Pockets

Based on twenty one indicators, the present study investigates the levels of social and economic deprivation among the twenty-eight states and seven union territories of India. The entire research work is based on secondary sources of data. The overall analysis of the study reveals that the level of economic deprivation is high in the western, central and eastern parts and it is moderate to low in the states situated in the northern and north-eastern parts of India. The high level of social deprivation is in the north-central states and it is low in the north-eastern and southern most states of India. However, the states of Uttarakhand and Meghalaya have recorded high level of social but low level of economic deprivation, and the states of Goa and Kerala have experienced the low level of social but medium level of economic deprivation.

Based on a book jointly written with Barbara Burman (The Artful Pocket: Social and Cultural History of an Everyday Object 17th-19th century), the article uses a material culture approach to look at women’s tie-on pockets in relation to female middle-class values and practices in eighteenth-century Britain. The article argues for the centrality of objects as historical sources – and not just illustrations – and thus challenges the traditional reliance of historians on written documents only when it comes to studying a period when material literacy was much more widespread than textual literacy. In that context, looking at an object middling women made with their own hands and wore close to their bodies enables the historian to study the embodied practices of these women. Restoring their agency, the material culture approach to the history of middling women allows them to tell something of their story in their own voice.