Journal article
Undignified names: caste, politics, and everyday life in North India
- Abstract:
- Focusing on the experiences of the marginalised castes in North India, this article examines the use of given names in intercommunity micro interactions and how it shapes the practices of everyday humiliation. With ethnographic data from Dalit activist discourses as well as everyday life in an urbanising village in Rajasthan, this article analyses how the upper castes tend to deform the given names of the members of the Dalit community to produce undignified names, and how the community claims their right to be addressed with appropriate names. I engage with the complexity of the formation and use of undignified names by analysing their function in shaping the local political field to regulate participation in the public sphere and how they are linked to valuable names in the production of social distinctions and their economic benefits. Taking names as an important symbolic object, this article foregrounds the politics of humiliations in everyday intercaste vyavahar to understand the micro dynamics of caste reproduction and how it is negotiated and contested.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.6MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1080/09584935.2023.2262943
Authors
- Publisher:
- Taylor & Francis
- Journal:
- Contemporary South Asia More from this journal
- Volume:
- 31
- Issue:
- 4
- Pages:
- 567-583
- Publication date:
- 2023-10-05
- Acceptance date:
- 2023-04-27
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1469-364X
- ISSN:
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0958-4935
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1546211
- Local pid:
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pubs:1546211
- Deposit date:
-
2023-10-19
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Buswala, B
- Copyright date:
- 2023
- Rights statement:
- © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupThis is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/),which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which thisarticle has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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