Download or read book Caste Protest and Identity in Colonial India written by Śekhara Bandyopādhyāẏa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 1997 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Movement by low-caste Hindu groups and their struggles for social and political recognition have been the subject of a number of academic studies in recent years - in anthropology and religious and political studies as well as history. The Namasudras of Bengal, however, represent a particularly interesting and important case, given their standing as the largest Hindu caste in eastern Bengal before Partition and their apparent lack of a single, shared identity before the late 19th century. Bandyopadhyay provides an intelligent and well-researched study of the Namasudras from their emergence as a census-defined community in 1872 to their disintegration with the Partition of 1947. The author makes very extensive use of Bengali tracts, pamphlets and newspapers as well as English materials (including official and archival materials). Bandyopadhyay gives an in-depth narrative and provides an analysis of the Namasudras that is both sensitive to their internal differentiation and their place in the wider political and social context of Bengal and India.
Download or read book Caste Conflict and Ideology written by Rosalind O'Hanlon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-08-22 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nineteenth century saw the beginning of a violent and controversial movement of protest amongst western India's low and untouchable castes, aimed at the effects of their lowly position within the Hindu caste hierarchy. This study concentrates on the first leader of this movement, Mahatma Jotirao Phule.
Download or read book Caste Protest And Identity In Colonial India written by Śekhara Bandyopādhyāẏa and published by . This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Identity and Identification in India written by Laura Dudley Jenkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can a state empower its citizens by classifying them? Or do reservation policies reinforce the very categories they are meant to eradicate? Indian reservation policies on government jobs, legislative seats and university admissions for disadvantaged groups, like affirmative action policies elsewhere, are based on the premise that recognizing group distinctions in society is necessary to subvert these distinctions. Yet the official identification of eligible groups has unintended side-effects on identity politics. Bridging theories which emphasize the fluidity of identities and those which highlight the utility of group-based mobilizations and policies, this book exposes didactic enforcement of categorizations, while recognizing the social and political gains facilitated by group-based strategies.
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 The Saint in the Banyan Tree written by David Mosse and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-10 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This is a powerful and exciting work. Mosse has produced a work of scholarship that is lively and readable without any loss of subtlety and sophistication. It is a ground-breaking study, of critical importance to the ways we understand religious nationalism and the anthropology of postcolonial experience.”—Susan Bayly, author of Asian Voices in a Postcolonial Age
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 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 Namasudra Movement written by Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Namasudra, an untouchable caste in West Bengal, India.
Download or read book Caste Culture and Hegemony written by Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2004-08-19 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is widely believed that, because of its exceptional social development, the caste system in colonial Bengal differed considerably from the rest of India. Through a study of the complex interplay between caste, culture and power, this book convincingly demonstrates that Bengali Hindu society preserved the essentials of caste discrimination in colonial times, even while giving the outward appearance of having changed. Using empirical data combined with an impressive array of secondary sources, Dr Bandyopadhyay delineates the manner in which Hindu caste society maintained its cultural hegemony and structural cohesion. This was primarily achieved by frustrating reformist endeavours, by co-opting the challenges of the dalit, and by marginalising dissidence. It was through such a process of constant negotiation in the realm of popular culture, argues the author, that this oppressive social structure and its hierarchical ideology and values have survived. Starting with an examination of the relationship between caste and power, the book examines early cultural encounters between `high' Brahmanical tradition and the more egalitarian `popular' religious cults of the lower castes. It moves on to take a close look at the relationship between caste and gender showing the reasons why the reform movement for widow remarriage failed. It ends with an examination of the Hindu `partition' campaign, which appropriated dalit autonomous politics and made Hinduism the foundation of an emergent Indian national identity. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay breaks with many of the assumptions of two important schools of thought - the Dumontian and the subaltern - and takes instead a more nuanced approach to show how high caste hegemony has been able to perpetuate itself. He thus takes up issues which go to the heart of contemporary problems in India's social and political fabric. This important and original contribution will be widely welcomed by historians, sociologists and political scientists.
Download or read book Colonial Lists Indian Power written by Michael Katten and published by Gutenberg. This book was released on 2005-01 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relying on rarely used sources in English and Telugu, Michael Katten explores in detail at the local level, the distinctive forms of identity and the ways they emerged as the indigenous peoples interacted with colonial leaders in southern India.
Download or read book Cultural Constellations Place Making and Ethnicity in Eastern India c 1850 1927 written by Swarupa Gupta and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Cultural Constellations, Place-Making and Ethnicity in Eastern India, c. 1850-1927, Swarupa Gupta outlines a fresh paradigm moving beyond stereotypical representations of eastern India as a site of ethnic fragmentation. The book traces unities by exploring intersections between (1) cultural constellations; (2) place-making and (3) ethnicity. Centralising place-making, it tells the story of how people made places, mediating caste / religious / linguistic contestations. It offers new meanings of ‘region’ in Eastern Indian and global contexts by showing how an interregional arena comprising Bengal, Assam and Orissa was forged. Using historical tracts, novels, poetry and travelogues, the book argues that commonalities in Eastern India were linked to imaginings of Indian nationhood. The analysis contains interpretive strategies for mediating federalist separatisms and fragmentation in contemporary India.
