Caste (Anthropology)

Introduction

Caste has been the subject of curiosity, debate, protest, investigation, reform, and outrage for over a century, and stands still as a surrogate for understanding India. Long held to be the primary unit of Indian social organization, caste fractures were often cited as the very reason for India’s historical disunity and fissiparous tendencies. As a social form, caste is tethered by the twin notions of varna and jati: the former signaling a religious-ideological formulation into whose four broad categories (or chatur-varnas) all the diverse occupationally specialized, endogamous regional groups (or jatis) could be placed (or excluded from, creating a further subcategory of untouchables). Later scholars added conceptions of purity and pollution to our understandings of how groups are distinguished and hierarchies delineated, pointing to the symbolic and real dimensions of caste practices. As an occupational hierarchy, however, caste has important socioeconomic dimensions that complicate any straightforward religious interpretation. There is a substantial corpus of research that documents economic and occupational strategies that mitigate some caste rigidities and allow for more contestations of power and mobility than conventional varna-jati perspectives would appear to allow. Such studies not only explore the everyday workings of hierarchy, the possibilities of class mobility, and the meshing of kinship with economics and identity, but also expose caste as a system of clientelism and patronage that determines access to power, reinforcing as much as subverting existing social relations. Caste is malleable, no doubt, but what social form it assumes depends on a highly variable set of institutional relationships: with kin and community groups, reformist organizations, political parties, the colonial and later developmentalist state, and even with international bodies concerned with human rights and development. Distinguishing between caste and the caste system, then, is one way to begin speaking about the structural transformations of caste from colonial times to the present. For no longer can caste be defined purely in terms of endogamy, heredity, and relative rank. Rather, castes develop into political factions in competition with other such factions for common economic or political goals: processes that lead to a conceptualization of caste as an ethnicized formation. Caste then also defines mechanisms by which to claim power, create new alliances, articulate discontent, demand justice, critique dominant ideologies, and project the textured and multidimensional worldviews and experiences of the marginalized, thus compelling a rethinking of hierarchy while creating spaces for the articulation of difference. Citations in the following sections are organized to guide readers through the morphing meanings and understandings of caste, beginning with classic conceptualizations, the transformations of caste under colonialism and consequent waves of social reform, to the present day identitarian assertions of democratic selfhood. It is important to note, however, that although section heads define broad areas of emphasis, there are at times overlaps, which are indicated where possible.

Classic Theories

Classic theories of caste treat it as a phenomenon to be studied, documented, and understood as a more-or-less closed socioreligious system. Roberto de Nobili and later Abbé Dubois laid the groundwork for early conceptualizations of caste as a highly ritualized, Brahminical, curious, and somewhat impenetrable system that posed particular challenges for missionizing work. The petrified religious foundations of caste establish its contradistinction with the state in Hegel’s thinking: caste expressed India’s fundamental “nature” and was the reason why India was both without history in need of European subjection. The more sociological assessments of Max Weber and colonial administrators like H. H. Risley, too, saw the institution of caste as an impediment to individual progress and to capitalist and national development. Not unlike the missionizing efforts of de Nobili and Dubois, Risley sought a reconstitution of caste—but this time with anthropometric tools, as an overarching logic of enumeration and classification that yielded a civil society amenable to colonial strategies of governance. These early theories set the stage for later conceptualizations. Hutton 1947 drew on existing census reports as well as works by other British scholar-administrators to reflect on the origins and the functional basis of caste, and to document factors contributing to the emergence and development of caste; his work serves as much as an overview of caste as a historical document on colonial methods and conceptualizations. Bailey 1961 and Marriott 1960 study the idea of caste in relation to that of tribes as usually distinguished, but here coexisting and mutually influencing social forms. Marriott 1960 and Leach 1960 provide comparative descriptions of what Marriott calls the elaborateness of caste ranking in different regions of the subcontinent, covering interdependencies, variations, acceptance of hierarchy, occupational specialization, and so on; both are in a way concerned with establishing and substantiating the forms and functions of caste. Srinivas 1952, however, gives us the first vocabulary by which to understand mobility: Sanskritization is a process by which lower caste groups seek to emulate the behaviors of higher castes, many of which are associated with purity, thereby enabling a rise in position over a few generations. Dumont 1980 establishes a different and critical baseline: reading caste as inextricable from its religious matrix, turning on the opposition of purity to impurity, and as a totalizing status-defined framework by which to read all social interactions, Dumont’s work becomes a point of reference that scholars like Jonathan Parry (in Parry 1979) nuance by describing inconsistencies within caste ideologies. Mencher 1974 and Meillassoux 1973, on the other hand, critique caste by arguing, respectively, that it functions fundamentally as a system of economic exploitation, and that jajmani relations were in fact relations of labor exploitation—each therefore providing a basis to read caste as class. Finally, Béteille 1996 reflects on the declining importance of the chaturvarna framework and the remarkable tenacity (p. 25) of jati in allowing for the expression of collective identity—extending Srinivas’s earlier insights on this subject, as well as those of other vernacular theorists.

Bailey, F. G. 1961. Tribe and caste in India. Contribution to Indian Sociology 5:7–19.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Bailey distinguishes tribes from castes (the former segmentary, the latter hierarchical) but places both in a common, mutually constituting context that produces regional variations in form. They exist on a continuum rather than being strictly distinguishable as types.
Find this resource:
Béteille, André. 1996. Varna and jati. Sociological Bulletin 45.1: 15–27.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Readable discussion of the ideas of varna and jati, and a response to M. N. Srinivas’s essay of the same title and N. K. Bose’s writings on the subject. Demonstrates the relative insignificance of varna as a framework for understanding caste and the resurgence of jati-based identities and politics.
Find this resource:
Dumont, Louis. 1980. Homo hierarchicus. Translated by Mark Sainsbury, Louis Dumont, and Basia Gulati. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Seminal treatise on caste in India that opposes the characterization of caste as an extreme form of social stratification, and puts forward caste hierarchy as an ideological ordering of society as a whole, based on a religiously inflected opposition of purity to impurity (and therefore Brahmin/non-Brahmin, high/low, spiritual/temporal, superior/inferior, etc.). First published 1966.
Find this resource:
Hutton, J. H. 1947. Caste in India: Its nature, functions, and origins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Anthropologist, administrator, and 1931 census commissioner Hutton’s attempt to provide a comprehensive account of caste from descriptions and theories of origin to present forms and strictures, with appendices on exterior castes.
Find this resource:
Leach, Edmund, ed. 1960. Aspects of caste in South India, Ceylon and north-west Pakistan. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Collection of essays that evaluate caste against both Dumont’s early theses on the embeddedness of caste in religious matrices and other analyses of caste as rigid social hierarchy. Leach identifies five key elements that distinguish caste: hierarchy, endogamy, hereditary occupation, untouchability, and rules governing commensality.
Find this resource:
Marriott, McKim. 1960. Caste ranking and community structure in five regions of India and Pakistan. Deccan College Monograph Series 23. Poona, India: Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Structural analysis of variations in elaborateness of the caste system across five South Asian regions, ranking each area according to the degree of consensus on the hierarchy of castes, delineation of hierarchy by ritual, and limits placed on social interaction between high and low castes. Argues that tribes and castes are often coeval, and that castes can have emerged from tribes.
Find this resource:
Meillassoux, Claude. 1973. Are there castes in India? Economy and Society 2.1: 89–111.
DOI: 10.1080/03085147300000004Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Critique of Dumont’s theory of caste and Marxist analysis of caste as fundamentally based in economic relations of production. Jajmani relations were in fact clientalist, dependent on the exploitation of labor, and varna is really class masked by religious precepts.
Find this resource:
Mencher, Joan. 1974. The caste system upside down, or the not-so-mysterious East. Current Anthropology 15.4: 469–493.
DOI: 10.1086/201505Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Reading caste from the “bottom up,” Mencher makes two related arguments: that caste is fundamentally a system of economic exploitation; and that, as a result, one of its functions has been the denial of class-based social groupings.
Find this resource:
Parry, Jonathan. 1979. Caste and kinship in Kangra. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Social structural account of caste and kinship in Himachal Pradesh highlights the existence of as many hierarchies within caste groups as between them. Pervasive though hierarchy is in a Dumontian sense, caste ideology is never perfectly coherent or without inconsistencies.
Find this resource:
Srinivas, M. N. 1952. Religion and society among the Coorgs of South India. Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Classic ethnographic study of the Kodava community, Srinivas’s analysis of social structure focuses on vertical groupings (village, family) versus horizontal groupings of labor division and caste. Advances the influential theory of Sanskritization: processes by which smaller, peripheral groups are absorbed (or seek to be absorbed) into mainstream Sanskritic Hinduism.
Find this resource:
Srinivas, M. N. 1959. The dominant caste in Rampura. American Anthropologist 61.1: 1–16.
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1959.61.1.02a00030Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Srinivas establishes parameters in this essay for the understanding of “dominance” that may be tied to wealth, landholding, and political power, not just caste status. “Sanskritization” can mean the emulation of other dominant castes, not only Brahmins.
Find this resource:
Post-Dumontian Approaches

