Caste And Democratic Politics In India

Author : Ghanshyam Shah
Publisher : Anthem Press
Page : 373 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : History
ISBN : 9781843310853

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Caste and Democratic Politics in India by Ghanshyam Shah Pdf

The Indian constitution seeks to prevent the perpetuation of caste and build a casteless social system. But in over half a century since Indian independence, this has not been achieved and does not seem likely in the near future. Therefore, no understanding of Indian politics is possible without a thorough understanding of the complexities of the caste system. The aim of this four-part book is to bring about such an understanding. It begins by examining the various meanings attached to the notion of caste. The essay and book extracts in this first section include classic writings on caste such as those by G S Ghurye, Louis Dumont, Mahatma Gandhi and B R Ambedkar. The second part consists of essays that demonstrate the relationship between caste and power. The third part comprises material that investigates caste and various Indian political practices on the ground. The fourth, on caste and social transformation, includes discussion on one of the most salient topics in contemporary Indian politics, namely, the issue of reservations for socially backward castes.

Author : Christophe Jaffrelot
Publisher : Primus Books
Page : 835 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2010
Category : History
ISBN : 9789380607047

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Religion, Caste, and Politics in India by Christophe Jaffrelot Pdf

Following independence, the Nehruvian approach to socialism in India rested on three pillars: secularism and democracy in the political domain, state intervention in the economy, and diplomatic non-alignment mitigated by pro-Soviet leanings after the 1960s. These features defined a distinct "Indian model," if not the country's political identity. From this starting point, Christophe Jaffrelot traces the transformation of India throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly the 1980s and 90s. The world's largest democracy has sustained itself by embracing not only the vernacular politicians of linguistic states, but also Dalits and "Other Backward Classes," or OBCs. The simultaneous--and related--rise of Hindu nationalism has put minorities--and secularism--on the defensive. In many ways the rule of law has been placed on trial as well. The liberalization of the economy has resulted in growth, yet not necessarily development, and India has acquired a new global status, becoming an emerging power intent on political and economic partnerships with Asia and the West. The traditional Nehruvian system is giving way to a less cohesive though more active India, a country that has become what it is against all odds. Jaffrelot maps this tumultuous journey, exploring the role of religion, caste, and politics in determining the fabric of a modern democratic state.

Author : Lucia Michelutti
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2020-11-29
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781000084009

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The Vernacularisation of Democracy by Lucia Michelutti Pdf

The book is an ethnographic exploration of how ‘democracy’ takes social and cultural roots in India and in the process shapes the nature of popular politics. It centres on a historically marginalised caste who in recent years has become one of the most assertive and politically powerful communities in North India: the Yadavs. The Vernacularisation of Democracy is a vivid account of how Indian popular democracy works on the ground. Challenging conventional theories of democratisation the book shows how the political upsurge of 'the lower orders' is situated within a wider process of the vernacularisation of democratic politics, referring to the ways in which values and practices of democracy become embedded in particular cultural and social practices, and in the process become entrenched in the consciousness of ordinary people. During the 1990s, Indian democracy witnessed an upsurge in the political participation of lower castes/communities and the emergence of political leaders from humble social backgrounds who present themselves as promoters of social justice for underprivileged communities. Drawing on a large body of archival and ethnographic material the author shows how the analysis of local idioms of caste, kinship, kingship, popular religion, ‘the past’ and politics (‘the vernacular’) inform popular perceptions of the political world and of how the democratic process shapes in turn ‘the vernacular’. This line of enquiry provides a novel framework to understand the unique experience of Indian democracy as well as democratic politics and its meaning in other contemporary post-colonial states. Using as a case study the political ethnography of a powerful northern Indian caste (the Yadavs) and combining ethnographic material with colonial and post-colonial history the book examines the unique experience of Indian popular democracy and provides a framework to analyse popular politics in other parts of the world. The book fills

Author : Rajni Kothari
Publisher : Asia Book Corporation of America
Page : 394 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 1970
Category : Political Science
ISBN : UCAL:B3445481

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Caste in Indian Politics by Rajni Kothari Pdf

Author : Jagpal Singh
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 310 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2020-10-07
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000196061

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Caste, State and Society by Jagpal Singh Pdf

This book examines the politics of social, cultural and political recognition of caste groups in North India. It explores the factors that make some castes politically influential, while others continue to remain socially and economically marginalized. The author situates these groups within democracy and utilizes a multicultural framework to understand why and when various castes have sought to achieve recognition and redistributive justice; to what extent different castes have been able to achieve these goals; and how civil society has engaged with these issues. Unlike dominant discourses on caste and democracy, which give primacy to electoral/procedural democracy over the substantive one, this book views the relationship between castes and the state in both dimensions of democracy. An important addition to the study of caste politics in India, the volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of social exclusion, development studies, minority studies, sociology and social policy, politics, and South Asian studies. It will also be of importance to politicians, policy makers, and civil society activists.

Author : Christophe Jaffrelot,Sanjay Kumar
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2012-05-04
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781136516627

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Rise of the Plebeians? by Christophe Jaffrelot,Sanjay Kumar Pdf

For decades, India has been a conservative democracy governed by the upper caste notables coming from the urban bourgeoisie, the landowning aristocracy and the intelligentsia. The democratisation of the ‘world’s largest democracy’ started with the rise of peasants’ parties and the politicisation of the lower castes who voted their own representatives to power as soon as they emancipated themselves from the elite’s domination. In Indian state politics, caste plays a major role and this book successfully studies how this caste-based social diversity gets translated into politics. This is the first comprehensive study of the sociological profile of Indian political personnel at the state level. It examines the individual trajectory of 16 states, from the 1950s to 2000s, according to one dominant parameter—the evolution of the caste background of their elected representatives known as Members of the Legislative Assembly, or MLAs. The study also takes into account other variables like occupation, gender, age and education.

