Reconsidering Untouchability PDF Download

Author: Ramnarayan S. Rawat
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253222621
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
"Challenges and revises our understanding of the historical and contemporary role of Dalits in Indian society. A pathbreaking book that rightfully restores the historical agency of and gives voice to Dalits in North India." --Anand A. Yang, University of Washington --

Author: Jesús F. Cháirez-Garza
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526168715
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
This book examines the transformation of untouchability into a political idea in India during the first half of the twentieth century. At its heart is Ambedkar’s role and the concepts he used to champion untouchability as a political problem. Ambedkar’s main objective was to comprehend the numerous avatars of untouchability in order to eradicate this practice. Ambedkar understood untouchability beyond aspects of ritual purity and pollution by stressing its complex nature and uncovering the political, historical, racial, spatial and emotional characteristics contained in this concept. Ambedkar believed the abolition of untouchability depended on a widespread alteration of India’s political, economic and cultural systems. Ambedkar reframed the problem of untouchability by linking it to larger concepts floating in the political environment of late colonial India such as representation, slavery, race, the Indian village, internationalism and even the creation of Pakistan.

Author: Ramnarayan S. Rawat
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374315
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The contributors to this major intervention into Indian historiography trace the strategies through which Dalits have been marginalized as well as the ways Dalit intellectuals and leaders have shaped emancipatory politics in modern India. Moving beyond the anticolonialism/nationalism binary that dominates the study of India, the contributors assess the benefits of colonial modernity and place humiliation, dignity, and spatial exclusion at the center of Indian historiography. Several essays discuss the ways Dalits used the colonial courts and legislature to gain minority rights in the early twentieth century, while others highlight Dalit activism in social and religious spheres. The contributors also examine the struggle of contemporary middle-class Dalits to reconcile their caste and class, intercaste tensions among Sikhs, and the efforts by Dalit writers to challenge dominant constructions of secular and class-based citizenship while emphasizing the ongoing destructiveness of caste identity. In recovering the long history of Dalit struggles against caste violence, exclusion, and discrimination, Dalit Studies outlines a new agenda for the study of India, enabling a significant reconsideration of many of the Indian academy's core assumptions. Contributors: D. Shyam Babu, Laura Brueck, Sambaiah Gundimeda, Gopal Guru, Rajkumar Hans, Chinnaiah Jangam, Surinder Jodhka, P. Sanal Mohan, Ramnarayan Rawat, K. Satyanarayana

Author: C.S. Adcock
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199995435
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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This book provides a critical history of the distinctive tradition of Indian secularism known as Tolerance. Examining debates surrounding the activities of the Arya Samaj - a Hindu reform organization regarded as the exemplar of intolerance - it finds that Tolerance functioned to disengage Indian secularism from the politics of caste.

Author: Eugene F. Irschick
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317436172
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Providing a different approach to the history of India than previously advocated, this textbook argues that there was constant interaction between peoples and cultures. This interactive, dialogic approach provides a clear understanding of how power and social relations operated in South Asia. Covering the history of India from Mughal times to the first years of Independence, the book consists of chapters divided roughly between political and thematic questions. Topics discussed include: Mughal warfare and military developments The construction of Indian culture Indian, regional and local political articulation India’s Independence and the end of British Rule Women and governmentality The rise of the Dalit movement As well as a detailed timeline that provides a useful overview of key events in the history of India, a set of background reading is included after each chapter for readers who wish to go beyond the remit of this text. Written in an accessible, narrative style, the textbook will be suitable in courses on Indian and South Asian history, as well as courses on world history and South Asian studies.

Author: Ashok K. Pankaj
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429785186
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
The linguistic origin of the term Dalit is Marathi, and pre-dates the militant-intellectual Dalit Panthers movement of the 1970s. It was not in popular use till the last quarter of the 20th century, the origin of the term Dalit, although in the 1930s, it was used as Marathi-Hindi translation of the word "Depressed Classes". The changing nature of caste and Dalits has become a topic of increasing interest in India. This edited book is a collection of originally written chapters by eminent experts on the experiences of Dalits in India. It examines who constitute Dalits and engages with the mainstream subaltern perspective that treats Dalits as a political and economic category, a class phenomenon, and subsumes homogeneity of the entire Dalit population. This book argues that the socio-cultural deprivations of Dalits are their primary deprivations, characterized by heterogeneity of their experiences. It asserts that Dalits have a common urge to liberate from the oppressive and exploitative social arrangement which has been the guiding force of Dalit movement. This book has analysed this movement through three phases: the reformative, the transformative and the confrontationist. An exploration of dynamic relations between subalternity, exclusion and social change, the book will be of interest to academics in the field of sociology, political science and contemporary India.

