Caste

Caste and Careers: Limited Mobility Over Three Generations

Does caste still dictate occupation and occupational mobility? A socio-economic survey in Uttar Pradesh reveals that aside from modest Dalit upward mobility, the occupational gap between upper-caste…
▶09-Apr-2025
Rukmi Pradeep, Srinivas Goli

Redesigning Reservations: How Heterogeneous are the Scheduled Castes?

The Supreme Court’s concern about unequal access to reservations within beneficiary groups is valid. However, the court and executive should prioritise an evidence-based approach, using data to…
▶07-Oct-2024
Ashwini Deshpande, Rajesh Ramachandran

Chandrashekhar Azad and Dalit Politics in Uttar Pradesh

The Azad Samaj Party represents both a crisis following the fracturing of the Dalit movement and a possible future regeneration under a new Ambedkarite organisation.
▶27-Jun-2024
Sudha Pai

Renaming Caste, Retaining Privilege

Attempts to 'invisibilise' caste through definitional alterations – whether in terms of an organic community or of a cultural community – are enmeshed in long-range socioeconomic…
▶15-Jun-2024
Ankur Barua, Vishal Vasanthakumar
Book
Book Review

Marked by Insight and Foresight

The writings between the 1980 and 2003 of K. Balagopal, the scholar and democratic rights activist who died too early, emphasised caste’s role in fuelling fascism in India.
▶22-Apr-2024
Nivedita Menon

The Death of a Dalit in a Democracy

Dalits aspire to practice the ethics of democracy as their way of life. Yet, when they live a democratic life and celebrate the Constitution as their social public ethics, the consequence is the end…
▶23-Jan-2024
Jadumani Mahanand

Can a Caste Census Reverse the BJP's Advantage in Wooing Lower Castes?

A caste census may not transform the course of electoral politics. But bringing caste contradictions to the fore could give the social justice parties a strategy to woo lower castes that have drifted…
▶27-Nov-2023
Pankaj Kumar

The Workers Left out of the Law to End Manual Scavenging

A decade after the law to end manual scavenging, thousands of workers continue to clean waste with little protection. The narrow framing of the law contributes to this state of affairs.
▶28-Sep-2023
Ahana Ganguly

The Politics over California’s Anti-Caste Bill

Anxiety amongst upper-caste diaspora that their narrative about a benign Indian culture would be undone lies at the heart of the opposition to California’s bill to ban caste discrimination.
▶30-Aug-2023
Prabodh Jamwal, Anuradha Bhasin
Essay

Gandhi and Liberal Modernity: The Vexed Question of Caste

Gandhi’s thinking on caste must be frameworked within his opposition to capitalist modernity and its destructive effects on the peasant. His ambivalences on caste owe to his efforts to integrate his…
▶02-Aug-2023
Akeel Bilgrami