Caste Inequalities Research Articles

Dravidian Movement’s Political Dramas

Even after India’s independence from British colonialism, the Vedic Sanathana dominated the majority of people. The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam criticised the ruling Congress party in Tamil Nadu. At the same time, the ideas of social reforms against the social atrocities that dominated the Tamil society of that time were depicted through political dramas. The Dravidian movement’s political dramas particularly portrayed the views against the caste inequality, untouchability, gender inequality, mythological myths, and Sanskrit dominance created by the Vedic Sanathana.

Entangled Impurities in Contemporary Sindh: Some Evidence from Law and Bureaucracy

Abstract This article lays out a framework for conceptualizing how religious differences and hierarchical, hereditary inequality consolidate in contemporary Sindh. I argue that the terms Hindu, Dalit, and hari are often conflated due to their entangled trajectories. Addressing this conflation sheds light on how structural inequality and discrimination function in Sindh. The article begins by focusing on a government document that limits potential applicants for a sanitation job to “non-Muslims.” Next, it explores how the religious category of Hindu has become, over time, susceptible to ritual stigmas, social marginalization, caste oppression, and hierarchization. Last, it addresses a legal judgment that hinges on recognizing caste inequality but cannot say so. Analysis of the decision reveals how the entanglement of Hindu, Dalit, and hari legal categories produces certain citizen-subjects as perpetual legal minors requiring the state’s paternalistic protection. Throughout, the article illustrates how the production of multiple hierarchies in the social fabric of Sindh and Pakistan broadly operates through the deployment of caste stigma as a public secret.

‘Why Can’t Our Bhuta Have a Mask?’ Caste Contestations and Ritual Practice in Tulunadu

The paper describes caste contestations around the Bhutaradhane tradition in the Tulunadu region of coastal Karnataka. Bhutaradhane is a pantheistic tradition of spirit worship which has been a key site for the assertion of regional identity claims in Tulunadu. The Bhutas (spirits) are ranked along a graded hierarchy that reflects the caste structure of the region. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper describes the interventions of a Dalit caste, the Mundalas, to rupture this hierarchical structure and challenge their low assigned status in the tradition and in society. It explores how they draw on narratives of the past to appropriate and reshape the Bhutaradhane tradition in line with their aspirations for upward mobility. The paper situates current contestations around the caste’s patron Bhuta within the growing socio-political consciousness of the Mundalas, who have challenged the hegemonic discourse of Bhuta heritage, laying bare the operations of caste within the ritual as well as caste inequalities and exclusions in the region.

Speaking out on the internet: what does it mean to seek “justice” on social media?

The public sphere has moved online, and with it, several versions of “protests” and “movements” too. We are living through a moment in history where the “due process” of law and justice may or may not follow the public demonstration of either injustice or democratic dissent. A “public” protestation in such a situation has very often meant “on social media”, giving even more credence to the idea that a successful protest is often one that “trends”. This paper will address some of these issues in the context of India, where the spread of internet and social media in the past several years has been as quick as it has been widespread. Using two examples – that of the Indian #MeToo movement and the Anti-CAA protest at Shaheen Bagh – this paper attempts to trace the complexities of online movements in India that have grown online and spread offline. The many inequalities of access, class, caste, language, and internet literacy that exist in India provide a background for these movements and the idea of seeking justice. The complexity of opaque algorithms that curate social media feeds makes the endeavour of seeking for and finding various forms of justice or solidarity – especially through the internet – even more complicated. The two movements – one that was born online and the other that was entirely offline; both operationalised the internet and particularly social media in ways that gave them more visibility and popularity. Both movements were led by women, but one was mostly a movement of elites, while the other was led by those usually considered outside the mainstream. Using insights from Science Technology and Society (STS), this research effort hopes that reading these two cases together will be able to reveal some of the intricacies of the tricky nature of online justice seeking and the complex Indian digital space.