Author: Ravinder Kaur
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
ISBN: 9354927343
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
The People' and 'New India' are terms that are being invoked freely to both understand and govern India as she enters her 75th year of post-colonial nationhood. Yet, there is little clarity on who these people of India really are, what they do, their desires, histories and attachments to India. Similarly, the phrase 'New India' is used far too loosely to explain away a dangerously confounding politics. In this book, some of the most respected scholars of South Asia come together to write about a person or a concept that holds particular sway in the politics of contemporary India. In doing so, they collectively open up an original understanding of what the politics at the heart of New India are-and how best we might come to analyse them. This brilliant collection put together by Ravinder Kaur and Nayanika Mathur includes original and accessible essays by leading social science and humanities scholars of South Asia.

Author: Taylor C. Sherman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691222584
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
An iconoclastic history of the first two decades after independence in India Nehru’s India brings a provocative but nuanced set of new interpretations to the history of early independent India. Drawing from her extensive research over the past two decades, Taylor Sherman reevaluates the role of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, in shaping the nation. She argues that the notion of Nehru as the architect of independent India, as well as the ideas, policies, and institutions most strongly associated with his premiership—nonalignment, secularism, socialism, democracy, the strong state, and high modernism—have lost their explanatory power. They have become myths. Sherman examines seminal projects from the time and also introduces readers to little-known personalities and fresh case studies, including India’s continued engagement with overseas Indians, the importance of Buddhism in secular India, the transformations in industry and social life brought about by bicycles, a riotous and ultimately doomed attempt to prohibit the consumption of alcohol in Bombay, the early history of election campaign finance, and the first state-sponsored art exhibitions. The author also shines a light on underappreciated individuals, such as Apa Pant, the charismatic diplomat who influenced foreign policy from Kenya to Tibet, and Urmila Eulie Chowdhury, the rebellious architect who helped oversee the building of Chandigarh. Tracing and critiquing developments in this formative period in Indian history, Nehru’s India offers a fresh and definitive exploration of the nation’s early postcolonial era.

Author: Sumit Guha
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295746238
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical memory in world-historical context. He presents memory as the result of both remembering and forgetting and of the preservation, recovery, and decay of records. By describing how these processes work through sociopolitical organizations, Guha delineates the historiographic legacy acquired by the British in colonial India; the creation of the centralized educational system and mass production of textbooks that led to unification of historical discourses under colonial auspices; and the divergence of these discourses in the twentieth century under the impact of nationalism and decolonization. Guha brings together sources from a range of languages and regions to provide the first intellectual history of the ways in which socially recognized historical memory has been made across the subcontinent. This thoughtful study contributes to debates beyond the field of history that complicate the understanding of objectivity and documentation in a seemingly post-truth world.

Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198896735
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 689

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Book Description
Beginning with the 1990s, the subject of caste has seen a profound increase in interest among scholars. What was until then approached as a fossilized tradition of the ritual-obsessed Hindus refusing to see the progressive spirits of the emerging world and studied as a branch of anthropology, suddenly began to be seen as a complex reality deeply embedded in a range of institutions and social practices, attracting scholars from a wide range of disciplines—sociology, political science, history, literature, and even economics. Underlying this opening of the subject of caste were many factors: epistemic, empirical, and political. Caste is no longer approached through the classical binaries of 'traditional' and 'modern'; the 'East' and the 'West'; or the 'closed' and 'open' systems of stratification. With the growing consolidation of caste-based identities among those ranked lower down in the hierarchy since the 1990s, raising questions of citizenship and dignity, the subject has acquired a new salience. As the emerging research shows, the realities of caste on the ground have always been diverse across regions, often contested and ever changing. This Handbook presents a wide range of essays written by authors representing diverse academic disciplines and perspectives, bringing together the emerging trends in the research, imaginations, and lived realities of caste.