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.