Caste Hierarchy Research Articles

Multiple stressors, food system vulnerability and food insecurity in Humla, Nepal

As the impacts of climate change (CC) have become apparent, Nepal has recently implemented a number of programs emphasizing climate sensitive resource management and development interventions. However, the attribution of vulnerability to CC alone may misdirect these programs because it is only one of multiple factors that affect rural livelihoods. Therefore, it is important to examine how CC interacts with historical socioeconomic, institutional and biophysical structures, as well as current policies and development to shape vulnerability. In this paper, we assessed the role of CC on food insecurity in the context of multiple interacting stressors in Humla district in west Nepal. Results suggested that the major features of climatic variabilities pertinent to food security included increasing dry spells, delayed monsoon and more frequent extreme events having direct negative impacts on agriculture. However, the most significant agricultural impacts were induced by socio-institutional changes. Environmental management through a community forestry program regulated livestock population, decreased manure supply to farms and significantly decreased soil productivity. This was synergized by a recent trend of school attendance among the young population which led to farm labor shortage and poor land management. Due to unequal land distribution, the low-caste households were more food insecure than households in higher tiers of the caste hierarchy. Their preexisting deprivation led to the adoption of modest or counterproductive coping strategies which would make them more vulnerable to future shocks. From these findings, we conclude that although CC is critical, it is not the only or the most significant factor of vulnerability. Its impacts are pre-configured by social relations, antecedent entitlement distributions and concurrent socio-institutional changes.

New Agro-technological Practices and Caste Hierarchy: Some Anthropological Thoughts on Western Uttar Pradesh

The caste hierarchy in an Indian village is a ubiquitous fact, having explicable metaphors for each of them. Villagers regard the castes as higher or lower than one another in precedence and esteem, thereby forming a hierarchy of castes. Overall, the entire caste group in the village can be termed as high, medium and low. However, this is an en-bloc category assigning themselves with different castes and sub-caste groups, which occur with the hierarchy provision among themselves. However, while looking at the individual caste or jati hierarchy in the particular village, one comes across different metaphors. With the coming of the new agro-technology, observable changes have happened in the caste and class of rural culture with the addition of socio-economic status of particular jati group. With the above background and taking some secondary sources with ethnographic field work, the present paper highlights some changes in understanding, manifestation and overview of caste and class concept with the advent of new agro-technology in rural India. Authors found that there is an ongoing process of jati hierarchy and distinct expressive behaviour among the lower caste group in the village.

Empowerment of Black Mother: Some Feminist Ideologies

Gender has always been a sensitive issue especially in writing. Today identity has become the most important term in every sphere of the world. Each person search for ‘who am I’ or ‘where I stand’; but women have faced more discrimination from time to time in the patriarchal societies. The inequality of sexes finds expression in writing also. Our society and culture have always discouraged women from writing and expressing themselves. But women's urge to talk about themselves through writing compels them to adopt different means of expression. Many post-structuralist feminists like Luce Irigaray, Helen Cixous and Julia Kristeva find woman's specificity buried in the present psycho-socio cultural set-up where language can represent men only. Therefore, women's specificity remains suppressed. Though the meaning, scope and significance of ‘gender’ has enlarged over the years, women studies in India have so far not indulged in these theoretical controversies for the mere reason that hierarchies of caste and class are so strong here, they do not escape anyone's notice, and the western feminists’ ideas regarding gender do not seem so important to woman writers in India.

Structures of Social Exclusion, Dera Culture and Dalit Social Mobility in Contemporary East Punjab

Dalit social exclusion emanates from structures of cultural differentiation and spatial demarcation. The structures of cultural differentiation are entrenched in the oppressive social system of caste hierarchy. They are further fortified with the seamless social boundaries of segregated Dalit neighbourhoods. If graded caste hierarchy reduced Dalits to the lowest rung on the scale of social status, their segregated neighbourhoods ghettoized them within the socio-spatial boundaries of oppressive territorial demarcations. Until recently, segregated Dalit space used to be a submissive site of despair, dependence and helplessness. All public amenities and sacred domains of mainstream religions were/are housed within the well-guarded neighbourhoods of the upper/dominant castes. Dalit neighbourhoods were/are deprived of all such essential facilities and access to the sanctum sanctorum of the mainstream religious centres. However, embolden by the presence of a large number of Ravidass Deras, Dalits have come to muster enough strength to assert for their distinct and independent socio-cultural and religious identity, which in turn prompted them to ask for their long denied due share in the local structures of power. The mushrooming of Ravidass Deras and the concomitant rise of separate Dalit identity is an apt case for a critical study of Dalit social mobility in contemporary East Punjab.

