Beginning with the 1990s, the subject of caste has seen a profound increase in interest among scholars. What was until then approached as a fossilized tradition of the ritual-obsessed Hindus refusing to see the progressive spirits of the emerging world and studied as a branch of anthropology, suddenly began to be seen as a complex reality deeply embedded in a range of institutions and social practices, attracting scholars from a wide range of disciplines--sociology, political science, history, literature, and even economics. Underlying this opening of the subject of caste were many factors: epistemic, empirical, and political. Caste is no longer approached through the classical binaries of 'traditional' and 'modern'; the 'East' and the 'West'; or the 'closed' and 'open' systems of stratification. With the growing consolidation of caste-based identities among those ranked lower down in the hierarchy since the 1990s, raising questions of citizenship and dignity, the subject has acquired a new salience. As the emerging research shows, the realities of caste on the ground have always been diverse across regions, often contested and ever changing. This Handbook presents a wide range of essays written by authors representing diverse academic disciplines and perspectives, bringing together the emerging trends in the research, imaginations, and lived realities of caste.
Author: Surinder S. Jodhka, Jules Naudet
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 12/15/2023
Pages: 682
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.81lbs
Size: 9.61h x 6.69w x 1.44d
ISBN: 9780198896715
About the Author
Surinder S. Jodhka is a Professor of Sociology at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His recent publications include India's Villages in the 21st Century: Revisits and Revisions (co-edited with Edward Simpson, OUP, 2019); Mapping the Elite: Power, Privilege, and Inequality (co-edited with Jules Naudet, OUP, 2019); A Handbook of Rural India (Orient Blackswan, 2018); Contested Hierarchies, Persisting Influence: Caste and Power in Twenty-First Century India (co-edited with James Manor, Orient Blackswan, 2018); Inequality in Capitalist Societies (co-authored with Boike Rehbien and Jesse Souza, Routledge, 2018); The Indian Middle-Class (co-authored with Aseem Prakash, OUP, 2016); Caste in Contemporary India (Routledge, 2015/2018); and Caste: Oxford India Short Introductions (OUP, 2012). He is among the first recipients of the ICSSR-Amartya Sen Award for Distinguished Social Scientists for the year 2012.
Jules Naudet is a CNRS Associate Research Professor at the Center for South Asian Studies, EHESS, Paris, and a CASBS Fellow at Stanford University (2021-2022). He has authored
Stepping into the Elite (OUP, 2018), which revisits the classical question of the experience of moving from one class to another, co-edited
Justifier l'ordre social (with Christophe Jaffrelot; University Press of France, 2013), and co-authored
Ce que les riches pensent des pauvres (with Serge Paugam, Bruno Cousin, and Camila Giorgetti; Le Seuil, 2017), a comparative analysis of the representations of the poor by the inhabitants of upper-class neighbourhoods in Paris, Delhi, and São Paulo. Naudet is a member of the editorial board of
SAMAJ (South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal) and the co-editor-in-chief of
La Vie des Idées/ Books & Ideas, an online journal hosted by the Collège de France. He co-edits the book series
Exploring India's Elite with Surinder S. Jodhka.
