Download or read book Viramma Life of an Untouchable written by Viramma and published by Verso. This book was released on 1997 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Viramma is an agricultural worker and midwife in Karani, a village near Pondicherry in southeast India. Viramma is a member of the caste called Untouchable. Of her 12 children, only three survive. Viramma's story--told over the course of 10 years--is a vivid portrayal of a proud and expressive woman living at the margins of society. 12 photos.
Download or read book Growing up Untouchable in India written by Vasant Moon and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2002-07-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'In this English translation, Moon's story is usefully framed by apparatus necessary to bring its message to even those taking their first look at South Asian culture...The result is an easy to digest short-course on what it means to be a Dalit, in the words of one notable Dalit.'-Journal of Asian Studies
Download or read book Viramma Life Of A Dalit written by Viramma and published by . This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first Indian edition of this remarkable book, which created a great impact in France and was subsequently translated into English and Italian. The Indian edition carries a fresh Afterword by Jean-Luc and Josiane Racine.
Download or read book Joothan written by Omprakash Valmiki and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008-07-02 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Omprakash Valmiki describes his life as an untouchable, or Dalit, in the newly independent India of the 1950s. "Joothan" refers to scraps of food left on a plate, destined for the garbage or animals. India's untouchables have been forced to accept and eat joothan for centuries, and the word encapsulates the pain, humiliation, and poverty of a community forced to live at the bottom of India's social pyramid. Although untouchability was abolished in 1949, Dalits continued to face discrimination, economic deprivation, violence, and ridicule. Valmiki shares his heroic struggle to survive a preordained life of perpetual physical and mental persecution and his transformation into a speaking subject under the influence of the great Dalit political leader, B. R. Ambedkar. A document of the long-silenced and long-denied sufferings of the Dalits, Joothan is a major contribution to the archives of Dalit history and a manifesto for the revolutionary transformation of society and human consciousness.
Download or read book Everyday Life in South Asia written by Diane P. Mines and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-16 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now updated: An “eminently readable, highly engaging” anthology about the lives of ordinary citizens in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka (Margaret Mills, Ohio State University). For the second edition of this popular textbook, readings have been updated and new essays added. The result is a timely collection that explores key themes in understanding the region, including gender, caste, class, religion, globalization, economic liberalization, nationalism, and emerging modernities. New readings focus attention on the experiences of the middle classes, migrant workers, and IT professionals, and on media, consumerism, and youth culture. Clear and engaging writing makes this text particularly valuable for general and student readers, while the range of new and classic scholarship provides a useful resource for specialists.
Download or read book An Untouchable Community in South India written by Michael Moffatt and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-08 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While many studies suggest that Indian Untouchables do not entirely share the hierarchical values characteristic of the caste system, Michael Moffatt argues that the most striking feature of the lowest castes is their pervasive cultural consensus with those higher in the system. Though rural Untouchables question their particular position in the system, they seldom question the system as a whole, and they maintain among themselves a set of hierarchical conceptions and institutions virtually identical to those of the dominant social order. Based on fourteen months of fieldwork with Untouchable castes in two villages in Tamil Nadu, south India, Professor Moffatt's analysis specifies ways in which the Untouchables are both excluded and included by the higher castes. Ethnographically, he pursues his structural analysis in two related domains: Untouchable social structure, and Untouchable religious belief and practice. The author finds that in those aspects of their lives where Untouchables are excluded from larger village life, they replicate in their own community nearly every institution, role, and ranked relation from which they have been excluded. Where the Untouchables are included by the higher castes, they complete the hierarchical whole by accepting their low position and playing their assigned roles. Thus the most oppressed members of Indian society are often among the truest believers in the system. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Flesh and Fish Blood written by Subramanian Shankar and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-07-02 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Flesh and Fish Blood Subramanian Shankar breaks new ground in postcolonial studies by exploring the rich potential of vernacular literary expressions. Shankar pushes beyond the postcolonial Anglophone canon and works with Indian literature and film in English, Tamil, and Hindi to present one of the first extended explorations of representations of caste, including a critical consideration of Tamil Dalit (so-called untouchable) literature. Shankar shows how these vernacular materials are often unexpectedly politically progressive and feminist, and provides insight on these oft-overlooked—but nonetheless sophisticated—South Asian cultural spaces. With its calls for renewed attention to translation issues and comparative methods in uncovering disregarded aspects of postcolonial societies, and provocative remarks on humanism and cosmopolitanism, Flesh and Fish Blood opens up new horizons of theoretical possibility for postcolonial studies and cultural analysis.
