Articles by Ashutosh Varshney

It is now widely accepted that the lower castes have risen in Indian politics. Has there been a corresponding change in the economy? Using comprehensive data on enterprise ownership from the Economic Census of 1990, 1998 and 2005, this paper shows there are substantial caste differences in entrepreneurship across India. The scheduled castes and scheduled tribes are significantly under-represented in the ownership of enterprises and the share of the workforce mployed by them. These differences are widespread across all states,have decreased very modestly between 1990 and 2005, and cannot be attributed to broad differences in access to physical or human capital.

Classes, Like Ethnic Groups, Are Imagined Communities A Response to Rao Ashutosh Varshney THE application of class analysis to India's countryside is in need of an intellectual renewal By repeatedly giving rise to, or participating in, the casteand religion-based movements, rural India has not only continued to flout the core predictions and propositions of the standard class analysis, but more importantly for our purposes, the concept of class has also undergone serious changes in the last decade and a half. The key challenges to the concept of class, as we used to practise it the 1960s and 1970s, have come from the theories of collective action on the one hand and of ethnicity and nationalism on the other.