Anthroclan

                                                                     Nationalism “consciousness of belonging to a nation (existent or in the realm of aspiration) or nationality, and the desire, as manifest in sentiment and activity, to secure or maintain its welfare, prosperity, and integrity, and to maximize its political autonomy” - James Coleman (1986: 425) Nation - “a large group of people who feel that they form a single and exclusive community destined to be an independent state”. It is followed by the defined characters as given below   - largeness in scale - a belief that the nation constitutes a terminal community - the assumption of the national destiny of independent   - statehood in the modern world  Smith (1991 ), in his National Identity,  identified five major ways in which the word nationalism is used. According to him, nationalism can signify:       1)   The whole process of forming and maintaining nations or nation-states.     2)      A consc

Caste among the religious minorities in India Caste as a hereditary system of stratification is rooted in Hinduism. The Varna vyavastha (four-fold stratification of Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra), the hundreds of jaatis that operationalise the caste system in society, the out-castes or Dalits who are outside this vyavastha- all these categories of hierarchy emanate from Hindu religious texts and practices. Castes have traditional association with specific occupations, which also re-infor ce hierarchy and are passed along the family line. Although this aspect might not be so rigid anymore for all castes, it nevertheless determined relations of patronage and tied up ideas of ritual hierarchy into economic relations. The   occupational and ritual relations of purity and impurity, while finding their legitimation in the Hindu religion, has made ways into other religions of the sub-continent as well, even if in a less ritualistic form. Therefore, many have argued that practices o