi and Aden secondarily. It is the first historical study of slums, or poor and stigmatized housing, in colonial Western India. It critically engages with the terms of global urban modernity and the historiography of colonialism in South Asia, challenging the broader nationalist frames in which scholars have understood South Asia's poverty. While this is not a comparative project, the dissertation interrogates many of the implicit and explicit comparative claims that have been made about colonial cities and their legibility in the discourse on global slums. Housing was a visible marker of inequality on the urban landscape and therefore a useful site through which to examine the changing relations between migrants and settlers, laborers and capitalists, and society and the state. The changing political economy of Western India resulted in a laboring and urban poor whose housing issues became productive of regional, colonial, and national difference. By following circular migrants across city and country, this study builds on the subcontinent's Early Modern history of a pervasive rural-urban continuum of human networks. Everyday workers used their mobility and habitation practices to negotiate a changing world, bringing cities like Bombay, Karachi, and Aden into their routes of mobility to earn a livelihood. Increased opportunities combined with the intensification of production, market crises, growing demographic pressures on the land, and the spread of indebtedness to produce and reproduce inequality. This dissertation also compares the subsequent management of the urban poverty problem in cities across Western India, which heightened concerns over public health and sanitation. Newly financed poor housing initiatives sought to correct these at the turn of the century, but their limitations made modern slums. By addressing the eventual obfuscation of the once-transitioned status of the modern slum-dweller, this study delineates the bases for the conceptualization of a distinctive third world poverty and urban form.

Sri Lanka's thirty-year civil war brought about tremendous suffering upon the lives of the Tamil civilian population in northern Sri Lanka. In May 2009, when the war ended, not a single civilian remained within the Vanni, the former rebel territory, as they had all been killed or displaced. More than one hundred thousand civilians were dead or disappeared and three hundred thousand survivors were held in so-called "transit camps" without freedom of movement. The data for this dissertation is based on extensive anthropological field research conducted in northern Sri Lanka during the last phase of the civil war and into its aftermath over a period of two and a half years between July 2007 and May 2010. It sets out to explain the experience of suffering among a Tamil Catholic fishing community, which, due to the war, had been displaced from its coastal home, Perunkalipattu in 1999, and has been relocated to the City of Santa Marta, an internal-refugee camp. Between July 2007 and May 2009, this community was part of the four hundred thousand Tamil civilians trapped in so-called "no-fire zones," where they suffered violence at the hands of the state as well as the rebels. This dissertation takes a unique approach to the exploration of the community's suffering by incorporating the effects of the war on the community's Catholic devotion and the possibility of healing of traumatic experiences of war through that devotion. The study thereby opens up a new field of anthropological investigation of displacement, social suffering, faith and healing. It contributes, among others, to the anthropology of violence, South Asia studies, and the anthropology of Christianity, and provides unique materials for anthropological reflection on ethnographic writing and the art of fieldwork.

The dissertation examines the cult of the goddess Haḍimbā that is located in the Kullu Valley of the West Indian Himalaya (Himachal Pradesh). Massive transformations introduced in the region in recent years by means of better transportation systems, a developing capitalist economy, new technologies, and, most prominently, tourism have drastically affected life in the region and have destabilized traditional social and cultural patterns. These changes are engaged by the residents of the Kullu Valley in various ways that are informed and oriented by their traditional worldview and ritual system. The main chapters of the dissertation present and analyze three separate yet interrelated spaces that constitute a veritable theater of change. In these spaces, in which Haḍimbā figures prominently, the identity of the goddess, the rituals performed in her honor, and the powers she is believed to possess are constantly negotiated and refashioned: practitioners foreground Haḍimbā's identity as a Mahābhārata demoness instead of equating her solely with the Purāṇic Durgā (ch. 1); they justify, protect, and increasingly offer her bloody buffalo sacrifices despite criticisms leveled against this practice by outsiders (ch. 2); and they uphold their views concerning the ability of their goddess to control local weather patterns, even as the climate is changing and competing paradigms offer new theories in this regard (ch. 3). It is in this sense—in light of these massive renegotiations of Haḍimbā's character—that she is "becoming herself." Concurrently, it is not only the goddess' but her devotees' identity that is being negotiated and refashioned. Taken as a whole, the choices made by local people in these three spaces reveal their attempt to recast their marginality, the magnitude of which they have only recently begun to realize. They do so by pursuing new frameworks of reference that aim to challenge, if not subvert, the hegemonic narratives that are promoted in the region by outside forces. Thus, by highlighting Haḍimbā's Mahābhārata associations they offer a new kind of epic frame for national and religious identity; by insisting on the performance of animal sacrifice they invert and celebrate what is elsewhere considered a backward and illegitimate act; and by retaining their belief in the control of their goddess over her territory they defend their own agency and find a legitimate place for themselves and their way of life at the pan-Indian and global table. At the same time, the dissertation shows that local religious beliefs and practices do not remain untouched by these external pan-Indian and global paradigms and that in the interaction between them a new a hybrid worldview is being formed.

