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This article is an engagement with the socio-cultural, economic and political lifeworld of a Scheduled Caste, namely the Musahars, in light of official records and field data collected from four villages in Bihar. Against the background of Brahminical, colonial and post-colonial understandings of Musahars, the article presents an ethnographic account of Musahars by reflecting on their life cycle, culture and educational, health, political and economic conditions. They have remained as usual a poor, landless, marginalised and excluded caste group in the state of Bihar. The discourses representing Musahars in a negative manner have continued to remain as deeply embedded forms of structural violence against Musahars. The article finds that the Naxalite movement in Bihar has generated a somewhat socio-political awareness and aspiration among the Musahars and is equipping them to fight against the system for their well-being.

This is the first paper comparing Indian and Nepali Maoist rebels providing health services and health promotion to the communities under their influence. The paper presents the key provisions either made by rebel health workers themselves or by putting political pressure on government health workers to deliver better services in the areas controlled by rebels. The paper is based on a mixed-method approach comprising 15 interviews and a questionnaire survey with 197 Nepalese Maoist health workers and a secondary analysis of policy documents and other published materials on the Maoist health services of India. The paper suggests that rebel health services in India and Nepal followed a fairly similar approach to what and how they offered health care services to local populations. Maoists becoming a government party changed the political landscape for the rebel health workers in Nepal. However, not incorporating the Maoist rebel health workers into the government health system was a missed opportunity. There are lessons that India and Nepal can learn from each other. Should the Maoist rebels and the Government of India come to an agreement, potential for rebel health workers to be integrated in the official health care system should be considered.

Professor D. N. Dhanagare, a distinguished Indian sociologist, passed away at the age of 81 on 7 March 2017 following a brief illness due to cardiac and renal problems. With his passing away, we lost an erudite public intellectual, and a tradition of scholarship in sociology in India has come to an end. He leaves behind, among many other things, a great tradition of sociological research in the areas of peasant and farmer movements and agrarian relations, thought-provoking teaching and meticulous research supervision. Dhanagare was a regular visitor in the Tata Institute of Social Sciences as an expert or teacher. He was invited to develop and teach a course \"Social Movement and Social Change' in Development Studies master programme. He taught the course for six years from 2008 to 2013. Since I was coordinating the programme, I used to meet him frequently. Our meeting turned into a fruitful academic relationship. He made me realise my many limitations, but encouraged me to read, write and publish. Personally, I have lost a mentor.

While all landholding households involve themselves in manual agricultural operations, they also employ free labour. [...]sharecropping is on the decline and reverse tenancy is slowly becoming the norm. [...]land reform laws were enacted during the early 1950s to change the situation. [...]India continued to face the problem of food shortage. The significance of labour migration in this respect is also highlighted by Gerry Rodgers and Janine Rodgers (2011) in their study of two Bihar villages, in Jan Breman’s (2007) studies of the “footloose proletariat” of south Gujarat and in a restudy of a Tamil village by Harriss, Jeyaranjan and Nagaraj (2010). [...]Henry Bernstein (2008) has argued that the dominance of capital today is no longer expressed in “classic” capital–labour relations.

Based on a study of the Bhartiya Kisan Union (BKU) and the farmer/peasant movements in western Uttar Pradesh (UP) during 1987-89, this paper deals with the relationship between traditional sociocultural institutions and cultural practices on the one hand, and agrarian mobilisation, on the other. It is shown that, during 1987-89, when the BKU organised various successful agitations and movements against the state by mobilising the farmers/peasants of western UP on a large scale, its strategies of agrarian mobilisation were rooted in and modelled on the traditional sociocultural system of the local agrarian society. The BKU used the primordial institutions of caste and clan to organise and mobilise the farmers; it used traditional cultural practices or symbols to generate consciousness, sentiments and enthusiasm; and it used the traditional institution of panchayat for discussions and deliberations, and to address the farmers. The paper also shows that the BKU began declining when it entered electoral politics and started mobilising the farmers on political lines.

This paper analyses the economic life of the Pardhis, a denotified tribal community, in the light of field data collected from a non-regularised slum area, known as Jai Ambe Nagar, in an eastern suburb of Mumbai. It looks at the various elements that constitute the organisation of economic life of Pardhis in this enclave. It also reflects on the social embeddedness of the Pardhi's economic life by analysing the relationship of their economic life with sociocultural institutions of the community, particularly the kinship system. There are tendencies of forced adaptation to the plurality of forces unleashed by the urban setting or urbanism that has not resulted into significant changes in their traditional institutions and practices. Structures and normative orientations of the traditional order still persist among them and on many occasions get reinforced due to the interplay of different urban situations.

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the agrarian forces and relations of production in terms of caste in four Bhojpuri-speaking villages of Buxar District. It argues that agrarian economic structure constitutes the elements of capitalist mode of production. The ownership of the forces of production such as land, tractors, threshers, pumpsets, harvesters, etc. is highly unequal in terms of caste. Moreover, castes also differ as regards the use of the forces of production in agriculture. It is also found that, unlike the category of 'Scheduled Castes', the categories of 'Backward Castes' and 'Forward Castes' are heterogeneous in economic terms.

Paramjit S. Judge, Making of Modern India: Sociological Explorations into Postcolonial Indian Modernity. Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2019, 239 pp., ₹995 (hardback). ISBN: 978-81-316-1008-4.