Monday, May 19, 2008

Nehru's 'temples'

A fascinating article on different trajectories of communal violence and modernizationOn the Desecration of Nehru’s ‘temples’: Bhilai and rourkela compared by Jonathan Perry and Christian Struempel in EPW. Abstract:
"The major steel towns built in the wake of the Second
Five-Year Plan were to be “temples” to India’s industrial
future and secular “modernity”; but soon they were
desecrated by ethnic and communal violence. Focusing
on two of them, this article shows that the extent of
the violence was markedly different, and asks “why?”.
Attention is drawn to the kind of ethnic mix in their
workforces, to their different experiences of “modernity”,
shop floor cultures and histories of displacement, and to
the different agendas of state governments and the way
they shaped civil society institutions."

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