Local, yet global: Implications of caste for MNEs and international business

Caste is an informal institution that influences socioeconomic action in many contexts. It is becoming increasingly evident that international business research, practice, and policy need to programmatically address caste. To facilitate this endeavor, we review the limited research in IB that has addressed caste, and theorize caste as a distinct informal institution by distinguishing it from other systems of stratification like race, class, and gender. In addition, we propose a parsimonious framework to highlight the implications of caste for Indian and non-Indian MNEs in their Indian and global operations. In doing this, we focus on implications with respect to the internal organization and inter-organizational relationships of MNEs, and consider how these implications might differ as based on the MNEs’ organizational forms. We then build on these implications to discuss how MNEs and other stakeholders of international business can address caste inequalities via policies related to human rights, anti-racism, and affirmative action. By bridging theory, practice, and policy, we pave the way for MNEs to address global inequalities that relate to caste.

Guest Editor’s Introduction: Critical Philosophy of Caste and Race

Guest Editor’s Introduction: Critical Philosophy of Caste and Race

Training for employment or skilling up from employment? Jobs and skills acquisition in the Tiruppur textile region, India

This paper explores how skills for garment work are acquired in the rural hinterland of Tiruppur, one of India’s largest garment manufacturing clusters. Drawing on a quantitative survey and qualitative interviews with garment workers in Tiruppur’s hinterland, we document the informal pathways of skill acquisition for garment work and advocate a demand-driven approach to vocational training. Such an approach, first, unsettles linear policy assumptions about direct linkages between training, skills acquisition and access to decent and rewarding employment. We show how rather than being formally trained for employment, villagers gained skills from employment and upskilled themselves on the job. Such upskilling took the form of self-directed learning rather than formal training, and involved spatial and job mobility between companies and sectors. Second, a demand-driven perspective reveals how access to more advanced skills and more desirable jobs is shaped by the structural inequalities of gender, age and caste, which curtail the opportunities of women and the elderly in particular. Finally, policy and research would benefit from a demand-driven approach to training and recruitment that prioritises the skill development needs of local populations and that supports those whose participation in training and labour markets remains constrained by gender, age or caste.

Caste and Socioeconomic Inequality in Child Health and Nutrition in India: Evidences from National Family Health Survey

This study is on caste inequality in child health outcomes: mortality, malnutrition and anaemia for the year 1998/99 to year 2019/21 and examines the association of socio-economic factors with outcomes. Disparity ratio (DR) and Concentration Index (CI) are computed to examine inequality in outcomes. The association of socio-economic factors was modelled using logit regression. The study finds marginalised group were more likely to have poor health outcomes. The disparity ratio found increased among SC and ST compared to Others during 1998-99 and 2019-21. The value of the concentration index was found high on U5MR among SC and ST. Among SC and ST, the child health outcome greatly varies for poorest and richest. Odds ratio is 40-60 per cent higher for SC and ST compared to children belonging to Others. On socio-economic factors; land ownership and wealth status contribute significantly but house ownership not so. Caste-based inequality is still impacting health and nutrition of children in the country. The more focused inclusive policy and clustering of marginalised groups at regional level can be helpful in improving health and nutrition of marginalised children concentrated in different regions with equity lens to push the SDG Goals.

Gender, Social Protection, and Crises of Social Reproduction: Contextualizing NREGA

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the importance of social protection programs such as India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). And yet, acute crises such as pandemics are layered upon existing inequalities of gender and caste in India. We show that a distinctive feature of twenty-first-century Indian capitalism is a restructuring of the caste-gender division of labor in rural India, such that women’s unpaid labor of social reproduction has increased, particularly for women from marginalized castes. Thus, patterns of participation in NREGA cannot be understood without understanding the specifics of the underlying crisis of social reproduction for labor. Social protection programs that do not consider the labor of social reproduction and are unaccompanied by broader socialization of such labor then likely fall short of mitigating deep-rooted inequalities. JEL Classification: B54, J21, J88

A Study of the Problems of People's lives in the novels ‘Malarum Sarugum (The Flower and the Dried Leaf)’, ‘Thaakam (Thirst)’, ‘Setril Manitharkal (Humans in the Mud)’, ‘Pazhaiyana Kazhithalum (Out with the Old)’, and ‘Sennel (Red Rice)

