Showing papers on "Caste published in 2016"

Does Affirmative Action Work? Caste, Gender, College Quality, and Academic Success in India

Abstract: Public policy in modern India features affirmative action programs intended to reduce inequality that stems from a centuries-old caste structure and history of disparate treatment by gender. We study the effects of one such affirmative action program: an admissions policy that fixes percentage quotas, common across more than 200 engineering colleges, for disadvantaged castes and for women. We show that the program increases college attendance of targeted students, particularly at relatively higher-quality institutions. An important concern is that affirmative action might harm intended beneficiaries by placing them in academic programs for which they are ill-prepared. We find no evidence of such adverse impacts.

Caste, Gender and the Rhetoric of Reform in India's Drinking Water Sector

Abstract: Recent analyses indicate a historic loss of equity in the shift in India’s drinking water policy from a welfarebased, free supply mode to a market-oriented demandled approach. However, a complex entwining of caste and gender has consistently defined water allocation and access among users and entrenched fractures in the structure and culture of the policy-implementing and regulatory institutions. Contrary to popular assumptions, both official welfare-based supply and recent neo-liberal policies and interventions hinge on a tokenistic, segregated and apolitical mention of gender and/or caste concerns which, when translated into action, have often reinforced existing inequities. Based on the above observations, this paper argues that subsequent changes in domestic water policies have only served to exacerbate an enduring unequal social order around water in India

The Caste Hierarchy And The State In Nepal A Study Of The Muluki Ain Of 1854

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Where the Path Leads The Role of Caste in Post-University Employment Expectations

Abstract: This study attempts to trace the differential pathways that dalit and non-dalit students from comparable elite educational backgrounds traverse in their journey from college to work. While the training they receive in the university world is quite comparable, dalit students lack many advantages that turn out to be crucial in shaping their employment outcomes. Dalit students support the affirmative action policy completely which allows them to break their traditional marginality. Our findings suggest that social and cultural capital (the overlapping of caste, class, family background and networks) matter a great deal in the urban, highly skilled, formal and allegedly meritocratic private sector jobs, where hiring practices are less transparent than appear at first sight.

Dangerous Wives And Sacred Sisters Social And Symbolic Roles Of High Caste Women In Nepal

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Ascriptive hierarchies: Caste and its reproduction in contemporary India:

Abstract: Social science literature on caste tends to view it as a peculiar institution of the Hindus, emanating from their past tradition and religious beliefs/scriptures. This view also presumes that the p...

Rural Non-Farm Employment in India

Abstract: In this paper an attempt is made to assess the contribution of the non-farm sector to household income across population quintiles. The correlates of employment in the non-farm sector have also been examined. The study is based on rural data from 32,000 households in 1,765 villages across India, collected by the NCAER in 1993-94. Analysis shows that non-farm incomes account for a significant proportion of household income in rural India, with considerable variation across quintiles and across India's major states. Education, wealth, caste, village level agricultural conditions, population densities and other regional effects influence access to non-farm occupations. The direct contribution of the non-farm sector to poverty reduction is possibly quite muted as the poor lack assets, but it has been found that the growth of certain non-farm sub-sectors is strongly associated with higher agricultural wage rates.

Social Transformation in Post-Conflict Nepal: A Gender Perspective

Abstract: The concept of social transformation has been increasingly used to study significant political, socio-economic and cultural changes affected by individuals and groups. This book uses a novel approach from the gender perspective and from bottom up to analyse social transformation in Nepal, a country with a complex traditional structure of caste, class, ethnicity, religion and regional locality and the experience of the ten-year of People’s War (1996-2006). Through extensive interviews with women in post-conflict Nepal, this book analyses the intended and unintended impacts of conflict and traces the transformations in women’s understandings of themselves and their positions in public life. It raises important questions for the international community about the inevitable victimization of women during mass violence, but it also identifies positive impacts of armed conflict. The book also discusses how the Maoist insurgency had empowering effects on women. The first study to provide empirical evidence on the relationship between armed conflict and social transformation from gender’s perspectives, this book is a major contribution to the field of transitional justice and peacebuilding in post-armed-conflict Nepal. It is of interest to academics researching South Asia, Gender, Peace and Conflict Studies and Development Studies.

