1In the context of a political and scholarly climate in which the language of inclusion often obscures the entrenched hierarchies of caste, Caste in Everyday Life offers a grounded and critical contribution to contemporary debates in caste studies. Its intervention lies in reframing caste not through the conventional idioms of law, policy, or social reform, but through affect, performance, and embodied experience—dimensions often overlooked in mainstream sociological or political analyses. The volume responds to a significant epistemic lacuna: the failure of dominant caste literature to engage with the phenomenological and psychological registers of caste oppression. This orientation aligns with a broader affective turn in the social sciences that foregrounds emotion, sensation, and embodied knowledge as valid sites of critique and social reproduction. In doing so, it furthers the work of scholars like Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai by offering empirical and situated narratives that anchor the abstractions of caste within the lifeworlds of marginalized actors.
2The volume’s commitment to affect and everyday life is not merely thematic, but also methodological. Drawing on ethnography, oral history, and autoethnography, the contributors reject detached social science empiricism and instead adopt approaches that foreground subjectivity, memory, and narrative. These methodologies are especially apt for the project at hand because they permit access to the subtle, visceral, and often nonverbalized registers of caste-based violence and exclusion. The focus on the everyday serves not to normalize but, rather, to expose: the mundane is treated as a site of caste’s most resilient operations. The methodologies reflect a critical stance against claims of caste-neutral objectivity, insisting instead on the legitimacy of experiential and embodied knowledge in academic inquiry.
3The editors open the volume with a robust conceptual framework that critiques the classical sociological approaches of scholars such as Louis (1980:03) and Michael (1979:03), while also introducing readers—both scholarly and lay—to a lexicon that enables the articulation of caste’s lived and affective registers. This approach, grounded in clarity and conceptual accessibility, helps democratize theoretical discourse by making complex structures of power and inequality legible to a wider array of readers, particularly those whose lives are shaped by the phenomena being studied while foregrounding the experiential turn inaugurated by scholars like Gopal Guru, Sundar Sarukkai, and Joel Lee. Their invocation of Ambedkar's insistence that caste is a “state of mind” rather than a “wall of bricks” (p. 1) sets the tone for a project that explores the psychological, affective, and social reproduction of caste through everyday life. Importantly, the editors resist romanticizing the “everyday” by showing how banal acts—gestures, silences, rituals—maintain caste hierarchies, particularly through what Sukumar (p. 6) calls “casted enactments.”
4The volume is structured around five thematic sections—psychosocial violence, exclusion in education, stigma and subject formation, banal casteism, and caste economies—each illuminating how caste persists not as residual history but as a phenomenological present.
5In the first section, “Psycho-social Violence,” G.C. Pal (Chapter 2, “Persistence of Caste Violence in Contemporary India: Psychosocial Underpinnings,” pp. 29-54) and Dhaneswar Bhoi (Chapter 3, “Caste and Everyday University Life: Psychoemotional Experiences of Dalit Students,” pp. 55-80) offer sobering accounts of caste-based humiliation, trauma, and erasure. Pal’s chapter examines the psychosocial underpinnings of violence against Dalits, arguing that violence is not anomalous but instead constitutive of caste society. Bhoi’s autoethnographic insights on Dalit students in Indian universities offer a visceral account of structural neglect, epistemic violence, and institutionalized casteism. His narrative method powerfully captures what journalist Isabel Wilkerson (2020:223) terms "the thievery of caste," how caste systems rob individuals of agency, dignity, and social mobility—in this case, the theft of time and possibility (p. 56).
6The second section of the book, “Exclusion in Education,” extends this critique by interrogating how state institutions operationalize exclusion through everyday microaggressions and structural gatekeeping, even while claiming to democratize access to it. Subhadarshee Nayak’s fieldwork in Odia-medium schools (Chapter 4, “Caste in Schools: Experiences of Dalit Children,” pp. 83-106) underscores how pedagogical environments reproduce caste through curricular silences and meal-based segregation. Deep Chand’s account of viva voce examinations in Uttar Pradesh (Chapter 5, “(Re)-production of Caste Prejudices: Viva-Voce Examination in Higher Education in Eastern Uttar Pradesh,” pp. 107-30) demonstrates how the performance of caste becomes especially palpable in oral evaluations, where “merit” is a socially coded performance of caste privilege. These contributions challenge the dominant meritocratic discourse that masks caste inequalities behind neoliberal vocabularies.
7The third section on caste, “Stigma and Subjectivity,” is perhaps the most compelling in its epistemic intervention. Narayana Sukumar’s reflection on the Thoti’s stick (Chapter 6, “Living Memories of Caste: The Thoti’s Stick,” pp. 133-56) is both intimate and analytic, revealing how caste is inscribed on the body across generations—especially when he notes how even educated family members remain haunted by the memory of public performances involving the stick (p. 145). The material object—the stick with bells—becomes a mnemonic of humiliation, a form of inherited stigma that resists erasure. Shailaja Menon’s account of the Pulluvans in Kerala (Chapter 7, “The Pulluvans, Sacred Serpents and Performative Healing in Kerala,” pp. 157-76) shows how caste is re-ritualized under neoliberal cultural logics, particularly through state-sponsored cultural festivals that aestheticize Dalit labor while erasing its historical caste burden (p. 167). Dhivya Sivaramane’s ethnography of temple entry struggles in Tamil Nadu (Chapter 8, “Whose Freedom? Interrogating the Free Hindu Temples Campaign, Caste Politics and Dalit Contestations of Temple Space in Tamil Nadu,” pp. 177-208) critiques the empty promises of secular constitutionalism, foregrounding the embodied violence of spatial exclusion—illustrated vividly in the villages of Chettipulam, Uthapuram, Pazhankallimedu, and Lingathuparai, where Dalits were denied access to temple despite legal assurances.
