Raphael Susewind

Can one infer the religious community to which an Indian belongs from his or her name? Intuitively, the answer would be yes: Indians and those familiar with the country certainly develop a pretty good sense for such inferences. And even though names remain only one among several clues (including dress, language, etc), names alone are sadly often reason enough to discriminate against people (for instance to deny Muslims housing). But most Indians also know the flurry of probing questions along the lines of "What's your name?" - "X" - "No, your full name?" - "X Y" - "Where are you from?" - "Z" - "No, I mean: Hindu?". Clearly, names are not always good indicators to gauge an individual's community.

Today's post sheds a probabilistic light on this problem. First, I discuss why it could be useful to infer communities from names. Next, I introduce a name matching algorithm which I developed to achieve this task (building on others' earlier efforts, and available for download below under the GNU Affero GPL license). Finally, I give a first indication of how good my algorithm works: what's in a name? Your comments are of course highly appreciated - and I apologize in advance for a rather technical post (which is in fact as much a writeup for my own memory as it is meant for you to read). Once I develop empirical applications of this software, I promise more lively prose...

Recently, a friend in Delhi asked me a seemingly simple question: why are you in India? I found it a surprisingly hard question to answer - for once because it goes both deep and shallow, strangely enough. Today, I will try to answer it. Why do I want to devote my professional (and by extension a large bit of my private) life to India? This story has to start, I think, in Pakistan.

It has to start in Pakistan for two quite simple reasons. First of all, anthropologically, South Asia is one. This is beautifully displayed in a famous map by Himal South Asia, which turns the globe upside down (pictured to the right) and gives a compelling visual impression of this unity - rather than singling India out, as usual projections tend to do. This map therefore features in most of my teaching on South Asia to say that the subcontinent rests on solid shared foundations. Obviously the statement that "anthropologically, South Asia is one" can only also mean that "anthropologically, South Asia are many" - but what separates the many from each other is not necessarily a national boundary (though different political systems make a difference, I am not denying this). The diversity within India, within Pakistan, within Bangladesh, and even within the tiny Nepal is arguably wider than the differences between them. Thus reflecting on India from Pakistan is perfectly appropriate...

This is a preprint of a review whose final and definite form will be published in Contemporary South Asia © Taylor & Francis; see entry in my publication list. The book itself is here.

Articles of faith: Religion, secularism, and the Indian Supreme Court, by Ronojoy Sen, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2010, xli + 237 pp., ISBN 0-19-806380-6

After independence, India established a ‘principled distance’ between religion and the state as part and parcel of becoming a ‘modern nation’. At the same time, India also saw the rise of Hindu nationalist forces which question this very distance. Both seemingly opposed trends share common roots, argues Ronojoy Sen in his detailed exegesis of Supreme Court judgments on religion: the court ‘significantly narrowed the space for religious freedom’ by ‘homogenizing and rationalizing religion and religious practices’ – which in turn ‘strengthened the hand of Hindu nationalists, whose ideology is based on a monolithic conception of Hinduism and intolerance of minorities’ (xxix, xxx). While identifying the link between exclusivist Hindutva and wider trends towards a more homogeneous and standardized Hinduism ‘as a religion’ is not that new, Sen manages to shift this debate from colonial to post-colonial times, and is the first to highlight the key role of the judiciary. This makes his book an important contribution to the study of religion, law and politics in contemporary India.

Later today, I will give a talk on my Gujarat project at Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University Lucknow. While preparing my notes for this lecture, I realized that I somehow missed to put any extensive english summary of this project online til today. To fill this gap: here come today's notes (which in turn build on earlier talks and conference papers); please refer, however, to my published work, especially my monograph, if you want to cite my findings -- these notes are rough and not meant for further distribution.1. In the meantime, however, I am curious for your comments below, as always...

• 1. Is publishing them on this blog a contradiction, then? Mabye, yes...

Last week, I went to New Delhi to attend an ICSSR strategy workshop on improving social science research in India (set up in the wake of this report and shortly before the new budget year starts). After an early morning arrival and the disillusion that the only breakfast option at Connaught Place at such an early hour is McDonalds, I waived down an Auto Rickshaw to proceed straight to the conference hotel - The Ashok, a Government of India enterprise of the surprisingly efficient sort. Somehow, breakfast at McDonalds insulted my Indian sensibilities. But little did I know about the Ashok!

Social science in the Indian province

Social science in the Indian capital

The story began at the outermost gate, where the guards were rather bemused to see a Gora arrive in a humble three-wheeled conveyance. My Auto Rickshaw was not allowed on the driveway, so I got down, paid my 50 Rs, and turned to the guards to ask whether they want to x-ray my suitcase. That the Gora was speaking Hindi turned their bemusement into somewhat more ambivalent bewilderment: surely they wanted to check this fellow rather thoroughly. After five minutes of x-ray, questioning and body search, they were however convinced that I am indeed only an anthropologist.