The Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders and India's Hidden Apartheid

(Un)making the manual scavenger

“…Caste power's salience lies in its transversal relationship with liberalism's separation of public and private spheres. Liberal rule in India, imposed through the colonial rule of difference (Chatterjee, 1993) and postcolonial Brahmanism (Aloysius, 1998), has long disavowed its uncertain compromises with caste illiberalism (Teltumbde, 2010(Teltumbde, , 2018, flattening historically situated practices into the binary of the public and the private. Therefore, caste power haunts both the designation of the public as the site of "modern" governance and the private as a realm of timeless "tradition."…”

“…Caste power's salience lies in its transversal relationship with liberalism's separation of public and private spheres. Liberal rule in India, imposed through the colonial rule of difference (Chatterjee, 1993) and postcolonial Brahmanism (Aloysius, 1998), has long disavowed its uncertain compromises with caste illiberalism (Teltumbde, 2010, 2018), flattening historically situated practices into the binary of the public and the private. Therefore, caste power haunts both the designation of the public as the site of “modern” governance and the private as a realm of timeless “tradition.” This binary, as postcolonial, feminist, and anti‐caste scholars have traced, irrevocably transformed how caste society reflected on its practices—the insistence on “family firms” among mercantile castes (Birla, 2009), the gendered caste practice of widow immolation (Mani, 1998), imaginations of bondage and enslavement (Mohan, 2015; Prakash, 1990; Viswanath, 2014), caste enumeration (Dirks, 2001), and occupational stigma and privilege (Pandian, 2009; Prashad, 2000; Rawat, 2011; Subramanian, 2019).…”

The cosmopolitan standard of civilization: a reflexive sociology of elite belonging among Indian diplomats

“…While the politics of this silence and the broader dynamics of caste are beyond this paper's scope, it is imperative to establish that caste is not an exotic drag on rational modernity or a ritual doctrine to be banished by a secular temperament -if this were so, it would arguably have made its exit by now. Contemporary manifestations of caste are fundamental to Indian cultural, social, economic, and political relations (Béteille, 2012;Teltumbde, 2010). Caste matters for the IFS because castebased hierarchies, recruitment methods, and representational ideals have fundamentally shaped the Service.…”

Everyday politics of care and exclusion: Conceptualising agency in rural south India

“…Dalits are estimated to be 19% of India's population (Nagarajan, 2021). They are marginalised and excluded by other hierarchically structured caste groups (Teltumbde, 2010). Thus Dalits have been widely excluded from agrarian land ownership, accessing Hindu temples, profitable markets, ecological commons and much more.…”

“…Struggles against India's casteism have been waged for millennia (Teltumbde, 2010), which also foreground how caste intersects with gendered, ethnic and religious exclusions (Arya, 2020;Paik, 2018). These intersecting exclusions are seen as inflicting violent atrocities and oppression.…”