(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Shiv Nadar University is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, research-focused, and student-centric University offering a full range of academic programs at the undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral level. With state-of-the-art infrastructure, the University comprises of academic wings, sophisticated labs, international standard sports facilities, amphitheaters, auditorium, conference rooms and smart classrooms. The University&rsquo;s goal is to become internationally recognized for the quality of its research and creative endeavors and their applicability to improving quality of life, generating new insights and expanding the boundaries of human knowledge creativity. Committed to excellence in teaching, research and service, the University aims to serve the higher education needs of India and the world beyond.

Shiv Nadar University

Lakes provide significant ecological and economic benefits to society. However, they are prone to over-exploitation and degradation. In this paper, we address the challenge of protecting Chilika Lake in India from heavy siltation caused by land degradation in its catchment areas. Community led afforestation is explored as a management tool for reducing soil erosion and improving fish yields in the lake. Optimal afforestation by a forestry-dependent community is compared to that from the perspective of a manager who maximizes the joint utility of the forestry and fishery-based communities. Additionally, a payment for ecosystem services (PES) mechanism is designed, which pays the forest community on the basis of reduced siltation loading in the lake while also allowing it to benefit from fuelwood harvesting in the newly restored forests. Through relating the impact of fuelwood harvesting by the forestry-based communities on fish yields of the fishing community, a dynamic optimization model evaluates the various trade-offs between environmental services provided by the forest and lake ecosystems. Findings indicate that paying the forestry-based communities for restoration can help improve the lake's lifespan in absence of other interventions. Increasing afforestation levels in the lake's catchment region to 1000 km2 can result in additional fish yield of half a million tonnes over the next hundred years, generating more than a billion dollars in revenues for the fishing communities. © 2019 Elsevier B.V.

Economics

Forest Policy and Economics

A forestry-based PES mechanism for enhancing the sustainability of Chilika Lake through reduced siltation loading

History

World University root node

Global Governance and India's North-East: Logistics, Infrastructure and Society

Logistical hubs and the look east and act east policy: The case of Kolkata and its port

We report results of the state-of-the-art ab initio calculations on two-dimensional (2D) hybrid halide perovskites capped with surface ligands to understand their effects on the stability with respect to bulk MASnBr3 (MA = CH3NH3). Considering the thinnest (one-unit-cell thick) layers R2SnBr4 with surface ligands of different lengths (R = MA, ethyl ammonium (EA), butyl ammonium (BA), and phenylethyl ammonium (PEA)), it is found that van der Waals (vdW) interactions between the long chain molecules play a crucial role in enhancing the stability of the layers. The vdW contribution in ligand-ligand interactions increases with increasing length of the ligands, and interestingly, the stability of BA2SnBr4 and PEA2SnBr4 layers becomes better than bulk MASnBr3 and comparable to that of inorganic bulk CsSnBr3. Furthermore, our calculations on the 2D-3D BA2SnBr4 system in which the surface ligands connect the neighboring perovskite layers suggest further enhancement in the stability of the layers. The present study shines light on the role of H···Br bonding in deciding the structure of the inorganic part of these thinnest layers and the effect of inclusion of vdW interactions on these H···Br bond lengths. The band gap of the layers increases slightly on increasing the length of the ligands, and there is a slight blue shift of the absorption spectrum. All the studied perovskite layers are direct band gap semiconductors, and our results show that the environmentally friendly BA2SnBr4 (PEA2SnBr4) layers are good candidates for green LEDs with a band gap of 2.28 (2.36) eV as obtained by using the HSE06 hybrid exchange-correlation functional with dispersion correction. Copyright © 2019 American Chemical Society.

Design

Center for Informatics

Journal of Physical Chemistry C

Role of Ligand-Ligand Interactions in the Stabilization of Thin Layers of Tin Bromide Perovskite: An Ab Initio Study of the Atomic and Electronic Structure, and Optical Properties

This article explores the interplay between two seemingly contrary impulses in David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas: the mythopoeic and the postmodernist. Specifically, the article focuses on the novel’s postmodernist refiguration of the biblical myth of deliverance. Merging its biblical messianism with Nietzsche’s trope of Eternal Recurrence, the novel arrives at the figure of the eternally recurrent messiah. This article argues that the novel’s enigmatic leitmotif—the comet birthmark—serves as a symbol not only for Cloud Atlas’s recurrent messiah, but also for its interpretation of the biblical messiah as iterable, in the poststructuralist sense. The article concludes by identifying the novel’s postmodernist mythopoeia as an instance of metamodernism.

English

Fulltext

C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings

The Iterable Messiah: Postmodernist Mythopoeia in Cloud Atlas

The essay focuses on the uncharacteristically good production quality of the contemporary novels of master crime writer Surender Mohan Pathak by the publishing house Raja Pocket Books since 2009. Placing his novels against the contemporary pulp fiction from the small presses, the essay argues the birth of a pulp novel as an artefact for consumption by the middle classes and the implications it has on the way crime fiction is articulated in Hindi literary and production histories. © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity; individual chapters, the contributors.

Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories

From the colloquial to the ‘literary’: Hindi pulp’s journey from the streets to the bookshelves

For decades, scholars have emphasized the power of the Western tourist gaze to construct Third World destinations as the ‘Exotic Other'. Scholars have also shown that ‘Third World’ tourism fuelled by media fantasies of the Other represents neo-colonization in the twenty-first century. However, considering all its intentions/claims of impartiality, tourism research has generally travelled in only one direction (from the West to the East). In this study, conducted in Goa and Puducherry, focusing on the social contexts in which people are viewed and photographed, we ask–what do the ‘Third World’ people think of Westerners gazing at them, and their surroundings? How do Western tourists react when photographed by domestic tourists? What are the power relations within which the photographer and the photographed are located? We recognize that no simplistic analyses are possible in the postcolonial context. Directing a critical lens at the tourist gaze, this essay moves from an understanding of the gaze as appropriating to that of the gaze as negotiated. © 2015 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Sociology

Current Issues in Tourism

Situating the tourist gaze: from appropriation to negotiation

Exotic invasive fish species, when introduced into pristine natural environments, threaten the survival of many endemic species. Management challenges associated with controlling their further spread and protecting endemic species can be exacerbated when the same exotic fish species also provide gastronomical benefits to humans. Local human populations can switch their consumption preferences toward the exotic fish species, leading to an increase in their spread rate and control costs. Using the example of the African Catfish invasion in a freshwater lake, we develop a bioeconomic model of its optimal control, which also incorporates the behavioral challenges arising from a gastronomical preference for the exotic fish species. In particular, the cost of catfish control increases with its consumption demand, which, through altering the inter-species dynamics, threatens the survival of endemic fish species. The manager has at his disposal the market and non-market values of the endemic fish species to invest toward their preservation efforts. The non-market value of the endemic species is further modeled as endogenous to the community’s preference switching. Results suggest that a late detection of the exotic fish species in freshwater bodies can increase their control costs enough to make their eradication challenging, especially when the manager faces financial resource constraints. The presence of behavioral effects adds to this challenge — directly, through increasing the control costs, and indirectly, through lowering the non-market value of the endemic fish species. © 2018 Ram Ranjan. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

PLoS ONE

Protecting endemic species from African Catfish invasion when community behavioral responses get in the way

Illegal logging is a significant problem in Indonesia, which is one of the few countries with a large forest area. In this study, we investigate the factors that affect harvesting and supply of illegal timber from Indonesia to China and Japan. Moreover, we investigate the factors that lead to the demand of Indonesian illegal timber from China and Japan. A simultaneous-equation econometric model of illegally logged timber demand and supply is developed and tested using the annual data over the period 1996–2010. We find that corruption and decentralization in Indonesia have significant and positive impacts on the illegally logged timber supply while excess demand in Japanese construction and furniture industries as well as Japan’s housing starts are the significant factors that affect the illegal logging in Indonesia. The law enforcement or policies aimed at reducing illegal harvesting in Indonesia are found to be more effective than the policies targeting the import of illegally logged timber into Japan and China. © 2017 Taylor & Francis.

Journal of Sustainable Forestry

Determinants of illegal logging in Indonesia: An empirical analysis for the period 1996–2010

This article explores the ways in which long-term western spiritual practitioners settled in Puducherry, India reconstruct their selves as "connected" to the divine, the guru, and India through notions of "karma," "calling," and "surrendering." Current work on spirituality takes an either/or approach to spirituality and the self-either the self-oriented quest for metaphysical meaning-making is seen to be consumerist and individualistic, or it is seen to be experiential and ethical. Further, scholars on either side of the divide agree that contemporary spiritualities are primarily self-oriented, with one camp arguing that such self-orientation is consumerist and selfish versus the other arguing that such self-orientation challenges modern consumerism and can be an ethical alternative to consumerism. By contrast, I argue that contemporary spiritualities demonstrate the ways in which individualist, self-oriented experimentation with, and even consumption of, other religious ideas and practices is intertwined with attempts to go beyond the atomistic self. © 2018 The Author(s).

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Connecting their selves: The discourse of Karma, calling, and surrendering among western spiritual practitioners in India

This volume maps the breadth and domain of genre literature in India across seven languages (Tamil, Urdu, Bangla, Hindi, Odia, Marathi and English) and nine genres for the first time. Over the last few decades, detective/crime fiction and especially science fiction/fantasy have slowly made their way into university curricula and consideration by literary critics in India and the West. However, there has been no substantial study of genre fiction in the Indian languages, least of all from a comparative perspective. This volume, with contributions from leading national and international scholars, addresses this lacuna in critical scholarship and provides an overview of diverse genre fictions. Using methods from literary analysis, book history and Indian aesthetic theories, the volume throws light on the variety of contexts in which genre literature is read, activated and used, from political debates surrounding national and regional identities to caste and class conflicts. It shows that Indian genre fiction (including pulp fiction, comics and graphic novels) transmutes across languages, time periods, in translation and through publication processes. While the book focuses on contemporary postcolonial genre literature production, it also draws connections to individual, centuries-long literary traditions of genre literature in the Indian subcontinent. Further, it traces contested hierarchies within these languages as well as current trends in genre fiction criticism. Lucid and comprehensive, this book will be of great interest to academics, students, practitioners, literary critics and historians in the fields of postcolonialism, genre studies, global genre fiction, media and popular culture, South Asian literature, Indian literature, detective fiction, science fiction, romance, crime fiction, horror, mythology, graphic novels, comparative literature and South Asian studies. It will also appeal to the informed general reader. © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity; individual chapters, the contributors.