The range of criticisms to which Dumont’s theories of caste have been subjected are wide, addressing his purportedly selective use of sources, privileging of religious and Brahminical readings, feeding into Orientalized perceptions, ignoring the imbrication of caste with labor and modes of production, and so on. Several of the works in this section take issue with Dumont’s theories—Quigley 1993 is the most elaborate of these. Other critiques are more or less developed, and serve mainly as a lifting off point for the development of alternative modes of reading caste. Leonard 1978 rejects the pollution/purity framework and advances instead an economic reading of caste interactions. Essays in the collection Searle-Chatterjee and Sharma 1994 reject the idea of an encompassing ideology that denies the possibility of agency and pivots on a notion of an essential hierarchical self, finding it more useful to think of caste as a system of action, as something that people do, rather than are. Rudner 1994 pays homage to Dumont’s by now “standardized” views of caste, but insists that caste has become a symbolic framework within which all manner of potential alliances become possible—in other words, an ethnicized identity. Gupta 2000 confirms such a view of caste as fluid and strategic with the aid of electoral voting data. Like Rudner, Lindt 2013, too, presents caste as a framework within which to reconcile several divergent rationales in the process of social transformation. While these studies seem to replace Dumontian frameworks for others that highlight fluidity and internal inconsistency, Parish 1996, amonograph on the Nepali Newars, rejects totalizing analyses entirely, and points instead to the fundamental incoherence of caste ideologies. Far from divorcing caste from ritual, Raheja 1988 decenters and rethinks hierarchy entirely by showing that it is the ritual centrality of certain prestations that creates dominance. Finally, Ganguly 2005 is a postcolonial reading that critiques secular readings of caste, as these draw on legacies of liberalism and Marxism, and presents instead Dalit life worlds as the performative elements of caste that encompass a plenitude of heterogeneous ways of dwelling in late modern India (p. x).

Ganguly, Debjani. 2005. Caste, colonialism and counter-modernity: Notes on a postcolonial hermeneutics of caste. New York: Routledge.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Critique of Orientalist, nationalist, and Marxist frameworks for the understanding of caste; Ganguly takes a cue from subaltern studies to examine how caste is “performed” in everyday life-worlds, via analysis of Ambedkar’s writings and Dalit narratives.
Find this resource:
Gupta, Dipankar. 2000. Interrogating caste: Understanding hierarchy and difference in Indian society. New Delhi: Penguin.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Treatment of caste as a series of discrete categories that allow for the formation of multiple, fluid, strategic hierarchies. Uses electoral voting data to argue against caste rigidities and of caste as a closed system of stratification.
Find this resource:
Leonard, Karen. 1978. Social history of an Indian caste: The Kayasths of Hyderabad. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Historian’s account of the administration of Hyderabad over two hundred years, and its implications for the constitution of kin groups and families. Rejects purity- and pollution-oriented explanations of caste and insists that social boundaries and continuities depended on economic resources and occupational strategies.
Find this resource:
Lindt, Benjamin. 2013. Towards a comprehensive model of caste. Contributions to Indian Sociology 47.1: 85–112.
DOI: 10.1177/006996671204700104Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Post-Dumontian analysis of caste as a logic of rationalizing competing rationales (economic, biological, ideational), in order to account for the ongoing processes of transformation.
Find this resource:
Parish, Stephen. 1996. Hierarchy and its discontents: Culture and the politics of consciousness in Caste society. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Takes issue with Dumont’s all-encompassing theory of caste and presents the case of the Newars of Nepal, who present several varied interpretations of hierarchy and equality.
Find this resource:
Quigley, Declan. 1993. The interpretation of Caste. Oxford: Clarendon.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Complex argument about caste deriving form from both kinship (endogamy) and kingship (hierarchy), with the latter being essential to productivity from the level of the kingdom down to the household.
Find this resource:
Raheja, Gloria Goodwin. 1988. The poison in the gift: Ritual, prestation, and the dominant caste in a North Indian village. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Critical study of kinship, gift-giving, and caste that uses detailed analysis of gift exchange to show how dominance is grounded in ritual centrality rather than Dumontian hierarchy or ranked exchanges.
Find this resource:
Rudner, David West. 1994. Caste and capitalism in colonial India: The Nattukottai Chettiars. Berekeley: Univ. of California Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Study of the Nattukottai Chettiar bankers that demonstrates the role of kinship and social obligation in allowing for the movement of capital, and therefore of caste as a financial institution. Revises prevailing theories of caste linked to religion, and insists instead on the importance of institutional structures in mediating individuals and their social worlds.
Find this resource:
Searle-Chatterjee, Mary, and Ursula Sharma, eds. 1994. Contextualising caste: Post-Dumontian approaches. Sociological Review Monograph Series 41. Oxford, and Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Important collection of essays that eschews a ritualistic or religious framework for understanding caste, but focuses instead on local dominance or instances of egalitarianism, monarchical institutions, and comparative frameworks (a la Berreman’s work on caste and race) to consider what forms caste takes beyond religion and beyond its existence as a system.
Find this resource:
Untouchability

The idea of untouchability is central to understanding the experience of caste and the emergence of caste identities, and has often been critical to mobilizing support for social reform and later caste politics. The theme of untouchability recurs in many sections of this bibliography, but the works presented here address it as a social and structural reality rather than the rationale for reform or the basis for politics (See Colonial Constitutions and Ambedkar, for example). Before they were subsumed into the politically far more active and empowered category of “Dalits,” “untouchables” were the groups placed outside even the varna system, and treated therefore as the very embodiment of ritual exclusion whose polluted status denied all possibilities of mobility. Moffat 1979 reiterates Dumont’s thesis about the ideological unity of caste, presenting untouchables as living in conformity and consensus with Indian religio-cultural practices, and therefore without distinct identity. But untouchable communities have other narratives: Prakash 1991 documents oral histories that explain the emergence of the community’s low-caste status, in contrast to upper-caste theories of natural inferiority. While Deliège 1993 shows that untouchables do not see themselves as polluted or impure, he also distinguishes arguments emphasizing inherent ideological unity from those “models of separation” that emphasize discontinuity and often, as a result, caste as a political identity and alternative worldview—represented in this set of writings by Mendelsohn and Vicziany 1998 (and further in the section on Democratic Politics). But what of the lower-caste communities that do not participate, or that participate only marginally in sociopolitical struggle? Deliège 1999 insists on the “liminality” of untouchables, or their position neither on the brink of revolution nor satisfied with social position, both reviled and economically needed. Deliège also shows how economic mobility removes untouchability somewhat from the purity-pollution binary, whereas Christian promises of deliverance from caste oppression never do materialize (Deliège 1999). Khare 1984 and Charlsley 2004 complement Deliège’s extensive writings by offering detailed, ethnographically sensitive descriptions of untouchable theories of individuation and the performance of identity, respectively, both mediated by Indic metaphors, ideas, and texts—sources that wane in importance in later articulations of explicitly Dalit worldviews. Finally, Mohan 2015, an account of the slave castes in 19th-century Kerala, shows how such independent worldviews emerged even in the colonial encounter with Protestant missionaries, who offered both emancipatory routes and new strictures and inequalities.

Charlsley, S. 2004. Interpreting untouchability: The performance of caste in Andhra Pradesh, South India. Asian Folklore Studies 63:267–290.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Essay on the performance of a caste purana (or myth) that speaks to the caste-based ideology and distinct identity of the Madiga community, and that therefore keeps us from reading the category of untouchable entirely negatively.
Find this resource:
Deliège, Robert. 1993. The myths of origin of the Indian untouchables. Man 28.3 (September): 533–549.
DOI: 10.2307/2804238Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines untouchable community myths of origin, which contest position within social hierarchy without actually subverting caste itself. Disassociates caste from logics of purity, and shows how economic mobility weakens rules of ritual pollution.
Find this resource:
Deliège, Robert. 1999. The untouchables of India. Oxford: Berg.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Overview of the practice of untouchability, its socioreligious origins, and its lived realities. Treats untouchability as an ambiguous condition, liminal, at once reviled and necessary, and therefore a unique category of social exclusion.
Find this resource:
Khare, Ravindra S. 1984. The untouchable as himself: Ideology, identity and pragmatism among the Lucknow Chamars. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Ethnographic account of the Chamars untouchables’ own cultural ideology, which contains an Indic conception of individuation and equality, represented by the figure of the ascetic. This worldview recalls not so much Dumontian Homo hierarchicus but Homo justus, which draws both on Indic values as well as modern compensatory and redistributive mechanisms.
Find this resource:
Mendelsohn, O., and M. Vicziany. 1998. The untouchables: Subordination, poverty and the State in modern India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511612213Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Useful volume providing a historical overview on the untouchables as a social and political category modulated and reified by administrative policy and state politics.
Find this resource:
Moffat, Michael. 1979. An untouchable community in South India: Structure and consensus. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Study of the Tamil Endavur untouchable community’s paradoxical support of the logics of the system that oppresses them. They therefore live in consensus with a structure that replicates all the relations and institutions that ensure their own exclusion.
Find this resource:
Mohan, P. Sanal. 2015. Modernity of slavery: Struggles against caste inequality in colonial Kerala. New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099765.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Investigation of emerging protest movements among the Pulaya and Paraya communities of Travancore-Cochin as a result of Protestant missionary activity; the monograph resituates untouchability in the context of slavery and demonstrates how the emergent emancipatory discourses critiqued inequalities within Christian worlds while simultaneously reformulating Dalit worldviews.
Find this resource:
Prakash, Gyan. 1991. Becoming a Bhuniya: Oral traditions and contested domination in eastern India. In Contesting power: Resistance and everyday relations in South Asia. Edited by Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash, 145–174. New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Investigation of oral historical explanations of how Bhuniyas came to acquire their low status, which counter upper-caste theories of natural inferiority while paradoxically also acknowledging polluted status and the reality of caste hierarchies.
Find this resource:
Colonial Constitutions

