@article{1436705,
      author = {Ingole, Anagha,},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1436705},
      title = {Caste panchayats and caste politics in India /},
      abstract = {'Scholars have waited long and keenly for a book-length  treatment of the subject of caste panchayats. Their  expectations could not have been more substantially  fulfilled. This is a work that combines real historical  depth of learning with acute theoretical analysis. It is  highly instructive and illuminating not only on the nature  and function of caste panchayats, but on the wider details  of castes relation to politics and, quite generally, on the  claims of Indian political modernity.' Akeel Bilgrami,  Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy, Professor,  Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University, New York,  NY, USA The volume makes an important contribution in  analytical understanding of castes and their historical  formation in Panchayats. More importantly, the research  work maps out the role these panchayats have been playing  in consolidating both property as well political power  relations. The author offers a careful account of complex  phenomena such as caste panchayats. Gopal Guru, Former  Professor, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru  University; Editor, EPW, India The book refutes the  dominant understanding about caste panchayats as mere  dispute resolution bodies that are vestiges of the past. In  tracing the long career and evolution of intra-caste  governance from 300 BC to the present, it challenges  several orthodoxies in the caste scholarship. Most  prominently, it questions the assumptions of modernization  theory that became internalized in the very definition of  caste based political organisations as caste became a  subject of study in politics in the 1960s and 70s. In doing  this, the book reflects in some detail on the uncomfortable  question of the persistence of caste-based conservatism  despite the current dominance, so to say, of caste-based  democratization in the Indian polity. It tries to make  visible the limitations of caste politics from below, as it  is being imagined today, making a plea for a radical  re-imagination of caste as an identity that does not  require a self-perpetuation of the primordial aspects of  caste to purse the opportunities offered by modern  democracy, but one that can facilitate the empowerment of  caste through the pursuit of the ameliorations on offer as  well as the annihilation of caste, as eventually mutual  goals. Anagha Ingole teaches at the Department of Political  Science, University of Hyderabad, India. She has been a  Fulbright-Nehru Post-Doctoral Fellow at Columbia University  New York, where she wrote a large part of this book. She  started her work on caste panchayats while working with  BARTI, Pune and has written on the topic since, in national  and international publications.},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1275-6},
      recid = {1436705},
      pages = {1 online resource (198 pages)},
}