The learned author has produced the work with the sole intent to grasp the real Indian civilizational and cultural postulates in the folds of Indian history. As history forms a colossal steep monumental wall with a crest of todayness, it becomes an uptill task to see the lower parts of this characteristic monument from the crest. To see the intended parts, one, brave like a historian, needs climb down with care and hardihood in the valley of such dark monument, to cheak, examine and observe the intended fact. In this work, the author painstakingly has found the truth about the Hindu sub-caste sudra, of which , members overwhelmed time and again against the set caste norms to be rulers and lay foundation of the magnificent dynasties an the Indian sub-continent. This work of History suggests many factual things and nullifies the caste myths-and contributes a lot to the dalits movements. It starts a new debate on the emancipation of castes, present day reservation to sub-castes, and a new perspective of caste system in India. Stands a work of immense value.

Study of a scheduled caste in Uttar Pradesh.

This book is a study of the new frame of mind of the Indian Untouchable.

Untouchable Pasts constructs a history of an untouchable and heretical community over the last two hundred years. The Satnamis of Central India have combined the features of a caste and a sect to question and challenge the tenor of ritual power that variously defines Hinduism. At the same time, within the community, schemes of meaning and power, particularly those centering on gender, have been imbued with ambiguity and a reproduction of forms of inequality. The book presents an interpretive account of Satnami endeavors, encounters, and experiences by combining history and anthropology, archival and field work. It addresses a clutch of theoretical questions and a range of key and inextricably bound analytical relationships in an accessible manner. Issues of caste and untouchability, sect and kinship, myths and pasts are rendered here as part of a wider dynamic between religion and power, gender and community, writing and the constitution of traditions, ritual and the making of modernities, and orality and the construction of histories. Indeed, Untouchable Pasts brings together the perspectives and possibilities defined by three overlapping but distinct theoretical developments that have been elaborated in recent years: first, novel renderings of anthropologies and enthnographies of the historical imagination; second, critically engaged constructions of histories from below, particularly by the collective Subaltern Studies endeavor; and, finally, a conceptual emphasis on the 'everyday' as an arena for the production, negotiation, transaction, and contestations of meanings within wider networks and relationships of power. By casting these analytical tendencies in a critical dialogue with one another, Untouchable Pasts works toward questioning some of those overarching oppositions—for example, between ritual and rationality, myth and history, tradition and modernity, and community and state—that have formed the conceptual core of several inherited traditions of social and political theory within the academy in both Western and non-Western contexts.

The Scheduled Caste people, all over India, have suffered from various types of socio-economic problems from time immemorial over which the social scientists, specially the anthropologists and sociologist have given not much attention to make diagnosis of their problems and to suggest ways and means to eradicate their problems. Thus the present volume will be highly helpful not only for those interested in the study of Scheduled Caste people and their problems, but also for the planners and administrators who are engaged in the welfare programmes of this downtrodden section of the society.

Firmly situated within the analytics of the political economy of a north Indian province, this book explores self-fashioning in pursuit of the modern amongst low-caste Chamars. Challenging existing accounts of national modernity in the non-West, the book argues that subaltern classes shape their own ideas about modernity by taking and rejecting from models of other classes within the same national context. While displacing the West — in its colonial and non-colonial manifestations — as the immanent comparative focus, the book puts forward a unique framework for the analysis of subaltern modernity. This builds on the entanglements between two main trajectories, both of which are viewed as the outcome of the generative impetus of modernisation in India: the first consists of the Chamar appropriation of socio-cultural distinctions forged by 19th-century Indian middle classes in their encounter with colonial modernity; the second features the Chamar subversion of high-caste ideals and practices as a result of low-caste politics initiated during the 20th century. The author contends that these conflicting trends give rise to a temporal antinomy within the Chamar politics of self-making, caught up between compulsions of a past modern and of a contemporary one. The eclectic outcome is termed as ‘retro-modernity’. While the book signals a politics of becoming whose dynamics had previously been overlooked by scholars, it simultaneously opens up novel avenues for the understanding of non-elite modern life-forms in postcolonial settings. The book will interest scholars of anthropology, South Asian studies, development studies, gender studies, political science and postcolonial studies.

This book is a detailed commentary on politics and political consciousness, participation, and mobilization among the Dalits in northern India. Based on extensive fieldwork at the village level in eastern Uttar Pradesh, it deals with Dalit social and political history in the state from 1950 to the present. Using alternative sources—stories and narratives alive in the oral tradition and 'collective memory' of the oppressed and marginalized Dalits—Narayan documents various social upheavals that have taken place in post-Independence India. He also examines the process of politicization of Dalit communities through their internal social struggles and movements, and their emergence as a 'political public' in the State-oriented democratic political setting of contemporary India. How has the ongoing process of politicization of the Dalits developed their politics? How far does it appear as an alternative? To what extent is it similar to the politics played out by dominant parties? Does it imitate or seek break away from the methods of the upper castes? This book seeks to answer these important questions as it maps the changing nature of contemporary Indian politics. In doing so, it unfolds the multiple, suppressed, layers of Dalit consciousness in vibrant ethnographic detail, hitherto overlooked by mainstream discourse.

This volume is about the emerging development trajectories of rural labour relations in India, based on studies from its regions and states. Its overarching theme is the rural class conflict and the results of such conflict, and the link between this and the nature and impact of state intervention. Vigorous emancipatory processes are identified, and the limitations of and contradictions inherent in such processes are examined. Both powerful general trends and significant regional variations are distinguished.