CMD213 | Major Debates on Caste in India

The proposed course, Major Debates on Caste in India, is a foundational course that seeks to expose students to major debates and trends in social science research on caste in India. The very fact that Indian society cannot be fully understood without understanding caste provides the impetus for this course. While caste and its encounter with modernity and electoral democracy are one of the most fashionable themes of Indian politics, yet it’s not an easy task to define what caste is. Disciplinary boundaries work as a major handicap in our quest to have a comprehensive understanding of caste.

Through intersecting writings of three different disciplines (literature, politics, sociology and anthropology) on caste, the course provides an opportunity for students to comprehend caste in its entirety.

The course is divided into three major interrelated parts. The first part is centred on the lived realities and everydayness of caste. The discussion on lived realities of caste would be accompanied by a detailed discussion on those concepts which are central to the everyday working of caste, such as untouchability, Brahmanical patriarchy, humiliation and violence.

The second part of the course deals with the relationship between caste, democracy and modernity. It seeks to unravel caste’s encounter with modernity and its implications for Indian society. Since students are familiar with political churning, hence this section would help to understand the relationship between caste and democratic processes. Readings will be designed in such a manner that it covers both the political history and conceptual issues in appreciating the relationship between caste and democracy. Since anti-caste intellectuals played a major role in politicising caste, hence, few readings would be devoted to understanding the extent to which lower caste politics has achieved its desired goals. An attempt would be made to understand anti-caste politics in its entirety by focusing both on its electoral dimensions as well as movements.

And then, we will move to the third and last segment of this course. Debates among sociologists and anthropologists, mainly between Louis Dumont, M. N. Srinivas, Nicholas Dirks and Dipankar Gupta, constitute the third part. The debate is anchored around the following questions: what is caste? What is the appropriate conceptual category to understand caste, i.e. varna or jati? What makes caste a system, both at the level of intellectual debates and empirical processes? How has hierarchy been thought about? What is the relationship between ritual status and temporal power?