The literature on caste and colonialism, far more than prior analytic approaches, broadly insists on the modernity of caste, and therefore on its mutability, made possible by the administrative and epistemological frameworks of colonial governance. The focus is not so much on origins and antiquity any longer as much as it is on understanding caste as formed by the historical relationships and processes set in place by the modernizing drive of the colonial state. Within this broad terrain, Bayly 1999 and Dirks 2001 are definitive works. Both are de-essentializing and non-generalizing arguments, emphatic in their attention to the historicity of caste. But while Bayly sees the formation of caste in its modern forms as originating in the late Mughal period (an argument buttressed by Washbrook 1975), Dirks argues that it was only under British colonialism that caste became the definitive way to understand Indian social organization. Whereas Bayly sees a greater role for Brahmins and upper castes in shaping the emergence of modern caste, Dirks argues more that upper castes benefited from the crystallization of caste in service of the colonial state. Several other works add flesh, dimension, and local context to these arguments. Dube 1998 provides an ethnohistory of everyday symbols, metaphors, and practices among the Satnamis, using those to demarcate spaces of contestation and reappropriation of prevailing orthodoxies. Bandyopadhyay 2011 explores the processes by which Bengali Namasudras subversively and openly protested and accommodated caste logics to their own ends. Viswanath 2014 explores the collusion of state, elites, and, counterintuitively, missionaries to contain caste as “religion” in order to manage populations among Tamil Pariahs. Gupta 2012 and Malhotra 2002 examine how ideals of gender identity and the debates over sati, widow remarriage, and other key reform issues reiterated and reproduced caste frameworks in different regions of India. The ritual elements of caste are overall deemphasized in the literature on caste under colonialism in favor of attention to discursive processes of identity creation—although essays in Bergunder, et al. 2010 remind us that those older approaches to analysis are not absent in colonial studies of caste either. Nonetheless, it is critical texts like Rawat 2011 that walk us through the transformation of caste as a logic of purity and pollution, into a category of modern governance, while also quite importantly returning low-caste groups to the status of active agents in the constitution of their own histories. Finally, Pandian 2009 considers the implications of the colonial legacy that treated Tamil Kallars as “criminal castes” for their own remaking and economic advancement as agrarian cultivars within modern development-oriented frameworks.

Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar. 2011. Caste, protest and identity in colonial India: The Namasudras of Bengal. New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
First published in 1997, and republished with further research based on political development in the 1940s. Examines Namasudra identity as constituted by “hidden protest, open revolt, and accommodative behavior” (p. 63), as well as the complex processes of alliance and assertion that led the community from a position of marginalization to one of political dominance.
Find this resource:
Bayly, Susan. 1999. Caste, society and politics in India from the eighteenth century to the modern age. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CHOL9780521264341Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Historical account of “caste society” from precolonial times to the end of the 20th century. Bayly reads caste and caste society as contingent and highly variably political responses to the changing needs of precolonial rulers, colonial theories of Indian society, and modern reformist forms of governance.
Find this resource:
Bergunder, Michael, Heiko Frese, and Ulrike Schröder, eds. 2010. Ritual, caste, and religion in colonial South India. New Delhi: Primus.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Collection of essays on the interrelations of ritual, religion, and caste and their impact on cultural and religious identities in colonial South Indian (Tamil and Telugu) society.
Find this resource:
Dirks, Nicholas B. 2001. Castes of mind: Colonialism and the making of modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines caste as it is produced in and by colonial forms of administration and epistemology; also analyzes the processes by which “caste” became the dominant descriptor and political metaphor for diverse social identities and agendas. Dirks surveys caste from medieval times through to the present, studying Jesuit commentaries, colonial ethnographies, and later scholarship seeking to retrieve ethnography from its colonial pasts.
Find this resource:
Dube, Saurabh. 1998. Religion, identity, and power among a Central Indian community, 1780–1950. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Ethnohistory of the Satnami sect in Chhattisgarh that documents processes by which caste groups appropriate and reinterpret the symbols of prevailing orthodoxies. The text itself analytically challenges common “oppositional” paradigms (state/society, caste/sect, ritual purity/kingly power, etc.) to examine expressions of identity and agency.
Find this resource:
Gupta, Charu, ed. 2012. Gendering colonial India: Reforms, print, caste and communalism. New Delhi: Orient Black Swan.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Collection of essays that examines interactions of gender, caste, and community identities in colonial India via discussions of sati, widow remarriage, domesticity, sexuality, and education.
Find this resource:
Malhotra, Anshu. 2002. Gender, caste, and religious identities: Restructuring class in colonial Punjab. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Study based among Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs in late-19th-century India. Considers the tension between caste reform and the embeddedness of caste in the gendered ideal of the pativrata, or ideal wife. Middle-class modernity resituates gender within caste practices.
Find this resource:
Pandian, Anand. 2009. Crooked stalks: Cultivating virtue in South India. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1215/9780822391012Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Beautifully written account of the Kallar castes of Cumbum Valley in Tamil Nadu, legislated by the British as “criminal castes” in need of surveillance and moral reform. Pandian tracks this colonial legacy and essentialized reputation through its diffusion into local history, legislation, and popular culture—examining the association of virtue with economic improvement at the confluence of colonial morality, agrarian norms, and development discourses.
Find this resource:
Rawat, Ramnarayan. 2011. Reconsidering untouchability: Chamars and Dalit history in North India. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Takes on the cultural stereotypes of Chamar workers in order to rethink Dalit history beyond the colonialism-nationalism constructed divide; highlights discursive processes that transformed caste Hindu understandings of Chamars as ritually impure into social and administrative categories of governance. Seeks to reinstate the Chamars as active agents in their own history.
Find this resource:
Viswanath, Rupa. 2014. The Pariah Problem: Caste, religion, and the social in modern India. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.7312/columbia/9780231163064.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Political economy of the Tamil Pariahs at the turn of the 20th century, which shows how the state, elites, and even missionaries colluded to contain “the Pariah Problem” to realms of the social and religion. The Dalit question was cast as a religious, rather than political or international, issue.
Find this resource:
Washbrook, David. 1975. The development of caste organization in South India, 1880–1925. In South India: Political institutions and political change, 1880–1940. Edited by C. J. Baker and D. A. Washbrook, 150–203. Delhi: Macmillan Company of India.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Essay reads post-conquest and colonial caste associations as produced through unique manipulations of traditional symbolisms, a process pointing to their inherent modernity.
Find this resource:
Early Protest and Social Reform

The scholarship on protest and social reform is very largely focused on describing and documenting the various social and political movements that articulated opposition to caste hierarches and injustices, both during colonial rule and after independence. Yet, opposition was itself entangled. Bandyopadhyay 2007 investigates why the ban on widow remarriage was bound to failure: Vidyasagar’s scriptural strategies did not recognize the force and diverse support of “popular” orthodoxies, or entrenched caste and gender attitudes (Vidyasagar was a key scholar of the Bengal Renaissance). Likewise, Copland 1973 explains Maharaja of Kolhapur’s strategic non-Brahminism as part of the “conditional bargain” with the British to “stem the tide of militant nationalism.” Most other texts are concerned with documenting emergent anti-caste ideologies and subaltern consciousness on their own terms. O’Hanlon 1985 sets about examining the “actual content” of non-Brahmin ideologies, hitherto studied only via secondary sources, and the social structures from which Mahatma Jotirao Phule’s non-Brahminism emerged. Similarly, Jurgensmeyer 1982 studies lower-caste mobilization around their conception of an alternative faith, adi-dharma. Gokhale-Turner 1979 and Murugkar 1991 are each important accounts of Dalit Panther radicalism, whose comparative frameworks we see explored further in the scholarship on Caste and/as Race. Pandian 1993 documents both E. V. Ramaswamy’s opposition to Indian nationalism and critique of antiquity as itself Brahminical, in the context of the Tamil Self-Respect movement. Aloysius 1998 gives us the writings of C. Iyodhee Thass Pandithar, who claimed Buddhist origins for outcastes long before Ambedkar’s conversion; the text has since become a significant resource for Dalit intellectuals in Tamil Nadu. And finally, Gupta 1985, a comprehensive account of the emergence of scheduled caste politics, tracks regional variations as well the politics of enumeration and classification under late colonialism, transforming “Depressed classes” into the “scheduled castes” of contemporary nomenclature.

