Notes on Editors and Contributors
EDITORS:
Surinder S. Jodhka is a Professor of Sociology at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He researches on social inequalities, caste, and its articulation in contemporary India, rural/agrarian change, and the political sociology of community identities. His recent publications include India’s Villages in the 21st Century: Revisits and Revisions (co-edited with Edward Simpson, OUP, 2019); Mapping the Elite: Power, Privilege, and Inequality (co-edited with Jules Naudet, OUP, 2019); A Handbook of Rural India (Orient Blackswan, 2018); Contested Hierarchies, Persisting Influence: Caste and Power in Twenty-First Century India (co-edited with James Manor, Orient Blackswan, 2018); Inequality in Capitalist Societies (co-authored with Boike Rehbien and Jesse Souza, Routledge, 2018); The Indian Middle-Class (co-authored with Aseem Prakash, OUP, 2016); Caste in Contemporary India (Routledge, 2015/2018); Caste: Oxford India Short Introductions (OUP, 2012). He is among the first recipients of the ICSSR-Amartya Sen Award for Distinguished Social Scientists, for the year 2012.
Jules Naudet is a CNRS Associate Research Professor at the Centre for South-Asian and Himalayan Studies (CESAH) at EHESS, Paris, an Associate Researcher at the Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi, and a 2021–2022 CASBS Fellow at Stanford University. His earlier work looked at upward social mobility in India, the US, and France and he is the author of Stepping into the Elite (OUP, 2018), a book that revisits the classical question of the experience of moving from one class to another. He also co-edited Justifier l’ordre social with Christophe Jaffrelot (University Press of France, 2013) and is the co-author, with Serge Paugam, Bruno Cousin, and Camila Giorgetti, of Ce que les riches pensent des pauvres (Le Seuil, 2017), a comparative analysis of the representations of the poor by the inhabitants of upper-class neighbourhoods in Paris, Delhi, and São Paulo. Naudet holds several editorial positions. He is a member of the editorial board of SAMAJ (South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal) as well as the co-editor-in-chief of La Vie des Idées/ Books & Ideas, an online journal hosted by the Collège de France. Along with Surinder Jodhka, he co-edits the book series Exploring India’s Elite. He also co-organizes the research seminar ‘Sociology of Inequalities in India’ at the EHESS, in Paris (along with Joël Cabalion, Mathieu Ferry, Odile Henry, Clémence Jullien, and Olivier Roueff). Naudet currently devotes his research to the study of the Indian and French economic elites.
CONTRIBUTORS
Janaki Abraham is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University. Her research interests include the study of kinship, gender and caste, visual anthropology, sexual harassment, and gender and
space, particularly the study of towns. She is the co-editor, with Sanjay Srivastava and Yasmeen Arif, of Critical Themes in Indian Sociology (SAGE, 2019) and the author of several articles in journals and edited books. From 2012 to 2016, she was co-editor of the Book Reviews section of the journal Contributions to Indian Sociology
S. Anandhi is a Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India. She is a historian with research interests in political movements and social processes in colonial and postcolonial Tamil Nadu, India. She has contributed several articles on caste, gender, and sexual politics in the Dravidian movement and on Dalit Women’s Struggles. Her recent publications include Rethinking Social Justice (co-edited, Orient Blackswan, 2020); and Dalit Women: Vanguard of an Alternative Politics (coedited, Routledge, London and New York, South Asia edition in India, 2017).
Sarbani Bandyopadhyay teaches sociology in St. Xavier’s College (autonomous) Kolkata. She has a PhD from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay. Her PhD thesis is titled ‘The Lives of Caste among the Bengali Middle Class: A Study of the Contemporary’. She has published a couple of papers from her thesis and presented at several international conferences. Currently she is working on the intersections of the caste and the Muslim questions in post-Partition West Bengal.
