On Display: Caste
Welcome to our digital exhibit on Caste. This page is a companion to the physical display in the Harvard Kennedy School Library, available through March 2025. Harvard affiliates can request books via HOLLIS, for pick-up at the library of your choice.
A caste system is a form of social stratification which classifies individuals into fixed social groups, or castes. Based on their birth into a caste, an individual is expected to pursue particular occupations, follow particular lifestyles, marry within their caste, and interact with others based on ritual hierarchies.
The most notable example of a modern caste system is in India. The country's system of social classification has roots in ancient India and has gone through many iterations since then, becoming increasingly entrenched and rigid under British colonialism. Under India's caste system, Dalit communities have been considered "untouchable" and subject to persecution.
India legally banned discrimination on the basis of caste with the adoption of its constitution after achieving independence from British rule in 1947. Indian social reformer Bhimrao Ramji (B.R.) Ambedkar led the constitution's drafting after many years of advocating for Dalit rights and against the caste system. In India and throughout the world, Ambedkar Jayanti (also known as Equality Day) is celebrated on Ambedkar's birthday (April 14). The celebration was first observed by the United Nations in 2016. Despite these legal and activist efforts, the caste-based discrimination is still practiced in India.
The books in this display illuminate the history and modern practice of India's caste system and caste in general through the lenses of politics, gender, and personal experience.
Acknowledgements
The student-led Casteless Caucus at HKS first envisioned this display, led its curation, and offered key insights at every stage of its creation.
Harvard Library Research Guides
Harvard Initiatives
- In Focus: Asian & Pacific American Heritage Month - curated resources from across Harvard including institutional history, media, people, campus groups, and more.
- Asian American Policy Review - Former HKS student journal "dedicated to analyzing public policy issues facing the Asian American and Pacific Islander community."
- India Caucus - HKS student organization that "brings together students from or interested in India to discuss a wide range of topics related to the country and to celebrate Indian culture and traditions."
- South Asia Caucus - HKS student organization that "provides a platform for student from or interested in the region to discuss a range of topics including policy, culture, and politics."
Book List
Click on the circular "i" icons to view book descriptions. Click on the Harvard shield icons to access eebooks (HarvardKey required).
The Annihilation of Caste by
The Annihilation of Caste is one of the most important - and still the most controversial - works of Indian political writing. Completed in 1936, the book is an audacious denunciation of Hinduism and the caste system that infuriated Gandhi, yet has remained a rallying cry for 60 years. In her lengthy introduction Roy looks at how caste has continued through modern Indian history, and why the words of Ambedkar are necessary today more than ever. In startling and urgent writing she shows that caste is the most urgent question if India is to become a world-leading nation.
ISBN: 9781781688311Publication Date: 2014
Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India by
Like one in six people in India, Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable. While most untouchables are illiterate, her family was educated by Canadian missionaries in the 1930s, making it possible for Gidla to attend elite schools and move to America at the age of twenty-six. It was only then that she saw how extraordinary--and yet how typical--her family history truly was. Her mother, Manjula, and uncles Satyam and Carey were born in the last days of British colonial rule. They grew up in a world marked by poverty and injustice, but also full of possibility. In the slums where they lived, everyone had a political side, and rallies, agitations, and arrests were commonplace. The Independence movement promised freedom. Yet for untouchables and other poor and working people, little changed. Satyam, the eldest, switched allegiance to the Communist Party. Gidla recounts his incredible transformation from student and labor organizer to famous poet and founder of a left-wing guerrilla movement. And Gidla charts her mother's battles with caste and women's oppression. Page by page, Gidla takes us into a complicated, close-knit family as they desperately strive for a decent life and a more just society. A moving portrait of love, hardship, and struggle, Ants Among Elephants is also that rare thing: a personal history of modern India told from the bottom up.
ISBN: 9780865478114Publication Date: 2017
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by
Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Isabel Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people--including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others--she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.
