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Khare and Varman present a compellingly pessimistic analysis of the plight of the poor in India. The dilemmas of the poor are often exacerbated by large corporations seeking to find ways to market products to impoverished emerging market consumers.  In India, consumers are frequently hurt by these initiatives, small retailers may suffer, while corruption and trickery by petty bureaucrats and ruthless landlords help the rich get richer at the expense of the poor.  The article by Khare and Varman is a scathing indictment based on detailed ethnographic evidence but it reveals only a fraction of the disadvantages and traps of disempowerment facing those Indians living lives of great precarity.  In this comment, we seek to build upon Khare and Varman’s insightful analysis both in order to reinforce their conclusions about the Kafkaesque existence of India’s poor and to introduce some further considerations and complications that make the quagmire even more entrapping.  We focus on four sources of these problems:  patriarchy, bureaucracy  and corruption, class and caste power and hierarchies, and uneven and inadequate infrastructure. We also highlight some largely individual and non-government initiatives that may offer hope of escaping this quagmire for the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

When social and economic conditions change dramatically, status hierarchies in place for hundreds of years can crumble as marketization destabilizes once rigid boundaries. This study examines such changes in symbolic power through an ethnographic study of a village in North India. Marketization and accompanying privatization do not create an independent sphere where only money matters, but due to a mix of new socioeconomic motives, they produce new social obligations, contests, and solidarities. These findings call into question the emphasis in consumer research on top-down class emulation as an essential characteristic of status hierarchies. This study offers insights into sharing as a means of enacting and reshaping symbolic power within a status hierarchy. A new order based on markets and consumption is disrupting the old order based on caste. As the old moral order dissolves, so do the old status hierarchies, obligations, dispositions, and norms of sharing that held the village together for centuries. In the microcosm of these gains and losses, we may see something of the broader social and economic changes taking place throughout India and other industrializing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an ethnographic account of how Golden Harvest International School in Bengaluru branded itself as both 'International' and 'Indian', by elaborating discursive practices within the school. Drawing upon scholarship that has sought to delineate the ways in which globally hyper-mobile Indians construct a distinctive cultural identity, the paper shows how a fusion of national and international allowed the school to cater to a particular set of elite parents, who were globally hyper-mobile even as they sought to be 'appropriately Indian'. The paper pays attention to how cultural practices and resources in the school operated within a forward caste-Hindu ethos that was presented as 'Indian', while also responsibilising teachers, students, and even parents to ensure the school acquired and retained globally valued credentials such as accreditation for the Middle Years Program of the International Baccalaureate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postmodern anthropology has used the claims of reflexivity, inter-subjectivity and recognition of differences in individual experiences in its attempt to unsettle the authority of traditional anthropology. This has led anthropologists to assert that ethnography is a cultural construct, whereby 'fieldwork' is conceptualised as 'embodied spatial practice'. Drawing on village studies from India, this paper argues that the recognition of different embodied practices of ethnographers from diverse social locations has not necessarily led to the democratisation of the discipline. Conversely, insufficient engagement with hierarchical, overlapping power relations within the ethnographic field, as well as within the disciplinary establishment, has led to the standardisation of disciplinary articulations of research ethics, the terms of which privilege hegemonic groups within the discipline. The articulation of the concerns of scholars from marginalised social groups often remains difficult within such disciplinary frameworks. This paper argues that establishing a critical tradition in ethnography in the true sense requires the postmodern sensibility of recognition of the differences in experiences, supplemented with feminist and subaltern critical interrogations of power and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The electoral decline of the organised Left in West Bengal politics has given rise to intellectual speculation about the increasing possibility of caste politics. In this context, this article investigates whether there is any merit in the claim that the electoral decline of the Left Front has paved the way for the rise of caste at the centre stage of mainstream electoral politics in West Bengal. It asks whether lower castes have started to mobilise politically in West Bengal in the same way as in many other states. The article argues against the claim of 'a new politics of caste' in West Bengal by showing that the electoral decline of the Left Front has not been accompanied by any rise in lower caste representation. In this context, the article also attempts to understand the reasons for the continuing non-politicisation of caste in West Bengal, revealing many factors relating to demography and political economy which don't augur well for caste politics in West Bengal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To better understand whether the transition by Asian countries toward market economies mirrors the path taken in the West, we ask how embedded network ties between equity analysts and the chief executive officers (CEOs) of the firms that they follow in India influence the accuracy of analysts' earnings forecasts. We contrast traditional institutions of caste and regional language with contemporary institutions, such as universities, as the locus of such ties. We posit that CEOs from the postreform generation are more likely to transfer material private information via their school ties, while prereform-generation CEOs favor caste or language ties. Contrasting domestic business groups (BGs) with Western multinational corporations (MNCs) as organizational contexts, we argue that BGs legitimate the transfer of private information along particularistic ties, whereas MNCs