Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH) is a premier institute of science and technology established in 2008. IITH has been consistently ranked in the&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/reports/" rel="noopener noreferrer">top 10 institutes</a>&nbsp;in India for Engineering&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nirfindia.org/2021/EngineeringRanking.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">according to NIRF</a>&nbsp;making it one of the most coveted schools for science and technology in the country.

IITH offers&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/academics/under-graduate/">undergraduate programs</a>&nbsp;in all the classical engineering disciplines, applied sciences, design, as well as several modern interdisciplinary areas. Students are given a flexibility to explore a broad set of areas, and potentially pursue a minor or double major in a discipline that is not their own. Students who wish to seek a deeper understanding of their own discipline are strongly encouraged to get involved in cutting-edge research with the help of a faculty to mentor them, and earn an Honors in their own field.

The very foundation of IIT Hyderabad is based on&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/research/">research and innovation</a>. The vibrant research culture is evident from the number of patents and publications that IITH produces consistently every year. IITH offers&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/academics/programmes-offered/">graduate programs</a>&nbsp;at both a masters, and a doctoral level, in several diverse areas. There are separate programs for technology, design, science, and liberal arts. The&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/academics/post-graduate/">MTech program</a>&nbsp;is offered in various modes and durations to cater to the ever-growing need of postgraduate level professionals in the country.

IITH encourages and supports&nbsp;<a href="https://iic-iith.netlify.app/index.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">innovation and entrepreneurship</a>&nbsp;at every stage. The minor program in entrepreneurship is open to all students of IITH, and many of the courses are offered by industrialists who are entrepreneurs themselves. There are various&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/research/centres-incubators/">innovation centers and incubators</a>&nbsp;that promote entrepreneurship and help mentor young innovators. IITH has been very successful in building tie-ups with leading academic institutions around the globe.

IITH enjoys a very special relationship with Japanese universities and industries that goes beyond academic and research collaborations. In fact, some of the iconic buildings in IITH campus will carry the signature of Japanese architecture.

IITH creates a unique holistic ecosystem for education that offers interactive learning, a very flexible academic structure, cutting-edge research, strong industry collaboration, and entrepreneurship. This is an environment which enables students and faculty to translate their dreams into realities.

IIT Hyderabad

Newlywed couples in Telangana perform various rituals to get blessed with children, which usually take place soon after marriage. In the absence of immediate conception, the couple is advised by the extended family to perform specific rituals to appease fertility gods. This article attempts to document fertility rituals in the Telangana region and the crucial ways in which they help men diagnosed with infertility. It will discuss in detail a commonly performed ritual called Balamma. In addition, the article highlights rituals performed to propitiate snakes, the significance of horoscopes, and consultations with local “healer-astrologer-medicine man/woman”. The article suggests that the efficacy of these rituals should not be seen in whether they result in procreation. Rather, the main objective of the rituals is to placate the extended patrilineal family and shift attention and blame from the couple to angry supernatural beings. The article establishes the crucial role played by these rituals in safeguarding men diagnosed with infertility, as they are more reluctant than women to discuss their diagnosis. © 2023 Oriental Institute of Cultural and Social Research and SAGE.

World University root node

Department of Liberal Arts

Oriental Anthropologist

Placating Kin: Rituals and Infertility

New employment demands of a burgeoning Indian software service industry are spawning neo-educational structures, especially in the domain of data sciences through vibrant market mechanisms offering a scalable and industry-focused learning system. Since the 1990s, Indian software firms have developed expertise in carrying out outsourced back-office tasks and mid-level IT services like data entry, managing call centres, and performing software quality testing for foreign companies taking advantage of a technically trained local workforce. The trend of automating manual work practices in the IT industry has generated a different kind of demand for data sciences directed at upskilling and job readiness. India is witnessing a market-oriented groundswell of data science and IT skill tutoring ‘shops’, resituating science and engineering education. In this chapter we report from ethnographic research conducted in two IT skill training parks to underpin arguments about emerging neo-educational learning structures suited to a data science education for new livelihood opportunities in an IT-accredited India. Our chapter makes a case for looking at ‘data studies’ from an ethnographic perspective uncovering a ‘program’ of upward mobility through IT skilling and employment. What directions might data studies about tutoring data science skills in the Indian context lead to? Excerpts presented here from field research imagine new livelihoods, aspirations, and technology skills that are more often than not a reflection of the power of data science education. © 2022, The Author(s).