Caste Networks in the Modern Indian Economy

Abstract: Social networks support diverse economic activities in developing countries, using the information and the social sanctions at their disposal to sustain cooperation and to solve market imperfections. In India, the natural unit around which networks would be organized is the endogamous (sub) caste or jati. Caste networks have, indeed, historically supported, and continue to support economic activity and mobility. While this provides a novel economic explanation for the persistence of caste in modern India, a balanced assessment of the contribution of these networks to growth and the macro economy must also account for the static and dynamic inefficiencies that they generate.

Caste as self-regulatory club: evidence from a private banking system in nineteenth century India

Abstract: The Chettiar banking system evolved and functioned in the absence of a government sponsored central bank in 19th-century India. I find that the underlying common social institution of caste was crucial for the workings of the banking system and effectively acted as a club. Exclusion was achieved by restricting membership by birth and the practice of endogamy. These mechanisms created the necessary incentives to provide meaningful rules as well as their enforcement. I describe and analyze the privately provided self-regulatory mechanisms of clearinghouses, inter-bank lending and information sharing. The Chettiar banking system thus adds to existing instances of self-regulated banking as well as points to the economic underpinnings of caste as an institution.

Crossing Caste Boundaries in the Modern Indian Marriage Market

Abstract: Though caste remains a major social cleavage and a source of social exclusion in India, three factors now rise against it: a diversifying middle class, urbanization, and a demographic youth bulge. While conventional wisdom suggests that Indians marry within their own caste, we find that in the urban, middle-class marriage market, which increasingly includes members of lower castes, openness to intercaste marriage is substantial and varies within and across groups. Why are some more open to intercaste marriage? Drawing on a semi-experimental study of 1070 marriage market participants belonging to both Scheduled and upper castes, we argue that interest in intercaste marriage is rooted in a desire for upward mobility and governed by the principle of exchange. Those who can benefit from an exchange and who have high class or caste status to offer are more likely to express an interest in intermarriage. Among Scheduled Caste individuals, interest in intermarriage increases with income, while among upper caste individuals the opposite is true. We also find that the Scheduled Caste groups in our study are more interested in intermarriage than the upper caste ones. Increasing openness to intermarriage – particularly when upper castes are willing to marry lower (backward and Scheduled) castes – is a sign of social inclusion in urban India.

Theorising the interaction of caste, class and gender: A feminist sociological approach

Abstract: In the context of the rise of feminist scholarship exploring links between caste, class and gender, the particular concern of this article is with developing a sociological framework that would hel...

Why do financial inclusion policies fail in mobilizing savings from the poor ? Lessons from rural South India *

Abstract: Combining multivariate and qualitative analyses, this micro-level study suggests an explanation for the persistence of informal savings in rural South India despite publicly run large-scale programs to promote bank savings. Notably gold, but also ROSCAs and private lending, remain dominant forms of saving. We argue that cultural norms and social institutions such as social class and caste shape the nature, the propensity but also the opportunities to save. Gold serves multiple purposes, which are financial, economical, socio-cultural, and political. Furthermore, we find that Dalits' (the lowest caste) preference for gold illustrates a relative emancipation of Dalits combined with the maintenance of prohibition related to caste which prevents them to invest in other assets such as land.

Minds of caste – Discrimination and its affects

Abstract: This guest editorial considers the relevance of caste in today's world in terms of ‘castes of mind’.

Internal migration in India: are the underclass more mobile?

Abstract: Several researchers believe that migration in the Indian subcontinent has been historically low. Kingsley Davis (1951) has attributed this to the prevalence of caste system, joint families, traditional values, diversity of language and culture, lack of education and pre-dominance of agriculture and semi-feudal land relations. However, the rapid transformation of Indian economy, improvement in the levels of education, transport and communication facilities, shift of workforce from agriculture to industry and service activities provided new impetus to the mobility pattern during colonial times and after independence.