Aloysius, G. 1998. Religion as emancipatory identity: A Buddhist movement among the Tamils under colonialism. New Delhi: Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The only compilation of the turn-of-20th-century Tamil intellectual Iyodhee Thass Pandithar’s writings, which anticipated Ambedkar by associating Dalit identity with Buddhism as a form of opposition to caste.
Find this resource:
Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar. 2007. Caste, widow-remarriage, and the reform of popular culture in colonial Bengal. In Women and social reform in modern India: A reader. Edited by Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar, 100–117. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Essay demonstrates that the taboo on widow remarriage in colonial times was doomed to failure, as Vidyasagar did not recognize that communities who supported the taboo did so precisely as a way of emphasizing their orthodoxy.
Find this resource:
Copland, Ian. 1973. The Maharaja of Kolhapur and the non-Brahmin movement 1902–10. Modern Asian Studies 7.2: 209–225.
DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X0000456XSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Discussion of how the Maharaja of Kolhapur became a leader of the non-Brahmin movement, preserving regional interests while working with the British to curb militant nationalism.
Find this resource:
Gokhale-Turner, Jayashree. 1979. The Dalit Panthers and the radicalisation of the untouchables. Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 17.1: 77–93.
DOI: 10.1080/14662047908447324Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Early discussion of the radical politics of the Dalit Panthers.
Find this resource:
Gupta, Surinder K. 1985. The scheduled castes in modern Indian politics: Their emergence as a political power. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Detailed account of the emergence of scheduled castes as a force to reckon with from the end of the 19th century until 1935. Covers census classification, the initiation of depressed classes into politics, and the emergence of new political identities.
Find this resource:
Jurgensmeyer, Mark. 1982. Religion as social vision: The movement against untouchability in 20th century Punjab. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Account of the adi-dharma movement against untouchability in 19th-century Punjab, which held that the untouchables represented a separate indigenous community, suppressed by Hindu invaders. Text documents how untouchables mobilized and organized around the idea of an originary faith, or adi-dharma.
Find this resource:
Murugkar, Lata. 1991. Dalit Panther movement in Maharashtra. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Critical but comprehensive overview of the Dalit Panther movement, 1972–1979.
Find this resource:
O’Hanlon, Rosalind. 1985. Caste, conflict and ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and low caste protest in nineteenth-century western India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511563379Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Among the best historical accounts of Jotirao Phule’s life and work; his radical brand of humanism; his readings of the relationships between ritual, history, and political power; and his role in the formation of lower-caste identity and the non-Brahmin movement in Maharashtra in the late 19th century.
Find this resource:
Pandian, M. S. S. 1993. Denationalising the past: Nation in E. V. Ramaswamy’s Political Discourse. Economic and Political Weekly 28.42: 2282–2283.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Discussion of Self-Respect movement leader Periyar’s critique of nationalism and constructions of both national and Tamil antiquity as myths that consolidated Brahmin and upper-caste hegemony.
Find this resource:
Ambedkar

Scholarship on Ambedkar—India’s first law minister, chair of the Drafting Committee for India’s Constitution, and keen social theorist—was long limited to a handful of Indian commentators, and very few others outside of India. Keer 1990 was long the only account of Ambedkar’s life and work. It was not until the 1990s, in the wake of politicized religious and caste resurgences, that works such as Omvedt 1993 and Zelliot 1992 began to highlight Ambedkar’s role in laying the groundwork for what was coalescing into the Dalit movement. A later biography, Jaffrelot 2005, places Ambedkar in another trajectory: as a social theorist. In this capacity, prefiguring the thinking of later sociologists, Ambedkar conceptualized caste as a form of “graded inequality” and argued that its permeation was the result of lower-caste emulation of upper-caste practices. Omvedt 2012 places him in yet another genealogy, this one linking Ambedkar’s ideas and conversion to Buddhism to a much longer history of radical critiques of Brahminical Hinduism and caste practices. Zelliot 2013 is less concerned with lineage and more with the specific sociopolitical context that produced the Mahar movement—and Ambedkar’s politics itself. Ambedkar’s writings on caste are available in annotated form in Ambedkar 2014, with Rege 2013 drawing out his specific arguments about the perpetuation of caste via the control of gender. Jaoul 2006 points to the fact that Ambedkar is no longer only a theorist, statesman, and politician, as Jaffrelot suggests, but is equally a symbol of contemporary Dalit politics and a figure who enables a relation to the state based on arguments and demands for democratic rights and compensatory justice. Rao 2009 rounds off this section as an account of Dalit “emancipation” leading up to Ambedkar, but also examining his legacy in a postcolonial present marked by new forms of violence and vulnerability.

Ambedkar, B. R. 2014. Annihilation of caste: The annotated critical edition. Edited and annotated by S. Anand. London: Verso.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Annotated edition of Dr. Ambedkar’s original 1936 speech denouncing caste as a formation within Hinduism; text provides an overview of his analysis of caste and compelling argument for its reform.
Find this resource:
Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2005. Dr. Ambedkar and untouchability: Fighting the Indian caste system. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Important biography of Ambedkar that highlights his roles as social theorist who honed his analysis of caste to its changing political contexts. Shows how Ambedkar’s analysis anticipates the later insights of ethnographic theorists such as Dumont and M. N. Srinivas.
Find this resource:
Jaoul, Nicolas. 2006. Learning the use of symbolic means: Dalits, Ambedkar statues, and the state in Uttar Pradesh. Contributions to Indian Sociology 40.2: 175–207.
DOI: 10.1177/006996670604000202Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines the iconography of statues of Ambedkar in Uttar Pradesh in order to tease out Dalit relations with the state. The essay uses an analysis of symbols to lead to an understanding of how Dalits imagine the state, appeal to it, and aspire for democratic rights.
Find this resource:
Keer, Dhananjay. 1990. Dr Ambedkar: Life and mission. Mumbai: Popular Prakashan.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Definitive early biography of B. R. Ambedkar (first published 1954), covering his critique of Hinduism, work for the labor cause, constitutional work, responses to nationalism, and his perspectives on caste.
Find this resource:
Omvedt, Gail. 1993. Dalits and the democratic revolution: Dr Ambedkar and the Dalit movement in colonial India. New Delhi: SAGE.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Tells the history of the Dalit movement from its origins, through the freedom struggle and class struggles, to the death of Ambedkar in 1956.
Find this resource:
Omvedt, Gail. 2012. Understanding caste: From Buddha to Ambedkar and beyond. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Rejects a religious reading of caste to show how secular thinking is framed by Brahminism. Presents several historical critiques of caste and the injustices of social hierarchies: from the Buddhist contestations of the prevailing social order, to radical bhakti critiques of caste ritualism, and the radical thinking of saint-singers and later social reformers alike.
Find this resource:
Rao, Anupama. 2009. The caste question: Dalits and the politics of modern India. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Important account of what caste “emancipation” has meant for Dalit communities from the late 19th century to the present in western India, leading up to Ambedkar’s assertion of Dalit identity, but concerned with new forms of violence and vulnerability that emerge in the postcolonial period.
Find this resource:
Rege, Sharmila. 2013. Against the madness of Manu: B.R Ambedkar’s writings on Brahmanical patriarchy. Delhi: Navayana.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Edited volume and interpretation of the writings of B. R. Ambedkar on how caste was perpetuated by the control of women, and of the arguments he made against Brahminical patriarchy.
Find this resource:
Zelliot, Eleanor. 1992. From untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar movement. New Delhi: Manohar.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Classic series of essays on the Mahar movement in Maharashtra, from its 19th-century roots to the more recent emergence of Dalit literature.
Find this resource:
Zelliot, Eleanor. 2013. Ambedkar’s world: The Making of Babasaheb and the Dalit movement. Delhi: Navayana.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Monograph on the Mahar movement, local leadership, and ideologies, all of which helped establish the sociopolitical context for Ambedkar’s ideology and political ascendance.
Find this resource:
Mobility and Self-Constitution

Countering any strictly religious reading of caste as endogamous, rigid, ritualistic, and hierarchical are a series of works that focus on changing economic realities, and on the social mobility and new forms of self-constitution that resulted from them. Lynch 1969 and Sahay 2004 are the only works to show how mobility is framed by Sanskritization—although Sahay points to limits on such mobility as much as its possibilities. Most other works do not explicate the Sanskritization process (or, as noted in the section on Democratic Politics, consider state concession and reservation-mediated mobility), but rather the imbrications of caste with economic logics. Of these, Bailey 1957 is the earliest account of the transformation of peasant economy as agriculture is displaced by increased commercial activity, resulting in changes to traditional social structures and power distributions. Béteille 1971, too, is a classic village study that shows a correspondence between caste and economic class (landlords, tenants, laborers)—but as Brahmans seek education and new work opportunity, and with land reforms, the status of land itself and the relations that support agrarian economies are transformed. As changing political environments provide greater access to wealth and power, caste becomes increasingly ethnicized, allowing for greater fluidity and self-selection in the formation of new associations and alliances. Kolenda 1978 gives us an influential framework for analyzing these changes, distinguishing the organic solidarity of traditional caste organization and competitive solidarity that allows for more self-selected alliances, as well as more competition between new caste groupings—an argument buttressed by Shah 1975, a study of Rajput-Koli caste alliances in Gujarat. In general, more recent analyses have tended to highlight not so much mobility, and not even new solidarities (although neither theme is absent either), but rather the processes of self-constitution that accompany social change. Doron 2008 and Ciotti 2010 highlight the processes of self-constitution brought about by shifting occupational strategies—Doron by examining the economic and other strategies used by Banarasi boatmen to advance their interests in Banaras’s still-orthodox ritual economy, and Ciotti by showing how entry into the weaving industry allowed Chamars to develop a “positive self-representation divested of the attributes of untouchability” (p. 88). Gidwani 2008 provides a case study of sorts of Lewa Patels and their cultural logics of work, labor, and capital accumulation.

