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 The Republic of India written by Alan Gledhill and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Caste written by Isabel Wilkerson and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2023-02-14 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions—now with a new Afterword by the author. #1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, O: The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, New York Post, The New York Public Library, Fortune, Smithsonian Magazine, Marie Claire, Slate, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews Winner of the Carl Sandberg Literary Award • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • National Book Award Longlist • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist • PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist • PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Longlist • Kirkus Prize Finalist “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.” In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully written narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their outcasting of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity. Original and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.
Download or read book Indian Caste System written by R.K. Pruthi and published by Discovery Publishing House. This book was released on 2004 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contents: Introduction, The Caste System, India s Social Customs and Systems, The Changing Concept of Caste in India: History and Review, Society: Class, Family and Individual, Division of Castes, Expulsion from Caste, Caste System: A Case of South India, Caste System in India, Various Rules: Religion and Caste, Organisation and Jurisdiction, Disintegration and Multiplication of Caste, Caste and Structure of Society, Our Social Heritage.
Download or read book The Pariah Problem written by Rupa Viswanath and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-08 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once known as "Pariahs," Dalits are primarily descendants of unfree agrarian laborers. They belong to India's most subordinated castes, face overwhelming poverty and discrimination, and provoke public anxiety. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped sources, this book follows the conception and evolution of the "Pariah Problem" in public consciousness in the 1890s. It shows how high-caste landlords, state officials, and well-intentioned missionaries conceived of Dalit oppression, and effectively foreclosed the emergence of substantive solutions to the "Problem"—with consequences that continue to be felt today. Rupa Viswanath begins with a description of the everyday lives of Dalit laborers in the 1890s and highlights the systematic efforts made by the state and Indian elites to protect Indian slavery from public scrutiny. Protestant missionaries were the first non-Dalits to draw attention to their plight. The missionaries' vision of the Pariahs' suffering as being a result of Hindu religious prejudice, however, obscured the fact that the entire agrarian political–economic system depended on unfree Pariah labor. Both the Indian public and colonial officials came to share a view compatible with missionary explanations, which meant all subsequent welfare efforts directed at Dalits focused on religious and social transformation rather than on structural reform. Methodologically, theoretically, and empirically, this book breaks new ground to demonstrate how events in the early decades of state-sponsored welfare directed at Dalits laid the groundwork for the present day, where the postcolonial state and well-meaning social and religious reformers continue to downplay Dalits' landlessness, violent suppression, and political subordination.
Download or read book The Culturalization of Caste in India written by Balmurli Natrajan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-07-20 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In India, caste groups ensure their durability in an era of multiculturalism by officially representing caste as cultural difference or ethnicity rather than as unequal descent-based relations. Challenging dominant social theories of caste, this book addresses questions of how caste survives the system that gave rise to it and adapts to new demands of capitalism and democracy. Based on original fieldwork, the book shows how the terrain of culture captured by a new grammar of caste revitalizes castes as cultural communities so that the culture of a caste is produced, organized and naturalized in the process of transforming jati (fetishized blood and kinship) into samaj (fetishized culture). Castes are shown to not be homogenous cultural wholes but sites of hegemony where class, gender and hierarchy over-determine the meanings and materiality of caste. Arguing that there exists a new casteism in India akin to a new racism in the USA, built less on biology and descent and more on purported cultural differences and their rights to exist, the book presents an extended critique and a search for an alternative view of caste and anti-casteist politics. It is of interest to students and scholars of South Asian culture and society.
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 The Caste System of Northern India written by Sir Edward Blunt and published by Gyan Publishing House. This book was released on 2010 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With special reference to Uttar Pradesh, India.
Download or read book Caste in India written by Diane P. Mines and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A clear and compelling introduction to one of the world's most complex and misunderstood social systems. This volume offers an exhaustive overview of the anthropology and history of caste based on extensive reading and over two decades of ethnographic research in rural South India. It also speaks to the wider political and economic dimensions of caste as it is lived and debated in India today. Caste in India will be a most welcome addition to introductory courses in anthropology, history, sociology, geography, and political science.
