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Caste Dominance and Territory in South India: Understanding Kammas’ socio-spatial mobility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2018

DALEL BENBABAALI
DALEL BENBABAALI*
Affiliation:
School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, University of Oxford Email: dalel.benbabaali@area.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article argues that taking territory into account is essential to understand the change in the scale and nature of caste dominance in contemporary India. The demonstration is based on an analysis of the socio-spatial trajectories of the Kammas—a dominant caste from Coastal Andhra, where they continue to own most of the land, even though they have migrated in large numbers towards the interior and southern regions of the Indian peninsula, both to newly irrigated areas and to the cities. The key positions they occupy in the politics and economy of Andhra Pradesh confer upon them a hegemonic character. However, this hegemony is threatened by the growing resistance of Dalits to caste and class oppression, while Kamma cultural domination, long contested in Telangana, is now challenged by the formation of the new state.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 6 , November 2018 , pp. 1938 - 1976
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

*Fieldwork for this research was funded by various grants and scholarships from the University of Paris-Nanterre, the Fondation Thiers (Institut de France), the Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient (Pondicherry), the Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities (Delhi), and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR). A seminar version of this article was presented at a workshop organized by Alpa Shah and Jens Lerche in the Department of Anthropology of the London School of Economics in April 2014. I am grateful to the discussants Barbara Harriss-White and Geert De Neve for their comments, as well as two anonymous reviewers for this journal.

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96 Ibid., p. 319.

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