Gautam Bhatia graduated from the National Law School of India University. He has BCL and MPhil degrees from the University of Oxford and an LLM from Yale Law School. His essays have appeared in the Oxford Handbook for the Indian Constitution, Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law, and in journals such as Constellations and Global Constitutionalism. He has published three books—Offend, Shock, or Disturb: Freedom of Speech under the Indian Constitution, The Transformative Constitution: A Radical Biography in Nine Acts, and a novel, The Wall. As a lawyer, he has been part of legal teams involved in contemporary constitutional cases such as the challenge to criminal defamation, the nine-judge bench right to privacy case, the Section 377 challenge, and the Aadhaar challenge. His work has been cited thrice by the Indian Supreme Court, and once by the High Court of Kerala. He founded and writes the Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy Blog (http://indconlawphil.wordpress.com).
Guilhem Cassan is a Professor of Economics at the University of Namur and Fellow of the CEPR. His work revolves around the study of the role of identity—caste and gender—in economics behaviour as well as the study of the political economy of inequality, both in history and in contemporary times. His research has notably been published in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and the Journal of Development Economics. Mathieu Claveyrolas is an Anthropologist at the CNRS, Paris and Member of the Center for South-Asian Studies (EHESS/CNRS). He specializes in Hinduism through ethnographic methods focusing on temples, actors, and practices. He first studied Indian Hinduism (in Varanasi) before turning to Mauritian, Creole, Hinduism, and, more recently, Guyanese Hinduism in New York City. Among his main publications are Quand le temple prend vie. Atmosphère et dévotion à Bénarès (2003), Quand l’hindouisme est
créole. Plantation et indianité à l’île Maurice (2017), Les territoires du religieux dans les mondes indiens (edited, 2016), and Les Hindous, les Autres et l’Ailleurs (edited, 2021).
Karthikeyan Damodaran is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Goettingen. He has previously held posts at Goettingen and Jain (deemed-to-be) University, Bangalore. His research interests include Dalit politics, caste, commemorations, Urban Cultures, and Tamil Cinema. He is the author of numerous articles on Dalit politics and Tamil cinema.
Leigh Denault is a Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Churchill College, Cambridge University. Her first monograph focused on the social, cultural, and legal history of the family in colonial North India at the University of Cambridge (Publicising Family in Colonial North India, c. 1780–1930, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, 2009). Her current research focuses on conceptions of social welfare in 20th-century India. She is also working on a digital history project mapping newspaper networks and debates about press freedom across mid-19th-century India.
Ashwini Deshpande is a Professor of Economics, and Founding Director of Centre for Economic Data and Analysis at Ashoka University, India. Her PhD and early publications have been on the international debt crisis of the 1980s. Subsequently, she has been working on the economics of discrimination and affirmative action, with a focus on caste and gender in India. She has published extensively in leading scholarly journals. She is the author of Grammar of Caste: Economic Discrimination in Contemporary India (OUP, hardcover 2011 and paperback 2017); and Affirmative Action in India (OUP, Oxford India Short Introductions series, 2013). She received the EXIM Bank award for outstanding dissertation (now called the IERA Award) in 1994, and the VKRV Rao Award for Indian economists under 45 in 2007.
Rajeshwari Deshpande is a Professor of Politics at the Savitribai Phule Pune University. She was the ICCR Visiting Professor (Rajiv Gandhi Chair in Contemporary Indian Studies) at the University of Technology, Sydney, and UKIERI Visiting Fellow at King’s India Institute, London. Her research interests are in areas such as intellectual traditions of Maharashtra, politics of the urban poor, urban caste-class realities, women’s politics, and politics and policies related to social welfare. Her recent publications include Last Fortress of Congress Dominance: Maharashtra since the 1990s (with Suhas Palshikar, SAGE, 2021), Gandhinchya Shodhat Javdekar (Marathi-Javdekar in search of Gandhi, Samkaleen Prakashan, 2019), Politics of Welfare: Comparisons across Indian States (edited, with Louise Tillin and KK Kailash, OUP, 2015).
Martin Fuchs is trained in Sociology and Anthropology. He is Professor of Indian Religious History at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt, Germany. He is also a member and temporarily Director of the M.S. Merian—R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences ‘Metamorphoses of the Political’ (ICAS:MP) in Delhi, India. He has published books and articles on Max Weber, Louis Dumont, B. R. Ambedkar, Indian social movements, religious individualization (bhakti), Indian modernity, urban poor
(Mumbai), reflexive anthropology, ethnographic representation, intercultural translation, and comparison.
