Beyond caste : identity and power in South Asia, past and present / by Sumit Guha.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Front Matter -- Governing Caste: The Study of State Power and Ethnic Rank in South Asia -- The Birth of Caste -- Territorial Power: The Spatial Dimension of Social Organization -- The Political Economy of Village Life -- A Locus of Sociopolitical Organization: The Household -- Ruling, Identifying, and Counting: Knowledge and Power in Eighteenth-Century India -- Empires, Nations, and the Politics of Ethnic Identity, c. 1800–2000 -- Afterword -- Bibliography -- Index.

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Caste' is today almost universally perceived as an ancient and unchanging Hindu institution preserved solely by a deep-seated religious ideology. Yet the word itself is an importation from sixteenth-century Europe. This book tracks the long history of the practices amalgamated under this label and shows their connection to changing patterns of social and political power down to the present. It frames caste as an involuted and complex form of ethnicity and explains why it persisted under non-Hindu rulers and in non-Hindu communities across South Asia.