Bailey, F. G. 1957. Caste and the economic frontier: A village in highland Orissa. Manchester, UK: Univ. of Manchester Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Classic village study of social change in Bisipara, Orissa; Bailey shows how the emergence of a new mercantile economy established through migration, administrative action, and education alters the power of old landholding elite castes, and leads to mobility within existing caste hierarchies.
Find this resource:
Béteille, André. 1971. Caste, class, and power: Changing patterns of stratification in a Tanjore village. New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Based on fieldwork in Sripuram in Thanjavur District, Tamil Nadu, an account of changing power relations and class position in a community once structured primarily by caste distinctions between Brahmins, middle-level non-Brahmins, and the Adi-Dravidas, or erstwhile untouchables.
Find this resource:
Ciotti, Manuela. 2010. Retro-modern India: Forging the lower caste self. New Delhi: Routledge.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Ethnography of Chamar community’s relationship with the craft of weaving in a village near Banaras, and of their constitution of a retro-modernity via engagement with state developmentalist visions of change as well as 19th-century middle-class aspirational symbolism.
Find this resource:
Doron, Assa. 2008. Caste, occupation, and politics on the Ganges: Passages of resistance. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Ethnography of Banarasi boatmen investigates how this low caste, subaltern community exercises forms of covert and overt resistance against caste society as well as the state in order to protect and advance its own interests. Reads the ritual economy of Banaras (and therefore the status of boatmen) as not only a site of ideological struggle, but also as a space of economic competition.
Find this resource:
Gidwani, Vinay. 2008. Capital interrupted: Agrarian development and the politics of work in India. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Although not a text focused explicitly on caste issues, this remains an important case study of Lewa Patels, their uncertain dominance, social mobility, and relationship to work and labor.
Find this resource:
Kolenda, Pauline. 1978. Caste in contemporary India: Beyond organic solidarity. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Text that explores aspects of caste practice that have remained constant while others have adapted. Kolenda argues that earlier organic caste solidarity caused fissure, or competition for status via wealth and power, whereas with “competitive solidarity,” more fusion of different groups and interests occurs.
Find this resource:
Lynch, Owen. 1969. The politics of untouchability: Social mobility and social change in a city of India. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Landmark urban study of untouchability and of movements for upward mobility within caste hierarchies among untouchable Jatavs in Agra. Treats caste as an adaptive structure, within which relationships are recast with new economic opportunity.
Find this resource:
Sahay, Gaurang R. 2004. Hierarchy, difference and the caste system: A study of rural Bihar. Contributions to Indian Sociology 38 (February): 113–136.
DOI: 10.1177/006996670403800105Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Study based in rural Bihar, holding that different castes have their own independent ideologies that undergird their struggles for power. Study also disassociates caste from occupation.
Find this resource:
Shah, Ghanshyam. 1975. Caste association and political process in Gujarat: A study of Gujarat Kshatriya Sabha. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Study of the impact of politics on caste, and of the alliance of Rajputs and Kolis to obtain electoral power. Author argues that caste loyalties dissipate and secularized competitive behaviors are necessary for democratic politics take hold.
Find this resource:
Dalit Movement

The term “Dalit” refers mainly to former untouchables and is often traced back to Ambedkar’s anti-caste movement, though it did not come into wide political usage until several decades later. What we call the Dalit “movement” today is a convergence of sometimes regionally diverse lower-caste critiques, the development of political consciousness, and the forceful assertion of democratic rights. Prior to independence, Geetha and Rajadurai 1998 point out, one target of Dalit critique, particularly for Tamil non-Brahmin writers and activists, was Indian nationalism itself, held to be culturally hegemonic and denying subaltern groups meaningful representation. But the bigger issue from colonial times to the present has always been Brahminical Hinduism, whose hegemony the contemporary Dalit movement has focused itself very largely on confronting. Dalit intellectuals like Kancha Ilaiah (see Ilaiah 1997 and Ilaiah 1998) take pains to establish this ideological difference, or the nature of “Dalitbahujan” consciousness, as distinct from that of all-pervasive upper-caste “Brahminism,” and explicitly seek political confrontation in the form of “Dalitization” as the only path to the holistic transformation of Indian society. In such a confrontation, Jaoul 2007 shows us that outrage is a critical modality, while Waghmore 2013, an ethnography of routinized caste violence, considers how Dalit assertions test prevailing standards of civility. Central to the articulation of Dalit consciousness are conceptions of labor. Ilaiah 1997 puts across a definition of “productive labor” as technically sophisticated and incognizant of the purportedly upper-caste distinctions of mental and physical work. Essays in Robb 1993 complement Ilaiah, providing historicized and theoretical perspectives on labor within social hierarchy, and tracing the ways labor meanings emerge from Dalit history. In the space of electoral politics, the massive victories of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in Uttar Pradesh have attracted much scholarly attention: Pai 2002 traces the long history of Dalit assertions in the state, which created the context for the emergence and rise of the BSP, and Narayan 2011 documents the consequent emergence of a Dalit public sphere. Jaoul 2007 notes, however, that the focus on the BSP in the scholarship on the Dalit movement can be misleading, in that it misses the role of a range of Dalit grassroots organizations beyond the space of electoral politics that have laid the groundwork for the BSP’s very political successes.

Geetha, V., and S. V. Rajadurai. 1998. Towards a non-Brahmin millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar. Mumbai: Popular Prakashan.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Written by two well-known Tamil activists and writers at a time when non-Brahminism was losing its radical edge, this volume of essays takes comprehensive stock of the non-Brahmin movement from the 1916 Non-Brahmin Manifesto to Periyar’s Self-Respect movement of the 1920s and 1930s.
Find this resource:
Ilaiah, Kancha. 1997. Productive labour, consciousness and history. In Subaltern Studies. Vol. 9, Writings on South Asian history and society. Edited by Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty, 165–200. New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Seminal essay in which Ilaiah defines Dalitbahujans as composed of an alliance of lower-caste and untouchable groups who can together challenge upper-caste historiography. Argues for the projection and even clash of Dalitbahujan culture and consciousness in public debate as the only path to equality.
Find this resource:
Ilaiah, Kancha. 1998. Towards the Dalitisation of the nation. In Wages of freedom: Fifty years of the Indian nation-state. Edited by Partha Chatterjee, 267–291. New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argument for the radical transformation of caste society via Dalitization, or the assertion and rise of laboring Dalitbahujan masses into positions of political power and influence.
Find this resource:
Jaoul, Nicolas. 2007. Political and “non-political” means in the Dalit movement. In Political process in Uttar Pradesh: Identity, economic reforms, and governance. Edited by Sudha Pai, 191–220. New Delhi: Pearson Longman.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Reading of the UP Dalit movement as composed of a set of electoral and vote bank strategies (represented by the BSP) as well as more grassroots sociocultural work (which gains less attention). The interaction and interdependence of these two sometimes conflicting sets of strategies characterize the state’s Dalit movement.
Find this resource:
Jaoul, Nicolas. 2008. The “righteous anger” of the powerless investigating Dalit outrage over caste violence. South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 2.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Investigation of Dalit protest against upper-caste violence as effectively articulating the popular language of moral outrage and the democratic language of rights and protections.
Find this resource:
Narayan, Badri. 2011. The making of the Dalit public in North India: Uttar Pradesh, 1950–Present. Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An account of the emergence of Dalit political consciousness, mobilization, and therefore a Dalit public sphere from independence to the present.
Find this resource:
Pai, Sudha. 2002. Dalit assertion and the unfinished democratic revolution: The Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh. New Delhi: SAGE.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Account of the emergence and rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), and its failure to break the upper-caste stronghold in Uttar Pradesh.
Find this resource:
Robb, Peter, ed. 1993. Dalit movements and the meanings of labour in India. Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Collection of essays tracing the history of labor from the 18th century to the present, looking at labor as a product of migration and protest and holding that the “long march from caste to class is far from complete” (p. 245).
Find this resource:
Waghmore, Suryakant. 2013. Civility against caste: Dalit politics and citizenship in western India. New Delhi: SAGE.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Ethnography of Dalit struggles against routine violence. The text argues that since democracy preceded struggles for civility in India, Indian civil society is still composed of ascribed groups; caste is therefore a requisite category to effect systemic change.
Find this resource:
Experience and Worldviews

We see from the literature on the Dalit Movement that Dalit ideology is necessarily articulated as distinct from and in opposition to Brahminical religion, thinking, and hegemony, and counter to common norms of public culture and incivility. There is another corpus of writing that complements these accounts by delineating the contours of lived Dalit experience. Together, these writings prompt us to think of Dalit worldviews as not simply derivative, but as producing new forms of political, economic, and religious practice. Omvedt 2006 begins with a familiar critique but moves to emphasizing the worldviews that have been denied expression within hegemonic upper-caste contexts. Most other works in this section are either focused on “life history” as a genre, as Ganguli 2012 is, or (compilations of) first-person accounts of taking control of narrative and Dalit historiography. Channa and Mencher 2013 collects narratives from Dalit activists and scholars, reflecting on their work and experiences of protest and articulating Dalit critique. Jeremiah 2013 analyzes the Pariah community’s adoption of a religious worldview—the author coming at this experience as a pastor and community member himself. But perhaps the most forceful, polemical explication of Dalit experience comes first from Ilaiah’s Why I Am Not a Hindu (Ilaiah 1996), and second from the eight women’s narratives collected in Rege 2006. These are not merely re-presentations of Dalit critique, but also testimonials to the unexpressed, unexplored everyday experiences of discrimination and violence that allow the writers to wrest control of the telling of their stories from dominant publishing houses, media, and other sources of narrative.

