Description:
Focusing on the low caste Chamar community, this book examines how some of them abandoned their traditional polluting work, and strategically entered the upper-caste weaving profession. Located within the changing politics of the time, it outlines human agency and its search for dignity.
Review Quotes:
"Ciotti convincingly stakes out the theoretical underpinnings of "retro-modernity" and carefully builds her argument in each chapter. As such, Retro-modern India makes an original and important contribution to the field and will certainly provoke and stimulate anyone with an interest in post-colonial modernity from a "subaltern" point of view." - Clarinda Still, Pacific Affairs: Volume 84, No. 4 - December 2011