The Untouchables’ Rejection of Hinduism and its Relation to Racial Ideologies

The Untouchables’ Rejection of Hinduism and its Relation to Racial Ideologies PDF Author: Nejla Demirkaya
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668058369
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 21

Get Book Here

Book Description
Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Asian studies, grade: 1,0, University of Göttingen (Centre for Modern Indian Studies), course: Untouchability and religious identity in modern India, language: English, abstract: This paper will deal with the concept of race as configured by low caste movements in India and social reformers seeking to abolish Untouchability and to improve the status of lower castes by way of opposing Brahmin hegemony. It will be shown that the formulation of a distinct racial identity often goes hand in hand with the rejection of Hinduism, the religion the discriminatory caste system originated from. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries there have been many different strategies by means of which the Untouchables have tried to escape their subjugated position within the discriminatory Hindu social order. Along inevitably came the need for the formulation of a separate identity that, obviously, did not emphasise their supposed ritual impurity or their long history of oppression, but rather a prestigious heritage and equality, if not superiority not only in a moral, but cultural and even biological sense. In line with the nationalist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that drew much of their inspiration from Orientalist knowledge and colonial ethnographic theories regarding the racial origins of Indian society, another factor may have contributed to the Untouchables‘ rejection of Hindu orthodoxy: That of a racialised thinking and pronounced, separate ethnic identity. Thus, in what ways is the Untouchables‘ rejection of Hinduism related to racial ideologies?

The Untouchables’ Rejection of Hinduism and its Relation to Racial Ideologies

The Untouchables’ Rejection of Hinduism and its Relation to Racial Ideologies PDF Author: Nejla Demirkaya
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668058369
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 21

Get Book Here

Book Description
Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Asian studies, grade: 1,0, University of Göttingen (Centre for Modern Indian Studies), course: Untouchability and religious identity in modern India, language: English, abstract: This paper will deal with the concept of race as configured by low caste movements in India and social reformers seeking to abolish Untouchability and to improve the status of lower castes by way of opposing Brahmin hegemony. It will be shown that the formulation of a distinct racial identity often goes hand in hand with the rejection of Hinduism, the religion the discriminatory caste system originated from. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries there have been many different strategies by means of which the Untouchables have tried to escape their subjugated position within the discriminatory Hindu social order. Along inevitably came the need for the formulation of a separate identity that, obviously, did not emphasise their supposed ritual impurity or their long history of oppression, but rather a prestigious heritage and equality, if not superiority not only in a moral, but cultural and even biological sense. In line with the nationalist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that drew much of their inspiration from Orientalist knowledge and colonial ethnographic theories regarding the racial origins of Indian society, another factor may have contributed to the Untouchables‘ rejection of Hindu orthodoxy: That of a racialised thinking and pronounced, separate ethnic identity. Thus, in what ways is the Untouchables‘ rejection of Hinduism related to racial ideologies?

Caste

Caste PDF Author: Isabel Wilkerson
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0593230272
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 545

Get Book Here

Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions—now with a new Afterword by the author. #1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, O: The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, New York Post, The New York Public Library, Fortune, Smithsonian Magazine, Marie Claire, Slate, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews Winner of the Carl Sandberg Literary Award • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • National Book Award Longlist • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist • PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist • PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Longlist • Kirkus Prize Finalist “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.” In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully written narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their outcasting of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity. Original and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.

Annihilation of Caste

Annihilation of Caste PDF Author: B.R. Ambedkar
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 178168832X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391

Get Book Here

Book Description
“What the Communist Manifesto is to the capitalist world, Annihilation of Caste is to India.” —Anand Teltumbde, author of The Persistence of Caste The classic work of Indian Dalit politics, reframed with an extensive introduction by Arundathi Roy B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste is one of the most important, yet neglected, works of political writing from India. Written in 1936, it is an audacious denunciation of Hinduism and its caste system. Ambedkar – a figure like W.E.B. Du Bois – offers a scholarly critique of Hindu scriptures, scriptures that sanction a rigidly hierarchical and iniquitous social system. The world’s best-known Hindu, Mahatma Gandhi, responded publicly to the provocation. The hatchet was never buried. Arundhati Roy introduces this extensively annotated edition of Annihilation of Caste in “The Doctor and the Saint,” examining the persistence of caste in modern India, and how the conflict between Ambedkar and Gandhi continues to resonate. Roy takes us to the beginning of Gandhi’s political career in South Africa, where his views on race, caste and imperialism were shaped. She tracks Ambedkar’s emergence as a major political figure in the national movement, and shows how his scholarship and intelligence illuminated a political struggle beset by sectarianism and obscurantism. Roy breathes new life into Ambedkar’s anti-caste utopia, and says that without a Dalit revolution, India will continue to be hobbled by systemic inequality.