The colonial carnivalesque in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies

Drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, this article argues that the novels Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand and Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh represent the destabilization of traditional, pre-colonial hierarchies, especially those of caste, by employing the mode of the colonial carnivalesque. Their representations of the inversion of caste hierarchies often employ grotesque images involving excrement. This novelistic form of the carnivalesque manifests in images of the world-upside-down, which on the one hand invite laughter or a sense of schadenfreude towards humiliated high-caste figures, and on the other hand elevate Dalits from the mire and filth with which the upper-castes equate them. The article analyses whether the critical representations of Untouchability and caste in these novels amount to a critique of the caste system per se, or whether they are confined to a critique of the practices of Untouchability.

Democratic politics in Nepal

While recent political transformation has brought several inclusion policies and changes in Nepal, Dalit are still politically excluded. In order to trace out the political inequality of Dalit and to generalize the findings, both primary and secondary qualitative data have been interpreted and analyzed. The key informant interview method was employed to explore the experiences of Dalit on the current political inequality, identity debates, and representation. It was found that deeply rooted caste hierarchy and discrimination practices are underlying detrimental factors for the depleted socio-economic, educational, and political status of Dalit in Nepal. The conception of Dalit as a common identity, although contested among Dalit, is only a short-term strategy to unite them against all forms of injustice including caste based discrimination, and to achieve equality. It can be concluded that special political representation measures, such as proportional representation (PR), are one of the major institutional reforms for achieving social justice for Dalit in Nepal.

Resisting Injustice: Seeking New Ways to Speak!

Resisting Injustice: Seeking New Ways to Speak! Aruna Gnanadason Dalit* women in India speak… they break centuries‐old “silences” that have been imposed on them by caste and patriarchy. They express themselves through asking new questions with political astuteness, through insightful analyses of the role caste plays in Indian society, and through new ways of defining poverty and economic injustice through a Dalit lens. They give voice to their struggles through protest marches and peaceful resistance. They also speak through art and music, through dances to the beat of the parai*, through verse, and through the retelling of ancient stories of their mothers and fathers and a courageous reconstruction of history. Dalit women have broken the silence, and they have the determination to tear through the shrouds of silence that have for too long covered up their broken bodies, shadowed their spirits, and scarred their souls. The Dalit woman is the doubly or even thrice oppressed in Indian society. She has been called “the dust of the dust”. Dalit women are ground to dust by the weight of systems legalized in British colonial times and by an oppressive patriarchal and caste hierarchy in India—a religiously sanctioned indigenous system that has considered Dalits as the “outcastes” in Indian society. Even as I write this paper, yet another incident of a brutal rape and murder of a Dalit woman is reported. A group of gangsters evidently from the family of the headman (and of an upper‐caste group) gang rape a Dalit woman (who is not named!) and tear her body to pieces and burn her in Malpara Village in Agra. Agra is the city where the Taj Mahal stands. This marble architectural wonder aptly called “a poem of love” was built in 1631 by the Mughal King Shah Jahan in memory of his beloved Mumtaz Mahal. And somewhere nearby an unnamed Dalit woman is raped, dismembered, and burnt! While the report does not tell us why this fate for her—as in other cases, one can only conjecture that she must have broken some upper‐caste law; polluted the supposedly common well by drawing water from it; or perhaps having the gumption to cross the landlord's house, thus breaking the “apartheid‐like” laws that govern the movement of Dalits; or it could have been a way to teach a lesson to her people for having the courage to speak up; it could also be because she dared to fall in love with a man of an upper caste; or simply because the group of upper‐caste men wanted to show their power and have some fun! As in such cases, the village headman and others tried to prevent the woman's husband from approaching the police and burned her mutilated body—so that all evidence is erased. The police promise action, some arrests are made… but we know that the culprits will soon be out. Those with privilege escape punishment once too often, especially when a woman is the victim. We read report after report of the rape and abuse of Dalit women and girls in the hands of landlords, managers, and masters in places they work as domestic workers. Just any man or woman in authority over Dalits of an upper‐caste group is able to hold Dalits at ransom; with threats of violence and other forms of pressure. Privilege, power, and wealth largely remain ensconced in the hands of a minority in India. Reclaiming history has become a strong political tool in the hands of Dalits in India—hence, a Dalit History month was effectively used by Dalits to voice their protest, to say their story and demand that they be heard. As Dalit poet Challapalli Swaroopa Rani writes: The day I was born I bore the imprint of an unchaste woman thrown into the drainage of traditions and dustbin of customs. I became the forbidden one. I am the one carrying the onus of age‐old rejections generations of humiliations as my legacy… In which canto of your country's famed history will you write it down, my story? Therefore, a Dalit History Month (April 2015) which declares in its announcement: Dalit History Month is a...

