Whilst much has been written about the significance of caste in Tamil politics, there has
been less attention paid to the ways in which caste is played out in the cultural sphere. This …

" Police Matters moves beyond the city to examine the intertwined nature of police and caste
in the Tamil countryside. Radha Kumar argues that the colonial police acted as tools of the …

This article examines the political deification of Harichand and Guruchand Thakur, the
founders of an anti-caste religion called Matua Dharma, in contemporary West Bengal. The …

Police custodial violence was a normal occurrence in the southern Indian province of
Madras through the twentieth century, across the colonial and postcolonial periods alike …

Caste inequalities persist in the relatively anonymized terrain of the modern, Indian city. The
study of caste in urban India thus requires us to turn to the seemingly invisible symbolic …

In his short story 'New Custom'(Naya Kaayda), Ajay Navaria (2013) describes how a tea-
seller in a village asks a man, whom he had initially mistaken to be a Thakur, to wash the …

In their struggle for equality in Tamil Nadu, Dalits (ex-untouchables) often challenge
prevailing caste norms by appropriating practices and conventions of locally dominant …

This dissertation examines the entanglements of Dalit (formerly “untouchable”) activists in
southern India with the ideas and practices of democracy. The research seeks to understand …