Ciotti and Jeffrey's efforts to understand the rearticulation of caste self-hood under conditions of Indian globalization are welcome for extending this field of concern by taking into account the effects of consumption, massified education, Dalit politics of self-respect and dignity, and emergent linkages between country and city on two important communities in north India, Jats, and Chamars. However the spectacular successes of the BSP have also led scholars to turn back to earlier studies of caste and community formation in north India during the colonial period, and explore the associational forms and political strategies that have enabled the BSP's spectacular rise to power (Chandra 20). These are states with long histories of anti-caste struggle, demands by non-Brahmin castes for proportional representation, and the successful exclusion of Brahmins from political power (even when their symbolic salience looms large in the social imaginary). Studies of caste, democracy, and personhood have tended to focus on southern and western India. More significant, democratization through caste reflects 'a form of politics that forefronts collective rights and group emancipation rather than individual autonomy,' and challenges received accounts of democratization that 'assume liberal individualism as the goal of enfranchisement even when political action centers on demands for group recognition and the protection of minorities' (Rao 2009: xii). P Singh government to implement the recommendations of the Mandal Commission (1980), constituted by the Janata Party government in 1979 to explore the advisability of extending reservations to the Other Backward Classes (OBCs)-to be sure.

(1) What Christophe Jaffrelot (2002) has called a 'silent revolution' has been enabled by 'reservations,' the affirmative action policies of the state-a process accelerated by the 1989 decision of the V. Focused on the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, each is shaped by the new politics of caste enabled by the rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP Party of the Majority) and defined by that party's tactical success in harnessing both ideological shifts in Hindutva activism, and neo-liberal economic policy in the interest of a new politics of recognition and redistribution. The two books under review address caste's continued salience as a political-symbolic force in Indian social life through dense, localized ethnography. London, New York, and New Delhi: Routledge, 2010. Retro-Modern: Forging the Low-Caste Self. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting.

Gender and Caste by Anupama Rao