Surinder S Jodhka
Biographic Data
| ID | 91557 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Surinder S Jodhka |
| GIVEN NAMES | Surinder S |
| FAMILY NAME | Jodhka |
| SIGNATURE | JODHKA S S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Jawaharlal Nehru University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4916-1086 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 133 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Persistent Rural, Emergent ‘Ruralities’
,
Re-Cast(e)ing the State Policy: Ascription, Identities, and Democratic Politics
The post-Independence Indian state has had an ambivalent attitude towards caste. Even though the presence of caste as a structure of social disability and hierarchy was widely acknowledged, it did not enter the imaginations of India’s development establishment. It found no place in the vocabulary of economic growth spelt out in the planning models of the Nehruvian state. For the modernist elite, ascriptive structures like caste tended to disappea…
Global Handbook of Inequality
Sikh Religion and Contentions around Caste
Caste has been a contentious subject in Sikhism. While the Sikh theological canons have vehemently opposed its practice, it continues to be present among the Sikhs, including its discriminatory culture. The obvious response of the Sikh leaders and scholars has been to ask for 'a moral self-criticism'. The issue thus becomes praxeological, a matter of aligning 'practice with the theory'. This is a simplistic response. Such a narrative also does no…
Global Handbook of Inequality
The Oxford Handbook of Caste
Beginning with the 1990s, the subject of caste has seen a profound increase in interest among scholars. What was until then approached as a fossilized tradition of the ritual-obsessed Hindus refusing to see the progressive spirits of the emerging world and studied as a branch of anthropology, suddenly began to be seen as a complex reality deeply embedded in a range of institutions and social practices, attracting scholars from a wide range of dis…
Oxford Handbook of Caste
Marginalities and Mobilities among Indias Muslims: Elusive Citizenship
Agrarian Studies and the Caste Conundrum
The article calls for a recognition of caste as a structuring reality of agrarian life in South Asia. Such a recognition may also have a larger and comparative bearing beyond India. The article also argues for a simultaneous recognition of the serious problems with the almost universally accepted "idealistic" conceptualizations of caste. Further, approaching caste as an aspect of land relations and the realities of economic processes would signif…
Religion and Politics in South Asia
Why are the farmers of Punjab protesting
In early June 2020, the union government of India enacted three legislations concerning agriculture. The new laws were intended to open up the farming sector to an increased commercial engagement by the big corporates, who could purchase, store and even decide through contract farming what crops to produce. Together they were designed to fundamentally change and reorient the pre-existing regulatory framework of Indian agriculture. The farmers, pa…
Introduction. Towards a Sociology of India’s Economic Elite: Beyond the Neo-Orientalist and Managerialist Perspectives
Is there such a thing as an “Indian way of doing business”? Many publications, whether academic or not, indeed assert the singularity of Indians’ approach to business, often mobilizing an orientalist gaze and reifying the peculiar conception of business that supposedly prevails in the subcontinent. This special issue of SAMAJ proposes to move away from a focus on “doing business” in order to rather dedicate more attention to the role of economic …
Caste: Experiences in South Asia and beyond
This special issue of Contemporary South Asia seeks to capture the diversity and situatedness of the caste experience and deepen our understanding of caste dynamics and lives in the twenty-first century. In this Introduction, we highlight the continuing salience of caste, offer an overview of theoretical understandings of caste and foreground the importance of analysing caste in the present as a dynamic form of human relations, rather than a remn…
Ascriptive hierarchies: Caste and its reproduction in contemporary India
Social science literature on caste tends to view it as a peculiar institution of the Hindus, emanating from their past tradition and religious beliefs/scriptures. This view also presumes that the processes of urbanization and industrialization, unleashing the process of modernization, will end caste, eventually producing a shift from a closed system of social hierarchy to an open system of social stratification based on individual achievement, me…
Social Inclusion
Religion, Community and Development: Changing Contours of Politics and Policy in India
Religion, Community and Development Gurpreet Mahajan 2. Religion and Indian Politics: Changing Perspectives D.L.Sheth 3. Group Equality and the Public Sphere: The Sachar Committee Report and Multiculturalism in India Amir Ali 4. Hindutva's Discourse on Development Pralay Kanungo 5. Seva, sangathanas and gurus: Service and the Making of the Hindu nation Sujata Patel 6. Development as Liberation: An Indian Christian Perspective Rudolf C. Heredia 7.…
