Xiang Biao, Global ‘Body Shopping’: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Review by Prof.Madhava Prasad, EFLU.
In the recent Telugu film Aadavari Matalaku Arthale Verule, Venkatesh plays the role of an expert IT worker who achieves impossible feats (not what you expect: there is a scene in which he bangs away at a keyboard for a whole night and saves the company from some kind of disaster). The interesting part of the story, however, is that Venkatesh is a country boy, he is a bloody good IT guy but he has no English, only speaks Telugu. Fortunately for him, the beautiful Trisha, playing the training supervisor of the new recruits, does not equate intelligence with knowledge of English, although for other reasons she remains skeptical of his abilities until he performs the above-mentioned miracle. The story then moves to Sydney, Australia where a team led by Trisha and including Venkatesh is sent to undertake a job for a client. Soon after this the IT story is pushed to the background and on returning to India, Venkatesh accompanies Trisha to her village, where the more familiar rural tale of internecine conflicts takes over and Venkatesh, never too convincing as an IT worker finally seems at home. I was thus astonished to read Xiang Biao‟s Body Shopping and discover that his research project had led him to the same three geographical locations that are featured in the film: rural Andhra Pradesh, globalised Hyderabad, and Sydney, one of the markets for skilled labour produced in AP-Hyderabad. It was quite uncanny how the film‟s unconscious, its formal structure, seemed to capture a truth about contemporary India that, say, a film on the same theme by Shekhar Kammula might have missed precisely by presenting a more homogeneous and ideologically appropriate image of the new economy. The cultural logic of the big-budget Telugu film‟s „sekandaff‟, a feature noted by film historian S.V. Srinivas whereby narratives beginning in urban, global settings invariably return to the village for the final resolution, may perhaps be seen as bearing eloquent witness, in its own way, to the social reality that Xiang Biao‟s research has revealed. While AMAV is by no means a critical realist treatment of contemporary society, its very failure to accomplish the ideological leap into the representation of a brave new world – the casting of Venkatesh, who is obviously unsuited to the image we have formed of the IT worker, the compulsive return to rural roots etc – is more socially revealing than the successes of the multiplex variety. One of Biao‟s Telugu informants, a body –shop operator in Sydney, “had a relative who was a movie superstar in India”. Who knows, had Biao conducted his research a few years later, the informant might have taken him to meet his relative, the movie star Venkatesh, who is in town for a shoot!
The induction of AP‟s dominant caste youth into the global finger-labour market is the subject of Body Shopping. As a Chinese anthropologist determined to resist the pressure in a Western university like Oxford, where he studied, to “specialize in „home‟ topics”, Biao settles on Indian IT workers in Sydney: he lives with them in their five-to-a-room cockroach infested accommodation, advises and instigates them against their exploitative employers and middlemen, and pursues his study while bearing witness to and getting mixed up with their problems. The anthropologist‟s normal position of cultural distance and detachment is here seriously and interestingly compromised at every turn, and Biao includes all such detail, including the story of the marriage proposal, with the promise of a „donation‟, that he receives through his parents while still away from home, which connects up his personal life in unexpected ways to the story of the role of the dowry system in the saga of Indian IT job seekers. The novelty of this work lies in its attempt to study social groups within the context of the ongoing processes of abstraction and virtualism, as these groups develop strategies to participate in global processes. Biao points out that the anthropologist‟s traditional approach is to “make sense of the world by emphasizing „embeddedness‟, focusing on how economic activities, no matter how abstract and global, still depend on and are still shaped by concrete human connections”, whereas his own guiding question is “how people develop social relations … that lead to economic globalization”. In other words the social group is seen here to be contributing to the process of abstraction rather than simply responding to it and trying to preserve its own identity in the process. Thus while institutions like caste and the dowry system are both seen to be at work in the way IT labor emerges, Biao asserts that „it should not be seen merely as a process of embedding‟. I think what he means is that the assumption that traditional ties and institutions, social networks, provide a kind of stable base in a field fraught with risk is erroneous, that there is also a process of „disembedding‟ going on alongside. What is body shopping? I discovered here to my astonishment again, that this is a uniquely Indian phenomenon. According to Biao, it is „arguably a uniquely Indian practice whereby an Indian-run consultancy (body shop) anywhere in the world recruits IT workers, in most cases from India, to be placed out as project-based labor with different clients. Unlike conventional recruitment agents who introduce employees to employers, body shops manage workers on behalf of employers….” Under this system workers are not employees of the firm they work in. An interesting contrast is suggested between „body shopping‟ which implies the labor intensive nature of the work done by these low-end workers, and „head hunting‟, which refers to hiring for senior level jobs involving brain power. Biao does not suggest it, but this very Indian institution of body shopping is of course instantly recognizable as a variation of labour contracting practices that prevail in plantations, mines, the construction industry, and elsewhere, now and in the colonial past. One of the reasons why body-shopping companies fail to manage workers of other countries is that these latter are not willing to put up with the kind of living conditions that Indians seem to suffer without complaint. This is a feature of „ethnic culture‟ that has made Indians the most successful national group in this sector of labour.