Identity, autonomy and emancipation: The agendas of the Adi-Andhra movement in South India, 1917–30

Dalits of the Telugu-speaking region of Madras Presidency struggled for liberation from socio-economic and politico-cultural deprivation by mobilising themselves under the ‘Adi-Andhra’ identity. They worked for the eradication of untouchability, achieving education, land, jobs and political representation, using modern ideas of equality and empowerment and, thus, challenged the traditional caste hierarchy. The existing literature on the subject has largely tended to represent Dalit movements as either autonomous from or integral to Congress-dominated nationalism and Hinduism. However, I would argue that to accomplish their objectives, Dalits constantly interacted with Hindu nationalists and the colonial state between 1917 and 1930. However, on a number of occasions, they expressed their dissatisfaction with both Hindu nationalist reform and colonial policies and programmes for the emancipation of Dalits. It is, therefore, essential to recognise that Dalits were neither integrated with them, nor entirely estranged from them.

Discrimination and Integration of the Dalits in Early Modern South Indian Missions: The Historical Origins of a Major Challenge for Today’s Christians

ABSTRACT The persistence of caste hierarchies and discrimination among the Christian faithful is one of the challenges that churches still face in India. While several studies have been devoted to the relation between caste and Christianity since the nineteenth century, the early modern period has attracted very limited attention. This article proposes junctures and figures that can illustrate the various approaches toward caste divisions held by the Catholic missionaries in India between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, namely, from the establishment of the Portuguese presence on the subcontinent until the Malabar Rites controversy. In particular, the article will suggest that, if missionary adaption (accommodatio) was based primarily on the incorporation of caste structures within the Church, unsuccessful attempts were made to root Christianity in the Indian context while criticizing local social hierarchies contradicting Christian values.

Policing and the “War on Black Bodies”

Policing and the “War on Black Bodies” Chenjerai Kumanyika (bio) I hope it is not controversial to say that any discussion of policing in the United States must proceed from the acknowledgment that there has never been an ethical and effective system of policing in this country. To suggest otherwise is to argue that the lives of those who have been unjustly denied human, civil, political, and cultural rights as a result of policing do not matter. To continue to state the obvious, it is only during the very short period between the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and now that the question of ethical policing has been entertained at a national level with any pretense of sincerity. In all the years before this period, policing extended from the legally encoded and broadly embraced preservation of an explicit caste hierarchy. It is only during this recent period that ethical and effective policing even enters the legal imagination as a possibility and confronts the modern United States as a problem. A colleague recently asked me if I thought that the language of war accurately applied to the current spectacle of policing in the United States.1 He asked this in response to a scholarly presentation that I had just given on a panel about media production in the context of Ferguson and other Black-Lives-Matter-related protests. Even before the many protests that I have attended since August 9, 2014, the analysis of policing as part of a broader “war on black bodies” has been commonly accepted and frequently articulated among politicized Black folk and social justice advocates. [End Page 252] Public institutions have also caught on to this war metaphor: “American Policing: The War on Black Bodies” was the title of a September 2014 panel organized by the New York Public Library at the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture. Although the interpersonal violence and militarization of policing in the United States is increasingly visible and disturbing, I have worried that using the term “war” as a primary analytical framework lacks precision and sufficient explanatory power. I have wondered if “war” should be reserved to describe the conditions in places such as the Central African Republic, Yemen, or Syria, where the scale and urgency of everyday danger feel qualitatively different. But my mind also flashed back to the feeling that I had upon arriving in Ferguson, Missouri on the evening of November 26, 2014, the night after the decision not to indict Darren Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown was made. On the way to protests in front of the police station, my wife and I passed a Target parking lot that looked similar to how one might imagine central command in Iraq. It was completely filled with news tents and vehicles that looked and felt like tanks but were probably bomb-proof 600 MRAP armored personnel carriers. At the edge of the parking lot, both police and National Guard soldiers blocked off the intersection of West Florissant, making it impossible to enter the street by car and intimidating to enter the street on foot. When we approached that intersection soldiers abruptly advanced on our cars and gestured at us, waving large automatic weapons and ordering us to turn around. After navigating various road blocks and a neighborhood that seemed drenched in a haze of blue and red lights, the piercing sound of sirens, and the rumbling of large military vehicles, we arrived at 222 South Florissant in front of the Ferguson Police Department. Facing the police station, protesters faced off against a long line of officers dressed in the combination of military-style clothing and weaponry that we have come to call “riot gear.” Helicopters flew ominously overhead and a shrill voice from a bullhorn barked out orders for everyone to evacuate the area because, the voice announced, this was no longer a peaceful protest. Two different kinds of large black armored personnel vehicles passed slowly back and forth in front of the line of Special Units and Tactics (SWAT) officers. Five police officers on top of the vehicle trained their automatic weapons outward towards us, the protesters. Sandbags stood in piles between...

