Contributions to Indian Sociology

It is well known that the legal texts of the Hindu tradition known as Dharmaśāstra vigorously defend caste and social hierarchy. Studies of the nature of caste in this textual tradition, however, have overlooked the important argument that legal texts and categories define and determine caste status. This article examines two major commentaries of the Dharmaśāstra tradition from medieval India and shows how they fit into a wider philosophical debate about the nature of caste as a social institution. With comparisons to studies of race in America, I emphasise the instability of sight or vision as the determinate factor in the social construction of caste. Rather, following medieval Hindu law authors, I argue that caste, like race, is produced and sustained through the cultivation and promulgation of legal rules and categories. The constitutive role of the law in the reproduction of caste thus has a deeper history that merits further attention to understand the sociology of caste.

In this article, I examine the ways in which ideas of martyrdom are employed by Gujjars in Rajasthan to describe their experiences of participating in the 2006 and 2007 Gujjar Andolan (protest), serving in the army, and in their telling of the Devnarayan epic. I take as a starting point the manner in which the bodies of Gujjars killed in police firing during the andolan were laid out for 17 days at the site of the andolan while Gujjar men and women recited the Devnarayan epic. The laying out of the martyred bodies then becomes a site for the production of caste belonging and caste love.

This article examines how ethnicities in the state of Sikkim have evolved and emerged as fluid but potent instruments that are deployed by the state’s constituent ethnic groups in their efforts to marshal and retain control over its socio-economic and political resources, in conjunction with the policies of the central government. The process of validating ethnic identities that began in the colonial period has now been strengthened and shapes the protective polices of governments at both levels, the central and the state, for Sikkim. The processes of modernisation and development set in motion after Sikkim’s merger with India have resulted in consolidation and reconfiguration of ethnicities across the structural and cultural spheres of Sikkimese society.

The initial impressions from Delhi’s Lajpat Rai Market, Palika Bazaar and Nehru Place have been that they integrated into the digital economy as suppliers and service providers to e-commerce platforms during COVID times. The increasing use of digital payments to boost online sales, including social media marketing on Facebook and YouTube, has also brought many of them inside a banking system. As a result, physical bazaars are now less about informal face-to-face commerce and operate more as repair hubs and ancillaries to a platform economy.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, communities in the hills of Northeast India fought the epidemic by taking recourse to traditional preventive health measures, both sealing off villages and quarantining to combat the spread of the highly infectious coronavirus. These traditional emergency health measures grew out of local experience with disease but resemble the current practices of lockdown and quarantine. Quarantine measures, dismissed by the World Health Organization in 2018 as ‘no longer efficient’, were re-established in the course of the epidemic. However, these practices continued to be part of the oral tradition of villages in the Northeast and highlighted an aspect of their autonomy in this arena.

Saiba Varma. 2020. The Occupied Clinic: Militarism and Care in Kashmir. Durham and London: Duke University Press. xx + 281 pp. Maps, figures, notes, bibliography, index. $27.94 (eBook)

Nilika Mehrotra, ed. 2020. Disability Studies in India: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. xiii + 318 pp. Tables, figures, references. €96.29 (eBook)

Durba Mitra. 2020. Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 296 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 (paperback).

Markus Schleiter and Erik de Maaker, eds. 2020. Media, Indigeneity and Nation in South Asia. London and New York: Routledge. xvi + 281 pp. Notes, figures, references, index. £120.00 (hardback)

James Staples. 2020. Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian: The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India. Seattle: University of Washington Press. xvi + 229 pp. Figures, notes, glossary, references, index. $30 (paperback)

Usha Sanyal. 2020. Scholars of Faith: South Asian Muslim Women and the Embodiment of Religious Knowledge. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. xiv + 395 pp. Figures, tables, glossary, bibliography, index. ₹1495 (hardback)