Explore the vast range of titles available.

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.

The real tragedy of COVID-19 is the social and cultural stigma associated with the infected people from the disease. Taking forward from one of the celebrated works of Erving Goffman, known as stigma (1963), this article offers a critical understanding of different fractions created during the COVID-19 pandemic in Indian society. Following the qualitative research method, the study interviewed twenty COVID-19-positive people selected from different age groups, sex, and socio-economic background of the state of Odisha in India. The participants attended the interview through telephonic and video conferencing to throw light on the conundrum of COVID-19 and discrimination. The interview outlined the link between prestige and economically marginalized and how social stigma brought about catastrophe to the different sections of Indian society and culminated in 'Twain Untouchability . Besides this, the article also includes content analysis of some of the newspaper articles published in 2020. The article examines the lived experiences, discrimination, and stigmatization of COVID-19 infected people through phenomenological analysis in the following ways. Firstly, the study analyzes people’s social and emotional experiences in pre, post, and during the COVID-19-positive phase. Secondly, it examines the people and their relatives social and emotional perceptions about COVID-19-affected people. Thirdly, it suggests some ways to mitigate the stigma experiences during COVID 19 pandemic.

Outcaste untouchables in India have been subjected to centuries of oppression and discrimination by upper-caste Hindus. ‘Although the government of India passed legislation known as “The Scheduled Castes…. The Prevention of Atrocities Act 1989” (2014), they are considered ritually polluting and are denied fundamental rights to education, freedom of movement, and access to justice’ (Mayell, 2003). The paper aims to discuss the marginalized untouchable communities, euphemistically called Dalits, in Indian Anglophone fiction from the Dalit discourse perspective. Literary works such as Sea of Poppies (2008), Untouchable (1935), and The God of Small Things (1997), have depicted the dehumanizing treatment Untouchables are exposed to within the caste system. This study is qualitative research. Through a keen study of these selected works, research papers, and theories related to the untouchables and caste system such as Ambedkarism and Subaltern studies, it is highlighted that Dalits are often forced to live in squalor, work in difficult situations for menial jobs, and are vulnerable to violence and abuse. The findings highlight the ongoing marginalization of Dalits, who endure disproportionate poverty, hazardous labor, and systemic violence. Despite India's modernization, Dalits face discrimination across various demographic factors, underscoring the urgent need for social justice and equity measures.

ObjectivesIn recent years, Bangladesh has made remarkable advances in health outcomes; however, the benefits of these gains are unequally shared among citizens and population groups. Dalits (jaat sweepers), a marginalised traditional working community, have relatively poor access to healthcare services. This study sought to explore the sociopolitical and cultural factors associated with health inequalities among Dalits in an urban setting.DesignAn exploratory qualitative study design was adopted. Fourteen in-depth interviews, five focus group discussions and seven key informant interviews were conducted. The acquired data were analysed using an iterative approach which incorporated deductive and inductive methods in identifying codes and themes.SettingsThis study was conducted in two sweeper communities in Dhaka city.ParticipantsParticipants were Dalit men and women (in-depth interviews, mean age±SD 30±10; and focus group discussions), and the community leaders and non-governmental organisation workers (key informant interviews).ResultsThe health status of members of these Dalit groups is determined by an array of social, economic and political factors. Dalits (untouchables) are typically considered to fall outside the caste-based social structure and existing vulnerabilities are embedded and reinforced by this identity. Dalits’ experience of precarious access to healthcare or poor healthcare is an important manifestation of these inequalities and has implications for the economic and social life of Dalit populations living together in geographically constrained spaces.ConclusionsThe provision of clinical healthcare services alone is insufficient to mitigate the negative effects of discriminations and to improve the health status of Dalits. A better understanding of the precise influences of sociocultural determinants of health inequalities is needed, together with the identification of the strategies and programmes needed to address these determinants with the aim of developing more inclusive health service delivery systems.

The caste system has implications for the environmental experiences of Dalits (formerly \"untouchables\"). Dalits are disproportionately impacted by natural disasters and climate change because of their high dependence on natural resources and manual labor, including agriculture. Dalit viewpoints and ecological expertise nevertheless remain missing from the environmental literature and mainstream activism. Aligning with Black ecologies as a challenge to eco-racism, I use the term \"Dalit ecologies\" to conceptualize Dalit articulations with their environment and experiences of eco-casteism involving inequities such as their exclusions from natural resources and high vulnerability to pollution and waste. My analysis of scholarly literature finds that nature is caste-ized through the ideology of Hindu Brahminism that animates mainstream environmental activism in India. Dalit subjectivities and agency nevertheless remain evident in their literary and oral narratives and ongoing struggles for access to land, water, and other environmental resources.

Caste and race, Dalits and Black people, and the common ground between them have been analyzed in many areas, but their conjunction in the environmental field has been neglected. This article locates Dalit ecologies by examining the close connection between caste and nature. Drawing from a plural framework of environmental justice and histories of environmental struggles among African Americans, it focuses on historical and contemporary ecological struggles of Dalits. It contemplates how their initial articulations under the rubric of civil rights developed into significant struggles over issues of Dalit access, ownership, rights, and partnership regarding natural resources, where themes of environmental and social justice appeared at the forefront. The intersections between Dalit and Black ecologies, the rich legacies of Black Panthers and Dalit Panthers, and their overlaps in environmental struggles open for us a new historical archive, where Dalit and Black power can talk to each other in the environmental present.

This paper significantly wishes to unpack the social and cultural impact of the mass religious conversion movements in Rayalaseema society with specific reference to Dalits during the period 1850 to 1880. This paper will use the archival material such as missionary records, magazines, pamphlets, and books written by missionaries; further, it will also utilize oral interviews collected from the field. The mass conversion movements established a relationship between Dalits and missionaries and brought them together. In their efforts to create a new Christian community of Dalit converts, missionaries had interacted with Dalits, shared meal with them, stayed with them and transformed forbidden and “polluted” ghettos into social spaces. The present paper argues that the practices of the missionaries were liberating and humanizing for Dalits. It will examine how these practices led to unintended consequences. It needs to be remembered that the missionaries’ aim was not to abolish caste but to develop Christianity. How did the missionaries contribute to social interaction and build a spirit of solidarity among the Dalit converts? Based on specific situations, incidents, and examples recorded in the missionary archives and oral interviews, the article observes that community conversion movements destabilized the caste structure and brought significant changes in the social life of Dalits in colonial Rayalaseema.

This full-scale study of Punjabi politics since Indian Independence in 1947 considers the major political problem confronting virtually every new nation: how to create a functioning political system in the face of divisive internal threats. Originally published in 1966. 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.

Although sanitation is a core element of healthy family and community life and an important indicator of social development, it has not received the sociological attention it deserves. Based on an analysis of both rural and urban areas cutting across diverse social groups, this article shows that the sanitation in India is not only a rural but also an urban problem, particularly in the context of growing industrialisation, coupled with concomitant rapid urbanisation and expansion of cities. The article unveils the link between poor sanitation, especially preference for open defecation among rural folks with peoples’ practices and perceptions, which are deeply rooted in cultural norms. Ultimately, it is argued that it is not the resources but rather the beliefs, practices and customs of people related to health and environment that matter in improving the sanitary conditions in India