Upper-caste Hindu Research Articles

Managing the “Hypersexual and “Primitive” Sexual Instinct

Highlighting the “difference” or “aberration” of indigenous communities was central to the construction of their “uncivilized” status in British colonial India. Existing scholarship on indigeneity in modern South Asia has highlighted how elite opinion, whether it be colonial or Indian, emphasized the “strangeness” of the lifestyles of the indigenous communities. Scholarship on gender, sexuality, and indigeneity has noted how any sexual or marital practice that deviated from the norms of upper-caste Hindu heteronormative patriarchy was deemed “uncivilized,” reinforcing the “savagery” of the indigenous. In this article, I deconstruct the process of the sexual pathologization of indigenous communities in colonial India and argue that the field of sexology played a seminal role in this process as it endowed it with a sense of scientific objectivity and legitimacy. I demonstrate how the British sexologist Havelock Ellis focused on the alleged hypersexuality and seasonal nature of the sexual response among specific indigenous communities, namely the Andamanese and the Hos, in his monumental work, Studies in the Psychology of Sex. I also show that such a pathologized view of indigenous sexuality was not only the mainstay of colonial sexology but also informed the work of elite Indian sexologists such as A. P. Pillay, as well as the writings of the anthropologist Verrier Elwin. Thus, the specter of sexually aberrant indigeneity first cast by colonial sexology left a lasting legacy in the sexological and anthropological history of modern India.

Unveiling the counternarratives of Ganga: Ganga as goddess in the Sundarbans

ABSTRACT The upper-caste Hindu communities in India portray the river Ganga as a deity associated with death and salvation. These mythical narratives overshadow the less imaginative, more experiential, and ambivalent emotions upheld by the riverine communities living around the Ganga. To understand the interplay between the contextual realities of these communities and the conceptualisation of Ganga, the article analyses select oral narratives of the riverine communities of the Sundarban Delta in West Bengal. It focuses on how the belief of Ganga as a goddess is materialised through ‘memorates’ within the vulnerable riverine ecology of the Sundarbans. The article highlights the intersections between the symbolic and material aspects of the river interacting with the economic and social realities of people thereby creating a counternarrative to the representation of the river in the Vedas and the Puranas.

A New Regime of Dispossession in Neo-Liberal India? Wind Energy, Hindutva, and Land Politics in Western Gujarat

Renewables in India are presented as modern technologies ensuring a pathway towards sustainable development and unlimited growth. But this story entails problematic land politics and the reconfiguration of space for resource frontiers’ expansion, local state formation, and ethno-religious authoritarian agendas: for the past 20 years, Kutch district of Gujarat state in Western India has experienced several waves of land liberalisation and industrialisation programmes, including wind power projects, but its proximity with Pakistan and the presence of Muslim pastoral populations on both sides of the border have also fostered Hindu nationalist movements since 1947. The development of wind energy projects in Western India follows traditional patterns of a regime of dispossession: a set of “inscription devices” assemble and disassemble land in a discursive, bureaucratic, and violent way and affix an official stamp of legality on damaging mechanisms of dispossession within a state-specific regime. But as wind projects move to borderland territories, their associated regime of dispossession aligns with long-term exclusive ethno-religious conceptions of space as Hindu. The unfolding land politics endorses the Bharatiya Janata Party’s electoral strategy to capture the remaining constituencies and co-opt minority leaders, while agents enforcing wind’s regime of dispossession see an opportunity to assert upper-caste Hindu supremacy.

Emotional Consequences of Gender-Based Violence: Influences on Ratnamala’s Decision-Making in The Story of Felanee

This study analyses how the emotional consequences of gender-based violence (GBV) shape Ratnamala's decision to elope with Kinaram in Arupa Patangia Kalita's novel, The Story of Felanee (2011). Focusing on the sociocultural practices of 1940s Assam, this research reveals how GBV, particularly the oppressive norms of widowhood prevalent in Ratnamala's patriarchal, upper-caste Hindu community, profoundly impacts her emotional landscape and ultimately fuels her act of resistance through elopement. By integrating the decision-making framework of Ernst and Paulus with Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis and Kahneman and Tversky's Prospect Theory, this paper provides a nuanced understanding of the interplay between GBV, emotional responses, and Ratnamala's pursuit of autonomy and happiness.

