Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Caste-system in India'

This thesis analyzes the history of caste system and explains the theories of the birth of caste in Indian civilization. After defining the caste system in historical and cultural manner. examines the birth of and spreading of Dalit movement or low caste mass movement during the 19th and 20th century with the influence of British rule.

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses.
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2031-01-02

India has a population of 1, 2 billion people, and the country also has a great poor populationwhere 70 % still live in rural areas. The poorest are often Dalits, once called the untouchablesand they constitute one sixth, 167 million people, of India’s inhabitants. They are consideredoutside the caste system and are often on the bottom of the social ladder. Because of theircaste identity they are still discriminated. Since media has the power to influence this thesis focuses on how the Dalits arerepresented in three newspapers: Times of India, The Hindu and Indian Express. How dojournalists find their reporting about Dalits? The theories used are development journalism,the agenda setting theory and theory about minorities in media. A quantitative content analysis was done in Delhi during 17 days. 98 articles thatmentioned Dalits were found and coded. This was combined with a qualitative method: respondent research. Eight interviews withpolitical journalists were done. During the field work there was a legislative assembly electionin the state Uttar Pradesh, which affected the results since caste is closely related to politics inIndia. The results show that Dalits are mentioned quiet often in the newspapers, but the mainsubject is almost never Dalits and their situation in society. The most frequent topics were theelection, affirmative action, and crime and rape against Dalits. These subjects often have aconnection to sensation. The most quoted actors in the articles are the elite and not Dalits.Almost all respondents thought they could empower Dalits if they were reported about. Thisis a paradox since they almost never interview Dalits. There are no Dalit journalists at thethree newspapers, which can be one reason why they are not included in the news. There is little research done on this subject and therefore more research is needed.

Mestrado em Desenvolvimento e Cooperação Internacional
Nas últimas décadas, a gestão dos recursos hídricos tornou-se um elemento central no desenvolvimento devido às suas progressivas escassez e degradação da qualidade. Como esperado, tal é particularmente sensível nos países em desenvolvimento, onde se encontra o maior número de pessoas sem acesso a água potável. Neste trabalho procuramos realçar a importância da consideração de factores culturais e sociais na gestão dos recursos hídricos, de forma a se poder atingir uma melhor eficiência na implementação de projectos de melhoria das condições de abastecimento de água. Assim sendo, optámos por nos centrar na análise da sociedade indiana enquanto exemplo de um contexto socio-cultural particularmente complexo no que concerne à gestão da água. Na Índia predominam ainda grandes níveis de desigualdade social, em grande parte devidos ao sistema de castas e às grandes assimetrias de género. No seu quadro, a água detém um valor simbólico importante, sendo a sua gestão, por aqueles, fortemente influenciada. Precisamente, o principal objectivo deste trabalho consiste em demonstrar como na Índia as representações culturais da água, bem como a própria organização social desse país devem ser seriamente consideradas de forma a garantir o sucesso dos seus programas de gestão da água.
In the past decades, water resource management has become a main development issue due to its progressive scarcity and quality degradation. This is particularly true for the developing countries, where most of the population without access to drinking water lives. In this work, we intend to highlight the need to consider social and cultural factors in water management in order to attain better efficiency in implementing projects that aim to improve water supply conditions. Therefore, we decided to focus on the analyses of the Indian society as an example of a particularly complex social and cultural context when regarding water management. In India there still exist great levels of social inequality, mainly due to the caste system and gender asymmetries. In its framework, water has an important symbolic role and its management is by those highly influenced. Thus, the main purpose of this work is to demonstrate how in India cultural representations of water, as well as its social organization should be seriously considered in order to assure the success of its water management programmes.

