This dissertation combines archival and ethnographic work in Bombay, India, to articulate the changing ways in which caste has been understood in India, focusing particularly on western India and Marathi-speaking society. The author isolates three historical moments: the beginning of modern education and the first Marathi textbooks written in collaboration by British colonial officials and English-educated Brahmins (the highest caste group); the nationalist period in western India; and, the contemporary sphere of literary politics in Bombay. In these three moments, the author suggests that there are fundamental shifts in how people, Indians, were narrating and making sense of the slow ongoing transformation of India's partly tribal, partly feudal or caste-based, and partly imperial society to its modern, and some say occasionally postmodern, partially capitalist present. The author focuses on nineteenth century Marathi textbooks, nationalist writings and early twentieth century textbooks, and contemporary literary works, events, and practices, interpreting these cultural forms to shed light on the longer and larger socio-economic changes that constituted and constitute Indian society.; The author puts forward the concept of a "caste unconscious" (working from Fredric Jameson's concept of a "political unconscious"), suggesting that this might be a useful tool for thinking about the transformation of a society based on the sacred structure of caste to one based on egalitarian citizenship. She suggests that the division of society along caste lines was written out of the construction of regional and national identities in school textbooks and other modern discursive sites. Social divisions, however, were articulated, in changing forms in subsequent nationalist discourse (here, she considers Gandhi's views on untouchability) in the first half of the 20 th century. More recently, beginning in the late 1960s, the question of ongoing social divisions and conflict in Indian society has been articulated in interesting and critical ways by ex-untouchable, or dalit, writer-activists. The author looks at this cultural movement in the specific case of the Bombay-based Marathi speaking dalit writer-activists who established the Dalit Panther party in 1972. Her ethnographic research deals with the workings out of this cultural phenomenon in the politico-cultural cartography of Bombay.
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