Responding to suicide

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 Black Doctors of Colonial Lima: Science, Race, and Writing in Colonial and Early Republican Peru by José R. Jouve Martín

Reviewed by: The Black Doctors of Colonial Lima: Science, Race, and Writing in Colonial and Early Republican Peru by José R. Jouve Martín Ruth Hill Jouve Martín, José R. The Black Doctors of Colonial Lima: Science, Race, and Writing in Colonial and Early Republican Peru. Canada: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2014. 203 pp. On one hand, José R. Jouve Martín’s newest book, The Black Doctors of Colonial Lima: Science, Race, and Writing in Colonial and Early Republican Peru (2014), signals a departure from his first effort, Esclavos de la ciudad letrada: esclavitud, escritura y colonialismo en Lima (1650-1700) (2009). The earlier title focused on seventeenth-century Lima and how persons of varying degrees of sub-Saharan African ancestry, free or enslaved, navigated that bureaucratic and literary maze of social control and representation limned by Angel Rama in La ciudad letrada. The present monograph, in contrast, brings to the forefront health policy, medicine, and the “limits of racial domination” (to borrow Douglas Cope’s felicitous phrase) during the long eighteenth century, when late-viceregal institutions ostensibly gave way to republican ones. On the other hand, there is an intellectual and methodological consistency that situates Jouve Martín’s two books within a personal and collective trajectory of anti-racist scholarship and pedagogy. As a result, both books are essential titles for scholars and teachers interested in understanding racial formations in Peru, and in how Afro-Peruvians negotiated and resisted racial, caste, and legal hierarchies from the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. The Black Doctors of Colonial Lima imparts to readers the life stories of a handful of mulatto, pardo, and black physicians from Lima: José Manuel Valdés, José Manuel Dávalos, and José Pastor Larrinaga. It is the first book-length study devoted to such physicians in any one city of colonial and early republican Latin America. As such, its scope and its intentions are both daring and original, and the Introduction clearly presents to readers the novelty of the subject matter as well as the organization of the volume’s materials and themes. Although I could not possibly do justice to Jouve Martín’s slim volume within the span of this review, I shall try to communicate its ambitions and its achievements. As a historian of science, I was surprised by the many ways in which Afro-Peruvian physicians transcended their medical profession and entered the public sphere and the literary establishment during the early nineteenth century. This was made possible because certain government and university officials, reaffirming the informal policy known as Obedezco, pero no cumplo, elected to not maintain all of the barriers erected by institutional racism. As a result, a handful of mulatto, pardo, and black physicians not only were aware of key scientific achievements of the Enlightenment but also contributed to the same in Peru, their writings finding publishers as far away as Madrid, Granada, and Montpellier. Moreover, they associated with powerful Crown figures in the sciences and they had a voice in public health policy matters and debates in Peru. The advancement of the sciences during the long eighteenth century was of course predicated on the alliance of literati and government (Church and Crown officials alike), as many previous scholars have demonstrated. [End Page 765] By a closely watched barometer of Enlightenment values, the three Afro-Peruvian physicians appear to have conformed completely to the dominant culture. “Like many of his contemporaries,” Jouve Martín concludes, “Valdés rejected the existence of a rift between the two [spheres, medicine and religion]. He saw them as inextricably linked. The church had strongly influenced the practice of medicine in Peru since early colonial times, and it continued to do so, well into the nineteenth century” (Black Doctors 128). Here the outsized critical literature on the Catholic Enlightenment would have been helpful to Jouve Martín’s argument as well as to his readers’ understanding of early modern and modern Spanish and Latin American science. Valdés, as the author of the current study reveals, rose to the position of surgeon general (protomedicato general) of the Republic in 1835, under President Felipe Salaverry. He also was a tenured professor...

