The Modernity of Caste and the Market Economy

What place does the caste system have in modern India with its globally-integrating market economy? The most influential anthropological approaches to caste have tended to emphasize caste as India’s traditional religious and ritual order, or (treating such order as a product of the colonial encounter) as shaped politically, especially today by the dynamics of caste-based electoral politics. Less attention has been paid to caste effects in the economy. This article argues that the scholarly framing of caste mirrors a public policy ‘enclosure’ of caste in the non-modern realm of religion and ‘caste politics’, while aligning modernity to the caste-erasing market economy. Village-level fieldwork in south India finds a parallel public narrative of caste either as ritual rank eroded by market relations, or as identity politics deflected from everyday economic life. But locally and nationally the effects of caste are found to be pervasive in labour markets and the business economy. In the age of the market, caste is a resource, sometimes in the form of a network, its opportunity-hoarding advantages discriminating against others. Dalits are not discriminated by caste as a set of relations separate from economy, but by the very economic and market processes through which they often seek liberation. The caste processes, enclosures and evasions in post-liberalization India, suggest the need to rethink the modernity of caste beyond orientalist and postcolonial frameworks, and consider the presuppositions that shape understanding of an institution, the nature and experience of which are determined by the inequalities and subject positions it produces

Caste and development: Contemporary perspectives on a structure of discrimination and advantage

Inherited caste identity is an important determinant of life opportunity for a fifth of the world’s population, but is not given the same significance in global development policy debates as gender, race, age, religion or other identity characteristics. This review asks why addressing caste-based inequality and discrimination does not feature in intergovernmental commitments such as the Sustainable Development Goals, and whether it should. Taking India as its focus, it finds that caste has been treated as an archaic system and source of historical disadvantage due compensation through affirmative action in ways that overlook its continuing importance as a structure of advantage and of discrimination in the modern economy, especially post-liberalization from the 1990s. A body of recent literature from anthropology, economics, history and political science is used to explore the modern life of caste in society, economy and development. Questions are asked about caste as social hierarchy, the role of caste in post-liberalization rural inequality, in urban labor markets and in the business economy, and the effect of policies of affirmative action in public-sector education and employment. Caste is found to be a complex institution, simultaneously weakened and revived by current economic and political forces; it is a contributor to persisting national socioeconomic and human capital disparities, and has major impacts on subjective wellbeing. Caste effects are not locational; they travel from the village to the city and into virtually all markets. Caste persists in the age of the market because of its advantages – its discriminations allow opportunity hoarding for others; and the threat of the advancement of subordinated groups provokes humiliating violence against them. The evidence points to the need for policy innovation to address market and non-market discrimination and to remove barriers, especially in the informal and private sector; and to ensure caste has its proper place in the global development policy debate

Caste Identities and Structures of Threats: Stigma, Prejudice and Social Representation in Indian universities

Caste is a complex ontological construction. Despite several anti-caste move-ments and constitutional provisions, caste exists in the Indian psyche as part of everyday life. Even in the advent of globalization, caste continues to foster social and economic inequalities and exclusion in newer forms and perpetuates violence. The available research on caste-based stigma and humiliation provides a limited understanding as it deals with Dalits only; and ignores caste-Hindus (upper-caste) agency. Based largely on qualitative data collected at an intense three-day workshop, including two Focus Group Discussions and a year-long ethnography, this article illustrates the micro processes of everyday life experiences of caste-based stigma and humiliation among university students, academic staff and administrative staff. It explores subtle and overt caste discrimination, prejudices and stereotypes existing in the spatial morphologies of Indian higher education, its perpetuation on campuses and its impact on students’ psyche. It highlights the dearth of scholarship in this area of caste identity and stigma; and proposes nuanced questions for future research to understand why universities in India are turning into places of social defeat for Dalit and OBC students. The article argues the basis of caste discrimination and humiliation in universities is not the same as it exists in other social institutions. Instead of asserting conclusions on this matter we set out justifiable lines of inquiry. There are two issues that this article examines first, how students in Indian higher education evolve strategies for coping with threatened identities. Second, what structural repair in higher education is required to heal the wounded (caste) psyche

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’

First-person accounts of the processes and planning involved in a suicide attempt on the railway

Background The processes and planning involved in choosing and attempting to die by a particular method of suicide are not well understood. Accounts from those who have thought about or attempted suicide using a specific method might allow us to better understand the ways in which people come to think about, plan and enact a suicide attempt. Aims To understand from first-person accounts the processes and planning involved in a suicide attempt on the railway. Method Thematic analysis was conducted of qualitative interviews (N = 34) undertaken with individuals who had contemplated or attempted suicide by train. Results Participants explained how they decided upon a particular method, time and place for a suicide attempt. Plans were described as being contingent on a number of elements (including the likelihood of being seen or interrupted), rather than being fixed in advance. Participants mentally rehearsed and evaluated a particular method, which would sometimes involve imagining in detail what would happen before, during and after an attempt. The extent to which this involved others (train drivers, partners, friends) was striking. Conclusions By giving people free reign to describe in their own words the processes they went through in planning and undertaking a suicide attempt, and by not interpreting such accounts through a lens of deficit and pathology, we can arrive at important insights into how people come to think and feel about, plan and enact a suicide attempt. The findings have implications in terms of understanding suicide risk and prevention more broadly