Body-shopping functions through „ethnic‟ solidarities and seems at first glance to confirm the „anthropological embeddedness narrative of globalization‟. The rise of ethnicity as a topic of research in social science in recent decades has been explained by Wallerstein as being linked to the persistence of cultural factors as determinants in keeping wage prices down. (….) However, contrary to the tendency to attribute collective behaviour induced by group solidarity to such ethnicised workers, Biao finds that there is a process of individualization among these workers, although this is nothing like the „individualism‟ of Western societies. It would seem that the cultural distinction, the special Indian talent for IT work, etc are ingredients of an ideology that keeps group identification alive while allowing for individualized career trajectories to drive workers‟ choices. Since IT in India has been largely a field of job opportunities, the “IT people” are a social category. Anybody who tucks his shirt in instead of letting it hang loose is an IT worker, an informant tells Biao. These “IT people” are the „product‟ whose production needs to be explained. Biao lists the “key domains of the production of IT labor in Andhra Pradesh”: higher education, specifically private colleges and training institutes; caste; family networks; and particularly, the institution of dowry”. The colleges and training institutes are where the production of the IT worker takes place, and the other institutions – caste, family networks and dowry – are where the required investments come from: With the rapid expansion of opportunites generated by global body shopping, it is private-sector institutes and not public universities or elite institutions that are churning out the majority of today‟s hypermobile IT people. Between 1995 and 2000, seventy five private engineering colleges were set up in Andhra Pradesh – compared to twenty-six (government and private) over the sixty years from 1929 to 1989…almost all delivering IT education….Education at these colleges was strongly emigration oriented, and their IT curriculum was often pulled entirely from US textbooks….” As for the investments: Private colleges absorbed considerable private resources. Government regulations on facilities/equipments and qualified staffing required a minimum investment of INR 5 crores to set up a private engineering college and INR 2-3 crores for a normal degree college….By far the largest investments in IT education, however, were the resources mobilized to pay for the tuition fees, which in 2000-2001 would have been around INR 200-240 crores. It is the story of how this huge amount is mobilized by individual aspirants for IT jobs, and their families that is the most fascinating part of the whole story. All training institutes depend for profits on tuition fees. Here is an example of how one well-known firm goes about the business of recruiting students to its franchises: At one of NIIT‟s franchises in Tanuku town, West Godavari district in eastern Andhra Pradesh, two full-time executives specialized in „village marketing.‟ Students at the Tanuku institute were asked for information about other college students in their home villages; the two executives followed up by tracking down those students‟ families and persuading them to send their sons to NIIT, sometimes with students from the institute in tow to provide convincing testimony. Over the month of June 2001, the two executives visited thirty four families and recruited eight students. The Tanuku institute also offered incentives to its students to rope in their friends – a gift voucher worth INR 500 and two NIIT lottery tickers with a chance to win a car or a computer for each student brought in….”
