Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520075854 ISBN 13: 9780520075856

Publisher: University of California Press, 1992

Synopsis

Covering groups from peasants to urban laborers, and from women to merchants, the essays in this volume depict a rich variety of non-confrontational forms of resistance and contestatory behaviors that challenge our usual assumptions about the overt nature of resistance to dominant powerholders. Taken together, the essays suggest that a much wider range of socio-cultural practices must be taken into account if we wish to understand how the world of dominated groups is constrained, modified and conditioned by power relations.

Topics range from the form of resistance represented by the lifestyle of the courtesans of Lucknow (Veena Oldenberg), to the interaction between overt and indirect resistance by millworkers of Bombay (Raj Chandavarkar), and the indirect way of influencing political events exercised by merchants who did not want to appear dominant. Unconventional sources and methods have been used to supplement traditional archival research, such as the analysis of three forms of an origin myth to illustrate the ways in which the very act of narrativizing an event automatically provides contestation (Gyan Prakash).

About this title

About the Author

Douglas Haynes is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth. Gyan Prakash is Associate Professor of History at Princeton University.

From the Back Cover

Riots, rebellions, and revolutions have always captured our attention. But moments of upheaval do not contrast as strongly with "normal" times as many social historians, sociologists, and political scientists have assumed. Offering examples from South Asia, these essays examine subtle forms of the "everyday resistance" and varieties of the everyday use of power that mark the patterns of ordinary life in the region. These essays are part of a larger effort to understand the history of subordination in India. They focus on peasants and urban laborers, courtesans and merchants, sometimes employing unconventional sources and methods. By depicting a rich variety of non-confrontational forms of resistance and contestatory behaviors, the authors challenge our usual assumptions about the overt nature of resistance to dominant powerholders. Taken together, the essays suggest that we must consider a much wider range of socio-cultural practices if we wish to understand how the world of dominated groups is constrained, modified, and conditioned by power relations. Identifying the "everydayness" of resistance in social life thus reveals a social structure formed from a constellation of contradictory and contestatory processes, rather than a seamless, functional whole. At the same time, struggle is portrayed as something that is constantly being conditioned by the structures of social and political power. As the editors note, "neither domination nor resistance is autonomous; the two are entangled together so that it becomes difficult to analyze one without discussing the effects of the other".

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520075854
• ISBN 13: 9780520075856
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 324
• Editor: Haynes Douglas E., Prakash Gyan