ISBN: 9780593230251Publication Date: 2020
Caste and Nature: Dalits and Indian Environmental Politics by
Rarely do Indian environmental discourses examine nature through the lens of caste. Whereas nature is considered as universal and inherent, caste is understood as a constructed historical and social entity. Mukul Sharma shows how caste and nature are intimately connected. He compares Dalit meanings of environment to ideas and practices of neo-Brahmanism and certain mainstreams of environmental thought. Showing how Dalit experiences of environment are ridden with metaphors of pollution, impurity, and dirt, the author is able to bring forth new dimensions on both environment and Dalits, without valourizing the latter's standpoint. Rather than looking for a coherent understanding of their ecology, the book explores the diverse and rich intellectual resources of Dalits, such as movements, songs, myths, memories, and metaphors around nature. These reveal their quest to define themselves in caste-ridden nature and building a form of environmentalism free from the burdens of caste. The Dalits also pose a critical challenge to Indian environmentalism, which has, until now, marginalized such linkages between caste and nature.
ISBN: 9780199477562Publication Date: 2018
Caste Matters by
In this explosive book, Suraj Yengde, a first-generation Dalit scholar educated across continents, challenges deep-seated beliefs about caste and unpacks its many layers. He describes his gut-wrenching experiences of growing up in a Dalit basti, the multiple humiliations suffered by Dalits on a daily basis, and their incredible resilience enabled by love and humour. As he brings to light the immovable glass ceiling that exists for Dalits even in politics, bureaucracy and judiciary, Yengde provides an unflinchingly honest account of divisions within the Dalit community itself-from their internal caste divisions to the conduct of elite Dalits and their tokenized forms of modern-day untouchability-all operating under the inescapable influences of Brahminical doctrines. This path-breaking book reveals how caste crushes human creativity and is disturbingly similar to other forms of oppression, such as race, class and gender. At once a reflection on inequality and a call to arms, Caste Matters argues that until Dalits lay claim to power and Brahmins join hands against Brahminism to effect real transformation, caste will continue to matter.
ISBN: 9780670091225Publication Date: 2019
Civility Against Caste: Dalit Politics and Citizenship in Western India by
Civil society as an analytical concept is increasingly treated with suspicion in the study of politics in postcolonial societies. While engaging with Dalit struggles for civility, this book offers a critique of normative liberal assumptions of civil society and also counters the scholarship that rejects the idea and possibility of civil society in postcolonial societies.Based on an ethnography of Dalit movements in Maharashtra, this book highlights the centrality of caste in constructing localized forms and processes of civil society. The study marks a shift from perspectives that either emphasize the role of the state in shaping civil society or totally ignore the role of caste in its formation. As one of the first books on the post-Panther phase of Dalit politics in Maharashtra, this book makes an important contribution. It reopens the debate on the nature and forms of Dalit assertion in the 1990s and looks beyond the 'impasse' in Dalit politics.
ISBN: 9788132113089Publication Date: 2013
Coming Out As Dalit: A Memoir of Surviving India's Caste System by
Born into a "formerly untouchable manual-scavenging family in small-town India," Yashica Dutt was taught from a young age to not appear "Dalit looking." Although prejudice against Dalits, who compose 25% of the population, has been illegal since 1950, caste-ism in India is alive and well. Blending her personal history with extensive research and reporting, Dutt provides an incriminating analysis of caste's influence in India over everything from entertainment to judicial systems and how this discrimination has carried over to US institutions. Dutt traces how colonial British forces exploited and perpetuated a centuries-old caste system, how Gandhi could have been more forceful in combatting prejudice, and the role played by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, whom Isabel Wilkerson called "the MLK of India's caste issues" in her book Caste. Alongside her analysis, Dutt interweaves personal stories of learning to speak without a regional accent growing up and desperately using medicinal packs to try to lighten her skin. Published in India in 2019 to acclaim, this expanded edition includes 2 new chapters covering how the caste system traveled to the US, its history here, and the continuation of bias by South Asian communities in professional sectors. Amid growing conversations about caste discrimination prompting US institutions including Harvard University, Brandeis University, the University of California system, and the NAACP to add caste as a protected category to their policies, Dutt's work sheds essential light on the significant influence caste-ism has across many aspects of US society. Raw and affecting, Coming Out as Dalit brings a new audience of readers into a crucial conversation about embracing Dalit identity, offering a way to change the way people think about caste in their own communities and beyond.
