Indian Social History Research Articles

Legal Limbo and Caste Consternation: Determining Kayasthas’ Varna Rank in Indian Law Courts, 1860–1930

Abstract This article explores how colonial law in India interacted with the construction of caste rank (varna) between 1860 and 1930. It specifically tracks contestations over Kayasthas’ legal varna rank in northern and eastern India through various inheritance disputes, threading them together to shed light on how courts sought to anchor their interpretations of Hindu law around the Indian jurisprudential conceptions of varna. It examines the successes and failures of Kayasthas to have favorable legal rulings that would uphold their status as “twice-born”/dvija, demonstrating that colonial law was limited in its ability (and often indifferent) to construct caste ranks. Inconsistent ruling in provincial courts pushed Kayasthas to seek taxonomic recognition as “twice-born” in the colonial census, demonstrating how colonial law and taxonomy intersected in novel ways. This article argues that by taking a novel approach to Indian social history through the prism of law, we can enrich our understanding of how modern notions of caste and social rank were constructed in colonial India.

Reading Dalit Autobiographies in English: A Top Ten List

Dalit autobiography has joined protest poetry as a leading genre of Dalit Literature since the nineteen seventies. Finding their inspiration in the social and political activism of B. R. Ambedkar (1891-1956), leader of the India’s anti-caste movement and a founding father of the Republic, low caste men and women have documented their struggles and victories in the face of ongoing violence and deprivation. Surveying ten life narratives translated into English from Marathi, Hindi, and Kannada, the essay treats works by Ambedkar, Daya Pawar, Sharankumar Limbale, Baby Kamble, Laxman Gaikwad, Siddhalingaiah, Omprakash Valmiki, Urmila Pawar, Vasant Moon and Namdeo Nimgade. Tracing the origins of Dalit autobiography in the writings of Siddharth College and Milind College students in the 1950s, protest writers in the 1960s, and the Dalit Panthers and their followers in the 1970s, the survey identifies recurring themes of social exclusion, poverty, patriarchy, survival and assertion in the realms of politics, employment, education, and religion. These intimate testimonials share a radical vision of social transformation across caste, class, gender, linguistic and geographic boundaries and provide a needed corrective to mainstream portraits of modern Indian social history.

Mapping B. R. Ambedkar Within the Matrix of Manu’s Patriarchy, the Mentoring of Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad and the Dynamics of Agamben’s Homo Sacer

On the 125th birth anniversary of Dr B. R. Ambedkar, this essay acknowledges the great leader’s life, vision and contributions to the cause of marginalized humanity in India. It attempts to examine Ambedkar’s agenda for social reform and his efforts towards the empowerment of the abused caste and gender categories through intense satyagraha (a form of nonviolent resistance), widespread education and supportive state laws. The article concludes with a review of caste and gender issues in the present times and argues for the need to revamp the education system. This essay begins with Ambedkar’s early life and education facilitated by the patronage of the philanthropic reformer and King of Baroda Province, Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III. Second, it examines Ambedkar’s endeavours to educate and empower the women and depressed castes of India through his research, scholarship and rewritings of the Indian social history. And third, the essay attempts to understand the concept of the untouchable Dalit as a category that comes close to the Greek phenomenon of the homo sacer—a Greek concept synonymous with the rational of the Dalit/Ati-shudra. Through the ancient concept of the homo sacer, Giorgio Agamben explores agencies that conspire to draft, long-drawn statements of abuse and exploitation of the ostracized social and political underdog.

Some Buddhist Donors and Their Families

Abstract From the very beginning the Buddhist order was dependent on donations, which were attractive for laypeople because of the merit thus accumulated. Therefore, names of donors were carefully documented in both, inscriptions, and, as soon as manuscripts are extant, also in colophons. Sometimes joint donations were made by families, whose members are named, under lucky circumstances even with an indication of their mutual relation such as parents, brothers, sisters etc. as participating in the merit made. This allows occasionally glimpses of the composition of average families and estimating their approximate seize in the ancient Indian cultural area. Hardly anything is known otherwise about this facet of Indian social history.