The village of Halebid, in the southwestern Indian state of Karnataka, was once a city called Dorasamudra, capital of the Hoysala dynasty from the mid-11th to mid-14th centuries. Although the site is home to more than twenty temples and temple ruins, as well as the fragmentary remains of a fort wall and palace compound, the place name "Halebid" today is nearly synonymous with a single monument: the lavishly sculptural Hoysalesvara temple. This expansive, double-shrine temple would have been a dominant feature of the Hoysala capital from the time of its construction around 1120 C.E., but the near monopoly it has over the site in both popular and academic circles has caused other buildings to be overlooked. This focus on the Hoysalesvara temple has also isolated the building from its surroundings, obscuring its relationship to other features of the historical city. In this dissertation I develop a fuller understanding of the Hoysala capital and its temples by expanding the scope of inquiry to include the whole city. Taking the archaeological material and published inscriptions of the entire site into account, I consider the ways in which a selection of Dorasamudra's temples relate to one another and to other features of their surrounding landscape. This site-contextualized study provides insight into the relevance of the temples' spatial and sculptural forms, ritual purposes, and patrons' goals. Comparison with monuments at other sites reveals that many temples of Dorasamudra contributed to the city's prestige through their distinctive visual properties or their association with important deities or authoritative institutions. In addition to offering new perspectives on individual temples of the Hoysala capital, this study provides a greater understanding of the social and architectural characteristics of distinct neighborhoods, routes of access to specific temples and throughout the city, and a dynamic urban landscape that would have been visually and spatially altered with each new construction.

This dissertation examines the United States's elite news media's hegemony in a global media landscape, and how it can come to stand for the entire American nation in the imagination of outsiders. In this transnational, instantaneous digital media arena, what is created for an American audience can fairly easily be accessed, interpreted and relayed to another. How, then, is U.S. international news, which is traditionally ethnocentric and security-focused, absorbed in Afghanistan and Pakistan, two countries where the United States has acute foreign policy interests? This study draws from two bodies of scholarship that are analogous, yet rarely linked together. The first is on hegemony and the U.S. news media's relationship with American society and the government. This includes scholarship on indexing and cascading; agenda building and agenda setting; framing; and reporting during conflict. The second is on the American news media's relationship with the world, and nationalism as a fixed phenomenon in international news. This includes examining the different kinds of press systems that exist globally, and how they interact with each other. Afghanistan and Pakistan's media systems have expanded dramatically since being freed in 2002 and they struggle daily with making sense of the volatility that comes with the U.S.-led Afghanistan war. Through 64 qualitative, in-depth interviews with Afghan, American and Pakistani journalists, this study explores the sociology of news inside Afghanistan and Pakistan and how the American news narrative is received there. There is a widespread, long-standing perception in Afghanistan and Pakistan that American journalists stain the reputation of their nations as failed states. Just as the U.S. exercises global hegemony in a material sense, the U.S. media is powerful in shaping how American and international publics see the world. Yet, while American foreign correspondents are U.S.-centric in their reportage on the Afghan, American and Pakistani entanglement, so too are Afghan journalists Afghan-centric and Pakistani journalists Pakistani-centric. Nationalism is how journalists organize chaos and complexity. While their news stories can represent an entire nation, they are more likely to harden national identities than to broker understanding between nations.