Adivasi Text as an Assertion and a Lament: A Feminist Perspective and a Critique of Religious Conversion and Reservations

This article explores the ways in which Kocharethi: The Araya Woman by Adivasi writer Narayan is a significant work in Adivasi literature in the way that it opens the life-world of a community, family and individuals. Kocharethi is a story about the intimate ways in which the Malayaraya Adivasi community of Kerala relates to their land and its ownership. Kocharethi is about their exploitation, impoverishment, displacement and erasure and their interaction and negotiation with modernity. It is not an overtly political piece of writing in the sense that it does not incorporate political consciousness, language, form and content, but by centring the Adivasi life-world, it attains a political feat within a literary industry that focuses primarily on the upper-caste Hindus. In a way, Kocharethi is an assertion of the autonomous identity of the Adivasi communities in general and the Malayaraya people in particular. This article therefore engages with complex insights into the relationship between the Adivasi identity, Christianity and Hinduism and how these religions have dehumanized and accepted the people within the fold only on their own terms. The article looks into the important arguments about affirmative action, such as the policy of reservation for Dalits and Adivasis, and one of the transformations that the Malayaraya community underwent, that of conversion to Christianity. When it comes to the women of this community, it is even more complex. Hence, this article is also an attempt to reread the text by Kerala’s first Adivasi novelist, Narayan, from a feminist perspective without undermining the unique and significant position that it holds in Adivasi literature. It further looks at the issues of Adivasi women, specifically the Malayaraya women, and also analyses the patriarchal structure that is depicted in the text. The transition that the community makes due to modernity is placed subsequently.

Making Sense of Nepal’s Nationalism: Implications for the India–Nepal Relationship

The assertion of (territorial) nationalism by Nepal has serious implications for its bilateral relationship with India. Once dominant, the singular narrative of the upper-caste Hindu Parbatiya nationalism is increasingly encountering competing narratives emerging from the marginalised Janajatis and the Madhesis of Nepal. Accordingly, several nationality sentiments that were sidelined earlier have now become salient. While the India factor in these competing perspectives of nationalist discourses in Nepal appears to be subtle (but important), the growing territorial dimensions to it invariably locates India in a prominent position. This article investigates the implications of the changing dynamics of Nepal’s nationalism on its bilateral relationship with India. Looking at the internal dynamics of nationalism discourses in Nepal, the article offers a critical analysis of the territorial disputes between India and Nepal, and its implications on nationalism in Nepal and on the bilateral relationships between India and Nepal.

Demystifying the state of Minorities in Contemporary India: Reading Amit Masurkar's Sherni (The Tigress) from the Vantage Point of Marginality

Bharatiya Janata Party, the ruling party of an emergent Indian nation-state, has, from its genesis ventriloquized and brandished its exacerbating agenda of Hindu Fundamentalism in a flawed myth of an anecdotal Hindu Nationalist past where non-Hindus are conveniently ostracized. This political gambit is deployed to manufacture an overblown theory of a decline in Hindu culture, the best resonance of which is the Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2019, discriminating, and interrogating the legitimacy of specific communities on sheer grounds of religion. Amit Masurkar's film of 2021, Sherni (The Tigress) provides a critical insight into this brutal Racial Politics pervading an upper caste Hindu society, in the guise of a subtle sub-text, camouflaged within a distracting narrative of Man versus Nature. This paper facilitates the reading of this hidden discourse of Realpolitik alongside the predominant cultural narrative of gender and natural domination. Through a palimpsestuous reading, it explores themes of racial exclusion and segregation in an Ultra-Right Hindu Nation that the film silently addresses. Furthermore, this paper challenges the dominant narrative of Ecofeminism, to instead investigate the categories of race and ethnicity that intersect gender issues.

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.

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.