David N. Gellner is a Professor of Social Anthropology and a Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford. He has worked on religion, ethnicity, class, politics, activism, and borderlands in Nepal, and occasionally over the border in eastern UP, since the 1980s. Among his many publications are Rebuilding Buddhism: The Theravada Movement in Twentieth-Century Nepal (Harvard University Press, 2005), Global Nepalis: Religion, Culture, and Community in a New and Old Diaspora (OUP, 2018), ‘Masters of Hybridity: How Activists Reshaped Nepali Society’ in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2019), and ‘Nepali Dalits in Transition’ in a special issue of Contributions to Nepalese Studies (2019).
Hugo Gorringe is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and the Co-Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on the interplay between caste, politics, and Dalit movements in Tamil Nadu. He is author of Untouchable Citizens (SAGE, 2005) and Panthers in Parliament: Dalits, Caste and Political Power in South India (OUP, 2017), as well as numerous articles and chapters on identity, violence, space, caste, and politics.
Eva-Maria Hardtmann is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Her research areas include social movements, citizenship, transnationalism, gender, and power relations. She specializes in South Asia and her fieldwork has been carried out mainly in northern India, but also among immigrated Dalit activists in Great Britain, in relation to the U.N. and among Dalit activists in the Global Justice Movement. Her writings include the ethnographies Dalit Movement in India: Local Practices, Global Connections (OUP, 2009) and South Asian Activists in the Global Justice Movement (OUP, 2017).
Zoe E. Headley is a CNRS Associate Research Professor and Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at EHESS, Paris.
Christophe Jaffrelot is Director of Research at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS in Paris, Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s College London, and a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was elected President of the French Association of Political Science in July 2020. He is the author of numerous books, including Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy (2021), Hindu Nationalism: A Reader (2007), and India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India (2003).
Kalpana Kannabiran is a Distinguished Professor at the Council for Social Development. Her work focuses on the intersections of sociology, law, gender studies, and social movements. She is a co-founder of Asmita Resource Centre for Women, Secunderabad. She has taught in NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad and was the Director of the Council for Social Development, Hyderabad. She is the author of Tools of Justice: Non-Discrimination and the Indian Constitution (2012), co-author of Gender
Regimes and the Politics of Privacy: A Feminist Re-Reading of Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2021), and author of Law, Justice and Human Rights in India: Short Reflections (2021). She was a recipient of the VKRV Rao Prize for Social Science Research in 2003, and has also received the Amartya Sen Award for Distinguished Social Scientists in 2012, for her work in the field of law.
Pushpesh Kumar teaches sociology at the University of Hyderabad. He has written extensively on gender and sexuality issues. He has recently published an edited volume entitled Sexuality, Abjection and Queer Existence in Contemporary India (Routledge, 2022). He also serves on the international advisory committee of the Community Development Journal (OUP).
George Kunnath is a Research Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute, LSE. Kunnath received his PhD in Social Anthropology from SOAS, University of London. His work focuses on caste and class relations; relationality of inequality, conflict, and development, and research ethics. Kunnath has published his research in Current Anthropology, Journal of Peasant Studies, and Dialectical Anthropology, among others. His book Rebels from the Mud Houses: Dalits and the Making of the Maoist Revolution in Bihar (Social Science Press, 2012; Routledge, 2017) discusses Dalit agency and the Maoist movement in the eastern Indian state of Bihar.
Roland Lardinois sociologist is a Senior and a Research Fellow emeritus at the French National Center for Scientific Research, Paris. His field of research deals, on the one hand, with modern and contemporary India, in particular the sociology of engineers and, on the other hand, on the history of Indian studies in France. He has published Scholars and Prophets: Sociology of India in France in the 19th–20th centuries, translated from the French by Renuka George (Social Science Press, 2013), and edited, in collaboration with Charles Gadéa, Les mondes de l’ingénieur en Inde xixe–xxie siècle, Paris, Classiques Garnier (Classiques Garnier, 2022).
