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Book Review: Subordinate And Marginal Groups In Early India, Edited By Aloka Parasher-Sen, Ananya Vajpeyi

Ananya Vajpeyi

Marginality and subordination have been important themes in India's human and social sciences for almost a hundred years. Aloka Parasher-Sen's edited volume is a useful intervention in the literature on caste in the "intermediate and immediate past" (p. 3). This is the long stretch of South Asian premodernity frequently ignored by historians, thanks to presentist commitments that tend to overwhelm their scholarship ideologically or lop-sided archival and linguistic skills that tend to constrain it intellectually. The politics of the discipline of history being what it is today, the ancient, colonial, and contemporary periods all receive disproportionate amounts of scholarly attention, …