Contemporary South Asia Podcast

Academic freedom across South Asia is under growing pressure, narrowing the spaces in which scholars, students, and public intellectuals can research, teach, debate, and speak openly. Universities, research centres, and think tanks are increasingly affected by political interference, censorship, harassment, funding pressures, punitive legislation, and — in some cases — arrest. In association with...

This episode explores the intersections of migration, labour, and aspiration within the urban handicraft economy of contemporary India through an ethnographic study of Shilparamam, an artisanal market in Hyderabad. Focusing on biographical narratives of artisans, shopkeepers, and their assistants who have migrated from regions such as Mithila (Bihar), Mednipur (West Bengal), Manikpatna (Odisha), a...

Across rural Punjab, formal state institutions are often experienced as distant, opaque, and unreliable. In this context, intermediaries occupy central roles in the everyday political and social life of villages. This article examines how their authority is built and sustained through dhara bandi (a Punjabi term for factional loyalty and social-political alliances, maintained through everyday acts...

We discuss Dhaneswar's study examining the daily social realities and emotive experiences faced by Dalit university students. The study analyses their mental and emotional suffering caused by the university’s social dynamics, casted behaviours, particularly from upper-caste groups. These contour Dalit students’ casted experiences, potentially leading to self-harm with, in extreme cases, a fatal ou...

This paper explores the politics of invisibilising waste through peripheral spaces and built infrastructures of landfills. In particular, it examines the socio-spatial making and unmaking of the Bhalswa landfill in Delhi, from colonial to post-colonial times. It seeks to understand the processes and politics behind the opening of the landfill and the recent attempts at its closure, which have effe...

Post-truth is increasingly linked to the decline of democracy through its association with fake news and misinformation. In recent literature, however, there has been a shift in discussing post-truth as a type of political discourse premised on desire. Building on this shift, I develop a new interpretive methodological framework to analyse textual data for post-truth narratives. The framework is p...

Interview with Bharti Arora, an Assistant Professor of English at the Department of English, University of Delhi. Special Section titled: Decolonial praxis/es of solidarity in Indian literary and cultural discourses on social movements For the full journal issue, see: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ccsa20/33/1 Summary The special section probes how Indian literary and cultural discourses represen...