Sony Pellissery

N. Jayaram

Rahul Choragudi

Caste in India, despite its historical resilience, has been undergoing transformation since independence. If caste as a system of rigid stratification has been on the decline, castes as autonomous interest-serving groups have been on ascendance. This book critically engages with the changing notions of caste and its intersection with public policy in India. It discusses key issues such as social security, internal reservation, the idea of Most Backward Classes, caste issues among non-Hindu religious communities, caste in census, caste in market, and service castes and urban planning. Drawing on in-depth case studies from states including Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Karnataka, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and West Bengal, the volume explores the cyclical process of how caste drives policies, and how policies in turn shape the reality of caste in India. It looks at the impact of factors like protective discrimination, adult franchise and democratic decentralisation, horizontal and vertical mobilisation, land reforms, and religious conversion on social mobility, and traditional hierarchy in India. Empirically rich and analytically rigorous, this book will be an excellent reference for scholars and researchers of public policy, public administration, sociology, exclusion studies, social work, law, history, economics, political science, development studies, social anthropology, and political sociology. It will also be of interest to public policy and development practitioners.

Issues and Perspectives

Caste Matters in Public Policy

This book explores the dynamics of the socio-cultural baggage that Indian indentured migrants took with them to the Caribbean island of Trinidad and how they have since become a vibrant diaspora community, namely the Indo-Trinidadians. It combines social history with first-hand fieldwork data to portray human ingenuity in terms of social reconstitution and community building in a hostile socio-cultural environment. Furthermore, it addresses key social institutionsreligion, caste, and familyand cultural elementslanguage, foodways, and ethnicity. Its analytical framework is guided by the concept of metamorphosis; it steers clear of the persistence versus change hypotheses. Given its focus, it will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, social anthropology, history, and migration and diaspora studies.

The Making of a Girmitiya Diaspora

From Indians in Trinidad to Indo-Trinidadians

Matt Evans

Fred Lazin

This volume provides a broad overview of recent higher education policy in a variety of countries, both developed and developing, around the world. Using interdisciplinary methods and analysis, it focuses on how diminishing governmental resources and expanding market forces influence higher education policy in different countries in terms of access, minority status (including ethnic, national and gender groups), affirmative action, quality, and performance.

Cross-National Perspectives

Higher Education and Equality of Opportunity

Vibha Arora

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of illustrations -- Notes on contributors -- Preface -- Introduction: steering democratisation and negotiating identity in the Himalayas -- PART I Shifting selves and competing identities -- 1 Seeking identities on the margins of democracy: Jad Bhotiyas of Uttarkashi -- 2 The politics of census: fear of numbers and competing claims for representation in Naga society -- 3 The making of the subaltern Lepcha and the Kalimpong stimulus -- PART II Negotiating democracy -- 4 Monks, elections, and foreign travels: democracy and the monastic order in western Arunachal Pradesh, North-East India -- 5 'Pure democracy' in 'new Nepal': conceptions, practices, and anxieties -- PART III Territorial conflict and after -- 6 Demand for Kukiland and Kuki ethnic nationalism -- 7 Displacement from Kashmir: gendered responses -- Index

Interests, Conflicts, and Negotiations

Democratisation in the Himalayas

Partha Nath Mukherji

Bhola Nath Ghosh

This volume includes fourteen essays by eminent sociologists in memory of Ramkrishna Mukherjee (1919–2017), the last of the founding architects of sociology in India. It also includes two interviews with Ramkrishna Mukherjee by senior sociologists. The essays cover a variety of themes and topics close to the works of Ramkrishna Mukherjee: the idea of unitary social science, methodology of social research, the question of facts and values, rural society and social change, social mobility, family and gender, and nationalism. In the two interviews included here Mukherjee clarifies his intellectual trajectory as well as issues of methodology and methods in social research. Overall, this volume endorses his emphasis on the need for social researchers to transcend the ‘what’ and ‘how’ to ‘why’ in the pursuit of sociological knowledge. The volume is a valuable addition to the history of sociology in India. Students of sociology and other social sciences will find it useful as a book of substantive readings on social dynamics; those researching the social world will find in it a useful guide to issues in designing and execution of social research projects.

Essays in Memory of Ramkrishna Mukherjee

Understanding Social Dynamics in South Asia

Historically treated as an amorphous borderland and marginal to the understanding of democratic politics and governance in South Asia, Southeast Asia and northern Asia, the Himalayan region, in the last 50 years, has become an ‘active political laboratory’ for experiments in democratic structures and institutions. In turn, it has witnessed the evolution of myriad political ideologies, movements and administrative strategies to accommodate and pacify heterogeneous ethnic-national identities. Routeing Democracy in the Himalayas highlights how, through an ongoing process of democratisation, the Western liberal ideologies of democracy and decentralisation have interacted with varied indigenous politico-cultural ideas and institutions of an ethnic-nationally diverse population. It also reviews how formal democracy, regular elections, local self-governing structures, protection of the rights of minorities and indigenes, freedom of expression, development of mass media and formation of ethnic homelands — all have furthered participatory democracy, empowered the traditionally marginalised groups and ensured sustainable development to varying degrees. The book provides ethnographic and historical vistas of democracy under formation, at work, being contested and even being undermined, showing how democratisation thematically stitches the independent Himalayan nations and the Indian Himalayan states into a distinctive regional political mosaic. Combining new perspectives from comparative sociology, political anthropology and development studies, the volume will be useful for policy makers, as well as specialists, researchers and students in sociology, anthropology, area studies, development studies, and Tibet and Himalayan studies.

N. Jayaram

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