Thus the agricultural surpluses of Kamma and Reddy landowners are keeping the training institutes going (Biao estimates that 25 percent of agricultural surplus in the villages he studied was invested in higher education). If the family lacks the resources to pour into higher education, dowry is often an alternative source. Parents eager to marry off their daughters contribute to the flow of agricultural surplus from the villages to the cities, and enable the grooms to pursue the IT education that they hope will turn their dreams into reality. Dowry may come in the form of „sponsorship‟, or as Biao puts it, there is a „futures market‟ in IT grooms. This leads to situations where failure to find employment results in humiliation, break up of marriages, and other forms of individual misery. Body shops, relying on cultural and sometimes familial ties, tend to be small and their mode of functioning very informal. In such a situation, it is not uncommon for workers to dream of one day setting up a body shop in order to further their own careers. This becomes possible if the worker has enough contacts back home, and sometimes one enterprising friend back home who will rope in others is enough to go ahead and set up body shop. Interesting details about the marriage market for IT workers: a downturn in the global economy leads to sharp drop in dowry rate, which in turn led to the strategy of getting married before graduating, in order to avoid having to look for a bride while still on the jobhunt. Extended family networks also work, alongside dowry, as a source of backing. Family members come to the help of younger brothers, cousins, etc. The value systems of „ethnic groups‟ come in handy. As Wallerstein has observed, the „peoples‟ of the world are divided in social science literature into three groups: race, nation and ethnic group, the last one being the most recent addition to the terminology. It is interesting to follow Wallerstein‟s explanation of the need that this addition meets. While race is a genetic category and nation a sociopolitical one, „ethnic group‟ is a cultural category “of which there are said to be certain continuing behaviours which are passed on from generation to generation and that are not normally linked in theory to state boundaries” (Wallerstein 77). This kind of continuing behavior is crucial for explaining the success of Indian IT labour in the global economy. Body shopping is itself an „ethnic business‟ according to Biao, a business that thrives on precisely those „values‟ that make Indian labour adapt to extreme conditions which workers of other nationalities reject. Ethnic communities are marked by “value introjections, reciprocity transactions, bounded solidarity, and enforceable trust”, all social science terms cited by Biao, which point to members of communities who function with a sense of obligation and other affective-transactional dispositions that are specific to non-modern social formations, and more specifically to caste communities. This does not mean, as Biao is quick to point out, that there is some communal solidarity at work here which might give the workers bargaining power against the companies seeking to exploit their cheap labour. Indeed, Indian workers are more likely than not “to size up their surrounding society and make decisions on individual rather than collective terms”. To return to Wallerstein, he observes that the „concept of „ethnic group‟ is related to the creation of household structures that permit the maintenance of large components of non-waged labour in the accumulation of capital”. The ethnic group is a new description of the „erstwhile minority‟. Ethnicization of occupational categories is a process by which certain types of waged labour become the exclusive domain of certain groups that are bound by community values and are also excluded from the organized sector. A modern state, of course, cannot overtly keep a people apart in this fashion, as a non- or semi-proletarianized group from which to draw cheap labour, as it “violates the concept of ‟national‟ equality for them to do so”. But the state need not do anything since “what is illegitimate for the state to do comes in by the rear window as „voluntay‟ group behavior defending a social „identity‟.” The point of interest here is how such ethnically defined groups have now become an integral part of the global economy, contributing to the ongoing IT revolution. Biao‟s study shows how such ethnic groups actually function in response to the global opportunites, how existing social institutions (family, caste, community, dowry) are mobilized, how individual workers seek to strike a balance between their family and communal obligations and the needs of a market governed by different values, how amidst the squalor and the social constraints, the individual dreams of the „impossible‟ jump which might land him in Australian or American society as an equal member, no longer subject to the fretful community of fellow Indians who are experienced both as a source of support and a nuisance. Biao‟s book presents the daily lives, the intricate familial and professional negotiations, calculations and strategies, dreams and speculations through which individual Indians in the finger-labour market survive. It is a story of how communities and families feed the training schools with much needed investment by way of fees, so that they may be launched on an international job market, where the earnings, if secured, are high enough to make a difference to the family‟s situation back home. The family back home remains the anchoring place, an “ethnic” feature that both endears our workers to the employers because of the docility it induces, and renders them a source of annoyance because of the slippery practices, the deviousness that this ultimate fidelity to family and community seems to legitimize. All in all, it is sobering to learn, from this little book, that colonial labour procuring and management practices are alive and well in the „digital‟ age.
Reference
Wallerstein, Immanuel. „The Construction of Peoplehood: Racism, Nationalism, Ethnicity” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso, 1991; 71-85.
New arrivals in English under different subject headings
Law/Justice/ Human Rights
Redefining family law in India/ editors by Archana Parashar; Amita Dhanda. – London: Routledge, 2008.
