Caste In India Research Articles

Troubled waters : reviewing legal pluralism at the interface of caste and the access to water in India

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.

Kesri Singh: the fight for identity between divergent and hegemonic warrior masculinities in Amitav Ghosh’s Flood of Fire

The increasing prominence of men’s studies in the academic panorama has allowed for further investigation not only on women’s, but also on men’s literary identities. The Ibis Trilogy by Amitav Ghosh offers new insights on the subject by staging several queer masculinities. The present essay analyses the non-conforming identity of Kesri Singh from the perspective of men’s studies. Firstly, the essay compares and contrasts the socially imposed masculinity with Kesri’s divergent one. Secondly, it highlights the strategy deployed by the warrior in order to protect his psychological and physical integrity in a toxic environment. Given the strong historical background of the novels, references are provided to account for the patriarchal context in which Kesri develops. Further sources of discrimination such as race and class are also explored, according to an intersectional feminist approach. Thus, it will be proved that a male gender related discourse covers ample narrative space in the Trilogy; it also reflects the critical opposition by Ghosh to the Western colonialism and Indian caste division. Moreover, it will be exposed the manipulative use of the male gender as an instrument to enforce colonialism and classism. Therefore, the Trilogy presents masculinity as a highly debatable, multifaceted notion which undergoes a negotiation in meaning throughout the novels. This premise leads to a broader definition of the concept, which provides a new, significant viewpoint on the subject.

Ambedkar and the problem of biography

In 1945 Dr. B. R. Ambedkar published What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables. He prefaced it with a dedication to “F”, Fanny or Frances Fitzgerald, a widowed Irishwoman who was his longtime friend. This dedication gives us some clues as to the nature and complexity of their relationship. His dedication reproduces a section of the Book of Ruth, from the Old Testament, a story about loyalty and family, homeland and exile, one’s own tribe and another tribe, solidarity, migration and conversion. I delve deeper into the story of Ruth, along with another Biblical figure, Moses, who moves between countries, tribes, identities and religions. Their stories retain both the history of their otherness and the importance of their role as founders. Ambedkar’s refusal to integrate into the Hindu caste order, his assertion of the inassimilable otherness and difference of the Untouchables, and eventually his conversion Buddhism, all proceed from his interpretation of Ruth.

Evolution of the figure of the Brahmin in early Muslim writings

When we talk about the caste system today, among other things, we talk about the wily, crafty and the boasting Brahmins who founded and maintained a set of self-serving rules that effectively took the form of the caste system. How do social scientists know about these Brahmins? As a set of new scholars are demonstrating today, the ancient Indian texts - such as the Vedas or the Mahabharata - do not talk about the caste system or the rule-setting priestly class of Brahmins. These texts do not even exhibit an impulse to put into place a system that even remotely resembles the so-called caste system. Whence is this idea of Brahmin then? Ever since Wilhelm Halbfass’s Imagining India (1990), a growing but a small number of Indologists talk about the 11th century Al-Bīrūnī as one of “the greatest scholars ever” to speak about the Indian caste system. There is, however, neither a comprehensive study to show what his contributions measure up to nor any attempt to dig into the Islamic culture that culminates in Al-Biruni’s quite detailed picture of the Brahmin and the caste system. This paper sifts through the earliest available Islamic writings on India, from the early 8th century to Al-Biruni’s time, to chart a genealogy of the figure of the law-making crafty Brahmin that we confront by the 11th century in Muslim writings.

Caste, race, and slavery: On comparisons between race in the United States and caste in India, and to forgotten assumptions behind the legal categories

While diving into the background ideas about caste and race as legal categories, a researcher will discover an important disagreement between scholars: For some, caste is certainly connected with race, whereas for others, caste and race are separate concepts which refer to distinct realities. The aim of this article is twofold: To consider the validity of several characteristics which are ascribed by many authors as common to caste and race, and to analyse background assumptions that enabled the comparison between caste and race as such. The important question, connected with both these aims is about the emergence of the idea that the ancient “Hindu nation” was divided into two peoples, and castes as a system are reflecting the original division in modern India. We will closely examine comparisons made between the advent of Aryans in India and slavery in the United States and Africa. Finally, we will reconsider the European ideas of human evolution and equality of men, which served as a contrasting board for explanations of caste as a form of slavery.

