This book is about the legal regulation of caste discrimination. It highlights the difficulty of capturing caste in international and domestic law, and suggests solutions. Its aim is to contribute to the task of understanding how to secure effective legal protection from and prevention of discrimination on grounds of caste, and why this is important and necessary. It does this by examining the legal conceptualization and regulation of caste as a social category and as a ground of discrimination, in international law and in two national jurisdictions (India and the UK), identifying their complexities, strengths, limitations and potential. Adopting a broadly chronological approach, the book aims to present an account of the role of law in the construction of caste inequality and discrimination, and the subsequent legal efforts to dismantle it. The book will be of value to lawyers and non-lawyers, academics and students of human rights, international law, equalities and discrimination, descent-based and caste-based discrimination, minority rights, and South Asia and its diaspora. It will be a resource for legal practitioners and those in the public and non-governmental sectors involved in the implementation, interpretation and enforcement of equality law in the UK – the first European country to introduce the word "caste" into domestic equality legislation – and in countries with South Asian diasporas such as the USA.

This book discusses the salience of the caste question in UK law. It provides the background to how the caste provision came into the Equality Act 2010 and how it was reinforced in 2013, and analyses the various interests that played a role in getting caste into law.

This textbook offers comprehensive coverage of the Equality Act 2010 and deals also with the equality aspects of the Human Rights Act 1998 and European Convention on Human Rights. It encourages critical analysis of equality law to equip the reader with an understanding of the enduring challenges that frame equality law and contemporary responses to those challenges. New content includes a chapter on age discrimination and analysis of the Public Sector Equality Duty. Structured so as to be accessible to the student approaching discrimination law for the first time, the book is also sufficiently detailed and analytical to appeal to the well-informed reader, and to provide those engaged in research with a solid base for further independent study. For the undergraduate student studying discrimination law as a free-standing subject or as part of a wider course, the book provides a one-stop shop. This book is also a key core text for any postgraduate discrimination law course.

This book argues that the dominant descriptions of the ‘caste system’ are rooted in the Western Christian experience of India. Thus, caste studies tell us more about the West than about India. It further demonstrates the imperative to move beyond this scholarship in order to generate descriptions of Indian social reality. The dominant descriptions of the ‘caste system’ that we have today are results of originally Christian themes and questions. The authors of this collection show how this hypothesis can be applied beyond South Asia to the diasporic cultures that have made a home in Western countries, and how the inheritance of caste studies as structured by European scholarship impacts on our understanding of contemporary India and the Indians of the diaspora. This collection will be of interest to scholars and students of caste studies, India studies, religion in South Asia, postcolonial studies, history, anthropology and sociology.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions—now with a new Afterword by the author. #1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, O: The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, New York Post, The New York Public Library, Fortune, Smithsonian Magazine, Marie Claire, Slate, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews Winner of the Carl Sandberg Literary Award • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • National Book Award Longlist • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist • PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist • PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Longlist • Kirkus Prize Finalist “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.” In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully written narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their outcasting of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity. Original and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.

Dr Bhimrao R. Ambedkar (1891-1956) was one of India's greatest intellectuals and social reformers; his political ideas continue to inspire and mobilise some of the world's poorest and most socially disadvantaged, in India and the global Indian diaspora. Ambedkar's thought on labour, legal rights, women's rights, education, caste, political representation and the economy are international in importance. This book explores his lesser-known period of London-based study and publication during the early 1920s, presenting that experience as a lens for thinking about Ambedkar's global intellectual significance. Some of his later canon on caste, and Dalit rights and representation, was rooted in and shaped by his earlier work around the economy, governance, labour and representation during his time as a law student and as a doctoral candidate at the London School of Economics. The Indian diaspora in the UK is the country's single largest national minority. This volume connects Ambedkar's influence during his lifetime, and his legacy today, to this early phase of his career and intellectual life in London, and its immediate aftermath. It contains new material on the establishment of the city's Ambedkar Museum, explores Britain's Ambedkarite movement, and charts the campaign to outlaw caste discrimination in the UK.

This book explores destitution from the perspective of international human rights law and, more specifically, economic, social, and cultural rights. The experience of destitution correlates to the non-realisation of a range of economic, social, and cultural rights. However, destitution has not been defined from this perspective. Consequently, the nexus between destitution and the denial of economic, social, and cultural rights remains unrecognised within academia and policy and practice. This book expressly addresses this issue and in so doing renders the nexus between destitution and the non-realisation of these rights visible. The book proposes a new human rights-based definition of destitution, composed of two parts. The rights which must be realised (the component rights) and the level of realisation of these rights which must be met (the destitution threshold) to avoid destitution. This human rights-based understanding of destitution is then applied to a UK case study to highlight the relationship between government policy and destitution, to illustrate how destitution manifests itself, and to make recommendations – founded upon engendering the realisation of economic, social, and cultural rights – aimed towards addressing destitution. This book will have global and cross-sectoral appeal to anti-poverty advocates, policy makers, as well as to researchers, academics and students in the fields of human rights law, poverty studies, and social policy.