Law and the image: the authority of art and the aesthetics of law/ edited by Costas Douzinas and Lynda Nead. – Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Understanding Usul Al-Fiqh: Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence/ Abu Tariq Hilal. – New Delhi: Revival Publications, 2007.
Kitaabul Meerath: the book of Inheritance/ Majlisul Ulama of South Africa. – New Delhi: Idara Isaha’at-e-diniyat (P) Ltd, 2005.
Uniform civil code: a critical study/ Maulana Wahiduddin Khan. – New Delhi: Good Word Books, 2004.
Woman in Islamic shari’ah/ Maulana Wahiduddin Khan. – New Delhi: The Islamic Centre, 2008. Education
Traditional education among Muslims: a study of some aspects in modern India/ Akhlaq Ahmed. – New Delhi: Wise Publications.
Religion
Who is who in the holy Quran: Quranic name and symbols/ Mohammed Saeed Siddiqi. – 1st Ed. – New Delhi: Idara Isaha’at-e-diniyat (P) Ltd, 1995.
The Quran: an abiding wonder/ Maulana Wahiduddin Khan. – New Delhi: Good Word Books, 2001.
Legacy of the great four Imams/ Aftab Sharyar. – 2nd Ed. – New Delhi: Islamic Book centre, 2005.
Answers to non-Muslims’ common questions about Islam/ Zakir Naik. – New Delhi: Al Hasanat Books pvt. Ltd., 2008.
Introduction to the systems of Islam/ Jalal Al-Ansari. – New Delhi: Revival Publications, 2007.
Minorities/ Dalit Studies/ Caste
A standard dictionary of Muslim names/ Al-haji Shaikh Muzafferuddin. – Reprint. – New Delhi: Islamic Book Service, 2006.
Philosophy
Violence and difference: Girard, Derrida and deconstruction/ Andrew J. McKenna. – Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
Anthropology
Violence and the sacred/ Rene Girard. – Baltimore: the John Hopkins University press, 1979.
New arrivals in Reports, Policy documents, Dossiers etc…
International criminal court: conversations with Indian parliamentarians/ edited by Vahida Nainar. – Mumbai: Women’s Research & Action group, 2005.
International criminal court & India: some questions and answers/ Saumya Uma. – Mumbai: Women’s research & Action Group, 2004.
Kashmir: will the pain never end?: Impunity of policing and aimlessness of politics: A report. – HRF, PDF & APCLC, 2007.
Report of the 1st National consultation on International criminal court & India, 8-9 Dec. 2005. – Mumbai: Women’s research & Action Group.
Audio-Visuals
Delhi Diary 2001 Director: Ranjani Mazumdar
The film attempts to understand how the imposition of emergency (1975-77) and the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 impact the lives of people in the city of Delhi, scarring them with the memory of terror.
Contents of Journals
THE BOOK REVIEW
Vol.XXXII No.8 August 2008
Jim Masselos The making of an Indian colonial metropolis: Colonial governance and public culture in Bombay, 1890-1920 by Prashant Kidambi; The colonial city and the challenge of Modernity: urban hegemonies and civic contestations in Bombay city (1900-1925) by Sandip Hazareesingh
Maria Aurora Couto Between empires: print and politics in Goa by Rochelle Pinto Tapati Guha-Thakurta Bharatmata: India’s freedom movement in popular art by Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger
Suryanandini Sinha India’s popular culture: Iconic spaces and fluid images edited by Jyotindra Jain
B.G. Verghese Indian Secularism: a social and intellectual history, 190-1950 by Shabnum Tejani
Swarna Rajagopalan Sri Lanka in the Modern age: a history of contested identities by Nira Wickramasinghe
Prakash Kashwan Environmental economics: theory and applications by Katar Singh, Anil Shishodia; Economic development,climate change, and the environment edited by Ajit Sinha, Sidhartha Mitra
R.Rajamani Green Tapism: environmental impact assessment notification, 2006 by Leo F. Saldanha, Abhayraj Naik, Arpita Joshi, Subramanya Sastry Sudha Vasan Forest futures: global representations and ground realities in the Himalayas by Antje Linkenbach
Ranjit Lal About Indian birds by Salim Ali and Laeeq Futehally; Garden birds of Delhi, Agra and Jaipur by Samar Singh
Suguna Ramanthan Elusive Terrain: Cultre and literary memory by Meenakshi Mukherjee B.Mangalam The silent raga by Ameen Merchant