mitigate such transfers. Our conceptual framework is supported by analyses that draw on a sample of 1,552 earnings forecasts issued between 2001 and 2010 by 296 equity analysts. Our findings suggest that the embeddedness perspective should be broadened to incorporate the influence of the larger historical social structures within which economic action is embedded, and to view BGs as carriers and repositories that blend modern management practices with particularistic behavioral patterns among top executives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The so-called Indian Renaissance in the nineteenth century was characterized by a reform movement that attempted to rid society of its old orthodoxies regarding caste, class and gender. Women's education, widow re-marriage, equality before God were some of the issues taken up by the leaders in different parts of the country. Yet strangely enough in the creative literature of that period the low caste people and the outcastes are virtually invisible. The situation was not very different in the early decades of the twentieth century. Except for a Telugu novel Mala Palli (1921) by Unnava Lakshminarayana which deals with the Malas, an untouchable community of Andhra Pradesh no novelist in India seems to have focussed on the large section of the dispossessed and exploited people. Premchand's novel Rangbhumi, (Hindi: 1925) was the next attempt made by an Indian writer to write about caste and untouchability questions. Though Sivarama Karanth's Chomanadudi (Kannada: 1933) is another attempt to depict the life of an untouchable family, its English translation was not available till 1978. From that point of view Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable (1935) seems to be a pioneering attempt to give visibility to the silent and shadowy community who maintain cleanliness and health of the upper caste people. The present paper looks into how Indian upper caste writers who were privileged to write in English treated Dalits in their creativity. Taking Mulk Raj Anand's famous novel, Untouchable for detailed analysis the essay raises questions, such as, how do the progressive writers like Mulk Raj Anand treat caste as fictional subject? Why is it so important to talk about caste and untouchability in the first half of the twentieth century?, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The religiously sanctioned Devadasi system in India exemplifies intersectional oppression of gender, caste, and sexuality. Historically, Devadasis, or "servants of God," were women wedded to God who performed temple duties and were considered sacral women with ritual powers. As part of her duties, the Devadasis offer sexual services to her patrons, invariably the economically and socially powerful patriarch/s in society. The Devadasis were not a monolithic community; there were caste-based segregations within the Devadasi community which delineated their social positions. Devadasis were drawn from castes lower in the hierarchy (non-Brahmins) and the Scheduled castes (Dalits). To distinguish the two categories, the Devadasis from the non-Brahmin castes were referred to as Kalavantin/Isai Vellalar/Kalavantulu and those from the Dalit castes were referred to as Jogini/Mathamma; their social and economic status were entirely different. The Devadasis from the non-Brahmin communities performed classical music and dance, while the Dalit Devadasis performed folk dances during temple festivals. Though the Devadasi system was outlawed in 1988, the practice of dedicating young girls as Devadasis continues to be prevalent among the Scheduled castes. This paper argues that the activists who fought for the liberation of the Devadasis from the oppressive system focused mostly on the Devadasis from the non-Brahmin castes, excluding the Devadasis from the Scheduled castes. This paper contextualizes the prevalence of the Devadasi system within the interconnected matrices of caste and gender structures in Hindu society. Drawing on the socio-historical trajectory of the emancipation of Devadasis in Goa, a state in Western India, this paper analyzes the caste hierarchies and social inequities embedded within the Devadasi system. Apart from discussing the legal interventions initiated by the State to abolish the Devadasi system, this paper also analyses the role of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) in the emancipation and empowerment of Dalit Devadasis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cultural and ritual performance of Theyyam in Northern Kerala, considered as a reflection of the war cry against the caste system and oppression, conducts subversion of the social hierarchy. The chosen deity by the performer for a transitory symbolisation expresses the collective outrage of the oppressed and exploited people. This research paper enquires about the anti-structural characteristics exhibited by the performance of Theyyam. In the context of Richard Schechner's performance theory, it attempts to trace the characterisation of Mikhail Bakhtin's carnivalesque, Victor Turner's liminality and social drama in the transitional performance of Theyyam that mostly relies on interim separation and reintegration. The expression of antipathy to the hierarchy in Bakhtinian carnival, the anti-structural emphasis in Turnarian liminality, and the deconstructive-reconstructive stages in social drama elucidate the symbolic delineation of the performance of Theyyam. The analytical findings of the paper derived from the discussion of the three concepts reveal that the performance of Theyyam is rooted in its anti-structural characteristics. The performer is subject to continuous alteration in the identity that intermediates the idiosyncrasy between the deity and the human being. It symbolises the temporal transition from the oppressed to the equivalent status of the dominator that occurs as part of counter-culture, through status reversal and inversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author discusses the use of a list of sexual harassers in Indian academia (LoSHA) on social media as a means to achieve social justice in India. Also cited are the efforts by Dalit queer law student Raya Sarkar to urge campus sexual harassment victims to contribute to LoSHA, and the politics of caste provilege in India.

An essay is presented which explores the ancient Indian dance performance treatise known as the Natyashastra. Topics discussed include the movement patterns and codes of the Indian classical dance which may be attributed to the principles of the Natyashastra, the aesthetic philosophy of the Natyashastra according to Indian classical dance scholar Kapila Vatsyayan, and the link between the caste system in India and the choreographic instructions of the Natyashastra.