Joel Lee is the author of Deceptive Majority: Dalits, Hinduism, and Underground Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He teaches anthropology at Williams College in Massachusetts.
Julien Levesque is currently a Senior Teaching and Research Assistant in Indian Studies and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Indian Studies, Asien-Orient Institut, University of Zürich. He has previously worked at Ashoka University and the Centre de Sciences Humaines in New Delhi. He is also affiliated with the Centre for South Asian Studies (CEIAS), EHESS, Paris. He holds a PhD (2016) in Political Science from the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS), Paris. His first monograph, published in 2022, investigates nationalism and identity construction in Sindh after Pakistan’s independence. His ongoing work examines the politics of the Muslim caste in North India and Pakistan.
Julie Marquet is an Assistant Professor at the Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale in France. She works on caste disputes in the French settlements of India in the 18th and 19th centuries and on citizenship under colonial rule.
Nicolas Martin is an Assistant Professor in Indian/South Asian studies at the Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies of the University of Zurich. He was trained as a social anthropologist at the London School of Economics where he produced a dissertation and a subsequent book about landed power in the rural Pakistani Punjab. Since 2012 he has shifted his attention to the Indian rural Punjab where he has been researching democracy, elections, violence and criminality, clientelism, caste, and local government.
Peter Mayer is an Associate Professor of Politics and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide. He has written on many aspects of Indian politics, international relations, economics, history, anthropology, and sociology—especially the sociology of suicide. His recent publications have examined issues including a zone of weak governance in the Indus-Ganges plains, India’s engagement with economic reforms, longterm trends in the real wages of agricultural labourers in the Kaveri Delta, the foreign relations of Australia and India, why elections in India appear to defy Duverger’s Law of party competition, and the declining rate of massacres of India’s Dalits.
Dilip M. Menon is the Mellon Chair in Indian Studies in Africa and the Director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of Witwatersrand. He works on South Asian history, oceanic history, and the idea of knowledge from the global south. His recent publications are a co-edited volume Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (OUP, 2020) and the forthcoming Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South (Routledge, 2022).
Lucia Michelutti is a Professor of Anthropology at the University College London. She writes on issues of democracy, politics, leadership, violence, and crime in South Asia, specifically Uttar Pradesh and in Latin America in Venezuela. She is the author of The Vernacularization of Democracy (Routledge), co-editor of The Wild East (with Barbara Harriss-White, UCL Press) and co-author of Mafia Raj (with Hoque, Martin, Picherit, Rollier, Ruud, and Still, Stanford University Press).
Radha Modi is an Associate Teaching Professor at Florida State University. She specializes in research on race relations, immigrant incorporation, and economic inequality. Her research and publications investigate the role of skin colour in the racialization of second-generation South Asians in the US with a publication in Ethnic and Racial Studies. She also has publications on wealth inequality during the Great Recession of 2008. In collaboration with South Asian Americans Leading Together, a national nonpartisan organization working on civil rights, she authored a report entitled Communities on Fire: Confronting Hate Violence and Xenophobic Political Rhetoric, documenting the hate violence experienced by South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Arab communities following the 2016 election. In addition to research, she works with national organizations such as South Asian American Digital Archive.
Haripriya Narasimhan is an Anthropologist and a Faculty in the Department of Liberal Arts at IIT Hyderabad. Her research interests are in the areas of media, health, and globalisation. She has previously worked on caste, and with C.J. Fuller
(Prof Emeritus, LSE), published Tamil Brahmans: A Middle Class Caste (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Ujithra Ponniah is a Wealth Inequality and Elite Studies Fellow in the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Previously she taught at the School of Gender Studies at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad, India. She has a doctorate in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (2018) and a master’s in Development Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She works on inequality with a focus on elites and ascriptive hierarchies. She is in the process of converting her doctoral thesis into a book manuscript.
Jai Prasad is a Doctoral candidate and Research Fellow in the Department of Politics, South Asia Institute, Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies, Universität Heidelberg, Germany. Prior to this, he was a publishing editor with a renowned academic press in New Delhi. He is currently researching the ideational roots of institutional change in forest governance in India, with particular focus on the landmark Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006. His broader research interests include policy and politics of redistributive welfare, and political sociology of indigeneity and sustainable natural resource use.
