About the Book
The book refutes the dominant understanding about caste panchayats as
mere dispute resolution bodies that are vestiges of the past. In tracing
the long career and evolution of intra-caste governance from 300 BC to
the present, it challenges several orthodoxies in the caste scholarship.
Most
prominently, it questions the assumptions of modernization theory that
became internalized in the very definition of caste-based political
organisations as caste became a subject of study in politics in the
1960s and 70s. In doing this, the book reflects in some detail on the
uncomfortable question of the persistence of caste-based conservatism
despite the current dominance, so to say, of caste-based democratization
in the Indian polity. It tries to make visible the limitations of
'caste politics from below', as it is being imagined today, making a
plea for a radical re-imagination of caste as an identity that does not
require a self-perpetuation of the primordial aspects of caste to purse
the opportunities offered by modern democracy, but one that can
facilitate the empowerment of caste through the pursuit of the
ameliorations on offer as well as the annihilation of caste, as
eventually mutual goals.
Contents
1. Introduction: Studying Caste Panchayats
2. The Caste Panchayat, Caste Governance, and the Role of the State: The Long View
3. Caste Panchayats Today
4. Intra-caste Purity and Social Ostracization
5. Caste Endogamy
6. Conclusions
About the Author / Editor
Anagha Ingole teaches at the Department of Political Science, University
of Hyderabad, India. She has been a Fulbright-Nehru Post-Doctoral
Fellow at Columbia University New York, where she wrote a large part of
this book. She started her work on caste panchayats while working with
BARTI, Pune and has written on the topic since, in national and
international publications.
