Textual Lives of Caste Across the Ages

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B01=Prathama Banerjee
caste
caste criticism
caste thinking
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HBJF
Category=HBTB
Category=HBTQ
Category=NHF
Category=NHTB
Category=NHTQ
COP=United Kingdom
cultural history
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eq_history
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India
jati
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philosophy
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social history
softlaunch
South Asia
textuality
varna

Product details

  • ISBN 9781350355019
  • Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
  • Publication Date: 14 Nov 2024
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Hardback
  • Language: English
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The essays in this volume explore the myriad ways in which caste (varna and jati) has been theorized and critiqued in multiple philosophical, religious, logical and narrative traditions in India. Spanning ancient, medieval and modern times, and in diverse classical and vernacular languages, the chapters show how the social fact of caste, and imaginations of kinship, community and humanity were historically subject to epistemological, spiritual, and existential debate in both elite and popular circles in India.

Textual Lives of Caste Across the Ages seeks to bridge the interdisciplinary gap between historians and sociologists by focusing on texts that help us think across the sociological and philosophical, the political and the religious, the epistemological and the aesthetic, and indeed, the elite and the popular. The volume also sets up a conversation between scholars specializing in different regions, archives, and historical periods and demonstrates how caste imaginaries have been deeply diverse and contested in India’s past. Reconstructing these diverse traditions of social and existential criticism helps us in our contemporary struggles against caste hierarchy and untouchability and enriches our contemporary critical repertoire.

Prathama Banerjee is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, India. A historian of 19th- and 20th-century India, her research interests include political, intellectual and cultural history. Her most recent book is Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South (Duke University Press, 2020).