1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910454818803321

Autore

Rao Anupama

Titolo

The caste question [[electronic resource] ] : Dalits and the politics of modern India / / Anupama Rao

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berkeley, : University of California Press, c2009

ISBN

1-282-36091-4

9786612360916

0-520-94337-6

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (416 p.)

Disciplina

305.5/688

Soggetti

Dalits - Political activity

Electronic books.

India Politics and government 1947-

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Author'S Note -- Introduction -- Caste Radicalism And The Making Of A New Political Subject -- The Problem Of Caste Property -- Dalits As A Political Minority -- Legislating Caste Atrocity -- New Directions In Dalit Politics Symbologies Of Violence, Maharashtra, 1960-1979 -- The Sexual Politics Of Caste Violence And The Ritual Archaic -- Death Of A Kotwal The Violence Of Recognition -- Epilogue Dalit Futures -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

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.