Caste hierarchy and fragmentation among Dalits: a study of selected districts of South-Eastern Bihar

This essay explores the relationship between caste, gender and knowledge production through an engagement with the creative, political and theoretical writings of Dalits (ex-untouchable castes) in modern India. Collectively the texts explicate how caste hierarchies, intersecting with other forms of socially constructed difference such as gender and class, are reproduced through spatial practices that regulate the presence, movement and interactions of bodies. My analysis focuses on the ways in which these textual projects interrogate caste-gender discrimination across local, institutional and national-symbolic spaces, thus demonstrating their connectivity within a broader geography. As such, they disrupt dominant discourses of state and nation in which caste is confined to exceptional or innocuous spaces, in order to claim its diminishing significance in post-colonial India. Such forms of containment are reproduced in feminist research when caste is framed as a local, ‘internal hierarchy’ and in turn, of limited relevance to transnational analyses. As the archive interrogates and reworks the category of caste, it provides an analytics to interrogate caste privilege across multiple contexts. I draw on these analytics to consider how my access to and reading of an archive of Dalit politics is shaped by caste-class privilege and diasporic location.

This essay argues that access to water, and the right to water in India is subject to legal pluralism in India: the plurality of state law and the normative order of the caste system in India. While the Constitution of India prohibits discrimination against or exploitation of the Scheduled Castes, society is also subject to a parallel set of social rules set forth by caste hierarchies. The Dalit community has been historically subject to exploitation and limited access to resources, with the use of religious and social sanction, this essay focuses particularly on the right to water, which is an essential part of the constitutional right to the environment is subject to plural legal systems, of state law and caste-based normative orders. Ethnographic social science research, particularly in anthropology and sociology has produced extensive findings on how the caste system limits access to natural resources and particularly water, owing to ideas of purity and impurity associated with water use, and the status of water as a common public good. This essay explores how lawyers must consider legal pluralities when understanding access and management of natural resources. The essay analyses John Griffiths’ idea of legal pluralism which describes a scenario in which not all law is administered by the State or its institutions, and there exists de facto law, beyond the boundaries of the State. This paper expands Griffiths’ model of pluralism to explain how the right to water is subject to both caste order and state law and how the lived reality of Dalits when accessing water is subject to a constant pluralism.

Responding to suicide R. Srivatsan (bio) Scott Fitzpatrick (2016) covers the terrain spanning suicide prevention efforts and survivor narratives. He sets up a binary with one pole as biomedical perspectives on suicide, immediately judged as inadequate, and then seeks to examine at the opposite pole, the texture, history, and policy drivers of the current turn toward survivor narratives. He argues that privileging one specific type of recovery narrative, that is, self-(re) formation, aligns the discourse of suicide narratives to an overall liberal policy orientation of suicide prevention and corrupts the integrity and complexity of the survivor’s struggle. I would like to respond to the essay in two somewhat different registers. The Aporia of an Ethics of Sicidology I agree with Fitzpatrick that there is a problem with the ethics of a suicidology that elicits and encourages only those narratives that meet a specific norm of storytelling, that is, of courage, recovery, and self-reconstruction. It is certainly important, as he argues, to maintain the integrity of the narrative and the struggle it enacts in how the survivor comes to terms with the raw intensity of the experience, and the path she takes to a social life. Yet, the latter, too, is an ethical position that correctly gives primacy to the survivor’s account. The aporia, or practical impasse, of such an ethical position or judgment is that it forecloses an investigation of what suicide as a social act is trying to say. I would suggest that there is a symbolic, even symptomatic, dimension to suicide that needs to be understood in its complex historicity. I use some examples from a different sociocultural context, India, and my own engagements with some of the discourses, to tease out this point. My first example of a discourse surrounding suicide is that around the Mental Health Bill pending enactment in the Indian Parliament (as of 2016), which has a clause that proposes decriminalizing suicide (suicide is a crime in India, although survivors are rarely pursued by the law) and, with the best of intentions, proposes treating all attempted suicides as problems of mental ‘illness’ and giving survivors immediate psychiatric assistance. Criticizing this proposal, mental health and civil rights activists argued that although decriminalizing suicide was good and in line with humane international legal developments, treating a suicide survivor as a person suffering mental illness is fraught with the risk of life-long legal, social, and medicolegal discrimination (Davar et al., 2013). In fact, in India, the potentially more serious crime is of abetment to suicide, which is often a convenient name for familial and other forms of institutionalized murder in a changing and stressed society. Most immediately, treating a survivor as a mentally ill person would not permit the prosecution to use the account of the survivor (who is presumed ‘mentally ill’) to prove its case against the abettors. This discourse and its setting [End Page 281] are indicative of the developmental forces that the law is designed to exert on ‘traditional communities,’ aimed at individualizing their members and socializing them into modern ethicolegal conduct. In another example, when a student from a Dalit community (systematically discriminated against in the caste hierarchy in India) committed suicide in 2013 in a prestigious university, the authorities tried to bring quick closure to the tragic event with a story of a failed love affair leading to depression and the taking of a life (Solidarity Committee of University Students, 2013). In immediate opposition, Dalit students’ unions told the story of persistent discrimination by the university administration as the chronic ground for his existential fatigue and the decision to end his life. What is telling is that the student, who was described posthumously as an ordinary quiet individual, became in death the powerful icon of the oppressed, and the act of mourning that death publicly reclaimed him as a symbol of protest against the social discrimination faced by the whole community. In other words, the memory of the person who committed suicide played a greater and richer social role than that he did in life. In my third example, the Christian Medical College in Vellore (Tamil Nadu) has to deal with...