Insurgency and Migration: Examining the Experiences of Home and Belonging among Non-Migrant Kashmiri Pandits Living in Indian Administered Kashmir

ABSTRACT This study examines how non-migrant Kashmiri Pandits from the upper caste Hindu community construct the meaning of home and belonging via their lived experiences in relation to the insurgency of 1989 in Kashmir which led to the migration of their community. Literature indicates the meaning of the loss of home and belonging migrant Kashmiri Pandits construct while living in the host places yet the least scholarship is available for non-migrant Kashmiri Pandits. An interpretative phenomenological approach was used to explore the experiences of the participants. A total of 19 participants were selected purposively for the present study. Participants described their experiences pre- and post-insurgency period of 1989. The analysis of the data resulted in two subordinate themes: home and belonging as an emotional space and home and belonging as a socio-political space. These findings, which are based on a phenomenological approach, help to better comprehend the feeling of being a non-migrant Kashmiri Pandit and the anguish that comes with conflict-induced migration.

Training Female Bodies for New India: Women’s Physical Education between Global Trends and Local Politics in Colonial South Asia, c. 1900–1939

This paper explores the emergence of modern female physical education in late colonial India in the period between the beginning of the twentieth century and the late 1930s. Focusing mostly on physical training schemes directed at middle-class, upper-caste Hindu girls and women, the study provides detail about the role played by a variety of Indian and non-Indian historical actors that were committed to the spread of female physical fitness. It demonstrates that, despite different ideological tendencies, political agendas and methods, the extent to which these actors shared beliefs and assumptions about the fit female body is striking. The paper also makes it clear that it is necessary to move away from national or imperial lenses that have hitherto occluded the global interconnections and border-crossing trajectories at play when analyzing discourses and practices of female physical education in South Asia in the period under purview.

Between religion and politics: the political deification of Mahishasur

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the political deification of a so-called demon Mahishasur in hegemonic Hindu myths. The Mahishasur movement is a social movement for caste equality headed by indigenous and oppressed-caste groups against the hegemonic upper caste Hindu storyworlds which dominate Indian politics, society, and culture. In this article, I use data collected through participant observation and long interviews to focus on the way political organisers select and create icons for this movement, how the participants in the movement behave around these icons, and finally what terms do they use to understand their own practices. I use three related aspects of the movement – icons, rituals, and discourse – to bring out the emic concepts and practices around political deification used in the Mahishasur movement.

Bengali Dalits Speak: A Critical Study of Jatin Bala’s A Verse as a Sharpened Weapon

Dalit literature in India emerged as a movement of Ambedkarite ideology to challenge caste discrimination. Poetry as a popular genre has been adopted by Dalit writers to disseminate revolutionary ideas to bring about a change in society. They significantly unmask how the upper caste Hindus hold the supreme power to ostracize the Namashudras (Dalits) in the name of religion and caste. A Bengali Dalit poet Jatin Bala with a liberal vision and mission, used his words to protest, revolt and negotiate with the domineering ideology. His poetry A Verse as a Sharpened Weapon not only breaks the myth that West Bengal is a casteless society but also carries a note of dissent against the upper caste hegemony. He has successfully constructed the poetic device with aesthetic values to showcase the domination and oppression that Dalits face in Bengal. As a revolutionary poet, Bala breaks the chain of age-old caste oppression and reverberates the message of liberty, equality and fraternity through his verse. The present article examines Jatin Bala’s poetry to explore the theme of exploitation and protest. It also shows how Bala’s poetry becomes the voice of resistance, liberation and emancipation of his community from bondage.

Tracing An Archetypal Journey of Protagonists Towards Reforming the Parayar Dalit Identity

Vanmam centres around the lives of the Tamil Dalit Christian community, Parayars, in the Kandampatti village of South India—a space dominated by the people following the Hindu religion, that is, the so-called upper caste, Naickers and Tamil Dalit Hindu Community, the Pallars. The researcher would trace the archetypal journeys of the protagonists, Saminathan and Jayaraju, by employing the structure of the monomyth as given by Joseph Campbell. The heroes of Vanmam engage themselves towards the upliftment of their community, for which they keep a common goal in mind. This goal is to unite the two Dalit communities, the Parayars and the Pallars, which are divided on the lines of religion. The Parayars cherish the Ambedkarite ideologies that invigorates them to aim for the positions of power and authority. The first step towards this aim was to win the post of president through the village panchayat elections. This was crucial in reforming their identity and strengthening their sense of self. The stages of monomyth help in determining the various aspects of the narrative that are in alignment with it and those that are not. Campbell’s structure of monomyth is an established tool of analysis of the narrative, and the researcher would examine to what extent it can be applied to trace the journeys of the protagonists in Bama’s novel Vanmam.