The paper undertakes indigenous caste monography of the Gaduliya Lohars (Blacksmiths with carts) of Rajasthan, in light of their historical origin and the present state, they are living in. They are named according to the nomadic lifestyle they have acquired historically, leaving the courts with their patron king. Post-Independent democratic India accorded the community with their association with the legendary past of the nation, during All India Gadi Lohar Sammelan held in 1955, thus glorifying their semi-nomadic existence that followed their self-imposed exile from Chittorgarh. It was an attempt, diligent yet fruitless, to settle this community as 'Ironworkers' of the new Industrial nation; a honeytrap of mobilizing such nomadic communities to use as potential vote banks. Presently, they are considered as 'illegal migrant settlers' in the western and northern states of India; as they can be found residing on the pavements alongside highways. Since Independence, they have been switching between multifarious caste attributions such as Scheduled tribe, OBC (Other Backward Caste), SBC (Special Backward Caste). The paper explores how to confer to space, which is illegal to dwell, is a fundamental development of Settlement that hinders 'Migration', negatively affecting the existence of a community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a half-century, the historiography on Spanish Habsburg rule suggested that the crown envisioned Indies society as best divided into two segregated sociolegal groups: the republic of the Spaniards and the republic of the Indians. This model was popularized by the eminent mid twentieth century Swedish historian Magnus Mörner and has since become a foundational concept in the field. However, using extensive archival evidence, this article suggests that the Mörner Thesis of the Two Republics is flawed. Historicizing sixteenth-century uses of the concept of the republic, it finds that contemporaries conceived of a complex social order in which many political communities such as municipalities and groups of petitioners could overlap within larger meta-republics, such as the Indies republic and the Christian faith-republic. It then turns to subjects' uses of the two republics, noting that this conceptual duality appeared rarely in the petitions of Spanish officials, commoners, Indians, Afro-descendants, and mestizos, and was also rare in royal and viceregal legislation. Moreover, this binary most often served to suggest Spaniards' and Indians' common ground. The article then reflects on other approaches to understanding the Indies' Spanish-Indian binary, the place of non-Spanish, non-Indian vassals within republic-thinking, and the staggering complexity of Indies laws, categories, and social interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a plethora of research on North Korea, understanding and managing the challenges posed by the country have long been complicated with no simple solution to put an end to this decades-long security and economic predicament on the Korean Peninsula. With the potential for international conflict, attention must be given to the converging messages emerging from the scholarly works reviewed in this article: Glyn Ford, Talking to North Korea: Ending the Nuclear Standoff, Van Jackson, On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and the Threat of Nuclear War and William Overholt's collection North Korea: Peace? Nuclear War? These works speak to the need to: take seriously the risk of nuclear war; consider the connectedness of the North's decades-long security and economic reform dilemmas; and to acknowledge that the mistrust that is deeply rooted on all sides must be mitigated to bring peace. These books are published at a critical juncture of increased tensions following a highly publicised but remarkably short-lived effort at a breakthrough on the Korean nuclear issue, Pyongyang's rapidly evolving security posture and its perennial domestic challenges. Each of these volumes provides valuable insights on these challenges for North Korea and internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we introduce the special issue through framing the debate on the role of caste in India's current land wars. We draw attention to how caste consistently mediates land transfers in present day India by pre-empting, undermining, or fuelling processes of social contestation, as well as the ways in which land claims in turn shape realigned or reimagined caste identities. Based on this, we make three main arguments. The first and most obvious one is that in contemporary conflicts over land, caste matters in evolving ways that deserve attention. Second, we argue that caste and land are recursively linked categories that are produced and reproduced in continuous interaction, even as multi-scalar political economies (re)shape them. And third, that different registers of caste are articulated by different social groups in more or less overt ways as they stake often competing claims to land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014, the state of Andhra Pradesh was bifurcated by the Indian government, leaving the truncated state without a capital city. A period of political uncertainty before bifurcation and the announcement of the new capital city created possibilities for land speculation and for the acceleration of the commodification of real estate in different parts of the state. Concentrating on Guntur-Vijayawada in the Coastal Andhra region and Donakonda town close to the Rayalaseema region, this article explores how speculative investments based on political calculations by members of regional elite castes translated into the emergence of competing regional investment zones as possible future choices of the capital city. Through an extended and largely ethnographic study, this article shows how caste politics and regional processes of land speculation led to land transfers without violent struggles between different groups. Rather, the cultural politics of regional differentiation and the economy of anticipation allowed a pragmatic convergence of interests to emerge, where acquisition of agricultural land was followed by silent dispossession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the caste and class dimensions of the local resource politics of conservation displacement. Through long-term study of a conservation displacement site in central India, it interrogates how alliances and rivalries contoured along historical class-caste contestations result in differential patterns of recovery from "green grabbing" and exclusionary conservation. It is argued that contestations within and between subaltern social groups, traditional dominant castes and newly upwardly mobile peasant castes are geared towards cornering resource flows associated with the local welfare/developmental state. Given severely limited avenues of gainful employment for the rural poor in the neo-liberal era, access to the local gatekeeping economy shapes trajectories of accumulation and decline