Degrees without Freedom: The Impact of Formal Education on Dalit Young Men in North India

This article considers the capacity of formal education to undermine established processes of caste and class reproduction in an area of north India, with particular reference to the views and strategies of educated Dalit young men. It draws on quantitative and qualitative research conducted by the authors in a village in Bijnor district, western Uttar Pradesh (UP). We discuss how educated Dalit young men perceive education, how they seek to use educational credentials to obtain ‘respectable’ jobs, and how they react when this strategy fails. Increased formal education has given Dalit young men a sense of dignity and confidence at the village level. However, these men are increasingly unable to convert this ‘cultural capital’ into secure employment. This has created a reproductive crisis which is manifest in an emerging culture of masculine Dalit resentment. In response to this culture, Dalit parents are beginning to withdraw from investing money in young mens’ higher secondary and tertiary‐level education. Without a substantial redistribution in material assets within society, development initiatives focused on formal education are likely to be only partially successful in raising the social standing and economic position of subordinate groups.     

Litigation against Political Organization? The Politics of Dalit Mobilization in Tamil Nadu,India

This article examines contemporary Dalit assertion in India through an ethnographic case study of a legal tool being mobilized by Tamil Nadu's lowest‐ranking Arunthathiyars in their struggle against caste‐based offences. The Arunthathiyars of western Tamil Nadu are increasingly taking recourse to the 1989 Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA Act) in an attempt to bring members of higher castes to justice. The article explores how Arunthathiyars are employing the law and how their litigation is reshaping the politics of caste in this region. The authors document how a process of litigation by Arunthathiyars is countered by a politicization of caste by the dominant Gounders of the region, who recently entered electoral politics with a new caste‐based party. Even though the litigation route further antagonizes caste relations, it is argued that the PoA Act has provided Dalits with an invaluable tool to seek justice, democratize public space, and challenge the power of the dominant caste in the region. Dalit social movements, it is concluded, are more likely to be successful if they are backed by a legal weapon and accompanied by Dalits’ growing economic independence.     

NGOs as Social Movements: Policy Narratives,Networks and the Performance of Dalit Rights in South India

Donor‐funded development NGOs are sometimes portrayed as co‐opting, privatizing or depoliticizing citizen action or social movements. This much is implied by the term ‘NGOization’. Alternatively, NGOs can be seen as bearers of rights‐based work increasingly threatened by tighter regulation or substitution by corporate social responsibility models of development. This article engages critically with both perspectives. It traces the role of NGOs and their funders in agenda setting, specifically in bringing the previously excluded issue of caste discrimination into development policy discourse in the form of a Dalit‐rights approach in Tamil Nadu, south India. The authors explore the institutional processes of policy making and NGO networking involved, the alliances, entanglements of NGOs and social movements, and the performativity of NGO Dalit rights. But at the same time, the article illustrates how NGO institutional systems have constrained or failed to sustain such identity‐based claims to entitlement. In Nancy Fraser's terms, the article explores success and failure in addressing ‘first‐order’ issues of justice, that is rights to resources (in this case, land), and in tackling ‘second‐order’ injustices concerning the framing of who counts (who can make a claim as a rights holder) and how (by what procedures are claims and contests staged and resolved). This draws attention to the important but fragile achievements of NGOs’ discursive framings that give Dalits the ‘right to have rights’.     

Class,Caste, Gender,and the Materiality of Cement Houses in India

Recently, large parts of India and the global South have experienced a rapid transformation from mud to cement houses, which has been promoted by governments and cement companies for its positive impacts on household socioeconomic status and gender inequalities. But we know little else about how different communities are participating in house transformation. In this paper, I study the embodied and affective dimensions of house transformation in Himachal Pradesh, India. I argue that house transformation is also the transformation of traditional gender and caste identities into new middle-class identities which benefits some social groups, like upper-caste women and Dalit men, but not others like Dalit women along intersectional lines. My work extends literature in infrastructure studies and urban political ecology by highlighting how the materiality of infrastructures interacts with everyday dimensions of difference to reproduce the marginalisation of historically oppressed groups along intersectional lines of class, caste, and gender.     

