Download or read book Religious Festivals and Caste System in India During 19th Century written by John Campbell Oman and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 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 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 Inglorious Empire written by Shashi Tharoor and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2018-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inglorious Empire' tells the real story of the British in India from the arrival of the East India Company to the end of the Raj, revealing how Britain's rise was built upon its plunder of India. In the eighteenth century, India's share of the world economy was as large as Europe's. By 1947, after two centuries of British rule, it had decreased six-fold. Beyond conquest and deception, the Empire blew rebels from cannon, massacred unarmed protesters, entrenched institutionalised racism, and caused millions to die from starvation. British imperialism justified itself as enlightened despotism for the benefit of the governed, but Shashi Tharoor takes on and demolishes this position, demonstrating how every supposed imperial "gift" - from the railways to the rule of law -was designed in Britain's interests alone. He goes on to show how Britain's Industrial Revolution was founded on India's deindustrialisation, and the destruction of its textile industry.
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 Eight Faces of Revenge written by Vibha S. Chauhan and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-11-26 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is revenge an expression of rage, pain, strength, frailty, justice, or sadism? A complex emotion, revenge defies simple definitions since it is infused with different social codes and ethics. It is this intricate connection between the idea of revenge and its connections with history, aesthetics, socio-political constructs, racism, and religion that this volume attempts to explore. Moving across continents and cultures, the book examine a wide range of emotional and geographical terrains like the law of karma, gender violence, epic narratives, caste system, and cinema in India; the horror of the Holocaust and metaphysical revenge; witchcraft in Ghana, South Africa, and Namibia; Greek mythology; and sexual and emotional abuse of women by a Portuguese Brazilian slave holder.
Download or read book Annihilation of Caste written by B.R. Ambedkar and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “What the Communist Manifesto is to the capitalist world, Annihilation of Caste is to India.” —Anand Teltumbde, author of The Persistence of Caste The classic work of Indian Dalit politics, reframed with an extensive introduction by Arundathi Roy B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste is one of the most important, yet neglected, works of political writing from India. Written in 1936, it is an audacious denunciation of Hinduism and its caste system. Ambedkar – a figure like W.E.B. Du Bois – offers a scholarly critique of Hindu scriptures, scriptures that sanction a rigidly hierarchical and iniquitous social system. The world’s best-known Hindu, Mahatma Gandhi, responded publicly to the provocation. The hatchet was never buried. Arundhati Roy introduces this extensively annotated edition of Annihilation of Caste in “The Doctor and the Saint,” examining the persistence of caste in modern India, and how the conflict between Ambedkar and Gandhi continues to resonate. Roy takes us to the beginning of Gandhi’s political career in South Africa, where his views on race, caste and imperialism were shaped. She tracks Ambedkar’s emergence as a major political figure in the national movement, and shows how his scholarship and intelligence illuminated a political struggle beset by sectarianism and obscurantism. Roy breathes new life into Ambedkar’s anti-caste utopia, and says that without a Dalit revolution, India will continue to be hobbled by systemic inequality.
Download or read book Religion and Societies written by Carlo Caldarola and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 697 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The series Religion and Society (RS) contributes to the exploration of religions as social systems – both in Western and non-Western societies; in particular, it examines religions in their differentiation from, and intersection with, other cultural systems, such as art, economy, law and politics. Due attention is given to paradigmatic case or comparative studies that exhibit a clear theoretical orientation with the empirical and historical data of religion and such aspects of religion as ritual, the religious imagination, constructions of tradition, iconography, or media. In addition, the formation of religious communities, their construction of identity, and their relation to society and the wider public are key issues of this series.
