Rethinking Difference in India Through Racialization

Book excerpt: Through the analytic of racialization, the chapters in this book argue that social difference in India is reproduced and buttressed through casteist, racist, colonial, and Hindu nationalist projects that generate tacit or explicit consent for continued violence against racialized others. At the same time, the chapters look transnationally, examining how regional forms of difference marked by caste and tribe, for instance, have long articulated with historical forms of global racial capitalism. Ultimately, this book attends to the narratives and experiences of those living at the margins, who strategically deploy racial and antiracist concepts to build international solidarity movements beyond the narrow confines of the Indian nation-state. In so doing, it hopes to derive insights on the necessity of transnational translations, even as it directs renewed attention to the specificity of regional hierarchies that shape everyday life and death in India. This book is a significant new contribution to addressing fundamental questions of caste, race, and religious politics in India and will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of Sociology, Politics, Geography, History and Anthropology. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.