Institutionalizing Equality: Contexts and Meanings of Equal Opportunity Commission
Sikhs in Contemporary Times: Religious Identities and Discourses of Development
Dominant narrative of the scholarship in Sikh studies has been historical and theological, focused mostly around questions of interpretations of the Sikh scriptural authority and the Sikh past. The rise of the Khalistan movement during the 1980s also generated a good amount of research on the political sociology of the Sikh ethnicity. But the changing nature of social and economic life of the Sikhs, their internal dynamics and divisions, their ex…
Caste and Democracy: Assertion and Identity among the Dalits of Rural Punjab
The literature on the political sociology of caste identity/mobili sations in contemporary India and her democratic political process generally focuses primarily on macro analysis of electoral politics or caste associations. The existing formulations on 'caste and politics ' have also been drawn largely from such analyses where the political experience of the so-called middle-level, landowning 'dominant' castes has been the primary source of empi…
Towards a Comparative Political Economy of Unfree Labour: Case Studies and Debates and Peasants, Populism and Postmodernism: The Return of the Agrarian Myth
Towards a Comparative Political Economy of Unfree Labour: Case Studies and Debates T OM B RASS London: Frank Cass, 1999 Peasants, Populism and Postmodernism: The Return of the Agrarian Myth T OM B RASS London: Frank Cass, 2000 Reviewed by S URINDER S. J ODHKA Unfree Labour and ‘ Postmodern Myths ’ : Towards a Critical Re-Examination I The last two decades of the twentieth century saw many changes in the world. Though we continue to live in a capi…
Sikhism and the caste question: Dalits and their politics in contemporary Punjab
Caste has invariably been seen in unitary terms, as a pan-Indian reality without any significant variations in its structure or ideology. While it was sanctioned through some Hindu scriptural sources, other Indian religious communities, 100, were believed to support the idea of hierarchy and practice caste in everyday life, albeit to a lesser degree. Despite scholarly criticisms of such theories and the many changes that caste has undergone over …
Community & Identities: Contemporary Discourses on Culture and Politics in India
Profession: From the Desk of the Managing Editor
From “book view” to “field view: Social anthropological constructions of the Indian village
The “book view” of rural India of the title is that of Indologists and Orientalists, constructed from Hindu scriptures and the historical record. In the post-Independence period this was gradually replaced by the “field view” of sociologists and anthropologists, based on participant observation. Their studies threw new light on the nature of the village community, particularly in relation to caste, gender and political faction. The work is import…
Understanding Assam
Ascriptive hierarchies: Caste and its reproduction in contemporary India
Social science literature on caste tends to view it as a peculiar institution of the Hindus, emanating from their past tradition and religious beliefs/scriptures. This view also presumes that the processes of urbanization and industrialization, unleashing the process of modernization, will end caste, eventually producing a shift from a closed system of social hierarchy to an open system of social stratification based on individual achievement, me…
Sikhism and the caste question: Dalits and their politics in contemporary Punjab
Caste has invariably been seen in unitary terms, as a pan-Indian reality without any significant variations in its structure or ideology. While it was sanctioned through some Hindu scriptural sources, other Indian religious communities, 100, were believed to support the idea of hierarchy and practice caste in everyday life, albeit to a lesser degree. Despite scholarly criticisms of such theories and the many changes that caste has undergone over …
Why are the farmers of Punjab protesting
In early June 2020, the union government of India enacted three legislations concerning agriculture. The new laws were intended to open up the farming sector to an increased commercial engagement by the big corporates, who could purchase, store and even decide through contract farming what crops to produce. Together they were designed to fundamentally change and reorient the pre-existing regulatory framework of Indian agriculture. The farmers, pa…
From “book view” to “field view: Social anthropological constructions of the Indian village
The “book view” of rural India of the title is that of Indologists and Orientalists, constructed from Hindu scriptures and the historical record. In the post-Independence period this was gradually replaced by the “field view” of sociologists and anthropologists, based on participant observation. Their studies threw new light on the nature of the village community, particularly in relation to caste, gender and political faction. The work is import…
Caste and Democracy: Assertion and Identity among the Dalits of Rural Punjab