Author : Jeffrey Witsoe
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 254 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2013-11-05
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780226063508

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Democracy against Development by Jeffrey Witsoe Pdf

Hidden behind the much-touted success story of India’s emergence as an economic superpower is another, far more complex narrative of the nation’s recent history, one in which economic development is frequently countered by profoundly unsettling, and often violent, political movements. In Democracy against Development, Jeffrey Witsoe investigates this counter-narrative, uncovering an antagonistic relationship between recent democratic mobilization and development-oriented governance in India. Witsoe looks at the history of colonialism in India and its role in both shaping modern caste identities and linking locally powerful caste groups to state institutions, which has effectively created a postcolonial patronage state. He then looks at the rise of lower-caste politics in one of India’s poorest and most populous states, Bihar, showing how this increase in democratic participation has radically threatened the patronage state by systematically weakening its institutions and disrupting its development projects. By depicting democracy and development as they truly are in India—in tension—Witsoe reveals crucial new empirical and theoretical insights about the long-term trajectory of democratization in the larger postcolonial world.

Author : Christophe Jaffrelot
Publisher : Orient Blackswan
Page : 524 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Caste
ISBN : 8178240807

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India's Silent Revolution by Christophe Jaffrelot Pdf

A Useful Work, Summerizing, Synthesizing And Analysing A Vast Amount Material To Demonstrate The Extent To Which The Transformations Of Caste Politics Have Led To Fundamental And Systematic Changes In The Indian Political System. Covers Bjp, Bsp Etc.

Author : Kavalam Madhava Panikkar
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 42 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : Caste
ISBN : STANFORD:36105121950260

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Caste and Democracy & Prospects of Democracy in India by Kavalam Madhava Panikkar Pdf

Author : Susan Bayly
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 448 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2001-02-22
Category : History
ISBN : 0521798426

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Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age by Susan Bayly Pdf

One of the most powerful statements ever written on the subject of caste in India.

Author : Anagha Ingole
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 198 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2021-05-17
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9789811612756

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Caste Panchayats and Caste Politics in India by Anagha Ingole Pdf

The book refutes the dominant understanding about caste panchayats as mere dispute resolution bodies that are vestiges of the past. In tracing the long career and evolution of intra-caste governance from 300 BC to the present, it challenges several orthodoxies in the caste scholarship. Most prominently, it questions the assumptions of modernization theory that became internalized in the very definition of caste-based political organisations as caste became a subject of study in politics in the 1960s and 70s. In doing this, the book reflects in some detail on the uncomfortable question of the persistence of caste-based conservatism despite the current dominance, so to say, of caste-based democratization in the Indian polity. It tries to make visible the limitations of ‘caste politics from below’, as it is being imagined today, making a plea for a radical re-imagination of caste as an identity that does not require a self-perpetuation of the primordial aspects of caste to purse the opportunities offered by modern democracy, but one that can facilitate the empowerment of caste through the pursuit of the ameliorations on offer as well as the annihilation of caste, as eventually mutual goals.

Author : Anupama Rao
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 416 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2009-10-13
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780520943377

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The Caste Question by Anupama Rao Pdf

This innovative work of historical anthropology explores how India's Dalits, or ex-untouchables, transformed themselves from stigmatized subjects into citizens. Anupama Rao's account challenges standard thinking on caste as either a vestige of precolonial society or an artifact of colonial governance. Focusing on western India in the colonial and postcolonial periods, she shines a light on South Asian historiography and on ongoing caste discrimination, to show how persons without rights came to possess them and how Dalit struggles led to the transformation of such terms of colonial liberalism as rights, equality, and personhood. Extending into the present, the ethnographic analyses of The Caste Question reveal the dynamics of an Indian democracy distinguished not by overcoming caste, but by new forms of violence and new means of regulating caste.

Author : Rajni Kothari
Publisher : Orient Blackswan
Page : 488 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 1970
Category : India
ISBN : 8125000720

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Politics in India by Rajni Kothari Pdf

Acclaimed to be by far the most sophisticated general study on Indian politics. Politics in India unfolds, here with insight and acumen and the vastness and confusion of the Indian political scene is elaborately discussed. This book is the first comprehensive treatment of the Indian political system examined from different vantage points and drawing together the contribution of various disciplines into a common framework.

Author : Rajni Kothari
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 380 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 1970
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 0391019635

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Caste in Indian Politics by Rajni Kothari Pdf

Author : Satendra Kumar
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 138 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2022-09-21
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000684315

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Popular Democracy and the Politics of Caste by Satendra Kumar Pdf

This book examines the intersection of caste and politics in North India and highlights its contribution to the anthropological study of democracy. It argues that the long-term process of internalization of democracy within the caste body has fundamentally changed the workings of the Indian party system. Drawing on an in-depth ethnographic case study of the Gujjars, a marginalized caste group in India, the book presents a systematic analysis of the political mobilization and culture of political participation of the Other Backward Classes to understand why and how certain caste groups have been more successful in politics than others. It discusses various key themes such as popular democracy and the politics of caste, regional politics and territoriality, myth, legends and heroes in the Gujjar community, the transition from lineage deities to caste deity, and the (re)formation of caste-community identity. It reveals the symbiotic relationships between religion and caste and shows how religion shapes contemporary caste. The book makes an important contribution to the study of marginalised groups and their politicization and fills a significant gap in the political sociology of India. It will be useful for scholars and researchers of sociology, history, exclusion studies, Dalit studies, political studies, history, social anthropology, and South Asian studies.