Social exclusion and caste discrimination in public and private sectors in India: A decomposition analysis

Abstract: This paper provides an empirical analysis of caste discrimination in the regular urban labour market in India. The affirmative action policy is confined to the minuscule public sector and excludes the vast private sector; therefore, analysis of caste discrimination has been conducted separately for public and private sector workers. To examine the wage gap between workers of forward castes (others) and lower castes (Scheduled Castes), the 50th, 61st, and 68th rounds of the Employment and Unemployment Survey data of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) have been used. The main conclusions, based on decomposition analysis, are that (a) endowment difference contributes more than discrimination to the raw wage gap; so, expanding educational opportunities for Scheduled Castes can be a useful strategy to reduce discriminatory treatment against them; (b) wages are lower for Scheduled Castes than for equally qualified forward castes by 19.4 per cent in the public sector and by 31.7 per cent in the private sector; (c) occupational discrimination, or unequal access to jobs, is more important than wage discrimination in both public and private sectors; and (d) the quantile regression results reveal a “glass ceiling effect” in the private sector and a “sticky floor effect” in the public sector. The empirical findings provide strong evidence for the extension of affirmative action policy in the private sector.

Snakes and ladders: rethinking social mobility in post-reform India

Abstract: The question of social mobility in a terrain of increasing inequality has gained particular urgency in post-reform India. We approach social mobility not as a one-way ascent toward the top, rather as a risk-laden enterprise prone to fluctuations that include both incremental gains and the possibility of sliding downwards. We argue that to ‘move up the ladder’ is not merely a matter of individual choice or hard work in the face of odds as free-market believers have long held. It is as much an outcome of collective political bargaining, privileges that dominant class and caste status affords, access to resources and, indeed, occasional luck. Two propositions follow. First, we suggest that the state remains albeit as a reluctant enabler of social mobility in the age of markets. Second, the participation in the new economy hinges also upon one’s ability to ‘dress up’ for the part, to be able to craft one’s look as if one belonged to spaces – work or leisure – that one desires to inhabit. The work of appearanc...

The economies of love: love marriage, kin support and aspiration in a south Indian garment city

Abstract: The paper considers narratives and experiences of love marriage in the garment city of Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu, south India. As a booming centre of garment production, Tiruppur attracts a diverse migrant workforce of young men and women who have plenty of opportunity to fall in love and enter marriages of their own making. Based on long-term ethnographic research, the paper explores what love marriages mean to those involved, how they are experienced and talked about, and how they shape post-marital lives. Case studies reveal that a discourse of loss of post-marital kin support is central to evaluations of love marriages by members of Tiruppur’s labouring classes. Such marriages not only flout parental authority and often cross caste and religious boundaries, but they also jeopardise the much needed kin support that youngsters need to fulfil aspirations of mobility, entrepreneurship and success in a post-liberalisation environment. It is argued that critical evaluations of love marriages not only disrupt modernist assumptions of linear transformations in marital practices, but they also constitute a broader critique of the neoliberal celebration of the ‘individual’ while reaffirming the continued importance of caste endogamy, parental involvement and kin support to success in India’s post-reform economy.

Understanding the Persistence of Caste: A Commentary on Cotterill, Sidanius, Bhardwaj and Kumar (2014)

Abstract: We contextualise Cotterill, Sidanius, Bhardwaj, and Kumar’s (2014) paper within a broader literature on caste and collective mobilisation. Cotterill and colleagues’ paper represents a fresh and timely attempt to make sense of the persistence of caste from the perspective of Social Dominance Theory. Cotterill and colleagues, however, do not examine caste differences in the endorsement of karma, and take behavioural asymmetry among lower castes for granted. Cotterill and colleagues also adhere to a Varna model of the caste system that arguably is simplistic and benefits the upper castes of Indian society. We caution that emphasising behavioural asymmetry and endorsing the Varna model might further stigmatise lower castes, especially Dalits, and feed into a conformity bias already predominant in caste-related psychological research. We argue that the conceptualisation and operationalisation of Right-Wing Authoritarianism, Social Dominance Orientation and legitimising myths in the Indian context needs to take into account the particular meaning and functions of these constructs in specific intergroup contexts, and for identity positions salient within these contexts. We contend that any examination aimed at better understanding the nature of social hierarchy and oppression within the caste system and Indian society in general remains inconclusive without including a focus on the construction and contestation of social categories and social identities.