in the context of India's new land wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the political narratives around a two-decade -old process of land acquisition and development in the "global city" Rajarhat, a former rural settlement in the Indian state of West Bengal. These narratives are built against the backdrop of a neoliberal state acting as a corporate facilitator, particularly in matters of land, and the concomitant dispossession. The multifaceted politics of Rajarhat took shape during the erstwhile communist regime in West Bengal, the dichotomy of a self-identified Left state engaged in forceful and violent land acquisition thus forming an interesting paradox. The article also presents evidence against the long -held political myth of caste relations being irrelevant in Bengali politics, by examining the upper-caste -dominated social relations in Rajarhat and the formation of low-level cartels or "syndicates" in the area. In conclusion, the article points to the reinvention and redeployment of caste relations – even in increasingly urban spaces where "hierarchical" caste practices are usually taken to be on the decline – rooted in the duality between land struggles and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adivasi population represents a special case in India's new land wars. Strong individual and community rights to agricultural and forest lands have been enacted for this group based on notions of adivasi identities as primeval, but without linking these to economic and political influence. This article interrogates the adivasi land question seen through a caste lens. It does so via case studies in two states to understand the ways in which adivasi identity can be mobilised for its instrumental value and used to demand land rights. In Andhra Pradesh, the Supreme Court's Samatha Judgement has prevented virtually all private mining activities. In Jharkhand, however, similar legislation is seen to be trumped by the national Coal Bearing Areas Act, as well as by former and current land acquisition acts that allow industrial land claims to take precedence over identity-based ones. Available evidence indicates the challenges involved in bringing support for land rights that are premised on a supposedly unchanging adivasi identity when these rights go against dominant interests. This circumstance serves to highlight the possibilities present in caste analysis to understand the plight of adivasis, despite their usually distinct treatment in scholarly analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anti-Special Economic Zone (SEZ) mobilisation in Haryana failed to generate a mass movement. This is despite the political strength of farmers and their deep resentment of the government's policy to build up land reserves for industrial purposes. This article argues that there are two main reasons for this outcome. First, the state government put in place a series of significant policies to compensate landowners and give them a stake in the industrial project, primarily through payment of an "annuity." Second, the main anti-SEZ movements were led by dominant landowning castes who did not incorporate the concerns of landless labourers and tenant farmers who faced equally or even more dire consequences from the government's land acquisition policy. Moreover, mobilisation relied on traditional caste institutions such as khap panchayats and farmer unions strongly associated with Jats, rather than adopting a more broad-based approach. Entrenched caste animosity and pre-existing conflicts of interest between landed Jats and Dalits, who have traditionally worked as agricultural labourers, further explain the limited scope of the mobilisation among rural groups. The analysis underscores how hierarchical relations shape social movements, define the claims they make and ultimately impact their effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the concepts of orchestration and spectacle to analyse the work of leaders of an anti-dispossession movement in rural West Bengal. It examines what being a movement leader entails and argues for the importance of connections and social relations in the production of both movement leadership and movement spectacles. By introducing a Dalit perspective on a movement that was otherwise led by the local middle-caste peasantry, the article shows how local caste and class relations have been important in defining access to positions of movement leadership; in disconnecting specific Dalit interests from the movement's larger political agenda; and in giving rise to certain forms of internal policing of caste boundaries within the movement. The fact that the ability to cultivate and "connect" to the new political spaces opened by the anti-dispossession movement correlates strongly with historically produced caste and class inequalities calls for greater attention to the internal caste politics of anti-dispossession movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Widespread "land wars" in contemporary India have rekindled older debates over the implications of capitalism for caste, with some arguing that land dispossession for new economy projects may be liberating for Dalits. We assess this argument through comparative ethnographic and survey research into the consequences of dispossession for Dalits in the cases of two Special Economic Zones built during the 2000s. We advance three arguments. The first, methodological, is that approaching this question requires systematically comparing the outcomes of dispossession for Dalits relative to upper castes. The second, based on such an assessment, is that the interaction between exclusionary growth and caste-based agrarian inequalities has in both cases expanded socio-economic inequalities between upper and lower castes and left most dispossessed Dalits worse off in absolute terms. Third, the cases demonstrate important qualitative differences across generally bad outcomes for Dalits, which derive from the combination of project characteristics and pre-existing agrarian inequalities. While demonstrating how the exclusionary growth driving dispossession in contemporary India is generally unpromising for Dalits, we underscore the importance of comparative ethnographic research into the interaction between different forms of dispossession and specific agrarian social structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the northern regions of India, the rising popularity of alternative religious sects, prominently Deras, has sparked much interest in explaining this phenomenon. Current literature, based on case studies of specific Dalit Deras, relates the emergence of these religious sects to caste-based social discrimination and exclusion of lower castes by the mainstream Sikh religion. This article presents a case study of a small town, Patran, in the state of Punjab. Confirming the popularity of these alternative religious sects for upper and lower castes in the town, the article argues that the contemporary attractiveness of Deras needs to be