Caste And The City

Author : Juned Shaikh
Publisher : University of Washington Press
ISBN 13 : 0295748516
Total Pages : 243 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Outcaste Bombay written by Juned Shaikh and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2021-04-25 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the twentieth century, Bombay’s population grew twentyfold as the city became increasingly industrialized and cosmopolitan. Yet beneath a veneer of modernity, old prejudices endured, including the treatment of the Dalits. Even as Indians engaged with aspects of modern life, including the Marxist discourse of class, caste distinctions played a pivotal role in determining who was excluded from the city’s economic transformations. Labor historian Juned Shaikh documents the symbiosis between industrial capitalism and the caste system, mapping the transformation of the city as urban planners marked Dalit neighborhoods as slums that needed to be demolished in order to build a modern Bombay. Drawing from rare sources written by the urban poor and Dalits in the Marathi language—including novels, poems, and manifestos—Outcaste Bombay examines how language and literature became a battleground for cultural politics. Through careful scrutiny of one city’s complex social fabric, this study illuminates issues that remain vital for labor activists and urban planners around the world.

Author : Deeba Zafir
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1040044247
Total Pages : 182 pages
Book Rating : 4.47/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Caste and the City written by Deeba Zafir and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-21 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at Dalits in the city and examines the nature of Dalit aspirations as well as the making of an urban sensibility through an analysis of hitherto unexamined short stories of some of the first- and second-generation as well as contemporary Dalit writers in Hindi. Tracing the origins of the emergence of Dalit critical consciousness to the arrival of the Dalits into the print medium, after their migration to the city, this book examines their transactions with modernity and the emancipatory promises it held out to them. It highlights the literary tropes that mark their fiction, specifically those short stories which take up urban themes, and shows how even in seemingly caste-neutral spaces caste discrimination is present. The book also undertakes an examination of the stories by contemporary Dalit women writers in Hindi – Rajat Rani Meenu and Anita Bharti – who have posed a radical challenge to both the mainstream feminist movement and the Dalit movement. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of South Asian literature, especially Hindi literature, Dalit studies, subaltern history, postcolonial studies, political science, and sociology as well as the informed general reader.

Author : Isabel Wilkerson
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN 13 : 0593230272
Total Pages : 545 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Caste written by Isabel Wilkerson and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2023-02-14 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #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.

Author : Ajantha Subramanian
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 067424348X
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Caste of Merit written by Ajantha Subramanian and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Supriya Chaudhuri
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000429016
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Religion and the City in India written by Supriya Chaudhuri and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-19 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers fresh theoretical, methodological and empirical analyses of the relation between religion and the city in the South Asian context. Uniting the historical with the contemporary by looking at the medieval and early modern links between religious faith and urban settlement, the book brings together a series of focused studies of the mixed and multiple practices and spatial negotiations of religion in the South Asian city. It looks at the various ways in which contemporary religious practice affects urban everyday life, commerce, craft, infrastructure, cultural forms, art, music and architecture. Chapters draw upon original empirical study and research to analyze the foundational, structural, material and cultural connections between religious practice and urban formations or flows. The book argues that Indian cities are not ‘postsecular’ in the sense that the term is currently used in the modern West, but that there has been, rather, a deep, even foundational link between religion and urbanism, producing different versions of urban modernity. Questions of caste, gender, community, intersectional entanglements, physical proximity, private or public ritual, processions and prayer, economic and political factors, material objects, and changes in the built environment, are all taken into consideration, and the book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of different historical periods, different cities, and different types of religious practice. Filling a gap in the literature by discussing a diversity of settings and faiths, the book will be of interest to scholars to South Asian history, sociology, literary analysis, urban studies and cultural studies.

