Rowdy

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Notes

1. In North India, the term goonda is more prevalent than ‘rowdy’. However, in both vernacular speech and in official reports, these words remain interchangeable.

2. In rare instances, the qualifiers ‘female rowdy-sheeter’ or ‘lady rowdy-sheeter’ are used in news reports.

3. For a provocative discussion of the politics of the ‘rowdy’ figure, see Vivek Dhareshwar and R. Srivatsan, ‘“Rowdy-Sheeters”: An Essay on Subalternity and Politics’, in Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty (eds), Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 201–31. For an analysis of the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, see Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Anand Yang, ‘Caste and Tribes: The Criminal Tribes Act and the Magahiya Doms of Northeast India’, in Anand A. Yang (ed.), Crime and Criminality in British India (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), pp. 128–39. A discussion of the Goonda Act of 1923 can be found in Sugata Nandi, ‘Constructing the Criminal: Politics of Social Imaginary of the “Goonda”’, in Social Scientist, Vol. 38, no. 3/4 (2010), pp. 37–54.

4. The Times of India (21 June 2016).

5. Kannada Prabha (7 May 2016).

6. For an imaginative analysis of the relationship between Bengaluru's tabloids and the city's political, gendered and linguistic practices, see Tejaswini Niranjana, ‘Reworking Masculinities’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 35, no. 47 (2000), pp. 4147–50.