In sociology and in the wider academia, caste is regarded as the basic unit of the Indian society. Yet, this academic notion of caste, I argue, had emerged only in the late 19th century in the course of the census operations in colonial India. Hence, the pervasive scholarly practice of translating varna and jati, indigenous social forms whose existence can indeed be traced from the earliest times, as caste, is erroneous; it has led to inconsistencies in the writings on the subject. To illustrate, I analyse the writings of the eminent sociologist M.N. Srinivas in this article. Srinivas’s explanation of caste was caught up in an inherent contradiction that led him to make inconsistent inferences. Srinivas was not unaware of the problem. However, the idea of ‘system’ that he had imbibed from the discipline of social anthropology prevented him from reviewing his historically received notion of caste. Hence, those inconsistencies continued.
This article is about the question of state power, violence and the identity predicaments of a marginalised Muslim community called Marakkayars, living in Beemapalli, a coastal hamlet located in the Thiruvananthapuram district of southern Kerala. Based on insights from judicial discourse and ethnography of an event of spectacle state violence that occurred in Beemapalli in the year 2009, the article shows how the contesting discourses that emerged after the violence are entangled with a larger transformation that has taken place in the recent history of this locality—the shift from an ethnic enclave to a ghetto. The judicial discourse which justifies the police violence in Beemapalli and the counter narratives from the locality that vehemently oppose it give interesting insight into the confrontations between the state and a ghettoised community prior to and after the violence. The article also demonstrates how the relationship between the state agencies and ghettoised Marakkayar Muslims is saturated with varied forms of violence: legitimate and illegitimate, physical and symbolic, spectacle and everyday in a complex way.
This article interprets the function of mine worker’s observance of the colliery-goddess cult, described as the Khadan–Kali cult, for gaining access to divine power so as to secure safety, and explains its relationship with the new political and scientific accident-control emphases adopted by workers from the 1920s onwards. Some observers regard the workers’ industrial–religious rites an expression of the pre-bourgeois customs. The latter is understood to have been in contradistinction to the modern principle of secular ethics and reason. Mine workers with such ‘fatalistic’ outlook could make few efforts to curb occupational hazards. Such outlook was an allegory of workers’ loss of control over their own personal destinies and of the price they paid for industrialisation. These observations, my study shows, would overlook, in our case, the fact that the colliery-goddess cult embodied the desire of workers for control over hazardous mining and for self-preservation. Indeed, it gave way to the secular-safety politics and also inscribed newer meanings to the relationship between the deity and her adherents. Miners vested in it a critique of the new official scheme that attributed responsibility for fatality and injury to an individual miner and subjected him/her to certain punitive actions. The article relies on material collected from archives and historical–anthropological survey of 25 former mine workers, undertaken during 2003–09.
This article seeks to understand the contrarian impulses embedded in the historic Supreme Court judgement in the ‘battle for Niyamgiri’ that resulted in tribal gram sabhas rejecting the bauxite mining proposal of the Odisha state government and transnational corporation, Vedanta. It proposes that the importance of the Niyamgiri case lies in the legal representation of indigeneity that emerges as a counterpoint to automatic assumptions of developmentalism and cultural homogeneity. However, rather than seeing this as an epistemic or discursive break in the practice of law, it proposes that we see the case ‘jurisdictionally’, as a practice of representation that is enacted through technologies and devices of law. It is important to understand that constitutive actors—lawyers, judges, ministers, experts, tribals—within specific jurisdictional spaces can change the prudence and diction in law, beyond the internal necessity of rules underwritten by tradition or dominant discourse. It is through this lens that the article sees the Niyamgiri story as inaugurating a particular form of lawful relations for indigeneity—one that becomes a part of case law history and precedent. No matter how tenuous, precedents such as Niyamgiri underwrite the prospect of future iterations of indigeneity.