Caste in a new light: Jati in British multiculturalism

Advocates of multiculturalism claim that it supports the rights of cultural minorities and the public recognition of cultural differences. However, this article shows that this cannot be true of Indian culture as it has become transported to Britain, where multiculturalism actually poses a threat to it. Using the resources of the research programme of the Ghent School on the comparative study of India and Europe, this article substantiates this claim by showing how the dominant conception of cultural differences as well as the classical conception of the Indian caste system, which takes over the Indian social structures of jati, are both imported by multiculturalist thought and practice. The concretizing of multiculturalism in the form of anti-discrimination law is not only anticipated by a destructive politics of identity, but the law itself can be used to foster the destruction of Indian culture on the pretext of targeting the discriminatory caste system.

Locating Violence in Kusum Kumar’s Suno Shefali (Listen Shefali)

India has a long tradition of social dramas that dates back to the 19th century. Such plays have been instrumental in raising social and political awareness among the masses. Located within this strong tradition of ‘socials’, is Kusum Kumar’s hard-hitting play Suno Shefali (Listen Shefali). Originally written in Hindi in 1975 and published in 1978, the play is significant for it engages with violence and oppression at the intersection of caste, class and gender at a time when feminist scholars had not theorized intersectionality as an important analytical tool of analysis. The play also predates several important Indian plays, especially by the male playwright, that deal with the problems of caste system in India. In this essay, I will attempt to study various forms of violence committed on a Dalit woman at the intersection of gender, caste and class in Kumar’s Listen Shefali using theoretical concepts like Kimberle Crenshaw’s ‘intersectionality’, Johan Galtung’s ‘structural violence’, M. Weigert’s ‘personal violence’, Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘symbolic violence’ and Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s ‘epistemic violence’.

How does caste affect entrepreneurship? birth versus worth

Informal institutions play an important role in resource allocation across entrepreneurs in developing countries. I focus on the caste system in India and document three stylized facts. First, entrepreneurs of historically disadvantaged castes have a higher average revenue product of capital, arpk, relative to high-caste enterprises. Second, cross-caste differences in arpk are driven by small enterprises. Third, the majority of these differences are concentrated in financially underdeveloped regions. In a model of entrepreneurship, I find that the cross-caste differences in arpk are explained by differences in access to credit and that such asymmetries reduce output per capita by 5.6%.

Examining the Presence of Dalit identity in Hindi Cinema

A century of Bombay’s popular cinema has overtly celebrated the upper caste hero on screen. Major genres of Hindi cinema are stuffed with the Hindu-Brahmanical cultural values, social themes and political interests. The caste and question of Untouchability not even figured as the peripheral aspects of the cinema. The narratives revolve around certain abstract upper caste Hindu identities, divorced from the idea that in the actual Hindu social order caste distinctions play a crucial role. Bombay’s popular Hindi cinema though showcased artistic and intellectual agency by representing the problems of urban poor during its ‘Golden Age’ period, however the caste question is visibly ignored. Importantly, the problems of the Untouchables were discussed in the national political spectrum and the new Constitution offered them a new identity and special provisions to facilitate their entry into mainstream civil life, the Hindi cinema of 1950s neglected their concerns and voices under the influence of nationalistsocialist rhetoric. It is only in the neo-liberal era that the cinema industry witnessed the arrival of nuanced Dalit representation on screen.

Odouring Foodscapes, Ordering Gender: Mapping Women and Caste in Samskara and The Weave of My Life

