Includes bibliographical references and index.

One straw from a broom cannot sweep : the ideology and practice of the joint family in rural North India / Susan S. Wadley -- Allah gives both boys and girls / Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery -- "Out here in Kathmandu" : youth and the contradictions of modernity in urban Nepal / Mark Liechty -- Rethinking courtship, marriage, and divorce in an Indian call center / Cari Costanzo Kapur -- Love and aging in Bengali families / Sarah Lamb -- New light in the house : schooling girls in rural North India / Ann Grodzins Gold -- Roadwork : offstage with Special Drama actresses in Tamil Nadu, South India / Susan Seizer -- Breadwinners no more : identities in flux / Michele Ruth Gamburd -- Life on the margins : a hijra's story / Serena Nanda -- Crossing "lines" of difference : transnational movements and sexual subjectivities in Hyderabad, India / Gayatri Reddy -- Seven prevalent misconceptions about India's caste system -- God-chariots in a garden of castes : hierarchy and festival in a Hindu city / Steven M. Parish -- High and low castes in Karani / Viramma, with Josiane Racine and Jean-Luc Racine -- Weakness, worry illness, and poverty in the slums of Dhaka / Sabina Faiz Rashid -- Anjali's alliance : class mobility in urban India / Sara Dickey -- Recasting the secular : religion and education in Kerala, India / Ritty Lukose -- The Hindu gods in a South Indian village / Diane P. Mines -- The Feast of Love / McKim Marriott -- The delusion of gender and renunciation in Buddhist Kashmir / Kim Gutschow -- Muslim village intellectuals : the life of the mind in northern Pakistan / Magnus Marsden -- In friendship : a father, a daughter, and a jinn / Naveeda Khan -- Vernacular Islam at a healing crossroads in Hyderabad / Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger -- Voices from the partition / Urvashi Butalia -- A day in the life / Laura Ring -- Living and dying for Mother India : Hindu nationalist female renouncers and sacred duty / Kalyani Devaki Menon -- Political praise in Tamil newspapers : the poetry and iconography of democratic power / Bernard Bate -- Mala's dream : economic policies, national debates, and Sri Lankan garment workers / Caitrin Lynch -- Interviews with high school students in eastern Sri Lanka / Margaret Trawick -- Cinema in the countryside : popular Tamil film and the remaking of rural life / Anand Pandian -- Dangerous desires : erotics, public culture, and identity in late-twentieth-century India / Purnima Mankekar -- A diaspora Ramayana in Southall / Paula Richman -- British Sikh lives, lived in translation / Kathleen Hall -- Examining the "global" Indian middle class : gender and culture in the Silicon Valley/Bangalore Circuit / Smitha Radhakrishnan -- Placing lives through stories : second-generation South Asian Americans / Kirin Narayan -- Unexpected destinations / E. Valentine Daniel.