The literature on the political sociology of caste identity/mobili sations in contemporary India and her democratic political process generally focuses primarily on macro analysis of electoral politics or caste associations. The existing formulations on 'caste and politics ' have also been drawn largely from such analyses where the political experience of the so-called middle-level, landowning 'dominant' castes has been the primary source of empi…
Caste: Experiences in South Asia and beyond
This special issue of Contemporary South Asia seeks to capture the diversity and situatedness of the caste experience and deepen our understanding of caste dynamics and lives in the twenty-first century. In this Introduction, we highlight the continuing salience of caste, offer an overview of theoretical understandings of caste and foreground the importance of analysing caste in the present as a dynamic form of human relations, rather than a remn…
Agrarian Studies and the Caste Conundrum
The article calls for a recognition of caste as a structuring reality of agrarian life in South Asia. Such a recognition may also have a larger and comparative bearing beyond India. The article also argues for a simultaneous recognition of the serious problems with the almost universally accepted "idealistic" conceptualizations of caste. Further, approaching caste as an aspect of land relations and the realities of economic processes would signif…
Towards a Comparative Political Economy of Unfree Labour: Case Studies and Debates and Peasants, Populism and Postmodernism: The Return of the Agrarian Myth
Towards a Comparative Political Economy of Unfree Labour: Case Studies and Debates T OM B RASS London: Frank Cass, 1999 Peasants, Populism and Postmodernism: The Return of the Agrarian Myth T OM B RASS London: Frank Cass, 2000 Reviewed by S URINDER S. J ODHKA Unfree Labour and ‘ Postmodern Myths ’ : Towards a Critical Re-Examination I The last two decades of the twentieth century saw many changes in the world. Though we continue to live in a capi…
Sikhs in Contemporary Times: Religious Identities and Discourses of Development
Dominant narrative of the scholarship in Sikh studies has been historical and theological, focused mostly around questions of interpretations of the Sikh scriptural authority and the Sikh past. The rise of the Khalistan movement during the 1980s also generated a good amount of research on the political sociology of the Sikh ethnicity. But the changing nature of social and economic life of the Sikhs, their internal dynamics and divisions, their ex…
Understanding Assam
Profession: From the Desk of the Managing Editor
From “book view” to “field view: Social anthropological constructions of the Indian village
The “book view” of rural India of the title is that of Indologists and Orientalists, constructed from Hindu scriptures and the historical record. In the post-Independence period this was gradually replaced by the “field view” of sociologists and anthropologists, based on participant observation. Their studies threw new light on the nature of the village community, particularly in relation to caste, gender and political faction. The work is import…
Towards a Comparative Political Economy of Unfree Labour: Case Studies and Debates and Peasants, Populism and Postmodernism: The Return of the Agrarian Myth
Towards a Comparative Political Economy of Unfree Labour: Case Studies and Debates T OM B RASS London: Frank Cass, 1999 Peasants, Populism and Postmodernism: The Return of the Agrarian Myth T OM B RASS London: Frank Cass, 2000 Reviewed by S URINDER S. J ODHKA Unfree Labour and ‘ Postmodern Myths ’ : Towards a Critical Re-Examination I The last two decades of the twentieth century saw many changes in the world. Though we continue to live in a capi…
Sikhism and the caste question: Dalits and their politics in contemporary Punjab
Caste has invariably been seen in unitary terms, as a pan-Indian reality without any significant variations in its structure or ideology. While it was sanctioned through some Hindu scriptural sources, other Indian religious communities, 100, were believed to support the idea of hierarchy and practice caste in everyday life, albeit to a lesser degree. Despite scholarly criticisms of such theories and the many changes that caste has undergone over …
Community & Identities: Contemporary Discourses on Culture and Politics in India
Caste and Democracy: Assertion and Identity among the Dalits of Rural Punjab
The literature on the political sociology of caste identity/mobili sations in contemporary India and her democratic political process generally focuses primarily on macro analysis of electoral politics or caste associations. The existing formulations on 'caste and politics ' have also been drawn largely from such analyses where the political experience of the so-called middle-level, landowning 'dominant' castes has been the primary source of empi…
Institutionalizing Equality: Contexts and Meanings of Equal Opportunity Commission
Sikhs in Contemporary Times: Religious Identities and Discourses of Development
Dominant narrative of the scholarship in Sikh studies has been historical and theological, focused mostly around questions of interpretations of the Sikh scriptural authority and the Sikh past. The rise of the Khalistan movement during the 1980s also generated a good amount of research on the political sociology of the Sikh ethnicity. But the changing nature of social and economic life of the Sikhs, their internal dynamics and divisions, their ex…