Gender,Caste and Matchmaking in Kerala: A Rationale for Dowry

The matrilineal castes of northern Kerala consider dowry demeaning and resort to it only in ‘exceptional’ circumstances. In local discourse, dowry is transacted when women are considered ‘old’ by the standards of the marriage market, where over‐age is a condition reached usually on account of what is considered a deficit of a normative conception of femininity. Dowry is practised openly only by poor and socially vulnerable households, as the relatively affluent could mask dowry with hidden compensations. This article explores the ways in which gender mediates matchmaking and generates a residual category of women for whom dowry is openly negotiated. Open negotiation on the margins of the marriage market expose the terms of exchange in ‘respectable’ society, where matchmaking strategies reveal the emphasis placed on conjugality and on caste in the social construction of women's interests and identity. Up to the mid‐twentieth century, matrilineal women derived their identity from their natal families. The political economy of marriage in Kerala brought a new emphasis to bear on conjugality and on caste, which generated new restrictions on women and produced a rationale for dowry.     

"How" Does the Bible Mean? The Bible and Dalit Liberation in India

Abstract

This essay analyses the role of the Bible in Dalit liberation in a context where Dalit theology, despite being increasingly recognized as an academic theology, hasn't been effective practically in either sustaining the Dalits in their struggles for liberation or in challenging the perpetuation of caste discrimination within the Indian churches. In the light of the Dalits' own reception of the Bible as a potential source of Dalit liberation the essay critically revisits some of the defining biblical paradigms articulated by Dalit theologians, using as its epistemological tool the tensions between "epic" and "emic" forms of theological conceptualizations, in order to identify the reasons for the lacunae between Dalit theology and its practical viability for Dalit liberation. In the light of this analysis the essay explores and offers the synoptic healing stories as a viable biblical paradigm which can animate the Dalit struggles for liberation and thus enhance the practical efficacy of Dalit liberation.     

Writing sex and sexuality: archives of colonial North India

This article focuses on disparate sites and subjects to reflect on and problematize the relationship between sexuality and the archives in colonial north India. I dwell on how ‘recalcitrant’ and hidden histories of sexuality can be gleaned by not only expanding our arenas of archives, but also by decentering and recasting colonial archives. I do so by specifically investigating some of the “indigenous” writings in Hindi, through texts concerning homosexuality, sex manuals, the writings of a woman ayurvedic practitioner, didactic literature and its relationship to Dalit (outcaste) sexuality, and current popular Dalit literature and its representations of the past. The debate for me here is not about the flaws of archival uses but rather of playing one archive against another, of appropriating many parallel, alternative, official, and popular archives simultaneously to shape a more nuanced and layered understanding of sexuality.     

Feminism,the false consciousness of neoliberal capitalism? Informalization,fundamentalism, and women in an Indian city

Neoliberal globalization produces complex terrains of gender exploitation, with – some feminists argue – contradictory impacts on women. On the one hand, it subjects more women to increasing domination and devalorization by capital; on the other hand, women often ‘work’ globalization in ‘enabling’ ways. Informal jobs are often preferred sites for crafting economic emancipation and breaking away from patriarchy at home. Another body of literature argues that the feminization of informalization does not dismantle androcentric, neoliberal capitalism; moreover, reading these moments as women ‘working’ globalization represents a co-optation of women. Using examples of the feminization of informalization and ethno-religious gender violence in Ahmedabad city, India, this article critiques the concept of co-optation and argues that ‘actually existing women’ forge complex negotiations in the context of diverse exploitation, which can be conceptualized better with Marxian and Gramscian notions of false consciousness. The article also contends that understanding false consciousness as an assemblage where gender, class, caste, and ethnicity intersect in myriad ways will create possibilities for resistance.     

Caste and the Desire for Belonging

Questions of power and competition have figured prominently in the expanding debate about Dalit assertion. This article moves beyond the rhetoric of caste wars to engage with the affective and emotional dimension of caste. The focus is on the urban environment, where caste unity is challenged by the centrifugal forces of urban living. The article demonstrates how Khatiks in Bhopal are reunited through a festival culture that straddles class differentiation, factional politics and generational gaps. The emerging formation signifies the continuing strength of caste sentiments in the city and demonstrates how Dalits create arenas for publicly declaring pride in their heritage both within and beyond the political arena.     

