Social Stratification and Change in India PDF Download

Author: Yogendra Singh
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : India
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Author: Ajantha Subramanian
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067424348X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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How the language of “merit” makes caste privilege invisible in contemporary India. Just as Americans least disadvantaged by racism are most likely to endorse their country as post‐racial, Indians who have benefited from their upper-caste affiliation rush to declare their country post‐caste. In The Caste of Merit, Ajantha Subramanian challenges this comfortable assumption by illuminating the controversial relationships among technical education, caste formation, and economic stratification in modern India. Through in-depth study of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs)—widely seen as symbols of national promise—she reveals the continued workings of upper-caste privilege within the most modern institutions. Caste has not disappeared in India but instead acquired a disturbing invisibility—at least when it comes to the privileged. Only the lower castes invoke their affiliation in the political arena, to claim resources from the state. The upper castes discard such claims as backward, embarrassing, and unfair to those who have earned their position through hard work and talent. Focusing on a long history of debates surrounding access to engineering education, Subramanian argues that such defenses of merit are themselves expressions of caste privilege. The case of the IITs shows how this ideal of meritocracy serves the reproduction of inequality, ensuring that social stratification remains endemic to contemporary democracies.

Author: Alan Gledhill
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Author: Dipankar Gupta
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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This is a collection of sociological essays on four main themes in Indian culture: caste, caste profiles, class and conflict.

Author: Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789360804701
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Author: Harald Tambs-Lyche
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351393960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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In this volume, the author challenges a number of widely held cultural stereotypes about India. Caste is not as old as Indian civilization itself, and current changes are no more radical than in the past, for caste has evolved throughout its history. It is not a colonial invention, nor does it result from weak state control. There is no single form of Indian kingship, and power relations, fundamental as they are for understanding Indian society. Nor do Indian villages conform to a single type, and caste is as much urban as rural. Only in a regional ‘local’ perspective can we view it as a ‘system’. Caste does offer space for the individual, though in a particular Indian mould, and Hinduism does not provide for an integration of castes through ritual. In short, social organization varies widely in India, and cannot provide the key to the specificity of caste. This must be sought in the way society is imagined, the models of society current in Indian thought. Of course as mentioned above, there is no single model: Brahmins, kings, and merchants among others have all produced alternative models with themselves at the centre, vying for hegemony, while facing contesting models held by subalterns. Still, a hierarchical mode of thought is hegemonic and largely explains why Indians see their social stratification differently from people in the West. The volume will be indispensable for scholars of South Asian Sociology and Culture.

Author: Kanhaiyalal Sharma
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788170366089
Category : Castas - India
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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This book provides a holistic understanding of the complexities of Indian society by analyzing the historical, cultural and political bases of social stratification. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of sociology, social anthropology, and political sociology, as also to concerned intellectuals and planners.

Author: Kanhaiya Lal Sharma
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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With reference to India.

Author: Dipankar Gupta
Publisher: Penguin Books India
ISBN: 9780140297065
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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The caste system has conventionally been perceived by scholars as a hierarchy based on the binary opposition of purity and pollution. Challenging this position, leading sociologist Dipankar Gupta argues that any notion of a fixed hierarchy is arbitrary and valid only from the perspective of the individual castes. The idea of difference, and not hierarchy, determines the tendency of each caste to keep alive its discrete nature and this is also seen to be true of the various castes which occupy the same rank in the hierarchy. It is, in fact, the mechanics of power, both economic and political, that set the ground rules for caste behaviour, which also explains how traditionally opposed caste groups find it possible to align in the contemporary political scenario. With the help of empirical evidence from states like Bihar, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, the author illustrates how any presumed correlations between caste loyalties and voting patterns are in reality quite invalid. Provocative and finely argued, Interrogating Caste is a remarkable work that provides fresh insight into caste as a social, political and economic reality.

Author: Louis Dumont
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226169634
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 542

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Louis Dumont's modern classic, here presented in an enlarged, revised, and corrected second edition, simultaneously supplies that reader with the most cogent statement on the Indian caste system and its organizing principles and a provocative advance in the comparison of societies on the basis of their underlying ideologies. Dumont moves gracefully from the ethnographic data to the level of the hierarchical ideology encrusted in ancient religious texts which are revealed as the governing conception of the contemporary caste structure. On yet another plane of analysis, homo hierarchicus is contrasted with his modern Western antithesis, homo aequalis. This edition includes a lengthy new Preface in which Dumont reviews the academic discussion inspired by Homo Hierarchicus and answers his critics. A new Postface, which sketches the theoretical and comparative aspects of the concept of hierarchy, and three significant Appendixes previously omitted from the English translation complete this innovative and influential work.