About the Book MICHIEL BAAS BRINGS ALIVE A WORLD OF MEN SCULPTING BODIES, REDEFINING MASCULINITIES AND CONFRONTING THEIR VULNERABILITIES IN THE GYMS OF URBAN INDIA. The gyms of urban 'new India' are intriguing spaces. While they cater largely to well-off clients, these shiny, modern institutions also hold the promise of upward mobility for the personal trainers who work there. By improving their English, 'upgrading' their dressing style and developing a deeper understanding of the lives of their upmarket customers, they strategise to climb the middle-class ladder. Their lean, muscular bodies—which Bollywood has set the tone for are crucial to this. Diverging from an older masculine ideal represented by pehlwani wrestlers, these bodies not only communicate (sexual) attractiveness, but also professionalism, control and even cosmopolitanism. With the gym aspiring to be a safe space for women, trainers must also find a way to break with the toxic masculinity that dominates life outside. Yet, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Class barriers are less permeable than they appear. The use of bodily capital to breach them is more fraught with danger than one might anticipate. And the profession is riddled with pitfalls and contradictions. Michiel Baas has spent a decade studying gyms, trainers and bodybuilders, and finds in them a new way to investigate India. He walks us through the homes and workspaces of these men - yes, they are almost all men - to bodybuilding competitions and also into their most intimate worlds of ambitions, desires and struggles. An unusual study of an unusual subject, Baas unveils a fascinating world, hidden in plain sight.

This volume offers an empirically rich, theoretically informed study of the shifting intersections of nation/alism, gender and sexuality. Challenging a scholarly legacy that has overly focused on the masculinist character of nationalism, it pays particular attention to the people and issues less commonly considered in the context of nationalist projects, namely women and sexual minorities. Bringing together both established and emerging researchers from across the globe, this multidisciplinary and comparison-rich volume provides a multi-sited exploration of the shifting contours of belonging and Otherness generated by multifarious nationalisms. The diverse, and context specific positionings of men and women, masculinities and femininities, and hegemonic and non-normative sexualities, vis-à-vis nation/alism, are illuminated through a vibrant array of contemporary theoretical lenses. These include historical and feminist institutionalism, post-colonial theory, critical race approaches, transnational and migration theory and semiotics.

The Postcolonial Sporting Body considers the future not only of sport, but of global politics and identity in a world striving towards greater equity and decolonisation.

China and India are emerging as major maritime powers as part of long-term shifts in the regional balance of power. As their wealth, interests, and power grow, the two countries are increasingly bumping up against each other across the Indo-Pacific. China’s growing naval presence in the Indian Ocean is seen by many as challenging India’s aspirations towards regional leadership and major power status. How India and China get along in this shared maritime space—cooperation, coexistence, competition, or confrontation—will be one of the key strategic challenges for the entire region. India and China at Sea is an essential resource in understanding how the two countries will interact as major maritime powers in the coming decades. The essays in the volume, by noted strategic analysts from across the world, seek to better understand Indian and Chinese perspectives about their roles in the Indian Ocean and their evolving naval strategies towards each other.

JAIR Journal of International Relations (JAIR J. Int. Relat.) is a biennial, peer-reviewed, refereed journal of International Relations published by The Jadavpur Association of International Relations with the financial assistance from the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), New Delhi.

‘When racial and sexual injustice have been reduced, we shall still be left with the grave injustice of the smart and the dumb’—Thomas Nagel Education achieves many things—it pulls people out of poverty, enables socio-economic mobility and promises a route to dignity. But what does education mean to different people, what does it do and whose needs are being met by education? Even as globalization and formal education have established themselves as unquestionable truths, only a privileged few have cornered its benefits. In this process, education is being reconceived and its promises are being rewritten. Today, there clearly is more to education than going to school, getting credentials and getting a job. This book is an attempt to capture what this ‘more’ is, by exploring education’s connections to caste, class and gender and understanding how they affect the promise of education. In documenting the fractured realities of the many children who want guns for Christmas and the psychological trauma of conflict in Manipur, how a ban on toddy-tapping affects educational choices in Tamil Nadu or why a grandmother chose to get her fifteen-year-old granddaughter married to a seventeen-year-old truck driver in rural Rajasthan and many such stories, this book attempts to paint a portrait of the political and cultural processes that affect education.

