This article moves through the tempo of visual and aural inventories that float in and out of the making of a film based project on public spheres within a post-war post-colonial landscape. Seeking a set of conversations which offer clues to the inhabitation and production of public spheres within the zone of cinemas, the article considers the creative process at play in the writing of these iterative histories of the very ways in which cities are imagined, lost and perhaps re-gained (...) through poetic reflection. (shrink)

This article unpacks the notion of ‘carrying’ as an embodied set of influences that bear upon our research practices and journeys. It is widely recognised that we acquire and carry a body of books as intellectual companionship. It is not however readily acknowledged how we as researchers carry sounds, aesthetics, traumas and obsessions, which stay with us and take time to appear before us, as methodological projects within our grasp. Researchers are carriers embarked on exchanges in a double sense. Firstly, (...) we are embodied and affected by our life trajectories. There is a temporality to our research which is entwined with the very knots of our lives. Secondly, we are carriers through the specific ways in which we activate our research materials and relationships. In this article, the two elements of carrying are underlined as being intimately related. (shrink)

In her 1999 article ‘The Scent of Memory’, Avtar Brah maps the ways in which gendered, classed and racialised identities and subjectivities are produced in the diaspora space of Britain. ‘The Scent of Memory’ begins, repeatedly returns to and ends with the figure of a mother — Jean, a white English woman in the Southall of the 1970s and 1980s. One way of reading this article is as a series of interruptions, each of which allows us to see Jean differently, (...) to replace her in what Brah has memorably termed the entanglement of genealogies of dispersion with those of staying put. In this article, I stage my own set of speculative interruptions, through which recent feminist theorising of maternal subjectivities confronts the ways in which the maternal and the reproductive are conceptualised, metaphorised and mobilised in contemporary accounts of community cohesion, Britishness and belonging. At stake is our ability to challenge those still-dominant discourses that naturalise repetition and sameness as the necessary ground of belonging, obscuring and ignoring the gendered, racialised and other differences that mark Britishness, and which thereby reproduce the migrant and the minoritised as a problem for the stability of British identities. Following on from and extending Lisa Baraitser's claim that thinking about the relationship with the other ‘might just as well start with the mother’, I ask whether rethinking the reproductive can enable a more complex account of the ways in which ‘the native’ is transformed in diaspora spaces. (shrink)

Lectures on Hindu philosophy; with reference to Tamil literature.

This paper looks at the place of items long associated with the bodies of South Asian women in mainstream fashion. First, there will be a profiling of some of the scenes where bindhies, mendhies and related scents and sounds are donned and adored by white bodies. By participating in conversations with South Asian women in Britain in the second part of the article, the author is able to discuss some of the stirrings raised by the recent legitimization of these items (...) by multicultural capitalism, leading towards an exploration of a different sense of aesthetics, memory and desire. The ambivalent attraction of limited recognition offered by the anthropological urge to ‘know’ the ethnic ‘other’ is noted. A consideration of the rage induced by the power of whiteness to play with ‘ethnic’ items which had not so long ago been reviled when they were worn by South Asian women points to the historical amnesia that underlies much multicultural celebration. The allure of images packaged as oriental for South Asian women themselves, although often from a different set of sensibilities and memories, stresses the importance of historical reconstruction. (shrink)

This article excavates a discussion on the mediations that informed the making of the film Aaj Kaal by Asian elders, in a project directed by Avtar Brah and coordinated by Jasbir Panesar with the film trainer Vipin Kumar. It brings this largely unknown and inventive film to the foreground of current developments in participative media research practices. The discussion explores the coming together of the ethnographic imagination and performative pedagogies during the course of an adult education community project centred on (...) South Asian elders making a film. Collaborative dialogic encounters illuminate post-war British front rooms, the seaside and public spheres from what is usually an unlikely vantage point of view in public accounts. (shrink)

The introduction to this special issue addresses the production of intimacy in the labour of research. It explores the sensory, emotional and affective relations which form an integral, if often invisible, part of the process through which researchers engage with, produce, understand and translate `research'. The article argues that these processes inform the making of knowledge, shape power relations and enable or constrain the practical negotiation of ethical problems. These issues are not, however, often foregrounded in debates on methods or (...) methodology and are frequently erased from researchers' own accounts of their work. The article explores some of the possible reasons for this, which include institutional and cultural conventions of academic practice, the historical legacies with which disciplines often struggle, and the difficult issues and decisions that individual researchers face as they try to negotiate the relations between scholarly research and personal relationships across time, and between scholarly research and, for example, creativity, fiction, or sensationalism. The article concludes with a review of the main themes in the special issue, focusing in particular on the ways in which the contributors use the concept of intimacy to challenge the boundaries between creativity and analysis; spatial and temporal proximity and distance; freedom and censorship; subjects and objects. (shrink)

