Download or read book Religion Caste and Politics in India written by Christophe Jaffrelot and published by Primus Books. This book was released on 2010 with total page 835 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following independence, the Nehruvian approach to socialism in India rested on three pillars: secularism and democracy in the political domain, state intervention in the economy, and diplomatic non-alignment mitigated by pro-Soviet leanings after the 1960s. These features defined a distinct "Indian model," if not the country's political identity. From this starting point, Christophe Jaffrelot traces the transformation of India throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly the 1980s and 90s. The world's largest democracy has sustained itself by embracing not only the vernacular politicians of linguistic states, but also Dalits and "Other Backward Classes," or OBCs. The simultaneous--and related--rise of Hindu nationalism has put minorities--and secularism--on the defensive. In many ways the rule of law has been placed on trial as well. The liberalization of the economy has resulted in growth, yet not necessarily development, and India has acquired a new global status, becoming an emerging power intent on political and economic partnerships with Asia and the West. The traditional Nehruvian system is giving way to a less cohesive though more active India, a country that has become what it is against all odds. Jaffrelot maps this tumultuous journey, exploring the role of religion, caste, and politics in determining the fabric of a modern democratic state.
Download or read book Caste Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age written by Susan Bayly and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-02-22 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phenomenon of caste has probably aroused more controversy than any other aspect of Indian life and thought. Susan Bayly's cogent and sophisticated analysis explores the emergence of the ideas, experiences and practices which gave rise to the so-called 'caste society' from the pre-colonial period to the end of the twentieth century. Using an historical and anthropological approach, she frames her analysis within the context of India's dynamic economic and social order, interpreting caste not as an essence of Indian culture and civilization, but rather as a contingent and variable response to the changes that occurred in the subcontinent's political landscape through the colonial conquest. The idea of caste in relation to Western and Indian 'orientalist' thought is also explored.
Download or read book Caste in Indian Politics written by Rajni Kothari and published by Orient Blackswan. This book was released on 1995 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Book That Studies The Confrontation Between India S Caste System And The Parliamentary Form Of Government In Varying Contexts And Through Different Methods Of Investigation.
Download or read book Caste Panchayats and Caste Politics in India written by Anagha Ingole and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-17 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book refutes the dominant understanding about caste panchayats as mere dispute resolution bodies that are vestiges of the past. In tracing the long career and evolution of intra-caste governance from 300 BC to the present, it challenges several orthodoxies in the caste scholarship. Most prominently, it questions the assumptions of modernization theory that became internalized in the very definition of caste-based political organisations as caste became a subject of study in politics in the 1960s and 70s. In doing this, the book reflects in some detail on the uncomfortable question of the persistence of caste-based conservatism despite the current dominance, so to say, of caste-based democratization in the Indian polity. It tries to make visible the limitations of ‘caste politics from below’, as it is being imagined today, making a plea for a radical re-imagination of caste as an identity that does not require a self-perpetuation of the primordial aspects of caste to purse the opportunities offered by modern democracy, but one that can facilitate the empowerment of caste through the pursuit of the ameliorations on offer as well as the annihilation of caste, as eventually mutual goals.
Download or read book Caste and Democratic Politics in India written by Ghanshyam Shah and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Indian constitution seeks to prevent the perpetuation of caste and build a casteless social system. But in over half a century since Indian independence, this has not been achieved and does not seem likely in the near future. Therefore, no understanding of Indian politics is possible without a thorough understanding of the complexities of the caste system. The aim of this four-part book is to bring about such an understanding. It begins by examining the various meanings attached to the notion of caste. The essay and book extracts in this first section include classic writings on caste such as those by G S Ghurye, Louis Dumont, Mahatma Gandhi and B R Ambedkar. The second part consists of essays that demonstrate the relationship between caste and power. The third part comprises material that investigates caste and various Indian political practices on the ground. The fourth, on caste and social transformation, includes discussion on one of the most salient topics in contemporary Indian politics, namely, the issue of reservations for socially backward castes.
Download or read book The Caste Question written by Anupama Rao and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative work of historical anthropology explores how India's Dalits, or ex-untouchables, transformed themselves from stigmatized subjects into citizens. Anupama Rao's account challenges standard thinking on caste as either a vestige of precolonial society or an artifact of colonial governance. Focusing on western India in the colonial and postcolonial periods, she shines a light on South Asian historiography and on ongoing caste discrimination, to show how persons without rights came to possess them and how Dalit struggles led to the transformation of such terms of colonial liberalism as rights, equality, and personhood. Extending into the present, the ethnographic analyses of The Caste Question reveal the dynamics of an Indian democracy distinguished not by overcoming caste, but by new forms of violence and new means of regulating caste.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture written by Vasudha Dalmia and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-05 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging and truly interdisciplinary guide to understanding the relationship between India's colonial past and globalized present.
Download or read book Caste in Indian Politics written by Rajni Kothari and published by Asia Book Corporation of America. This book was released on 1970 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book From Hierarchy to Ethnicity written by Alexander Lee and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-27 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Hierarchy to Ethnicity discusses the origins of politicized caste identities in twentieth-century India, and how they evolved over time.