ISBN: 9780807045282Publication Date: 2024
The Dalit Movement in India: Local Practices, Glocal Connections by
This work traces new 'practices' and discourses among Dalit activists since the 1990s and shows how these practices both shaped and changed social relations. It is an anthropological attempt to reach behind the surface of the contemporary Dalit movement. Some of the topics discussed are the kind of discourses found among Dalit activists, the organizational structure of the movement, and the local practices among activists.This study also relates the method of anthropological fieldwork to theories about social movements. It offers a historical context as a prerequisite to understanding processes in the contemporary Dalit movement. It focuses on the heterogeneity and the geographical spread of the movement. The fieldwork moves from a small locality of Dalits in Lucknow to interaction with Dalit activists in Maharashtra to the life of Punjabi Dalit migrants in Birmingham.
ISBN: 9780198065487Publication Date: 2011
Dalit Women: Vanguard of an Alternative Politics in India by
Through its investigation of the underlying political economy of gender, caste and class in India, this book shows how changing historical geographies are shaping the subjectivities of Dalits across India in ways that are neither fixed nor predictable. It brings together ethnographies from across India to explore caste politics, Dalit feminism and patriarchy, religion, economics and the continued socio-economic and political marginalisation of Dalits. With contributions from major academics this is an indispensable book for researchers, teachers and students working on new political expressions, gender identities, social inequalities and the continuing use of the notion of 'caste' identity in the oppression of subalterns in contemporary India. It will be essential reading in the disciplines of politics, gender, social exclusion studies, sociology and social anthropology.
ISBN: 9781138221062Publication Date: 2017
The Doctor and the Saint: Case, Race, and the Annihilation of Caste: The Debate between B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi by
To best understand and address the inequality in India today, Arundhati Roy insists we must examine both the political development and influence of M. K. Gandhi and why B. R. Ambedkar's brilliant challenge to his near-divine status was suppressed by India's elite. In Roy's analysis, we see that Ambedkar's fight for justice was systematically sidelined in favor of policies that reinforced caste, resulting in the current nation of India: independent of British rule, globally powerful, and marked to this day by the caste system. This book situates Ambedkar's arguments in their vital historical context-- namely, as an extended public political debate with Mohandas Gandhi. In The Doctor and the Saint, Roy exposes some uncomfortable, controversial, and even surprising truths about the political thought and career of India's most famous and most revered figure. In doing so she makes the case for why Ambedkar's revolutionary intellectual achievements must be resurrected, not only in India but throughout the world.
ISBN: 9781608467976Publication Date: 2017
Dynamics of Caste and Law: Dalits, Oppression, and Constitutional Democracy in India by
Dynamics of Caste and Law breaks new ground in understanding how caste and law relate in India's democratic order. Caste has become a visible phenomenon often associated with discrimination, inequality and politics in India and globally. India's constitutional democracy has had a remarkable goal of creating equality in a context of caste. Despite constitutional promises with equal opportunities for the lower castes and outlawing of untouchability at the time of independence, recurring atrocities and inadequate implementation of law have called for rethinking and legal change. This book sheds new light on why caste oppression persists by using new theoretical perspectives as well as Bhimrao Ambedkar's concepts of the caste system. Focusing on struggles among India's Dalits, the castes formerly known as untouchables, the book draws on a rich material and explains, among other things, mechanisms of oppression and how powerful actors may gain influence in institutions of law and state.
ISBN: 9781108489874Publication Date: 2020
The Gender of Caste: Representing Dalits in Print by
Caste and gender are complex markers of difference that have traditionally been addressed in isolation from each other, with a presumptive maleness present in most studies of Dalits ("untouchables") and a presumptive upper-casteness in many feminist studies. In this study of the representations of Dalits in the print culture of colonial north India, Charu Gupta enters new territory by looking at images of Dalit women as both victims and vamps, the construction of Dalit masculinities, religious conversion as an alternative to entrapment in the Hindu caste system, and the plight of indentured labor. The Gender of Caste uses print as a critical tool to examine the depictions of Dalits by colonizers, nationalists, reformers, and Dalits themselves and shows how differentials of gender were critical in structuring patterns of domination and subordination.
