The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India / Edition 1

by Anupama Rao

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520257610
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	10/13/2009
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Anupama Rao is Associate Professor of History at Barnard College.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Author's Note
Introduction

Part One. Emancipation
1. Caste Radicalism and the Making of a New Political Subject
2. The Problem of Caste Property
3. Dalits as a Political Minority

Part Two. The Paradox of Emancipation
4. Legislating Caste Atrocity
5. New Directions in Dalit Politics: Symbologies of Violence, Maharashtra, 1960–1979
6. The Sexual Politics of Caste: Violence and the Ritual-Archaic
7. Death of a Kotwal: The Violence of Recognition

Epilogue: Dalit Futures
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Rao's book will be required reading for any student of Dalit emancipation in
India for some time to come."—H-Net Reviews

"Most compelling."—Asian Affairs

Editorial Reviews

Most compelling.

Asian Affairs - Eleanor Zelliot

Rao’s book will be required reading for any student of Dalit emancipation in India for some time to come.

H-Net Reviews - Sasheej Hegde

"The strength of the book lies in its massive historical archival research backed up by meticulous anthropological fieldwork."

The Journal of Asian Studies - Chinnaiah Jangam