Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity: Notes on a Postcolonial Hermeneutics of Caste

"This book is an attempt to come to terms with the presence of caste in late modern India. It does so by addressing two questions: How do we read caste today? Why is it no longer enough to brand caste as pre-modern and backward? The author challenges the normative modernity inherent in social scientific approaches to caste by arguing that caste is not so much an essence responsible for India's "backwardness as a constellation of variegated social practices that are in a constant state of flux and that cannot be completely contained in a narrative of nation-building, modernisation and development. She turns her archival and analytical focus on both caste Hindu and dalit literary, mythographic and religious texts and in the process illustrates the importance of reading caste as an assemblage of secular and non-secular practices and affects that generate everyday life in India. What is offered in such analysis is not an endorsement of either the caste-system or casteism, but a resistance to the reified ways in which caste continues to figure in social scientific and nation-building discourses."--BOOK JACKET.

Debjani Ganguly is Director, Research Development, at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University.