Play, Theater, and Nondualism: A Philosophical Meditation

The attempt here is to meditate philosophically on the nature, meaning, and significance of the conceptions of play, theater, and nondualism and to articulate further the metaphysical interweaving and symphony of these concepts with particular reference to the domain of social ethics. After a brief analysis of the philosophical notion of nondualism and its description of reality as fundamentally nondualistic, the essay dwells on the possibility of play and theater as the epiphany of the Self and its forms and contends that the pluriform images are the apparent other of the nondual self. Then, moving on to the domain of social ethics, the essay ventures to imagine theatricality as an incarnation of social ethics and attempts to show that nondualism and untouchability are diametrically opposed to each other in both theory and practice. Augmenting this discussion, the essay dwells upon Theyyam, the celebratory divine dance form, and indicates how it takes one to the ethical imaginary by radically subverting the socially exclusionary practice of caste hierarchy.

Caste And Prostitution In India: Politics Of Shame And Of Exclusion

The act of prostitution has existed in India since centuries have undergone change within its nature, intensity and issues concerning it. Once, socio culturally sanctified prostitution is now have been reconstructed and represented through language as a matter of undignified profession eventually marginalizes a women in sex work from all Public Spaces. The power of culture and language of social morality instrumentalizes the body of women which eventually denies them their most basic human rights on the pretext of being indulged in Shameful activity. Shame constructed through social morality has instrumentality to make women in sex work subservient to the desires of Men. Caste is one of the determining factor when it comes to Ritualized prostitution. Even though ritualized prostitution is illegal it is still prevalent. Caste system as essentially being exclusionary tends to impose prostitution which is socially considered as Shameful on lower caste groups (as in the case of Jogins of Andhra Pradesh) in such a manner that it eventually reinforces the dominance of cultural traditions of which caste system is a part. Many lower caste communities are forced to be in this profession in the name of traditional culture (Like Nats in Rajasthan). The forms of Ritualized prostitution in India in case of Devadasi/jogins and caste based prostitution reinforces societal moralities on these women in such a manner that it alters their perception about their own SELF as someone indulged in immoral/shameful practice. Therefore, need is to deconstruct the language of shame and exclusion and how it institutionalizes the caste hierarchies and gendered power relations in a manner that helps in sustenance of caste based cultural practices.

Caste and Prostitution in India: Politics of Shame and of Exclusion

The act of prostitution has existed in India since centuries have undergone change within its nature, intensity and issues concerning it. Once, socio – culturally sanctified prostitution is now have been reconstructed and represented through language as a matter of undignified profession eventually marginalizes ‘women in sex work’ from all Public Spaces. The power of culture and language of social morality instrumentalizes the body of women which eventually denies them their most basic human rights on the pretext of being indulged in Shameful activity. Shame constructed through social morality has instrumentality to make women in sex work subservient to the desires of Men. Caste is one of the determining factor when it comes to Ritualized prostitution. Even though ritualized prostitution is illegal it is still prevalent. Caste-system as essentially being exclusionary tends to impose prostitution which is socially considered as ‘Shameful’ on lower caste groups (as in the case of Jogins of Andhra Pradesh) in such a manner that it eventually reinforces the dominance of cultural traditions of which caste system is a part. Many lower caste communities are forced to be in this profession in the name of traditional culture (Like Nats in Rajasthan). The forms of Ritualized prostitution in India in case of Devadasi/jogins and caste based prostitution reinforces societal moralities on these women in such a manner that it alters their perception about their own SELF as someone indulged in immoral/shameful practice. Therefore, need is to deconstruct the language of ‘shame’ and exclusion and how it institutionalizes the caste hierarchies and gendered power relations in a manner that helps in sustenance of caste based cultural practices.

Dynamics of inequalities in a global perspective: An introduction

The contribution in this introduction, and in this monograph issue of Current Sociology itself, is to explain how patterns of inequality associated with global capital have been reconfigured in different contexts and have historically produced varied results. The definition of global inequality used here transcends Euro- and US-centric models of linear development and comparisons of national income and its distribution to explain how complex socioeconomic hierarchies, including – but not limited to – class, reinforce inequalities among social groups around the globe. The editors trace contemporary patterns of inequality back to the history of imperial and colonial power so as to reintroduce into the scholarly dialogue on inequality a broader understanding of ascriptive hierarchies of race, gender, caste, and national citizenship and their relationship to colonial conquest, enslavement, and labor migrations as interrelated contexts of the global production and reproduction of inequality patterns.

