Caste Panchayats and Caste Politics in India: Book Discussion

Book discussion on ‘Caste Panchayats and Caste Politics in India’, authored by Anagha Ingole. It was chaired by Priyadarshini Vijaisri. The panelists included Anagha Ingole, Gopal Guru and Akeel Bilgrami.

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Caste Panchayats and Caste Politics in India traces the long career and evolution of intra-caste governance from 300 BCE to the present, repudiates the dominant view about caste panchayats as mere dispute resolution bodies and challenges several orthodoxies in the caste scholarship. It reflects on the question of caste-based democratization in the Indian polity and tries to make visible the limitations of ‘caste politics from below’, as it is being imagined today. The book makes a plea for a radical re-imagination of caste as an identity that can facilitate the empowerment of caste through the pursuit of the ameliorations on offer as well as the annihilation of caste, as eventually mutual goals.

Anagha Ingole is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science at the University of Hyderabad.

Gopal Guru is Former Professor, Department of Political Science, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Editor, Economic and Political Weekly.

Akeel Bilgrami is Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, New York.

Priyadarshini Vijaisri is Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.

Saturday, 10 July 2021, 7 pm IST, Zoom https://bit.ly/360YoP4