¹ See Chatterjee, Partha, The nation and its fragments. Colonial and postcolonial histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Kumar, Radha, The history of doing. An illustrated account of movements for women's rights and feminism in India 1800–1990 (New Delhi: Zubaan, 1993)Google Scholar; Sangari, Kumkum and Vaid, Sudesh (eds.), Recasting women: essays in colonial history (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1986)Google Scholar; Sarkar, Tanika, Hindu wife, Hindu nation. Community, religion and cultural nationalism (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001)Google Scholar; Fischer-Tiné, Harald and Mann, Michael (eds.), Colonialism as civilizing mission. Cultural ideology in British India (London: Anthem Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

² See Caplan, Pat, Class and gender in India. Women and their organizations in a south Indian city (London and New York: Tavistock Publications, 1985)Google Scholar; Hancock, Mary, Womanhood in the making: domestic ritual and public culture in urban South India (Boulder, Colorado and Oxford: Westview Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

³ For an account of middle and upper class women in politics see Forbes, Geraldine, Women in modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Agnew, Vijay, Elite women in Indian politics (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1979)Google Scholar; Kumar, Radha, The history of doing (New Delhi: Zubaan, 1993)Google Scholar.

⁴ Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder, Real and imagined women. Gender, culture and postcolonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 130CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Sunder Rajan (1993), p.129.

⁶ Fernandez, Leela, ‘Nationalizing “the global”’: media images, cultural politics and the middle-class in India’, Media, culture and society, (Sage Publications: London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi, 2000), 22, 5:611–628Google Scholar.

⁷ Based on research into middle-class women and children's early education in Kolkata (Calcutta), Donner contends that, ‘Although mothers have contributed to schooling for generations, the emphasis on employment in multinational companies has brought about a shift in educational strategies towards private English-language education. This is increasingly seen as a precondition for occupational choices offered in the “global” market, which demands the reorganization of parenting practices and the division of labour in the household’. From Donner, Henrike. ‘Children are capital, grandchildren are interest’: Changing educational strategies and parenting in Calcutta’ in Assayag, Jackie and Fuller, Chris (eds.), Globalizing India: Perspectives from below. (London: Anthem Press, 2005), p. 119Google Scholar. Emphasis in the text.

⁸ See Rao, Anupama (ed.), Gender and caste (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2003)Google Scholar.

⁹ From Chopra, Radhika, Osella, Caroline, and Osella, Filippo (eds.), South Asian masculinities: Contexts of change, sites of continuity (New Delhi: Kali for Women & Women Unlimited, 2004), p. 4Google Scholar. Emphasis in the text.

¹⁰ For example, see Kapadia, Karin, Siva and her sisters: gender, caste and class, in rural south India (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

¹¹ On the problematic nexus between education and employment opportunities amongst western UP Chamar youth, see Craig, Jeffrey, Jeffery, Roger and Jeffery, Patricia ‘Reproducing Difference? Schooling, Jobs and Empowerment in Uttar Pradesh, India’ in Chopra, Radhika and Jeffery, Patricia (eds.), Educational Regimes in Contemporary India (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, and London: Sage Publications, 2005)Google Scholar.

¹² Low-caste political mobilisation in north India has been the subject of several analyses. Amongst others, see Jaffrelot, Cristophe, India's silent revolution: the rise of the low castes in North Indian politics (Delhi: Manohar, 2003)Google Scholar; Mendelsohn, Oliver and Vicziany, Marika, The untouchables. Subordination, poverty and the state in modern India (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pai, Sudha, Dalit assertion and the unfinished democratic revolution. The Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2002)Google Scholar.

¹³ This process is explored by the author in ‘Ethnohistories behind local and global bazaars: Chronicle of a Chamar weaving community and its disappearance in the Banaras region’, Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.) (Sage Publications: Los Angeles, London, New Dellhi, Singapore, 2007). 41: 3, 319–52.

¹⁴ As will be explained in the course of this paper, the need to recruit educated young men led to a change in the established pattern of bride-searching amongst Manupur Chamar community—which, until then, had mainly taken place in rural areas. The scarce presence of educated women in the latter led to searching for them in urban areas.

¹⁵ Kapadia, Karin, ‘Introduction: The politics of identity, social inequalities and economic growth’ in Kapadia, Karin (ed.), The violence of development. The politics of identity, gender & social inequalities in India (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2002), p. 4Google Scholar.

