[Reader-list] When was Caste? Some reflections on early modern South Asia: Special Lecture by William R. Pinch

[Praveen Rai]

Centre for the Study of Developing Societies

invites you to a Special Lecture



*When was Caste?  *

*Some reflections on early modern South Asia*

by *William R. Pinch*



*Ashis Nandy* will Chair

Thursday, 27 February 2014, 6.15 pm

CSDS Seminar Hall,

29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054





Caste purports to be a key component of India's ancient present, a
definitive feature of the unchanging quality of Hindu society.  Social and
cultural historians, who know better, link the construction of caste to
modernity--and especially to the rise of the obsessively ethnographic state
otherwise known as the British Raj.  Philologists, meanwhile, learnedly
point out that the word caste comes to us from the Portuguese, who arrived
in southwest India the late fifteenth century and used the term to describe
the welter of hierarchically inflected social relations that confronted
them.  World historians tell us, stroking their beards in a sagely fashion,
that the Portuguese arrival coincided, more or less, with the beginning of
what is now usually referred to as "the early modern period".  So when was
caste?  Clearly it conjures up multiple time frames.  The lecture will
reflect on the contradictory temporal signals sent by caste.



*William R. Pinch* is Professor of History at Wesleyan University and
associate editor of the journal *History and Theory*. His current research
focuses on the emotional world of Company soldiering in mid
nineteenth-century north India, though he is also working on a joint
translation of two eighteenth-century Brajbhasha poems that celebrate
Himmat Bahadur. His books include *Peasants and Monks in British India
(Berkeley 1996)* and *Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (Cambridge 2006).*



*Ashis Nandy* is Honorary Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for the Study
of Developing Societies.




-- 
Praveen Rai
Academic Secretary
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29, Rajpur Road
Delhi - 110054
Phone: 91-11-23942199
Fax: 91-11-23943450
www.csds.in