abstract The article locates the caste-spaces in India through the sensoriality of smell emitted by food in different gastronomical zones and its influence on the socio-political condition of Dalit women. It focuses on the embedded olfactory value of food to inform the contested nature of the Indian caste system and enables an understanding of the gendered aspect of the caste-spaces. By examining caste as spatial, sensorial and corporeal, the article confronts the crucial gaps in caste and food studies by deconstructing the order and odour of foodways in U.R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara (1976) and Urmila Pawar’s The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs (2008). While critiquing the caste system narrative, the selected texts map different olfactory zones in intercultural culinary landscapes. The article argues how the caste society is built on the gastronomic idea of ‘we are/smell what we eat’ by mapping the ways in which the two texts explore the physical and sensorial consumption of food in different socio-cultural spaces. It is argued that gendered meanings around smell are invariably connected to the caste system, and that Dalit women’s relationships to food and smells should be foregrounded in the olfactory politics of caste. The article traces the ways in which smellscapes highlighted in the selected texts create invisible boundaries of spatial and moral stratification (order) through the invisible medium of smell (odour). It also situates the praxis of deodorisation as a tool of dissent by Dalits, and especially Dalit women. The article raises critical inquiry into how the olfactory effect of food is not just a chemical by-product, but rather a symbolic agent which can work both to oppress − through spatial and corporeal discourses − or be opened up to rigorous inquiry.

WATER CRISIS IN DALIT LITERAURE : FICTION AND REALITY

Caste is a stigma in Indian society and has hampered its growth. Because of this, a section of society has perpetually dictated the lower castes. The upper caste has tormented Dalits economically and socially for primary needs such as water, an essential need for both humans and animals. The upper castes have forbidden the right to water to a lower caste. The upper classes felt that a touch of Dalit would contaminate the water. If a Dalit happened to trod into a pond, the Indian priest had to sanctify the defiled water with a yajna. This situation led to many heart-rending casualties. This paper will investigate how the denial of even the fundamental right to water has rendered trouble in the lives of Dalits in India. Though the Dalit leaders had launched Satyagraha for Dalits to use a public tank in Maharashtra, the upper caste Hindus banned, the lower caste Hindus' access to water bodies. The present study will shed light on water issues, specifically in Dalit literature by non-Dalit writers. Do upper caste Hindus still keep separate water bodies for themselves? To what degree have progressive writers displayed it in their writings?

Depiction of Caste Annihilation and Class Abrogation in Mulk Raj Anand’s UNTOUCHABLE and COOLIE

Since civilization has started caste system based on profession not by birth. Later on it turns into a power game and the whole human society were divided into four varnas. Manusmriti, widely regarded to be the important and authoritative book on Hindu law and dating back to at least 1000 years before Christ was born ‘‘acknowledges and justifies the caste system as the basis of order and regularity of society .’’(Web ) The caste divides Hindu into four main categories – Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras. Many believe that the groups originated from Brahma , The Hindu God of Creation. They are classified according to occupation and determine access to wealth , power and privilege. In recent years Violence has become a common phenomenon in India. It has engulfed the entire political, social, economic, cultural and even our personal lives. Violence of social justice and caste discriminations of complex characters have added additional burden to our society whereas we Indians have been specially advised to practice “non-violence”. The growing trend in violence thus provokes us to talk about non-violence and identify the roots of violence in India. Caste Violence is perhaps one of the most hazardous forms of violence in India. It often intermingles with the most political, social, cultural, and class atrocity. So caste discriminations and atrocities against the socially weaker sections with age- old traditional and unconventional norms deserve a careful historical investigation. Indian Caste system is the most widely discussed subject all over the world. Caste system is a social evil in which the higher caste people exploits and persecutes the lower caste people and forced them to live sub-human lives like beasts. This paper is based on caste and vulgarism of ‘Untouchable’ and ‘Coolie’ poignantly portrayed by M R Anand. It is an attempt to explore its origin, nature, gravity, and deprivation.

A critical study of tomorrow is ours

Tomorrow is ours protests against the forces of religion, fascism, imperialism and caste prejudices. It throws light on the sad experiences of its author in this antagonistic world. The novel studies the Indian society minutely. It shows the wide difference between the caste Hindus and the untouchables. It focuses on the hatred, detestation, complete isolation the former nurses for the latter. The novel stresses the need for compassion, affection, love and help for the poor and the neglected class. The high drama of the struggle for freedom, of the distress and dejection brought about by the ravages of the World War, the plight of woman in the male dominated society and finally the triumph of persistence are effectively and forcefully spotlighted.