Download or read book The Light of Knowledge written by Francis Cody and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early 1990s hundreds of thousands of Tamil villagers in southern India have participated in literacy lessons, science demonstrations, and other events designed to transform them into active citizens with access to state power. These efforts to spread enlightenment among the oppressed are part of a movement known as the Arivoli Iyakkam (the Enlightenment Movement), considered to be among the most successful mass literacy movements in recent history. In The Light of Knowledge, Francis Cody’s ethnography of the Arivoli Iyakkam highlights the paradoxes inherent in such movements that seek to emancipate people through literacy when literacy is a power-laden social practice in its own right. The Light of Knowledge is set primarily in the rural district of Pudukkottai in Tamil Nadu, and it is about activism among laboring women from marginalized castes who have been particularly active as learners and volunteers in the movement. In their endeavors to remake the Tamil countryside through literacy activism, workers in the movement found that their own understanding of the politics of writing and Enlightenment was often transformed as they encountered vastly different notions of language and imaginations of social order. Indeed, while activists of the movement successfully mobilized large numbers of rural women, they did so through logics that often pushed against the very Enlightenment rationality they hoped to foster. Offering a rare behind-the-scenes look at an increasingly important area of social and political activism, The Light of Knowledge brings tools of linguistic anthropology to engage with critical social theories of the postcolonial state.
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
Download or read book The Biopolitics of Development written by Sandro Mezzadra and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-12-27 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an original analysis and theorization of the biopolitics of development in the postcolonial present, and draws significantly from the later works of Michel Foucault on biopolitics. Foucault’s works have had a massive influence on postcolonial literatures, particularly in political science and international relations, and several authors of this book have themselves made significant contributions to that influence. While Foucault’s thought has been inspirational for understanding colonial biopolitics as well as governmental rationalities concerned with development, his works have too often failed to inspire studies of political subjectivity. Instead, they have been used to stoke the myth of the inevitability of the decline of collective political subjects, often describing an increasingly limited horizon of political possibilities, and provoking a disenchantment with the political itself in postcolonial works and studies. Working against the grain of current Foucauldian scholarship, this book underlines the importance of Foucault’s work for the capacity to recognize how this degraded view of political subjectivity came about, particularly within the framework of the discourses and politics of ‘development’, and with particular attention to the predicaments of postcolonial peoples. It explores how we can use Foucault’s ideas to recover the vital capacity to think and act politically at a time when fundamentally human capacities to think, know and to act purposively in the world are being pathologized as expressions of the hubris and ‘underdevelopment’ of postcolonial peoples. Why and how it is that life in postcolonial settings has been depoliticized to such dramatic effect? The immediacy of these themes will be obvious to anyone living in the South of the world. But within the academy they remain heavily under-addressed. In thinking about what it means to read Michel Foucault today, this book tackles some significant questions and problems: Not simply that of how to explain the ways in which postcolonial regimes of governance have achieved the debasements of political subjectivity they have; nor that of how we might better equip them with the means to suborn the life of postcolonial peoples more fully; but that of how such peoples, in their subjection to governance, can and do resist, subvert, escape and defy the imposition of modes of governance which seek to remove their lives of those very capacities for resistance, subversion, flight, and defiance.
Download or read book Caste in History written by Ishita Banerjee-Dube and published by Oxford in India Readings: Them. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, a part of the prestigious Themes in Indian History series, brings together the work of distinguished scholars on the analyzing caste and related socio-cultural processes. There are anthropological and ethnological collections on the issue of caste but this volume through a collection of seminal essays brings together the much-needed historical perspective on the issue. A comprehensive introduction sets the tone for the consideration of the questions of caste. Beginning with the period of the coming of the Portuguese to India, the collection of essays considers caste in medieval and modern times. It brings together the ethno-sociological categories of study such as the census and village-community with the political and the historical-colonialism, nationality, and state-formation. The question is approached from both the macro-perspective considering prominent leaders, the national movement, and British imperialism as well as through micro-studies of specific communities and their practices. These wide-ranging topics are divided in four subsequent sections -- Caste and Colonialism, Caste in Practice, Caste and Politics, and Caste in Everyday Life -- the questions are considered from these various dimensions. Eminent contributors like Bernard Cohn, Frank Conlon, Eleanor Zelliot, Shail Mayaram, Shekhar Bandopadhyay's works feature in this volume along with several other equally incisive and readable essays. This volume will be indispensable for any collection or consideration related to the issue of caste.
Download or read book A Concise History of Modern India written by Barbara D. Metcalf and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-09-28 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a second edition of their successful Concise History of Modern India, Barbara Metcalf and Thomas Metcalf explore India's modern history afresh and update the events of the last decade. These include the takeover of Congress from the seemingly entrenched Hindu nationalist party in 2004, India's huge advances in technology and the country's new role as a major player in world affairs. From the days of the Mughals, through the British Empire, and into Independence, the country has been transformed by its institutional structures. It is these institutions which have helped bring about the social, cultural and economic changes that have taken place over the last half century and paved the way for the modern success story. Despite these advances, poverty, social inequality and religious division still fester. In response to these dilemmas, the book grapples with questions of caste and religious identity, and the nature of the Indian nation.