Poverty reduction and Education for All (EFA) are important policy issues in many developing countries as they are both Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). As the existing literature suggests, education positively influences poverty reduction, while poverty, or low income, adversely affects the quality and quantity of education. Accordingly, if education fails to facilitate poverty reduction, the following generation's schooling is likely to be adversely affected, thus perpetuating a vicious education–poverty circle. It was against such a background, and employing a mixed methods approach to data collection and analysis, that this study investigated the relationship between education and multidimensional poverty at an individual as well as household level, and the influence of deprivation on children's education, in the context of the slum in Delhi, India. The thesis reveals that education – particularly primary and middle schooling – enhances the earnings of male slum dwellers in particular, the overwhelming majority of whom suffer from informality and instability of employment. It also emerges that education plays an important role in the ability to participate with confidence in the public sphere. At the household level, education proves to have a positive association with monetary poverty, but a higher level of education per se does not necessarily facilitate escape from non-monetary poverty. In such a nexus of poverty and education, the thesis found that household wealth in association with social group and migration status tends to be positively correlated with child schooling, education expenditure, and basic learning. There may be a chance of escaping poverty through education, but such a likelihood is limited for those households that are underprivileged in terms of caste and religion owing to slow progress in basic learning, as well as migrant households due to lack of access to schooling. The thesis concludes by proposing some education policies drawn from the major findings of the study that may be implemented in the Indian slum context.

Waiting time for non-emergency medical care in developing countries is rarely of immediate concern to policy makers that prioritize provision of basic health services. However, waiting time as a measure of health system responsiveness is important because longer waiting times worsen health outcomes and affect utilization of services. Studies that assess socioeconomic inequalities in waiting time provide evidence from developed countries such as England and the United States; evidence from developing countries is lacking. In this paper, we assess the relationship between social class i.e. caste of an individual and waiting time at health facilities - a client orientation dimension of responsiveness. We use household level data from two rounds of the Indian Human Development Survey with a sample size of 27,251 households in each wave (2005 and 2012) and find that lower social class is associated with higher waiting time. This relationship is significant for individuals that visited a male provider but not so for those that visited a female provider. Further, caste is positively related to higher waiting time only if visiting a private facility; for individuals visiting a government facility the relationship between waiting time and caste is not significant. In general, caste related inequality in waiting time has worsened over time. The results are robust to different specifications and the inclusion of several confounders.

During the last decades, a Hindi Dalit literary movement has emerged in North India. This essay is a study and comparison on character portrayals in short stories by two authors from this movement, Jayprakash Kardam and Ajay Navaria. The aim of this essay is to explore the implications of these portrayals considering these authors’ views on social change, their literary affiliations and a theoretical discussion on Dalit literature. The methodical basis for this study is a detailed character analysis of these short stories’ protagonists, antagonists and other relevant characters, supported by narrative- and conceptual analyses. This essay argues that the theoretical abstraction of Dalit consciousness [cetnā] has a mainstreaming effect on the Dalit experience [anubhūti] when it is portrayed in literature. These dynamics are visible in Kardam’s stories, in which his portrayals of the Dalit protagonist follow the conventional Dalit character template, a forthright and innocent archetype juxtaposed against an evil Brahmin. The pivoting moment in Kardam’s stories is when consciousness awakens in the Dalit protagonist and he joins the corporate resistance against a casteist society. In comparison, Navaria makes the individual the site for change in his stories—reflecting the Gandhian notion of hṛday parivartan (“change of heart”). Navaria foregrounds alternative perspectives to Dalit cetnā in his stories and seeks to understand his characters from a broader human experience. I further argue that Navaria’s stories are suggestive of an expansion of the binary discussion on anubhūti (“experience”) and sahānubhūti (“sympathy”) by the term samānubhūti (“empathy”) since Navaria, by his more complex, nuanced and personalised characterisation of both Dalits and Brahmins, provides a common ground that invites to reconciliation. This study concludes that while Kardam could be designated as a conventional Dalit author, Navaria should rather be situated in the boundaries between the Dalit and the mainstream Hindi literary field. It further concludes that more research is needed on theoretical concepts used in the Dalit literary discourse.

