Department of Sociology

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Browsing Department of Sociology by Author "Saha, Sumita"

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    The ‘Ayah’ and the Elderly: Illness, Nursing and Intimate Labour in Kolkata’s Domestic Spaces
    Saha, Sumita
    Demographic transition, global population ageing and restructuring of family has inflected questions on the appropriate care arrangement and care management in later-life adulthood. These co-evolving and intersecting trends have drawn attention to the context and setting of care. South Asian cultures rooted in the principle of seva, filial piety and moral indebtedness towards the elders view intergenerational care as a duty, responsibility and expression of normative practice. With the rise in exigencies and contingences related to care in late modernity, navigating homecare practices, solicitude politics and brokering of care within it became the epicenter of this study. Efforts are made to understand the modalities through which an ayah becomes part of the ageing, and resuscitation and dying process of older people. Drawing on feminist gerontology and critical gerontology and cultural gerontological ontology, this study deploys micro-ethnography, 16 family case studies and in-depth qualitative interviewing with 30 ayahs in South 24 Parganas, North 24 Parganas and Kolkata Municipal Corporation. In response to the interconnecting trends discussed earlier, dependence on the cheap and affordable labour of paid careworkers can be witnessed in urban India. Locally known as ayahs, these are women grappling with the multiple disadvantages of lower caste-lower class and the gender penalty of low remuneration, devaluation and stigma. Unlike the professional nurses, ayahs are not trained and unlike the ASHA workers there is no effort at capacity building of the ayahs. Despite such overt shortcomings, ayahs have developed a vocabulary to typify and categorize patients according to their plight, difficulty level in dealing such patients, and the degree of dependency of the older adults in care. Through experiential knowledge they could fathom the advantages and disadvantages of working in different shifts, attending to children vs. older population, and caring for patients in different stages of illness. This clarity of the ayahs enables them to survive in carework in the absence of training and professionalization. Ayahs are aware of the stakes of intimate body care labour and have identified certain strategies to manage dirt, stigma and repugnance. These strategies are internalization and routinization of disgust, desensitization towards the gross elements of the body, and acceptance of their status-quo in a socially graded world. To negotiate the difficulties of carework, deeming the patients as parental figures and empathizing with the pangs of old-age is not only a coping mechanism but a modality of cementing solidarity. Dealing with older patients can be challenging especially those with dementia onset, highly-dependence or intransigence. Carework involves understanding the life course of the patient, and ayahs acknowledge that amelioration of intergenerational and interpersonal tensions promotes well-being. Their willingness to go beyond their immediate tasks, treat the client’s family as her own and exercising agency integrates and knits them to the client’s family. The element of proximity and close-contact in carework creates possibilities of moral ambiguities, emotional stress and facilitation of a filial tie between the caregiver and the older adult. Ayahs are the lynchpin in the homecare model and their situated knowledge of ‘culture-centric care’ needs to be harnessed for sustainable elderly care practices. This can be referred to as the ‘ayah-centred’ approach to care and this ayah habitus is important for designing policies that resonates with NPHCE (National Programme for Health Care of Elderly). The study foregrounds the solicitude politics and contested narratives of care, older peoples’ difficulty in coming to terms with their fractured self, erosion of autonomy and patienthood, emotional distress and coping of caregivers in attending to such patients, and what it means to deal with the recalcitrant aspects of body carework.
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    A School for all A Study of Children with special needs in Kolkata
    Saha, Sumita
    The present study aims to explore the inclusion of the Children with Special Needs (CWSN) in government run schools of Kolkata. The world has been consistently trying to build an inclusive society, where initiating inclusive education has been a foundational pillar. Post the Jomtien Declaration of 1990, inclusive education assumed to be a forthcoming realty, since the Declaration stressed on ‘Education for All’, with an exclusive focus on eradicating all forms of discrimination in accessing education. In the present day, education is recognized as a primary agent of mobility and empowerment, hence making education accessible to all is seen as an important step towards promoting an inclusive society. In congruence with the Salamanca Conference, India launched its inclusive education programme with the RTE Act of 2009, which mandated free and compulsory elementary education. As a consequence, India’s government run schools followed ‘admission for all’ irrespective of any stratification. Children with Special Needs were granted admission in all the government run schools where the philosophy of inclusive education voiced for inclusive school where needs of the diverse learners will be taken care of. In spite of all such policy imperatives, theoretical discourses often concluded that Children with Special Needs were often made aware about their exceptionalities, where disabled students are often subjected to marginalization as well as isolation. The present thesis aims to uncover the process of inclusion of Children with Special Needs in government run schools of Kolkata, where the study primarily tries to be inclusive by prioritizing the voices of the CWSN, who are acknowledged as the central characters of the inclusive education policy. The present study followed a critical ethnographic method to understand the culture of inclusive school through the lens of the stakeholders, including teachers, parents, special educators as well as students. Accommodating the diverse needs of the learners requires developing an inclusive environment which will enhance the participation rate of the students involved. Furthermore, an inclusive environment of the school also involves inclusive friendly infrastructure which will help in self-reliance and empowerment of the CWSN. Hence, practicing inclusion in schools is a complex phenomenon which involves multicharacter as well as other dynamics. The present thesis aims to explore the inclusion of Children with Special Needs in government run schools of Kolkata. Here the government run schools follow a ‘resource room model’ based inclusion of special needs children, where special educators help them to cope with the teaching learning process. Thus, resource rooms served to be one of the significant places where I interacted with the special needs children as well as their parents, since the study wanted to capture the voices of special needs children and their interpretation of the process of inclusion in regular schools.
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    Staging An Oral Tradition: Studying contemporary Baul Performances in Bengal
    Saha, Sumita
    The term Baul has been used by various scholars to denote among other things, a syncretic marginal sect, a tradition, a community, a cult, an order of singers, a spirit, and a class of mystics or a religion- positioned within a specific landscape. The colonial representations of the Bauls of Bengal, with respect to the bradralok discourses, mentioned that Bauls were uninformed, ignorant, unsophisticated, nomadic, and non-analytic entertainers. Baul Gaan (the songs of the Bauls) in sondhya bhasha- a linguistic strategy of secrecy in their songs- not only concealed their esoteric beliefs and practices but, the songs replete with metaphors—grounded in the exigencies of their immediate reality—were also drawn from and mediated by the Bauls’ position as a member of the larger rural society, their resistance and negotiations with the structure of domination and their socio-historic experiences. The 21st century records a huge repertoire of Baul Gaan performances and concerts all over the world. Baul Gaan as a process, therefore, has largely dealt with adaptation to changing circumstances, generational struggles, governmental intervention and tendencies of universalization. Baul songs as the folklore of communication, and not as material facts, therefore constantly negotiates with its overlapping companions—-the individuals, the venues, the patrons, the music, and the contextual identity of the song in performance. Therefore instead of looking at the corpus of the songs through an exclusive interrogation of their esoteric beliefs and practices, my thesis aims to enquire about the negotiations of Baul composer—Baul performer—the audiences and their patrons by a multi-local analysis of the multitude of performative settings of Baul songs. My thesis sensitises the readers to locate Baul songs texts through an author function instead of traversing the slippery path of individualism, authenticism, or divine revelations. It also deals with the socioeconomic profiles of the performing Bauls from the ethnographic field, and separately deal with the notion of gender—Baul women, their voices, their expectation and experiences. My intention throughout the thesis, thus, had been a constant effort to re-insert Bauls and their songs within a flexible socio-economic and performative framework.