Ramnarayan S. Rawat is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Delaware. He co-edited the Dalit Studies (2016) with K. Satyanarayana. He is currently co-editing the second Dalit Studies volume. His second book, The Language of Liberalism: The Dalit Public Sphere in Late Colonial India, is in the advanced stages of completion. His first book, Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalit History in North India, received Joseph W. Elder Book Prize (2009) awarded by the American Institute of Indian Studies and a honorable mention in the Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize (2013) awarded by the Association of Asian studies.
Deepa S. Reddy received her BA in Anthropology and English Literature from the University of Toronto, and her PhD in Anthropology from Rice University. She teaches anthropology and cross-cultural studies at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. Her research foci have ranged from religious nationalism and identitarian politics, the internationalization/globalization of ‘caste’, bioethics and biopolitics, to air quality and environmental governance in India. She blogs on paticheri.com
Ajantha Subramanian is a Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at Harvard University. Her first book, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India (Stanford University Press, 2009; Yoda Press, 2013), chronicles the struggles for resource rights by Catholic fishers on India’s southwestern coast, with a focus on how they have used spatial imaginaries and practices to constitute themselves as political subjects. Her second book, The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard University Press, 2019), analyses meritocracy as a terrain of caste struggle in India and its implications for democratic transformation.
Harald Tambs-Lyche is a social anthropologist. He received his PhD from the University of Bergen in 1972, becoming a Professor at the University of Picardie in 1996. He has
written four monographs: London Patidars (1980); Power, Profit and Poetry: Traditional Society in Kathiawar, Western India (1997); The Good Country: Individual, Situation and Society in Saurashtra (2004); and Business Brahmins: The Gauda Saraswat Brahmins of South Kanara (2011), edited several books and written a large number of articles.
Anand Teltumbde was a Senior Professor and Chair of Big Data Analytics at the Goa Institute of Management. He is a leading Indian intellectual and the author of several books on Ambedkar and the Dalits in India, including Khairlanji: A Strange and Bitter Crop (Navayana, 2008).
Carol Upadhya is a social anthropologist and a Professor in the School of Social Sciences at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India, where she leads the Urban and Mobility Studies Programme. Her research interests include Indian software capital and labour, the reconstitution of the Indian middle class, transnational migration and regional diasporas in India, and real estate development and the urbanization of rural landscapes. She is the author of Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy (2016) and co-editor of Provincial Globalization in India: Transregional Mobilities and Development Politics (2018).
Divya Vaid teaches sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has an MSc and DPhil from Oxford. Her research interests include the study of social mobility and inequalities, social stratification and educational attainment, and the application of quantitative methods. Her work has appeared in the Annual Review of Sociology, Contemporary South Asia, Asian Survey and the Economic and Political Weekly among others. She is the author of Uneven Odds: Social Mobility in Contemporary India (OUP, 2018).
Raphaël Voix is a social anthropologist, Research Fellow at the National Centre for Scientific Research, member of the French Institute of Pondicherry (MEAE/ CNRS), and associate member of the Centre for Indian and South Asian Studies, Paris. His research focuses on sectarian Hinduism through fieldwork done mainly in Bengali communities. He has published extensively in journals and edited books on the themes such as asceticism and violence, Hindu utopia and millennial movements, contemporary uses of Vedic texts, Hinduism and the courts, politics and contemporary yoga.
Suryakant Waghmore is a Professor of Sociology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the IIT Bombay. He is the author of Civility against Caste (2013) and co-editor of Civility in Crisis (2020).
Harish Wankhede is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Political Sciences, JNU. He is recipient of the prestigious Raman Fellowship for conducting Post-Doctoral Research at Stanford University as Visiting Scholar. His research interests are political theory, public institutions, secularism and social justice, and Hindi cinema. He has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and edited books, and regularly contributes opinion pieces to national newspapers and magazines.