Novel literature, which emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, was a form of literature that emerged to describe and explain the new society. The novel literature is based on the conflict that arises within man and between man and society, as well as the problems, struggles, and human nature that are directly related to real life. The issues of life, struggle, and consequences of the grassroots people mentioned in Tamil novels, the literary creativity of the teachers, etc., are the subjects of study in novels such as T. Selvaraj’s 'Malarum Sarukum', Ku Chinnappa Bharathi’s 'Thaakam', Rajam Krishnan’s 'Setril Manitharkal', Sivakami’s 'Pazhaiyana Kazhithalum' and Solaisundara Perumal’s 'Sennel'. In these novels, the landlessness of the poor, wage problems, unemployment, and the caste inequality that results from it are deepening, and the slavery, the inability to fight together as an organization, the exploitative tendencies of the farm landlords, and thus the poverty among the labourers becomes the basis of many problems and weakens the lives of the labourers. Novel literature highlights the social contradictions and the various problems that arise in people's lives. In this way, the title of this thesis has been undertaken with the objective of examining these novels, which are centered on the workers who are the axis of society, and to identify and reveal the various problems found in them.

Borders, Boundaries and Barricades: Speculative Delhis

In Samit Basu’s SF novel Chosen Spirits (2020), a character offers a cosmology of power within India’s capital city: ‘Delhi has always been a city of seven walls […] You could guess you’d crashed into your wall before, when you couldn’t go further, but now the walls can be mapped and measured, the tools exist.’ Written against the backdrop of India’s discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the protests against it in 2019–20, Chosen Spirits extrapolates a near-future Delhi in which, despite the relative success of the protests, the stark inequalities of caste, class and religion have been reinforced by changes to the city’s geography, and state surveillance increasingly precludes the possibility of working for change. Reading the novel alongside other recent works of speculative fiction set in Delhi, this article analyses Basu’s walled city, and those of other contemporary Indian SF writers, against the shifting borders, boundaries and barricades of the city, exploring their potential as sites of radical activism.

Placing Caste: Spatialization, Urban Segregation, and Musical Boundary-Making

AbstractIn the face of India’s enduring caste inequalities, their entrenchment or resistance is central to social and urban navigation. In this article, I locate music as an important site to investigate how caste comes to be spatialized, where place identity comes to symbolize group difference, with the effect of exacerbating social and spatial segregation. I use ethnographic field notes from attending musical events and 103 interviews with members of two live musical worlds situated in the southern city of Chennai: Carnatic music, which is seen as the preserve of Brahmin, or “upper” caste residents of the city; and Gaana music, which is associated with Dalit, or previously “untouchable” caste urban residents. I argue that for caste elites, symbolic power is constructed and maintained through norms and boundary work, thus producing hegemonic place identity and cultural power. For the caste oppressed, caste discrimination is experienced as stigmatized place identity, which is variously managed, reappropriated, or rejected through a range of strategies. The persistence of place-based stigma to devalue caste identity shapes the experience of caste-based urban inequalities that obstruct marginalized communities’ right to the city. In recent years, Gaana musicians are using their music to protest caste-based urban segregation, indexing the rise of a cultural articulation of an anti-caste assertion that challenges the marginalization of urban Dalits. This article advances sociological understandings of the forms that urban segregation can take when layered with caste as an axis of social difference and conceptualizes spatialization of caste as a driver of urban segregation.

Race, class, caste, disability, sterilisation and hysterectomy

This interdisciplinary historical paper focuses on the past and current state of diverse forms of surgical hysterectomy as a global phenomenon relating to population control and sterilisation. It is a...

