Surinder S. Jodhka - Böcker

Beginning with the 1990s, the subject of caste has seen a profound increase in interest among scholars. What was until then approached as a fossilized tradition of the ritual-obsessed Hindus refusing to see the progressive spirits of the emerging world and studied as a branch of anthropology, suddenly began to be seen as a complex reality deeply embedded in a range of institutions and social practices, attracting scholars from a wide range of disciplines--sociology, political science, history, literature, and even economics. Underlying this opening of the subject of caste were many factors: epistemic, empirical, and political. Caste is no longer approached through the classical binaries of 'traditional' and 'modern'; the 'East' and the 'West'; or the 'closed' and 'open' systems of stratification. With the growing consolidation of caste-based identities among those ranked lower down in the hierarchy since the 1990s, raising questions of citizenship and dignity, the subject has acquired a new salience. As the emerging research shows, the realities of caste on the ground have always been diverse across regions, often contested and ever changing. This Handbook presents a wide range of essays written by authors representing diverse academic disciplines and perspectives, bringing together the emerging trends in the research, imaginations, and lived realities of caste.

This edited volume is dedicated to the study of social, economic, and political elites in India. It's contributors address some fundamental questions regarding India's social and economic elites, the change in their composition in recent years, their relationship with each other and with the rest of the social body, and the role of caste in the configuration and reconfiguration of social and economic elites by analysing elite discourses and representations and what they reveal of their social inscription in contemporary India. The editors have sorted this book into three broad themes. The first theme concerns elite spaces which explores the uneasiness of elites to handle public and private spaces and interests. The second theme concerns the trajectories of particular elite groups such as the dominant caste called the Kammas of Andhra Pradesh, the Jats of Uttar Pradesh, and Urban elites. The third and final theme concerns elite lives and practices of diverse elite groups. This book is addressed to not only the scholar community interested in the sociology of India's elites, but to any reader interested in knowing how recent social and economic change in India affects the lives and trajectories of its elites.

Inequality is one of the most discussed topics of our times. Yet, we still do not know how to tackle the issue effectively. The book argues that this is due to the lack of understanding the structures responsible for the persistence of social inequality. It enquires into the mechanisms that produce and reproduce invisible dividing lines in society. Based on original case studies of Brazil, Germany, India and Laos comprising thousands of interviews, the authors argue that invisible classes emerge in capitalist societies, both reproducing and transforming precapitalist hierarchies. At the same time, locally particular forms of inequality persist. Social inequality in the contemporary world has to be understood as a specific combination of precapitalist inequalities, capitalist transformation and a particular class structure, which seems to emerge in all capitalist societies. The book links the configurations to an interpretation of global domination as well as to symbolic classification.

By making religious community a relevant category for discussing development deficit, the Sachar Committee Report (that was submitted to the Prime Minister of India in 2007) initiated a new political discourse in India. While the liberal secular framework privileged the individual over the community and was more inclined to use the category of class rather than the identity of religion, the Sachar Committee differentiated citizens on the basis of their religious identity. Its conclusions reinforced the necessity of approaching issues of development through the optic of religious community. This volume focuses on this shift in public policy. The articles in this collection examine the nature and implications of this new approach to the Indian social reality. Taking a close look at the findings of the Sachar Committee Report (SCR) they highlight the challenges posed by inter-community comparisons. At another level the articles supplement the debate initiated by the SCR by constructing a profile of religious communities in India so as to factor in their concerns of development into the present discourse and to nuance and modify the simple indicators to which development is often reduced. As most religious communities are themselves engaged in development-related activities the volume also examines some of these initiatives in order to see what development connotes to the members themselves and what receives attention by the community. Students of social sciences and development studies as well as those dealing with issues of marginalization will find this collection an invaluable resource for understanding contemporary India and for undertaking further theoretical and empirical research.

Caste is a contested terrain in India’s society and polity. This book explores contemporary realities of caste in rural and urban India. It examines questions of untouchability, citizenship, social mobility, democratic politics, corporate hiring and Dalit activism. Using rich empirical evidence from the field across Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and other parts of north India, this volume presents the reasons for the persistence of caste in India from a new perspective. The book offers an original theoretical framework for comparative understandings of the entrenched social differences, discrimination, inequalities, stratification, and the modes and patterns of their reproduction. This second edition, with a new Introduction, delves into why caste continues to matter and how caste-based divisions often tend to overlap with the emergent disparities of the new economy. A delicate balance of lived experience and hard facts, this persuasive work will serve as essential reading for students and teachers of sociology and social anthropology, social exclusion and discrimination studies, political science, development studies and public policy.

This book studies how marginality impacts the everyday lives of Indian Muslims. It challenges the prevailing myths and stereotypes through which Indian Muslims have come to be seen in the popular imagination. The volume engages with questions of citizenship, collective violence, and issues of civil and criminal jurisprudence. It explores the linkages between development, marginality, and citizenship – the three critical issues for modern democracies today. Going beyond the singular narrative of a community on a continuous slide, the chapters in this volume present diversities of the Muslim experience of exclusion and participation. It discusses themes such as violence and marginality among minorities; Indian Muslims and the ghettoized economy; employment aspirations of low-income Muslim men; intergenerational social mobility of Muslims; the nature of the middle class; and the question of Islam, development, and globalization to showcase the living conditions of Muslims in India.Part of the Religion and Citizenship series, this timely volume will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of political studies, sociology, political sociology, minority studies, public policy, religion, citizenship studies, diversity and inclusion studies, and social anthropology.