Gendering and Vernacularizing Conversions in India: Christianity, Clothing, and Cartoons

This essay examines varied perceptions of Christian missionaries, upper-caste Hindu reformers, and Dalits regarding religious conversions to Christianity, particularly by Dalit women, in colonial India. Simultaneously, it also converses with some of the works on US Christianity, to reflect on how transnational studies can enrich our understanding about religion in the Americas and expand our archival arenas. In the process, the essay contemplates a counter-history of Christianity through intersecting metaphors of sentiment, vernacular, gender, and sartorial desires.

The Moral Orders of Matchmaking Work: Digitization of Matrimonial Services and the Future of Work

The digitization of matrimonial matchmaking has implications for work but also subjective notions of family, femininity, parent-child relations, community boundaries which this work relies on. This paper is based on qualitative, ethnographic fieldwork with matchmakers working with middle-class, upper-caste Hindu and Parsi communities in metropolitan India and offering services alongside, or as an alternative to the now widely used online matrimonial services. Through our fieldwork, we found all matchmakers engaged with digital technologies' involvement in the ongoing churn around modern choice. Matchmakers engaged with this wider social discourse through ideas of trust, autonomy and genealogy and in doing so they responded to and re/produced varying imaginations of the future of families, community, individuals. Our findings contribute to an understanding of the digitization of a service as well as make a case for widening the conceptual scope of the future of work debate currently dominated by economistic conceptions of work. By paying attention to the links between the productive and reproductive spheres of life, we follow labor and capital into the families and communities they reside in order to see the variety of moral projects capital can be invested in.

Hari Mohan Jha’s Khattar Kaka: Humorous Subversion of Hinduism in Mithila

As the religious meanings and practices of Hinduism came to be codified in the mid-twentieth century, apposite forces were at work, critiquing and interrogating the same. This paper disentangles the biographic and literary work of the renowned twentieth century modern Maithili litterateur Hari Mohan Jha and his fictional character Khattar Kaka, a caricature who critiqued the increasingly Brahminical and closed world of Hinduism. Kaka’s subversive humor amounts to a critique of ritualistic, popularly known as karmkandi, Brahmanism prevalent among upper caste Hindus. Jhas’s resuscitation of Carvaka, interchangebly Lokayata, an ancient Hindu philosophical thought, offered a critical view of the Maithili speaking Hindus in northern India. This amounts to an exercise of modernity as much as intertextuality.

Association Between Menstrual Hygiene Practice and Exposure to Risk of RH Problems among the Female Students of College Level in Surkhet

The goal of this cross-sectional study, carried out in two constituent campuses of Surkhet, was to explore an association between menstrual hygiene practice and exposure to RH risk among female students. Stratified sampling was applied to recruiting 282 female students for this study. For data collection, a self-administrative questionnaire was conducted. The majority of the respondents in this study were between the ages of 19 and 24, the upper-caste Hindus, married and unemployed. The study found that the average age of the menarche among rural and urban female students of the selected campuses was 13.73 years. It was found that many girls in rural campuses faced restrictions during menstruation. Disposable sanitary pads were commonly utilized by them. Reproductive health problems were more common among the female students in the urban campuses, including genital itching, urinary tract infections, and menstrual problems. The computed relative risk of restricting the practice, bathing once a day, and utilizing a sanitary disposal pad was less than 1, indicating that using a sanitary disposal pad minimizes the likelihood of RH problems. The results of the study indicated that those who change absorbents as needed and use homemade pads may have experienced RH problems. Deriving on the results of this study, it is suggested that research and advocacy regarding this issue be raised at campuses.