An Analysis of Caste Discrimination and Untouchability in R.B. Nischal's Poem Paitālā Pukār 2

This paper examines the socio-cultural issues of Dalits. The objective of the study was to analyze caste discrimination and untouchability of Dalits. For this objective, the researcher has employed Stuart Hall's theoretical insights of representation under cultural studies. The poem was selected purposively and it was the library based qualitative research. The data were collected from record-keeping and description. The researcher found that Dalit community that has suffered from the time immemorial in every aspect due to generational, multi-faceted and institutionalized discrimination due to the Hindu caste system in Nepal for religious and political reasons. This unfair practice has left a clear mark of social division, exclusion and inequality which has severely ruined Dalits' life and identity. Addressing this issue in the poem Paital Puk r Ram Bahadur Kami, displays episodes of verbal and physical violence and recurrent intra-caste discrimination. As well as he depicts the traumatic existence of the Dalit oppressed community. Other dominations and discriminations are less traumatic in comparison of cultural trauma which is like an incurable disease. Therefore, this paper displays how the Dalit people have been living in a society bearing harsh torture, trauma and inhuman treatment. Moreover, it is significant for academia for representing diverse cultural experiences and people and it can be a valuable asset for the society.

Complete mitochondrial DNA sequence tries to settle hitherto putative history of Kayastha population of India.

Indian caste system is unique as it has an inimitable type of class system where the social ordering is done based on birth. Within the caste system, there is a distinct endogamous population known as the Kayastha, who have had inconclusive stratification records due to unidentified historical records. To gain a more inclusive view on the history and genetic affinities of Kayastha people, complete mitochondrial genomes from 15 individuals of a Kayastha population from North-western India have been sequenced. Interestingly, three novel sub-clades (U2b2a, M3d2, and M33a3b) have been identified that represent unique Kayastha motifs. The haplotype-based analysis suggests that the Kayastha population shares genetic affinities with the Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan populations found in the trans-Himalayan region. The FST based population comparison and the MDS plot indicates that Kayastha people have close maternal genetic affinity with the available genetic database of Brahmins, Kashmiris, and Tharus. The maternal genetic lineages among Kayastha population shows deep in situ origin that emerged much before settled life developed on this sub-continent. Both mtDNA and Y-chromosome markers, trace the genetic lineages of Kayastha population with Tharus, who regard themselves Kshatriya, corroborated by the oral history of the Kayasthas for their Kshatriya affiliation. It also validates genetic heritage of earliest settlers of India in both indigenous tribal and caste populations.

Inter-Caste Gender Performativity in Indian Hindu Culture: A Postcolonial Gender Study in Mulk Raj Anan’s “Untouchable” and Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things”

This paper attempts to evaluate the inter-caste gender performativity in Indian Hindu Culture through Judith Butler's ‘gender performativity’ by analyzing the texts, Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. In Indian Hindu culture, inter-caste relationship is dogmatically and traditionally antagonistic whereas some autobiographical documents kept evidences of consensual and ‘non-theatrical inter-caste relationship’ which crosses the margin of untouchability. Women, the gender subalterns in inter-caste consensual relationship, never possess the certainty of their caste. They never inherently belong to any caste of them, rather, they are traditionally found to be tagged off the caste of the men whoever touched them. The non-consensual inter-caste relationship are always oppressive and non-theatrical keeping women silent by the forceful touch of upper caste men but such relationship does not determine or modify women’s rank. It’s a double standard and both contexts are dominated by upper castes. The non-theatrical context subverts the upper caste notion of the belief in after life punishment of inter-caste touch and the elitist discourse of ‘impurity’. Such relationship proves that the theatrical notion is nothing but a bourgeois-political weapon of the upper caste to oppress the lowers. It is a qualitative research which has been done by closed textual reading method. This paper explores how both the writers are affected by inter-caste gender performativity in Indian Hindu culture and analyses the gender performativity of Hindu castes from four separate contexts: theatrical nontheatrical, public and private spheres. The research proves that both the writers are separately affected by socially prescribed gender performativity having distinctive stand points; and the Indian Hindu castes have conditional gender performativity in both theatrical and nontheatrical contexts.

