| FT-56412-08 | Research Programs: Summer Stipends | Anupama P. Rao | Caste and The Colonial City | 6/1/2008 - 7/31/2008 | $6,000.00 | Anupama | P. | Rao | | | | Barnard College | New York | NY | 10027-6909 | USA | 2008 | South Asian History | Summer Stipends | Research Programs | 6000 | 0 | 6000 | 0 |
Turn of the century Bombay was a magnet for untouchable groups who sought to escape the social oppression and material deprivation of rural life. Caste and the Colonial City explores the impact of the substantial in-migration of untouchable, or Dalit, castes to Bombay, British India's key commercial and manufacturing hub, during the period 1880-1930. The project correlates the material conditions of urban life and industrial labor with Dalits' ambivalent experience of the city as a refuge from traditional caste ties and rural exploitation, on the one hand, and as a segregated space with streets, neighborhoods and the workplace divided along caste and class lines, on the other. The study thus addresses the colonial city as a key, if under-examined vector for the production of a Dalit modernity distinguished by novel associational forms, cultural practices, and political activism that grew out of the centrality of untouchable labor to the expansion of urban infrastructure. |