The Social Change Represented in the Psychology of Women Characters Portrayed by S. Ramakrishnan

Tamil society is considered to be one of the oldest societies. Various problems like caste and economic inequalities along with gender differences exist in this society. Among these, gender inequality serves as a subject of debate till date. In society, women are not treated equally. In areas such as education, employment and marriage, women are treated poorly as compared to men. This inequality appears in different manners at different stages in time. Contemporary literature is written to show antagonism to this inequality. Particularly, short stories play a vital role in delineating these differences. Short story writer S. Ramakrishnan has given centre stage to the day-to-day problems faced by women in his short stories. The female characters portrayed in his stories struggle to establish their equality in spite of the troubles life throws at them. From his collection of short stories named Avalathu Veedu, two stories Avalathu Veedu and Embaavai are taken as primary sources for this research article. This article analyses the psychology of two female characters, Agalya and Nanmathi, who represent the main characters of the selected short stories. The social change represented from their psychological characteristics is also discussed. The principles of psychological defence mechanism is used to analyse the characteristics of these female characters.

Caste, then Class: Redistribution and Representation in the Dravidian Model

Dravidian parties believe that changes to the economic structure will not lead to social justice if the upper/dominant castes continue to exclusively possess social capital. To them, and later, to the successive Dravidian party governments, economic justice was not possible without first ensuring social justice. This view was held by the stalwarts of the Dravidian movement such as Periyar E.V. Ramasamy (Periyar henceforth), the subject of this engagement, and actualised by leaders such as C.N. Annadurai and M. Karunanidhi, whose electoral politics was a means to empower subaltern groups in Tamil society. We contend that Periyar was the chief aggregator of the ideas put forth by earlier social justice ideologues, and an effective disseminator of the Dravidian political ethos among the masses, making his contribution comprehensive and unique. Through an analysis of the approach of Dravidian party governments towards affirmative action, administrative reform and legislation, and through comparisons of the performance of Tamil Nadu in terms of development indicators with other states, we reveal the profound influence of Periyarist thinking on the Dravidian movement and State praxis. The quest of the Dravidian movement for social justice did not just focus on class inequalities but on caste inequalities, which it saw as a propagator of class inequalities.

Ambedkar and Annihilation of Caste–Performing Theory, Praxis, Counter Identity

Caste needs to be denounced because it is downrightly unethical and immoral. Ambedkar has been at the forefront of the ethical battle against caste inequalities in India and has left an indelible imprint on Indian polity, governance, and human rights. The paper here attempts to read Ambedkar, the man, the theorist, and an anti-caste intellectual, primarily through his seminal work Annihilation of Caste (1936). An analysis of this undelivered speech, the text, and its context form the broad outline of the paper. Within this outline, Ambedkar’s other texts like his paper presented at Columbia University titled Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development (1916), Who Were the Shudras (1946), Who Were the Untouchables (1948), and a select few speeches like the Mahad speech in December 1927 are some of the watershed events and interventions in the history of anticaste struggle in India. These are landmark texts by Ambedkar and have been selected and analyzed in a manner that studies the ethical dimensions of the marginalized groups, the untouchables in this case. As for his praxis, his role as a politician, journalist, statesman, a trained economist, and as the chief architect of the Indian Constitution speaks for itself. The paper attempts to figure out the man’s emergence, the ethical concerns in his works, his growth as a theorist, and his anti-caste praxis in developing an anti-caste consciousness primarily through Annihilation of Caste.

Mapping the Changing Notions of Inequality Among the Trade Union Leaders of Colonial Bengal (1920–1947)

ABSTRACT This paper envisages how the concept of ‘Inequality’ has been perceived by the Trade Unionists in late colonial Bengal. Informed by the ideology of Communism, these activists penned down a myriad of insightful analytical tracts, primarily in vernaculars, ranging from propaganda pamphlets to articles in the party organs. Their critique of Imperialism, and how it precipitates economic and socio-political inequalities was grafted in the ethos of class struggle. Through delineating their stark ideological differences with Gandhian mass politics, and by focusing on their intellectual endeavours concerning various structural inequalities of class, religion, caste, and gender it aims at charting out the indigenous response to the global doctrine of Communism. Often overlooked as conventional intellectuals, their literature brings to fore an alternative discourse on anti-colonialism in South Asia, overwhelmed by the theme of Nationalism. This paper is a methodological probe in doing intellectual history from below, adding to the edifice of the existing scholarship on Decolonisation, Communism, and Inequality in the Global South.