Socio-political Mobilization of Kudmis in Junglemahal Region of West Bengal

Kudmis of Eastern India are important peasant community. They are highly concentrated in the Junglemahal areas of West Bengal, Jharkhand and Odisha.They are also scattered in some parts of Assam. Assamese Kudmis were migrated from Chhotnagpur region. After 1950 when the scheduled tribe list was prepared and Kudmis did not find place in the list since then they have been fighting for their identity as scheduled tribe. It is also relevant to mention that in the British era various documents projected the Kudmis as tribe and aboriginal community of India. That’s why they demanded to restore their previous identity.It has also been observed that like other aboriginal tribes the Kudmis wanted to elevate their social status as ‘Kshatriya’ in the Hindu caste hierarchy.This process is known to us as ‘Sanskritization’. This paper has tried to find the reasons behind the socio-politico mobilization and movements of Kudmis of Junglemahal and the out comes exploring the recent trends.

A Cross-Regional Analysis of Colorism Experiences in High Schoolers in India and the United States

Around the world, various beauty standards are often portrayed in the media and expressed by people living in that region, which devolve into unconscious biases. Previous research points to a worldwide skin tone perception standard: dark skin is undesirable. Slavery in the United States and the caste system in India, among other historical phenomena, have played a role in creating this common perception. This study investigates colorism, defined as prejudice against dark skin tones, and aims to examine experiences of colorism and self-esteem through an online survey sent to high school students in India and in the United States. This research paper is unique because a comparison study of regions is not commonly found in the existing literature and, high school students, living in a globally connected world, will provide new perspectives on the cross-cultural issue of colorism. 122 responses (90 from India and 32 from the United States) were collected. A T-test comparing India to the United States found that students in India reported higher colorism than those in the United States (t = -70.219, p < 0.01), and students in the United States reported lower self-esteem (t = -53.33, p < 0.01) compared to those in India. However, skin tone was not significantly correlated with self-esteem or colorist experiences in India or the USA. These results show that the stigma of dark skin tones has not been mitigated and also suggests that there may be other variables apart from skin tone that have greater effect on self-esteem.

The body and the contagion: a symbiosis of yoga, dance, health and spirituality

ABSTRACT What are the connections between bodies, healing, and transcendence? I propose that by examining the intersections of the medical and the socio-cultural body with dance or the performative body, we can shine a critical light on this question. This paper brings Yoga and Indian dance together to explore how notions of health, spirituality, and morality came to be inscribed in particular kinds of bodies leading to selective ideas of bodily transcendence and spirituality in postcolonial India. I show through a diverse range of scholarships how the heterogeneous roots of Yoga have been homogenized in modern India as something Hindu and Brahminical (which is now integrated with rightwing Hindutva). Interestingly, the Indian classical dance revivalism shared the same logic as Yoga revivalism. As a result, the upper caste Hindu bodies distinguished themselves from their cultural others (Muslims and low caste Hindus) through concepts of purity, health, spirituality, and transcendence. I examine how some of these concepts of Yoga, dance, and embodiment from the east and west mingled in recent times and influenced narratives of ‘contemporary dance’ in India and the U.S. In these symbiotic, cross-cultural exchanges, concepts of somatics and neurobiology blended with modern Yoga and dance to render the elite, upper-caste/class bodies, and/or white bodies as universal, righteous, and transcultural.

Religion in the labor market: evidence from India

ABSTRACT In this paper, we analyse the education and wage gaps between Hindus and Muslims over the period 1983 to 2011–2012 in India. We find that Muslims are worse off than Hindus in terms of education and this disadvantage has increased over time. Our analysis shows that the wage gap is more pronounced at the higher end of the wage distribution which we interpret as a glass ceiling effect. We find that the wage gap has increased over time and the increase is more pronounced at the upper quantiles. Our decomposition analysis shows that difference in education has a significant contribution to the Hindu-Muslim wage gap. We find that the Hindu-Muslim gaps are more pronounced in urban areas relative to rural areas. Comparing Muslims with different Hindu castes, we find that while the disadvantaged castes have improved their condition relative to Muslims over time, the condition of Muslims relative to the advantaged castes has worsened. Dividing the sample into younger (aged 16–35) and older (36–65) cohorts, we find that the Hindu-Muslim gap in education is more acute in the younger cohort while the Hindu-Muslim wage gap is more pronounced for the older cohort.