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of migrant labor, development, and gender among Malaiyaha ("Hill Country") Tamil tea plantation residents in contemporary Sri Lanka. It draws on one year of field research (2008-2009) conducted during state emergency rule in Sri Lanka amongst Malaiyaha Tamil plantation residents, migrant laborers, and community members responding to histories of dislocation and ethnic marginalization. Based on ethnographic observations, detailed life histories, and collaborative dialogue, it explores how Malaiyaha Tamils reconstitute what it means to be a political minority in an insecure Sri Lankan economy and state by 1) employing dignity-enabling strategies of survival through ritual practices and storytelling; 2) abandoning income-generating options on the plantations to ensure financial security; and 3) seeking radical alternatives to traditional development through employment of rights-based ideologies and networks of solidarity in and beyond Sri Lanka. Attending to these three spheres of collective practice--plantation life, migrant labor experience, and human development--this dissertation examines how Malaiyaha Tamils actively challenge historical representations of bonded labor and political voicelessness in order to rewrite their representative canon in Sri Lanka. At the center of each pragmatic site is the Malaiyaha Tamil woman. Focusing particularly on the female worker, I present emerging gender relations and experiences in group life, transnational labor mobilization, and development work that pose radical and deliberate alternatives to economic marginalization and capitalist plantation production in Sri Lanka. Negotiating their place within patriarchal structures on the plantation and in civil society, Malaiyaha Tamil women present themselves in ways that sharply contrast the expert narratives of their experiences, which are composed for public recognition and consumption. Interceding this transmission of knowledge, their stories actively transform plantation development discourses in Sri Lanka and resituate their practices within the more enabling frame of transnational feminism and solidarity. Addressing lacunas in South Asian, social science, and humanities literature on Malaiyaha Tamil women, this dissertation contributes lived content on previously unrecorded women's experiences and complicates former accounts of the woman worker in Sri Lanka. Informing this project is the relationship among community, vulnerability, and reproduction. How are forms of Malaiyaha Tamil development and membership, when increasingly opened up to the realm of the political, made at once vulnerable and generative in their attempts to gain a sense of security and belonging in Sri Lanka? What do practices of cultural reconfiguration and solidarity-building reveal about the persistence of community as an affective term and the woman worker's position in global movements of transnational feminism and migrant labor? Each chapter focuses on this relationship in the context of the final months and aftermath of civil war in Sri Lanka, and I engage the work of political theorists, Sri Lankan historians, and development scholars to argue for a more productive way of thinking about communities in crisis. I argue that community is the continual mental exercise of self-refinement and a mode in which Malaiyaha Tamils address insecurities of a closed past with intentional practices of fixing belief in an open present. This enabling perspective allows us to account for the realities of social investment, movement, and network-building that Malaiyaha Tamils experience in Sri Lanka. By analyzing the contradictions and legacy of seizing Malaiyaha Tamil plantation experience in Sri Lankan history and scholarship, this dissertation seeks to envision the Sri Lankan woman worker as a global subject with transformative possibilities for her community and nation and contribute to the anthropologies of development, labor, and gender in South Asia.

This dissertation investigates the close connection between poetry and prayer in South Asia by studying the history of Sanskrit hymns of praise (stotras) in Kashmir. It offers a broad introduction to the history and general features of the stotra genre, and it charts the course of these literary hymns in Kashmir from the ninth century to the present. Historically, Kashmir was one of the most dynamic and influential centers of Sanskrit learning and literary production in South Asia. This dissertation focuses on a number of innovative texts from this region, such as Ksemaraja's eleventh-century commentaries and Sahib Kaul's seventeenth-century hymns, which have received little scholarly attention. In particular, it offers the first study in any European language of the Stutikusumanjali, a major work of religious literature dedicated to the god Siva and one of the only extant witnesses to the trajectory of Sanskrit literary culture in fourteenth-century Kashmir. This dissertation also contributes to the study of Saivism by examining the ways that Saiva poets have integrated the traditions of Sanskrit literature (kavya) and poetics (alankarasastra), theology (especially non-dualism), and Saiva worship and devotion. It argues for the diverse configurations of Saiva bhakti expressed and explored in these literary hymns and the challenges they present for standard interpretations of Hindu bhakti. More broadly, this study of stotras from Kashmir offers new perspectives on the history and vitality of prayer in South Asia and its complex relationships to poetry and poetics.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Toronto, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-89).