Transforming Communication

The Power of Data Science Ontogeny: Thick Data Studies on the Indian IT Skill Tutoring Microcosm

Na_chni na_ch, a dance form of West Bengal, is going through a difficult time in its 500-year history. The woman dancer, who is known as a nachni, performs, often at night, along with her male partner, or rasik. Her life is intricately tied with that of her rasik, which includes her status as a woman performer at public events and the observance of proper rituals upon her death. Caught in a web of exploitation, the nachni essentially has no ‘kin’. Following the work by Inden and Nicholas on Bengali kinship and its categories and meanings within Bengali culture, this article looks at the amorphous pattern of kinship for the marginalized, with a special focus on the daily lives of nachnis. It explores the networks on the margins of kinship in which women performers of this crisis-ridden folk-art form survive. © 2020 SAGE Publications.

Indian Journal of Gender Studies

Ki sambandha hoibe takhon he?: Locating Nachnis in the Societal Margins of Kinship in Rural Bengal

Aim: This study aims to provide a medical anthropological perspective on how congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) is perceived and constructed by parents and doctors in India. It aims to put forth the complexities that are associated with CAH and the various experiences that parents and doctors share as a result, while also exploring the influences that culture and medicine have on each other. Methods: An ethnographic approach was taken to understand CAH in this study, in which families and doctors of children with CAH were interviewed. Fieldwork was done for 2 months in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Results: A major finding of this study was the faith that parents had on biomedicine in general and doctors in particular. While parents continued to follow the instructions provided by the doctors, they also exercised their agency by questioning the decisions taken by the doctors. The research also revealed that there is constant worry and fear in parents about the future of their children due to the stigma attached to CAH. Conclusion: A constant discourse between medicine and culture can be noticed while analyzing the complexities associated with CAH. The study tries to show that medical decisions that doctors take in matters concerning CAH are culturally driven. Surgical corrections done in order to categorize the child into one of the two sexes is an example for the same. Similarly, various structures of family, marriage, and kinship have been medicalized owing to the strong influence medicine and culture have on each other. © 2019 Indian Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism | Published by Wolters Kluwer - Medknow.

Indian Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism

Socio-cultural dimensions of congenital adrenal hyperplasia: An ethnographic study from Chennai, South India

A hundred years ago, pre-puberty marriage for girls was the norm among South Indian Tamil Brahmans, and Brahman girls received little or no education. By the 1940s, child marriage had largely ended and girls' education was improving gradually. Today, girls' educational standards more or less match that of boys', and many Brahman women are also employed outside the home. In relation to marriage and education in particular, the position of women has greatly improved, which is regarded by Tamil Brahmans themselves as a sign of their modern, educated, professional, middle-class status, whereas extreme gender inequality formerly indicated their traditional, high-caste status. This paper examines how female marriage, education, and employment are interrelated and how they have changed among Tamil Brahmans, particularly in the Eighteen-Village Vattima subcaste, which continued child marriage until the 1970s. Among Tamil Brahmans, as both women and men recognize, a real reduction in gender inequality has occurred. Moreover, Brahman men have more readily ceded status to Brahman women than Brahmans together have to non-Brahmans, so that there is a striking contrast today between persisting ideas of caste superiority and diminishing gender inequality. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012.