8In the penultimate section, “Banal Casteism: Everyday Assertions of Superiority,” the book turns to what Bhoi and Gorringe frame as “banal casteism”—the seemingly innocuous acts through which caste superiority is asserted. Rohini Srikumar and Amritha Mohankumar’s analysis of digital food branding (Chapter 9, “Brahmins’ ‘Touch’ in Digital Branding: Food, Taste and Identity,” pp. 211-26) reveals how caste purity is recoded through neoliberal logics of “quality” and “taste,” especially via Brahmin-branded vegetarianism. K.R. Disha’s reflections on Dalit women in inter-caste marriages (Chapter 10, “Practising Family, Intimacy and Caste: Narratives of Dalit Women in Non-endogamous Marriages,” pp. 247-70) expose the affective asymmetries and caste-gender violence that persist within intimate relationships, often despite progressive political commitments. Ankita Bhatkhande’s study of language in a Brahmin household (Chapter 11, “‘Do Not Talk Like the Other Castes’: Language and Everyday Casteism in a Marathi Brahmin Household in Mumbai,” pp. 271-90) uncovers how caste is preserved through linguistic purity and normative modes of speech, subtly reinforcing boundaries through everyday injunctions.
9The final section, “Economies of Caste and Employment,” addresses the laboring caste body in urban and migratory contexts. Raju Chalwadi’s work on Valmikis in Mumbai (Chapter 12, “(Re)Constructing Spatial and Social Relations: Valmikis of Mumbai and Their Everyday Challenge to Caste,” pp. 293-308) reveals the spatial stigmatization that Dalits endure, particularly through practices of segregation in municipal housing schemes and the persistence of caste-based sanitation roles, such as the reference to waste collection routes being informally assigned along caste lines (p. 299). Neelima Rashmi Lakra’s study of Dalit brick kiln workers (Chapter 13, “Caste, Labour, and Migration: Everyday Pains of Dalits in Brick Kilns,” pp. 309-32) further illustrates how mobility does not imply escape; rather, it reorganizes caste-ed experiences across geographies, exemplified by how workers are denied access to water facilities and forced to settle in makeshift spaces away from dominant caste villages (p. 319). Both chapters challenge the urban-anonymity thesis by showing how caste follows the body, even into the city’s supposed modernity. The volume asserts that caste is visible and violently operative in urban geographies—reconstituted through housing, labor networks, institutional protocols, and everyday social practices. This framing resists the long-held perception that urbanization dilutes caste and draws attention to the sophisticated repackaging of caste hierarchies in seemingly progressive, social, civic, and bureaucratic spaces. The continued exclusion, surveillance, and humiliation of Dalits and marginalized caste groups in these environments showcase the deeply embedded presence of caste in India’s contemporary urban fabric. The book’s intervention powerfully reaffirms that caste is not just spatially adaptable but structurally persistent, shaping the contours of both belonging and exclusion even within the city’s formal institutions.
10The volume closes with a reflective afterword by Surinder Jodhka (pp. 333-36), whose work has long interrogated the transformation and persistence of caste in contemporary India. Jodhka situates the volume within a larger epistemic shift—away from system-level abstraction toward grounded, experiential accounts. While the afterword offers a concise synthesis, it could have further addressed how such a methodological shift can intervene in global caste-blind sociologies.
11In addition to making a significant contribution, the volume also invites further reflection on its conceptual and methodological priorities. While its affective turn is timely and intellectually productive, a more robust articulation of how affect interfaces with structural and historical processes would have further anchored the analysis. For instance, while Bhoi’s chapter on Dalit student experiences (pp. 55–80) powerfully evokes emotional and psychological distress, the broader structural mechanisms—such as state-imposed metrics of merit or university-level caste gatekeeping—are less analytically foregrounded. Similarly, in Menon’s chapter (pp. 157-76), the aestheticization of Dalit ritual labor is well articulated through an affective lens, but the structural logic of caste-based cultural appropriation remains implicit. These instances point to a tendency in some chapters to treat affect as self-explanatory, rather than as an analytical tool tethered to the political economy that enables and sustains caste hierarchies. Similarly, the methodological richness of the book, while intellectually generative, might have been further deepened by engaging with visual, spatial, or archival methods to map the sedimented layers of caste in the contemporary moment. However, this does not undercut the volume’s contribution and signals fertile grounds for future scholarship inspired by it. Likewise, while the affective register enriches the text methodologically, and some chapters thoughtfully engage with caste-gender intersections, the absence of queer-caste relationalities—particularly around domesticity, kinship, and vulnerability—limits the full potential of its intersectional ambition. A deeper engagement with caste's multiplicity—across regions, gendered formations, sexual subjectivities, and religious identities—could have added further resonance to this otherwise robust and generative volume. While the volume explores caste across institutional and spatial geographies, its silence on how caste operates within and across religious communities presents a notable absence, particularly given the increasing caste-based violence against Dalit Muslims and Christians in India.
12That said, Caste in Everyday Life is a landmark contribution that reorients caste studies toward affect, embodiment, and everyday relationality. For scholars, students, and researchers engaged in the critical study of South Asia, this volume offers a theoretically robust and empirically grounded resource. Its affective approach is especially salient in a context marked by dominant discourses that tend to flatten caste into legal or economic categories. It showcases phenomenological registers of caste, aligning with broader trends in South Asian ethnography and forging the affective turn more broadly within social sciences. Politically, the work resonates with contemporary debates surrounding caste enumeration, reservation politics, and the resurgence of anti-caste assertion in both rural and urban India. It demands that we rethink both the methods and politics of studying caste, especially in an era in which its presence is often denied, disguised, or rendered banal.