Introduction Studying Caste
Conceptual Currents and Emergent Perspectives
Surinder S. Jodhka and Jules Naudet
‘Caste’ often invokes tradition, as if a remnant of the ancient past. According to this popular view, caste was a closed system of hierarchy, unique to South Asia, which presumably tied everyone to the social collective that they were born into, with no individual choice of occupation, mobility, or marriage. Privileges and statuses were all pre-given, with no one ever questioning the social order. This notion of caste also claimed that the source of its origin and legitimacy lay in the religious cosmos of the Hindus, who practised it as a matter of dharma or faith. The traditional order thus persisted without any change and reproduced itself for ages in the spatial universe of its innumerable village communities.
A corollary to this textbook formulation of India’s past tradition would go on to suggest that it was only during the British colonial rule that Indians were first introduced to modernity. This march of India becoming ‘modern’ was significantly accelerated after Independence from colonial rule when the post-colonial state initiated the process of development with much enthusiasm. With India moving ahead on the path of development and modernization, caste ought to have become a thing of the past. The lingering traces of survival in modern times could only be a product of social, mental, and political anomalies, often attributed to the crooked world of electoral politics and the quota system born out of it. These lingering traces of it are also sometimes perceived as an evidence of the inability of the Indians/Hindus to move forward on the path of modernity and progress. Fixing these anomalies would, in this narrative, lead to the disappearance of caste, at least from the urban and modern landscapes of India’s national life.
This is an outdated and, dare we say, deceptive or misleading view of India’s past as well as of the experiences of caste on the ground in contemporary times. However, such a view persists across sections of the world community, in textbooks of social sciences, in popular writings and media representations and even amongst large sections of Indian middle classes as well as the elite. This is despite the fact that, academic or social
science writings on the subject have come a long way and their understandings of the lived realities of caste have undergone profound transformations.
Where do such views come from and why do they persist? As historians have pointed out, such notions of India’s past tradition were largely drawn from the early conceptualizations of South Asian societies by the Orientalist scholarship and the colonial administrators (Bayly, 2001; Cohn, 1996; Dirks, 2001). They drew their conceptions almost entirely from select classical texts, which indeed represented ‘the caste system’ as an aspect of ‘native’ religious tradition, an ideology that shaped minds and behaviour patterns of the Hindus in the Indian subcontinent, and had remained unchanged over centuries. Such a representation of the ‘orient’ was to also contrast it with the West, which was presented as a land of progress, science, and reason. However, this view completely ignored the easily observable empirics of ascription-based hierarchies (Jodhka, 2016). On the ground, caste had been very diverse across regions, often fluid, occasionally contested, and ever changing. Nevertheless, this view was accepted quite uncritically even by western-educated Indians, which included a large section of the nationalist leadership, who also later on came to be the first generation of native rulers and elite in independent India. Such an understanding of caste was also accepted by the elite in other countries of the region where caste exists in some form and impacts social structures: Sri Lanka (Lecamwasam and Peiris, 2020), Nepal (see David Gellner’s chapter on Caste in Nepal), Bangladesh, and Pakistan (see Julien Levesque’s chapter on Caste among Muslims in North India and Pakistan also see Jodhka and Shah, 2010).
