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.

This dissertation explores the means by which Hindus in the United States theorize and cultivate desires in the midst of the larger project of making Hindu subjectivities for themselves and their children. It suggests that the cultivation of desire—while significant in creating any type of subjectivity anywhere—is a centerpiece of making identities for Hindus in the diaspora. From its very beginnings, in reference to Jews, the language and sentiment of diaspora have always been associated with desires. Specifically, there is the longing for the homeland, which most diasporic communities have cultivated. For many Hindus, the idea of India as a desired ‘homeland’ is also fundamental, but for them, as throughout history, the desires associated with diasporic experiences have been enacted in a range of ways and they have always been about more than simply place. Hindu parents and community members are engaged in the development of other types of desires—moral-spiritual, theological, narrative-historical, “sanctioned” romantic and familial, gastronomic, and material. Many contemporary practices of Hindus in the diaspora—educational, ritual, representational, political, and consumer—revolve around the inculcation and fulfillment of desires, for both children and adults. Desire is a recurrent trope, articulated differently by parents, teachers, community leaders, married couples, students, young adults, devotees, and children. Not only do people express their own desires, but they negotiate, facilitate or hinder the desires, both real and perceived, of others. Through an examination of various Hindu realms and practices, I trace some of the types of Hinduism that are forming in the United States, as well as the affective cultures and desires that seem to animate them. The chapters explore: the development, content and cultures of Hindu supplementary educational programs; new modes of Hindu exhibition as ritual and devotional practices, and as reflections of collective desires about Hindu representation; the role of consumer cultures—particularly the place of ethnic stores and practices of shopping; the rise in forms of Hindu advocacy, particularly with respect to the concomitant desires to control representations of Hinduism and Indian history within educational and other public spheres; the place of Hindu nationalism and the motivations of participants in a variety of Hindu spaces; and the expression of ‘strategic citizenship’ on the part of a Hindu community seeking public recognition and acceptance. My hope is that this work not only sheds light on processes at work within contemporary Hindu communities in the U.S., but helps us to consider larger human questions about the development of religious selves and sensibilities, the shaping of identities, the cultivation of belonging, the negotiation of public and civic spheres, and the politics and poetics of nationalism and self-representation. The ways people locate themselves and are located by others, both consciously and unconsciously, are often artifacts of desire, and it is through desire that various identifications are negotiated.

This dissertation investigates the vocation of politics in the Maratha Empire from the release and restoration of Chhatrapati Shahu Bhonsle in 1708 to the British East India Company’s final victory against the Marathas in 1818. Founded in the mid-seventeenth century by the ambitious general and first Chhatrapati Shivaji Bhonsle, the Maratha Empire encompassed a decentralized web of allied governments stretching from the western Deccan into far-flung parts of the Indian subcontinent. While the Company’s pejorative moniker of “confederacy” has cast a long shadow over historical understanding of the politics of the Maratha state, this dissertation argues that the ascendancy of scribal-bureaucratic networks and their practices of communication enabled Maratha governments to foster a modern diplomatic framework of deliberation, adjudication, and collaboration. The creation of a flexible language and practice of communication transcending linguistic, cultural, religious, and political divisions was the signal achievement of the scribal-bureaucratic networks that increasingly came to dominate politics and government in the eighteenth-century Maratha Empire. Through a case study of individuals and households of the Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhu sub-caste, this dissertation demonstrates that both non-Brahman and Brahman officials skilled in the arts of verbal and written communication rose from the lower ranks of the Maratha bureaucracy to the highest circles of political decision-making. They not only advanced their socioeconomic claims to wealth, title, and property, but also shaped government agendas, resolved disputes, and forged alliances through the dialogic exchange of oaths, treaties, objects, and sentimental words. Moreover, scribal-bureaucrats drew on this mode of communication to build strategic multilateral coalitions and to pen novel reflections on the meaning and purpose of politics once the dominance of the British East India Company was impossible to ignore. Communicative politics comes into vivid focus through a critical examination of the records and manuscripts that described, evaluated, and enacted relationships between Maratha governments. While the focus is on the critically important governments of Satara, Nagpur, and Pune, close attention is paid to conduits of power, persuasion, and affiliation between them and their rivals and allies in the eighteenth-century Deccan. Over the course of six chapters, this dissertation traces a chronological arc from the re-constitution to the dissolution of Maratha sovereignty as well as a thematic one from the structures and practices, to the personnel, and finally to the shifting meanings of politics. Chapters 1 and 2 explore how the delicate frameworks and practices preserving relationships between governments were made and unmade in the context of Maratha expansion in the Deccan. Turning to the personnel of politics, Chapters 3 and 4 follow the careers of Kayastha Prabhu scribal officials who attained influence at the courts of Satara, Kolhapur, Nagpur, and Baroda. Finally, Chapters 5 and 6 highlight the ways in which the meaning of politics shifted in response to the emergence of Company power. The story of Maratha politics is thus the story of a concatenation of deliberative, pragmatic compromises suited to the realities of a dynamic inter-imperial world.

On the southwestern coast of India, Kerala, with its fortuitous position in the Indian ocean trade network, has served as a beacon for merchant ships since antiquity. As early as the ninth-century, Kerala’s rulers – the Cēras (ca. 800 – 1124) and merchant polities developed a symbiotic relationship that allowed a wealth of diplomatic privileges for traders. Religious leaders who travelled with merchants are named as the benefactors of agreements between the Cēras and the guilds. This dissertation will show that a corollary of this unique trade policy was the canonization of a shared architectural and artistic vocabulary in the region’s religious monuments. Individual chapters dedicated to the architectural style of temples, churches, synagogues, and mosques will examine this syncretism and the idiomatic mode of sacred art and architecture that came to define the Kerala style.