Kandidatuppsats i indologi

碩士
東吳大學
人權碩士學位學程
103
The caste system – the study of India Honor Killing Abstract Since India’s Independence , the government implemented a serial of affirmative action program, and made a great impact on numerous people beyond the other countries of the world .On 1950, Nehru invited Ambedkar as the first law minister to draft the Indian Constitution , Article 17 of the Indian Constitution had been abolished the , and prohibit the use of the word in public. The government begun provided the fundamental protection of human rights for the Dalit and the low-level catse. And set the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. However, the Indian society has discrimination and violation of fundamental human rights yet since the Indian’s constitution hitherto been implemented, but women has been violent among others. The intention of this article is to probe ideology of Indian people while facing the ‘’honor killing’’ under the caste system. That is the homicide of a member of a family by other members as a result of people marrying without their family's acceptance, and sometimes for marrying outside their caste. It’s hard to broke the caste tradition even the government encourage the intermarriage by legislation. The research purpose is to find out the reason why Hindu is deeply affected by caste ideology and Indian women suffer discrimination as caste, and propose solutions on how to solve the honor killing. Keywords: Hinduism, The caste system, Dalits, Gandhi, Ambedkar, the plans of redress discrImination, Honor killings

T h e project deals with adopting children from a distance in India and the assessment of the righteousness of the process from an ethical perspective. The first part introduces current India from a political, cultural, and religious perspective. The second part focuses on the introduction of the adoption from a distance process and evaluates the suitability and purposefulness of the individual parts of the project. The third part deals with the terms of righteousness and suitability of such adoption from a catholic perspective, where we also find the justification of the ethical part of the process. Such justification is later described in the description of Caritas in the threefold service to the church. following, you will find the incorporation of the human being into the social teachings of the church and the situational ethics. The project later focuses on the terms of solidarity, subsidiarity, and the universal relationship between men and charity. The last part is a practical excursion into the life of a community center in the Indian town of Moobidri, where the author visited himself.

Inspiré par la réflexion épistémologique de l'anthropologue Michel Verdon, ce mémoire propose un cadre conceptuel pour l'étude de l'organisation sociale des castes en Inde. L'ethnographie de Jonathan Parry, Caste and Kinship in Kangra, est analysée et réinterprétée dans un langage dit « opérationnel ». Les différentes approches des castes oscillent entre deux pôles théoriques opposés : l'idéalisme, représenté notamment par la démarche structuraliste de Louis Dumont, et le substantialisme, jadis adopté par les dirigeants coloniaux et incarné plus récemment dans les travaux de Dipankar Gupta. Toutes deux holistes, ces options conduisent pourtant à une impasse dans l'étude comparative de l'organisation sociale, car elles rendent les groupes « ontologiquement variables » et, par conséquent, incomparables. En repensant les prémisses sur lesquelles repose la conception générale de l'organisation sociale, un cadre opérationnel confère à la notion de groupe une réalité binaire, discontinue, évitant ainsi la variabilité ontologique des groupes et favorisant le comparatisme. Il rend également possible l'étude des rapports entre groupes et réseaux. La relecture de l'ethnographie Caste and Kinship in Kangra montre la pertinence d'une telle approche dans l'étude des castes. Le caractère segmentaire de ces dernières est remis en cause et l'autonomie des foyers, qui forment des réseaux d'alliances en matière d'activités rituelles, est mise de l'avant. Cette nouvelle description incite enfin à de nouvelles comparaisons.
Inspired by Michel Verdon’s epistemological and anthropological work, this thesis presents a new conceptual grid to study the caste social organization in India. Jonathan Parry’s ethnography, Caste and Kinship in Kangra, is re-analyzed and re-interpreted with the “operational language”. The different approaches to caste's analysis oscillate between two theoretical poles: idealism on one side, notably represented by Louis Dumont’s structuralism, and substantialism on the other, formerly adopted by the colonial administrators and developed more recently in Dipankar Gupta’s work. Unfortunately, these two holistic options mislead the social organization comparative study, because they ultimately render group “ontologically variable” and, thus, not comparable. Rethinking the premises on which rely the mainstream of the theories on social organization, this conceptual grid confers a binary, dis-continued meaning to the group notion, therefore avoiding ontological variability and allowing comparisons. It also favors the study of the relationships between groups and social networks. The re-reading of Caste and Kinship in Kangra ethnography shows its relevance in the study of the caste organization. Instead, in this thesis, the autonomy of households, with their ritual activities alliance networks, is opposed to the segmented caste view. This new description finally calls for new comparisons.

