This book discusses the epistemic foundation of the heuristic construct ‘vagabond’ and the convergence between the politics of itinerancy and that of dissent in the context of South Asia.It describes the fraught relationship between ‘native’ itinerant practices and techniques of governmentality which have furnished different categorizations and taxonomies of mobility. The book demonstrates the historical seismic breaks – from the Orientalist to the post-Orientalist, from the premod...

The book examines the social and cultural role of selfies in India. It looks at how the selfie, unlike the photograph, which was a gesture towards an external reality, remains intimately self-referential, yet reconfigures social ordering, identity formation, agency, and spaces in curious ways.This volume approaches questions about the construction and performance of the self through the digital selfie and uses this situated, contextualized, and culturally specific phenomenon as a s...

This book explores how the COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped urban spatialities through the rise of digitally mediated "temporal spaces" in Calcutta. Focusing on Uber-enabled mobility, cycling pathways, and cafés, it examines how digital infrastructures and human practices intersect to create fluid, dynamic urban experiences. Challenging fixed notions of place-making, the book interrogates what it means to "return to normal" and how digitality reconfigures urban life, sociality, and imaginati...

This volume brings together scholarship on indigenous forms of travel to decolonize travel theory. It looks at certain minoritarian-vernacular traveling cults – very rarely examined – that compel us to rethink, on the one hand, the conventional tropes of and rationales for travel; and, on the other hand, notions of (post)coloniality, nationalism and modernity in the context of India. The book illustrates the enduring problematic of the ‘colonial episteme’: how it deploys pervasive categori...