Download or read book Democracy against Development written by Jeffrey Witsoe and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hidden behind the much-touted success story of India’s emergence as an economic superpower is another, far more complex narrative of the nation’s recent history, one in which economic development is frequently countered by profoundly unsettling, and often violent, political movements. In Democracy against Development, Jeffrey Witsoe investigates this counter-narrative, uncovering an antagonistic relationship between recent democratic mobilization and development-oriented governance in India. Witsoe looks at the history of colonialism in India and its role in both shaping modern caste identities and linking locally powerful caste groups to state institutions, which has effectively created a postcolonial patronage state. He then looks at the rise of lower-caste politics in one of India’s poorest and most populous states, Bihar, showing how this increase in democratic participation has radically threatened the patronage state by systematically weakening its institutions and disrupting its development projects. By depicting democracy and development as they truly are in India—in tension—Witsoe reveals crucial new empirical and theoretical insights about the long-term trajectory of democratization in the larger postcolonial world.
Download or read book Caste State and Society written by Jagpal Singh and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2020-10-07 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the politics of social, cultural and political recognition of caste groups in North India. It explores the factors that make some castes politically influential, while others continue to remain socially and economically marginalized. The author situates these groups within democracy and utilizes a multicultural framework to understand why and when various castes have sought to achieve recognition and redistributive justice; to what extent different castes have been able to achieve these goals; and how civil society has engaged with these issues. Unlike dominant discourses on caste and democracy, which give primacy to electoral/procedural democracy over the substantive one, this book views the relationship between castes and the state in both dimensions of democracy. An important addition to the study of caste politics in India, the volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of social exclusion, development studies, minority studies, sociology and social policy, politics, and South Asian studies. It will also be of importance to politicians, policy makers, and civil society activists.
Download or read book Castes of Mind written by Nicholas B. Dirks and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-09 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization. Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.
Download or read book The Politics of Caste in West Bengal written by Uday Chandra and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-09-25 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers for the first time a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the making and maintenance of a modern caste society in colonial and postcolonial West Bengal in India. Drawing on cutting-edge multidisciplinary scholarship, it explains why caste continues to be neglected in the politics of and scholarship on West Bengal, and how caste relations have permeated the politics of the region until today. The essays presented here dispel the myth that caste does not matter in Bengali society and politics, and make possible meaningful comparisons and contrasts with other regions in South Asia. The work will interest scholars and researchers in sociology, social anthropology, politics, modern Indian history and cultural studies.
Download or read book The Caste of Merit written by Ajantha Subramanian and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the language of “merit” makes caste privilege invisible in contemporary India. Just as Americans least disadvantaged by racism are most likely to endorse their country as post‐racial, Indians who have benefited from their upper-caste affiliation rush to declare their country post‐caste. In The Caste of Merit, Ajantha Subramanian challenges this comfortable assumption by illuminating the controversial relationships among technical education, caste formation, and economic stratification in modern India. Through in-depth study of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs)—widely seen as symbols of national promise—she reveals the continued workings of upper-caste privilege within the most modern institutions. Caste has not disappeared in India but instead acquired a disturbing invisibility—at least when it comes to the privileged. Only the lower castes invoke their affiliation in the political arena, to claim resources from the state. The upper castes discard such claims as backward, embarrassing, and unfair to those who have earned their position through hard work and talent. Focusing on a long history of debates surrounding access to engineering education, Subramanian argues that such defenses of merit are themselves expressions of caste privilege. The case of the IITs shows how this ideal of meritocracy serves the reproduction of inequality, ensuring that social stratification remains endemic to contemporary democracies.
Download or read book Caste Politics and the Raj written by Śekhara Bandyopādhyāẏa and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores The Attitude Of Certain Lower Casts To Nationalist Movement In Bengal. It Shows That Their Aspirations Were Not Accommodated Within The Mainstream Of Nationalist Politics And This Led Ito Emphasize On Caste Which In Turn Delayed Their Integration Into The Nation. Has 4 Chapters Followed By Conclusion, Appendix And A Bibliography.
Download or read book Caste in Contemporary India written by SurinderS. Jodhka and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caste is a contested terrain in India's society and polity. This book explores contemporary realities of caste in rural and urban India. Presenting rich empirical findings across north India, it presents an original perspective on the reasons for the persistence of caste in India today.
Download or read book Dalit Women written by S. Anandhi and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-05-18 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Notes on contributors -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: We ask you to rethink: Different Dalit women and their subaltern politics -- Part I Imagining a new Dalit women's politics -- 1 Foreword: Dalits, Dalit women and the Indian State -- 2 For another difference: Agency, representation and Dalit women in contemporary India -- Part II Dalit women's conceptualizations of caste difference and their means of collectivization -- 3 Gendered negotiations of caste identity: Dalit women's activism in rural Tamil Nadu -- 4 Liberation panthers and pantheresses? Gender and Dalit party politics in South India -- 5 Microcredit self-help groups and Dalit women: Overcoming or essentializing caste difference? -- Part III A broken empowerment? Are women still trapped by caste and patriarchy? -- 6 Dalit women, rape and the revitalisation of patriarchy? -- 7 Different Dalit women speak differently: Unravelling, through an intersectional lens, narratives of agency and activism from everyday life in rural Uttar Pradesh -- 8 Subsidising capitalism and male labour: The scandal of unfree Dalit female labour relations -- Part IV Religion as Dalit political practice -- 9 Transformation and the suffering subject: Caste-class and gender in slum Pentecostal discourse -- 10 Improper politics: The praxis of subalterns in Chennai -- Afterword: The burden of caste: Scholarship, democratic movements and activism