Balbir Madhopuri. Ātaṅk aur jātivādī ḍaṅk / Terror and Casteism Sting (Сhapters from Chāṅgiā rukh / Against the Night)

The commented translation of a chapter from the Chāṅgiā rukh (Against the Night) autobiography (2002) by Balbir Madhopuri, a renowned Indian writer, poet, translator, journalist, and social activist, brings forward episodes from the life of Dalit inhabitants of a Punjab village in the 1960–1970s (Pic. 1, 2, 3). Following the school of hard knocks of his childhood in the chamar quarter of Madhopur, a village in Jalandhar district, Balbir Madhopuri managed to receive a good education and take to literature. He has authored 14 books including three volumes of poetry, translated 36 pieces of world literary classics into Punjabi, his mother language, and edited 44 books in Punjabi. In 2014, he was awarded the Translation Prize from India’s Sahitya Academy for his contribution to the development and promotion of Punjabi. His new fiction novel Miṭṭī bol paī (Earth Has Spoken, 2020) focuses on the struggle of downtrodden Punjabis for their human rights and the ad-dharam movement in the North of India in the 1920–1940s. This novel brought him a prestigious international award for excellence in Punjabi fiction, the Dhahan Prize, in 2021. Narrating his autobiography, Balbir Madhopuri shares memories, thoughts, and emotions from childhood and youth days that determined his motivations to struggle against poverty, deprivation, and injustice. The first of the two translated chapters, Dillī ke lie ravāngī (Departure for Delhi [Madhopuri, 2010], describes the atmosphere of the 1980s — the times of an undeclared terrorist war in Punjab when Sikh secessionists struggled for establishing an independent Khalistan state in India. Looting, raping, killing, setting off bombs in buses and trains, and taking civilian hostages became a sad reality that forced many Punjabis to leave their homes forever. In the final chapter of the book, Kirāyedārī kī lānat (Being a Tenant), Balbir Madhopuri reflects on the issues of social oppression and caste inequality that remain in the contemporary society and tells readers about the most difficult initial period of his life in India’s cosmopolitan capital.

Discrimination in Indian Higher Education: Everyday Exclusion of the Dalit–Adivasi Student

This study is based on the lived experiences of the Dalit and Adivasi students in an elite higher education institution in India. It describes the everyday struggle undertaken by the students from socially marginalized communities, who experience discrimination, alienation and exclusion due to their identity. The study analyses the narratives of students about their educational experiences to develop an understanding of the regulatory and gate-keeping mechanisms operating in the academic and non-academic spheres in the educational institutions. Further, by revealing the serious limitations of existing practices of inclusion it reflects upon the manifest reproduction of caste inequalities within educational institutions today.

Locked out of livelihoods: impact of COVID-19 on single women farmers in Maharashtra, India.

This article examines the impact of COVID-19 on the livelihoods of widows and other single women farmers from the most backward districts of Maharashtra, a state in western India. COVID-19 led to food insecurity, loss of farm incomes, decline in employment opportunities and increased debt traps for single women farmers. The paper highlights how agrarian distress and pre-existing inequalities of class, caste and gender in access to food, incomes, credit, land, markets, and decision making, were exacerbated during the pandemic, further impoverishing these women farmers. To trace these effects, the paper draws on two types of evidence gathered in Maharashtra by MAKAAM, an informal all-India women farmer’s forum: observations during multiple rounds of interactions with over a hundred women farmers during the COVID-support work of providing ration and seeds undertaken by MAKAAM during India’s national lockdown in 2020, and a subsequent large-scale survey covering about a thousand women. The paper also focuses on the inadequacy of state response, both in terms of providing relief and in its ability to partner with women’s collectives and grassroots organisations for better outcomes. The article makes a case for strengthening social security measures for women farmers and enhancing their access to productive resources, agricultural programmes and decision-making spaces in relevant institutions.