Padmanabh Samarendra

Padmanabh Samarendra is Professor at the Dr. K.R. Narayanan Centre for Dalit and Minorities Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. His research interests include the concept of caste and caste movements in modern India, colonial anthropology, colonialism, nationalism, etc. He is in the process of completing a monograph on caste. He has received fellowships from the Indian Council of Social Science Research, the Charles Wallace India Trust, the Ford Foundation and the Nehru Trust for Victoria and Albert Museum. He was a member of the Centre for Social Science Studies in Calcutta.

The project

Title: Interpretation of Caste and Hinduism: The French Traditions’

Hosting institution: Centre d'études sud-asiatiques et himalayennes – CESAH, Paris

Selective Bibliography

• `Marginalization through empowerment: The Policy of reservation for Scheduled Castes in India’, in Anna Bochkovskaya, Sanjukta Das Gupta, and Amit Prakash, eds., Interrogating Marginalities across Disciplinary Boundaries: Colonial and Post-Colonial India, New Delhi: Routledge India (2024)
• `Religion and Schedule Caste status’, Economic and Political Weekly, LI:31 (2016)
• `Local jatis and pan-Indian caste: The unresolved dilemma of M.N. Srinivas’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 50:2 (2016)
• `Religion, caste and conversion: Membership of a Scheduled Caste and judicial deliberations’, Economic and Political Weekly, LI:4 (2016)
• `Anthropological knowledge and statistical frame: Caste in the census in colonial India’, in Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar, eds., Caste in Modern India: A Reader, Vol I, Ranikhet: Permanent Black (2014)
• `Census in colonial India and the birth of caste’, Economic and Political Weekly, XLVI:33 (2011)