Channa, Subhadra Mitra, and Joan P. Mencher, eds. 2013. Life as a Dalit: Views from the bottom on caste in India. New Delhi: SAGE.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Essays from activists and scholars on caste society from a Dalit experiential perspective, covering untouchability, critiques of caste ideologies, protest and resistance, and mechanisms by which Dalit voices and worldviews are articulated.
Find this resource:
Ganguli, Debjani. 2012. Dalit life stories. In The Cambridge companion to modern Indian culture. Edited by Vasudha Dalmia and Rashmi Sadana, 142–162. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL9780521516259.010Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Explores Dalit politics in contemporary India via the life story as genre and cultural form, through which writers seek to take control from mainstream media of the telling of their own lives.
Find this resource:
Ilaiah, Kancha. 1996. Why I am not a Hindu: A Sudra critique of Hindutva philosophy, culture, and political economy. Calcutta: Samya.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Polemical text on the closed, oppressive nature of upper-caste Hindu culture, and on Dalitbahujan social, economic, and political realities shaped by these contexts. Text is also a celebration of Dalit experience, and a response to the attempted inclusion of Dalits under the Hindu umbrella through Hindutva politics.
Find this resource:
Jeremiah, Anderson M. H. 2013. Community and worldview among Paraiyars of South India: “Lived” religion. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Ethnography of the Paraiyar Tamil Christian community’s adoption of a religious worldview, written by a Paraiyar priest-ethnographer. The text addresses the failure of much “Dalit Theology” to take stock of the social and ritual basis of rural Dalit life, and therefore examines the tension between being a Dalit and a Christian in communities fractured by caste ideologies.
Find this resource:
Omvedt, Gail. 2006. Dalit visions: The anti-caste movement and the construction of an Indian identity. Hyderabad: Orient Longman.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Critique of the equation of Indian tradition with Hinduism, of the Brahminical foundations of Hindu practice, and of the Hindu Brahminical underpinnings of secular discourses. Considers alternative views of history and tradition, nurtured in Dalit contexts.
Find this resource:
Rege, Sharmila. 2006. Writing caste, writing gender: Narrating Dalit women’s testimonios. New Delhi: Zubaan.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
First-person accounts of eight Dalit women’s critiques of caste society, placed in the sociopolitical context of the anti-caste movement in Maharashtra from pre-Ambedkarite times to the present.
Find this resource:
Caste and Religion

The literature collected in this section examines the intersection of caste practices with religious practices other than traditional Hinduism. Although many other religions reject caste practices, the research on the intersections of caste and religious identity consistently denies that caste practices are specific to Hinduism. Egorova and Perwez 2013 considers a community of Telugu Madigas who historically elected Judaism, not as a means of escaping Dalit identity, but of reasserting it. Mosse 2012, Taneti 2013, and Wyatt 2010 discuss the role of caste within Christian communities in mobilizing anti-caste activism and explicating Dalit theologies. Ahmad 1978 and Jodhka 2004 explore caste practices among Muslim and Sikh communities, respectively. Prashad 2000 studies the Balmikis, and the processes by which an autonomous Dalit religious identity expresses itself but is also co-opted by majoritarian ideologies. Finally, Shani 2007 and Narayan 2009 consider the place and role of caste in framing Hindutva or political Hinduism, with Shani arguing that Hindutva is produced in part by caste tensions, and Narayan showing the processes by which Hindutva narratives subsume and co-opt caste-specific myths and practices to their ideological and political ends. Each of these studies uses caste as a framework within which to analyze social dynamics within religious communities.

Ahmad, Imtiaz. 1978. Caste and social stratification among Muslims in India. New Delhi: Manohar.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Among the only early collections to examine caste-like systems of social stratification among Muslim communities. Essays each make a case for using caste as a framework for analyzing local community dynamics.
Find this resource:
Egorova, Yulia, and S. Perwez. 2013. The Jews of Andhra Pradesh: Contesting caste and religion in South India. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199929214.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Account of a community of Madiga Dalits from rural Andhra Pradesh who declared affiliation to the Lost Tribes of Israel at the end of the 20th century, as a means of simultaneously reclaiming Dalit identity and protesting caste inequalities.
Find this resource:
Jodhka, S. S. 2004. Sikhism and the caste question: Dalits and their politics in contemporary Punjab. Contributions to Indian Sociology 23.1–2: 165–192.
DOI: 10.1177/006996670403800107Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Corrective to theories of caste that do not attend to regional variation and that frame it as specific to Hindu practice. Essay shows how caste-based divisions continue to play into conflicts within the Sikh community in spite of the fact that Sikhism theologically rejects the idea of caste.
Find this resource:
Mosse, David. 2012. The saint in the banyan tree: Christianity and caste society in India. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
DOI: 10.1525/california/9780520253162.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Study of the relationship between Christianity and Tamil society spanning four hundred years, with analysis of the role of Christianization in anti-caste Dalit social activism, and of fluctuations in religious and secular readings of caste. Mosse also tracks the engagement of local, village-level discourses on religion and caste with their more dominant, national counterparts.
Find this resource:
Narayan, Badri. 2009. Facscinating Hindutva: Saffron politics and Dalit mobilisation. New Delhi: SAGE.
DOI: 10.4135/9788132101055Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Text that examines how saffronization as a process actively incorporates local myths, legends, and the social commemorations of these into overarching narratives that feed Hindutva politics.
Find this resource:
Prashad, Vijay. 2000. Untouchable freedom: A social history of a Dalit community. New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Study of the Balmikis, mainly of Delhi but also elsewhere in the northern states, that examines how local municipal corporations were key to inducting sanitation labor castes into Hindu majoritarian projects. Text also demonstrates that legislation and activism alone cannot be effective correctives to caste discriminations.
Find this resource:
Shani, Ornit. 2007. Communalism, caste and Hindu nationalism: The violence in Gujarat. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511607936Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Study based on several episodes of communal violence in Gujarat; argues that changing caste relations and tensions are part of what bring about an upper-caste shift to Hindu revivalism, victimizing Muslims and Dalits and further deepening caste chasms.
Find this resource:
Taneti, James Elisha. 2013. Caste, gender, and Christianity in colonial India: Telugu women in mission. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137382283Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Historical study of Telugu Biblewomen, or native women preachers, in South Indian Protestant churches, considering the impact of caste, gender, and other global and local sociopolitical realities on their nascent theologies.
Find this resource:
Wyatt, Andrew. 2010. Dalit theology and the politics of untouchability among the Indian Christian churches. In From stigma to assertion: Untouchability, identity and politics in early and modern India. Edited by M. Aktor and R. Deliege, 119–146. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Close look at Dalit theology as a form of politics that expresses itself beyond the institutions of the state.
Find this resource:
Caste and Gender

Discussions of intersectional identities and experiences uncover several imbricated themes that connect this selection of writings with those in the sections on the Dalit Movement and Experience and Worldviews, strongly reminiscent of second-wave feminist conversations. Essays included in Rao 2003 provide a good overview of the critical themes. Gopal Guru’s important essay (Guru 1995) outlines the need for Dalit women to reclaim voice, assert autonomy, and specify difference—which they do by negotiating both external pressures from other upper-caste activists and internal patriarchal pressures within their communities. Chakravarty 2003 and Kannabiran and Kannabiran 1991 address cultures of violence that determine the experience of gender within caste society. The control of women’s bodies and subjectivities enables not only the control of gender, but equally the control of caste—as the strength of a community gets defined in terms of maleness. If violence represents one powerful mechanism of control, concepts like honor undergird it, and Chowdhry 2007 shows us how, via an investigation of the institution driven most by considerations of honor: marriage. Irudayam, et al. 2011 documents, sometimes in painful detail, the masculinities reproduced by dominant caste order that generate gendered violence within the family, thus drawing out the relationships between caste status and local power (landed or state), and poverty, labor, and violence. Narayan 2007 examines the historical processes by which myths and heroes are generated, but at the same time provides a genealogy of women heroes and other prominent symbols of Dalit political self-assertion, crucial to the Dalit movement’s self-constitution. Finally, Lindberg 2005 returns us to a cashew factory floor, examining gender dynamics as these are produced at the intersections of labor and family.