Download or read book Dalit Feminist Theory written by Sunaina Arya and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2019-09-09 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dalit Feminist Theory: A Reader radically redefines feminism by introducing the category of Dalit into the core of feminist thought. It supplements feminism by adding caste to its study and praxis; it also re-examines and rethinks Indian feminism by replacing it with a new paradigm, namely, that caste-based feminist inquiry offers the only theoretical vantage point for comprehensively addressing gender-based injustices. Drawing on a variety of disciplines, the chapters in the volume discuss key themes such as Indian feminism versus Dalit feminism; the emerging concept of Dalit patriarchy; the predecessors of Dalit feminism, such as Phule and Ambedkar; the meaning and value of lived experience; the concept of Difference; the analogical relationship between Black feminism and Dalit feminism; the intersectionality debate; and the theory-versus-experience debate. They also provide a conceptual, historical, empirical and philosophical understanding of feminism in India today. Accessible, essential and ingenious in its approach, this book is for students, teachers and specialist scholars, as well as activists and the interested general reader. It will be indispensable for those engaged in gender studies, women’s studies, sociology of caste, political science and political theory, philosophy and feminism, Ambedkar studies, and for anyone working in the areas of caste, class or gender-based discrimination, exclusion and inequality.
Download or read book Humiliation written by Gopal Guru and published by Oxford India Paperbacks. This book was released on 2011 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributed articles presented at a seminar.
Download or read book Outcaste a Memoir written by Narendra Jadhav and published by Viking Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Outcaste: A Memoir Is A Multilayered Personalized Saga Of The Social Metamorphosis Of Dalits In India. At One Level, It Is A Loving Tribute From A Son To His Father. At Another, It Gives An Intelligent Appraisal Of The Caste System In India And Traces The Story Of The Awakening Of Dalits Traversing Three Generations. At Still Another Level, It Is Reflective Of The Aspirations Of Millions Of Dalits In India. Written In The First Person, At Times From The Perspective Of Narendra Jadhav S Parents, Damu And Sonu, And At Other Times From His Own, The Book Traces The Remarkable Journey Of Damu From A Small Village At Ozar In Maharashtra To The City Of Mumbai To Escape Persecution. In The City, Although Illiterate And Despite The Disadvantages Of His Mahar Caste, Damu Earns Respect In The Various Jobs He Undertakes. Even More Heartening, His Children And Their Offspring Go On To Fulfil All His Aspirations, Rising To High Positions In Their Chosen Careers, And Overcoming, Finally, The Barrier That Had So Bedevilled His Own Life. Damu S Refusal To Cave In To Any Type Of Injustice And His Iron Determination Form The Heart Of The Book. But Outcaste Is Much More Than A Personal Recounting Of The Downside Of The Caste Divide In India. It Also Examines Dalit Issues In The Context Of The Dalits Awakening Spearheaded By The Champion Of Human Rights, Babasaheb Ambedkar, The Independence Movement, The Civil Disobedience Movement, Gandhiji S Relation With Ambedkar, The Mass Conversion Of Dalits To Buddhism In 1956, And Caste In Its Contemporary Reality. A Crucial Landmark Is Damu S Own Transformation Under The Spell Of Ambedkar. The Radical Change In Damu And His Family, Their Sloughing Off Of Servility, And Their Self-Esteem Are Seamlessly Woven Into The Narrative. The Book Ends With A Note Of Self-Realization: That In Modern India Dignity Rests In The Minds And Hearts Of People, And That Obsolete Prejudices Do Not Really Matter. Enlivening The Text Are Personal Anecdotes, Some Funny, Some Sad And Some Heart-Warming. And Running Like A Refrain Throughout Is The Clarion Call Of Ambedkar, Educate, Unite And Agitate . Poignant And Simple, Outcaste Makes For Fascinating Reading.
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 The Gypsy Goddess written by Meena Kandasamy and published by Atlantic Books Ltd. This book was released on 2014-04-03 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The provocative debut by the Women's Fiction Prize 2018-shortlisted author of When I Hit You. When women take to protest, there is no looking back. Sometimes it is over working conditions, other times, perhaps, a strike for higher wages. And so, in a hungry, back-broken community of villages in Tamil Nadu, a group of rural workers begin to defy their landlords. The landlords, in turn, vow to violently crush them. But these punishments only serve to strengthen the villagers' resistance - after all, when starvation is the only option, what else is there to lose...?
