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Leather was an important commodity for the British empire in terms of industrial production and scientific innovation. From the mid nineteenth century in India, the British sought to convert leatherwork into a scientific industry. Leather, however, also has a life in caste. The profound stench inherent to the process of leather tanning marks leather workers as polluted. Examining archival material and contemporary ethnography from Uttar Pradesh, this paper examines how the scientific colonial intervention in leatherwork was made complicated due to the sensorial politics of caste. The leather chemist, trained to impart scientific knowledge to leather workers, often failed to negotiate the caste-based sensorial nature of leatherwork, thereby allowing caste to limit the reach of modern science in the industry. Understanding this interaction between colonial science and leatherwork has important consequences for our understanding of the politics of caste and scientific knowledge in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with butchers, cattle traders and beef eaters in South India, the aims of this paper are twofold. Firstly, it challenges two dominant assumptions made in respect of cattle slaughter and beef consumption in South Asia: one, that the beef trade directly concerns only Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis and Christians, and two, that respect for cattle is the near sole preserve of upper-caste Hindus. Secondly, given the strength of the empirical evidence against these two assumptions, it considers how such a stark framing of the debates along caste and communal lines has been sustained so successfully and for so long. Using insights from the anthropology of ignorance—to which this article makes a unique contribution—I argue that part of the answer lies in the strategic acts of not knowing what goes on at particular junctures along the chain from the cowshed to the dinner plate, which a number of different actors are complicit in working to maintain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India 'nature writing' has traditionally encompassed ecology, geography and sacrality, and has often missed Dalit literary traditions. In the last few decades, environment literature has expanded its horizons to consider intersections between ecology, society and culture. However, the question still remains: why is there no recognition of ecological underpinnings in the writings of subordinate castes by the wider canon of the environmental literary sphere? This article addresses this exclusion and explores the relationship between caste, nature, Dalits and environmental imagination. It takes Dalit autobiographies from different regions and languages to highlight an unexplored aspect of Dalit writings, thus widening the scope and perspective of environment literature and providing a distinct perspective from the margins. Through the lens of eco-literature, eco-criticism and eco-justice, the article underlines how nature's beauty and caste burden, space and identity, land and bondage, social injustice and environmental 'othering' are significant features of these life narratives. It weaves certain select themes like nature's beauty, caste exploitation, labour and animals to explore the pain and stigmatisation, along with a vibrancy and dynamism, in Dalit eco-narrations of the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the political technologies of a caste certificate regularly employed by a Denotified Tribe, the Kunchikorves, in the Mumbai slum of Dharavi. The author demonstrates how the Kunchikorves mobilise kin and affine relations and engage with different organs of the state in an effort to authenticate their caste status. These ‘caste certificates’ are needed to make use of reservations policies to get government jobs and higher education. Municipal jobs and promotions are desirable as the basis for secure employment and upward mobility. Describing the circuitous methods by which the Kunchikorves obtain such authenticating documents, this paper notes that caste identity, while not hinging on notions of purity or pollution, is still an important vehicle for collective identification in contemporary India. The post-colonial state can be said to have extended and elaborated the colonial state's enumerating and objectifying imperatives when it comes to group identity. Groups such as the Kunchikorves are complicit in these objectifying measures, and actively seek out authenticating proofs of an identity that was originally pejorative, arbitrary and imposed. This paper argues that the Kunchikorves’ manufacturing of caste certificates secures them a job,while at the same time bequeathing them a caste categorisation necessarily mediated by processes of bureaucratic authentication. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Wedged uncomfortably between the gathering pan-Indian nationalist movement and the locally resonant and divisive anti-Brahman, Tamil ethno-nationalist movement, Left leaders in the Tamil region in India were faced with a difficult and complex set of political choices and challenges in the early twentieth century. These political challenges brought to the fore the social and political contradictions between an anti-colonial Indian nationalism led mostly by upper-caste liberal–bourgeois leaders and an equally entrenched and locally resonant ethno-nationalist movement which, despite its social reformist and anti-Brahman platform, was led by dominant non-Brahman caste leaders committed to the continuation of British rule. In this paper, we will be looking at two of the most prominent Tamil Left leaders who attempted to work with and bridge these contradictory movements in Tamil society. M. Singaravelu (1860–1946) and P. Jeevanandam (1907–63) were prominent Left leaders and intellectuals in the Tamil region and were well known for their close engagement with and sensitivity to issues of social reform, caste and linguistic and cultural hegemony. Both joined various political movements including the Indian National Congress, the Dravidian movement and the Indian communist party in different phases of their careers. It is their participation and engagement with such diverse and contradictory movements that make their intellectual interventions unique and a close study of their work valuable for providing a window into how the Left attempted to deal with such thorny issues as the politics of caste and language in India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Extending the paradigms of Subaltern Studies, this paper takes up three disparate sites—didactic Hindi literature, conversions and army discourses—to provide a perspective on the disjunctive forms of representation that signified Dalit bodies in colonial north India. Through different arenas, it shows how representations constituted, and were reflective of, the power relationships between upper and lower castes, in which the former reinstated their dominance. At the same time, the paper challenges straightjacketed links between representation and domination by expanding its archival arenas, and argues that Dalit bodies were not just screens on which high castes and colonial authorities projected their own caste, racial and gender anxieties. Rather, Dalits too represented themselves in different ways, conceiving a gendered sense of self in social, religious, public and political spaces. Such contested practices of representations produced creaks and dislocations in dominant embodiments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper studies photographs of Bombay's built environment, especially Dalit and working-class houses, taken by two social scientists in the 1920s and 1930s. The photographs are situated at the intersection of four discursive temporalities: (a) social reforms initiated by Indian nationalists of the late nineteenth to twentieth centuries; (b) sanitary reforms and urban restructuring undertaken by city administrators and the colonial state, which reappeared vigorously after the plague epidemic of 1896; (c) colonial knowledge production, including census, labour and housing reports that informed academic social–scientific knowledge; and (d) Dalit and working-class social movements that aspired to transgressing the limits of reform in order to re-define self and the collective, and demand the redistribution of material resources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the views of author Rabindranath Tagore on India's caste system, social evolution and processes of contestation and collaboration between two dominant castes, the Brahmins and the Kshatriyas. It mentions the article "A Vision of India's History" written by Tagore in 1912 in which he highlighted no difference in the world outlook of two castes. It discusses how Tagore's perspective of the caste system led him to support the Hindu inter-caste marriage Bill.

In this article the author reflects on how the patterns of democratic representation in India have changed over the past 60 years. According to her, the representation of the lower castes in the parliament has increased but the upper sections of the bureaucracy do not fully reflect the caste and religious diversity. She criticizes the representation in Indian democracy and claims that the limitations of policy outcomes have not been considered.