A zone of exception: gendered violences of family ‘Happiness’ in Vietnam

This article examines the ways in which women’s ‘family happiness’ in Vietnam paradoxically, and alarmingly, is rendered compatible with the endurance of what is diminished as ‘minor’ partner violence. Thus focusing on the gendering of ‘happiness’ and the discrepancies between ideals and practices, the article unfolds how intersections between a number of ‘power-geometries’ including violence preventive legislation, an official family discourse, and the patrilineally organized family facilitate the conditions that allow for male-to-female violence in the domestic sphere. The article highlights how Intimate Partner Violence transmutes the ‘happy family’ into a ‘zone of exception’ wherein which the laws prohibiting violence are suspended, the juridico-political status and rights of a woman blurred, and a state of chronic precariousness and crisis generated. Such tendencies are fortified by the ambiguous strategies of the Women’s Union. In maneuvering between violence preventive legislation and family ideals, the Union is criticizing patriarchal family hierarchies while also encouraging women to nurture family happiness by complying with an abusive partner.     

Constructing Social Capital: Self‐Help Groups and Rural Women's Development in India

The success of the group approach in rural micro‐finance among women has inspired the tendency to look at all networking as essentially good and desirable in rural community development, without acknowledging the entrenched caste, class, ethnic and religious hierarchies that lead to diversities among women. Government schemes designed for poverty alleviation among rural women tend to be influenced by concepts and models that have been successful elsewhere, but do not take into account the diversities of situations at the local level. Internationally popular catchwords are used indiscriminately without questioning how these concepts can work effectively in the specific local context. This paper examines why some ‘self‐help groups’ fail by using the Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas (DWCRA) experience in India. The empirical survey was done over a period of two years in Burdwan, a relatively rich agricultural tract located in eastern India. We argue that whilst the ‘group’ has inherent benefits, it must never be allowed to become the paradigm in developmental policies for women.     

Colonial Constructions of Masculinity: Transforming Aboriginal Australian Men into ‘Houseboys’

In Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia, Aboriginal men made up more than half of the domestic servant population by 1938. They replaced the Chinese and Malay male servants who had worked for British colonists in the early colonial period. Much of the historical work on male domestic servants in colonial situations plots the construction of the ‘houseboy’ as emasculated, feminised and submissive. In contrast, colonial constructions of Aboriginal men as ‘houseboys’ in Darwin emphasise the masculinity of the Aboriginal hunter. Aboriginal men were characterised as requiring constant discipline and training, and this paternalistic discourse led to a corresponding denial of manhood or adulthood for Aboriginal men. While male domestic servants in other colonial settings were allowed some privileges of masculinity in relation to female workers, amongst Aboriginal domestic workers, it was so‐called ‘half‐caste’ women who, in acknowledgment of their ‘white blood’, received nominally higher wages and privileges for domestic work. Aboriginal men were denied what was referred to as a ‘breadwinning’ wage; an Australian wage awarded to white men with families. Despite this, their role as husbands was encouraged by the administration as a method of controlling sexual relations between white men and Aboriginal women. These sometimes contradictory images can be understood as manifestations of the racialised construction of gender in Australia.     

Understanding the Bahujan Samaj Prerna Kendra: Space,Place and Political Mobilisation

On the tenth anniversary of its first term in state government, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) opened the Bahujan Samaj Prerna Kendra in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. The Kendra is a majestic, temple-like building designed to commemorate and celebrate the achievements of the Dalit movement in India. In this article I examine its symbolic and political features, which I argue must be understood against the backdrop of caste prejudice and the ongoing exclusion (social, spatial and economic) of Dalits in India. The Kendra prompts consideration of how the design and use of public space implicitly or explicitly excludes lower classes and castes, and the way in which the BSP has both challenged and used spatial strategy in its political discourse. I further suggest that the Kendra signals a new phase in the cultural politics of Dalits, articulating a new vision of moral, political and spatial order.     