ISBN: 9780295995649Publication Date: 2016
Joothan by
"Joothan" refers to scraps of food left on a plate, destined for the garbage or animals. India's untouchables have been forced to accept and eat joothan for centuries, and the word encapsulates the pain, humiliation, and poverty of a community forced to live at the bottom of India's social pyramid. Although untouchability was abolished in 1949, Dalits continued to face discrimination, economic deprivation, violence, and ridicule. Valmiki shares his heroic struggle to survive a preordained life of perpetual physical and mental persecution and his transformation into a speaking subject under the influence of the great Dalit political leader, B. R. Ambedkar. A document of the long-silenced and long-denied sufferings of the Dalits, Joothan is a major contribution to the archives of Dalit history and a manifesto for the revolutionary transformation of society and human consciousness.
ISBN: 9780231129725Publication Date: 2003
Karukku by
First published in Tamil in 1992, Karukku broke barriers of tradition in ways more than one. The first autobiography of a Dalit woman writer, the book is a classic of subaltern writing, and a bold and poignant tale of life outside mainstream Indian thought and function. Revolving around the main theme of caste oppression within the Catholic Church, Karukku portrays the tension between the self and the community, and presents Bama's life as a process of self-reflection and recovery from social and institutional betrayal. Marking ten years of the first English translation of Karukku, this edition includes a Postscript, where Bama relives the dramatic moment of her leave-taking from her chosen vocation that she had not described in the first edition and a special note "Ten Years Later".
ISBN: 9780198078302Publication Date: 2012
The Oxford Handbook of Caste by
Beginning with the 1990s, the subject of caste has seen a profound increase in interest among scholars. What was until then approached as a fossilized tradition of the ritual-obsessed Hindus refusing to see the progressive spirits of the emerging world and studied as a branch of anthropology, suddenly began to be seen as a complex reality deeply embedded in a range of institutions and social practices, attracting scholars from a wide range of disciplines--sociology, political science, history, literature, and even economics. Underlying this opening of the subject of caste were many factors: epistemic, empirical, and political. Caste is no longer approached through the classical binaries of 'traditional' and 'modern'; the 'East' and the 'West'; or the 'closed' and 'open' systems of stratification. With the growing consolidation of caste-based identities among those ranked lower down in the hierarchy since the 1990s, raising questions of citizenship and dignity, the subject has acquired a new salience. As the emerging research shows, the realities of caste on the ground have always been diverse across regions, often contested and ever changing. This Handbook presents a wide range of essays written by authors representing diverse academic disciplines and perspectives, bringing together the emerging trends in the research, imaginations, and lived realities of caste.
ISBN: 9780198896715Publication Date: 2023
A People's History of Heaven by
In the tight-knit community known as Heaven, a ramshackle slum hidden between luxury high-rises in Bangalore, India, five girls on the cusp of womanhood forge an unbreakable bond. Muslim, Christian, and Hindu; queer and straight; they are full of life, and they love and accept one another unconditionally. Whatever they have, they share. Marginalized women, they are determined to transcend their surroundings. When the local government threatens to demolish their tin shacks in order to build a shopping mall, the girls and their mothers refuse to be erased. Together they wage war on the bulldozers sent to bury their homes and, ultimately, on the city that wishes that families like them would remain hidden forever. Elegant, poetic, and vibrant, A People's History of Heaven takes a clear-eyed look at adversity and geography--and dazzles in its depiction of these women's fierceness and determination not just to survive, but to triumph.
