Caste In Everyday Life

This edited volume brings together a range of scholars to reflect on the varied ways in which caste is manifested and experienced in social life. Each chapter draws on different methods and approaches but all consider lived experiences and experiential narrations. Considering Guru and Sarukkai’s path-breaking work on ‘Experience, Caste and the Everyday Social’ (2019), this volume applies the insights of the theories to multiple settings, issues and communities. Unique to this volume, Brahmin and other dominant castes' experiences are considered, rather than simply focusing on the lives of oppressed castes (Dalits). Analysis of cross-caste friendships or romances and marriages, furthermore, brings out the intimate and ingrained aspects of caste. Taken together, therefore, the contributions in this volume offer rich insights into caste and its consciousness within the framework of everyday experiences.

Now updated: An “eminently readable, highly engaging” anthology about the lives of ordinary citizens in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka (Margaret Mills, Ohio State University). For the second edition of this popular textbook, readings have been updated and new essays added. The result is a timely collection that explores key themes in understanding the region, including gender, caste, class, religion, globalization, economic liberalization, nationalism, and emerging modernities. New readings focus attention on the experiences of the middle classes, migrant workers, and IT professionals, and on media, consumerism, and youth culture. Clear and engaging writing makes this text particularly valuable for general and student readers, while the range of new and classic scholarship provides a useful resource for specialists.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions—now with a new Afterword by the author. #1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, O: The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, New York Post, The New York Public Library, Fortune, Smithsonian Magazine, Marie Claire, Slate, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews Winner of the Carl Sandberg Literary Award • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • National Book Award Longlist • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist • PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist • PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Longlist • Kirkus Prize Finalist “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.” In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully written narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their outcasting of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity. Original and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.

The phenomenon of caste has probably aroused more controversy than any other aspect of Indian life and thought. Susan Bayly's cogent and sophisticated analysis explores the emergence of the ideas, experiences and practices which gave rise to the so-called 'caste society' from the pre-colonial period to the end of the twentieth century. Using an historical and anthropological approach, she frames her analysis within the context of India's dynamic economic and social order, interpreting caste not as an essence of Indian culture and civilization, but rather as a contingent and variable response to the changes that occurred in the subcontinent's political landscape through the colonial conquest. The idea of caste in relation to Western and Indian 'orientalist' thought is also explored.

Caste in Life: Experiencing Inequalities comprises real-life stories of caste-based social practices in India, capturing a complex social reality. The contributors write here about the role caste has played in their lives: Was it a source of comfort? An obstacle? Or an irritant? The reader will find the everyday reality of caste in its resilience and also the way it is changing with an India that is changing faster than anybody can capture the change.

"A history of the entwinement of everyday police and caste authority in the colonial and postcolonial Tamil countryside in twentieth-century south India"--

Experience, Caste, and the Everyday Social offers a sustained argument that the social is experienced in various ways, through the senses as well as through conceptualizations such as self, time, and friendship. By looking at the experiences of everyday life in societies like India, it attempts to understand how different socialities are formed and sustained. It offers new insights on themes such as the ontology of the social, the way the social is experienced, the nature of social that operates in the world as invisible authority, along with the creation of notions such as social self and social time. Endorsing the concept of ‘Maitri’, signifying ethical relationship among multiple social entities, the book offers a distinct theory of the social supported by ample empirical observations.

First published in 1932, Indian Caste Customs is an explication on how caste system operates in everyday life. What are its injunctions and prohibitions? What actions constitute offences against its moral law and social honour? What are the means by which breaches of that code are adjudicated? What are the penalties inflicted on offenders? The book attempts to answer these questions as well as discuss the merits and demerits of the caste system in India. This book will be of interest to students of history, sociology, anthropology and South Asian studies.