This book examines the structures of power and hierarchies within the agrarian political economy in India, with a focus on gender. It analyses various forms of inequalities within rural structures while situating the position of women and Dalit agriculture labourers within these discriminate networks of social exclusion, political marginalisation and poverty. The book maps the impacts of neoliberal capitalist globalisation on agrarian relations to identify who labourers are and how rural diversification is shaped by class, caste and gender hierarchies specifically in the villages of eastern Uttar Pradesh. It looks at occupational patterns of women workers, labour relations and reconceptualisation of labour. The book documents the experiences of exploitation as well as forms of resistance and collective action of rural women labourers. In doing this, the book deals with processes witnessed across the global South – rural distress, depeasantisation, migration, feminisation of agriculture as well as identity-based inequalities in rural labour markets. Rich in empirical data, the book will be useful for scholars and researchers of labour studies, women’s studies, political economy, agrarian economy, agrarian sociology, rural sociology, sociology, development studies and political studies.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Notes on contributors -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: We ask you to rethink: Different Dalit women and their subaltern politics -- Part I Imagining a new Dalit women's politics -- 1 Foreword: Dalits, Dalit women and the Indian State -- 2 For another difference: Agency, representation and Dalit women in contemporary India -- Part II Dalit women's conceptualizations of caste difference and their means of collectivization -- 3 Gendered negotiations of caste identity: Dalit women's activism in rural Tamil Nadu -- 4 Liberation panthers and pantheresses? Gender and Dalit party politics in South India -- 5 Microcredit self-help groups and Dalit women: Overcoming or essentializing caste difference? -- Part III A broken empowerment? Are women still trapped by caste and patriarchy? -- 6 Dalit women, rape and the revitalisation of patriarchy? -- 7 Different Dalit women speak differently: Unravelling, through an intersectional lens, narratives of agency and activism from everyday life in rural Uttar Pradesh -- 8 Subsidising capitalism and male labour: The scandal of unfree Dalit female labour relations -- Part IV Religion as Dalit political practice -- 9 Transformation and the suffering subject: Caste-class and gender in slum Pentecostal discourse -- 10 Improper politics: The praxis of subalterns in Chennai -- Afterword: The burden of caste: Scholarship, democratic movements and activism

"There is a great deal of controversy and debate on land acquisition and transactions concerning the economic development of India, particularly the rural parts of the country. This book explicates, from a sociological perspective, the effect of increasing land transactions on social mobility, based on a detailed study of selected villages in Lucknow, India. It argues that villages in modern India, particularly those close to cities, are no longer simple and integrated communities, but are, rather, more heterogeneous, complex and mobile, as a result of urban expansion and globalization. It contextualises land transactions in a political economic model, describing in detail the differential relationship between land and the state from ancient times to the present day, noting the different laws relating to land and their implications for rural life."

As 'globalization' moves rapidly from buzzword to cliche, evaluating the claims of neoliberal capitalism to empower and enrich remains urgently important. The authors in this volume employ feminist, ethnographic methods to examine what free trade and export processing zones, economic liberalization, and currency reform mean to women in Argentina, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Ghana, the United States, India, Jamaica, and many other places. Heralded as agents of prosperity and liberation neoliberal economic policies have all too often refigured and redoubled the burdens of gender, race, caste, class, and regional subordination that women bear.

Annotation. This volume of essays looks into the dynamic interconnection of class, caste and gender in the Indian political process. The focus is on interconnection (that is a relationship involving more than one category), while at the same time trying to understand each category by itself. The complex issues of caste, gender and class have been studied through a collection of essays that look into the people's struggle for social equality. Social oppression has been analyzed in the context of protests against such exploitation. Anti-caste movements and women's movements have been studied in much detail. The volume is divided into five sections and well-known specialists have contributed pertinent essays. This important book will contribute immensely in the understanding of the contemporary Indian political process.

#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.

This volume investigates how four socially constructed identities (race, gender, class and caste) can be rethought as matrices designed to accumulate various kinds of socio-economic values and to translate and transfer these values from one group to another. Essays in the anthology also attempt to compare the mechanisms deployed by various groups to consolidate identificatory investments. Drawn mainly for the fields of literary and cultural studies, the essays are grouped in four categories. Essays collected under ‘Theoretical Approaches’ scrutinize the relative value of various approaches; those collected under ‘Considerations of Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation’ examine the interaction between these three categories in formation of identities; those grouped under ‘Comparative Analysis of African-American and Dalit Writing’ provide comparative analyses of the literary productions of these two oppressed groups; and, finally, those under ‘The Persistence of Racialized Perceptions’ focus on the role of ideologically inflected perception of European colonizers and the persistence of such perception in the categorization and treatment of colonial migrants to the metropolis.