Middle Castes Against Hill High Caste Political Domination in Nepal: Can Indian Experience Be A Lesson?

This study examines the problems and prospects of middle caste politics in Nepal based on similar political developments in north India. It investigates the processes of middle caste and class formation in the two countries and goes on to examine demography and upper-caste political strategies. Taking the Federal Socialist Forum Nepal (FSFN) and its trajectory as an example of middle caste political formation, it shows that the middle castes are at a disadvantage in Nepal than their brethren have been in north India. FSFN’s new merger with two political parties recently further shows the difficulty of mobilizing a middle caste political force and mounting a sustained challenge against the political domination of the hill upper castes. This paper also analyzes emerging caste relations in contemporary Nepal.

COLABORAÇÃO PREMIADA E SUA APLICABILIDADE NO ORDENAMENTO JURÍDICO BRASILEIRO COM O ADVENTO DA LEI 12.850/2013 LEI DO COMBATE AO CRIME ORGANIZADO

The Awarded Collaboration is part of a new phase of procedural development in the criminal legal scenario, which has brought benefits in the fight against organized crime and systemic corruption implanted in the country, for decades. This article aims to analyze in the scope, the winning collaboration and its applicability in the Brazilian legal system with the advent of Law 12.850 / 2013 (Law to Combat Organized Crime). This research is scientific and will be of a qualitative approach aiming to generate knowledge for the elaboration of the monographic text as a course conclusion work, through the deductive approach method, it corresponds to the discursive extraction of knowledge from general premises applicable to concrete hypotheses, once that the researcher will establish relations from the general to the particular, based on logical reasoning, arrive at the truth of what he proposes. Anyway, what we have with the awarded plea bargain (awarded collaboration) in the form of Law 12.850 / 2013, is a very powerful and efficient instrument to fight organized crime, be it low-caste organized crime to high-caste organized crime, and mainly organized crime cast in the walls of the National Congress and the Planalto Palace, as seen with the results of the “lava jet” task force.

Caste and Higher Education in India

Subramanian’s The Caste of Merit addresses the issue of educational inequality in colonial and independent India, focusing on the Indian Institutes of Technology (iits) that have trained the engineering elites since the 1950s. The members of the high caste who initially comprised this group ascribed their personal success to merit, not to background. India’s policy of allowing disadvantaged caste groups to enter the (iits), however, challenged the high castes’ representation of their educational privilege as simply a matter of talent. Subramanian’s view of the upper-caste position as an attempt to forestall progress toward a more egalitarian Indian society opens a methodological debate about the fundamental epistemic demands that scholars must satisfy before they adopt social causes above and beyond the conveying of objective information.

Sin of Survival

The abolition and criminalization of the sati rite brought into light by the mid-nineteenth century a different kind of politics: that of stereotyping the (high-caste Hindu) widow. Widowhood was considered the biggest curse showered on a woman to chastise her for crimes and sins perpetrated in her earlier births. It was also deemed the widow’s fault that she survived her husband. Accordingly, the orthodox society treated her with utmost severity, punishing her for her sins. In a scenario where women’s issues were debated and weighed without women’s outlook or participation, contemporaneous women writers focused on the issue of widowhood. Resentment, entreaty, dismay, dignified silence, self-respect—a plethora of emotions is at display in women’s writings touching upon one of the most difficult and ubiquitous aspect of their lives. This chapter focuses on Shevantibai Nikambe’s and Krupabai Satthianadhan’s literary portrayal of widows.

Awakening the Serpent King: Ritual and Textual Ontologies in Garhwal, Uttarakhand

In the north Indian state of Uttarakhand, the god Nagaraja, associated with the pan--Indian god Krishna, is an extremely popular deity. However, there exist key disjunctures in how Nagaraja is known, experienced and worshiped in the north Indian state of Uttarakhand by jāgar performers—low--caste ritual specialists, storytellers, and musicians—on the one hand, and high--caste temple priests, on the other. Temple priests were generally dismissive of the practices of the jāgar performers, often re--directing my interest in regional narratives of Nagaraja to the Sanskrit--language Bhagavadgita and Bhagavata Purana (the Gita--Bhagavat), which they saw as authoritative and ‘original' sources of oral and vernacular traditions. This interpretation, however, was highly contested by jāgar performers who articulated a non--essentialist, ritually efficacious, rhetorical, oral and vernacular ‘textual ontology.' Jāgar performers not only critiqued Brahminical notions of textual purity and essentialism but also assumptions within the academic study of Hinduism about the relationship between vernacular religious practices and textual Hinduism, or the so--called Great and Little traditions of Hinduism. By ‘textual ontology,' I describe how different relations to textual authority and knowledge in turn reveal distinctive ways of creating, knowing, and interacting with deities and the world. In challenging priestly and western scholarly notions of text, this article offers a radically different view of textual production, transmission, and authority.

