A.R. Vasavi

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An independent social scientist with interests in agrarian studies, sociology of India and educational studies.
Phone: 919448360215
Address: PUNARCHITH LEARNING CENTRE
Nagavalli Village
B.R.Hills Road
Chamarajanagar Dt
Karnataka-571342
INDIA

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Papers by A.R. Vasavi

Government Brahmin': Caste, the educated unemployed, and the Reproduction of Inequalities

Integration of work and education

Samuhik Pahel, 2023

summary of lessons from alternative learning

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“Government Brahmin” Caste, the Educated Unemployed, and the Reproduction of Inequities

The Impact of Education in South Asia, 2018

Policies and programs of reservation/protective discrimination in education have failed to addres... more Policies and programs of reservation/protective discrimination in education have failed to address inequalities. Public humiliation, increased discrimination, and compromised life-chances mark the lives of many; especially, those who seek a better life through the education route. This essay, based on a longitudinal study, illustrates and draws on experiences of Mallesha, a scheduled caste person aspiring for a government job. Highlighting issues that the capability approach overlooks and tracking how institutions of the government and a range of programs, which are supposedly set up to facilitate “equality of opportunity,” fail to address the embedded nature of discrimination, disadvantage, and the internalized structures of inequality; this chapter captures the subjective dimensions of one person’s search for equality and dignity in a hierarchical society.

What's love got to do with it? – South Asia Citizens Web

If caste and religious proscriptions prevent the free option to love, then terrorism as a private... more

Culture of Agriculture

Co-opting Culture-Managerialism in Age of Consumer Capitalism

Economic and Political Weekly, 1996

Managerialism in Age of Consumer Capitalism A R Vasavi Culture and cultural variations have rece... more Managerialism in Age of Consumer Capitalism A R Vasavi Culture and cultural variations have recently become key issues in business management This recognition of culture has become imperative as global transnational capitalism penetrates and seeks legitimacy in areas of vast cultural diversity. But business management is gaze at culture will be predominantly in terms of seeing cultural diversity as market opportunity and in integrating cultural sensitivity in order to diffuse hostility to capitalism. In co-opting culture business management will negate the capacity of culture to mobilise sentiments against the discontents of capitalism.

“Government Brahmin” Caste, the Educated Unemployed, and the Reproduction of Inequities

The Impact of Education in South Asia, 2018

The Displaced Threshing Yard: Involutions of the Rural

Review of Development and Change, 2019

In understanding contemporary rural India, it is important to go beyond rendering the rural as sy... more In understanding contemporary rural India, it is important to go beyond rendering the rural as synonymous with villages and agriculture or focusing on the ‘agrarian question’. Given the multiple contradictions that the varied ruralities of India are exhibiting, it may be relevant to locate the rural as being constituted by the triangulated structures of reproduced caste, an economics of neglect, and a politics of rescue. The result of such triangulation is evident in the range of involutions that are manifesting across rural India. These include not only a sharpened differentiation of classes and households, but also forms of separation-integration of key rural institutions and structures, and the erosion of rural citizens. All these have implications for liveability and the nature of democracy in rural areas.

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Schooling for a New Society?

IDS Bulletin, 2003

Book Review: Those Who Did Not Die: Impact of the Agrarian Crisis on Women in Punjab

Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 2014

Ranjana Padhi, Those Who Did Not Die: Impact of the Agrarian Crisis on Women in Punjab. New Delhi... more

Provisioning transactions and the reproduction of agrarian social orders

Contributions to Indian Sociology, 1998

The jajmani system has often been seen as the model representation of rural provisioning transact... more The jajmani system has often been seen as the model representation of rural provisioning transactions which link landed members of agrarian societies to the labour and service caste groups. However, attention to a variant of provisioning transactions enacted in rural north Karnataka indicates the extent to which these transactions differ from the jajmani system and exemplify what might be called 'embedded' transactions. It is their embedded dimension, in which political and economic motivations are intertwined with the social and cultural, that enables these transactions to function, simultaneously, as a form of social reproduction. However, recent shifts in the organisation of agriculture and in the changing identities of low- ranked caste members have led to a decline in these transactions, producing ruptures in the reproduction of the local social order. While the articulation of these transactions in their 'embedded' state camouflages their economic and social or...

Book reviews and notices : RAMACHANDRA GUHA, Savaging the civilized: Verrier Elwin, his tribals and India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. 398 pp. Plates, notes, refer ences, appendices, index. Rs. 595 (hardback)

