3. Colonial India: religious and caste divides

2017 ◽  
pp. 34-47
Author(s):  
Craig Jeffrey
Keyword(s):  
Religious Diversity ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Caste System ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Natural Feature ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Partition Of India

India is often identified as a Hindu country, but there are many other religions in India including Buddhism, Jainism, Islam, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity. ‘Colonial India: religious and caste divides’ explains India’s religious diversity and the inequalities that are associated with the assumed ‘Hindu-ness’ of India. It also describes the Partition of India into three new nations in 1947 and the accompanying violence. A sharply hierarchical caste system is not necessarily a natural feature of Indian society. Caste is rather a social institution that has changed historically in response to economic and political forces. The imperial power introduced or exacerbated social contradictions that continue to mark the lives of low castes in modern India.

Dalit Camera: Through Untouchable Eyes

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Suresh Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Social Networking Sites ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Caste System ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Caste Discrimination ◽  
The Social ◽  
Media Institutions

In India, Dalits also known as ‘untouchables’ have been exploited and subjected to various sorts of atrocities due to the social stratification of Indian society. Though Dalit populace is around 23 percentage of total Indian population, they are underprivileged and discriminated in numerous ways. Dalits are socially, economically and politically segregated and oppressed by the caste dominated society. Mass media which claims to be the social institution seldom gives coverage to Dalit related issues. Even if any news items were to appear in the mainstream media, it was only misrepresentation of facts. For centuries, Dalits have been making an effort to emancipate from the clutches of caste system, and many Dalit leaders have even laid down their lives for this cause. Nonetheless, Dalits continue to undergo the caste discrimination in all spheres of their lives. Dalit intellectuals and activists tried to voice their concerns to the mass media, but owing to the caste dominated media and the absence of Dalit journalists, their voices were unheard and silenced. Dalits were even denied the space to work in such media institutions. When Dalits themselves tried to own their media to champion Dalits’ cause, economic factors miserably failed them in perpetuating such efforts. Thus, Dalits were denied their space to voice their views on a public platform. In a situation such as this, the emergence and proliferation of internet and social networking sites have provided a sigh of relief to them to voice their problems to be heard even to the international community. Dalit Camera, a YouTube channel has become a rallying point for the Dalit community in India. This article throws light on how Dalit Camera is a platform for the expression of discrimination and avenue for exposing the atrocities committed on Dalits.

Indian Sex Life

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Durba Mitra
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Global History ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Indentured Servitude ◽  
History Of

During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. This book shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society. The book reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women's performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. The book demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women's sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world. Reframing the prostitute as a concept, the book overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality.

Public Finance and Personal Law in Late Colonial India

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleanor Newbigin
Keyword(s):  
Public Finance ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Income Tax ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Personal Income Tax ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Indian State ◽  
Personal Law

This chapter considers the ways in which the fiscal demands of representative government, and specifically the development of a direct, personal income tax, impacted legal subjecthood during India’s transition to Independence. It shows how early twentieth-century understandings of economic value and public finance were embedded into Indian society and legal system through discussions about personal law. This had particular consequences for Hindu personal law, which, under pressure from a centrally administered income tax regime, was re-imagined as a singular, homogeneous all-Indian legal system in ways that rendered the Hindu joint family synonymous with the representative and fiscal structures of the Indian state.

Datta Bhagat’s Routes and Escape Routes and Vijay Tendulkar’s Kanyadaan: Critiquing the Dalit

2021 ◽  
pp. 2455328X2199573
Author(s):  
Joydeep Bhattacharyya
Keyword(s):  
Indian Society ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Large Segment ◽  
Art And Literature

This article seeks to understand Indian theatre’s take on Dalit politics of our time through a critical reading of two post-independence plays—Datta Bhagat’s Routes and Escape Routes and Vijay Tendulkar’s Kanyadaan. Politically, ‘Dalit’ becomes important only after 1947 in post-independence and post-colonial India or more specifically from the 1970s. In the post-Ambedkar phase of Dalit re/configuration, they begin to self-assert through politics, art, and literature, most effectively and convincingly, only with the rise of Dalit Panthers and in the aftermath of the implementation of Mandal Commission’s recommendation for Other Backward Classes (OBC) reservation. The article tries to examine the fresh critique of the Dalit vis-à-vis the upper caste-centric society, undertaken in this crucial context of reconfiguration and from beyond any traditional parameter of understanding, and map, through the plays, the plurality hidden within the perceived monolith of Dalit consciousness. Consequently, Dalit experiences against the backdrop of their struggle are laid bare, and unfamiliar realities come out to upset our comfortable knowledge about this large segment of Indian society.

The Dialectics of Resistance: Colonial Geography, Bengali Literati and the Racial Mapping of Indian Identity

2009 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUBHO BASU
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Information System ◽  
Geographic Information System ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Geographic Information ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Core ◽  
Indian Identity

AbstractThrough a study of hitherto unexplored geography textbooks written in Bengali between 1845 and 1880, this paper traces the evolution of a geographic information system related to ethnicity, race, and space. This geographic information system impacted the mentality of emerging educated elites in colonial India who studied in the newly established colonial schools and played a critical role in developing and articulating ideas of the territorial nation-state and the rights of citizenship in India. The Bengali Hindu literati believed that the higher location of India in such a constructed hierarchy of civilizations could strengthen their claims to rights of citizenship and self-government. These nineteenth century geography textbooks asserted clearly that high caste Hindus constituted the core ethnicity of colonial Indian society and all others were resident outsiders. This knowledge system, rooted in geography/ethnicity/race/space, and related to the hierarchy of civilizations, informed the Bengali intelligentsia's notion of core ethnicity in the future nation-state in India with Hindu elites at its ethnic core.