Can genetics help us understand Indian social history?

Attempts have been made recently to determine the identity of the so-called "Aryans" as components of the Indian population by using DNA analysis. This is largely to ascertain whether they were indigenous to India or were foreign arrivals. Similar attempts have been made to trace the origins of caste groups on the basis of varna identities and record their distribution. The results so far have been contradictory and, therefore, not of much help to social historians. There are problems in the defining of categories and the techniques of analysis. Aryan is a linguistic and cultural category and not a biological one. Caste groups have no well-defined and invariable boundaries despite marriage codes. Various other categories have been assimilated into particular castes as part of the evolution of social history on the subcontinent. A few examples of these are discussed. The problems with using DNA analysis are also touched on.

‘The nation and its fragments’: football and community in India1

Football has been one of the central components of popular culture in colonial and post‐colonial India. It has been closely linked to wider historical processes which have shaped the society and culture of the region since the nineteenth century. The history of Indian football shows that community connections and identities have been strongly articulated through the game at different points in time. In India, football started as a marker of nationalist community against British imperialism. This unitary social identity, however, gave way to a series of fragmentations in terms of new forms of community and identity. These related to social differences expressed through communal and sub‐regional identities represented through club loyalties. This essay examines the ways in which the notion of ‘community’ can be theoretically reconceptualized in the context of Indian football thereby establishing football’s credibility as a viable theme in the study of national/regional/local dichotomies in Indian social history and cultural studies.

The State of Indian Social History

Indian social history appears to be in decline. Although fine work has been published in recent years, the cutting edge of scholarship on the Indian past has moved elsewhere, particularly into the domains of cultural and intellectual life. As a consequence, the economic and material questions that were integral to social history have come to be neglected in many recent historical works. Such a neglect of the material, however, misinterprets the theoretical efforts of major thinkers, in particular Michel Foucault, who are cited in support of the shift to culture and intellectual history. For Foucault, economic conditions and material institutions were not irrelevant, but absolutely central for his analysis of modern forms of power. A one-sided reading of Foucault has meant that historians of India are ignoring economic questions precisely at the moment when economic relations throughout the world are being radically restructured. The task at hand is to bring back the exploration of the economy to the study of the Indian past. This will reinvigorate history writing and also place historians of South Asia squarely at the center of major debates and political conflicts taking place today around globalization and neo-liberalism.

The Politics of Pure Land Buddhism in India

AbstractPure Land Buddhism achieved its primary influence in East Asia because it supplied a nonmonastic, autonomous source of religious authority and practice to middle elites in those cultural regions. In contrast Pure Land failed to achieve any success in India. The explanation for the marginalization of Indian Pure Land is probably sociopolitical: Pure Land teachings tended to bypass not only the authority of the Hindu brahmins, but even the authority of Buddhist renunciate orders. Indian social history did not produce any significant middle elites concerned with such non-gurucentric religious authority. As a result, Buddhist India did not produce any innovations in the upâya of religious institutionalization in Buddhism.

Popular culture, community, power: Three studies of modern Indian social history

Popular culture, community, power: Three studies of modern Indian social history

Individuality and Achievement in South Indian Social History

One of the unresolved issues of Indian anthorpology is how to characterize and weigh the social importance of individuality and achievement in Indian social history. Of course, the individual as ‘empirical agent’ exists in India as everywhere (Dumont 1970a:9), yet because Hindu culture stresses collective identities over those of the individual, individual achievement, which is a measure of individuality, has been overlooked and sometimes outrightly rejected as a cause of history and social order (Dumont 1970a:107; 1970b; cf. Silverberg 1968). In consequence, the motivations underlying achievement that might explain historic action have also been ignored. This undervaluing of individuality and achievement has given rise to a long debate among South Asianists about the role of the individual in Indian society (e.g., Marriott 1968, 1969; Tambiah 1972:835; Beteille 1986, 1987), a debate that raises questions in wider arenas about the nature of society and culture in relation to individuals (e.g. Brown 1988; Mines 1988).