Durante o colonialismo português em Goa houve um processo sistemático de conversão a que podemos chamar de mimético, já que, desde o século XVI, ao se converterem as castas da elite, os Brâmanes, se esperava que as outras castas os emulassem. A excepção a este princípio foi o grupo dos Gaudde, que ao longo do tempo se dividiu em três castas: hindus, católicos e neo-hindus (Gaudde católicos, que se tornaram hindus em 1928). No contexto da sociedade indiana, os Gaudde de Goa apresentam uma dualidade classificatória: socialmente, seguem a organização da “casta”, mas foram reconhecidos em linguagem administrativa como uma “tribo” devido às regalias económicas e educacionais que este estatuto lhes concede. Os próprios afirmam ser os primeiros habitantes deste estado, tal como descrito pela literatura produzida durante e após o colonialismo português – o que foi traduzido como “tribo”. Um outro aspecto menos estudado do colonialismo português é a resistência invisível que os Gaudde efectuaram e a pertinência contemporânea deste passado. A sua contestação revelou-se através da manutenção em segredo das suas canções, danças e rituais, proibidos pela igreja católica por serem “não-católicos”. Este dado relaciona-se com a vivência local do catolicismo entre os Gaudde e sua articulação com o hinduísmo e o culto a entidades territoriais, resultantes do processo singular da conversão em Goa. As letras das suas canções têm de ser lidas à luz da lógica ritual hindu, embora os nomes de deuses tenham sido substituídos por santos católicos, adquirindo hoje um novo significado com a sua canalização para o turismo.
Portuguese colonialism in Goa carried out a systematic process of conversion that we could call mimetic, in the sense that by converting the higher castes, the brahmanes, it was hoped that the other castes would emulate them. Exceptions to this principle were the Gaudde, an original group that over time split into three different castes: the Hindus, the Christians and the Neo-Hindus (Christian Gaudde who became Hindu in 1928). Further specificities regarding the Goan Gaudde are important to understand their cultural practices and representations, and their sociological duality. Indeed, socially they follow the caste organization; however, administratively they are classified as a Scheduled Tribe, due to the economical and educational benefits of this status. The Gaudde affirm to be the first inhabitants of Goa, as depicted both by Portuguese colonialism and by postcolonial literature – which was translated as synonymous with a tribal group. Another less known aspect of Portuguese colonialism is the invisible resistance of the Gaudde and its contemporary relevance. Their resistance has developed through the maintenance of their songs, dances and rituals in secret because they were forbidden by the Catholic Church for being "non-Catholic". This is due to the local experience of Catholicism among Gaudde and its relationship to Hinduism and the worship of territorial entities, resulting from the peculiar process of conversion in Goa. The lyrics of their songs have to be read in the light of Hindu ritual, although the names of gods have been replaced by Christian saints, acquiring nowadays a new meaning with their repositioning towards touristic audiences.