The Caste system is a social reality in India; despite constitutional rights of equality, protection from discrimination, and the ban on untouchability, discrimination against Dalit communities or Schedule Castes, still persists. Outside and within their caste, Dalit women face triple discrimination based on caste, class and-gender resulting in horrific acts of violence directed against them. Among the most common violent attacks on them across rural India, apart from sexual violence, are those related to declaring them witches, or accusing them of witchcraft, often leading to tragic outcomes such as death of victims. Grabbing property, political jealousy, personal conflicts, getting sexual benefits, or settling old scores are found to be common reasons to declare a woman witch. However, deep down, it is a conspiracy of Brahmanical patriarchy to control resources and sustain caste hierarchy by hitting where it hurts the most – inflicting injuries on Dalit women. They face physical, economic, and cultural violence from social exclusion to being burnt alive. Most witch-hunting victims have been noticed as either, old, widows, or single, women. This paper analyses violence against Dalit women with specific reference to witch- hunting. It explores the caste hierarchy, motives behind such crimes, also the failure of legal mechanisms and judicial institutions in eradicating the menace of witch-hunting.

Social disorganization in a modernizing Dalit community

Media representation defines social reality by virtue of meanings negotiated through symbols, creating symbolic boundaries that define identities, one of which is gender. Symbolic boundaries of gender have revolved around the roles of masculinity and femininity, much of which were socialized by the media. Dove Cameron's "Breakfast” music video (2022) challenges symbolic boundaries by portraying boundary-crossing through the role reversal of men and women. Through focus group discussions with male and female participants, this study sought to evaluate the way messages of symbolic gender boundaries are portrayed, and how Indonesian young audiences respond to modern representations of gender boundaries. Data were analyzed using the Stuart Hall's Reception Analysis perspective. Results showed that Indonesian younger audiences -male and female- react positively and are receptive to the messages of gender boundary-crossing, and they actively reconstruct the symbolic boundaries of gender. The study finds that participants have progressive definitions of gender, with various aspects of their background influencing their views on gender. The symbolic boundaries of gender include characteristic traits, appearance, and sexualities. Ultimately, similar results were gleaned from both the male and female groups.

Coming of Age in the Bubble: Suburban Adolescents' Use of a Spatial Metaphor as a Symbolic Boundary

The unique feature of the Indian patriarchal social structure is the existence of caste hierarchy in it, which is an alien concept for Western feminist theorists. Arundhati Roy and Meena Kandasamy in their novels ‘The God of Small Things and The Gypsy Goddess’ portray the caste and gender pyramid vividly, and their protagonists pose threat to this structure and show the way out. Caste classification utterly refutes the subjectivity of a person. His rank and his professions are decided by his birth, not by his skills. The article traces the origin of caste hierarchy established in the society and its functioning. It presents the idea that gender and caste hierarchies are interlinked, and in both these structures, the concept of purity is a pertinent theme. Myths, religious scriptures, laws of the society, and value systems function together to assert caste and sexual dominion. The research article raises the issue that a girl’s education and her aspiration to pursue an academic career have no significance to the male chauvinistic society. Education is also controlled by the larger institution of patriarchy. Like other institutions, it frames the psyche of women in favour of patriarchy. In our society, the way marriage has been glorified, with the same stature divorce has been scandalized. The work presents gender discrimination in the workspace and inheritance policy. In the end, the article proposes the way out of the patriarchy and casteism, which is ‘denial’. If women and lower caste men refuse to be part of this power structure, the whole system would collapse like a castle of cards.