Subaltern Consciousness and the Historiography of the Indian Rebellion of 1857

My interest in the 1857 rebellion is more than academic. It to do partly with the story of how my great-grandfather Baba Karaak Singh was awarded a jagir (an estate and its revenues) by the British for loyalty, in the midst of a contagion of betrayal and treachery by mutinous sepoys (soldiers) and disaffected landlords, magnates, and peasants. Faithful to his masters, the old man, so the family legend goes, rode like the wind on a dark and moonless night to bring to the officer in charge details of the secret military plans of the rebels. My great-grandfather's name does not appear in any official roll-call of heroes or villains, pre-independence or post-independence; he was too minor a figure, too insignificant to be deserving of such notice by history. But he was remembered very well by his children and their children for the ill-gotten land that he left them, which grew sugar-cane that share-croppers planted and harvested and paid one-third as revenue to him, and the freshness and sweetness of which my mother could still taste in her mouth years later when she spoke of Baba Karaak Singh and his family jagir. So much for innocence. But I tell this story less as a confession of complicity by inheritance than as an explanation of the initial enthusiasm with which I read in the early 1980s the first essays in Indian social history by a group of post-independence historians in Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, the first volume of which appeared in 1982 under the general editorship of Ranajit Guha, Australian National University, Canberra. The historiography of Indian nationalism, Guha states in the first essay of the volume, has for a long time been dominated by elitism--colonialist and bourgeois-nationalist elitism (Historiography of Colonial India, Subaltern Studies I, 1)-an which saw the making of the Indian nation, predominantly, as the achievement of ruling-class ideas, institutions, and personalities.

Ancient Indian social history: some interpretations. By Romila Thapar pp. xi, 396. Hyderabad/London, Sangam Books by arrangement with Orient Longman Ltd., 1984. £11.25.

Ancient Indian social history: some interpretations. By Romila Thapar pp. xi, 396. Hyderabad/London, Sangam Books by arrangement with Orient Longman Ltd., 1984. £11.25.

The Report as Social History

Report of the Commission, Education and National Development, should be viewed as a major landmark in Indian educational history, and specifically as the latest effort of the Government of India to carry out the dictum of its democratic constitution to assist the states in providing comprehensive educational institutions and services. concept of universal education is relatively new in India; hence, the professional and practical problems in developing and integrating all educational sectors in relation to population growth and available resources are momentous. To quote from the Report, The population of India is now about 500 million, and half of it is below the age of 18 years-India today is essentially a land of youth. Over the next 20 years the population is likely to increase by another 250 million. . . . total student population which is now about 70 million will be more than doubled. . . and by 1985 will become about 170 million, about equal to the total population of Europe.1 When one adds to this (probably underestimated) projection the current 25-28% literacy rate, the magnitude of the government's responsibility is clear. Quantitative and qualitative mandates have impinged simultaneously. democratic ethic, in modern terms, is new in Indian social history. As in most nations, education until recently has been a function of elitism. What are the residues left by the three main streams of educational influence in India-gurus, Great Britain, and Gandhi? Gurukela System, in which boys generally lived with their gurus and identified with them psychologically and philosophically as they studied the great religious classics, was the Indian vehicle for teaching the humanities. Designed to enlighten and ennoble the twice-born (male Brahmins in particular), it was for these cultural elites a humanistic and pervasive induction into their society. Both the nation and its educational system, however, came to feel the impact of a changing world, in this case via the British Raj. British as early traders were indifferent to Indian education, but in consonance with developing imperialism they promoted through Macaulay in 1835 a needed educated class of intermediary bureaucrats who would presumably influence those below them via downward filtration. Some Oriental learning was permitted, but Western science and the English language were increasingly emphasized. Most significantly, a principle of lasting import was established: Since the government was deemed financially unable to