Download or read book Protest Upliftment and Identity written by Bipul Mandal and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-23 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The period from 1872-1947 witnessed the rise of many movements in Bengal, where those who were considered lower castes were mobilised to protest against the inequality and injustice meted out to them in various fields, including religion, politics and education. The focus of their struggle was the social injustice within the Hindu caste hierarchy. Unlike in south and western India where caste movements were often associated with anti-Brahmanical movements, in Bengal it was upgradation of caste from Sudra to Kshatriya varna. The main focus of the study is the Kshatriyaization movement of Rajbansis, the Matua movement of Namasudras, and the colonial policy of ‘Protective Discrimination’ and its impact. It studies the attempt by Rajbansi community to establish themselves as Kshatriyas in the first half of the twentieth century, though the movement started in the late nineteenth century itself. It also includes their struggle against the Brahmanical dominance and the elites of their own community. Alongside the Kshatriyaization movement, a parallel movement for the social uplift started among the Namasudra community, which later spread to northern Bengal. Their struggle actually began from the time of the first Census in 1872, when the census authorities classified the Namasudras as Chandals in the census report. The Namasudra protest movement, hereafter, developed through a different channel provided by a Vaishnava religious sect named Matua, started under a Namasudra leader Harichand Thakur. This book is essential for those wishing to understand the socio-religious movement of the Namasudra and the Rajbansi communities in their historical context. Print edition not for sale in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
Download or read book Indian Secularism written by Shabnum Tejani and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of the central issues in modern Indian politics have long been understood in terms of an opposition between ideologies of secularism and communalism. Observers have argued that recent Hindu nationalism is the symptom of a crisis of Indian secularism and have blamed this on a resurgence of religion or communalism. Shabnum Tejani unpacks prevailing assumptions about the meaning of secularism in contemporary politics, focusing on India but with many points of comparison elsewhere in the world. She questions the simple dichotomy between secularism and communalism that has been used in scholarly study and political discourse. Tracing the social, political, and intellectual genealogies of the concepts of secularism and communalism from the late nineteenth century until the ratification of the Indian constitution in 1950, she shows how secularism came to be bound up with ideas about nationalism and national identity.
Download or read book Contentious Traditions written by Lata Mani and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contentious Traditions analyzes the debate on sati, or widow burning, in colonial India. Though the prohibition of widow burning in 1829 was heralded as a key step forward for women's emancipation in modern India, Lata Mani argues that the women who were burned were marginal to the debate and that the controversy was over definitions of Hindu tradition, the place of ritual in religious worship, the civilizing missions of colonialism and evangelism, and the proper role of the colonial state. Mani radically revises colonialist as well as nationalist historiography on the social reform of women's status in the colonial period and clarifies the complex and contradictory character of missionary writings on India. The history of widow burning is one of paradox. While the chief players in the debate argued over the religious basis of sati and the fine points of scriptural interpretation, the testimonials of women at the funeral pyres consistently addressed the material hardships and societal expectations attached to widowhood. And although historiography has traditionally emphasized the colonial horror of sati, a fascinated ambivalence toward the practice suffused official discussions. The debate normalized the violence of sati and supported the misconception that it was a voluntary act of wifely devotion. Mani brilliantly illustrates how situated feminism and discourse analysis compel a rewriting of history, thus destabilizing the ways we are accustomed to look at women and men, at "tradition," custom, and modernity.
Download or read book Textual Lives of Caste Across the Ages written by Prathama Banerjee and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-10-17 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume explore the myriad ways in which caste (varna and jati) has been theorized and critiqued in multiple philosophical, religious, logical and narrative traditions in India. Spanning ancient, medieval and modern times, and in diverse classical and vernacular languages, the chapters show how the social fact of caste, and imaginations of kinship, community and humanity were historically subject to epistemological, spiritual, and existential debate in both elite and popular circles in India. Textual Lives of Caste Across the Ages seeks to bridge the interdisciplinary gap between historians and sociologists by focusing on texts that help us think across the sociological and philosophical, the political and the religious, the epistemological and the aesthetic, and indeed, the elite and the popular. The volume also sets up a conversation between scholars specializing in different regions, archives, and historical periods and demonstrates how caste imaginaries have been deeply diverse and contested in India's past. Reconstructing these diverse traditions of social and existential criticism helps us in our contemporary struggles against caste hierarchy and untouchability and enriches our contemporary critical repertoire.
Download or read book Screening Culture Viewing Politics written by Purnima Mankekar and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ethnography of urban women television viewers in India, and their reception of particular shows, especially in relation to issues of gender and nation.
