All walks of life
The practices of everyday life have long been of interest within the social sciences. They can also be one of the most accessible points of entry for students engaging with unfamiliar regions for the first time, especially regions as diverse and sometimes confusing for novices as South Asia. The second edition of Everyday Life in South Asia, updated and expanded since its original publication in 2002, does an admirable job in trying to cover the vast array of South Asian lived experience without unduly privileging one region, topic, or perspective.
The book comprises thirty-five chapters grouped into six parts dealing broadly with issues of family life, gender, caste and community, religion, nation-making, and globalization and diaspora. Some chapters are further linked by sets of interconnected and overlapping themes that weave through the volume. Thus, a reader interested in notions of gender and sexuality might choose to focus their attention on Part Two, ‘Genders’. But highlighting the "richly varied, historically shifting, and intensely experienced life as lived, and made, in South Asia" (6), readers could also trace a study of women's issues by looking at chapters contributed by Jeffrey & Jeffrey or Kapur (Part One), Gutschow (Part Four), Menon or Lynch (Part Five), and Mankekar or Richman (Part Six). Other threads traceable throughout the book include notions of ‘modernity’; questions and challenges related to South Asian youth; or ethnicity and nation-making. These examples do not do full credit to the interlinking, contemporary scholarship onSouth Asia, traceable throughout the volume.
Updated edition
Each section begins with a new introduction by the editors situating each chapter in relation to the others and to the broader issues being explored in contemporarySouth Asia. Several of these are quite useful in their own right. The introduction to the six chapters making up ‘Caste, Class, and Community’ (Part Three), for example, briefly surveys anthropological, ethno-sociological and aspectual models of caste and their critiques. The introductions are a new addition to the publication, and were absent in the first edition. Furthermore, a number of contributors to the first edition have updated their material based on subsequent research, and each section now contains at least one new chapter.
Even for those familiar with the first edition, the second contains a great deal of new material, sixteen new chapters in all. Several of these are particularly engaging and prescient in the context of contemporary undergraduate South Asian Studies – including Kapur's examination of courtship and marriage in Indian call centers, Gamburd's discussion of the changing gender dynamics of work and family economy in Sri Lanka, and Marsden's chapter on the intellectual life of men in northern Pakistan – but given that the first edition was only published a decade ago none of the chapters strike the reader as out-of-date (not even McKim Marriott's delightful ‘The Feast of Love’, first published in 1966).
Introductory material
Given its size and scope, Everyday Life in South Asia remains an exceedingly difficult book to summarize, but it is extremely accessible and has plenty to offer as introductory material for a wide range of topics. That said, several of the contributions – particularly the chapters excerpted from larger articles or books – are a little unsatisfying, leaving the reader with more questions than answers. It also offers very little for more advanced undergraduate students, for whom much of the material would have been covered during foundational classes. Notwithstanding these critiques, it is easy to imagine uses for this book by teachers seeking introductory material on various aspects of life inSouth Asia. And for the untrained reader, interested in but new to the region, this book offers exceptionally readable material on a wide range of topics with endnotes and a lengthy bibliography that can guide them to further readings.
Aaron Mulvany is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Development and Policy, Habib University (Aaron.Mulvany@habib.edu.pk)