Contributions to Indian Sociology, 2000

The articles by Stanley Tambiah and Lloyd Rudolph address another of Madan’s central concerns, th... more The articles by Stanley Tambiah and Lloyd Rudolph address another of Madan’s central concerns, that is, sociological representation and the problem of reflexivity. Tambiah re-examines Bemier’s text Travels in the Mughal empire, which was a primary source for the representation of oriental despotism for scholars as varied as Montesquieu and Marx. More importantly, he shows that the stereotypical ways of presenting the ’orient’ had a precise political agendait served as a warning to absolutist tendencies in Europe. While restricting himself to a specific historical period, Tambiah’s essay is framed by contemporary sociological concerns about ethnographic representation and its location in colonial structures of power. Colonial structures are not merely experienced as repressive by subject societies, they may also create institutions that generate possibilities for reflexivity and the expression of desire. In a fascinating account of Amar Singh’s diary, Rudolph shows how a Rajput prince is able to use this new genre of writing to reflect critically on his own society. In Rudolph’s account the diary becomes the space for the construction of native ethnography. The book includes a biographical note on T.N. Madan and an introductory essay by Veena Das that not only draws the different themes together and puts them in the framework of Madan’s own intellectual concerns, but also frames

Pluralising the sociology of India

Contributions to Indian Sociology, 2011

Focusing on the gaps in the practice, methodologies, pedagogies, and texts related to the ‘Sociol... more Focusing on the gaps in the practice, methodologies, pedagogies, and texts related to the ‘Sociology of India’, this article locates key problems in the theoretical and methodological orientation of the discipline, analyses the tensions within and between the varied institutions responsible for the production of sociological knowledge, and notes the absence of linkages between the discipline and the larger society and nation. The article provides three sug-gestions to pluralise the discipline: facilitating wider and more diverse themes and issues in research including encouraging studies of the ‘vicinity’; developing and deploying multiple methodologies to study and represent a range of issues; and integrating Indian language writings into the pedagogical, textual, and theoretical apparatus of the discipline.

Poor Women as Economic Agents: The Neo-Liberal State and Gender in India and the US

Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 2003

Drawing on neo-liberal economic norms, India and the US are increasingly marking and constituting... more Drawing on neo-liberal economic norms, India and the US are increasingly marking and constituting women in poverty as new economic agents. Though based in vastly different socio-economic polities, poor women in both countries are subject to state- led agendas that seek to alter their economic conditions and their subjectivities. Discourse in the US seeks to shift women from welfare to that of workfare and thereby integrate them into the normative structures of dual-parent families. In India the state draws cn the rhetoric of enabling economic empowerment and yet fails to provide the required structural support. Details from the various programmes in the two countries and their impact indicate the extent to which there is a 'serial collectivity' between women in the two countries who share similar shifts in their identities, cul tures and life conditions despite being located in vastly different structural conditions.

Harbingers of Rain: Land and Life in South India

The Journal of Asian Studies, 2003

The book focuses on understanding the cultural implications of changes introduced by government p... more The book focuses on understanding the cultural implications of changes introduced by government programs in an agrarian society. The introduction of new agricultural techniques, new crops, and new conceptualizations of droughts leads not only to economic and political changes, but also to changes in the social patterns and symbols of the society.

Suicides and the making of India's agrarian distress

South African Review of Sociology, 2009

Reviewing data from five states of India, where suicides by agriculturists reached epidemic level... more Reviewing data from five states of India, where suicides by agriculturists reached epidemic levels, this paper provides a sociological commentary to the issue. Linking macro and micro economic factors to social structural and symbolic meanings, the article highlights the ways in which the Green Revolution, as a model of modern agriculture, acts as a trap and induces a range of risks in the lives of agriculturists. Such conditions of distress are compounded by the social structuring of commercial agriculture that has led to 'agricultural individualisation' and the spread of new social demands. These trends combine with the larger context of a neo-liberal political economy where agricultural issues and agriculturists are in a state of 'advanced marginality', and account for the making of a crisis in which large numbers of agriculturists have taken their lives.

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TIF-School Differentiation in India Reinforces Social Inequalities

Recent pronouncements by the government seek to fit religious nationalism, neo-liberalism, and po... more Recent pronouncements by the government seek to fit religious nationalism, neo-liberalism, and populist schemes into schools to “improve” India’s education system. Such posturing overlooks a more structural truth: the educational regime is highly differentiated and fails to provide equality of educational opportunity, or generate an ethos of a democratic culture, or facilitate social transformative processes that can help address the multiple and interlinked inequalities of Indian society.

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Adverse Integrationof Rural India

SEMINAR, 2021

An overview of how rural India is 'adversely' integrated into the mainstream political economy.

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Chris J. Fuller Véronique Bénéï, eds, The Everyday State and Society in Modern India

L'Homme

Lorsque la star du cinema indien, Raj Kumar, fut kidnappee en 2000 par le « bandit » Virappan rec... more Lorsque la star du cinema indien, Raj Kumar, fut kidnappee en 2000 par le « bandit » Virappan recherche par la police depuis plusieurs decennies, les fans de l’acteur manifesterent en masse dans la capitale du Karnataka, Bangalore. L’etat d’alerte fut declenche et le couvre-feu instaure quarante-huit heures durant. Les manifestants obligerent l’Etat regional a negocier sa liberation aux depens du maintien de l’ordre. Semblablement, lors des elections au Tamilnadu autorisant le retour au pouvo...

The tiger and the tube well: malevolence in rural India

Critical Asian Studies

A.R. Vasavi

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