The Effectiveness of Jobs Reservation: Caste,Religion and Economic Status in India

This article investigates the effect of jobs reservation on improving the economic opportunities of persons belonging to India's Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST). Using employment data from the 55^th NSS round, the authors estimate the probabilities of different social groups in India being in one of three categories of economic status: own account workers; regular salaried or wage workers; casual wage labourers. These probabilities are then used to decompose the difference between a group X and forward caste Hindus in the proportions of their members in regular salaried or wage employment. This decomposition allows us to distinguish between two forms of difference between group X and forward caste Hindus: ‘attribute’ differences and ‘coefficient’ differences. The authors measure the effects of positive discrimination in raising the proportions of ST/SC persons in regular salaried employment, and the discriminatory bias against Muslims who do not benefit from such policies. They conclude that the boost provided by jobs reservation policies was around 5 percentage points. They also conclude that an alternative and more effective way of raising the proportion of men from the SC/ST groups in regular salaried or wage employment would be to improve their employment‐related attributes.     

Violation of the Laws and Customs of War on the Russian Front in the First World War

This article examines wartime efforts by the Russian civil and military authorities to shape public opinion, both at home and abroad, through investigating and publicizing enemy atrocities committed against Russians. An extraordinary investigative commission established in 1915, along the lines of Britain’s Bryce Commission, looked into alleged atrocities against soldiers and civilians as well as crimes against property; chronicled its findings; and publicized them on a wide scale. The ample funding and breadth of this undertaking challenges perceptions of the Tsarist authorities as unable to appreciate the importance of public opinion, even if the results were not always as intended.     

The effects of diplomatic sanctions and engagement on the severity of ongoing genocides or politicides

This study tests the effects of diplomatic sanctions and engagement on reducing the severity of ongoing instances of genocide or politicide. I argue that neither diplomatic measure will be effective in slowing or stopping the killing. I argue that diplomatic sanctions merely reduce the flow of information without credibly signalling intent or commitment, while diplomatic engagement does not challenge perpetrators. Neither policy raises the costs of perpetrating genocide or politicide. Therefore, neither is expected to be useful in mitigating ongoing atrocities. Ordered logit analyses of ongoing genocides and politicides from 1976 to 2008 confirm these assumptions, and demonstrate that changing levels of diplomatic representation with atrocity perpetrators may make policymakers feel like they are ‘doing something’, but does little to reduce the lethality of ongoing mass killing. Under one set of circumstances, increased engagement even exacerbates the atrocities.     

Transnational Advocacy Networks and Affirmative Action for Dalits in India

In India, movements and parties representing the lowest ranking dalit caste groups have followed different strategies in their struggle against social, economic and cultural discrimination. In this article, a new dalit movement making use of a ‘transnational advocacy network strategy’ will be compared to a more ‘classical’dalit political party. The main policy target for the new movement is an extension of existing affirmative action policies, while the dalit BSP party focuses more on emancipatory issues. Based on an analysis of the impacts of the BSP and of the new movement at the grassroots level, it is argued that the achievements of the new movement are tempered by the fact that in order to make use of international discourses and political pressure, the movement has had to develop a strategy and policy proposals compatible with existing mainstream neoliberal discourses. This depoliticizes the policies, and hence makes them of less importance strategically. It is argued that this is likely to be a difficulty for transnational advocacy networks in general.     

Minds of caste – Discrimination and its affects

This guest editorial considers the relevance of caste in today's world in terms of ‘castes of mind’.     

What is in a name? How caste names affect the production of situated knowledge

Patel, Desai, Kothari … to those literate in the workings of caste these names describe a network and its power in relation to other networks, they infer the rules of engagement within and between network members, and they ascribe a geographical terrain to home. In research, rules of behaviour and assumptions of place that are coded into names can affect access to respondents, their disclosure of data and subsequent claims to validity. This article explores the coded expectations of knowledge embedded in a name as seen by someone (me) fairly illiterate in the workings of caste by utilising the principle of Bourdieu’s doxa – a ‘pre-reflexive intuitive knowledge’ – to untangle and explore the effect of names on the production of partial and situated knowledge. Drawing on fieldwork in Gujarat, India, I analyse reflexive accounts through the lenses of feminist geographers and critical race scholars to illustrate the effects of being unknowingly and unwillingly placed into a social hierarchy of power in the field, introduce the idea of ‘us-ing’ (an opposite of othering) to describe researcher-respondent relations, and explore how readers might interpret the presence or absence of data and claims to validity. These accounts make visible the effects of positionality on knowledge production in ways that speak to feminist-postcolonial research, and specifically to feminist researchers of colour conducting research away from ‘home’.