Bhabani Bhattacharya Vs ‘He Who Rides A Tiger’

2021 ◽  
Vol 05 (01) ◽  
pp. 16-19
Author(s):  
Ajay Kr. Singh ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social System ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Spiritual Growth ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Caste System ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Freedom Movement

Bhabani Bhattacharya’s ‘He Who Rides a Tiger’ is yet another novel of man’s epic struggle against the unjust social equations which are as old as the ancient vedic civilization. It is the story of a blacksmith, Kalo, living in a small town, Jharana, in Bengal, and his daughter, Chandra Lekha. It is set against the backdrop of a widespread famine of Bengal of 1943. Though ‘He Who Rides a Tiger’ and ‘So Many Hungers’ treat the theme of hunger, exploitation and debasement of man, ‘He Who Rides a Tiger’ is no rehash of the latter novel. It launches a scathing critisism on the evil of caste system which has been the bane of Indian society. Arguably the writer’s best novel, it touches the pulse of the irony of Indian social life. The Indian social realities are presented with increasing bitterness within the perspective of the freedom movement. Its greatness as a piece of literature lies in its assertion of tremendous potentialities of the spiritual growth of man, and a thorough exposure of an imperfect social system.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Durba Mitra
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Scientific Analysis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Scientific

This introductory chapter traces the history of the concept of the sexually deviant female in colonial India. It first takes a look at how the figure of the prostitute appears across different archives from colonial India and within analyses of Indian social life. The chapter then shows how colonial studies on the nature of Indian society were to become the empirical basis for universalist theories of comparative societies. Indeed, the colonial state in India was, at its inception, an experiment in new forms of scientific and social scientific practices that were to influence state practices and the formation of disciplinary knowledge in the colony and metropole. At the heart of these sciences of society was a concern about structuring, tracing, and mapping the social world of colonial India through the assessment of women's sexuality. These histories reveal the way key debates about gender, caste, communal difference, and social hierarchy in India became objects of social scientific analysis through the description and evaluation of female sexuality. And, as the chapter shows, this social scientific imaginary had extraordinary reach.

Relentless Individual and Collective Commitment: An Interview with Jaydeep Sarangi and Manohar Mouli Biswas

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Surya Simon
Keyword(s):  
Social Worker ◽  
Caste System ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Collective Commitment

Abstract This interview with Indian translator, Professor Jaydeep Sarangi, and Indian writer, Manohar Mouli Biswas, was conducted on 16th April, 2019 in New Alipore College, India; and was part of a series of interviews conducted for a doctoral project that examines caste system and Dalit experiences in the context of India. In this interview, Sarangi sheds light on his experiences as a translator of Indian narratives from Bengali to English. He talks in-depth about his passion for translating Dalit narratives and his relentless commitment towards studies on the Dalit subject. Biswas shares his arduous and inspirational experiences as a Dalit, as a writer, and as a social worker. He also explores the scope and possibilities offered through writing and translation, and what that means to the Dalit collective as well as the Indian society as a whole.

The bishops and the dissenters

2019 ◽  
pp. 40-49
Author(s):  
Maijastina Kahlos
Keyword(s):  
Religious Diversity ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Church Councils ◽  
The Church

This chapter discusses the various ways in which bishops and church councils coped with religious diversity, attempting to enforce conformity of beliefs and rituals within Christianity. In their struggle to achieve religious unity, bishops enhanced the notion of religious unity, whether it was meant to exclude the option of other religions or the option of other Christian inclinations. In the relationship between imperial and ecclesiastical powers, there was both collaboration and rivalry. Emperors and bishops had shared interests as well as conflicting ones. The bishops made ample use of the means that the imperial power had at its disposal in disciplining and chastising religious dissidents through coercion, whether they were pagans outside the church or heretics within it. This does not mean that the emperors always fell neatly under the influence of bishops. The different aims frequently led to collisions of interests between the imperial government and the ecclesiastical establishment.

Resiliency and Change in the Indian Caste System: The Umar of U.P.

1967 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 575-587 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard G. Fox
Keyword(s):  
Structural Change ◽  
Caste System ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Anthropological Study ◽  
Social Structural

Lack of agreement on basic definitions has often bedeviled the anthropological study of Indian society. A case in point is “caste,” which has enjoyed almost as many definitions as there are students involved in its study. This multiplicity undoubtedly promotes a broadened investigation of caste phenomena, and thus ultimately increases our knowledge. But it also leads to the danger that competing definitions will masquerade as factual explanations, or that theoretically valid distinctions are lost in the rhetoric of definitional arguments. Especially in studies of the breakdown and reconstitution of caste institutions, the absence of a firm, explicit definitional base impedes evaluation of the nature, direction, and novelty of social structural change.

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