Religion, Community and Development: Changing Contours of Politics and Policy in India
Religion, Community and Development Gurpreet Mahajan 2. Religion and Indian Politics: Changing Perspectives D.L.Sheth 3. Group Equality and the Public Sphere: The Sachar Committee Report and Multiculturalism in India Amir Ali 4. Hindutva's Discourse on Development Pralay Kanungo 5. Seva, sangathanas and gurus: Service and the Making of the Hindu nation Sujata Patel 6. Development as Liberation: An Indian Christian Perspective Rudolf C. Heredia 7.…
Social Inclusion
Ascriptive hierarchies: Caste and its reproduction in contemporary India
Social science literature on caste tends to view it as a peculiar institution of the Hindus, emanating from their past tradition and religious beliefs/scriptures. This view also presumes that the processes of urbanization and industrialization, unleashing the process of modernization, will end caste, eventually producing a shift from a closed system of social hierarchy to an open system of social stratification based on individual achievement, me…
Introduction. Towards a Sociology of India’s Economic Elite: Beyond the Neo-Orientalist and Managerialist Perspectives
Is there such a thing as an “Indian way of doing business”? Many publications, whether academic or not, indeed assert the singularity of Indians’ approach to business, often mobilizing an orientalist gaze and reifying the peculiar conception of business that supposedly prevails in the subcontinent. This special issue of SAMAJ proposes to move away from a focus on “doing business” in order to rather dedicate more attention to the role of economic …
Caste: Experiences in South Asia and beyond
This special issue of Contemporary South Asia seeks to capture the diversity and situatedness of the caste experience and deepen our understanding of caste dynamics and lives in the twenty-first century. In this Introduction, we highlight the continuing salience of caste, offer an overview of theoretical understandings of caste and foreground the importance of analysing caste in the present as a dynamic form of human relations, rather than a remn…
Religion and Politics in South Asia
Why are the farmers of Punjab protesting
In early June 2020, the union government of India enacted three legislations concerning agriculture. The new laws were intended to open up the farming sector to an increased commercial engagement by the big corporates, who could purchase, store and even decide through contract farming what crops to produce. Together they were designed to fundamentally change and reorient the pre-existing regulatory framework of Indian agriculture. The farmers, pa…
Agrarian Studies and the Caste Conundrum
The article calls for a recognition of caste as a structuring reality of agrarian life in South Asia. Such a recognition may also have a larger and comparative bearing beyond India. The article also argues for a simultaneous recognition of the serious problems with the almost universally accepted "idealistic" conceptualizations of caste. Further, approaching caste as an aspect of land relations and the realities of economic processes would signif…
Global Handbook of Inequality
The Oxford Handbook of Caste
Beginning with the 1990s, the subject of caste has seen a profound increase in interest among scholars. What was until then approached as a fossilized tradition of the ritual-obsessed Hindus refusing to see the progressive spirits of the emerging world and studied as a branch of anthropology, suddenly began to be seen as a complex reality deeply embedded in a range of institutions and social practices, attracting scholars from a wide range of dis…
Oxford Handbook of Caste
Marginalities and Mobilities among Indias Muslims: Elusive Citizenship
Global Handbook of Inequality
Sikh Religion and Contentions around Caste
Caste has been a contentious subject in Sikhism. While the Sikh theological canons have vehemently opposed its practice, it continues to be present among the Sikhs, including its discriminatory culture. The obvious response of the Sikh leaders and scholars has been to ask for 'a moral self-criticism'. The issue thus becomes praxeological, a matter of aligning 'practice with the theory'. This is a simplistic response. Such a narrative also does no…
Re-Cast(e)ing the State Policy: Ascription, Identities, and Democratic Politics
The post-Independence Indian state has had an ambivalent attitude towards caste. Even though the presence of caste as a structure of social disability and hierarchy was widely acknowledged, it did not enter the imaginations of India’s development establishment. It found no place in the vocabulary of economic growth spelt out in the planning models of the Nehruvian state. For the modernist elite, ascriptive structures like caste tended to disappea…
Persistent Rural, Emergent ‘Ruralities’
,
Political science (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Law (13 works) · South Asian Studies and Conflicts (9 works) · Caste (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · South Asian Studies and Diaspora (7 works) · History (6 works) · Social science (5 works)