Author : Rupa Viswanath
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231537506
Total Pages : 417 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Pariah Problem written by Rupa Viswanath and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-08 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once known as "Pariahs," Dalits are primarily descendants of unfree agrarian laborers. They belong to India's most subordinated castes, face overwhelming poverty and discrimination, and provoke public anxiety. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped sources, this book follows the conception and evolution of the "Pariah Problem" in public consciousness in the 1890s. It shows how high-caste landlords, state officials, and well-intentioned missionaries conceived of Dalit oppression, and effectively foreclosed the emergence of substantive solutions to the "Problem"—with consequences that continue to be felt today. Rupa Viswanath begins with a description of the everyday lives of Dalit laborers in the 1890s and highlights the systematic efforts made by the state and Indian elites to protect Indian slavery from public scrutiny. Protestant missionaries were the first non-Dalits to draw attention to their plight. The missionaries' vision of the Pariahs' suffering as being a result of Hindu religious prejudice, however, obscured the fact that the entire agrarian political–economic system depended on unfree Pariah labor. Both the Indian public and colonial officials came to share a view compatible with missionary explanations, which meant all subsequent welfare efforts directed at Dalits focused on religious and social transformation rather than on structural reform. Methodologically, theoretically, and empirically, this book breaks new ground to demonstrate how events in the early decades of state-sponsored welfare directed at Dalits laid the groundwork for the present day, where the postcolonial state and well-meaning social and religious reformers continue to downplay Dalits' landlessness, violent suppression, and political subordination.

Author : Anupama Rao
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520943376
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Caste Question written by Anupama Rao and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative work of historical anthropology explores how India's Dalits, or ex-untouchables, transformed themselves from stigmatized subjects into citizens. Anupama Rao's account challenges standard thinking on caste as either a vestige of precolonial society or an artifact of colonial governance. Focusing on western India in the colonial and postcolonial periods, she shines a light on South Asian historiography and on ongoing caste discrimination, to show how persons without rights came to possess them and how Dalit struggles led to the transformation of such terms of colonial liberalism as rights, equality, and personhood. Extending into the present, the ethnographic analyses of The Caste Question reveal the dynamics of an Indian democracy distinguished not by overcoming caste, but by new forms of violence and new means of regulating caste.

Author : Sheryll Cashin
Publisher : Beacon Press
ISBN 13 : 080700037X
Total Pages : 322 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book White Space, Black Hood written by Sheryll Cashin and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 2021 C. Wright Mills Award Finalist Shows how government created “ghettos” and affluent white space and entrenched a system of American residential caste that is the linchpin of US inequality—and issues a call for abolition. The iconic Black hood, like slavery and Jim Crow, is a peculiar American institution animated by the ideology of white supremacy. Politicians and people of all colors propagated “ghetto” myths to justify racist policies that concentrated poverty in the hood and created high-opportunity white spaces. In White Space, Black Hood, Sheryll Cashin traces the history of anti-Black residential caste—boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and stereotype-driven surveillance—and unpacks its current legacy so we can begin the work to dismantle the structures and policies that undermine Black lives. Drawing on nearly 2 decades of research in cities including Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Cleveland, Cashin traces the processes of residential caste as it relates to housing, policing, schools, and transportation. She contends that geography is now central to American caste. Poverty-free havens and poverty-dense hoods would not exist if the state had not designed, constructed, and maintained this physical racial order. Cashin calls for abolition of these state-sanctioned processes. The ultimate goal is to change the lens through which society sees residents of poor Black neighborhoods from presumed thug to presumed citizen, and to transform the relationship of the state with these neighborhoods from punitive to caring. She calls for investment in a new infrastructure of opportunity in poor Black neighborhoods, including richly resourced schools and neighborhood centers, public transit, Peacemaker Fellowships, universal basic incomes, housing choice vouchers for residents, and mandatory inclusive housing elsewhere. Deeply researched and sharply written, White Space, Black Hood is a call to action for repairing what white supremacy still breaks. Includes historical photos, maps, and charts that illuminate the history of residential segregation as an institution and a tactic of racial oppression.

Author : John Dollard
Publisher : Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN 13 : 9780299121341
Total Pages : 490 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Caste and Class in a Southern Town written by John Dollard and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analysis of the effects of long-established patterns of discrimination upon the Negro and white citizens of a single Southern town poses the general problem in the specific terms of social research.

Author : M N Srinivas
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 9351187837
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Caste written by M N Srinivas and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2000-10-14 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As India attempts to modernize and ready itself for the twenty-first century, the issue of caste takes on an overwhelming importance. What form does caste take today? How can its debilitating aspects be countered? This book, edited and introduced by one of India's most eminent sociologists, attempts to answer these and other crucial questions. The essays in this volume, each authored by an expert on the subject, include a stimulating assessment of the role of women in perpetuating caste; incisive analyses of the relationship between caste and the economy, and between caste and Hinduism; a review of the backward class movements in Tamil Nadu; a commentary on the power struggle in UP and Bihar amongst the backward castes; the relationship between efficiency and job reservation; observations on caste amongst Muslims and Christians in India and critiques of the Mandal Commission Report and the Mandal judgement.