The Vulgarity of Caste

The Vulgarity of Caste PDF Author: Shailaja Paik
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503634094
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 541

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book offers the first social and intellectual history of Dalit performance of Tamasha—a popular form of public, secular, traveling theater in Maharashtra—and places Dalit Tamasha women who represented the desire and disgust of the patriarchal society at the heart of modernization in twentieth century India. Drawing on ethnographies, films, and untapped archival materials, Shailaja Paik illuminates how Tamasha was produced and shaped through conflicts over caste, gender, sexuality, and culture. Dalit performers, activists, and leaders negotiated the violence and stigma in Tamasha as they struggled to claim manuski (human dignity) and transform themselves from ashlil (vulgar) to assli (authentic) and manus (human beings). Building on and departing from the Ambedkar-centered historiography and movement-focused approach of Dalit studies, Paik examines the ordinary and everydayness in Dalit lives. Ultimately, she demonstrates how the choices that communities make about culture speak to much larger questions about inclusion, inequality, and structures of violence of caste within Indian society, and opens up new approaches for the transformative potential of Dalit politics and the global history of gender, sexuality, and the human.

The Vulgarity of Caste

The Vulgarity of Caste PDF Author: Shailaja Paik
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503634094
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 541

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book offers the first social and intellectual history of Dalit performance of Tamasha—a popular form of public, secular, traveling theater in Maharashtra—and places Dalit Tamasha women who represented the desire and disgust of the patriarchal society at the heart of modernization in twentieth century India. Drawing on ethnographies, films, and untapped archival materials, Shailaja Paik illuminates how Tamasha was produced and shaped through conflicts over caste, gender, sexuality, and culture. Dalit performers, activists, and leaders negotiated the violence and stigma in Tamasha as they struggled to claim manuski (human dignity) and transform themselves from ashlil (vulgar) to assli (authentic) and manus (human beings). Building on and departing from the Ambedkar-centered historiography and movement-focused approach of Dalit studies, Paik examines the ordinary and everydayness in Dalit lives. Ultimately, she demonstrates how the choices that communities make about culture speak to much larger questions about inclusion, inequality, and structures of violence of caste within Indian society, and opens up new approaches for the transformative potential of Dalit politics and the global history of gender, sexuality, and the human.

Dalit Women's Education in Modern India

Dalit Women's Education in Modern India PDF Author: Shailaja Paik
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131767331X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 371

Get Book Here

Book Description
Inspired by egalitarian doctrines, the Dalit communities in India have been fighting for basic human and civic rights since the middle of the nineteenth century. In this book, Shailaja Paik focuses on the struggle of Dalit women in one arena - the realm of formal education – and examines a range of interconnected social, cultural and political questions. What did education mean to women? How did changes in women’s education affect their views of themselves and their domestic work, public employment, marriage, sexuality, and childbearing and rearing? What does the dissonance between the rhetoric and practice of secular education tell us about the deeper historical entanglement with modernity as experienced by Dalit communities? Dalit Women's Education in Modern India is a social and cultural history that challenges the triumphant narrative of modern secular education to analyse the constellation of social, economic, political and historical circumstances that both opened and closed opportunities to many Dalits. By focusing on marginalised Dalit women in modern Maharashtra, who have rarely been at the centre of systematic historical enquiry, Paik breathes life into their ideas, expectations, potentials, fears and frustrations. Addressing two major blind spots in the historiography of India and of the women’s movement, she historicises Dalit women’s experiences and constructs them as historical agents. The book combines archival research with historical fieldwork, and centres on themes including slum life, urban middle classes, social and sexual labour, and family, marriage and children to provide a penetrating portrait of the actions and lives of Dalit women. Elegantly conceived and convincingly argued, Dalit Women's Education in Modern India will be invaluable to students of History, Caste Politics, Women and Gender Studies, Education Studies, Urban Studies and Asian studies.

Writing Resistance

Writing Resistance PDF Author: Laura R. Brueck
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231166044
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book Here

Book Description
Writing Resistance is the first close study of the growing body of contemporary Hindi-language Dalit (low caste) literature in India. The Dalit literary movement has had an immense sociopolitical and literary impact on various Indian linguistic regions, yet few scholars have attempted to situate the form within contemporary critical frameworks. Laura R. BrueckÕs approach goes beyond recognizing and celebrating the subaltern speaking, emphasizing the sociopolitical perspectives and literary strategies of a range of contemporary Dalit writers working in Hindi. Brueck explores several essential questions: what makes Dalit literature Dalit? What makes it good? Why is this genre important, and where does it oppose or intersect with other bodies of Indian literature? She follows the debate among Dalit writers as they establish a specifically Dalit literary critical approach, underscoring the significance of the Dalit literary sphere as a ÒcounterpublicÓ generating contemporary Dalit social and political identities. Brueck then performs close readings of contemporary Hindi Dalit literary prose narratives, focusing on the aesthetic and stylistic strategies deployed by writers whose class, gender, and geographic backgrounds shape their distinct voices. By reading Dalit literature as literature, this study unravels the complexities of its sociopolitical and identity-based origins.