understood also as a result of localised agrarian dynamics and related social pressures engendered by the process of rural to urban and agrarian to non-agrarian transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores mobilization to reduce the deepest inequalities in the two largest democracies, those along caste lines in India and racial lines in the United States. I compare how the groups at the bottom of these ethnic hierarchies—India's former untouchable castes (Dalits) and African Americans—mobilized from the 1940s to the 1970s in pursuit of full citizenship: the franchise, representation, civil rights, and social rights. Experiences in two regions of historically high inequality (the Kaveri and Mississippi Deltas) are compared in their national contexts. Similarities in demographic patterns, group boundaries, socioeconomic relations, regimes, and enfranchisement timing facilitate comparison. Important differences in nationalist and civic discourse, official and popular social classification, and stratification patterns influenced the two groups' mobilizations, enfranchisement, representation, alliances, and relationships with political parties. The nation was imagined to clearly include Dalits earlier in India than to encompass African Americans in the United States. Race was the primary and bipolar official and popular identity axis in the United States, unlike caste in India. African Americans responded by emphasizing racial discourses while Dalit mobilizations foregrounded more porously bordered community visions. These different circumstances enabled more widespread African American mobilization, but offered Dalits more favorable interethnic alliances, party incorporation, and policy accommodation, particularly in historically highly unequal regions. Therefore, group representation and policy benefits increased sooner and more in India than in the United States, especially in regions of historically high group inequality such as the Kaveri and other major river Deltas relative to the Deep South, including Mississippi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown has affected gendered practices within and between different kinds of homes in India. Topics covered include the country's deeply gendered and class-inflected distribution of domestic labor, the starkly different experiences of each class and caste, and the pandemic's effect on migrant workers.

May 2015 witnessed the Dangawas massacre in Rajasthan's Nagaur district, one of the most brutal caste atrocities in recent Indian history, which resulted in the death of five Dalits of the Meghwal caste at the hands of a Jat mob. Across Rajasthan, the violence of Dangawas, which marked the culmination of a decades-long land conflict, has become synonymous with the continuing reality of caste-based violence and the law that is meant to address it: The 1989 SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act. However, Meghwal survivors in Dangawas often articulate scepticism about the ability of law to provide them with a true sense of restitution. Emphasising a desire for social space (jagah), which they map onto the land at the root of the bloodshed, Dangawas' Meghwal survivors are caught in a post-traumatic moment marked by fear of further suffering. The memory of inconceivable violence, which has left them alienated in a divided village, has not only made renewed attempts of assertion, and demands for radical justice temporarily inconceivable, but has also led Dangawas' survivors to ask questions about their own agency and the meaning of sociality in an environment where members of a dominant caste still see themselves as guarantors of economic and social belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses continuities between the discourse of caste in ancient India, the racialization constitutive of the Enlightenment, and a similarly exclusionary, overdetermined conception of worthlessness—the lazy, immoral, deviant minorities—evident in contemporary racism as much as in the abandonment of a global underclass. We argue that the negative marking of a social condition or group as inferior and subhuman (on all kinds of grounds, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual) has been constitutive of the paradigms in which these societies subsist. The practices and project of all that is good is shadowed by this negative, its infectious, abominable presence. Analytically bringing together the politics of the homo sacer with the social psychology of abjection, we argue that such exclusion is as vested in politics and economic interests as in their psychic correspondences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What place does the caste system have in modern India with its globally integrating market economy? The most influential anthropological approaches to caste have tended to emphasize caste as India's traditional religious and ritual order, or (treating such order as a product of the colonial encounter) as shaped politically, especially today by the dynamics of caste-based electoral politics. Less attention has been paid to caste effects in the economy. This article argues that the scholarly framing of caste mirrors a public-policy 'enclosure' of caste in the non-modern realm of religion and 'caste politics', while aligning modernity to the caste-erasing market economy. Village-level fieldwork in South India finds a parallel public narrative of caste either as ritual rank eroded by market relations or as identity politics deflected from everyday economic life. But, locally and nationally, the effects of caste are found to be pervasive in labour markets and the business economy. In the age of the market, caste is a resource, sometimes in the form of a network, its opportunity-hoarding advantages discriminating against others. Dalits are not discriminated by caste as a set of relations separate from economy, but by the very economic and market processes through which they often seek liberation. The caste processes, enclosures, and evasions in post-liberalization India suggest the need to rethink the modernity of caste beyond orientalist and post-colonial frameworks, and consider the presuppositions that shape understanding of an institution, the nature and experience of which are determined by the inequalities and subject positions it produces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the former South Kanara or south coastal Karnataka region, the presence of overlapping languages, mainly Tulu and Kannada, posed prolonged dilemmas in the nineteenth century for the Basel Mission. The choice of language was important for their evangelical work, supported by important language-related activities such as dictionary making, grammar writing and translations. Since language use was intertwined with caste hierarchy, this raised issues over the position of lower castes, mainly Billavas, for the native elites and upper castes. This article argues that the prioritisation of Kannada, and relegation of Tulu to a secondary position, was an outcome