ISBN: 9781616207588Publication Date: 2019
The Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders and India's Hidden Apartheid by
While the caste system has been formally abolished under the Indian Constitution, according to official statistics, every eighteen minutes a crime is committed in India on a dalit-untouchable. The Persistence of Caste uses the shocking case of Khairlanji, the brutal murder of four members of a dalit family in 2006, to explode the myth that caste no longer matters. In this exposé, Anand Teltumbde locates the crime within the political economy of post-Independence India and across the global Indian diaspora. This book demonstrates how caste has shown amazing resilience - surviving feudalism, capitalist industrialization and a republican constitution - to still be alive and well today, despite all denial, under neoliberal globalization. This insightful new analysis not only provides a fascinating introduction to the issue of caste in a globalized world, but also sharpens our understanding of caste dynamics as they really exist.
ISBN: 9781848134492Publication Date: 2010
The Prisons We Broke by
Writing on the lives of the Mahars of Maharashtra, Baby Kamble reclaims memory to locate Mahar society before the impact of Babasaheb Ambedkar, and tells a powerful tale of redemption wrought by a fiery brand of individual and collective self-awareness. The Prisons We Broke is a graphic revelation of the inner world of Mahars, and the oppressive caste and patriarchal tenets of Indian society―but nowhere does the writing descend into self-pity. Kamble vividly and unapologetically brings to life the rituals and superstitions, the joys and sorrows, the hard lives and the hardier women of the Maharwada. Breaking the bounds of personal narrative, it is at once a sociological treatise, a historical and political record, a feminist critique, a protest against brahminical Hinduism, and the memoir of a cursed people. Jina Amucha, the original first published as a book in 1986, redefined autobiographical writing in Marathi, not only in terms of form and narration, but also in the selfhood and subjectivities articulated. The first autobiography by a Dalit woman in Marathi, Maya Pandit’s masterful English translation made it available to a wider readership for the first time in 2008.
ISBN: 9788125033905Publication Date: 2020
Spotted Goddesses: Dalit Women's Agency-Narratives on Caste and Gender Violence by
Roja Singh's critical ethnography on caste and gender is rooted in interactions, and lived experiences in communities of Dalit women in Tamil Nadu, India. Situated in transnational feminist discourses, Singh's perspective as a Dalit woman, provides an intersectional social analysis of power structures that sustain caste dominance in South India today. She describes strategies of social change in Dalit women's activism as rooted in subversive applications of imposed identities of "difference" thwarting social boundaries and punishment traditions. The core of this Interdisciplinary work is Dalit women's songs, oral and written testimonial narratives, including Singh's personal story. Roja Singh teaches Anthropology, Sociology, Women and Gender Studies in Interdisciplinary Studies at St. John Fisher College, New York. With a PhD in Comparative Literature--gender, society and culture--Rutgers University, USA, her Human Rights work is among Dalit communities in South India.
ISBN: 9783643909152Publication Date: 2018
Untouchable by
Bakha is a proud and attractive young man, yet none the less he is an Untouchable - an outcast in India's caste system. It is a system that is even now only slowly changing and was then as cruel and debilitating as that of apartheid. Into this vivid re-creation of one day in the life of Bakha, sweeper and toilet-cleaner, Anand pours a vitality, fire and richness of detail that earn his place as one of the twentieth century's most important Indian writers.
ISBN: 9780141393605Publication Date: 2014
We Also Made History: Women in the Ambedkarite Movement by
Originally published in Marathi in 1989, this contemporary classic details the history of women's participation in Dr. B. R. Ambedkar's Dalit movement for the first time. Focusing on the involvement of women in various Dalit struggles since the early twentieth century, the book goes on to consider the social conditions of Dalit women's lives, daily religious practices and marital rules, the practice of ritual prostitution, and women's issues. Drawing on diverse sources including periodicals, records of meetings, and personal correspondence, the latter half of the book is composed of interviews with Dalit women activists from the 1930s. These first-hand accounts from more than forty Dalit women make the book an invaluable resource for students of caste, gender, and politics in India. A rich store of material for historians of the Dalit movement and gender studies in India,nbsp;We Also Made Historynbsp;remains a fundamental text of the modern women's movement.
ISBN: 9788189013127Publication Date: 2015