Chakravarty, Uma. 2003. Gendering caste through a feminist lens. Kolkata, India: Stree.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Account of the culture of violence and the control of sexuality that underpins Brahminical patriarchy and caste.
Find this resource:
Chowdhry, Prem. 2007. Contentious marriages, eloping couples: Gender, caste and patriarchy in northern India. New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Study of contentious marriages, including inter-caste and widow marriage as well elopements, other marriages of choice, or arrangements that grow contentious. Chowdhry demonstrates how the twin ideologies of honor and female guardianship shape the actions of caste-based panchayats, and become the context within which other social, political, and economic dealings are worked out.
Find this resource:
Guru, Gopal. 1995. Dalit women talk differently. Economic and Political Weekly 30.41/42 (14–21 October): 2548–2550.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Essay on the need to talk differently thanks to upper-caste activists’ inability to represent Dalit women’s experiences and patriarchal domination within Dalit groups. Guru documents the emergence of the National Federation of Dalit Women (NFDW) and other Dalit women’s groups to reclaim voice and foreground their experiences.
Find this resource:
Irudayam, Aloysius, Jayshree P. Mangubhai, and Joel G. Lee, eds. 2011. Dalit women speak out: Caste, class and gender violence in India. New Delhi: Zubaan.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Collection of essays that draw on human rights literature, police records and official statistics on violence, and interviews with women to expose the structures of power and authority that produce and reproduce violence, both in Dalit families and in wider society.
Find this resource:
Kannabiran, Vasanth, and Kalpana Kannabiran. 1991. Caste and gender: Understanding dynamics of power and violence. Economic and Political Weekly 26.37 (14 September): 2130–2133.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Analysis of incidents of upper-caste violence to reflect on the processes by which power is asserted and articulated on the bodies of lower-caste men and women.
Find this resource:
Lindberg, Anna. 2005. Modernization and effeminization in India: Kerala cashew workers since 1930. Copenhagen: NIAS.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Study of low-caste men and women cashew workers from late colonial times to the present, examining work modernization, trade union activities, and marriage and family life. Just the power differentials of capitalist production cannot explain the greater discrimination of lower-caste women. Uses idea of effeminization to explain how gender coding takes place on factory floors.
Find this resource:
Narayan, Badri. 2007. Women heroes and Dalit assertion in North India: Culture, identity and politics. New Delhi: SAGE.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Study of how Dalit women heroes (viranganas) of the 1857 Rebellion emerge as symbols of Dalit assertion in Uttar Pradesh, used to build the images of Bahujan Samaj Party leaders like Mayawati. Investigates the processes by which myths and other materials are created or revived for political mobilization.
Find this resource:
Rao, Anupama, ed. 2003. Gender and caste: Issues in contemporary Indian feminism. New Delhi: Kali for Women.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Akin to “second wave” feminist analysis, an important edited anthology of historical and contemporary analyses, reports, manifestos, and testimonies documenting the role of caste in the determination of gender practices in the contexts of land ownership, labor, violence, and the control of sexuality.
Find this resource:
Caste and/as Race

Should caste be understood as a phenomenon specific to India? Or would it be better placed in a comparative framework, as akin to other forms of hierarchy and discrimination? The former approach is often dubbed “Orientalizing,” while the essays in this section weigh in in favor of the latter. Ghurye 1932 reproduces the logic of the Aryan invasion theory, which sees caste hierarchy as a product of the dominance of invading fair-skinned Aryans over indigenous Dravidians—and therefore of caste as emerging from racial differences. But these theories are now hotly contested, and Berreman 1960 establishes a much more useful baseline for comparisons of caste and race in both structural and experiential terms, as well as a rationale for the usefulness of comparative frameworks. Several others follow Berreman’s lead in comparing caste in India with race relations in the United States: Fuller 2011 discusses 1930s race relations in Mississippi, and Pandey 2013 finds a framework by which to understand prejudice across differences in these two countries. Slate 2012 shifts this focus somewhat in a story of the transnational moorings of the Dalit Panther movement, borrowing ideas of racial discrimination and prejudice from the black experience in the United States and using them to mobilize against caste in India. Finally, there is a series of essays that build on the debates and developments at the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism (WCAR), during which Dalit groups made a concerted attempt to have caste recognized as a form of descent-based discrimination by the United Nations. Visvanathan 2001, a short but very useful essay published prior to the conference, sees these new initiatives as marking out the terrain of a post-Ambedkarite politics. Kannabiran 2006 focuses on Dalit women’s articulations of selfhood in the NGO conference that accompanied the WCAR. And Natrajan and Greenough 2009 gathers essays by various scholars, Dalit intellectuals, and activists who consider what the comparison of caste to race entails, why it matters, and what the implications of the intermeshing of local and global contexts might be for Dalit agency and the recovery of dignity.

Berreman, Gerald D. 1960. Caste in India and the United States. American Journal of Sociology 66.2: 120–127.
DOI: 10.1086/222839Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Classic essay establishing parameters for a comparison of caste and race, without denying the specificities of either. Essay emphasizes the need for generalizations of stratification and process that can arise only from comparative studies.
Find this resource:
Béteille, A. 1990. Race, caste and gender. Man, n.s., 25.3: 489–504.
DOI: 10.2307/2803715Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Article argues for a comparison of race and caste, as the attitudes toward women of lower and higher status are remarkably similar, involving concerns with purity for women of higher rank, and extreme sexual abuse and violence for women of lower rank.
Find this resource:
Fuller, Christopher. 2011. Caste, race, and hierarchy in the American South. Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute 17:604–621.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9655.2011.01709.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Discussion of the Deep South, and an ethnography of race-class relations in 1930s Mississippi. Argues for a comparative framework for understanding the institutions and values of hierarchical societies.
Find this resource:
Ghurye, G. S. 1932. Caste and race in India. Mumbai: Popular Prakashan.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Ghurye reproduces the theory of the Indo-Aryan invasion and a theory of caste as having emerged when a race of fair-skinned “Aryans” invaded the Indian subcontinent and subordinated a darker-skinned, inferior race of “Dravidians.” Caste emerged as an endogamous institution when Indo-Aryan Brahmins attempted to keep themselves apart from the local population.
Find this resource:
Kannabiran, Kalpana. 2006. A cartography of resistance: The National Federation of Dalit Women. In The situated politics of belonging. Edited by N. Yuval-Davis, K. Kannabiran, and U. Vieten, 54–73. London: SAGE.
DOI: 10.4135/9781446213490.n5Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Essay that asks how suffering shapes the politics of belonging. Uses the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism to examine the National Federation of Dalit Women’s articulations of caste as race.
Find this resource:
Natrajan, Balmurli, and Paul Greenough, eds. 2009. Against stigma: Studies in caste, race, and justice since Durban. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Edited interdisciplinary collection on the debates over caste, race, and descent-based discrimination in the wake of the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism.
Find this resource:
Pandey, Gyanendra. 2013. A history of prejudice: Race, caste, and difference in India and the United States. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139237376Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Comparison of the struggles of Indian Dalits and African Americans leads to a comparison of prejudice (“universal” and “vernacular”), narratives of struggle, and the limits of citizenship in both locations.
Find this resource:
Slate, Nico. 2012. The Dalit Panthers: Race, caste, and Black Power in India. In Black Power beyond borders: The global dimensions of the Black Power movement. By Nico Slate, 127–143. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Places the Dalit Panther movement in a transnational context, and shows how Black Power in India represented a culmination of integration in a “Third Dalit World” or international community of oppressed.
Find this resource:
Visvanathan, Shiv. 2001. The race for caste: Prolegomena to the Durban Conference. Economic and Political Weekly 36.27 (7 July): 2512–2516.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Important essay that describes the debates building up to the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism, the agenda of the Dalit movement, and the possibilities of a post-Ambedkarite politics.
Find this resource:
Population Genetics

The few studies on caste as a purely biogenetic formation have provoked debate for their use of caste to provide clues into the origins and affinities of India’s population. Although there is much scholarly material on the use of population genetics data to weigh in on theories of community origin elsewhere, fewer scholarly accounts exist on the studies on Indian caste and genomics. The two essays by Egorova presented here are therefore noteworthy. Egorova 2009 points to the lack of consensus on interpretations of DNA studies—becoming fodder for politics more than knowledge. Egorova 2010 critiques a 2009 study by Reich and colleagues in Nature that dates the caste system based on when genetic variation patterns indicate the practice of endogamy originated.

Egorova, Yulia. 2009. De/geneticizing caste: Population genetic research in South Asia. Science as Culture 18.4: 417–438.
DOI: 10.1080/09505430902806975Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Discussion of four population genetics studies and their explanations of the origin of caste, and how these are selectively used or denied to suit different political interests and agendas.
Find this resource:
Egorova, Yulia. 2010. Castes of genes? Representing human genetic diversity in India. Genomics, Society and Policy 6.3: 32–49.
DOI: 10.1186/1746-5354-6-3-32Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Discussion of population genetics studies, the space these create to gain entry into global fields of biotechnology, and the threat of naturalizing and pathologizing caste without delivering promised health-care results.
Find this resource:
Ethnicity

Citing the writings of Edmund Leach and F. G. Bailey, Dumont once proclaimed, “If interdependence is replaced by competition, caste is dead. . . . There remain groups that one continues to call ‘castes’; but they are set in a different system” (p. 227). Even as the Indian government undertook the project of social reform in the decades after independence, caste groups had come to function via sabhas (associations), labor unions, and welfare societies in a process Dumont had described as the “substantialization of caste,” or the “transition from a fluid, structural universe in which the emphasis is on interdependence [. . .] to a universe of impenetrable blocks, self-sufficient, essentially identical and in competition with one-another.” What Dumont called “substantialization,” later authors, whose works are listed in this section, have dubbed ethnicization, highlighting the characteristics of caste other than endogamy, heredity, and relative rank. Barnett 1975, Barnett 1977, and Ali 2002 each deal with choice as an element of caste identity—though Barnett’s earlier essays handle the theme with greater emphasis on the changes wrought by urban environments to caste mobility and older ideological forms, and Ali is more concerned with the preponderance of ethnicity as a framework for elective choices, as opposed to conventional caste. Washbrook 1989 complements Barnett’s arguments, though for him the ethnicicization process is signaled precisely by the fact that caste groups begin to contest their places within the varna system, coalescing as kin-based endogamous clusters that resemble racialized forms. Jaffrelot, whose writings on caste often allude to “ethnicization processes,” traces these from the racialized discourses of colonialism to Ambedkar’s strategies of mobilizing untouchables as an alliance of groups capable of taking an ethnic stand against an entire system: ethnicity therefore straddles the boundaries of race and politics (see Jaffrelot 2012). Jaffrelot 2000 highlights regional variations, which have historically determined the character of ethnicization in different parts of India. Essays collected in Fuller 1996 are also regionally diverse, highlighting the transformation of caste from a vertical organization to a horizontal “ethnic array.” Natrajan 2012 objects to the elite construction of caste as benign cultural difference or ethnicity (or what he calls “culturalization”), which reify hegemonies rather than dismantling them. Guha 2013, on the other hand, treats caste as fundamentally an ethnic formation, or an expression of local political power that remains effective only because it operates supra-locally. Finally, Reddy 2005 uses the debates precipitated by Dalit initiatives to have caste recognized as a form of racial discrimination at the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism to consider the new ethnic forms that caste assumes when local realities are projected into supranational or global contexts.

