Description
The volume explores the tenuous and often contentious relationships between minority groups' resoluteness on their cultural peculiarities, the persisting ides of a monolithic nation-state that invariable tends to view difference as deviance. Alongside, it marks a significant departure that many contributors rely on field data to probe the very category of minorities per se?its normative postures, definitional accuracies and propensity towards reifying otherwise fluid identities. The volume suggests that the process of the production of minority and majority identities implicates colonial and post-colonial statecraft, census enumeration, legal pronouncements, and also mobilisations on ground…the contributions encompass a wide range of subjects, cases and approaches, yet commonality of themes and arguments holds them together. Tanweer Fazal, Contributions to Indian Sociology 50:3 (2016)
The volume explores the tenuous and often contentious relationships between minority groups' resoluteness on their cultural peculiarities, the persisting ides of a monolithic nation-state that invariable tends to view difference as deviance. Alongside, it marks a significant departure that many contributors rely on field data to probe the very category of minorities per se?its normative postures, definitional accuracies and propensity towards reifying otherwise fluid identities. The volume suggests that the process of the production of minority and majority identities implicates colonial and post-colonial statecraft, census enumeration, legal pronouncements, and also mobilisations on ground…the contributions encompass a wide range of subjects, cases and approaches, yet commonality of themes and arguments holds them together. Tanweer Fazal, Contributions to Indian Sociology 50:3 (2016)
Rowena Robinson is Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.