Centre for the Study of Social Systems
School of Social Sciences
CSSS Colloquium
Surinder S. Jodhka
(Professor, CSSS, Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Exclusionary Rural Transformations:
Social Dynamics of Caste and Community in the Non-farm Economy
Date & Time: February 9th 2017 (Thursday), 3.00 p.m.
Venue: CSSS Committee Room, SSS-II
Abstract: Rural population in India has always been internally differentially on caste and community lines. Caste and community have not merely been distinctions of cultural identity and ritual status. They have also shaped access to material resources, such as agricultural land and produced rigid and exclusionary social structure grounded on institutionalized practices of discrimination and denial. Poverty and deprivations have thus been socially localized realities in rural India. The presentation will draw from the author's recent fieldwork of the growing non-farm economy intwo large "rural" settlements of the Madhubani district of Bihar. Bihar has been one of the least developed pockets in contemporary India with poverty levels higher than the national average and significantly lower urban population. The paper attempts to show how the contemporary "non-farm" rural through its dynamic relationship with the emergent urban reproduces poverty, inequality and exclusion. Even though the "traditional" rural economy and its social organization have nearly completely disintegrated and changed, poverty tends persist and the newer forms of exclusions are often around the pre-existing structures of caste, community (religion) and gender.
Bio: Surinder S. Jodhka is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, JNU. His field of specialization includes social inequalities, agrarian change, village studies, social and cultural identities and development studies. He is currently engaged with studies on different dimensions of social inequalities – old and new – and the processes of their reproduction. His empirical focus over the past decade or so has been the dynamics of caste and the varied modes of its articulation with the nature of social and economic change in "neo-liberal" India. His publications include 'Caste in Contemporary India (Routledge, 2015), 'Caste: Oxford India Short Introduction (OUP, 2012), 'Interrogating India's Modernity: Democracy, Identity and Citizenship' (OUP 2013). The Indian Middle Class (OUP, 2016)
