Sociological Bulletin

This article examines how caste hierarchy is spatially reorganised through state-led religious infrastructure development in an Indian pilgrimage town. It argues that sacred infrastructure functions not merely as economic investment but as a sociological mechanism that reorders ritual authority, property relations and everyday access to urban space. Drawing on qualitative political sociology and spatial ethnography, it analyses Tuljapur, a major Hindu pilgrimage town in India, undergoing state-led infrastructure expansion centred on a historic temple complex. The study shows that sacred infrastructure functions as a critical mode of regional political economy, organising economic activity, settlement morphology and access to institutional authority. Rather than producing inclusive growth, temple-centred development consolidates spatial hierarchies by embedding caste-based regimes of access within the material fabric of planning and infrastructure. The article further demonstrates how state actors mobilise sacred space as a site of governance and legitimacy, rescaling state power through selective infrastructural investment while reproducing existing inequalities. By foregrounding religion and caste as spatial and political–economic forces, the article advances debates in regional and spatial theory on hierarchy, governance and uneven development. It argues that sacred towns are not exceptional or marginal spaces but key sites through which contemporary state and regional transformation are enacted.

P. C. Saidalavi, Seeking Allah’s Hierarchy: Caste, Labor, and Islam in India, 2025, University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN: 13 9781512828498.

Contemporary environmental conflicts around large-scale scientific and developmental projects in India are often narrated through analytically reductive binaries, framed either as ‘anti-science’ sentiment rooted in ignorance and superstition or as epistemic heroism opposing hegemonic modern science through indigenous knowledge. Despite their political differences, both positions rely on a stable epistemological opposition between science and experience. This article rejects both views and conceptualises environmental conflict as a struggle internal to modernity itself, where science emerges as a contested terrain rather than as a neutral authority or an external imposition. Focusing on the anti-neutrino movement in Theni, Tamil Nadu, the article examines how conflicts unfold through competing claims to scientific rationality, risk assessment and modern values. Drawing on theories of risk and multidimensional environmentalism, risk is understood as a socially inherited and historically sedimented condition shaped by prior encounters with state power, expertise and institutional failure. Within this framework, environmental movements engage modern legal, scientific and bureaucratic institutions to contest the production and insulation of scientific authority, which allows for a more adequate understanding of contemporary environmental struggles.

In his book Modernization of Indian Tradition, Yogendra Singh advanced a ‘paradigm for an integrated approach’ to analysing social change. Drawing insights from this paradigm, this lecture delivered in his memory analyses the dialectics of or the relations between tradition and modernity. It is based on a sociological reading of the historical novel Saheb Bibi Golam by the Bengali litterateur Bimal Mitra. It elucidates fiction as ethnography and provides a corrective to the conventional polarisation between fiction and social research.

MN Srinivas’ concept of ‘the dominant caste’ has rightly been highly influential. The forms that dominance takes have changed a good deal since his day, but inequality and hierarchy have persisted. Modern ideological justifications of dominance are frequently at variance with those of former times, leading to plenty of paradoxes. These paradoxes are illustrated with examples from Nepal, but their application is much wider. Thanks to Nepal’s different political history, the Nepali case can very usefully be contrasted with India and other parts of South Asia to highlight how, and in which contexts, hierarchy as a value persists even when equality is written into numerous constitutional provisions and laws.

The emergence of a large and prosperous Indian diaspora across the globe obscures the fact that it is not a homogeneous and monolithic whole but is representative of the diversity of India. The Dalit diaspora emerged simultaneously but separately with a strong consciousness and commitment to ameliorate caste disabilities both at home and in the host land. One can discern a perceptible influence of Dr Ambedkar’s dictum ‘educate, organise and agitate’ on Dalits. Therefore, the educated Dalits have organised themselves through various international organisations and are agitating against caste discrimination, in the process carving out a dignified identity for themselves. This article delves into the emergence and activism of the numerous international organisations and institutions working on Dalit issues in diasporic locations. It specifically analyses the attempts to incorporate caste as descent-based discrimination within the ambit of racism at various international forums and its inclusion as protected characteristics within the Equality Act, 2010, of the UK. These efforts have been successful in challenging the caste hegemony at both local and global levels and are a step forward towards its eradication.

Vishwa Anand, Poverty & Rural Violence in Bihar: A Sociological Analysis, Delhi: Manak Publications Pvt. Ltd, 2017, 207 pp., ₹495 (Hardback).ISBN: 978-93-7831-449-0.