Children and Media in India: Narratives of Class, Agency and Social Change

Abstract: Is the bicycle, like the loudspeaker, a medium of communication in India? Do Indian children need trade unions as much as they need schools? What would you do with a mobile phone if all your friends were playing tag in the rain or watching Indian Idol? Children and Media in India illuminates the experiences, practices and contexts in which children and young people in diverse locations across India encounter, make, or make meaning from media in the course of their everyday lives. From textbooks, television, film and comics to mobile phones and digital games, this book examines the media available to different socioeconomic groups of children in India and their articulation with everyday cultures and routines. An authoritative overview of theories and discussions about childhood, agency, social class, caste and gender in India is followed by an analysis of films and television representations of childhood informed by qualitative interview data collected between 2005 and 2015 in urban, small-town and rural contexts with children aged nine to 17. The analysis uncovers and challenges widely held assumptions about the relationships among factors including sociocultural location, media content and technologies, and children’s labour and agency. The analysis casts doubt on undifferentiated claims about how new technologies ‘affect’, ‘endanger’ and/or ‘empower’, pointing instead to the importance of social class – and caste – in mediating relationships among children, young people and the poor. The analysis of children’s narratives of daily work, education, caring and leisure supports the conclusion that, although unrecognised and underrepresented, subaltern children’s agency and resourceful conservation makes a significant contribution to economic, interpretive and social reproduction in India.

Giving Back: Diaspora Philanthropy and the Transnationalisation of Caste in Guntur (India)

Abstract: This thesis is an anthropological study of a group of highly educated transnational migrants belonging to the agrarian landowning elite of Coastal Andhra Pradesh, who have settled in the USA and other western countries. This affluent regional diaspora has engaged extensively in philanthropic projects for social development (especially in education, health and rural development) in their home region. Based on 15 months of field research carried out in Andhra and the US, the thesis examines the discursive and processual aspects of the philanthropic practices of this diaspora. The study offers insights into how a transnational community is shaped that remains culturally and materially rooted in Andhra and its regional social formations of caste, class and kinship. The thesis further traces how transnational philanthropy has become institutionalised within diasporic associations and within the local state in Guntur district. In this case, the institutionalisation of philanthropy is shown to be a mutation of earlier forms of ‘giving’ that have colonial roots, in which caste became a principle axis of community formation and assertion, and patronage within the caste - a key modality of building caste solidarity. With the global dispersal of this regionally dominant group and the accumulation of economic and cultural capital through migration, this older caste habitus has been reproduced but also altered in particular ways. These transnational practices of giving are enmeshed in a neoliberal economy and in governance practices, thereby reconstituting older structures and forms of dominance in Coastal Andhra within the contemporary globalising political-economic formation.

Creation of social space through prayers among Dalits in Kerala, India

Abstract: Control over social space was central to the everyday practice of caste in Kerala, India. Caste system in Kerala had evolved extreme forms of control over social space, which was critiqued by European missionaries in the nineteenth century. The missionary work among the slave castes that emphasized learning prayers and the Gospel provided the untouchable slaves with a new conceptual language. This was central to the claims of slave castes to the social space as they could come together defying the caste rules and regulations of distance pollution for prayer meetings which began in the slave schools and chapels in the evening after a day’s back-breaking labor in their landlords’ fields. The slave schools and chapels created a new social space that enabled the slave castes to claim all other modern social spaces. The slaves took over new cultural practices such as forming social organizations from the missionaries and used them effectively in their congregational activities. The experiences of socia...

