Saurabh Dube

This paper revisits earlier ethnographic writing and assumption as an “archive” in order to reconsider Dalit “religions.” It explores the nature of power in the caste order when viewed from Dalit positions and perspectives, the historical constitution of caste under the British empire by drawing on recent scholarship, the terms, at once, of the Dalit’s critical exclusion from and unequal inclusion in caste domains, Dalit responses to hierarchy and authority in everyday terrains, and, finally, the intimate intermeshing of religion and politics, both broadly understood.

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Colonial Casts

Vol. 39, Issue No. 18, 01 May, 2004

Saurabh Dube

Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India by Nicholas Dirks; Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2001; xvi + 372, Paperback $19.95 SAURABH DUBE Castes of Mind is an elegant essay in the interpretation of an idea, the idea of caste. Nicholas Dirks tracks the pathways of caste from its fluid and plural, political and contingent configurations in pre-colonial India, to its discrete renderings by administrators, missionaries, and scholars under early colonial rule. He traces the thoroughfares of caste from its transformation into a singular, hierarchical yet homogeneous, category-entity by the imperial

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Colonial Registers of a Vernacular Christianity

Vol. 39, Issue No. 02, 10 Jan, 2004

Saurabh Dube

This paper with its focus on writings by Indian catechists, discusses issues of colonial conversion and questions of vernacular translation that lie embedded within processes of evangelical entanglements between western missionaries and 'natives'. In their 'diaries' and 'daybooks' that recount the dissemination of the Book in 'heathen' spaces, the catechists' accounts appear out of tenor with missionary stipulation. These accounts point toward critical considerations not only of evangelical entanglements, but also of enduring enchantments of tradition and community, colony and modernity. Moreover, they proclaim a particular Christianity - historically contingent, distinctly Indian.

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Poor Protagonists

Vol. 38, Issue No. 42, 18 Oct, 2003

Saurabh Dube

expansion of representative politics and Poor Protagonists the requirement of mass mobilisation, in- The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India by Nandini Gooptu; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001; pp xxiii + 464, Rs 2,370.

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Historical Identity and Cultural Difference

Vol. 37, Issue No. 01, 05 Jan, 2002

Saurabh Dube

Questions of identity and difference have often been articulated within two broad strands of scholarship. One that stresses transnational processes and overlapping histories and the other that looks to the fragmentary and everyday processes in the past and the present, emphasising critical difference over historical identity. This paper explores two critical events of current history; two seemingly disparate cases that show persistent affinities - the opening ceremony of the Sydney Games in 2000 and the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas early this year - as a starting point in thinking through discrete academic orientations toward identity and difference.

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Peasant Insurgency and Peasant Consciousness

Vol. 20, Issue No. 11, 16 Mar, 1985

Saurabh Dube

Peasant Insurgency and Peasant Consciousness Saurabh Dube THE years since the Second World War have seen a remarkable rise in the status and prominence of social history. Over the past few years, however, the methods, assumptions and the general direction of the work in 'new social history' have been questioned from within the ranks of social historians.1 This article joins the debate. I examine the tension between certain structuralist methods