The Doctor and the Saint

The Doctor and the Saint PDF Author: Arundhati Roy
Publisher: Haymarket Books+ORM
ISBN: 1608467988
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Get Book Here

Book Description
The little-known story of Gandhi’s reluctance to challenge the caste system, and the man who fought fiercely for India’s downtrodden. Democracy hasn’t eradicated caste, argues bestselling author and Booker Prize–winner Arundhati Roy—it has entrenched and modernized it. To understand caste today in India, Roy insists we must examine the influence of Gandhi in shaping what India ultimately became: independent of British rule, globally powerful, and marked to this day by the caste system. Roy states that for more than a half century, Gandhi’s pronouncements on the inherent qualities of black Africans, Dalit “untouchables,” and the laboring classes remained consistently insulting, and he also refused to allow lower castes to create their own political organizations and elect their own representatives. But there was someone else who had a larger vision of justice—a founding father of the republic and the chief architect of its constitution. In The Doctor and the Saint, Roy introduces us to this contemporary of Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, who challenged the thinking of the time and fought to promote not merely formal democracy, but liberation from the oppression, shame, and poverty imposed on millions of Indians by an archaic caste system. This is a fascinating and surprising look at two men—one of whom has become a worldwide symbol and the other of whom remains unfamiliar to most outside his native country. Praise for Arundhati Roy “Arundhati Roy is incandescent in her brilliance and her fearlessness.” —Junot Díaz “The fierceness with which Arundhati Roy loves humanity moves my heart.” —Alice Walker

Who Were the Shudras?

Who Were the Shudras? PDF Author: Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789360804701
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description


Richard Wright in a Post-Racial Imaginary

Richard Wright in a Post-Racial Imaginary PDF Author: Alice Craven
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1623562317
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
In African American fiction, Richard Wright was one of the most significant and influential authors of the twentieth century. Richard Wright in a Post-Racial America analyses Wright's work in relation to contemporary racial and social issues, bringing voices of established and emergent Wright scholars into dialogue with each other. The essays in this volume show how Wright's best work asks central questions about national alienation as well as about international belonging and the trans-national gaze. Race is here assumed as a superimposed category, rather than a biological reality, in keeping with recent trends in African-American studies. Wright's fiction and almost all of his non-fiction lift beyond the mainstays of African-American culture to explore the potentialities and limits of black trans-nationalism. Wright's trans-native status, his perpetual "outsidedness" mixed with the "essential humanness" of his activist and literary efforts are at the core of the innovative approaches to his work included here.

Un/common Cultures

Un/common Cultures PDF Author: Kamala Visweswaran
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822391635
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Un/common Cultures, Kamala Visweswaran develops an incisive critique of the idea of culture at the heart of anthropology, describing how it lends itself to culturalist assumptions. She holds that the new culturalism—the idea that cultural differences are definitive, and thus divisive—produces a view of “uncommon cultures” defined by relations of conflict rather than forms of collaboration. The essays in Un/common Cultures straddle the line between an analysis of how racism works to form the idea of “uncommon cultures” and a reaffirmation of the possibilities of “common cultures,” those that enact new forms of solidarity in seeking common cause. Such “cultures in common” or “cultures of the common” also produce new intellectual formations that demand different analytic frames for understanding their emergence. By tracking the emergence and circulation of the culture concept in American anthropology and Indian and French sociology, Visweswaran offers an alternative to strictly disciplinary histories. She uses critical race theory to locate the intersection between ethnic/diaspora studies and area studies as a generative site for addressing the formation of culturalist discourses. In so doing, she interprets the work of social scientists and intellectuals such as Elsie Clews Parsons, Alice Fletcher, Franz Boas, Louis Dumont, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, W. E. B. Du Bois, and B. R. Ambedkar.

Castes of Mind

Castes of Mind PDF Author: Nicholas B. Dirks
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400840945
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Get Book Here

Book Description
When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization. Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.

Broken People

Broken People PDF Author: Smita Narula
Publisher: Human Rights Watch
ISBN: 9781564322289
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
Women and the Law.

Handbook of Leaving Religion

Handbook of Leaving Religion PDF Author: Daniel Enstedt
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789004330924
Category : Apostasy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Handbook of Leaving Religion introduces a neglected field of research with the aim to outline previous and contemporary research, and suggest how the topic of leaving religion should be studied in the future. The handbook consists of three sections: 1) Major debates about leaving religion; 2) Case studies and empirical insights; and 3) Theoretical and methodological approaches. Section one provides the reader with an introduction to key terms, historical developments, major controversies and significant cases. Section two includes case studies that illustrate various processes of leaving religion from different perspectives, and each chapter provides new empirical insights. Section three discusses, presents and encourages new approaches to the study of leaving religion.