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 Decline of the Caste Question written by Dwaipayan Sen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This revisionist history of caste politics in twentieth-century Bengal argues that the decline of caste-based politics in the region was as much the result of coercion as of consent. It traces this process through the political career of Jogendranath Mandal, the leader of the Dalit movement in eastern India and a prominent figure in the history of India and Pakistan, over the transition of Partition and Independence. Utilising Mandal's private papers, this study reveals both the strength and achievements of his movement for Dalit recognition, as well as the major challenges and constraints he encountered. Departing from analyses that have stressed the role of integration, Dwaipayan Sen demonstrates how a wide range of coercions shaped the eventual defeat of Dalit politics in Bengal. The region's acclaimed 'castelessness' was born of the historical refusal of Mandal's struggle to pose the caste question.
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 Caste Question written by Anupama Rao and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A powerful book on caste, a subject that has dramatic importance not only for the history of democracy in modern India, but for the general discussion on the interferences of social inequalities and cultural exclusions. The Caste Question goes beyond the usual antitheses of localism and globalism, and illustrates a decisive notion of intensive universality."—Etienne Balibar "A sustained and probing analysis of the modern history of caste in Western India, connecting issues of gender, personhood, property, and politics to facts of oppression and inequality. This is the most politically and theoretically engaged book on caste to have come out in a long time."—Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of Habitations of Modernity "A profound reflection, at once historically rich and theoretically nuanced, on the nature of political modernity itself."—John Comaroff, co-author (with Jean Comaroff) of Of Revelation and Revolution "Rao is entirely convincing in this brilliant and audacious re-evaluation of political modernity in India through the perspective of anti-caste struggles."—Mrinalini Sinha, author of Specters of Mother India: The Global Re-Structuring of an Empire
Download or read book The Caste Question written by Anupama Rao and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Shared Devotion Shared Food written by Jon Keune and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-22 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Hindu devotional or bhakti traditions welcomed marginalized people-women, low castes, and Dalits-were they promoting social equality? In this book, Jon Keune deftly examines the root of this deceptively simple question. The modern formulation of the bhakti-caste question is what Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar had in mind when he concluded that the saints promoted spiritual equality but did not transform society. While taking Ambedkar's judgment seriously, Jon Keune argues that, when viewed in the context of intellectual history and social practice, the bhakti-caste question is more complex. Shared Devotion, Shared Food explores how people in western India wrestled for centuries with two competing values: a theological vision that God welcomes all people, and the social hierarchy of the caste system. Keune examines the ways in which food and stories about food were important sites where this debate played out, particularly when people of high and low social status ate together. By studying Marathi manuscripts, nineteenth-century publications, plays, and films, Shared Devotion, Shared Food reveals how the question of caste, inclusivity, and equality was formulated in different ways over the course of three centuries, and it explores why social equality remains so elusive in practice.
Download or read book Education and Caste in India written by Ghanshyam Shah and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2020-06-04 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seven decades since Indian Independence, education takes the centre stage in every major discussion on development, especially when we talk about social exclusion, Dalits and reservations today. This book examines social inclusion in the education sector in India for Scheduled Castes (SCs). The volume: · Foregrounds the historical struggles of the SCs to understand why the quest for education is so central to shaping SC consciousness and aspirations; · Works with exhaustive state-level studies with a view to assessing commonalities and differences in the educational status of SCs today; · Takes stock of the policymaking and extent of implementations across Indian states to understand the challenges faced in different scenarios; · Seeks to analyse the differential in existing economic conditions, and other structural constraints, in relation to access to quality educational facilities; · Examines the social perceptions and experiences of SC students as they live now. A major study, the volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of education, sociology and social anthropology, development studies and South Asian studies.