Marine fish stocks are under serious threat of depletion due to increasing numbers of resource users with competing interests, resulting in degradation and the decline of fish catch. Using qualitative and quantitative techniques such as in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, household surveys and remote sensing and GIS, this study addresses: (1) the complex and inter-related nature of resource dependency, (2) the role of assets in determining survival strategies of households in artisanal fishing communities in Ponnani, India, (3) how asset degradation impacts resource-dependent households, (4) how households develop survival strategies, and (5) considers access to social, political, physical, human and financial assets. Information is organized using the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF) with modifications to suite the local complexities. Results show that households - engaged in diverse activities, including fishing, fish processing/marketing/culture and daily labour - evolved property rights of natural resources over generations. The Pathemari cargo business’s limited knowledge of fisheries compared to artisanal fishers, and the government led modernization resulted in resource degradation. Therefore, artisanal fishers living in coastal wards threatened by intense erosion, abandoned traditional occupations in pursuit of livelihood security. Results from image analysis and derived thematic maps indicate increased erosion of 0.35 sq km shoreline coinciding with government development initiatives. To improve livelihood options, the results indicate that 50% surveyed accessed political assets such as fishers’ cooperatives and only 20% accessed financial assets such as government sponsored schemes and loans. In-depth interviews and focus group discussions revealed many limiting factors of access, specifically marginalization and lack of financial assets: only 6% surveyed could raise enough money to migrate. With changes in technology, from harvesting to processing, gender roles are being radically altered. Women are losing jobs and income. Politically, the study revealed that local participation helped governing bodies prioritize on housing, roads, water and sanitation. Analysis of the information through the modified SLF suggests three strategies to enhance the asset base of coastal poor: strengthening grassroots organizations; transforming state relations; and developing new alternatives to conventional coastal development practice. Finally, the study suggests resource management policies to improve the households’ livelihood options and well-being.

Racial and gender inequality, as well as other forms of discrimination has been a part of the South African, American and Indian histories for a very long time. Even today racial disparity is still very evident in the South African and American societies whilst discrimination based on caste is still prevalent in the Indian society. This is illustrated by continued racial discrimination and the remaining signs of societal segregation. Due to continuing disparities amongst the people, it became necessary to implement affirmative action programmes. Focusing in particular on education and jobs, affirmative action policies require active measures to be taken to ensure that blacks and other minorities enjoy the same opportunities for career advancement and school admissions that had been the nearly exclusive province of whites in SA and the USA, or for the forward castes in India. Affirmative action has been both praised and denounced, as an answer to racial inequality. One of the key issues that arise when affirmative action is discussed is whether or not affirmative action in fact promotes equality and atones for past prejudices. Another concern is whether the current affirmative action policy is the right policy to use. The issues surrounding affirmative action seems to be universal as are the circumstances. Perhaps the most widespread similarity among the programmes in these very different countries has been that group preferences and quotas are almost always discussed. The debate on affirmative action exists because it is a very divisive issue and it affects different groups of people in different ways, and some groups or persons seemingly benefit more from affirmative action than other persons or groups. In addition, it causes people to be classified into groups, and at the same time, strives to break down group barriers. It is an issue that is difficult to resolve because people have varied ideas about how the problems of racial inequality and historical discrimination should be addressed
Jurisprudence
LLD

The thesis deals with dalit literature and its role in the dalit movement. In the preface it summarizes information about indian caste system, untouchability and outlines the history of the dalit movement. It tries to highlight certain important points within the history of dalit movement that were significant for the evolvement and development of the dalit literature. Then it goes onto the dalit literature itself. The brief historical depiction is devided into parts based on geographic and lingual regions (Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Hindi and Gujarati). Further the author deals with classification of dalit literature and its relation with afro- american literature. She poses and tries to answer the question of who in fact is the dalit writer, how is dalit literature received by literature critics and briefly also mentions its language specificities. In the analysis of dalit literature motives the author describes significant and frequent storylines and shows the connection of literature and dalit movement. Specific examples taken from dalit works point out particular motives and nicely illustrate the character of this literature. Separate chapter deals with recently current theme of women in dalit literature. In conclusion author offers summary of the whole theme, emphasizes its most important points...

Evangelicals have an unquestionable heritage for involvement in the world and its social problems and the Bible provides a basis for a liberative gospel. For the God of the Bible is not only a God of love and peace, but also of justice and he is therefore on the side of the poor, oppressed and suffering. he has given us a spirit of engagement with the world as salt and light and not escapism. As we give serious consideration to the challenges of liberation theologies, we need to hear the voice who calls his people in every age to go out into the lost and lonely world (as he did), in order to live and love, to witness and serve like him and for him and that is what African Evangelicalism is all about.
Systematic Theology and Theological Ethics
M. Th. (Religious Studies)