Women's participation in self-help groups as a pathway to women's empowerment: A case of Nepal

Abstract: Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the government of Nepal have made some effort to reduce poverty in Nepal by creating women's affiliation groups, some of which are micro-credit organizations. Using capabilities as defined by Amartya Sen (Development as freedom, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2000), which includes employment opportunities, women's ownership in productive resources such as land and/or homes, educational opportunities, and women's participation in decision-making in the family, this study evaluated the extent to which women's ethnic group or caste affiliation affected a woman's likelihood of being empowered by participation in these groups. We analyzed a sample of 8,973 women which was taken from the 2011 Nepal Demographic and Health Survey. Previous research has demonstrated that participation in gender-based groups is correlated with higher economic status. This study adds to the literature on women's affiliation groups by investigating the impact of structural factors, such as caste and ethnicity, on women's self-help group participation (women's groups and credit groups).

Do attitudes toward societal structure predict beliefs about free will and achievement? Evidence from the Indian caste system

Abstract: Intuitive theories about the malleability of intellectual ability affect our motivation and achievement in life. But how are such theories shaped by the culture in which an individual is raised? We addressed this question by exploring how Indian children’s and adults’ attitudes toward the Hindu caste system – and its deterministic worldview – are related to differences in their intuitive theories. Strikingly, we found that, beginning at least in middle school and continuing into adulthood, individuals who placed more importance on caste were more likely to adopt deterministic intuitive theories. We also found a developmental change in the scope of this relationship, such that in children, caste attitudes were linked only to abstract beliefs about personal freedom, but that by adulthood, caste attitudes were also linked to beliefs about the potential achievement of members of different castes, personal intellectual ability, and personality attributes. These results are the first to directly relate the societal structure in which a person is raised to the specific intuitive theories they adopt.

Racialized Casteism: Exposing the Relationship Between Race, Caste, and Colorism Through the Experiences of Africana People in India and Sri Lanka

Abstract: Contemporary South Asian sociality is marked by signifiers of race, caste, ethnicity, and colorism. Examining the particular social inequalities and marginalization experienced by Africana people in these societies uncovers the dialectical interrelationship between caste, race, and colorism. This yields an understanding of how race and its more trenchant inflection, racism, function in South Asia. Interpreting implications for Africana politics in South Asian societies requires a theorization of these categories. Racialized casteism is an analytic that reveals the relationship between race, caste, and colorism in South Asia and highlights how Africana presence indisputably raises the significance of race thereby intensifying the outcomes faced by Siddis and Kaffirs.

Professional women's perceptions & experiences of respectability, social status, and autonomy : a case study of women employed at the University of Sindh, Jamshoro, Sindh-Pakistan

Abstract: This thesis aims to explore the perceptions and experiences of professional women at the University of Sindh, Jamshoro-Pakistan (UoSJP), regarding their respectability and social status in the workplace and in the community. Additionally, the thesis elaborates on professional women’s perceptions and experiences regarding their autonomy and independence, which they have supposedly achieved through their university education and gainful employment. The major contribution of the thesis is that it addresses the lack of feminist research on professional women in the context of the ongoing debate over gender equality in Sindh, Pakistan. This thesis, by using feminist standpoint theory and intersectionality as theoretical and analytical tools, emphasises multiple identities, rather than focusing on a single dimension of social difference. Additionally, this thesis, by employing a Bourdieusian framework (economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital), explores and examines professional women’s identities in relation to their particular spatial locations, as well as the ways that social capital and institutionalised cultural capital intersect with their social and familial backgrounds to produce complex hierarchies. The research asserts that women’s higher-ranking position (socially accepted) also has a potential influence on their respectability, social status and autonomy in the workplace and in the community. Because it plays a significant role in establishing influential social networking, which further increases women’s symbolic capital. Thus, the thesis explores and establishes links between the respectability, social status, autonomy and independence of these professional women, and the intersection of potential influencing factors (for example, patriarchy, class, caste, familial and educational backgrounds, locale and employment). The thesis, then, discusses how professional women negotiate their multiple identities within certain defined spheres while upholding or regulating the respectability, dignity and ‘family honour’ that is linked to their modesty (sexuality). The thesis claims that ‘collectivity’ is the social ethic or essence of Pakistani society, while ‘individuality’ has been socially and culturally dishonoured and/or disapproved. Therefore, these professional women, understanding and attributing meanings to these concepts in local context, observed their ‘limited’ or ‘defined autonomy’, which is influenced by many potential intersecting factors rather than their gender and/or patriarchy.