India


Book Description

This essay on Indian social structure originally formed a chapter in Volume 1 of The Gazetteer of India: Indian Union, published in 1965. It introduces the reader to the caste system, the village community, religious groups, marriage, kinship and inheritance, and changes in society at the time. M.N. Srinivas is the author.




Who Were the Shudras?


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Dalits Development and Change


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Contents: Introduction, Socio-Economic Background of the Study Villages, Development Process and Dalits The Bauris, Development Impact on the Bauri Beneficiaries, Consequential Changes, Quality of Life, Summary and Conclusion.




Annihilation of Caste


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 Republic of India


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Homo Hierarchicus


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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.




Adibasi


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Broken People


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Women and the Law.




EMPOWERMENT OF MARGINALIZED CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS


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Part I - Dalit Dimension, Part II - Women Dimension, Part III - Old Age Dimension, Part IV - Social Development Dimension, Part V - Peasants and Agricultural Labour. Study of sociology in India invariably relates to the composition of segments, communities, institutions, social organizations, regions, issues, problems faced by these segments, challenges uncounted in the process, social welfare programmes for the people vulnerable to problems, impact of development intervention among these segments, planned directed social change, people’s participation in development transactions, social caste and benefits including social audit, capital formation, induced development, micro level planning, and public private partnership based development initiatives in the direction of social development. However the Indian social structure perpetuating inequality arising out of caste, gender, region, people’s vulnerability to injustices, human rights implications, etc., act as stumbling block in creation of a society. Consequently India is faced with sustained inequality in view of the system of social stratification within the larger framework of the social structure. Social relationships in Indian context is marked by social standing and identification in the system of hierarchy which seem to have perpetuated strongly the phenomenon of caste based inequalities which ultimately resulted in various forms of discriminations and distance between community and determined their social status. As a result, social segment categories were based upon their ascribed status, ownership means of production particularly land and other movable and immovable properties. Consequently this has led to emergence of social evil practices between social segments categorized as upper and lower, gender inequality between male and female, regional imbalance between rural and urban in terms of development intervention and creation of infrastructure.