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Focusing on the low caste Chamar community, this book examines how some of them abandoned their traditional polluting work, and strategically entered the upper-caste weaving profession. Located within the changing politics of the time, it outlines human agency and its search for dignity

Abstract
This article employs artifacts from the KMB's "material culture" as a lens into this institution's branding process and, within it, its interaction with the Venice Biennale. It analyzes larger questions about the career of the biennale cultural form as it re-territorializes in a new location that is added to the art world map "in progress." Historically, geographical location has been crucial for many biennales in the Global South to articulate their origin, identity, and claims vis-à-vis the global art world. Moreover, biennale proliferation especially in the South has produced cartographic re-imaginings aiming to destabilize the "center-periphery" configuration of the art world map. The article shows that the KMB does not reiterate ideological standings put forward by Southern biennales but crafts its positionality on different grounds. These entail simultaneously anchoring the KMB to histories of circulation in and out of South India tracing back at least two millennia and strategically weaving a relation with the archetypical Venice Biennale in the present.

AbstractThis paper explores the interplay between development, identity politics and middle-class aspirations amongst low-caste Chamar women in rural north India. It argues that this interplay has reinvigorated notions of women's domesticity, education and modern conjugality as they emerged in the reforms and 'modernising' efforts of sections of Indian society, since the nineteenth century, in their encounter with the colonial 'civilising mission'. It will show how the long-term effects of this 'legacy', through its reconfiguration and appropriation by members from a low caste, have affected a historically marginalised community in their pursuit of middle-class aspirations. In addition to the criticality of Indian women and their gender roles as 'sites' where nation and community transformations are symbolically and practically negotiated, scholars of South Asia have also highlighted the separation between historical and anthropological discourses on women. This paper brings these discourses together and addresses this separation by showing that Chamar appropriation of the 'modernising' agenda has initiated a dual process. On the one hand, a minority of women have embarked on an embourgeoisement trajectory predicated on education, 'modern motherhood' and aspirations to white collar employment, and on the other hand, underprivileged women (with their 'unfit' personas) have become increasingly vulnerable to stigmatisation as a result of being in 'menial labour'. It is further argued that dialectic study of the 'two [groups of] Chamar women' will provide an insightful lens through which inner conflicts within low-caste communities in contemporary India may be understood, and suggests that there are contradictory trends concerning women, their development prospects, and their membership within the nation.

In this article I analyse the structural and cultural conditions of low-caste women's political agency in urban north India. Whereas in Western feminist political theory, the sexual division of labour is considered to be a key constraint for women's political participation, I show how this has a secondary relevance in the context analysed. I argue that issues concerning the division of labour are intertwined with and subject to those of male consent and support for women's activities. I illustrate how it is often the supposedly 'oppressive' household boundaries rather than alternative outer spaces that, under a series of enabling circumstances, initiate women's political activities. Against this backdrop, I show how Indian women activists' political agency is shaped by men's role, and how agency's relational nature is embedded in women's lifecycles, everyday practices and cultural expectations; in essence, in overall gendered agency. Comparative analyses between Western and non-Western models of political participation and discourse have only just begun. In this respect, I contribute to this nascent field in the following directions: not only do the arguments I present in this article challenge the individualistic Western subject of political action, but they also complicate the idea of the resulting empowerment as a culturally constructed process whose understanding arises from the dialectics between insider and outsider values.

In this article I analyse the history of weaving in a Chamar community on the outskirts of the city of Banaras, eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP). I explore the recruitment of rural Chamar men as apprentices to the city's Muslim master weavers, the consequent emergence of a class of Chamar artisans and its gradual disappearance from the 1990s onwards. I argue that the weaving era represented a historical moment of relative prosperity for the Chamar community, where strengthened ties with urban Muslim weavers enabled a progressive disentanglement from relationships of domination by rural landed elites. As a consequence, a positive Chamar self-representation was crafted in ways which contrasted with the trends of identity consolidation for 'Untouchable' communities—as well as other castes—that started during the colonial period. Further, an important phase of social mobility was initiated through weaving. With the onset of economic liberalisation, as the handloom sari industry has lost its momentum, weavers have increasingly abandoned their occupation to join the ranks of unskilled casual labourers. Surrounded by compelling socio-economic imperatives that their meagre wages can not meet, former weavers appear to belong to a 'lost world' as they try to make sense of the laws of local and global bazaars.

This article analyses the ideological uses of formal education in a community of Chamars (former 'Untouchables' or Dalits) in northern India. In particular, it focuses on the ways it is deployed for self‐ and community improvement. Education is especially needed to forge an alternative to the inherited, essentialized, and derogatory Chamar identity. Furthermore, recent anti‐establishment political mobilization amongst the low castes in northern India has provided new impetus for accelerating identity change. In order to grasp the nature and extent of Chamar social transformation, I explore notions of the past, aspects of ritual, and folk theories of socialization. Drawing from these, an underlying protean self and community substance emerges in which the remaking of the present is tied to the remaking of the past. Against this backdrop, I show the contradictory nature of the effects of education. On the one hand, there is the constructed and shared 'educated' substance which acts as a unifying force amongst the Chamarsvis‐à‐visoutsiders. On the other, education as an individualizing experience and related processes of upward mobility fragment the community body politic, leaving the 'liberating' effect of education embedded in the production of new inequalities.