Resumo de Caste ,society And Politics In Indiasusan

Caste, Society and Politics in India is the
clearest and most convincing study of Caste in India I have read. Without denying
its medieval antecedents, Bayly argues thatCurrent manifestations of caste are now far more generalized
across the subcontinent than was the case in former times. ... Caste as we now recognize
it has been engendered, shaped and perpetuated by comparatively recent
political and social developments. ... even in parts of the so-called Hindu
heartland of Gangetic upper India, the institutions and beliefs which are now
often described as the elements of ''traditional'' caste were only just taking
shape as recently as the early eighteenth century - that is, the period of
rapid regional state-building which accompanied the collapse of Mughal rule and
the expansion of Western power in the subcontinent.

The following summary does justice neither to the subtleties
of Bayly''s thesis nor the complexities of Indian caste.

The origins of caste lay in the needs of Rajputs and others such as Maratha
king Shivaji to formalize and institutionalize positions based on military
prowess, as well as in notions of varna (the traditional fourfold class scheme), different kinds of jati (birth groups), and
associated Brahman-centered values. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, exaltation of routine and service by both Mughal successor kingdoms
and the East India Company (though the latter also feared caste-based sedition)
helped to spread Brahmanical caste conventions.

From early travelers and company reports to bureaucratic Victorian
census-taking and scientific theories of race, colonial
(Orientalist) theories of caste took a wide range of forms. Among
Indian theorists caste was intimately connected with notions of modernity and
nascent nationalism, with positions ranging from arguments for caste uplift to a Hindu defense of caste.

The first half of the twentieth century saw struggles between radically
different approaches to caste, most notably between Gandhi and Ambedkar and
Nehru over constitutional politics and the status of untouchables.
Independent India has seen intense debates over reservations
(quotas in government positions for members of particular castes), the
extension of notions of backwardness to include other backward
classes, and an increase in caste-based electoral politics.

This summarizes Bayly''s account of the ideological
debates and the events in the political arena. Two chapters (covering colonial
and independent India)
focus on more everyday

experiences of caste, in such areas as marriage, occupations, urbanisation,
notions of purity, pollution barriers, relationships between peasants and
landlords and merchants, and so forth. And a final chapter looks at the
symbolism and rhetoric of recent caste war violence, and at some of
the rural and urban tensions underlying it.Bayly concludes

India
then is not and never has been a monolithic caste society. It may even be
that one day the principles and usages of jati and Varna will lose much or all of their meaning
for Indians living both within and beyond the subcontinent. Nevertheless, if
one is to do justice to India''s
complex history, and to its contemporary culture and politics, caste must be
neither disregarded nor downplayed - its power has simply been too compelling
and enduring.

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