Textual Lives of Caste Across the Ages

Textual Lives of Caste Across the Ages PDF Author: Prathama Banerjee
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135035502X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Get Book Here

Book Description
The essays in this volume explore the myriad ways in which caste (varna and jati) has been theorized and critiqued in multiple philosophical, religious, logical and narrative traditions in India. Spanning ancient, medieval and modern times, and in diverse classical and vernacular languages, the chapters show how the social fact of caste, and imaginations of kinship, community and humanity were historically subject to epistemological, spiritual, and existential debate in both elite and popular circles in India. Textual Lives of Caste Across the Ages seeks to bridge the interdisciplinary gap between historians and sociologists by focusing on texts that help us think across the sociological and philosophical, the political and the religious, the epistemological and the aesthetic, and indeed, the elite and the popular. The volume also sets up a conversation between scholars specializing in different regions, archives, and historical periods and demonstrates how caste imaginaries have been deeply diverse and contested in India's past. Reconstructing these diverse traditions of social and existential criticism helps us in our contemporary struggles against caste hierarchy and untouchability and enriches our contemporary critical repertoire.

Woman, Body, Desire in Post-Colonial India

Woman, Body, Desire in Post-Colonial India PDF Author: Jyoti Puri
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135962650
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
First published in 1999.Jyoti Puri draws on post-colonial and feminist theory to focus on how women in current-day India conceptualize their gender and sexuality. She provides a groundbreaking ethnographic study based on fifty-four middle- and upper-class Indian women, ranging from the ages of fifteen to thirty-eight. She argues that these women's narratives are shaped by not only the nation-state, but by transnational processes as well. Woman, Bodyand Desire in Postcolonial India connects important issues of class an nationhood to the emerging sense of female identity in India, covering previously neglected topics such as menstruation, gay and straight sexual experience, sexual harassment and assault, marriage and motherhood. Puri discovers that attitudes about sexuality and gender are surprisingly similar in India and Western countries.

Caste and nature

Caste and nature PDF Author: Mukul Sharma
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199091609
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

Book Description
Rarely do Indian environmental discourses examine nature through the lens of caste. Whereas nature is considered as universal and inherent, caste is understood as a constructed historical and social entity. Mukul Sharma shows how caste and nature are intimately connected. He compares Dalit meanings of environment to ideas and practices of neo-Brahmanism and certain mainstreams of environmental thought. Showing how Dalit experiences of environment are ridden with metaphors of pollution, impurity, and dirt, the author is able to bring forth new dimensions on both environment and Dalits, without valourizing the latter’s standpoint. Rather than looking for a coherent understanding of their ecology, the book explores the diverse and rich intellectual resources of Dalits, such as movements, songs, myths, memories, and metaphors around nature. These reveal their quest to define themselves in caste-ridden nature and building a form of environmentalism free from the burdens of caste. The Dalits also pose a critical challenge to Indian environmentalism, which has, until now, marginalized such linkages between caste and nature.

Practicing Caste

Practicing Caste PDF Author: Aniket Jaaware
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823282279
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Get Book Here

Book Description
Practicing Caste attempts a fundamental break from the tradition of caste studies, showing the limits of the historical, sociological, political, and moral categories through which it has usually been discussed. Engaging with the resources phenomenology, structuralism, and poststructuralism offer to our thinking of the body, Jaaware helps to illuminate the ethical relations that caste entails, especially around its injunctions concerning touching. The resulting insights offer new ways of thinking about sociality that are pertinent not only to India but also to thinking the common on a planetary basis.

Hindu Castes and Sects

Hindu Castes and Sects PDF Author: Jogendra Nath Bhattacharya
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Caste
Languages : en
Pages : 708

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Hindu Equilibrium

The Hindu Equilibrium PDF Author: Deepak Lal
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199275793
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 486

Get Book Here

Book Description
India is an emerging giant. This book explains its long economic stagnation and recent rise by examining its social, political and historical evolution in long term perspective. It explains how its distinct social system based on caste arose and why it still is of importance in its political and social arrangements, despite India's recent move from the plan to market.

Writing Caste/Writing Gender

Writing Caste/Writing Gender PDF Author: Sharmila Rege
Publisher: Zubaan
ISBN: 9383074671
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 446

Get Book Here

Book Description
'The women tell it like it is... So riveting is the narration that it is difficult to put down the book until their stories are finished. For a non-fiction academic work this is no small feat.’ — The Hindu Sharmila Rege’s path breaking study of Dalit women’s writings and lives offers a powerful counter-narrative to the mainstream assumptions about the development of feminism in India in the 20th century. Extensive extracts from eight Dalit women’s writings cover issues such as food and hunger, community, caste, labour, education, violence, resistance and collective struggle. The voices that resound throughout the book, reveal that Dalit feminism, far from being ‘silent’ as so often presumed, is rich, powerful, layered – and highly articulate. Published by Zubaan.