Sweta Tiwari

Social movements are a part of the curriculum of Anthropology and Sociology in higher education institutions in India. Traditionally, these courses are taught via snippets of social movements accompanied by theoretical texts and there is little scope for individual teachers to change course content. While these texts are valuable, I found students struggled to make initial engagement with many of the prescribed texts and often became tense or anxious about the material. Students viewed social movements with antipathy and as a hindrance to stability, influenced by the political narratives and media representation of social movements as a disruption to solidarity. They often struggled to connect to the themes and issues of the Social Movement course, positioned within their own prisms of religion, caste, class, gender, and political sympathies. In this article, I vindicate the use of Animal Farm by George Orwell as a heuristic tool, taught alongside standard texts, to help students gr...

Names play a significant role in everyday life. Names are layered with
multiple cultural meanings. Not everything is named and things that are
named have some value. The process of naming is inherent to culture. Names are important bearers of culture. The aim of the article is to study the perspective of people on the process of renaming. It looks at the ways people comprehend the renaming of the ghats. The article highlights the strategies of maintaining the subaltern names of the ghats. The article looks at the performing functions of names. It examines the process of renaming of the ghats. It explores the process of renaming which represents community mores and values. The aim is to study such kind of appropriation which compromises with the existing meaning and creates a new identity for the ghats. It looks at
the renaming of the ghats as a socio-political intention to naturalize the place with a new name, wipe out the past and establish an authority over it. The article analyses struggle for renaming and sustaining subaltern names. Through this article, I seek to present the ways in which subaltern spaces are recognized. It elaborates on the conscious practices which are directed to reinforce and sustain the subaltern ghat names. I have primarily focused on two ghats, the Nishad Raj ghat and the Galli Baba ghat for the study. Though other ghat names have been mentioned, but the aim is to see people’s perspective on change of names. The primary focus of the article is to highlight the ways the subaltern ghat names survive among the hegemonic Brahmincal and patronized places.

Social movements are a part of the curriculum of Anthropology and Sociology in higher education institutions in India. Traditionally, these courses are taught via snippets of some major social movements accompanied by theoretical texts by acclaimed scholars and there is little scope for individual teachers to change course content. While these texts are valuable, teaching these courses I found students struggled to make initial engagement with many of the prescribed texts and often became tense or anxious about the material. Students viewed social movements with antipathy and as a hindrance to stability, influenced by the political narratives and media representation of social movements as a disruption to solidarity. They often struggled to connect to the themes and issues of the Social Movement course, positioned within their own prisms of religion, caste, class, gender, and political sympathies. This created a gap in understanding for these students in an Indian classrooms. In this article, I vindicate the use of Animal Farm by George Orwell as a heuristic tool, taught alongside the standard texts, to help students grasp the nature of social movements in theory as well as in praxis. Teaching and learning social movements require a certain amount of empathy and openness to untangle students from their own biases. Turning to fiction can help because students can connect and become invested in the story, after which point parallels to the academic texts or real-life social movements can be drawn. With its subtle literary techniques, Animal Farm elaborates on the social, political, and economic background for a social movement. Set in the animal world, it is a parable that is equidistant to human orientations and consequently makes an excellent starting point to distance students from their biases and preconceived ideas. This in turn helps them develop a reflexive understanding from which to engage with the core texts.