Parul Bhandari – författare

Based on ethnographic research, this book explores the ways in which elite women use and view money in order to construct identities – of class, status, and gender. Drawing on their everyday worlds, it tracks the intricate and contested meanings they attach to money. Focusing on weddings, travel, and spirituality, Parul Bhandari delineates the entitlements and privileges as well as the obsessions and vulnerabilities that underlie the construction of class, the shaping of elite cultures, and the curating of femininity. As such, this book offers an innovative account of the interplay between money, modernity, class, and gender.

This book presents a unique rendering of love in South Asia by reading love through the specific lens of dissent. It presents multiple articulations of dissenting love in contemporary South Asia including negotiations with parents to assert choice of partner, migration, elopement, live-in relationships, singlehood, ‘new’ ideas of masculinities, and embracing diverse sexual identities. It studies these forms of dissent in the context of changing legal discourses, impact of media in everyday life, and transforming social attitudes. As such, this book is the first of its kind to analyse the myriad ways in which love and dissent constitute each other shaping the social, political, and cultural mores and movements of South Asia. The contributions are based on ethnographic research cutting across diverse religious, ethnic, and gender and sexual identities of South Asia.Part of the Social Movements and Transformative Dissent series, this book will be of interest to students and researchers of sociology, anthropology, history, geography, political science, gender studies, and media studies. It will also appeal to academics who study South Asia with a special focus on love, intimacy, sexuality, marriage, migration, history, politics and media.

This book presents a unique rendering of love in South Asia by reading love through the specific lens of dissent. It presents multiple articulations of dissenting love in contemporary South Asia including negotiations with parents to assert choice of partner, migration, elopement, live-in relationships, singlehood, ‘new’ ideas of masculinities, and embracing diverse sexual identities. It studies these forms of dissent in the context of changing legal discourses, impact of media in everyday life, and transforming social attitudes. As such, this book is the first of its kind to analyse the myriad ways in which love and dissent constitute each other shaping the social, political, and cultural mores and movements of South Asia. The contributions are based on ethnographic research cutting across diverse religious, ethnic, and gender and sexual identities of South Asia.Part of the Social Movements and Transformative Dissent series, this book will be of interest to students and researchers of sociology, anthropology, history, geography, political science, gender studies, and media studies. It will also appeal to academics who study South Asia with a special focus on love, intimacy, sexuality, marriage, migration, history, politics and media.

Based on ethnographic research, this book explores the ways in which elite women use and view money in order to construct identities – of class, status, and gender. Drawing on their everyday worlds, it tracks the intricate and contested meanings they attach to money. Focusing on weddings, travel, and spirituality, Parul Bhandari delineates the entitlements and privileges as well as the obsessions and vulnerabilities that underlie the construction of class, the shaping of elite cultures, and the curating of femininity. As such, this book offers an innovative account of the interplay between money, modernity, class, and gender.

This book provides a comprehensive perspective on discourses of love in contemporary India. It focuses on the multiple sites and articulations through which “love” is constructed, articulated and experienced in India. Overwhelmingly, scholarship on love, especially in India, situates and analyses it in the context of marriage, family and beyond. It reviews those frameworks but goes beyond them by drawing attention to a range of sites, analytical prisms and everyday experiences of love, including the impact of consumer society, technologies and notions of citizenship and the nation at large. The book comprises seven chapters based on ethnographies to provide a wide-ranging account of the multiplicity of discursive formations and contexts, withing which love plays a crucial role in the everyday lives of contemporary Indians from a wide range of backgrounds.The introduction presents an overview of the literatures on Love and Marriage in South Asia and the current debates in popular media that are relevant to them.Chapter 2 discusses the extensive literatures on love and marriage in South Asia with special attention to the way these debates are today revised in the light of youth cultures, love outside marriage and a broader debate on sexualities, including the literatures on LGBTQ identities in India.Chapter 3 provides an insight into those meanings of love that are often not immediately associated with notions of individual will. As such, this chapter discusses those interpretations of love that are embedded in family structures, roles and responsibilities, religion and culture.Chapter 4 presents an analysis of how love constitutes gender and gender shapes experiences and expectations of love; in this chapter, the focus will be to unpack constructions of ‘appropriate’ masculinities and femininities for an urban and modern India.Chapter 5 traces how the political economy, as it were, of love, with special attention to its practices of consumption and circulation.Chapter 6 addresses how debates on love are re-situated within the notion of the new India, gendered ideas about modern self-hood, the revision of the link between love and marriage, divorce and cohabitation, and the complex relationship between notions of ‘modern’ and globalized forms of intimacies and nationhood as based on South Asian exceptionalism, heteronormative sexuality within marriage and discourses on communal family-making, tradition and moralities.Chapter 7 brings together all major themes discussed in the book, and contextualizes contemporary public discourse on love in India, to the main arguments of the book.

This book analyses how multiple and hybrid ‘modernities’ have been shaped in colonial and postcolonial India from the lens of sociology and anthropology, literature, media and cultural studies, law and political economy. It discusses the ideas that shaped these modernities as well as the lived experience and practice of these modernities. The two broad foci in this book are: (a) The dynamism of modern institutions in India, delineating the specific ways in which ideas of modernity have come to define these institutions and how institutional innovations have shaped modernities; and (b) perspectives on everyday practices of modernities and the cultural constituents of being modern. This book provides an enriching read by bringing together original papers from diverse disciplines and from renowned as well as upcoming scholars.

This book analyses how multiple and hybrid ‘modernities’ have been shaped in colonial and postcolonial India from the lens of sociology and anthropology, literature, media and cultural studies, law and political economy.

This book is an extensive and thorough exploration of the ways in which the middle class in India select their spouse.