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About the book

Caste Panchayats and Caste Politics in India traces the long career and evolution of intra-caste governance from 300 BCE to the present, repudiates the dominant view about caste panchayats as mere dispute resolution bodies and challenges several orthodoxies in the caste scholarship. It reflects on the question of caste-based democratization in the Indian polity and tries to make visible the limitations of ‘caste politics from below’, as it is being imagined today. The book makes a plea for a radical re-imagination of caste as an identity that can facilitate the empowerment of caste through the pursuit of the ameliorations on offer as well as the annihilation of caste, as eventually mutual goals.

About the author

Anagha Ingole teaches at the Department of Political Science, University of Hyderabad, India. She has been a Fulbright-Nehru Post-Doctoral Fellow at Columbia University New York, where she wrote a large part of this book. She started her work on caste panchayats while working with BARTI, Pune and has written on the topic since, in national and international publications.

Chair

Louise Tillin

Professor Louise Tillin is Director, King’s India Institute and Professor of Politics. Louise’s research interests span federalism, democracy and territorial politics in India, and the history and politics of social policy design and implementation. Louise is a regular commentator on Indian politics in UK, Indian and international media. She is an editor of the journal Regional and Federal Studies, and an editorial board member of Pacific Affairs.

Discussant

Srilata Sircar

Dr Srilata Sircar is Lecturer in India and Global Affairs at the King's India Institute. She is module leader for the Introduction to Global Affairs and Contemporary India modules. With a prior background in History and Development Studies, her research interests include urban political ecology of South Asia, the politics of caste in infrastructure-building, and the political economy of subaltern urbanization. Srilata is a contributing writer for Feminism in India.