Table of Contents:
List of Tables;
Acknowledgements;
Introduction;
SECTION I - State, Law, and Economy: The Colonial Flux;
1. The Advantages of Backwardness: Colonial Policy and Agriculture in Haryana;
2. Jat Domination in South-east Punjab: Socio-economic;
Basis of Jat Politics in a Punjab District;
3. Contours of Communalism: Religion, Caste, and Identity in South-east Punjab;
4. Contesting Claims and Counter-claims: Questions of the Inheritance and Sexuality of Widows in a Colonial State;
5. Fluctuating Fortunes of Wives: Creeping Rigidity in Inter-caste Marriages in the Colonial Period;
SECTION II - Caste, Community, and Gender: The Post-colonial Constraints;
6. High Participation and Low Evaluation: Women and Work in Rural Haryana;
7. Persistence of a Custom: Cultural Centrality of Ghunghat;
8. Ideology, Culture, and Hierarchy: Expenditure- Consumption Patterns in Rural Households;
9. A Matter of Two Shares: A Daughter's Claim to Patrilineal Property in Rural North India;
10. Private Lives, State Intervention: Cases of Runaway Marriage in Rural North India;
11. Caste Panchayats and the Policing of Marriage in Haryana: Enforcing Kinship and Territorial Exogamy;
12. 'First our Jobs then our Girls': The Dominant Caste;
Perceptions on the 'Rising' Dalits;
Index.