Ashok Vajpeyi Dance by M.Mukundan
Nilanjana S.Roy Something to tell you by Hanif Kureishi
Mini Nanda Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
M. Asaduddin The oxford India Anthology of modern Urdu literature: poetry and prose miscellany edited by Meher Afshan Farooqi; The Oxford India Anthology of modern Urdu literature: Fiction edited by Meher Afshan Farooqi
Ashutosh Mohan About me (Apni khabar) by Pandey Bechan Sharma ‘Ugra’ Nikhilesh Yadav Dark afternoons by Bani Basu
Krishna Das Anoma’s daughter by Santanu Kumar Acharya
Priyaranjan Parhi In the Islands of grace by H.K.Kaul; Every time I wake up by V.P.Singh; The Akshara anthology of young poets introduced by Gopal Sharman & jalabala Vaidya Radha Chakravarty Collected poems 1966-2006 by Kaiser Haq Gaytri Rangachari Shah Diplomatic tales by Kiran Doshi K.P. Fabian Words, words, words by T.P. Sreenivasan; Encounters by T.P. Sreenivasan
Partho Datta Prophets of Indore: Memoires of Ustad Amir Khan by Amarnath Navanwita Bora Sachdev Neglected lives by Stephen Alter
The Book Review
Vol.XXXII, No.9 September2008
Achin Vanaik Empire of the Periphery: Russia and the world system by Boris Kagarlitsky
Keki N.Daruwalla Minorities and police in India edited by Asghar Ali Engineer and Amritjit S.Narang
Shruti Tambe Shiv Sena Women: voilence and communalism in a Bombay slum by Artreyee Sen
Harsh Sethi Short of Democracy: issues facing Indian political parties edited by Arvind Sivaramakrishnan
M.S. Ganesh Constitutional Questions & Citizens’ Rights by A.G. Noorani; Human Rights, Justice and Constitutional Empowerment edited by C.Raj Kumar and K. Chockalingam
Kamala Sankaran Enculturing Law: New Agendas for Legal Pedagogy edited by Mathew John and Sitharamam Kakarala
Pradosh Nath High-tech Industries, Empoyment and Global Competitiveness edited by S.R. Hasim and N.S. Siddharthan
Shakti Kak Science, Agriculture and the Politics of Policy: The Case of Biotechnology in India by Ian Scoones; Institutional Reform in Indian Agriculture edited by Ashok Gulati, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, K.V. Raju Debates & Discourses Where Does The Fault Lie?
Vijaya Ramaswamy South India Heritage: An Introduction edited by Prema Kasturi and Chitra Madhavan
Meena Bhargava A Social History of the Deccan, 1300-1761, Eight Indian Lives by Richard M. Eaton Dhirendra Datt Dangwal Becoming India: Western Himalayas under British Rule by Aniket Alam Amita Govinda Learning from Children: What to Teach Them by Malavika Kapoor
Sonika Gupta Learning from the Field: Innovating China’s Higher Education System edited by Ronnie Vernooy, Li Xiaoyun, Xu Xiuli, Lu Min and Qi Gubo
Harish Trivedi Mere Yuvajan, Mere Parijan: G.M. Muktibodh ke Naam Patra edited by Ramesh Gajanan Muktibodh and Ashok Vajpeyi
Sudhir Kumar Billesur Bakariha by Suryakant Tripathi Nirala
Amit Dasgupta The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Akshaya Saxena Lunatic in My Head by Anjum Hasan; Silverfish by Saikat Majumdar
Sanam Khanna The Splendor of Silence by Indu Sunderesan
DECCAN STUDIES
Vol.VI, No. 2 July-Dec 2008
Inter-community life in Hyderabad: reconfigurations
Javed Alam
Irani Shias in Hyderabad Vinod K Jairath and Huma R Kidwai Muslim perceptions and responses in post-police action: Contexts in Hyderabad
M.A.Moid
Muslims of Rayalseema region in Andhra Pradesh: Domestic and public spheres
Md.Irfan Basha
Ethnic identity and Islamization among the Borewale Muslims of Andhra Pradesh
S.A.A. Saheb
DAKHAN TAK An icon departs
H.Rajendra Prasad
“A city that sat on its treasures but did not see them” V.K.Bawa
BOOK NOTES The Deodis of Hyderabad: a lost heritage, Rani Sharma
H.Rajendra Prasad
Heritage & environment—An Indian diary, by Shyam Chainani
V.K.Bawa
Tricolour shall fly over Hyderabad- Dr. Raj Bahadur Gour
H.Rajendra Prasad
SEMINAR: THE MONTHLY SYMPOSIUM
NO.588 AUGUST 2008
TALKING THEATRE: A SYMPOSIUM ON THEATRE PRACTICES IN INDIA TODAY
Akshara K.V and Sudhanva Deshpande
Reversal of roles Akshara K.V. What is to be undone?