This book studies how marginality impacts the everyday lives of Indian Muslims. It challenges the prevailing myths and stereotypes through which Indian Muslims have come to be seen in the popular imagination. The volume engages with questions of citizenship, collective violence, and issues of civil and criminal jurisprudence. It explores the linkages between development, marginality, and citizenship – the three critical issues for modern democracies today. Going beyond the singular narrative of a community on a continuous slide, the chapters in this volume present diversities of the Muslim experience of exclusion and participation. It discusses themes such as violence and marginality among minorities; Indian Muslims and the ghettoized economy; employment aspirations of low-income Muslim men; intergenerational social mobility of Muslims; the nature of the middle class; and the question of Islam, development, and globalization to showcase the living conditions of Muslims in India.Part of the Religion and Citizenship series, this timely volume will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of political studies, sociology, political sociology, minority studies, public policy, religion, citizenship studies, diversity and inclusion studies, and social anthropology.

Wealth inequality is both extreme and persistent across much of the world, yet it remains poorly understood relative to income inequality and poverty alleviation. Bringing together original research on Brazil, India, and South Africa, this volume examines the processes through which elite groups accumulate and maintain disproportionate control over assets - through historically embedded social hierarchies, institutional arrangements, and political–economic processes. These middle-income, semi-industrialised societies combine extreme wealth with persistent poverty, making them revealing sites for analysing how inequality is actively produced, not merely inherited.Across nine chapters, the book traces the historical formation of wealth shaped by colonial legacies, racial and caste hierarchies, land regimes, and state formation, before analysing contemporary processes of elite continuities and reproduction. These include financialisation, asset ownership, legal and regulatory frameworks, urban development, and corporate control. Rather than treating elites as a numerical category (the “top 1%”), the contributors analyse elites as historically constituted and institutionally embedded actors whose wealth and power are produced within existing accumulation regimes, and who in turn act to stabilise, adapt, and extend those regimes over time.The volume develops a relational, comparative political economy of wealth inequality, showing that processes illuminated in the Global South also deepen analysis of wealth concentration globally. It will interest scholars and advanced students in development studies, political economy, sociology, economics, law, and global studies.

Caste is a contested terrain in India’s society and polity. This book explores contemporary realities of caste in rural and urban India. Presenting rich empirical findings across north India, it presents an original perspective on the reasons for the persistence of caste in India today.

Caste is a contested terrain in India’s society and polity. This book explores contemporary realities of caste in rural and urban India. It examines questions of untouchability, citizenship, social mobility, democratic politics, corporate hiring and Dalit activism. Using rich empirical evidence from the field across Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and other parts of north India, this volume presents the reasons for the persistence of caste in India from a new perspective. The book offers an original theoretical framework for comparative understandings of the entrenched social differences, discrimination, inequalities, stratification, and the modes and patterns of their reproduction. This second edition, with a new Introduction, delves into why caste continues to matter and how caste-based divisions often tend to overlap with the emergent disparities of the new economy. A delicate balance of lived experience and hard facts, this persuasive work will serve as essential reading for students and teachers of sociology and social anthropology, social exclusion and discrimination studies, political science, development studies and public policy.

By making religious community a relevant category for discussing development deficit, the Sachar Committee Report (that was submitted to the Prime Minister of India in 2007) initiated a new political discourse in India. While the liberal secular framework privileged the individual over the community and was more inclined to use the category of class rather than the identity of religion, the Sachar Committee differentiated citizens on the basis of their religious identity. Its conclusions reinforced the necessity of approaching issues of development through the optic of religious community. This volume focuses on this shift in public policy. The articles in this collection examine the nature and implications of this new approach to the Indian social reality. Taking a close look at the findings of the Sachar Committee Report (SCR) they highlight the challenges posed by inter-community comparisons. At another level the articles supplement the debate initiated by the SCR by constructing a profile of religious communities in India so as to factor in their concerns of development into the present discourse and to nuance and modify the simple indicators to which development is often reduced. As most religious communities are themselves engaged in development-related activities the volume also examines some of these initiatives in order to see what development connotes to the members themselves and what receives attention by the community. Students of social sciences and development studies as well as those dealing with issues of marginalization will find this collection an invaluable resource for understanding contemporary India and for undertaking further theoretical and empirical research.

Inequality is one of the most discussed topics of our times. Yet, we still do not know how to tackle the issue effectively. The book argues that this is due to the lack of understanding the structures responsible for the persistence of social inequality. It enquires into the mechanisms that produce and reproduce invisible dividing lines in society. Based on original case studies of Brazil, Germany, India and Laos comprising thousands of interviews, the authors argue that invisible classes emerge in capitalist societies, both reproducing and transforming precapitalist hierarchies. At the same time, locally particular forms of inequality persist. Social inequality in the contemporary world has to be understood as a specific combination of precapitalist inequalities, capitalist transformation and a particular class structure, which seems to emerge in all capitalist societies. The book links the configurations to an interpretation of global domination as well as to symbolic classification.

Caste is a contested terrain in India’s society and polity. This book explores contemporary realities of caste in rural and urban India. Presenting rich empirical findings across north India, it presents an original perspective on the reasons for the persistence of caste in India today.

This handbook provides the most up-to-date and comprehensive review of the literature on inequality. It provides comprehensive overviews of the main theoretical traditions, concepts, dimensions, methodologies and contemporary debates around inequality as well as outlines of the situation of inequality in the world regions.