Ali, Syed. 2002. Collective and elective ethnicity: Caste among urban Muslims in India. Sociological Forum 17.4: 593–620.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1021077323866Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Study of Hyderabadi Muslims weakening ties to corporate caste-based identities and networks, arguing that ethnic identifications such as caste are increasingly elective, supplanted by status-seeking through profession, education, and so on.
Find this resource:
Barnett, Stephen A. 1975. Approaches to changes in caste ideology in South India. In Essays on South India. Edited by Burton Stein, 149–180. Honolulu: Univ. Press of Hawai‘i.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Essay that likens the modern transformations of caste to ethnicization.
Find this resource:
Barnett, Stephen. 1977. Identity choice and caste ideology in contemporary South India. In The new wind: Changing identities in South India. Edited by K. David, 393–416. The Hague: Mouton.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Reads identity and identity choice as a central form of ideological struggle in India, replacing that of caste, and opening the field of choices to include ethnicity, culture, class, and race.
Find this resource:
Fuller, C. J. 1996. Caste today. New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Collection of essays by well-known theorists on rural Hindu society, caste among Muslim communities, caste and race, and caste among middle-class Indians. Explores the many process by which vertically integrated hierarchy decays into a horizontally disconnected ethnic array (p. 26).
Find this resource:
Guha, Sumit. 2013. Beyond caste: Identity and power in South Asia, past and present. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
DOI: 10.1163/9789004254855Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In this comprehensive sociohistorical and longitudinal view of caste, Guha reminds us of the foreignness of the “caste” label to treat it as a complex form of ethnicity whose form has shifted in tandem with shifting social and political power.
Find this resource:
Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2000. Sanskritization vs ethnicization in India: Changing identities and caste politics before Mandal. Asian Survey 40.5: 756–766.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues that some western and southern Indian caste groups could construct an “emancipatory identity” based on egalitarian subcultures by invoking pre-Aryan and Buddhist affinities, whereas in the northern states, reservations presented key methods for the crystallization of low-caste movements. The only caste groups who are capable of ethnicizing in this sense are Dalits, and even then only those Dalit groups who have consciously tried to construct what Ambedkar called an ethnic identity that is not derived from caste.
Find this resource:
Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2012. The politics of caste identities. In The Cambridge companion to modern Indian culture. Edited by Vasudha Dalmia and Rashmi Sadana, 80–98. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL9780521516259.007Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Overview of the ethnicization process by which low-caste identities have been produced from the 19th century to the present. Reviews the formation of caste associations and caste-based interest groups. Views democratization as tantamount to the politicization of caste.
Find this resource:
Natrajan, Balmurli. 2012. The culturalization of caste in India: Identity and inequality in a multicultural age. New York: Routledge.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Treats caste as a site of hegemony whose materialities are given by class and gender dynamics. Caste groups ensure survival in a multiculturalist ethos by emphasizing difference and ethnicity over descent-based identities and relations; explores adaptations to capitalism and democracy.
Find this resource:
Reddy, Deepa S. 2005. The ethnicity of caste. Anthropological Quarterly 78.3: 543–584.
DOI: 10.1353/anq.2005.0038Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Uses the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism to examine the relationship of caste to race as a descent-based form of discrimination. Makes a case for reading caste as a form of ethnicity, given its shifting, strategic, and essentialized forms. Essay reprinted in Natrajan and Greenough 2009 (cited under Caste and/as Race).
Find this resource:
Washbrook, David. 1989. Ethnicity in contemporary Indian POLITICS. In South Asia: Sociology of “developing societies.” Edited by Hamza Alavi and John Harriss, 174–185. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Essay treats religion, regionalism/language, and caste as important sources of the symbols of ethnicity, suggesting that the persistence of such politics and their limited effectiveness are, in different ways, marks of Indian modernity.
Find this resource:
Democratic Politics

Many of the dynamics of caste politics are addressed by works listed in prior sections, particularly those on Untouchability, the Dalit Movement, and Ethnicity. This section lists works that provide specific historical and contemporary overviews of the emergence of electoral politics based on caste mobilization, and the legal advances or policy provisions that support these. Galanter 1984 is the definitive legal history, providing a comprehensive overview of the emergence and development of legal and policy frameworks for social reform and compensatory discrimination. Kothari 1970 is an overview of caste politics prior to the adoption of the Second Backward Classes commission (Mandal Commission) report. The essays here situate caste in the interstices of “tradition” and “modernity” and consider how new politics and developmental institutions make use of preexisting organizational forms (such as caste). Essays in Frankel and Rao 1990 examine “general” problems in specific regional contexts, and also highlight the decline of a traditional social order in the face of electoral and market forces. Essays included in the edited collections listed here, such as Shah 2004 and Srinivas 1996, then address the fallout of Mandal, which expanded mandated reservation policies and provoked unprecedented upper-caste protest—but the framework has by now shifted from a tension of tradition and modernity to political claims-making, and to demands for democratic rights and social justice. Jaffrelot 2003, echoing arguments presented in his other works (see Ethnicity, for example), tries to explain why northern Indian states lagged behind in terms of political inclusion, but provides overviews of lower-caste politics in other parts of India as well. Pai 2010 and Witsoe 2013 address caste in the context of development in Madhya Pradesh and Bihar, respectively. In Madhya Pradesh, the Dalit question is framed preemptively by Congress politics, but this fails, in Pai’s account. Witsoe’s is a complex analysis of how the rise of lower castes in Bihar has challenged the upper-caste model of state-led development, embedded electoral processes in local relations of dominance and subordination, and brought about a breakdown of hitherto upper-caste-dominated state institutions.

Frankel, Francine, and M. S. A. Rao, eds. 1990. Dominance and state power in modern India. Vol. II. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Important set of regionally focused essays on the decline and transformation of traditional social order in the wake of electoral and economic transformation and reconfigured relations with the state. Includes several essays on caste by Lele, Gokhale, and Shah (exploring emergent identities and mobilization), and Washbrook (on the ethnicization of caste identity).
Find this resource:
Galanter, Marc. 1984. Competing equalities: Law and the backward classes in India. Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Comprehensive study of the Indian policies of systematic compensatory discrimination or affirmative action, covering government policies, the problems of identifying beneficiaries, judicial decisions and constitutional provisions, and assessment of achievement and ongoing problems.
Find this resource:
Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2003. India’s silent revolution: The rise of the lower castes in North India. London: Hurst.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Detailed overview of the emergence of lower-caste politics in northern India following the decline of the Congress from the 1970s onward. Congress upper-caste/class elitism, political conservatism, and clientelism blocked democratic politics more than is usually acknowledged, and it is only with growing lower-caste assertion that social democracy takes hold.
Find this resource:
Jaoul, Nicolas. 2007. Dalit processions: Street politics and democratization in India. In Staging politics: Power and performance in Asia and Africa. Edited by Donal Cruise O’Brien and Julia Strauss, 177–192. London: I. B. Tauris.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Deals with the theatricality of contemporary democratization and Dalit adoption of urban cultures of street assertions as a way of claiming space and voice in a democratic polity.
Find this resource:
Kothari, Rajini, ed. 1970. Caste in Indian politics. New Delhi: Orient Longman.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Collection of nine essays that investigate the relationship between previously existing structures and the impact of democratic politics on changing sociopolitical behavior.
Find this resource:
Pai, Sudha. 2010. Developmental state and the Dalit question in Madhya Pradesh: Congress response. New Delhi: Routledge.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines the Dalit Agenda of the Congress government in Madhya Pradesh, and its strategies for caste empowerment—contrasted against the lower-caste mobilizations and capture of power in states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The study therefore tests the model of state-led development and concludes that it is unsuccessful, since it is unable to bring about grassroots change.
Find this resource:
Shah, Ghanshyam, ed. 2004. Caste and democratic politics in India. London: Anthem.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Collection of essays providing an overview of the problem of caste from early classic conceptualizations, through the transformation of social structures of authority and change, to political process and the debates over reservations.
Find this resource:
Srinivas, M. N., ed. 1996. Caste: Its twentieth century Avatar. New Delhi: Viking.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Collection of thirteen essays on caste and political economy, gender, religion, and reservations in the wake of the Mandal report (noteworthy for these essays), each focusing on continuities as well as transformations.
Find this resource:
Witsoe, Jeffrey. 2013. Democracy against development: Lower-caste politics and political modernity in India. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226063508.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Ethnography of state formation and democratic process, examining how the rise of lower castes in Bihar politics have strengthened democratic participation but weakened the patronage state, undermined institutions, and disrupted development initiatives. Several chapters published here have also appeared in prominent journals.