This book is a comprehensive guide to the diagnosis and management of both common and rare neurological disorders, for practising neurologists and trainees. Divided into twelve chapters, each section is dedicated to a subspecialty of neurology, including movement disorders, headache, epilepsy, neurotoxicology, stroke and more. Topics are presented with a broad overview and include recent advances in the field. Content is further enhanced by tables, clinical images, boxes and flow charts to assist learning. Key points Comprehensive guide to neurological disorders for clinicians and trainees Each section dedicated to a subspecialty of neurology Includes recent advances in the field Highly illustrated with tables, clinical images, boxes and flow charts

This book critically discusses the changing relationship between the Indian state and capital by examining the mediating role of society in influencing developmental outcomes. It theorizes the state’s changing context allowing the discussion of its pursuit of contradictory economic and social welfare goals simultaneously. Both structural and ideological factors are argued to contribute to a shifting context, but the centrality of re-distributive politics and the contradictions therein explain a lot of what the state does and cannot do. The book also examines what the state aspires to do but structurally cannot accomplish either because of the scale of the problem or the dysfunctionality that sets in with continuous reforms. The collection provides rich evidence on the contested forms of governance arising from changing contexts and shifting roles of the state. Readers will benefit from this recasting of the Indian state in terms of the actual forms of intervention today. Changing Contexts and Shifting Roles of the Indian State is a timely book. At a time when the question of the role of the state in promoting more inclusive forms of development has never been more urgent, this book provides a range of powerful and insightful case studies of how a changing Indian capitalism is impacting and in turn being impacted by the multi-stranded role of the Indian state. Patrick Heller, Professor of Sociology and International Affairs, Brown University, Providence. Since the early 1990s, the Indian economy has moved away from a statist model of development to a more market-oriented one. However, very little scholarship exists that attempts to analyse India’s recent development experience from a political economy lens. This book, which is edited by two of India’s reputed scholars in the political economy of development, addresses this important gap in the literature. It provides an insightful account of the role of the state and the market in India’s economic resurgence in the last three decades. The book also contributes to a fresh understanding of what is meant by a twenty-first century developmental state in a globalised world. The book will be valuable reading for all scholars of India, as well as to researchers in the political economy of development. Kunal Sen, Director, United Nations University – World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), Helsinki. This collection gives us a richer and more layered understanding of the Indian contemporary State. Rather than see the State as an unchanging entity with unchanging interests, the book argues that the role of the State changes with the context and with the change in political regime. Thus, taking contradictory decisions such as greater dispossession of land from the peasantry and expansion of the universe of economic rights is explainable. The argument is that we can have a better understanding when we see the Indian State as dealing with the ebb and flow of a democracy. C. Rammanohar Reddy, Former Editor, Economic and Political Weekly, Mumbai.

The ancient birthplace of some of the world's major religions and now a modern nuclear power, India is experiencing spectacular economic growth. In twenty-five years its population will overtake that of China, making it one of the most populous and rapidly-developing countries in the world. We all need to know more about this intriguing country. John Farndon explores the changing face of modern-day India and its fundamental contradictions. The country is leading the world in cutting edge technology and research, but it is also home to 40 per cent of the world's malnourished children. It is a liberal democracy, yet its political processes are influenced by some of the most conservative religious ideas in the world. The booming economy is at times both global and archaic. Getting to the heart of these inconsistencies, Farndon gives a fascinating insight into the country as it is now and as it will be in the future, and reveals how the changes in India will affect us all.

This book offers interdisciplinary examination of gender representations in cinema and SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand) platforms in India. This book will identify how the so-called feminist enunciations in twenty-first century film and SVOD content in India are marked by an ambiguous entanglement of feminist and postfeminist rhetoric. Set against the backdrop of two significant contemporary phenomena, namely neoliberalism and the digital revolution, this book considers how neoliberalism, aided by technological advancement, re-configured the process of media consumption in contemporary India and how representation of gender is fraught with multiple contesting trajectories. The book looks at two types of media—cinema and SVOD platforms, and explores the reasons for this transformation that has been emerging in India over the past two decades. Keeping in mind the complex paradoxes that such concomitant process of the contraries can invoke, the book invites myriad responses from the authors who view the shifting gender representations in postmillennial Hindi cinema and SVOD platforms from their specific ideological standpoints. The book includes a wide array of genres, from commercial Hindi films to SVOD content and documentary films, and aims to record the transformation facilitated by economic as well as technological revolutions in contemporary India across various media formats.