Such a conceptual trajectory of caste has had lasting impact. According to this evolving common-sense view of caste among India’s emerging middle-class elite during the late colonial period and soon after Independence, the introduction of western-style liberal democracy as a system of political organization (along with economic growth) was to dismantle caste on its own. The working assumption was that with equal rights to participate, without any weight of status and class, electoral democracy would undermine, and eventually erase caste-based divisions and hierarchies. The founding leaders of India’s constitutional democracy explicitly expressed such a view in their writings. The first Prime Minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, put it quite sharply:
In the context of society today, the caste system and much that goes with it are wholly incompatible, reactionary, restrictive, and barriers to progress. There can be no equality in status and opportunity within its framework, nor can there be political democracy . . . Between these two conceptions conflict is inherent and only one of them can survive. (Nehru, 1946, p. 257)
Another important architect of the Indian democracy, chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution, B. R. Ambedkar, put it even more emphatically:
You cannot build anything on the foundations of caste. You cannot build up a nation; you cannot build up a morality. Anything you will build on the foundations of caste will crack and will never be a whole. (Ambedkar, 2002, p. 102)
With the exception of B. R. Ambedkar and a few others, this early generation of India’s elite that inherited power from the colonial rulers thus saw caste primarily from a culturalist perspective, informed by the apolitical ideas of tradition and modernization. A direct implication of this was that caste was not seen as a relevant variable shaping and structuring deprivations and the economic well-being of different sections of India’s populace. Even when it was included in the policy, it was not seen as a reality that structured poverties and privileges. As David Mosse puts it:
The manner in which caste has entered social policy largely overlooks caste as a continuing structural cause of inequality and poverty in present-day market-led development, and instead treats it as an archaic Indian cultural and ritual phenomenon erased by such development, or as a social disability subject to (in principle, temporary) ‘special measures’. (Mosse, 2018, p. 423)
Despite many changes over time, such a view persists within the Indian state system. For example, when a section of civil society activists mobilized for recognition of the caste system as a form of racism at the Durban conference in 2011, the Indian government actively lobbied against it (see Deepa Reddy’s chapter on Caste, Race, and Ethnicity and Eva-Maria Hardtmann’s chapter on Dalit Transnational Mobilization). It obviously feared that such recognition would create ground for the close monitoring of caste-related violence and other forms of discrimination by UN treaty bodies. Upper-caste Indian diaspora groups in the UK lobbied against caste being included under ‘race’ as a ‘protected characteristic’ under the new Equality Act (see Dhanda et al., 2014).
However, given its centrality in India’s social and political life, caste did enter the institutional process and state policy-making right from the days of colonial rule. It was in the british colonial period, during the 1920s and 1930s that a system of classification that identified communities suffering from caste-induced disabilities began to be developed. Under pressure from some of the non-Brahmin castes, the colonial state initiated affirmative action to provide representation for them in the emerging political system. Such a policy perspective also found space in the Constitution of independent India (see Gautam Bhatia’s chapter on Caste and Law). Those who framed the Indian Constitution mostly agreed on working towards making India a society free of caste-based inequality and discrimination.
Not only does the Indian Constitution affirm its commitment to the value of equality among all, it also assigns the task of defending such values to the Indian State. It goes on to recognize social, economic, and political disabilities that caste has historically inflicted on a section of the Indian population. It even lays down provisions for a range of pro-active legal interventions and affirmative action policies that would expand the domain of citizenship and help create a level playing field (see Ashwini Deshpande’s chapter on Reservations and Affirmative Action). Over the years, India has indeed expanded its policies of affirmative action that have produced positive outcomes. However, despite these forces at play, the deepening of democracy or India’s economic
growth and its increasing globalization, caste shows no sign of fading away. In some ways, the salience of caste seems to have grown in Indian public life since the early 1990s.
It is this paradox of contemporary Indian society and its economic and political processes that shapes the contributions to this volume. The essays presented in the volume help us make sense of this puzzle and contribute to the understanding of the forces behind the continued reproduction of caste, with many of its features intact— hierarchy, patriarchy, humiliation, deprivations, exclusions, and economic disparities— even while changes on the ground are surely not insignificant.
In our attempt to engage with this paradox, we argue for a new narrative of caste, going beyond the Orientalist formulations of Indian culture or the modernization theories of change. As is evident from the wide range of essays written by a diverse galaxy of authors from various academic disciplines, such a narrative is clearly emerging. This innovative literature draws from grounded and empirical studies of the different aspects of caste that have flourished since Independence. The perspective we present in this Introduction and those presented in the chapters also reflect emerging diverse voices from the margins, articulated through social movements, autobiographies, and scholarship.
Conceptual Currents: Caste, like other social phenomena, is not simply a thing out there, a sui generis social fact, as Emile Durkheim would have put it. It is also a construct, a conceptual framing of the ‘thing out there’. Concepts in the social sciences have a life of their own. They are not simply words that denote a certain reality or process. While some are indeed used as technical terms with a limited descriptive or explanatory value, some others have capacious, and complicated careers. Their origins are important but their meanings and significations change over time, moulded, and twisted by the world in which they travel and the contexts in which they get deployed. Some of them even have the potential to shape, or at least influence, the very process, and realities they describe. As sources of meanings and meaningful/interpretative systems, they carry within them political possibilities and potentials for a wide range of imaginations and actions.