This paper argues that the excluded communities of south Asian continent are not conscious of their basic human rights, they usually face several sorts of discriminations from their companions. The conventional politics of Nepal has not focused to their upliftment despite the state has prioritized structurally. Even the investment of abundance state capital and narratives for development could not transform livelihood of rural strata. It aims to explore the existing condition of the excluded and marginalized communities, describe contemporary development comprehension and evaluation of the dynamic contributions from the political forces in context of the rural development. The political forces, in the name of facilitating the development process for comprehensive wellbeing of citizens, have grasped politics as a tool for opportunities multiplier for their extensive vested pursuits. Politics is reliable force for structural transformation of a society that enhances citizens' sovereign thought, but the political performance in Nepal is questionable. It discloses that the excluded communities are beyond the access of contemporary development and political participation because of paradigmatic complexities. The data were accumulated from primary as well as the secondary sources, personal communication, participant observation and focus group discussions. It explains development is not a mere installation of physical infrastructure to facilitate society; it is the conglomeration of attitude, thought and perfect demeanor and it is significant for the inquisitive individuals as it disseminates enriched notions. Ultimately, it influences as the milestones for structural changes in the rural society of Nepal where modern amenities are in short.

This study primarily aims at analyzing the socio-cultural identity of Karnali Dalits and its impact on society, with an additional motive to examine why Karnali Dalits tend to cover up their caste identity. To address the research need, structured interviews, one-to-one interviews, focus group discussion, participant observation and home visits were used. Major findings include the existence of rich socio-cultural identity of Dalits, who suffer from inferiority complex due to acute caste-based discrimination against them, and who are extremely excluded politically, socially and economically. The study, therefore, suggests that the state and other stakeholders formulate a strategy to empower Karnali Dalits, who often tend to conceal their caste identity due to prevailing severe discrimination against them. After the political changes in Nepal, there are many positive discriminatory laws and opportunities, which are still untapped by the Dalit communities in comparison to other ethnic and disadvantaged section of the communities. The comparative study of Dalit to provide concrete solution to develop positive discriminatory plans and programs which could provide some relief to the Dalits to some extent. The study reaffirms that Kamis are rich in iron work and mechanics, while Sarkis are craft persons in leather work, with Damais being skilled in musician, dance and tailoring.

Water is a deeply contentious issue, intersecting in many ways with identities of caste and gender status in South Asian countries, creating complex cultural meanings and social hierarchies. In that way the word Dalit means "suppressed" or "broken" and represents exploited groups traditionally associated with women in South Asian countries such as India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. The present study aims to identify how access to water use, availability and related experiences is shaped by their caste and gender identity hierarchy. Based on qualitative research methodology, this study has been carried out using primary and secondary data collection methods. Dalit women based case study and direct observation techniques have been used as primary data collection tools. 20 case studies have been taken from two different parts of Jaffna namely Alaveddy and Gurunagar. A variety of rich scholarly literature has been reviewed and analyzed as secondary data collection tools. The findings of the study found that water has been a traditional medium of marginalization of Dalits in overt and subtle ways. Dalits have been found to be denied rights and access to water by upper castes asserting their rights over water bodies, including wells, tanks and pipes, in Gurunagar and Alaveddy areas. Findings based on secondary data revealed the construction of 'caste water' texts by upper castes in cultural and religious domains, the doubling down of Dalit narratives and water knowledge explained that the high level of violence and discrimination historically experienced during water harvesting in South Asian countries such as Sri Lanka, India, and Nepal. Thus, comparatively while incidents of violence related to access and availability of water have decreased in Jaffna's Dalit communities in comparison, discrimination and exclusion around water bodies has continued. On the other hand, in other South Asian countries like India and Nepal, incidents of violence near water bodies are increasing day by day. Thus, water access discrimination continues to be determined by caste and water access discriminatory practices adopted by upper castes reinforce the theory that Dalit women are untouchable.