Collaboration With People With Lived Experience of Mental Illness to Reduce Stigma and Improve Primary Care Services

Collaboration with people with lived experience of mental illness (PWLE), also referred to as service users, is a growing priority to reduce stigma and improve mental health care. To examine feasibility and acceptability of conducting an antistigma intervention in collaboration with PWLE during mental health training of primary care practitioners (PCPs). This pilot cluster randomized clinical trial was conducted from February 7, 2016, to August 10, 2018, with assessors, PCPs, and patients blinded to group assignment. The participants were PCPs and primary care patients diagnosed with depression, psychosis, or alcohol use disorder at primary care facilities (the cluster unit of randomization) in Nepal. Statistical analysis was performed from February 2020 to February 2021. In the control group, PCPs were trained on the World Health Organization Mental Health Gap Action Programme-Intervention Guide (mhGAP-IG). In the Reducing Stigma Among Healthcare Providers (RESHAPE) group, the mhGAP-IG trainings for PCPs were cofacilitated by PWLE who presented recovery testimonials through photographic narratives. Prespecified feasibility and acceptability measures were adequacy of randomization, retention rates, intervention fidelity, data missingness, and safety. Outcome measures for PCPs included the Social Distance Scale (SDS), accuracy of diagnoses of mental illness in standardized role-plays using the Enhancing Assessment of Common Therapeutic factors tool (ENACT), and accuracy of diagnosis with actual patients. The primary end point was 16 months posttraining. Among the overall sample of 88 PCPs, 75 (85.2%) were men and 67 (76.1%) were upper caste Hindus; the mean (SD) age was 36.2 (8.8) years. Nine of the PCPs (10.2%) were physicians, whereas the remaining 79 PCPs (89.8%) were health assistants or auxiliary health workers. Thirty-four facilities were randomized to RESHAPE or the control group. All eligible PCPs participated: 43 in RESHAPE and 45 in the control group, with 76.7% (n = 33) and 73.3% (n = 33) retention at end line, respectively. Due to PCP dropout, 29 facilities (85.3%) were included in end line analysis. Of 15 PWLE trained as cofacilitators, 11 (73.3%) participated throughout the 3 months of PCP trainings. Among PCPs, mean SDS changes from pretraining to 16 months were -10.6 points (95% CI, -14.5 to -6.74 points) in RESHAPE and -2.79 points (-8.29 to 2.70 points) in the control group. Role-play-based diagnoses with ENACT were 78.1% (25 of 32) accurate in RESHAPE and 66.7% (22 of 33) in the control group. Patient diagnoses were 72.5% (29 of 40) accurate by PCPs in RESHAPE compared with 34.5% (10 of 29) by PCPs in the control group. There were no serious adverse events. This pilot cluster randomized clinical trial found that procedures were feasible and acceptable for PCPs to be trained by PWLE. These pilot results will help inform a full trial to evaluate benefits of collaboration with PWLE during training of PCPs to reduce stigma and improve diagnostic accuracy. ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT02793271.

The Identity Crisis of Bengali Dalit Refugees in Manoranjan Byapari’s Autobiography Interrogating My Chandal Life

Manoranjan Byapari is a famous Bengali Dalit writer whose family migrated from East Pakistan and took shelter in a refugee camp in West Bengal. In his autobiography Interrogating My Chandal Life, Byapari has given an account of Bengali Dalits’ victimization on the basis of caste in the pre-Partition Bengal and post-Partition West Bengal. In colonial Bengal, Dalits were known as Chandal or Untouchables. In 1911, their identity was recognized as Namashudras. After migrating to West Bengal, they were identified as Bangal and Dalit refugee. West Bengal and central governments did not warmly welcome the Namashudra refugees. They were sent to refugee camps which were crowded, unhygienic and did not provide adequate dole. Later they were sent to Andaman, Dandakaranya and other parts of India for their rehabilitation. In this dire situation, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) appeared as the Messiah to the Dalits and protested against the rehabilitation policy of the ruling government. The fake sympathy of the communist party had been revealed when they came in power in 1977 in West Bengal. Most of the communist leaders were upper-caste Hindus. In 1979, communist government secretly massacred the Namashudra refugees who were settled on the Marichjhapi Island. The state sponsored murder of Dalits remained undiscovered for many years. This study will examine the impacts of the Partition of Bengal on Dalits. It will further address how the state government provided different treatment to the Namashudra refugees for their lower caste identity.