CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Muhammad Auwn |
|---|---|
| Title | Silent Divide: State Sanctioned Reinforcement and Reproduction of Caste in Pakistan |
| Summary | Recent scholarship in India posits the telling of history through the centering of caste. This history is in stark contrast to both state and popular narratives of the nation. Within this history, caste is the omnipresent factor that shapes an everyday life of exclusion, exploitation, and violence. Moments of resistance to this oppression then form the key to narrating history. Whilst such trends are emergent and significant in India, Pakistan by contrast has popularized the exceptionalist narrative whereby that caste is a distinctive Indian phenomenon, and with the coming of Islam caste is eradicated. This narrative persists in religious, academic, and popular discourse - by tying caste to religion, as a Muslim-majority country, caste is absent. This study shows that despite the attempt to inscribe oneself into another social history, the state, and wider society reproduce caste in both formal and informal processes of discrimination. The processes of caste-based discrimination include the deployment of everyday derogatory terms of identification evoking their untouchable background to economic marginalization (for example in the employment that is available only to their community), mob riots, and state-enforced legal mechanisms such as blasphemy laws used disproportionately against Dalit Christian communities. |
| Supervisor | Naumescu, Vlad; Dafinger, Andreas |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/auwn_muhammad.pdf |
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