The study of Indian indentured servitude in the British Empire has largely been confined to the histories of slavery or free labor. Few scholars have connected indenture to larger processes in the British Empire. This dissertation examines the global nature of Indian indenture to find how trends in colonial power were inflected in the relationship between the state and the indentured worker. This dissertation uses the colonial experience in South Asia as a basis for its global history. It contends that the history of the colonial rule of law in the subcontinent was of deep importance to the mechanisms of indenture. By looking at archival records from the United Kingdom, Trinidad, Fiji, and elsewhere, this dissertation finds that officials in the indenture colonies were attempting to transform indebted Indian peasants into indentured workers. This process was inflected by the experience of colonial rule elsewhere. At first, this meant the implementation of ideas tied to imperial liberalism. Following the challenges to British colonialism in the mid-nineteenth century, the indenture colonies mirrored a wider movement towards conservative governance. The ways in which the colonial state attempted to control and manipulate workers underwent a dramatic shift. In the indenture colony, colonial power exerted both authoritarian and paternalist tendencies. This dissertation uses the governorships of Arthur Hamilton-Gordon in Trinidad and Fiji to explore this shift. This dissertation makes its argument by focusing on the indenture colonies of Trinidad and Fiji. In doing so, it moves beyond the model of studying indenture that has looked at the British Empire as a whole, or otherwise in specific colonies or sub-regions. Using Trinidad and Fiji allows for a deep understanding of continuity and change. For example, Trinidad can be used to examine indenture’s beginnings, as the colony began to import Indian indentured labor in 1842, while Fiji can be used to understand late indenture. Furthermore, colonial officials, ideas of authority, capital, labor, and goods were always circulating throughout this global empire. The study of Trinidad and Fiji allows for a critical understanding of such exchanges and this dissertation uses both to explore bureaucratic offices, law, financial systems, governance, protest, medicine and health, and global agitation in Indian indenture. “The Currents of Restless Toil” is an in-depth study into the nature of colonial governance in the indenture colonies of Trinidad and Fiji. It explores the nuances of colonial power, providing a window into the theory and practice that shaped the restless toil of Indians across the world.

A second generation South Asian can be faced with contrasting and conflicting cultures which can impact the formation of a healthy ethnic identity. The present study investigated what facilitated and hindered a South Asian's adolescent experience of becoming bicultural. Flanagan's (1954) Critical Incident Technique was used in interviewing 8 adult participants, including 5 females and 3 males, aged 20 to 26 years of age. The results identified 88 critical incidents, forming 10 helping categories and 4 hindering categories. The 10 Helping categories were: (1) Cross Cultural Friendships, (2) Speaking both Punjabi and English, (3) Personal Attributes, (4) Shared Experiences with Peers in the 'Same Boat', (5) Family Support and Influence, (6) Involvement in Recreational, Cultural and Religious Community Activities, (7) Visiting India, (8) High School Experience, (9) University Education and (10) Acceptance of Parent's and / or Grandparent's Views. The Hindering Categories were: (1) Parental and / or Familial Expectations, (2) Media Influence / Societal Expectations, (3) Personal Conflict of Cultural Values and (4) Experiencing Racism. The categories were found to be reliable and valid through procedures such as exhaustiveness, independent raters, co-researcher's cross checking, participation rate and theoretical agreement. The resulting categories provide a list of comprehensive factors that can facilitate and hinder an individual's process towards developing a bicultural identity. The findings are discussed in relation to implications for counselling theory and practice, and future research.

The present study explores the nature of coping mechanisms among South Asian Muslim immigrants living in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) who have been living in Canada between three to five years and experienced acculturation challenges and depression. Thirteen immigrants (seven females and six males) were interviewed to share their stories of personal experiences of settlement and acculturation in Canada. These interviews were analyzed using the grounded theory approach to develop themes and sub-themes to understand and interpret the data. The findings reveal that the research participants experienced a number of acculturation challenges (feeling different, feeling excluded, disruption in the family and material differences) which led to depression. During the course of their depression participants experienced certain events which became turning points in their lives, subsequently motivating them to change the way in which they live. They sought out particular kinds of support and coping mechanisms which helped them to settle, integrate and belong to the Canadian culture. The midlevel grounded theory that has emerged from participants’ responses is discussed. Recommendations are made to inform mental health professionals to incorporate these coping mechanisms in delivering culturally sensitive services to the target population. Study implications for theory, psychotherapy, counselling and other mental health practices and future research in the area of settlement and adaption of newcomers in Canada are discussed.

The present study explores the nature of coping mechanisms among South Asian Muslim immigrants living in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) who have been living in Canada between three to five years and experienced acculturation challenges and depression. Thirteen immigrants (seven females and six males) were interviewed to share their stories of personal experiences of settlement and acculturation in Canada. These interviews were analyzed using the grounded theory approach to develop themes and sub-themes to understand and interpret the data. The findings reveal that the research participants experienced a number of acculturation challenges (feeling different, feeling excluded, disruption in the family and material differences) which led to depression. During the course of their depression participants experienced certain events which became turning points in their lives, subsequently motivating them to change the way in which they live. They sought out particular kinds of support and coping mechanisms which helped them to settle, integrate and belong to the Canadian culture. The midlevel grounded theory that has emerged from participants’ responses is discussed. Recommendations are made to inform mental health professionals to incorporate these coping mechanisms in delivering culturally sensitive services to the target population. Study implications for theory, psychotherapy, counselling and other mental health practices and future research in the area of settlement and adaption of newcomers in Canada are discussed.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 2004. / Adviser: Michael F. Connelly.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2008. Graduate Programme in Clinical Psychology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 38-46). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR51529