MDCI1203 | Major Debates on Caste in India

The proposed course, Major Debates on Caste in India, is a foundational course that seeks to expose  students to major debates and trends in social science research on caste in India. The very fact that  Indian society cannot be fully understood without understanding caste provides the impetus for this  course. While caste and its encounter with modernity and democracy are one of the most  fashionable themes of Indian politics, yet it’s not an easy task to define what caste is. Disciplinary  boundaries work as a major handicap in our quest to have a comprehensive understanding of caste.  Through intersecting writings of three different disciplines (sociology and anthropology, literature,  and politics) on caste, the course provides an opportunity for students to comprehend caste in its  entirety.

The course is divided into three major interrelated parts. Debates among sociologists and  anthropologists, mainly between Louis Dumont, M. N. Srinivas, Nicholas Dirks and Dipankar  Gupta, constitute the first part. The debate is anchored around the following questions: what is  caste? What is the appropriate conceptual category to understand caste, i.e. varna or jati? What  makes caste a system, both at the level of intellectual debates and empirical processes? How has  hierarchy been thought about? What is the relationship between ritual status and temporal power?

Moving beyond social science discourses on caste, the second part brings in reflection on  caste in Hindi literature. Reading autobiographies can immensely help one not only to grasp the  1

everyday reality of caste but it can also enrich caste’s conceptualisation. Such a task would enable  students to comprehend as to how and why the meaning and nature of caste that one finds in  autobiographies differs from mainstream academic discourses. It asks, why the concept of  humiliation and violence, so central to autobiographies, hardly figure in social science discourses on  caste. It brings in the concept of humiliation centrally to the table. Most importantly, it also brings  in the debate on whether experience can be a legitimate vocabulary for theorising social  phenomena, caste in our case.

The last part, Caste, Democracy and Modernity, seeks to unravel caste’s encounter with  modernity and its implications for Indian society. It also brings to light the specifics of Indian  modernity and the ways in which caste has adapted to the democratic processes. Writings of  political scientists and political sociologists would be referred to understand the nature of this  encounter.