Caste, Marriage and Inequality: Essays on North and South India

Contents: Preface. I. Khalapur: 1. Living the levirate: the mating of an untouchable Chuhra widow. 2. ‘Untouchable’ Chuhras through their humour: "Equalizing" marital kin through teasing, pretence, and farce. 3. Micro-ideology and micro-Utopia in Khalapur: changes in the discourse on caste over thirty years. 4. Fewer deaths, fewer births: decline of child mortality in a UP village. II. Kanyakumari: 5. Memories of a Brahman Agraharam in Travancore. 6. The Tamil Brahman family as affected by out-migration and modern occupations. 7. Grandsons of the Shastrigals: migration and identity transformation among Dharmika Brahmans of Travancore. 8. Foxes, lions and bears: the circulation of landownership in Southernmost Tamilnadu. III. Joint families in Rajasthan: 9. The joint family household in rural Rajasthan: ecological, cultural and demographic conditions for its occurrence. IV. Comparison between regions of India: 10. Woman as tribute, woman as flower: images of "woman" in weddings in North and South India. 11. Sibling relations and marriage practices: a comparison of north, central, and south India. V. Caste in India: 12. Caste in India since independence. VI. Inequality: 13. How should we think about inequality? Or no tears for losers. 14. Demonizing Dalits: scouring the sources on the Sikh Pogrom. Index.

"As an ethnographer of villages, Pauline Kolenda has worked in north, central and south India. Fourteen of her papers, written between 1976 and 2001, are collected in this volume.

Part I is composed of four papers concerning Khalapur, in western Uttar Pradesh, where Kolenda did fieldwork first in 1954 and last in 1998. Two concern ‘untouchable’ Sweepers, one describing how Sweeper women experience the practice of mandatory levirate; the other describing the Sweeper men’s risqué humor that seems to turn the system of purdah upside down. A third records changes in the discourse on caste in Khalapur over thirty years, and the last demonstrates the marked decline in child mortality in Khalapur over recent decades and seeks to explain that decline.

Part II is composed of four papers concerning villagers of Kanyakumari district, in Tamilnadu, where Kolenda did fieldwork first in 1967 and last in 1997. Three of the papers concern Smartha Brahmans-their loss of the elite status they had had when they served the Maharaja of Travancore, their unusual family structure related to their adoption of secular education and migration out for work, and their experiences of out-migration. The fourth paper discusses the circulation of land among villagers of various caste-communities in Kanyakumari.

Kolenda’s ethnographic fieldwork in Rajasthan in the 1960’s and 70’s is an ingredient in the paper in Part III on joint families in Rajasthan that relies heavily on data from the Census of India 1961.

Two comparative papers compose Part IV-one comparing the image of ‘woman’ in weddings in Khalapur and in Kanyakumari, and the other comparing brother-sister relations in north, central and south India. In part V is a paper on Caste in India from the vantage of the mid-1980’s. Finally, Part VI contains two papers on different aspects of inequality. One compares inequality in India and the USA. The other speaks of the too-easy scapegoating of ‘untouchables’ in a scholarly discourse." (jacket)