Download or read book For the solution of the Caste question Buddha is not enough Ambedkar is not enough either Marx is a Must written by Ranganayakamma and published by Sweet Home Publications. This book was released on 2001 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the solution of the ‘Caste’ question Buddha is not enough Ambedkar is not enough either Marx is a Must This is neither Buddha's biography nor Ambedkar's. Further, it is not Marx's biography either. This is a discussion concerning the 'Dalit' question based exclusively on Ambedkar's writings. However, I have confined myself only to those writings that deal with the 'Dalit' question and Caste system. Ambedkar had also discussed other issues like Division of labour, Division of Labourers, poverty, unemployment and economic exploitation. These issues are connected with the Dalit question and the Caste system. Hence all these issues find place in this book. Ambedkar had also written on other themes like the 'Problem of the Rupee' and Large Scale Industry. But I have not included those issues which are not directly connected with the Dalit question. Even regarding Gandhi, I have not considered issues other than those Ambedkar cited in connection with the Dalit question. For the purpose of this essay, I wanted to rely only on Ambedkar's writings. But, in couple of contexts where I could not find relevant information in Ambedkar's works, I had to turn to a few references from his biographies. I have given these details in the respective contexts. The world needs the theory that is powerful enough to illuminate the path. It is irrelevant whether that theoretician is Buddha, Marx, Ambedkar or someone else. That which remedies the disease alone is a medicine! That which emancipates from sufferings alone is the higher path. If it is Buddhism, we are obliged to follow it, to revere it. The question, however, is to ascertain which is the higher path! This is the thing, which we must ascertain. We are obliged to follow the thing which we ascertain to be the higher path. We need to read Ambedkar's writings in order to arrive at a correct understanding of many issues which he discussed: the caste system, untouchability, poverty, Buddhism, Marxism, etc. We have to read them carefully and seriously. Whatever we read, we have to take everything that is useful. We have to follow it. We have to correct whatever needs correction. We have to abandon whatever is not useful. To do all this, however, we must first understand Ambedkar's ideas correctly. Problems like castes and untouchability are not things that have arisen, so to speak, yesterday or today. They have been entrenched for thousands of years. But we don't have any written literatureother than religious texts and some inscriptionsthat tells about them. The available sources may not be useful in many contexts. Yet they may be useful to some extent in some contexts. When we don't find clear-cut bases for the problems, however, there is no way out except attempting to understand them by means of our own logic.
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 Practicing Caste written by Aniket Jaaware and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Practicing Caste attempts a fundamental break from the tradition of caste studies, showing the limits of the historical, sociological, political, and moral categories through which it has usually been discussed. Engaging with the resources phenomenology, structuralism, and poststructuralism offer to our thinking of the body, Jaaware helps to illuminate the ethical relations that caste entails, especially around its injunctions concerning touching. The resulting insights offer new ways of thinking about sociality that are pertinent not only to India but also to thinking the common on a planetary basis.
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 Question of Caste written by Charles Sumner and published by . This book was released on 1869 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book CHATURVARNA Unified Theory of Hindu Caste written by B.T. Gopalakrishna and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2013-01-02 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book professes a unified theory of Hindu Caste. The Author through thorough analysis and study proposes a theory of societal order that would restore and redress caste question, that continues to baffle sociologists and policy leaders to this day in India and World, which is key to a better India and secure future for Modern India.
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 Scripting the Change written by Anuradha Ghandy and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dalit Studies written by Ramnarayan S. Rawat and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-07 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to this major intervention into Indian historiography trace the strategies through which Dalits have been marginalized as well as the ways Dalit intellectuals and leaders have shaped emancipatory politics in modern India. Moving beyond the anticolonialism/nationalism binary that dominates the study of India, the contributors assess the benefits of colonial modernity and place humiliation, dignity, and spatial exclusion at the center of Indian historiography. Several essays discuss the ways Dalits used the colonial courts and legislature to gain minority rights in the early twentieth century, while others highlight Dalit activism in social and religious spheres. The contributors also examine the struggle of contemporary middle-class Dalits to reconcile their caste and class, intercaste tensions among Sikhs, and the efforts by Dalit writers to challenge dominant constructions of secular and class-based citizenship while emphasizing the ongoing destructiveness of caste identity. In recovering the long history of Dalit struggles against caste violence, exclusion, and discrimination, Dalit Studies outlines a new agenda for the study of India, enabling a significant reconsideration of many of the Indian academy's core assumptions. Contributors: D. Shyam Babu, Laura Brueck, Sambaiah Gundimeda, Gopal Guru, Rajkumar Hans, Chinnaiah Jangam, Surinder Jodhka, P. Sanal Mohan, Ramnarayan Rawat, K. Satyanarayana
Download or read book Caste in Question written by Dipankar Gupta and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2004-12-08 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important volume provides an alternative perspective on caste. It demonstrates that the traditional view of caste—as a single hierarchy, with Brahmins at the top and the untouchable castes at the bottom—is no longer valid. From politics to gender to economic interaction, the contributors reveal how the erstwhile single, pure hierarchical order is constantly being questioned and weakened./-//-/The essays in this volume argue for a different conceptualisation of caste—one that would take into account the need for caste assertion and dignity as well as notions of hierarchy. The contributors show that while pride in one’s caste identity is an important feature of the caste order, this is not incompatible with contesting notions of hierarchy. Caste is now better seen in terms, first, of discrete identities and then in terms of multiple and contesting hierarchies. Using contemporary experiences, this exciting volume reflects on received wisdom concerning theories of caste and provides an entirely fresh perspective.