This paper looks at the place of items long associated with the bodies of South Asian women in mainstream fashion. First, there will be a profiling of some of the scenes where bindhies, mendhies and related scents and sounds are donned and adored by white bodies. By participating in conversations with South Asian women in Britain in the second part of the article, the author is able to discuss some of the stirrings raised by the recent legitimization of these items (...) by multicultural capitalism, leading towards an exploration of a different sense of aesthetics, memory and desire. The ambivalent attraction of limited recognition offered by the anthropological urge to ‘know’ the ethnic ‘other’ is noted. A consideration of the rage induced by the power of whiteness to play with ‘ethnic’ items which had not so long ago been reviled when they were worn by South Asian women points to the historical amnesia that underlies much multicultural celebration. The allure of images packaged as oriental for South Asian women themselves, although often from a different set of sensibilities and memories, stresses the importance of historical reconstruction. (shrink)

Obtaining ‘informed consent’ from every individual participant involved in health research is a mandatory ethical practice. Informed consent is a process whereby potential participants are genuinely informed about their role, risk and rights before they are enrolled in the study. Thus, ethics committees in most countries require ‘informed consent form’ as part of an ethics application which is reviewed before granting research ethics approval. Despite a significant increase in health research activity in low-and middle-income countries in recent years, only limited (...) work has been done to address ethical concerns. Most ethics committees in LMICs lack the authority and/or the capacity to monitor research in the field. This is important since not all research, particularly in LMICs region, complies with ethical principles, sometimes this is inadvertently or due to a lack of awareness of their importance in assuring proper research governance. With several examples from Nepal, this paper reflects on the steps required to obtain informed consents and highlights some of the major challenges and barriers to seeking informed consent from research participants. At the end of this paper, we also offer some recommendations around how can we can promote and implement optimal informed consent taking process. We believe that paper is useful for researchers and members of ethical review boards in highlighting key issues around informed consent. (shrink)

As mentioned in the narrations, the messenger of Allah (pbuh) used to recite some prayers known as opening prayers such as Subhaneke, Wejjehtu and Allâhümme Bâid before reciting Fatiha surah while starting the obligatory and supererogatory worships (salat). In this study, it is aimed to find out the reflections of the abovementioned prayers in narrations, and to determine their authenticity and to reveal the reasons why jurisprudential sects preferred different prayers. Benefitting from literature review method, hadith inferences were made, and (...) moving from the books of refutation & corrections and biographies, the cases of the narrators of the hadiths, who took part in the ascription of the narrations, were put forth. After the investigation, it was determined that the narrated narrations about Subhaneke, an opening prayer, were found to have been narrated by eight different prophet companions in their later works through Aisha and Abu Sâ’id al-Khudrî in early hadiths resources; and that all these narrations were week in terms of authenticity. However, it was revealed that the most authentic narrations about the issue were those depending on the practice of Umar. In the hadith resources, it was seen that five different prophet companions narrated some narrations about the Wejjechtu prayer, and that the great majority of these narrations were through Ali, and that most of these narrations were authentic, yet only one reference was found to be weak. On the other hand, it was revealed that the narrations narrated by Abu Huraira between the opening prayer, Allâhümme Bâid, turned out to be genuine in terms of authenticity. For instance, while Hanafis and Hanbalis have preferred reciting Subhaneke during salat, Shafiîs have found it appropriate to recite the prayer Wejjectu in the salat. On the other hand, Malikis have thought that it was obligatory to start the salat with Surah Fatiha, and that it was makruh to recite these prayers in salat. (shrink)

Statius' last, unfinished poem, the Achilleid, is a more varied and charming work than readers of the The baid could ever have imagined, and is perhaps the most attractive approach to this highly imitative and professional poet. It is generally agreed that both Statius' diction and his narrative form are greatly influenced by Virgil and Ovid: but if he considered the Theban poem as his own Aeneid, we might fairly see the Achilleid as more akin to the Metamorphoses; diction (...) and epic devices may remain recognizably Virgilian, but the relaxed tone, the gentle irony and open humour take us into Ovid's world. As an illustration, the brief episode in which Thetis conveys her sleeping son from Thessaly over the sea to Scyros probably draws its original inspiration from Venus' substitution of Cupid for Ascanius in Aeneid 1: Venus' son procures his own arrival, but she spirits away the sleeping Ascanius; ‘at Venus Ascanio placidam per membra quietem/ irrigat et fotum gremio dea tollit in altos/Idaliae lucos’. (shrink)

The early biographies of Gandhi were more or less hagiographies, telling the story of Gandhi, the saintly politician and the liberator of colonial India. Even though Gandhi himself had discussed the topics of his lustfulness and his decision to embrace celibacy in his 1927 autobiography, these matters were glossed over or simply ignored. As time has gone on, Gandhi has caused increasing problems for those of his biographers and interpreters who wanted to hold him up as a paragon but also (...) wanted to tell the truth. And more recently, reevaluations of the Gandhi story have at times bordered on the sensational through the documentation of his eccentricities and religious austerities and in particular his attitudes to sexuality and his ‘experiments’ with the power of celibacy.In 1946, Nirmal Kumar Bose became Gandhi’s translator and secretary during the Mahatma’s Noakhali pilgrimage to bring peace to war-torn rural Bengal. He commenced what would become a central battlefield of Gandhi schol .. (shrink)