Skip to main content

THE CASTE QUESTION NEVER FAILS TO CREATE A ROW


Anupama Rao

The Caste Question

Dalits and the Politics of Modern India


This innovative work of historical anthropology explores how India's Dalits, or ex-untouchables, transformed themselves from stigmatized subjects into citizens. Anupama Rao’s account challenges standard thinking on caste as either a vestige of precolonial society or an artifact of colonial governance. Focusing on western India in the colonial and postcolonial periods, she shines a light on South Asian historiography and on ongoing caste discrimination, to show how persons without rights came to possess them and how Dalit struggles led to the transformation of such terms of colonial liberalism as rights, equality, and personhood. Extending into the present, the ethnographic analyses of The Caste Question reveal the dynamics of an Indian democracy distinguished not by overcoming caste, but by new forms of violence and new means of regulating caste.

“Anupama Rao has written a powerful book on caste, a subject that has dramatic importance not only for the history of democracy in modern India, but for the general discussion on the interferences of social inequalities and cultural exclusions. The Caste Question goes beyond the usual antitheses of localism and globalism, and illustrates a decisive notion of intensive universality. It will be of considerable interest for scholars and students who look for an updated reflection on the anthropological dimensions of the political—and vice versa.”—Etienne Balibar

“Rao, a truly fine scholar, offers a profound reflection, at once historically rich and theoretically nuanced, on the nature of political modernity itself. Her ‘alternative history of democratic liberalism’ rooted in the global south demands a wide readershipacross the social sciences and humanities—and beyond.”—John Comaroff

“Anupama Rao's sweeping account of a century of ‘caste radicalism’ among Mahar dalits in western India [offers] an extended argument about the salience of dalit politics for many of the foundational categories of modern Indian democracy. She is entirely convincing in this brilliant and audacious re-evaluation of political modernity in India through the perspective of anti-caste struggles.”—Mrinalini Sinha

“Rao offers us a sustained and probing analysis of the modern history of caste in Western India, connecting issues of gender, personhood, property, and politics to facts of oppression andinequality. This is the most politically and theoretically engaged book on caste to have come out in a long time and it will do much to further discussions of citizenship in Indian democracy.”—Dipesh Chakrabarty

Hardback / 414pp / Rs 750.00 / ISBN 81-7824-286-9 / South Asia rights / Jan-Feb 2010 / Copublished with the University of California Press, Berkeley


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

THE GREAT AGRARIAN CONQUEST by NEELADRI BHATTACHARYA

BUY THE PAPERBACK       FROM THE REVIEWS   Review in SOCIAL HISTORY, USA by Benjamin Siegel The Great Agrarian Conquest represents a massive intervention into the contemporary historiography of South Asia, elaborating upon some conventional wisdom but upending a great deal more of it. Readers might well place this book in conversation with works like Ranajit Guha ’ s A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963) and Bernard Cohn ’ s Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (1997), to which The Great Agrarian Conquest owes some preliminary inspiration. Yet what Bhattacharya o ff ers is a wholly original account of the transformation to agrarian colonialism . . .   Few volumes in South Asian history have been more awaited than this monograph, Neeladri Bhattacharya ’ s fi rst. One of the most celebrated mentors and researchers at New Delhi ’ s Jawaharlal Nehru University, Bhattacharya retired in 2017 after a decades-long career. His formal scholarl...
Post a Comment
Read more

Romila Thapar remembers an old friend

A few weeks before he passed away, Eric Hobsbawm   and his wife invited Romila Thapar to the historian’s 95 th birthday party in London. John Williams played the guitar. The gathered companions drank to the great man’s health. He was convivial and had all his wits about him—as seems evident in the pictures below. A century seemed possible ... In her obituary below, Romila Thapar recounts what Hobsbawm’s work meant to her, and its intellectual legacy more broadly.        REMEMBERING ERIC HOBSBAWM             Romila Thapar Eric Hobsbawm was the kind of historian whose work, although largely on the last three centuries of European history, was relevant even to those of us who work on a different space and time. The process of historical investigation for him was not restricted to a narrow engagement with a specific subject, but with having to situate it in an extensive ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Unfamiliarity of the Past

Joya Chatterji's most recent book is PARTITION’S LEGACIES . It was published by Permanent Black in June 2019.  In this wide-ranging conversation about her books and her career as a teacher, she begins with talking about what drew her to history in the first place. She answers questions put to her by Uttara Shahani (a research scholar at Cambridge University) and Sohini Chattopadhyay (a history researcher at Columbia University) 1. Why did you become a historian? Let’s start at the very beginning . . . . . . A very good place to start. But before I launch into my answer, I want to thank you both for such excellent questions. They all force (or encourage) me to reflect on a lifetime of work. From a personal standpoint, this is a great moment for me to think backwards and ask myself: what did it all add up to? So I am grateful for your critical but generous-spirited questions. Why History? Why indeed. My relationship with the subject is best likened to a love affair. I was introduce...
Post a Comment
Read more