The paternal ancestry of Uttarakhand does not imitate the classical caste system of India.

Although, there have been rigorous research on the Indian caste system by several disciplines, it is still one of the most controversial socioscientific topic. Previous genetic studies on the subcontinent have supported a classical hierarchal sharing of genetic component by various castes of India. In the present study, we have used high-resolution mtDNA and Y chromosomal markers to characterize the genetic structuring of the Uttarakhand populations in the context of neighboring regions. Furthermore, we have tested whether the genetic structuring of caste populations at different social levels of this region, follow the classical chaturvarna system. Interestingly, we found that this region showed a high level of variation for East Eurasian ancestry in both maternal and paternal lines of descent. Moreover, the intrapopulation comparison showed a high level of heterogeneity, likely because of different caste hierarchy, interpolated on asymmetric admixture of populations inhabiting on both sides of the Himalayas.

Role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Higher Education of SC/ST

Globalization process has affected many aspects of human life. Education in general and higher education in particular is no exception to it. Globalization gathered momentum in higher education in the second half of 1990. Education as a service industry is a part of globalization process becoming commodity in the third world (TW) countries like India. Universities and higher education system in India and Asia have become the agents of both internationalization and globalization. Indian society which is historically characterized by high degree of social stratification and institutional in equally governed by caste system where a huge section of SC/STs population stand at the bottom of caste hierarchy and denied equal rights in education. The objective of this paper is to find out the role of Information Communication and Technology (ICT) in promoting higher education among SC/STs and also to find out whether SC/STs are able to transform themselves to fit into the current education system and are they able to place themselves in this new knowledge economy which is the result of globalization and Information communication and Technology development in India. The findings show that SC/STs still remain discriminated in education and there are major constraints for them in taking up higher education.Int. J. Soc. Sci. Manage. Vol-2, issue-4: 304-307

Dalit Women in India: At the Crossroads of Gender, Class, and Caste

As the lowest in the caste hierarchy, Dalits in Indian society have historically suffered caste-based social exclusion from economic, civil, cultural, and political rights. Women from this community suffer from not only discrimination based on their gender but also caste identity and consequent economic deprivation. Dalit women constituted about 16.60 percent of India’s female population in 2011. Dalit women’s problems encompass not only gender and economic deprivation but also discrimination associated with religion, caste, and untouchability, which in turn results in the denial of their social, economic, cultural, and political rights. They become vulnerable to sexual violence and exploitation due to their gender and caste. Dalit women also become victims of abhorrent social and religious practices such as devadasi/jogini (temple prostitution), resulting in sexual exploitation in the name of religion. The additional discrimination faced by Dalit women on account of their gender and caste is clearly reflected in the differential achievements in human development indicators for this group. In all the indicators of human development, for example, literacy and longevity, Dalit women score worse than Dalit men and non-Dalit women. Thus, the problems of Dalit women are distinct and unique in many ways, and they suffer from the ‘triple burden’ of gender bias, caste discrimination, and economic deprivation. To gain insights into the economic and social status of Dalit women, our paper will delve more closely into their lives and encapsulate the economic and social situations of Dalit women in India. The analyses of human poverty and caste and gender discrimination are based on official data sets as well as a number of primary studies in the labor market and on reproductive health.

Popular Perceptions of Masculinity in Rural North Indian Oral Traditions

In the oral tradition of rural north India, especially the Haryana region, hegemonic masculinity emerges as an ideological construct in the structure of patriarchy firmly located in materiality. This creates and consolidates male power over various categories of people and highlights several hierarchies of masculinities, caste, class, and gender, including those between males and females as well as those between males and males. The oral tradition, which includes folktales, myths, folk songs, popular sayings, and proverbs, enjoys a common currency of social interaction among a wide range of social groups. Together these have been evaluated to provide valuable insights into how masculinities are perceived, lived, or practiced at the local level, and molded or remolded in response to the socioeconomic shifts that are taking place. However, in this region there is also a contrary imaging of masculinity that demolishes all that is regarded as the hallmark of hegemonic masculinity. Registered in women’s folk songs, this imaging is considered a threat to male power, authority, and what is perceived to be “masculine.” All attempts by upper caste males to censor these songs or replace them have been unsuccessful, thereby highlighting the ongoing contradiction and contest around the concept of masculinity itself.