Includes index.

Bibliography: p. 311-316.

Machine derived contents note: Acknowledgements -- Notes on translations and area under study, with map -- Part I. Introduction: 1. Low caste protest in nineteenth-century western India -- Part II. Religion and Society Under Early British Rule: 2. From warrior traditions to nineteenth-century politics: structure, ideology, and identity in the Maratha-kunbi caste complex -- 3. The crisis of cultural legitimacy: missionaries, reformers, and Hindu society in the mid-nineteenth century -- 4. The growth of religious reform opinion in western India -- Part III. Jotirao Phule and his circle: the emergence of a distinctive radical voice: 5. Student radicals in mid-nineteenth-century Maharashtra -- 6. The Aryan invasions and the origins of caste society -- 7. Warriors and cultivators: the reinterpretation of popular culture -- 8. Maratha history as polemic: low caste ideology and political debate in late nineteenth-century Maharashtra -- Part IV. The Lower Caste Community in Contemporary Society: 9. Religious emancipation and political competition -- 10. Social protest and the construction of a religious ethic -- 11. Traditional privileges and new skills: Phule's analysis of the nature of Brahman power -- 12. The Satyashodhak Samaj in the 1870s -- Part V. Ideology and the Non-Brahman Movement in the 1880s: 13. Phule's polemic in the 1880s: the ideological construction of rural life and labour -- 14. The non-Brahman movement in the 1880s -- 15. Epilogue: ideology and politics in nineteenth-century western India -- Bibliographic note -- Bibliography -- Glossary -- Index.