Manoj Mitta - Caste Pride: Battles for Equality in Hindu India

UCI Law, with support from the UCI Department of Sociology and UCI Law Center for Law, Equality and Race (CLEAR), welcomes journalist Manoj Mitta to discuss his book, Caste Pride: Battles for Equality in Hindu India.

Publisher's Description

In this masterful work, Manoj Mitta examines the endurance and violence of the Hindu caste system through the lens of the law. Linking two centuries of legal reform with social movements, he unearths the characters, speeches, confusions and decisions that have shaped the war on caste, mitigating how this ancient institution discriminated between Hindus across the board. Where they could live, how they could dress, whether they could go to a shop, a stream, walk a street or mingle, enter a temple, whom and how they could marry, which scriptures applied to whom, whether their actions, innocent or criminal, would attract punishment or impunity.

Describing brilliantly the passage of Hinduism into its modern avatar, the book celebrates women and men across the caste spectrum and establishes that untouchability is merely the best-known aspect of varna, an elusive purity-based hierarchy that affects the freedoms of all. With ground-breaking discoveries and incisive insight, Caste Pride is at once moving, enlightening and transformative.

About Manoj Mitta

Manoj Mitta is a Delhi-based journalist focusing on law, human rights and social justice. A law graduate from Hyderabad, he has worked with the Times of India, the Indian Express and India Today. Mitta has written two critically acclaimed books on impunity for mass violence: When a Tree Shook Delhi: The 1984 Carnage and Its Aftermath, co-authored with H.S. Phoolka (2007), and The Fiction of Fact-finding: Modi and Godhra (2014). His article on caste was published in 2007 in Writing a Nation: An Anthology of Indian Journalism, edited by Nirmala Lakshman.