Caste is one such category. Even though it has been widely regarded as the most popular and lasting signifier of Indian social life and its ancient tradition, the term— not the reality that it has come to signify—has its origin in the western European linguistic cosmos. Native words such as jati and varna did not easily translate into its European counterpart. Over the years, it has also evolved into a category that did not simply describe a system of inequality or hierarchy that marked social and economic life almost everywhere in the subcontinent but a unique cultural universe that was fundamentally different from that of the Western world. In the evolving Orientalist scholarship of 18th- and 19th-century Europe, the Portuguese word casta was no longer a generic category. It came to be associated with Hindu religion, and its ritual life, as the Europeans had imagined it, their ‘other’. Coupled with this was also the claim that everything Indian was determined by or reducible to the Hindu religious worldview, which, they underlined, had also remained stable and static for centuries, bereft of any history, contestation, and agency.
However, the Orientalist and colonial narratives simplified it as a pan-Indian ‘system’ (see Roland Lardinois’s chapter on The Idea of Caste through the Ages: Concept, Words, and Things) and caste came to be imagined as being devoid of any materiality, constructed simply as a feature of the Hindu mind, shaped and structured by the dialectics of ‘purity’ and ‘pollution’, with which it has presumably been forever obsessed. As Louis Dumont translates this classical orientalist view in his much-celebrated book Homo Hierarchicus, the hierarchy that the Hindu mind produced was purely ideological, of status, and not of power or the material world (see Martin Fuchs’s chapter on Hierarchy and Mathieu Claveyrolas chapter on Hinduism and Caste System). While such an autonomy or separation of status from power was unthinkable in the western world, this was not the case in India, Dumont had argued. Thus, by implication, in this culturecentric orientalist view of caste, the inequality that caste produced was not to be seen through questions of distribution and discrimination or through the deprivations and exclusionary patterns of life and residence that it produced. Even untouchability was a matter of cultural consensus and not of violence and humiliation, which it most obviously is and would always have been (see Suryakant Waghmore’s chapter on Dynamics of Untouchability). Caste, as we see it, was never simply an ideological system, prescribing a social order of hierarchy based on cultural consensus. It always carried with it a system of domination and power, which produced deprivations and material inequalities.
As historians have rightly pointed out, the popular orientalist view of caste and India also ignored the significant regional diversities of the social arrangements on ground, as they would have evolved over time, intersecting with local economies, political histories and ecological possibilities (see Harald Tambs-Lyche’s chapter on Caste and Kingship). Even when caste was ideologically embedded in the religious and ideational frameworks of the South Asian region, it was not simply a mental construct. Moreover, like some other religious philosophies, Hinduism too had its fluidities and varieties that were evolving and changing over time and space (see Raphaël Voix’s chapter on Hindu Sects and Caste). The religious universe of South Asia has always been marked by diversities and contestations from within and from without (Raheja, 1988a; Thapar, 1989; Frykenberg, 1989; Lorenzen, 1999; Fuller, 1992). A case in point is the Nepal experience, where in absence of colonial encounter, caste, and its narratives evolved very differently (see David Gellner’s chapter on Caste, Ethnicity and the State in Nepal).
Most importantly, the Orientalist framing of Hinduism and the ascription-based hierarchies in the region produced a hegemonic narrative of caste as a static and closed system, which the British colonial rulers strategically deployed to legitimize India’s colonization. The colonial rulers used this formulation with their own people to make a case for India’s colonization and show to them how their presence in the region was an act of benevolence (Cohn, 1987; Metcalf, 1997). They, thus, implicitly professed that the colonizers were there to help India get out of its inherent inertia and enable it to move forward on the path of progress, which the western civilization had already accomplished and charted out for others. The classical orientalist writings by scholars such as Hegel had already produced an account of the Indians and Hindus as being people with no agency (see Inden, 1986) and who hence could not move on the path of
