This talk will reflect on broad trends in the study of caste including debates and discussions drawing on poststructuralist, Marxist, and anthropological approaches which have tended to approach caste as a distinctive form of hierarchy and social distinction. This framing will help to illuminate the challenge of new approaches and intellectual formations, which center critical caste and Dalit studies, scholarship on anticaste thought, and studies of global caste.

How does a politics of the present inflect social transformations of caste, as well as the resistance to its inequities? What are the potentials and the perils to studying caste through global fields of power and comparison? How might we bridge institutional logics and disciplinary constraints in effecting novel forms of critique?

In this episode of BIC Talks, Anupama Rao delivers a talk. This is an excerpt from an event that took place in the BIC premises in December 2024.

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