Anveshi Research Centre for Women's Studies

In the historiography of Hyderabad State, pre-1948 Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (Majlis) figures as a separatist, communal and fanatical political formation. For the nationalist, Hindu and left politics in this region, Majlis has long stood for the ‘other’, wherein concerns articulated by it get discredited. In this article, we argue that there is a need to rethink the Majlis’ political perspective and its articulation of Muslim concerns by placing them in the context of the momentous political developments in the first half of the twentieth century. Caught between the imminent decline of the Asaf Jahi kingdom and the arrival of democratic politics, the Majlis saw the necessity of popular will but also the dangers of majoritarianism during such transitions and fought against the threat of imminent minoritisation of Muslims in the Hyderabad State. This article draws on the Urdu writings on the Majlis and Bahadur Yar Jung’s speeches that have been rarely used in Telugu or English writings on this period.

This article draws on the insights/questions that emerged while putting together a set of stories for children published in a series named Different Tales. These stories, set in Dalit and other minority communities, problematize the normative grids through which we view ‘childhood’ as they depict the complex ways in which children negotiate and cope with the material conditions of their marginality, often drawing upon the resources and relationships within the community. What follows is a resistance to representing culture as a marker of essentialized difference.

The discourse on domestic violence in India is animated by the language of rights and empowerment in which domestic violence is seen as the condition that needs to be overcome. It imagines the women facing violence as would-be citizen-subjects, who can actualise their right against violence once the law and institutions are set in order. Inadequate institutionalisation of right against violence and inadequate individuation of women are understood to be the major problems here. In this article, we problematise these two assumptions by taking a close look at women’s interface with public institutions in the context of domestic violence. One, we point to the resources women need to mobilise in the family and community to actualise their right against this violence; two we argue that institutionalisation of this right has led to women being subject to governmental mode of power and three, we discuss the actual deployment of this right in everyday activism as a political goal, than a guarantee against violence. We suggest that a critical consideration of the working of this ‘right’ is required to understand the changing contours of women’s battles with this violence in the post-1990 period.