not only of missionary perceptions of the larger Kannada context, but also more importantly can be traced back to elite representations regarding the subaltern Tulu culture and lifeworld. As missionary intervention in education and native language use challenged the status quo of social hierarchy among local communities, this sparked efforts by the native elites to reclaim and restore the earlier hierarchy. In the process, the native elite representations of Tulu language and culture became at the same time an effort at dismissal and appropriation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The domestic labour market in India reflects how various classes of women manage their daily lives, whether as employers of domestic workers or as employees. The cultural underpinnings of various intersecting relationships implicated in this scenario have remained underresearched in India. Based on a qualitative study in a specific neighbourhood of New Delhi, this article shows that certain cultural strategies pursued by female employers explain their differential behaviour towards specific groups of maids. Observing that these female employers in Delhi prefer Nepali maids over native Indians, even if the latter are willing to work for lower wages, we set out to analyse why and how these employers evaluate immigrant Nepali maids as sharing 'our' culture, while native Indians are classified as the cultural 'other'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The South Asian subcontinent is characterized by a complex history of human migrations and population interactions. In this study, we used genome-wide data to provide novel insights on the demographic history and population relationships of six Indo-European populations from the Indian State of West Maharashtra. The samples correspond to two castes (Deshastha Brahmins and Kunbi Marathas) and four tribal groups (Kokana, Warli, Bhil and Pawara). We show that tribal groups have had much smaller effective population sizes than castes, and that genetic drift has had a higher impact in tribal populations. We also show clear affinities between the Bhil and Pawara tribes, and to a lesser extent, between the Warli and Kokana tribes. Our comparisons with available modern and ancient DNA datasets from South Asia indicate that the Brahmin caste has higher Ancient Iranian and Steppe pastoralist contributions than the Kunbi Marathas caste. Additionally, in contrast to the two castes, tribal groups have very high Ancient Ancestral South Indian (AASI) contributions. Indo-European tribal groups tend to have higher Steppe contributions than Dravidian tribal groups, providing further support for the hypothesis that Steppe pastoralists were the source of Indo-European languages in South Asia, as well as Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1884, Charles Webb, a European employee of a steam transportation company in Assam, sexually assaulted and killed Sukurmani, a woman who had left Bengal with her family to work on a tea plantation. The district magistrate dismissed most of the charges against Webb, assessing only a modest fine for wrongful confinement, and, though the case was appealed and brought to the attention of the viceroy, ultimately this verdict was upheld. The Webb case, as it became known in the Indian press, galvanized public opinion in India, as discussion of the case overlapped with discussion of the controversial Ilbert Bill of the previous year. This article traces the Webb case as it made its way through the courts and newspapers, arguing that a close study of this case reveals the ways that hierarchies of race, class, caste, and gender were constructed and were manifest in daily life. This article further argues that the treatment of the Webb case by the courts and later by the vernacular press indicates that sexual violence was a central element in nineteenth-century contests over colonial rule in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the BJP in national and state politics is often associated with a representation skewed toward traditional elite groups and the marginalisation of groups associated with other parties, such as minorities and various dominant OBC groups. This article examines the transformation of the sociological composition of the Lok Sabha over time and seeks to assess its elitist character, by providing descriptive statistics on five socio-demographic and economic variables: caste, religion, gender, dynasticism, wealth and occupation. Data suggests that political representation in India has by and large always been skewed toward the elites, but the composition of these elites has changed over time. For instance, the recent surge in the representation of the upper caste in the Lok Sabha pre-dates the rise of the BJP in 2014, and the marginalisation of minorities and women is a long-standing phenomenon. Since 2014 however, the BJP has contributed to enhancing a particular form of elite – those rooted in local and regional business networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The solidarity between socially marginalized groups in India is often compromised, directly or indirectly, by their own internecine complicity with structures and histories of systematic social violence. We look at this problem through a close analysis of the graphic novel Bhimayana, which brings together key events from the life of B. R. Ambedkar—the architect of the Indian Constitution who was born into the "untouchable" Mahar caste—and the artwork of the Gond tribal artists Durgabai and Subhash Vyam. While there is considerable affinity in terms of socioeconomic disadvantages between the tribes and the lower castes of India, these affinities are strained by contradictions that problematize the principle of solidarity. We argue that the intrusion of complicity and guilt into performances of solidarity finally serves to strengthen the political empowerment of these groups by making it possible to acknowledge their implication in the history of social harm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are very few scholarly endeavors that have focused on Pakistan–India partition and their ongoing conflict from an indigenous theoretical lens. A psycho-cultural paradigm has been used in this article to reexamine and reconceptualize the enduring two-Nations theory – a political ideology, which manifests Hindu-Muslim discord in the Indian Subcontinent by construing both communities as distinct nations based on their inherent ethno-religious and civilizational differences. Considering a very complex process of mass conversion, assimilation, and crisscrossing of caste-system between both groups, this article argues that it is theoretically problematic to differentiate between Hindus and Muslims purely on ethno-religious grounds. Given the significant impact of the institution of family on the lives of the Subcontinental people, regardless of their faith – I propose that it can be more explanatory to categorize both groups as competing branches of a joint family, to understand