Oxford India Studies in Contemporary Society – serie

Sports Studies in India, as a part of The Oxford India Studies in Contemporary Society, emerges from a sociological curiosity about sporting experience in terms of participation in sports as well as its theorization in scholarship. This volume aims to forge interest in the field of sports studies and offers a platform for a wide range of studies on sports, employing a variety of approaches, perspectives, and methodologies. The contributions in this volume sport as a microcosm of society, which affords an opportunity to understand the complex nexus of society-state-media. They also examine sport within a political economy perspective through lenses of religion, gender, and class, among others. Interspersed in this collection are case studies, critical explorations of sports in Bollywood, and autobiographical accounts that not only enrich the narrative, but also demonstrate the value of that different genres bring to the discourse of sports studies. In a pandemic-afflicted world where sports is taking new shape, when new norms may well come into being, this collection establishes a framework for understanding change in the realm of sports and society in India

The concept of 'tribe' in India is a beleaguered one, and shares overlapping definitions with a number of nomenclatures-'adivasis', 'indigenous people', and even 'Scheduled Tribes'. For centuries, over widely dispersed territories, groups of communities were subjected to very similar inimical processes that led to their destitution.First Citizens engages with the political and historical processes which go into the making of differential identities and adoption of specific labels by communities, and explores a number of critical issues confronting this extremely vulnerable section of Indian society. The essays document the diverse causes for migrations of India's 'tribal' populations, notably women, and their absorption into both rural and urban informal economies; the multi-layered aggression of 'development' policies impinging on the lives of those inhabiting mineral-rich habitats; the violent interface between politicized forest dwellers and the Indian state; the theory and practice behind the Forest Rights Act and the environmentalists' dilemma; and state legislation which may be enabling or otherwise for forest-based communities.Highlighting these communities' attempts to organize a broad-based social movement to challenge ecologically destructive and non-inclusive economic policies, this volume chronicles their struggle to claim a common identity as Indian citizens.

Healthcare issues have assumed significant socio-economic and political significance in contemporary India. Both the central and the state governments have responded to criticisms of health care inaccessibility by including it as a part of its developmental policies in the last two decades. Given this context, the contributors to this volume explore how the health care system is structured in India; the role of the state, market, private, and corporate sector in health care; the distribution of basic health care facilities by the state across caste, class, gender, and spatial locations; the implications of increasing clinical trials and use of pharmaceuticals in terms of cost, exclusion, and ethicality; how globalization created opportunities or built hurdles for democratizing health care facilities; and the critical role of communities in the new health care system. This edited volume thus provides a holistic narrative that explains the politics of health care access in terms of distribution, utilization, and outcomes as well as the context in which health inequalities are reproduced which is critical not only to our scholarly understanding of health care but to informing the development of health care policy in India at a critical juncture.