¹⁶ This phenomenon is the result of female foeticide as a ‘prevention measure’ against the future payment of a dowry on the part of the bride's family. Female foeticide has been recorded within wealthy communities or affluent areas where substantial dowries are paid.

¹⁷ Bourdieu, Pierre ‘Forms of capital’ in Richardson, John G. (ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), pp. 241–258Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Reay, Diane ‘Gendering Bourdieu's concept of capitals? Emotional capital, women and social class’ in Adkins, Lisa and Skeggs, Beverley (eds.), Feminism after Bourdieu (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell and the Sociological Review, 2004), p. 60Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Kumar, Nita. ‘Mothers and non-mothers: gendering the discourse of education in South Asia’ in Gender and History, Vol. 17, No.1 (2005), p. 167CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ For a contemporary account of the salience of these songs for women's articulation of north Indian ideologies of gender and kinship see Raheja, Gloria Goodwin and Gold, Ann Grodzins, Listen to the heron's words. Reimagining gender and kinship in north India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

²¹ Osella, Filippo and Osella, Caroline. Social mobility in Kerala. Modernity and identity in conflict (London: Pluto press, 2000), p. 79Google Scholar.

²² Kapadia (169–170) (emphasis and italics in the text).

²³ Partha Chatterjee (1993), p. 127.

²⁴ Partha Chatterjee, 1993, p. 127. On the process of separation between the colonial Bengali middle-class woman from the lower classes see also Banerjee, Swapna M. ‘Subverting the moral universe. “Narratives of transgression” in the construction of middle-class identity in colonial Bengal’ in Bates, Crispin (ed.), Beyond representation. Colonial and postcolonial constructions of Indian identity. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar. It is also significant that the pair made up of upper and middle-class families and their servants can serve as an observation point for the contemporary experience of modernity in globalizing India, as analysed by Seemin Qayum and Raka Ray in ‘Grappling with modernity. India's respectable classes and the culture of domestic servitude’ in Ethnography (Sage Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA, New Delhi, 2003) 4(4): 520–555.

²⁵ Pandey, Gyanendra, ‘Rallying the cow: Sectarian strife in the Bhojpuri region 1888–97’ in Guha, Ranajit (ed.), Subaltern Studies II. Writing on South Asia history and society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 71Google Scholar.

²⁶ Manupur Chamars were not alone in observing pardah during the twentieth century. Owen Lynch described this practice amongst the Jatav (Chamar) community in Agra as follows ‘Married women are expected to practice ghunghat (lowering the veil of the sari to cover the face). A newly married girl is expected to do this completely so that the whole face is covered before any man of her husband's neighbourhood, since he is like a potential husband to her. As time goes on, however, with age and children she is expected only to keep the veil over her head, and is allowed greater freedom in speaking to other men of the neighbourhood into which she has married’ (italics in the text) In The Politics of untouchability. Social mobility and social change in a city of India. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 174.

²⁷ See Ciotti, (2007), pp. 337–338.

²⁸ Nita Kumar ‘Oranges for the girls, or, the half-known story of the education of girls in twentieth-century Banaras’ in Nita Kumar (ed.), Women as subjects. South Asian histories (Calcutta: Stree, 1994), p. 212.

²⁹ Nita Kumar (1994), p. 213.

³⁰ Nita Kumar (2005), p. 171.

³¹ It might well be that the process of embourgeoisement changed women's bargaining power in the household and gave them increased control over their male family members. However, the Chamar ‘traditional’ gender setting needs to be stressed as it challenges the assumption of equal gender relations amongst Dalit communities. Although they might not endure the severe pardah registered amongst upper caste women in the region, nevertheless Chamar women's gender relations follow patterns found within Hindu communities. Owen Lynch's observations on Agra Jatavs testify to this point. He argues ‘In Jatav families the relationship between husband and wife is one in which the wife is expected to show respect and deference to her husband. A man is allowed to strike his wife but she cannot strike back. A husband can scold his wife but she ought not talk back, though she may privately do so in an indirect way. It is often said that a wife must treat her husband like a god . . . . The act which best expresses and even ritualizes the relation of husband and wife is that she will not eat her evening meal until he has eaten, no matter how late he may return (1969), pp. 173–174. For a more recent example of women's subordination amongst Chamars in Lucknow, see Ravindra S. Khare, ‘Elusive social justice, distant human rights: untouchable women's struggle and dilemmas in changing India’ in Michael R. Anderson & Sumit Guha (eds.), Changing concepts of rights and justice in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 212. Further, the emergence of Dalit feminism—as a distinct voice from mainstream (often upper caste-dominated) Indian feminism—has brought the issue of Dalit patriarchy to the fore (see the essays contained in Anupama Rao (ed.), Gender & caste (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2003).