the construction of political ideology of two-Nations theory in familial terms. This article seeks to clarify the theoretical mechanism through which the family-level ideas can shape peoples' worldview, informing the way they perceive abstract concepts such as group-conflict and the nation, thus impacting their political thoughts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers Ambedkar's ideas about the implementation of democracy in India, in the context of the linguistic reorganization of provincial administrative boundaries. In doing so, it looks to emphasize the importance of territorial configurations to Dalit politics during this period and, in particular, the consequences of 'provincialization', which has received little attention within the existing literature. Rethinking space by redrawing administrative territory provided Ambedkar with one potential avenue through which to escape the strictures of Dalits' minority status. In this vision, linguistic reorganization (and partition) were harbingers of greater democratization and potential palliatives to the threat of Hindu majority rule at the centre. In turn, however, Ambedkar simultaneously came to perceive the creation of these new administrative spaces as marking a new form of provincial majoritarianism, despite his best efforts to form alliances with those making such demands. In this sense, the article also seeks to address some of the shared processes behind linguistic reorganization and partition as two related forms of territorial redrawing. In the face of these demands, and the failures of both commensuration and coalition politics, Ambedkar turned to the idea of separate settlements for Dalits, whereby they might themselves come to constitute a majority. Whilst such a novel attempt at separation and resettlement was not ultimately realized, its emergence within Ambedkar's thought at this time points towards its significance in any history of caste and untouchability in twentieth-century South Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Asia is a site of myriad forms of dispossession and displacement. I draw on ethnographic research at an East Bengali dalit refugee camp-site in the suburbs of Calcutta, exploring how past displacements have mediated the refugees' present and how they negotiate continued dislocations engendered by the Indian state. In this article, I pose the following questions: how do mechanisms of prolonged displacement affect lower caste and class groups in the postcolony and how do the displaced groups negotiate it from below? What is the nature of transformation they experience in the patterns of their citizenship/subject position? In exploring conditions of protracted displacement, the article foregrounds the role of strategies of informalisation and grey-spacing through which urban governance functions. While this study identifies dalit refugees to be active agents negotiating myriad forms of dispossession, a point of emphasis remains that they are placed in unequal power relations vis-à-vis the insidious mechanisms of post-colonial governmentality. The continually displaced inhabitants of spaces of 'permanent-temporariness' carry on struggles that are discreet, low-key and non-heroic in nature. The paper further highlights that the sense of belonging of such dwellers of peripheral grey-spaces often strikes a discordant note. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article brings to light the comparison of Dalit writing in Tamil and Marathi. India being one of the fastest developing countries in the world, yet well known for its rigid caste system. This paper will pitch the dark side of history of suppression and how the writers help to heal the scars of subjugation of the Dalit community with special reference to the writers Bama and Urmila. Urmila Pawar, a writer and activist, is a noticeable personality in the Dalit and feminist movements in Marathi language. Her works exhibit social discrimination and the plight of women in the subjugated community. Bama Soosairaj, a teacher and a novelist, identified, as Tamil Dalit feminist is known for her writing on the sufferings of the underprivileged community and the struggle they undergo to shed that identity. The paper also separates the unambiguous realities of dalits, specially the lives of Dalit women and their commendable attempts to upraise socially. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study we use the India Human Development Survey (2011–2012) data and Logit model analysis to investigate how far the affirmative action policy has helped in increasing the chances of representation of eligible individuals from scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, and other backward classes in government jobs in India. Analysis of the data reveals that the reservation policy in government jobs in India has helped in increasing the chances of representation of people from these groups because they have a higher probability of representation in government jobs than upper caste (unreserved) individuals after controlling for individual and household characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction outlines some of the key historiographical debates concerning caste, 'tribe' and criminality, and their relationship to the modern state, in South Asia. Although these social categories have long, complex and often inter-related histories rooted in indigenous and precolonial ideas and institutions, they emerged most forcefully as categories of governance in the legal-political system of the colonial and postcolonial states. These categories remained highly unstable, however. There was a clear disjuncture between forms of 'colonial' knowledge which structured legal categorization and everyday negotiations and contestations of the same. Using the example of India's so-called 'criminal tribes' - the 200 or so communities declared as criminals 'by birth' under the Criminal Tribes Act (1871) during the colonial regime - we consider broader debates over the governing of 'colonial' categories, and subaltern agency and resistance in their making, as a way of interrogating the complex relationship between the 'margins' and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary India, the arena of identity politics and 'reservations' is highly contentious, with groups clamouring for official recognition within the categories of Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe or Other Backward Class. This article sheds new light on the wider processes of inclusion and exclusion among these categories by delineating the contested position of the so-called 'criminal tribes' within this framework. Until the 1920s, these criminalized communities were generally positioned as a separate group alongside 'untouchable' and 'tribal' communities, each of which was considered to have faced particular forms of disadvantage which demanded certain protections and 'uplift'. Between the 1920s and 1950s, however, this distinct status was withdrawn amid debates over the boundaries, purpose