Caste and community structures in India | Suguna Ramanathan
In popular imagination, the caste system in India has always been understood as somehow ‘essential’ to India. The subject of many an anthropological enquiry in the present, the formulation of caste as system may also be traced back to British colonial interest in understanding Indian society. Nicholas Dirks for instance has famously observed that caste is a modern phenomenon by which under British imagination and scrutiny it could subsume diverse forms of social identity present in India. SugunaRamanathan discussesthe continued dominance of caste as a form of representation in present day India especially in terms of its institutionalization and sanction in religion. She focuses on its operation in social life, the pernicious grip that it has on the Indian mind, and uses the framework of caste to examine the complex relationship between social justice and equality.
