CASTE AND CLASS IN INDIA

Caste and class as topics of research may cover almost entire gamut of sociological inquiry. The book, Caste and Class in India, is an outcome of a very well organized and academically fruitful exercise under the auspices of the TDSS, Pune. The papers included in the volume, covering nine states, highlight the complex dynamics of the nexus between caste and class. Caste as seen from the class point of view and class as seen from the caste point of view make it explicit that the two inhere each other historically as well as in contemporary India as inseparable aspects of India’s social formation. However, the dynamics of the nexus have varied from region to region. This is how West Bengal presents a different scenario compared to Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. What is today in the form of casteism in Bihar is not found elsewhere in the country. Rajasthan, despite its feudal legacy, has witnessed remarkable socio-economic and political changes in the post-independence period, and this is much less evident in the case of Bihar or Uttar Pradesh.

A lot of anti-Brahmin movements in the southern states and Maharashtra before independence created a great deal of socio-political awakening among the masses. The movements organized by the left parties after 1947 have further added to the persisting anti-Brahmin and anti-landlord thinking among the dalits. Despite all these antithetical tendencies, caste persists, and in some cases even the upper caste leaders of the left parties have been found as the biggest landlords in Kerala and some other parts of India. Caste seems to have its decline and revival at the same time, and this is possible because caste is appropriated by a select group of people to their economic and political advantages. The volume highlights on these and several other aspects of caste-class and class-caste nexus from historical as well as contemporary perspective. It would help teachers, researchers, students and policy-makers immensely by providing a panoramic view of the interpenetrating but not mutually reducible phenomenon of caste and class in India.