and indeed responsibilities of representation within the evolving framework of group rights. While there was continued recognition of their distinct status in debates over definitions of disadvantage (in terms of a shared history of criminalization), this did not translate into official recognition as a separate category of disadvantaged citizen after independence, thereby complicating these communities' ability to access the preferential policies inaugurated by the independent constitution in 1950. The article challenges the idea that these political categories are innate or fixed, and simultaneously historicizes the demands of the denotified (ex-'criminal') and nomadic tribe movement, which today campaigns for a separate constitutional classification within the 'reservations' regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on 'care work' tends to focus on relations between gender and 'care' at the cost of obfuscating caste and class markings that devalue such labour. This article argues that the service work of the contemporary nursing profession, as observed in Kolkata, continues to be devalued, not because it is care work but because it is linked to low-caste/out-caste women who have historically provided nursing care. To counter such stigma, nursing has witnessed a splintering along the lines of 'prestigious' and 'dirty' work. This cleavage, based on historically and socially produced structural inequalities, is supported both by organisational strategies and a privileged section of workers, who deploy 'merit' or cultural capital to close ranks against others. The article examines how women located at the bottom of this hierarchy resist such strategies. What does ritual, banal everyday resistance imply for processes and practices that reproduce organisational inequalities? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the post-1857 context of an earlier plural Dravidian social and political landscape, this article highlights the efforts of Vanniyars during the period 1900–35 in Tamil Nadu to articulate their claims for social and political mobility. Such efforts entailed the process of creating and forming a Vanniyar self-identification within the context of complex forces operating at the larger and emerging national and regional levels at that time. Presenting these Vanniyar enunciations, the article argues against a tendency in scholarship to see pluralisation as a recent phenomenon associated with the post-1980s Tamil politics. It also places the developments in South India within the larger picture of Indians learning to become responsible citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on fieldwork conducted in Kandhamal, Odisha in 2007–08, this article demonstrates how scripts about money, value, and indigeneity are used as exclusionary discourses by development state officials and caste Hindus to portray Indian tribals as failed citizens of the Indian development state. These discourses are used not only as a means of disciplining tribals as indigenous citizens, but also to elide other contradictions within the development state such as corruption, thereby sustaining 'modern development' as a project of perpetual deferral. However, this article also shows how Kandha tribals, in turn, appropriate these scripts to display their understanding of the shifting contours of indigenous citizenship and its mandates for entitlements from the development state and indigenous political agency. In so doing, this article demonstrates how historical discourses of money and indigeneity inform contemporary indigenous claims to citizenship. By attending to these discourses, it argues for indigeneity as a site to observe the folding-back of state power onto itself, as indigenous citizenship reanimates historical constructions of the adivasi as indigene but subverts these constructions by using a language of indigenous entitlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extant literature romanticizes frugality as a lifestyle trait that helps in the spiritual evolution of consumers, which in turn enables them in overcoming the negative consequences of materialism and over-consumption. Extant studies have not paid attention to cultural contexts, such as caste and gender, which could outline the non-volitional enactment of frugality in societies such as India. We draw from the work of the political philosopher Alain Badiou to argue that frugality embodies non-volitional subjectivities and is linked to processes of responsibilization and de-politicization. We engage with layered narratives from three story-sites and conceptualize frugality as a socio-political subjectivity that disenfranchises consumers and normalizes inequality. Our study provides evidence of how consumers are made to adopt frugality to conform to political conservatism and unequal orders of caste and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dalit literature is a kind of literature that evolved after independence. The beginning of Dalit literature has a great historical relevance. Similar literature exploring the lives and the pathetic existence of the marginalised and downtrodden sections exist in other parts of the world as well. Arjun Dangle has defined Dalit literature as one whichfamiliarises the readers 'with the age old caste system and untouchability in India. As we know, Dalits have always been relegated to the marginalised 'other' side of the Indian society; in other words they were completely excluded from the social mainstream. So when they began protesting after centuries of silence, a new kind of literature came to thefore that depicted an assertion of human rights, self esteem, revolt against social oppression, stories of personal and collective suffering, and putforth a vision of a new society sans any discrimination. The word Dalit is not new; it was in use in the 1930s as the Hindi and Marathi translation of 'Depressed classes', a term the British used for the present day Scheduled Castes. The main aim of Dalit literature is the emancipation of the Dalit community. Sharan Kumar Limbale has said: "Dalit literature is exactly that literature which aesthetically captures the trauma, sorrow, embarrassment, humiliation, ridicule and sufferings confronted by the Dalits". Some of the important Dalit writers -whose -writings willfind a place in the resistance literature the world over are: Mahasweta Devi, Namdeo Dhasal, Daya Pawar, Arjun Dangle, Perumal Murugan, D.Gopi, Neerave Patel, Poomani, Basudev Sunani, SachiRautray andMangalRathod. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses research which examined the evolution of work roles of women belonging to the Dheevaras fishing caste in Kerala, India. Topics explored include the well-being and economic status of Dheevara fisherwomen, the wage and gender work participation rates in Kerala compared to other Indian states, and the possible role of Hindu religious ideology to the withdrawal of Dheevara women from fish marketing.

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]