Caste

About: Caste is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5681 publications have been published within this topic receiving 91330 citations. The topic is also known as: caste system.

Caste as Maratha: Social categories, colonial policy and identity in early twentieth-century Maharashtra

Abstract: In the light of recent scholarship emphasising the historicity of caste, this article tracks the transformation of the category 'Maratha' from its precolonial register as a military ethos to that ofa caste in the early twentieth century. Surveying the category's genealogy in non-Brahman literature and colonial ethnographic writings and policy, it argues that this caste-based register of 'Maratha' was shaped through a complex, interactive process by both colonial and Indian discourses. In doing so, the article attempts to historicise 'Maratha' and emphasises the impor tance of locating the modern history of caste and its encounter with colonialism in regional/ local contexts.

Friendship and the private sphere

Abstract: Introduction One of the central arguments of this book is that friendship is a social relationship, and not just a personal one. Of course, it is a personal one, and one over which people can exercise a good deal of agency. However, it is also a relationship which is socially patterned – shaped and constrained by factors over which the individuals involved have only limited control (Duck, 1993). In particular, the forms which friendships take vary historically with changes in the dominant characteristics of the social and economic formation in which they occur. Expressed differently, the nature of the obligations and solidarities which arise between friends – and indeed who is recognised as a friend and what this represents – is influenced by the web of other commitments and obligations which an individual has. And these other commitments and obligations are themselves rooted in the economic and social ‘realities’ which confront the individual. Exactly how these impact on each individual will depend on their specific location within the social and economic structure. Class, ethnicity, gender, kinship, caste, age, and whatever other social divisions are most pertinent to that society at that period will impact on the ‘freedoms’ there are to develop forms of informal relationship and shape the consequent solidarities that emerge. As discussed in the introductory chapter, this type of argument has long been accepted in the field of family studies.

The IT Caste: Love and Arranged Marriages in the IT Industry of Bangalore

Abstract: Whatever the reasons may be, ‘love’ is what now defines marriage, at least in the Western world. Although there is much to be argued against this, not in the least based on the fact that online dat...