Sanam Roohi

• PhD
• Fellow at Centre for Advanced Internet Studies

Perceived from the outside and inside as a cohesive community, Kammas (a dominant caste in Coastal Andhra) self-project themselves as a group that has always extended the frontiers of economic advancement, including through transnationalization. Despite the sense of community cohesiveness, there exist layers of class stratification within this comm...

The Bharatiya Janata Party, conventionally an upper-caste party led by Hindi-speaking local elites whose rise was precipitated by its use of violence to rectify supposed historical wrongs against the Hindu majority (ostensibly by the Muslims), has undergone a discursive shift. In its attempt to hegemonise Hindutva, its recent makeover has pegged it...

The narratives of love jihad have become politically instrumentalized to curb what adherents of Hindutva (the political ideology espoused by the Bhartiya Janata Party, currently in power in India) believe to be a cultural war waged by Muslim men to sexually target Hindu women, luring them into marriage as part of their religious duty to convert the...

This ethnographic study, which draws from critical mobility studies and puts it in a productive conversation with migration infrastructures literature, foregrounds the cultivation of and access to differential mobility capital by Rayalaseema inhabitants chain migrating to Kuwait. By fostering embodied and affective relations of trust with different...

Hi everyone, you're welcome to register for this event that Dr Ram Zamanov and I are co-organizing on 4 March. Together with our invited speakers, we will reflect on studying competing online narratives for diasporic mobilization. Joining links will be shared closer to the event!

In June 2014, after a prolonged sub-national movement, the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh was bifurcated, and the new state of Telangana was carved out of it. Soon after, the freshly constituted government of Telangana state accorded two regional festivals – Bathukamma and Bonalu – the status of ‘state festivals’, emphasising their importance in th...

This article examines the two waves of the covid -19 pandemic in India in 2020–2021. It disaggregates the different narratives constructed by the Hindu right-wing in online circles. It shows that by instrumentalizing the interactive and multimodal features of social media, the Hindu Right amplified the notion of Muslims as contaminants in the first...

En juin 2014, après un long mouvement infranational, l’État indien de l’Andhra Pradesh a été divisé pour créer un nouvel État, le Telangana. Peu après, le gouvernement fraîchement constitué du Telangana a accordé le statut de « festival d’État » à deux festivals régionaux, le Bathukamma et le Bonalu, soulignant leur importance dans le répertoire cu...

Policy brief on social inequalities in the Erasmus+ programme, reviewing the academic literature on the profile of Erasmus+ students and the obstacles they face when going abroad. It draws particular attention to students’ socio-economic background, gender, and disability status.

This article focuses on the transnational giving practices of Kammas (a dominant caste in Coastal Andhra, South India) by examining their records, standing myths and evolving iterations around the practice. While Kammas date their giving practices to the 1700s, written records trace community giving to the late colonial period, where a few elites i...

Conceptualising giving as a broad category encompassing philanthropy, charity, humanitarian aid and gifts, this Special Issue brings together researchers whose ethnographic and theoretical work examine different forms of transnational giving in the historical and contemporary Global South. In this Issue we contend that the Global South should not b...

Conceptualising giving as a broad category encompassing philanthropy, charity, humanitarian aid and gifts, this Special Issue brings together researchers whose ethnographic and theoretical work examine different forms of transnational giving in the historical and contemporary Global South. In this Issue we contend that the Global South should not b...

When Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, it shook and eventually killed the dreams nurtured by Shekharappa Gyanagoudar, a retired factory worker living 6500 kilometres away in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. In the early morning on 1 March 2022, his son Naveen Shekharappa, a final year medical student at the Kharkiv National Medical...

The global COVID-19 pandemic has challenged social life in profound ways, including migration and migration-related diversities. It has challenged and sometimes deepened existing social structures and inequalities as well as created new ones. However, the precise impact of COVID-19 often remains unclear, as do the broader implications for how we co...

https://ari.nus.edu.sg/20331-104/

The conceptualisation of space (along with time) has a long checkered history going back to the times of Plato and Aristotle - figures who are foundational in political and social theory. This paper, however, does not trace the genealogy of space so far back in time, but rather focus on the ‘spatial turn’ that marked the social sciences in 1980s wh...

In 2014, the state of Andhra Pradesh was bifurcated by the Indian government, leaving the truncated state without a capital city. A period of political uncertainty before bifurcation and the announcement of the new capital city created possibilities for land speculation and for the acceleration of the commodification of real estate in different par...

https://academic.oup.com/jrs/article-abstract/32/2/348/5513014?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Analyses of everyday peace provide a critical response to existing peace practices. However, absent from these discussions is the feminist research that theorizes peace through everyday practices of care. We argue that contemporary debates on everyday peace should engage with this largely forgotten tradition. We explore the contributions of this re...

Feminist peace research is an emerging field of social sciences that is transdisciplinary, intersectional, and normative—as well as transnational. Although it draws from disciplines such as peace and conflict research (in and outside of international relations [IR]) as well as feminist security studies, it also differs from them in terms of researc...

Carol Upadhya, Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016, xiii + 383 pp., ₹995 (hardback). ISBN-13: 978-0-19-946148-6.

Guntur-Krishna districts in the state of Andhra Pradesh has seen intense mobility of professionals to the USA from among the ‘dominant’ castes of the region, particularly the Kammas. Kammas were a rural agrarian caste who have successfully transnationalized themselves, but continue to have strong connections with their region of origin. Rather than...

‘High skilled’ Kamma migrants from Coastal Andhra domiciled in the USA maintain strong ties with their villages and towns of origin. Since the 1990s, one key way in which they have sustained relations with their roots is through transnational philanthropy. Over the last two decades, migrant donors have diversified the modalities of their philanthro...

Literature on the Indian diaspora domiciled in the U.S.A. largely portrays the group as educated, highly skilled migrants in pursuit of their American Dream, without critically engaging with the regionally particularised migration trajectories that predispose only certain groups to become skilled migrants from the global South to the North. Migrati...

This chapter looks at the idea of governmentalization of NRI philanthropy in the state of Andhra Pradesh. In a detailed analysis, the author shows how the dominant community of the Kammas in the coastal Andhra region, having historically benefitted from being part of the anti-Brahmin movement, consolidated their identity as the foremost landowners...

In the past few years, Bangalore, like other metros in India, has witnessed the introduction of many mega projects, often under the urban renewal schemes, that have been rapidly altering the landscape of the city. One such mega-intervention is the road-widening /realignment projects and schemes whereby the existing width of the road is to be increa...

population was a good 25.2% 1 and an RTI query recently revealed that Muslims' representation in Kolkata Police and the KMC (two biggest government organizations) was not even 10% despite the community constituting 25% of the state's population, 2 . Considering that the Muslims in Bengal are largely concentrated in the urban region (Census 2001), t...