Download or read book Religion Science and Empire written by Peter Gottschalk and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Gottschalk offers a compelling study of how, through the British implementation of scientific taxonomy in the subcontinent, Britons and Indians identified an inherent divide between mutually antagonistic religious communities. England's ascent to power coincided with the rise of empirical science as an authoritative way of knowing not only the natural world, but the human one as well. The British scientific passion for classification, combined with the Christian impulse to differentiate people according to religion, led to a designation of Indians as either Hindu or Muslim according to rigidly defined criteria that paralleled classification in botanical and zoological taxonomies. Through an historical and ethnographic study of the north Indian village of Chainpur, Gottschalk shows that the Britons' presumed categories did not necessarily reflect the Indians' concepts of their own identities, though many Indians came to embrace this scientism and gradually accepted the categories the British instituted through projects like the Census of India, the Archaeological Survey of India, and the India Museum. Today's propogators of Hindu-Muslim violence often cite scientistic formulations of difference that descend directly from the categories introduced by imperial Britain. Religion, Science, and Empire will be a valuable resource to anyone interested in the colonial and postcolonial history of religion in India.
Download or read book South Asians in the Diaspora written by Knut A. Jacobsen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-08-14 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume deals with a phenomenon of increasing global significance, the South Asian diaspora. In particular it deals with the role of religion. The diversity of religious life in South Asia is remarkable and much of this diversity is replicated in the diaspora communities around the world. The case studies in this book explore and analyse the social, religious and cultural reality of people in the diaspora belonging to Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism and Zoroastrianism and originating from four of the South Asian nation states (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka). The book highlights the religious diversity that exists in the diaspora communities both across the traditions and within the particular religions.
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 Religion and the City in India written by Supriya Chaudhuri and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-19 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers fresh theoretical, methodological and empirical analyses of the relation between religion and the city in the South Asian context. Uniting the historical with the contemporary by looking at the medieval and early modern links between religious faith and urban settlement, the book brings together a series of focused studies of the mixed and multiple practices and spatial negotiations of religion in the South Asian city. It looks at the various ways in which contemporary religious practice affects urban everyday life, commerce, craft, infrastructure, cultural forms, art, music and architecture. Chapters draw upon original empirical study and research to analyze the foundational, structural, material and cultural connections between religious practice and urban formations or flows. The book argues that Indian cities are not ‘postsecular’ in the sense that the term is currently used in the modern West, but that there has been, rather, a deep, even foundational link between religion and urbanism, producing different versions of urban modernity. Questions of caste, gender, community, intersectional entanglements, physical proximity, private or public ritual, processions and prayer, economic and political factors, material objects, and changes in the built environment, are all taken into consideration, and the book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of different historical periods, different cities, and different types of religious practice. Filling a gap in the literature by discussing a diversity of settings and faiths, the book will be of interest to scholars to South Asian history, sociology, literary analysis, urban studies and cultural studies.
Download or read book Sociology of Religion in India written by Rowena Robinson and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2004-02-20 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focused on the theme of the sociology of religion, this volume brings together essays by well-known scholars which examine the resurgence of religious identities in the Indian context. The contributors question many received notions, address critical problems, and raise important issues surrounding various current debates./-//-/The papers are divided into four sections. The first deals with religion, society and national identity. The next section is devoted to sects, cults, shrines and the making of traditions. The third section discusses religious conversion, while the last section provides a comparative perspective drawn from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States. /-//-/Tackling a subject of immense contemporary importance and demonstrating a sensitivity to the shifts and changes brought about in faith, identity and tradition, this volume will be of considerable interest to students of sociology, anthropology, religion, politics and history./-//-/This book is one of the Indian Sociological Society: Golden Jubilee Volumes.
Download or read book The High caste Hindu Woman written by Ramabai Sarasvati and published by . This book was released on 1887 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dalit Millionaires written by Milind Khandekar and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-12-15 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dalit Millionaires is a collection of profiles of fifteen Dalit entrepreneurs who have braved both societal and business pressures to carve out highly profitable niches for themselves. The book is a vivid chronicle of how the battle has moved from the village well to the marketplace. There are tales describing how the multimillionaire Ashok Khade, at one time, did not have even four annas to replace the nib of a broken pen, how Kalpana Saroj, a child bride, worked her way to becoming a property magnate, and how Sanjay Kshirsagar moved on from a 120-foot tenement and now seems well on his way to become the emperor of a 500-crorerupee firm. The only common thread through these stories is the spirit that if you can imagine it, you can do it.
