Retro-modern India: Forging the Low-caste Self

Description

Firmly situated within the analytics of the political economy of a north Indian province, this book explores self-fashioning in pursuit of the modern amongst low-caste Chamars. Challenging existing accounts of national modernity in the non-West, the book argues that subaltern classes shape their own ideas about modernity by taking and rejecting from models of other classes within the same national context. While displacing the West — in its colonial and non-colonial manifestations — as the immanent comparative focus, the book puts forward a unique framework for the analysis of subaltern modernity. This builds on the entanglements between two main trajectories, both of which are viewed as the outcome of the generative impetus of modernisation in India: the first consists of the Chamar appropriation of socio-cultural distinctions forged by 19th-century Indian middle classes in their encounter with colonial modernity; the second features the Chamar subversion of high-caste ideals and practices as a result of low-caste politics initiated during the 20th century. The author contends that these conflicting trends give rise to a temporal antinomy within the Chamar politics of self-making, caught up between compulsions of a past modern and of a contemporary one. The eclectic outcome is termed as ‘retro-modernity’. While the book signals a politics of becoming whose dynamics had previously been overlooked by scholars, it simultaneously opens up novel avenues for the understanding of non-elite modern life-forms in postcolonial settings. The book will interest scholars of anthropology, South Asian studies, development studies, gender studies, political science and postcolonial studies. Front Cover Retro-modern India Copyright Page Contents Orthography and Transliteration Glossary of Selected Terms Foreword by Mukulika Banerjee Acknowledgements Chapter 1. Chamar Modernity: Progressing into the Past Chapter 2. ‘Today We Can Touch Anything’: Reflections on the Crux of Identity and Political Economy Chapter 3. Ethnohistories behind Local and Global Bazaars: Chronicle of a Weaving Community and its Disappearance Chapter 4. 'We Used to Live Like Animals’: Education as a Self- and Community-engineering Process Chapter 5. Nonrational Modernity? Religious Agency, Science and Spirits Chapter 6. Beyond the Vote: Politics as Sociality, Imagination and Identity Chapter 7. The Bourgeois Woman and the Half-naked one: Gendering Retro-modernity Chapter 8. The Politics of Indian Modernity Bibliography About the Author Index