Fulltext

Modern Asian Studies

Marriage, education, and employment among Tamil Brahman Women in South India, 1891-2010

In an Outpost of the Global Economy: Work and Workers in India's Information Technology Industry

Empowerment and constraint: Women, work and the family in Chennai’s software industry

This article explores the continued relevance of menstrual pollution among the Vattima, a Tamil Brahmin sub-caste. Even as they are part of the Tamil Brahmin diaspora, the Vattima Brahmins, a small, close-knit community, are in active contact with ancestral villages in the Kaveri delta region. Based on data gathered from Vattima in India and in USA, this article looks at the discourse surrounding menstruation and seclusion practices across generations. It highlights the ways in which changes in Vattima marriage practices, women's access to education as well as migration to, and employment in, urban areas, have contributed to significant changes in attitudes to menstrual pollution. Observing menstrual pollution, however, is seen as crucial in sustaining notions of Brahmin-hood within their homes and among other Brahmins. This is made possible by constantly rede-fining the space and time that should be kept pollution-free.

Contributions to Indian Sociology

Adjusting distances: Menstrual pollution among tamil brahmins

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Reply to Mahalingam Narayanan

Since the nineteenth century, Tamil Brahmans have been very well represented in the educated professions, especially law and administration, medicine, engineering and nowadays, information technology. This is partly a continuation of the Brahmans' role as literate service people, owing to their traditions of education, learning and literacy, but the range of professions shows that any direct continuity is more apparent than real. Genealogical data are particularly used as evidence about changing patterns of employment, education and migration. Caste traditionalism was not a determining constraint, for Tamil Brahmans were predominant in medicine and engineering as well as law and administration in the colonial period, even though medicine is ritually polluting and engineering resembles low-status artisans' work. Crucially though, as modern, English-language, credential-based professions that are wellpaid and prestigious, law, medicine and engineering were and are all deemed eminently suitable for Tamil Brahmans, who typically regard their professional success as a sign of their caste superiority in the modern world. In reality, though, it is mainly a product of how their old social and cultural capital and their economic capital in land were transformed as they seized new educational and employment opportunities by flexibly deploying their traditional, inherited skills and advantages.

Indian Economic and Social History Review

Traditional vocations and modern professions among Tamil Brahmans in colonial and post-colonial south India

The Eighteen-Village Vattimas are a Tamil Brahman subcaste. They were formerly rural landlords, but today they mostly belong to the urban middle class. In recent decades, the Vattimas' marriage system has changed markedly. Child marriage has ended and the age of marriage has since risen further. Close-kin marriage is no longer preferred, although subcaste endogamy remains the norm. Nevertheless, the education and employment of individuals, and their personal compatibility, have now become crucial criteria, and young men and women are involved in arranging their own marriages. Among the Vattimas (like other Indians), a form of arranged, endogamous companionate marriage has now developed, which plays a fundamental role in reproducing both caste and the middle class in contemporary India. © 2008 Royal Anthropological Institute.

Companionate marriage in India: The changing marriage system in a middle-class Brahman subcaste

Comparative Studies in Society and History

From landlords to software engineers: Migration and urbanization among Tamil Brahmans

Since 1991, when the policy of economic liberalisation began in earnest, the size and prosperity of India's middle class have grown considerably. Yet sound sociological and ethnographic information about its social structure and cultural values is still sparse, and as André Béteille (2003a: 75) comments: 'Everything or nearly everything that is written about the Indian middle class is written by middle-class Indians... [who] tend to oscillate between self-recrimination and self-congratulation' (cf. Béteille 2003b: 185). The former is exemplified by Pavan Varma's The Great Indian Middle Class (1998), which excoriates this class for its selfish materialism and the 'retreat from idealism' that was manifest in the smaller, 'traditional middle class' of the earlier, post-independence period (ibid.: 89). A good example of the opposite tendency is Gurcharan Das's India Unbound (2002), which celebrates 'the rise of a confident new middle class' (ibid.: 280). Das's diagnosis of what has changed is actually very similar to Varma's, but he insists that the new middle class is no 'greedier' than the old one, and the 'chief difference is that there is less hypocrisy and more self-confidence' (ibid.: 290). © 2007 Cambridge University Press.