This thesis examines how musicianship shapes and is shaped by caste and gender politics in Maharashtra state, India. Through a historical analysis of the relationship between caste, gender, sexuality and music, this thesis presents an alternate history of music in modern India through the lens of oppressed caste or Dalit communities who represent a generational trajectory of hereditary musicianship. This study highlights voices of Dalit women musicians as their embodied labour signifies a particular location in caste and gender hierarchy. Part of this study also presents responses of Dalit women musicians to the socio-economic hegemony and cultural apartheid of dominant castes, particularly brahmins in contemporary Maharashtra with a focus on contemporary Ambedkarite and caste-ending (jaatiantak) cultural movements, wherein liberatory politics are asserted through song, poetics, narrative and performance styles. Through ethnographic research, this thesis explores genres like bhimgeet (songs of Bhim), buddhageet (songs of Buddha) and vidrohi shahiri jalsa (rebellious music gathering) that demonstrate traces of a counter history marked by a critique of brahmanical constructions of musical knowledge. It marks the distinctive context of western India where the rise of brahmanical nationalism, Hindutva and communist mobilisations are challenged by anti-caste movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. This thesis then critically examines the dynamics of the brahmanical state and society in post-independence democratic India and how Dalit musicianship is appropriated, surveilled and incarcerated for different ends. Drawing on debates within the fields of ethnomusicology, history, feminist and gender studies, political theory, sociology, and scholarly works on caste, race, religion and literary criticism, my thesis problematises the overall construction of brahmanical epistemologies and highlights alternative spaces of knowledge creation in contemporary Maharashtra. The study ultimately examines the potentials, contradictions, and challenges presented in discursive and performative practices of music in India/South Asia.

Competition for grazing resources has been speculated to cause grazing conflicts in Northern Kenya. This study evaluated how pastoral communities compete for seasonal resources leading to grazing conflicts in the region. It was anchored on the theory that competition for limited resources led to livestock movements within and out of conservancies thus triggering conflicts on grazing resources. The study used mixed methods of ecological, remote sensing and social survey design. Purposive sampling was used to select four conservancies out of a population of fifteen, where three of them were community-managed while the fourth was privately owned. Lists of grazing committees were obtained, and systematic sampling used to select a population of 106 respondents. Self-administered questionnaires, focused group discussions and content analysis of literature were used to collect social data. The data was analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 26. Ecological and bio-physical data on land-use trends were obtained using remote sensing and analyzed using Quantum GIS. The results established that competition accounted for about 45% of variability of grazing conflicts (R2=0.449). It was found that community conservancies had the greatest effects of competition for forage compared to private conservancies. The results were modelled to determine how competition can predict grazing conflicts in the region. The study recommended further investigations on the effects of other factors contributing to grazing conflicts that were not considered, while building capacity to pastoral communities to adhere to grazing plans in order to stem over-grazing and migrations.

This chapter explores the dynamic interplay of legal, political, and social forces surrounding the Forest Rights Act as it entered the contested landscapes of Duddhi and Ramnagar. It illustrates how competing groups, including the Sangathan and the Banwasi Seva Ashram, actively shaped and reinterpreted the law to address longstanding issues of landlessness, caste hierarchy, and economic deprivation. The chapter reveals how local Dalit and Adivasi communities mobilized collective action, legal proof, and historical narratives to claim their rights and challenge entrenched systems of patronage and inequity. It details that the continuous reconfiguration of property relations through extralegal politics and emerging alliances blended militant and reformist approaches. Finally, the chapter emphasizes how these evolving legal and political practices forged a transformative space in which communities actively reclaimed their land, dignity, and future.

This study explores how ethnic identity and intergroup prejudice are shaped, expressed and challenged within basketball fandom in North Macedonia, a multi-ethnic and divided society. While sports fan culture is widely recognized as a platform where group belonging and identity are developed, there is limited qualitative research in the Balkans that examines how these identities intersect with ethnic divisions in everyday fan practices. In particular, this study looks at whether sports can serve as a tool for inclusion and reducing ethnic-based prejudice among fans in post-conflict and multi-ethnic societies. To address this gap, we conducted six focus group discussions with 30 members of ethnic-Macedonian and ethnic-Albanian basketball fan groups. Using thematic analysis, we analyzed (a) how fan identities are shaped by group and ethnic belonging and expressed through group symbols, loyalty, and rituals; (b) how intergroup prejudice and exclusion are expressed through perceptions of rivalry and national representation, and (c) whether extended intergroup contact can reduce prejudice among fans. Our findings reveal that fan identities are intertwined with broader socio-political narratives, and that sporting spaces often reinforce, rather than bridge, symbolic boundaries. In addition, Extended Contact Hypothesis (ECH) remains largely ineffective due to emotional detachment and conditional acceptance of the other. These insights offer further understanding of the role of sports and the limitations of contact-based interventions in divided societies, such as North Macedonia.