Dalit Autobiography: A Study of Dalit Women’s Autobiographies

Autobiography is widely admired in the world as a literary genre. Its importance as a means of self-creation, self-examination, and self-regeneration has been identified by critics and creative authors. Autobiography is a Western tradition where people enjoy celebrating them self and are eager to prove their achievements. Indians have adopted this tradition of writing an autobiography from the West. Autobiography can be classified into two categories, life stories that inspire and prove one’s achievements. Secondly, the life stories which not only describes the saga of the individual but also the society as a whole depicts sorrows, subjugation, sufferings, and socioeconomic conditions. Dalit autobiographies belong to the second category. They have portrayed the socio-economic, cultural, and political conditions of Dalit Community under the control and influence of Upper Caste Hindu society. Contemporary Indian Society was divided under the wrong notions of ‘Purity and Pollution’. Dalits were treated as untouchables and polluters to the High Caste Hindus because they were born in the low caste. They were intentionally kept ignorant and denied to take education and asked to live out of town in separate colonies by high caste Hindus to safeguard their control over Dalits. Autobiography came handy to them to demonstrate their age-old suffering, exploitation, and maltreatment. Writers like Shankarrao Kharat, Daya Pawar, Bandu Tupe, P. E. Sonkamble, Shrankumar Limbale, Laxman Mane, Laxman Gaikwad, and Kishor Kale came forward. They penned their experiences in the form of autobiographies. Like male autobiographies, female autobiographers like Baby Kamble, Shantabai Kamble, Urmila Pawar, Kumud Parade, Janabai Girhe, Bama, demonstrated their life stories and experiences of trivial exploitation based on caste, class, and gender.

The Problems of Economic Development among the Hiras, an Occupational Caste of Assam

Assam, the fascinating land of blue hills and red rivers, is inhabited by a number of communities belonging to various ethnic origins with diverse cultures. These communities can broadly be divided into two categories viz. tribals and nontribals and they are found spread on the hills as well as the two valleys of the state. The non-tribal category of inhabitants can again be sub-divided into high caste Hindus, O.B.C.’s, M.O.B.C.’s and Scheduled Castes (SC). Numerically, Hiras occupy the fifth position among the Scheduled Caste of Assam. They are traditionally an occupational Caste who make pottery by means of hand. Economic backwardness of the Hiras can be attributed to their low income occupation. The people should be made realize that education is the only way to equip oneself for Socio-economic development

Balbir Madhopuri. Hamārā, camārõ kā bargad (A Chapter from Chāngiā rukh / Against the Night)

This commented translation from Hindi of a chapter from the Chāṅgiā rukh (Against the Night) autobiography (2002) by Balbir Madhopuri, a renowned Indian writer, poet, translator, journalist and social activist, brings forward episodes from the life of low-caste inhabitants of a Punjab village in the 1960s — early 1970s. After two decades after independence, destinies of those stuck in the lowest part of the social ladder remained unenviable — despite the fact that according to India’s constitution, untouchability was abolished and its practice in any form was forbidden. The main social conflict in Punjab’s villages between high-caste landowners, Jats, and low-caste chamars, chuhras and other village servants is still underway — with only minor modifications. Following the school of hard knocks of his childhood in the chamar quarter of Madhopur, a village in Jalandhar district, Balbir Madhopuri managed to receive a good education and take to literature. Narrating his story, Balbir Madhopuri shares childhood memories and emotions that determined his motivations to struggle against poverty, deprivation and injustice. The metaphor of a hardy bargad — a strong and powerful tree that used to be heart and soul of chamars’ area in Madhopur, but was slashed and distorted at a whim of the high and mighty villagers — holds a special place in the book.

“Another high-caste woman beyond his reach”: Cast(e)ing the sexual politics of Manu Joseph’s Serious Men

Indian English Fiction has mostly portrayed Dalit characters from a humanist perspective. Manu Joseph’s debut novel Serious Men (2010) departs from such a convention by deploying sexist language to render subversive authority to the Dalit protagonist, Ayyan Mani. While Serious Men (2010) revises the passive depiction of Dalits in Indian English Fiction through its experimental usage of language, its subversion is undermined by its representation of women and lower-caste politics. This article is interested in exploring the intersections between language politics and the politics of caste in the novel, since it seems subversive in expressing the rant of an angry Dalit man, yet it also nevertheless reflects the overt sexualization of urban, upper-caste women. By interrogating the novel’s politics of Dalit representation and its critical reception, the article argues how despite satirizing casteist attitudes through the eyes of the Dalit protagonist, the novel inevitably undermines its critique of caste structures through its prejudiced portrayal of women and caste politics.