Secularization of Caste and the Making of a New Middle Class

Sheth, D. L.

doi:10.1007/978-981-10-6412-8_8

Cited by 28 publications

(59 citation statements)

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“…Deriving hypotheses from these theoretical links, I tested whether heightened urban religious bonding is better explained by one or other of these two social factors. Recent scholarship asserts that though these two characteristics are historically related to one another, there is evidence that they are becoming increasingly loosely coupled in modern India (Mayer 1997;Krishna 2002: 38;Sheth 1999), and the present paper's findings confirm the value of analyzing the independent effects of caste and class. Specifically, in support of previous literature emphasizing the importance of caste (Swallow 1982) and contrary to social class oriented explanations (Kakar 1991;Singer 1972), I found that upper caste status is associated with the highest level of religious bonding in urban India and class is not.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 77%

“…Other scholars take a similar tack, emphasizing a class aspect such as industrialism, but leaving this characteristic largely entangled with the industrialists' caste homogeneity (see e.g., Singer 1972). But others do not take this approach and argue instead that caste and social class have recently become increasingly decoupled (Krishna 2002: 38;Mayer 1997;Sheth 1999Sheth : 2504. In fact, one of India's most prominent social anthropologists, Andre Béteille (1997), has argued that in contemporary urban India, income, education, occupation, and wealth are increasingly better markers of social status than caste.…”

Section: Urban India and Religious Social Capitalmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Caste, Class, and Urbanization: The Shaping of Religious Community in Contemporary India

Stroope¹

2016

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Building on the implications of qualitative work from India and urbanism theories, I aim to understand whether religious bonding social capital in contemporary India increases with greater urbanization and whether such increases are moderated by caste or social class position. Results from multinomial logistic regression on 1,417 Hindu respondents in a nationally representative sample of India (World Values Survey-India 2001) indicate that religious bonding is fostered by urbanism and that this association is stronger for upper castes. But there is little evidence that social class similarly moderates the association between urbanism and religious bonding. In light of these findings, religious bonding might be better understood as rooted in the interaction of caste dynamics and changes in the urban environment, rather than as a result of greater affluence. The data are also consistent with work underscoring the importance of disentangling social class and caste among Hindus in contemporary India.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 77%

Section: Urban India and Religious Social Capitalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Caste, Class, and Urbanization: The Shaping of Religious Community in Contemporary India

Stroope¹

2016

Preprint

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“…Middle class identity, she says, is organized in terms of symbolic practices, which, in turn, are shaped by the existence of the English-dominant elite. This elite-the original Indian middle class-is Englishdominant (Dwyer 2000;Sheth 1999), controls India's cultural values, and legitimizes this control through control of social institutions (Dwyer 2000), including schools. In this section, I discuss some of the scholarship on middle classes in India, and introduce my interlocutors' ideas on middle classess.…”

Section: Middle Classness As a Positive Valuementioning

confidence: 99%

“…During colonial rule, the nascent middle classes began to emerge (Ahmad and Reifeld 2001). In the early post-Independence period the formation of alliances between the English-educated upper-caste urban elite and the landed peasantry who formed the regional elites led to the creation of these middle classes (Fernandes 2006;Sheth 1999).…”

Section: Class and Castementioning

confidence: 99%

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Discourses on language, class, gender, education, and social mobility in three schools in New Delhi, India

Proctor¹

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This dissertation examines the ideological connections between schooling, mobility, and social difference among students in New Delhi. In it, I argue that educational mobility, especially with regard to English-language education, is an ideology which seems to offer a path to reduce social difference while in fact protecting it. I also argue that people who desire mobility engage in discursive practices which attempt to emphasize how their social positions are better than the ones they aspire to, a process I call discursive mobility. These discourses are inherently conflicted and contradictory, something I argue is characteristic of discursive responses to ideologies of educational mobility. Thus, I inquire into how different ideologies and discourses (dominant and subordinate) relating to social difference, education, and mobility interact, the prominent role of English in ideologies of education and mobility, and how the process of attempting mobility produces inherently contradictory ways of being.This research was conducted in two government schools and one private school in New Delhi, using a number of methods including participant observation, surveys, interviews, group discussions, and matched guise technique. I describe the discursive contradictions that come from attempts at discursive mobility, how language is implicated in ideologies of educational mobility, how social ideologies of privilege affect schooling experiences and mobility possibilities, how students discursively respond to social difference, and how the discursive worlds of students in government and private schools differ. Abstract Approved: _____________________________________________________ Thesis Supervisor ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThis has been a most excellent adventure, and there are many, many people who have helped me get this far. I thank all of them, although I can't fit all their names here.The biggest thanks are to the people in the schools I studied-the teachers, administrators, and parents who shared their thoughts and everyday lives with me, and especially to the young people who shared their hopes and dreams with me.

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“There is a hell and heaven difference among faculties who are from quota and those who are non-quota”: under the veneer of the “New Middle Class” production of Indian public universities

2022

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The university is a highly politicized and fractious realm for students and academics. Amidst trade-offs between the processes of massification, democratization, commodification, and globalization, the question of transformation for sustainability has become crucial to the social good(s) of higher education. This paper considers academic citizenry within Indian public higher education — a context where the increase in the enrollment of first-generation students and female students, due to affirmative action policies, has not substantially translated into altering the composition of academic staff. Informed by a mixed-method study conducted in 2019 with the participation of academics and those in leadership positions at four higher education institutions, we found that the enactment of such policies was operationalized for the production of the “New Middle Class” by universities. Of concern is that neither the representation nor the participation of academics who are women, “lower” castes, or minorities meets the mark of just, inclusive institutions. Despite the rhetoric of inclusiveness and development, the implementation of related policies clothe subalterns with the veneer of the intellectual class, permitting access on condition that sociocultural identities are concealed, and the hegemonic status quo maintained. Terms such as “quality” and “equality” function as tools for social control rather than serving social justice, where assertions of caste identity and resistance are simultaneously repudiated and misrecognized.

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Secularization of Caste and the Making of a New Middle Class

Cited by 28 publications

References 0 publications

Caste, Class, and Urbanization: The Shaping of Religious Community in Contemporary India

Caste, Class, and Urbanization: The Shaping of Religious Community in Contemporary India

Discourses on language, class, gender, education, and social mobility in three schools in New Delhi, India

“There is a hell and heaven difference among faculties who are from quota and those who are non-quota”: under the veneer of the “New Middle Class” production of Indian public universities

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