Rethinking Caste And Resistance In India

This book is a collection of essays by prominent thinkers on the historist and humanist transcendence of the caste system such that an authentic democracy can bloom in India. It locates caste as not only a social problem, but a moral evil and schizophrenia affecting India civilization. Besides reflecting on Jotiba Phule, Karl Marx, and B.R. Ambedkar, this book also traverses through Nietzschean genealogy, communalism in colonial India, the need for radical education to fulfil the democratic revolution, the literature of Triveni Sangh, questions of social exclusion and inequality, the story of Eklavya in the Mahabharata and the asking of pertinent questions to the Indian left. This book is co-published with Aakar Books. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)

In recent years exclusionary policies of the Indian state have raised questions concerning social harmony and economic progress. During the last few decades the emergence of identity politics has given new lease of life to exclusionary practices in the country. Castes, communities and ethnic groups have re-emerged in almost every sphere of social life. This book analyses different aspects of social exclusion in contemporary India. Divided into three sections – 1. New Forms of Inclusion and Exclusion in Contemporary India; 2. Religious Identities and Dalits; 3. Ethnicity and Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion in the North-eastern Frontier – the book shows that a shift has taken place in the discourse on inclusion and exclusion. Chapters by experts in their fields explore issues of inclusion and exclusion that merit special attention such as dalit identity, ethnicity, territoriality and minorities. Authors raise questions about developmental programmes of the state aimed at making India more inclusive and discuss development projects initiated to alleviate socio-economic conditions of the urban poor in the cities. As far as North-east region is concerned, the authors argue that there is a tendency to highlight the homogenizing nature of the Indian culture by stressing one history, one language, one social ethos. Diversity is hardly accepted as a social reality, which has adversely affected the inclusive nature of the state. Against this development the final part of the book looks at questions regarding ethnic minorities in the northeast. Offering new insights into the debate surrounding social exclusion in contemporary India, this book will be of interest to academics studying anthropology, sociology, politics and South Asian Studies.

Through the analytic of racialization, the chapters in this book argue that social difference in India is reproduced and buttressed through casteist, racist, colonial, and Hindu nationalist projects that generate tacit or explicit consent for continued violence against racialized others. At the same time, the chapters look transnationally, examining how regional forms of difference marked by caste and tribe, for instance, have long articulated with historical forms of global racial capitalism. Ultimately, this book attends to the narratives and experiences of those living at the margins, who strategically deploy racial and antiracist concepts to build international solidarity movements beyond the narrow confines of the Indian nation-state. In so doing, it hopes to derive insights on the necessity of transnational translations, even as it directs renewed attention to the specificity of regional hierarchies that shape everyday life and death in India. This book is a significant new contribution to addressing fundamental questions of caste, race, and religious politics in India and will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of Sociology, Politics, Geography, History and Anthropology. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

This important volume provides an alternative perspective on caste. It demonstrates that the traditional view of caste—as a single hierarchy, with Brahmins at the top and the untouchable castes at the bottom—is no longer valid. From politics to gender to economic interaction, the contributors reveal how the erstwhile single, pure hierarchical order is constantly being questioned and weakened./-//-/The essays in this volume argue for a different conceptualisation of caste—one that would take into account the need for caste assertion and dignity as well as notions of hierarchy. The contributors show that while pride in one’s caste identity is an important feature of the caste order, this is not incompatible with contesting notions of hierarchy. Caste is now better seen in terms, first, of discrete identities and then in terms of multiple and contesting hierarchies. Using contemporary experiences, this exciting volume reflects on received wisdom concerning theories of caste and provides an entirely fresh perspective.

This book presents a comprehensive account of the socio-political thought of prominent modern Indian thinkers. It offers a clear understanding of the basic concepts and their contributions on contemporary issues. Key features: Explores the nature, scope, relevance, context, and theoretical approaches of modern Indian thought and overviews its development through an in-depth study of the lives and ideas of major thinkers. Examines critical themes such as nationalism, swaraj, democracy and state, liberalism, revolution, socialism, constitutionalism, secularism, satyāgraha, swadeshi, nationbuilding, humanism, ethics in politics, democratic decentralisation, religion and politics, social transformation and emancipation, and social and gender justice under sections on liberal-reformist, moderate-Gandhian, and leftist-socialist thought. Brings together insightful essays on Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Dayānanda Saraswati, Ramakrishna Paramhansa, Pandita Ramabai, Periyar E. V. Ramasamy, Jyotirao Govindrao Phule, Babasaheb Ambedkar, Dadabhai Naoroji, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose, Ram Manohar Lohia, Babu Jagjivan Ram, Vinoba Bhave, Acharya Narendra Deva, Manabendra Nath Roy, and Jayaprakash Narayan. Traces different perspectives on the way India’s composite cultures, traditions, and conditions inf luenced the evolution of their thought and legacy. With its accessible style, this book will be useful to teachers, students, and scholars of political science, modern Indian political thought, modern Indian history, and political philosophy. It will also interest those associated with exclusion studies, political sociology, sociology, and South Asian studies.

The book The Magical Lantern is a collection of essays on Marxist philosophy. It is based on the philosophical reflection on Marx’s idea of phantasmagoria as the 'magical lantern' that creates eerie images, an idea that is central to Marx’s theory of modern capitalist societies. It talks of the importance of Marx’s philosophy and its application in concrete politics, especially in creating socialist humanist philosophy of human emancipation where global societies can be emancipated from the phantasmagorias that haunt them, thus able to transcend global capitalism which is in terminal and permanent crisis. It then critiques the rise of authoritarian regimes emerging all over the world and seeks to explain the rise of global totalitarianism. But it claims that the answer to authoritarianism is not liberalism since liberalism is part of the late imperialism in permanent crisis as well as it involves what Slavoj Žižek calls the Denkverbot ('the prohibition against thinking') and thus involves the return of the eerie phantasmagoria that does not allow critical thinking. However, the critique of liberalism does not relapse into orthodox Marxism, since this book argues that in the genre of orthodox Marxism the ghosts of Stalin and Mao with their own authoritarianism haunt philosophies of human emancipation. While Stalin is portrayed as a brutal counter-revolutionary who destroyed Marxism by evoking Marxism itself, Mao is presented as the alchemist of the revolution and a peculiar form of Stalinism in rebellion against Stalinism itself! The chapters in this book were originally published in Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory.

This book looks at movements of communities which formed the lower and middle rungs of society in medieval and early colonial India. It presents migration, mobility and memories from a specifically Indian perspective, breaking away from previous Eurocentric studies. The essays in the volume focus on labour, peasant and craft migrations, and in fleshing out the causes and trajectories taken by these communities, they speak to each other by addressing similar issues as well as documenting varying responses to analogous situations.A fascinating history of migrations of people from below, the volume adopts a trans-disciplinary approach and uses inscriptions, official records, and literary texts along with community narratives and folk tradition. This will be of great interest to scholars and students of migration and diaspora studies, medieval and modern South Asian history, social anthropology and subaltern studies.

“This is a powerful and exciting work. Mosse has produced a work of scholarship that is lively and readable without any loss of subtlety and sophistication. It is a ground-breaking study, of critical importance to the ways we understand religious nationalism and the anthropology of postcolonial experience.”—Susan Bayly, author of Asian Voices in a Postcolonial Age