This volume offers for the first time a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the making and maintenance of a modern caste society in colonial and postcolonial West Bengal in India. Drawing on cutting-edge multidisciplinary scholarship, it explains why caste continues to be neglected in the politics of and scholarship on West Bengal, and how caste relations have permeated the politics of the region until today. The essays presented here dispel the myth that caste does not matter in Bengali society and politics, and make possible meaningful comparisons and contrasts with other regions in South Asia.

About the Author

Uday Chandra is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Goettingen, Germany.

Geir Heierstad is Research Director at the Department of International Studies, Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research, Oslo, Norway.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of Bergen, Norway.

Reviews

This important volume imaginatively unravels heterogeneous, subterranean, and formative histories . . . of caste. - Saurabh Dube, Center for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de Mexico

This timely, provocative and scholarly book . . . [wi]th its rich ethnography and fine-tuned political sense . . . challenges the comfortable assumptions of Bengal as a society in which class relations have trumped traditional inequities and hierarchies . . . [T]he authors put caste centrally on the agenda of social theory in South Asia. - Dilip Menon, Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of Witwatersrand

Book Information
ISBN 9780815376606
Author Uday Chandra
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint CRC Press Inc
Publisher Taylor & Francis Inc
Weight(grams) 530g