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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.

Against the backdrop of the global Black Lives Matter movement, debates around the social impact of hate crime legislation have come to the political fore. In 2019, the UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice urgently asked how legal systems can counter bias and discrimination. In India, a nation with vast socio-cultural diversity, and a complex colonial past, questions about the relationship between law and histories of oppression have become particularly pressing. Recently, India has seen a rise in violence against Dalits (ex-untouchables) and other minorities. Consequently, an emerging \"Dalit Lives Matter\" movement has campaigned for the effective implementation of India's only hate crime law: the 1989 Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA). Drawing on long-term fieldwork with Dalit survivors of caste atrocities, human rights NGOs, police, and judiciary, Sandhya Fuchs unveils how Dalit communities in the state of Rajasthan interpret and mobilize the PoA. Fuchs shows that the PoA has emerged as a project of legal meliorism: the idea that persistent and creative legal labor can gradually improve the oppressive conditions that characterize Dalit lives. Moving beyond statistics and judicial arguments, Fuchs uses the intimate lens of personal narratives to lay bare how legal processes converge and conflict with political and gendered concerns about justice for caste atrocities, creating new controversies, inequalities, and hopes.

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.

An exploration on different aspects of casteism based on the personal narratives of 32 people.

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.

This is a book about prejudice and democracy, and the prejudice of democracy. In comparing the historical struggles of two geographically disparate populations - Indian Dalits (once known as Untouchables) and African Americans - Gyanendra Pandey, the leading subaltern historian, examines the multiple dimensions of prejudice in two of the world's leading democracies. The juxtaposition of two very different locations and histories, and within each of them of varying public and private narratives of struggle, allows for an uncommon analysis of the limits of citizenship in modern societies and states. Pandey, with his characteristic delicacy, probes the histories of his protagonists to uncover a shadowy world where intolerance and discrimination are part of both public and private lives. This unusual and sobering book is revelatory in its exploration of the contradictory history of promise and denial that is common to the official narratives of nations such as India and the United States and the ideologies of many opposition movements.

One prevalent socio-cultural structure that is peculiar to South Asia is caste, which is broadly understood in socio-anthropological terms as an institution of ranked, hereditary and occupational groups. This book discusses the enigmatic persistence of caste in the lives of South Asians as they step into the twenty-first century. It investigates the limits of sociological and secular historical analysis of the caste system in South Asia and argues for ways of describing life-forms generated by caste on the subcontinent that supplement the accounts of caste in the social sciences. By focusing on the literary, oral, visual and spiritual practices of one particular group of ex-untouchables in western India called 'Mahars', the author suggests that one can understand caste not as an essence that is responsible for South Asia's backwardness, but as a constellation of variegated practices that are in a constant state of flux and cannot be completely encapsulated within a narrative of nation-building, modernization and development.

This study explores the nature and circumstances of India’s social unrest in the 1980s. The author provides an analysis of the widespread corruption among politicians and in most strata of the government machinery, the blatant discrepancy between legislation ostensibly designed to protect minorities and their actual treatments by higher castes, the administration and the jurisdiction at the time.

There is clearly an academic and political obsession with the 'idea' of the Brahmin. There is also, simultaneously, a near-complete absence of engagement with the Brahmin as an embodied person or community. This book addresses this intriguing paradox by making available a sociological description of the Brahmins in today's Karnataka. It pursues three distinct, yet enmeshed, registers of inquiry - the persona of the 'Brahmin' embodied in the agency of the individual Brahmin; the organised complexes of action such as the caste association and the public culture of print; and finally, taking off from a longer (yet, modern and contemporary) history of non-Brahminical othering of the Brahmin. It argues that we tend to understand the contemporaneity of caste almost exclusively within the twin registers of legitimation-contestation and dominance-resistance. While these facets continue to be salient, there is also a need to push out into hitherto neglected dimensions of caste. The book focuses attention on the many lives of modern caste - its secularisation, the subject positions that it offers, the equivocations by which persons and communities become 'subjects' of caste, their differential investments in the caste-self.