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.

Religion and identity in India

Abstract: In colonial India the British administration sought to fashion a Western‐style state structure at the same time as it assumed that primordial groupings based on caste and, especially, religion were the appropriate bases of the political community. Hence, colonial counting processes endowed religious identities with greater substance and clearer outlines than they had had in the past. The combination of homogenizing state practices and reinforcement of traditional identity, to which Indian nationalism had no coherent answer, ultimately legitimized India's partition. For two decades after independence, political conflict in India was primarily on modernist lines. However, in contrast to the urban elite who mostly operated in political life according to the norms of modern Western politics, other groups saw politics in terms of caste, religious and linguistic allegiances. The rise of communal elements in Indian politics thus followed the mobilization of non‐urban elites and poorer sections of the po...

The Adequacy of Women's Expectations for Adult Roles

Abstract: cultural standards of men, they are perceived as a threat and tensions increase? Of what significance are regional and community variations in the treatment of and degree of participation permitted women, mindful here that women share responsibility with men for the perpetuation of attitudes toward women? This paper is exploratory in suggesting the enhanced possibilities of fruitful analysis, if women are included in the minority group corpus, particularly with reference to such concepts and techniques as group belongingness, socialization of the minority group child, cultural differences, social distance tests, conflict between class and caste status, race relations cycle, and marginality. I believe that the concept of the marginal woman should be especially productive, and am now engaged in an empirical study of role conflicts in professional women.

Development, Devolution and Democracy: Village Discourse in West Bengal

Abstract: Introduction Contextualising Changing Environment in Local History Panchayats Caste, Class and Gender The Interventionist State Power and Enfranchisement A Class Account of Economic Benefits Social Renewal Summing Up

Caste ideology and interaction

Abstract: Following the publication of the book by E. R. Leach, ed., Aspects of Caste in South India, Ceylon and North-West Pakistan (1960), much additional information was gathered on caste hierarchies in South Asia, and two major attempts were made to identify the underlying unity of this material - a structuralist one by Louis Dumont and a ethnosocialogical one by McKim Marriott et al. This quest for unity seemed attractive, yet at the same time, as the contributions to the present volume indicate, premature. The four papers collected here and published in 1982 are all concerned with caste ideology and caste interaction in different locales of South Asia.