³² Walsh, Judith E.. Domesticity in colonial India. What women learned when men gave them advice (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 4Google Scholar.

³³ Given the derogatory meanings assigned to the Chamar caste in north India, the term ‘Chamar’ is used as a term of abuse. Also, the word ‘karma’ amongst Manupur Chamars is here used to signify ‘action’, rather than referring to the law of cause and effect that in Hindu texts links past to present lives.

³⁴ ‘Self-immolation’ is often used to refer to suicide by fire.

³⁵ ‘Childbirth pollution is the most polluting of all, far greater than menstruation, sexual intercourse, defecation or death. Consequently, touching the amniotic sac, placenta and umbilical cord . . . and cleaning up the blood are considered the most disgusting of tasks’ in Jeffery, Patricia, Jeffery, Roger and Lyon, Ann. Labour pains and labour power. Women and childbearing in India (London and New Jersey: Zed Books, New Delhi: Manohar, 1989), p. 106Google Scholar.

³⁶ Author's field note 1999.

³⁷ From Vasudha Dalmia ‘The house of service or the chronicle of an un/holy city’, introduction to the novel ‘Sevasadan’ by Munshi Premchand, translated by Snehal Shingavi (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. viii–ix.

³⁸ A similar phenomenon was observed by Lynch amongst Agra Jatavs. He argued how ‘Education and improved economic status have also influenced the distance at which marriages are contracted in two ways. In the first place, it is somewhat difficult to find a mate of comparable education or wealth within Agra, and one must look further afield. Secondly, the educated generally are in government service and are posted to different areas throughout Uttar Pradesh. They are often asked to look for a match either in their home place or at their post (1969), pp. 178–179. Based on a census he carried out on a sample of Jatav families based in Agra and their daughters’ marriage destination, Lynch reported that ‘the radius for this marriage circle is about 120 miles’ (ibid. 179).

³⁹ It should also be noted that not all urban Chamar women who were married into the village are educated.

⁴⁰ Data on the influx of urban brides into Manupur was collected during the author's last field trip to the village in 2005.

⁴¹ The desire to move to the city was expressed by both women and men. Women asked their husbands to move to the city for the sake of their children's future. Some men despised what they thought of as a degraded village environment in which fights occurred and uncivilised language was used, and expressed their preference for the city over it.

⁴² Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella argue that amongst the low-caste Izhavas, long-established middle and upper-middle-class people marry amongst themselves and separated themselves from their toddy-tapper and manual worker caste fellows (2000), p. 82. While these authors also report that the Izhavas practise hypergamous marriage as a mobility strategy (2000), p. 115, a comparable pattern is not clear-cut amongst the Chamars.

⁴³ From Saratkumari Chaudhurani, ‘The modern age and the modern woman’ written in 1891, translated by Swati Ganguli and included in Malini Bhattacharya and Abhijit Sen (eds.), Talking of power. Early writings of Bengali women from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century (Kolkata: Stree, 2003).

⁴⁴ The Author's field note (1999).

⁴⁵ Author's field notes 2005 (and the phrases in quotes to the end of this paragraph).

⁴⁶ Jeffery, Patricia and Jeffery, Roger, ‘Killing my heart's desire: education and female autonomy in rural north India’ in Kumar, Nita (ed.), Women as subjects. South Asian histories (Calcutta: Stree, 1994), pp. 125–171Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ The author examined the ideological uses of education in this community in ‘In the past we were a bit “Chamar”: Education as a self and community engineering process in northern India’, in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) (2006), 12: 899–916.

⁴⁸ Nita Kumar (2005), p. 170.

⁴⁹ Until 2005 no educated woman worked outside the household or held a government job.

⁵⁰ The Author's field note (2005).

⁵¹ Anandhi, S., Jeyaranjan J. and Rajan Krishnan ‘Work, caste and competing masculinities. Notes from a Tamil village’ Economic and Political Weekly (October 26, 2002).

⁵² Kumar, Nita. ‘Mothers and non-mothers: gendering the discourse of education in South Asia’ in Gender and History, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.