The BJP talks as if India were a single entity, but it understands that India's polity is a network of states in which castes, communities, classes and parties co-operate and compete for the benefits conferred by political power.
"If you are in Chennai, it's all about which caste you are.
In an age in which a caste of privately educated musicians threaten to dominate what remains of British rock while singing about nothing much at all, this is what gives the book its fundamental spark: the sense of raw working-class art, and someone driven to create by the furies to which the title allude.
Fights at bhangra clubs are not the only way in which the caste system impacts upon the British-Asian nightlife; it can also make going on the pull more complicated.
An activist in India has been beaten up for protesting about a ritual in which lower-caste Indians roll in the food leftovers of those of a higher caste.
A group of holy men in India's Karnataka state are seeking to outlaw a century-old ritual in which low-caste Hindus roll in the remains of food eaten by members of a higher caste.
The advent of settled, agricultural societies, at least 10,000 years ago, led to a new division of labour, in which priestly castes tried to monopolise access to the divine, and the authorities sought to control sacred ecstasy.Still, the modifications that religion has undergone should not, in Mr Wade's view, distract from the study of faith's basic functions.
"A feudal system has been forced on us, in which a new caste has appeared in Chechen society," he said of Kadyrov and his inner circle — one that is above all other clans, and above the law.
Ms. Doniger, who is a distinguished Sanskritist and a professor of the history of religion at the University of Chicago, also focuses much attention on the baroquely ornamented Hindu myths in which gods and caste members engage in ornate tricks and counter-tricks.
The genes confirm that women could marry up and ascend into higher castes, but men stayed in the castes in which they were born.