Sudhanva Gokahle
Mapping Marathi theatre
Shanta Gokhale
Locales
Samik Banyopadhyay
Violence, social pathology and theatre
Makarand Sathe
Small efforts matter
Dakxin Bajrange
Marginality, regional forms and state patronage
Veena Naregal
Protest through music
Sumangala Damodaran
A catalyst for theatre
Sanjna Kapoor
Censorship and the law
Sidharth Narrain
Criticism, critique, and translation
Aparna Dharwadker
Seminar: the monthly symposium
No.589 September 2008
A LETTER FROM SEMINAR
WHY PLANNING? Amartya Kumar Sen, Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, Harvard University, Cambridge
PLANNING THEN AND NOW Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission, Delhi
ENSURING COMPLEMENTARITY Arjun Sengupta, Chairman, National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector, Government of India, Delhi
WHAT IS WRONG WITH OFFICIAL POLICY N.G. Ranga, veteran peasant leader, was Chairman of the Swatantra Party, and Member of Parliament
BEYOND THE GREEN REVOLUTION M.S. Swaminathan, former Chairman of the National Commission on Farmers, and Member Rajya Sabha, Chennai
SUCCESS OR FAILURE M.Y. Ghorpade, former Member of Parliament, and Finance Minister, Karnataka, Bangalore
THE CHANGING VILLAGER Dipankar Gupta, Professor of Sociology, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi
PRIORITIES IN HEALTH CARE Seminarist
FOR A HEALTHY BHARAT Lalit M. Nath, former Professor and Head, Centre for Community Medicine; and Director, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi
ORGANIZATIONAL CHALLENGE Mohanlal Saksena, was a veteran Congressman, and Minister of State in the central government
A PARTY ADRIFT Dileep Padgaonkar, former Editor, 'The Times of India'; currently Editor, 'India and Global Affairs', and Chairman, Asia-Pacific Communication Associates, Delhi
BOOKS Reviewed by Prathama Banerjee, Harish Damodaran and Sukumar Muralidharan
Published article of Anveshi members
Media lo mem ekkada? / Joopaka Subadra
Bhumika, August 2008.
Adugu jaadalu ‘Ayyankali’ ve/ P.Mary Kumari (Maadiga)
Surya, 30th August 2008.
Sadaalakshmi sadaa adarsharatnam/ Joopaka Subadra
Bhumika, September 2008.
Caste, higher education and Senthil’s ‘Suicide’/ Senthil Kumar Solidarity Committee.
EPW, August 16 2008, No. 33.
Muslim perceptions and responses in post-police action: contexts in Hyderabad/ M.A.Moid.
Deccan Studies, Vol.6 No.2 July-December 2008.
Bhadratha perita terror/ A.Suneetha.
Andhra Jyoti, 11th Sept. 2008.
Sthreevaadula drushti sokani Telangana Rachaethrulu/ Joopaka Subhadra
Surya, 22nd Sepember2008.
Sthreela poraataalaku aadarsam/ P.Mary Kumari (Maadiga)
Surya, 13th September2008.
From ambedkar to thakkar and Beyond: towards a Genealogy of Our activisms/ R. Srivatsan
EPW, VOL 43 No. 39 September 27 - October 03, 2008.
Feminist Engagements with Law in India/ Suneetha Achyuta
EPW, VOL 43 No. 39 September 27 - October 03, 2008. (Book review)