Download or read book India s Caste System From Ancient to Modern written by Nadiia Kudriashova and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject Sociology - Individual, Groups, Society, grade: MA, Oregon State University, language: English, abstract: This paper analyses India's caste system from Ancient to modern. During the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, many countries of the East developed along the path of modernization of social, political, and socio-economic life. In some states, this process was interrupted by social explosions, which led to a rollback to the past. Others appeared capable of finding a viable balance between traditional and modern values. In both cases, specific political systems emerged, which are characterized by the coexistence of Western democratic principles and traditional social institutions. Thus, in India, on the one hand, the involvement of the caste in political life led to some transformation of this ancient social structure and retained its position in modern society; on the other, it created such a phenomenon as "democracy of the castes". Castes/jati are formed on the basis of a related self-organization; they have a different origin, but most of them go back to archaic tribes and tribal fragments; they are characterized by endogamy, hereditary profession, originality of culture. Ideological substantiations of the caste mode of communication are directly related to the fundamental concepts of Hinduism, dharma, karma, and sansara, which describe Indian ideas about the laws of the existence of the Universe and nature. Modern Indian society is distinguished by its phenomenal mosaic composition. Numerous and diverse linguistic, ethnic, confessional, caste groups not only coexist, but they are intertwined in the fabric of a social organism. Indians' identity is usually vague; its different variants come to the fore in different contexts; they overlap and complement each other. Entire communities do not have an unambiguous scientific nomination.
Download or read book Castes In India written by B. R. Ambedkar and published by . This book was released on 2023-08-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Castes in India" by B.R. Ambedkar is an incisive and seminal work that examines one of the most enduring social institutions in Indian society-caste. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the caste system, its historical origins, and its profound impact on Indian society. Ambedkar delves into the complex structure of caste, dissecting its divisions, hierarchies, and oppressive practices that have shaped the lives of millions for centuries. He presents a comprehensive critique of the caste system and offers a vision for its eradication and emancipation. He passionately argues for social justice, equality, and the importance of individual rights, challenging the entrenched notions of superiority and discrimination perpetuated by the caste system. Ambedkar's groundbreaking work remains a cornerstone in the discourse on caste and social reform in India, and his profound insights and unwavering commitment to social reform make this book an essential read for anyone seeking to understand the complexities of caste and its impact on Indian society.
Download or read book Caste System in India written by Ekta Singh and published by Gyan Publishing House. This book was released on 2005 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1. Caste System: Early Stages 2. Caste Determines Social Positions 3. Evolution of Castes 4. Castes in India-Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development 5. Annihilation of Caste 6. The Social Reforms 7. Caste System in Modern India 8. Conclusion Bibliography Index
Download or read book Who Were the Shudras written by B. R. Ambedkar and published by . This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The general proposition that the social organization of the Indo-Aryans was based on the theory of Chaturvarnya and that Chaturvarnya means division of society into four classes-Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (soldiers), Vaishyas (traders) and Shudras (menials) does not convey any idea of the real nature of the problem of the Shudras nor of its magnitude. Chaturvarnya would have been a very innocent principle if it meant no more than mere division of society into four classes. Unfortunately, more than this is involved in the theory of Chaturvarnya. Besides dividing society into four orders, the theory goes further and makes the principle of graded inequality. Under the system of Chaturvarnya, the Shudra is not only placed at the bottom of the gradation but he is subjected to innumerable ignominies and disabilities so as to prevent him from rising above the condition fixed for him by law. Indeed until the fifth Varna of the Untouchables came into being, the Shudras were in the eyes of the Hindus the lowest of the low. This shows the nature of what might be called the problem of the Shudras. If people have no idea of the magnitude of the problem it is because they have not cared to know what the population of the Shudras is.
Download or read book Indian Caste Customs written by L. S. S. O'Malley and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-31 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1932, Indian Caste Customs is an explication on how caste system operates in everyday life. What are its injunctions and prohibitions? What actions constitute offences against its moral law and social honour? What are the means by which breaches of that code are adjudicated? What are the penalties inflicted on offenders? The book attempts to answer these questions as well as discuss the merits and demerits of the caste system in India. This book will be of interest to students of history, sociology, anthropology and South Asian studies.
Download or read book Broken People written by Smita Narula and published by Human Rights Watch. This book was released on 1999 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women and the Law.
Download or read book Caste in India written by John Henry Hutton and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
