The Caste Pod is a podcast hosted by Ajantha Subramanian, historical anthropologist whose work addresses the historicity and political economy of caste. Ajantha is Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center.
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Caste as a Material Question with Rahul Sonpimple
Monday, July 20, 2026 • Duration 01:05:47
This episode featured a conversation with Rahul Sonpimple, founder of the All-India Independent Scheduled Castes Association. Our conversation began with Rahul’s conception of Indian history and the place of anti-caste struggle within it. We delved further into Rahul’s own understanding of “anti-caste” as deeply rooted in Ambedkar’s own argument about the necessity of force in emancipatory social transformation. Rahul was especially forthright about the political cost of elevating meekness as a moral condition, a choice that he associates with the rise of a Dalit middle class focused primarily on securing its own representational authority. This took us to a discussion of the need for an independent and consolidated Dalit politics rooted in the lives of the Dalit poor with sufficient leverage to negotiate terms with the state. The last part of the episode focused on Rahul’s critique of both Ambedkarites and Indian Marxists for their disregard of caste as a material question. He spoke at particular length about the failure of Indian Marxists to advance a materalist critique of caste and how their analytical separation of caste and class has played into the hands of the Hindu Right. We ended the episode with Rahul laying out his own definition of Ambedkarism as a material and spiritual politics that recognizes the Dalit poor as a revolutionary class with the potential to rebuild society.
Read the transcript here
Guest
Rahul Sonpimple is author and founder of the All-India Independent Scheduled Castes Association.
References
B.R. Ambedkar, The Buddha and his Dhamma, 1957.
B.R. Ambedkar, Small Holdings in India and their Remedies, 1918.
B.R. Ambedkar, Buddha or Karl Marx, 1956.
B.R. Ambedkar, “Mr. Russell and the Reconstruction of Society,” 1916.
Rahul Sonpimple, “Against Hindu Rashtra: Ambedkar’s Buddhist Rashtra as Nation,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, May 4, 2026.
Rahul Sonpimple, “Remembering Babasaheb Ambedkar: The Unfinished Task of Burying Manu,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, April 14, 2026.
Rahul Sonpimple, “Kanshi Ram Sahab: Beyond Bureaucratic Dalit Passivity,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, March 15, 2026.
Rahul Sonpimple, “Spontaneity in Ambedkar: Beyond the Passivity of Popular Dalit Discourse,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, April 16, 2025.
Rahul Sonpimple, “The End of Independent Ambedkarite Dalit Politics?” Round Table India, July 12, 2024.
Rahul Sonpimple, “Dalit conversions: An act of rebellion against caste supremacy,” Al Jazeera, 14 June 2018.
Himsa and ahimsa are foundational ethical concepts in Buddhism. Himsa refers to injury, harm, or violence and ahimsa to non-harming, non-violence, or compassion. Ambedkar critiqued extreme, blanket doctrines of ahimsa as unworkable and often hypocritical.
Chokhamela was a saint-poet from Maharashtra, India who belonged to the Mahar caste and was a devotee of Vitthala.
Bhakt: devotee
Vitthala: Hindu deity worshipped mainly in the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka as an avatar of Vishnu.
Kabir and Ravidas: medieval poet-saints who were part of the Bhakti movement (7th-17th century), which emphasized devotion to a personal god, rather than rituals and scriptural knowledge, as the path to spiritual liberation.
Samata Sainik Dal: a social organization founded by B. R. Ambedkar in 1927 with the objective of safeguarding the rights of all oppressed sections of Indian society.
Bhima Koregaon: a village in Maharashtra that was the site of an 1818 battle between the army of Peshwa Baji Rao II and an East India Company force comprised mainly of Mahars, a Dalit caste. This battle has attained legendary status for Dalits who view it as a victory of Mahars over the Brahminical Peshwas.
Baniya: refers to mercantile castes primarily from the states of Rajasthan and Gujarat.
Kanshi Ram: Indian social reformer and politician who founded the All India Backwards and Minorities Communities Employees' Federation (BAMCEF) in 1971 and the Bahujan Samaj Party in 1984.
Jogendra Nath Mandal: Bengali politician and Dalit leader who held the law portfolio in the 1946-47 Interim Government of India and served as the Minister of Law and Labor in Pakistan from 1947-50.
Rajah: M.C. Rajah was a Tamil politician and Dalit leader who served on the Madras Legislative Council in the 1920s and founded the All India Depressed Classes Association in 1925.
Kamble: B.C. Kamble was a Marathi politician and Dalit leader who led the Republican Party of India for decades.
BAMCEF: All India Backwards and Minorities Communities Employees' Federation
UGC Bill: officially the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026, is a set of regulations aimed at ending discrimination against marginalized communities in higher education. Following widespread protests and a public interest litigation (PIL), the Supreme Court of India stayed the regulations in January 2026.
Bhagwa kapda: saffron clothing
Scheduled Caste Federation: a political organization founded in 1942 by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar dedicated to advocating for the rights and political self-representation of the Dalit community.
Republican Party of India: a political party established by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar in 1956.
PESA: Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) Act, 1996 is a landmark legislation enacted by the Government of India to ensure self-governance for tribal communities living in Fifth Schedule Areas.
Manusmriti: a text that served as a foundational legal and societal framework in ancient India.
EWS: refers to the Economically Weaker Section, a government classification referring to those within the unreserved (general) category eligible for a 10% quota in government jobs and educational admissions.
Karan Johar: an Indian filmmaker, producer and television personality.
Dharavi: a residential area in Mumbai (Bombay) considered one of the world’s largest slums.
Adani: Gautam Adani is an Indian billionaire and chairperson of the multinational conglomerate, the Adani Group.
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Recall This Book x The Caste Pod: a Crossover episode with John Plotz
Thursday, July 16, 2026 • Duration 01:00:06
In the spirit of Hannah Arendt's natality principle (that new things are always and should always be being born, each one unique and endowed with limitless potential) we at RTB love it when a new podcast appears. Especially one as thoughtful and original as The Caste Pod, which assembles scholars and activists to make sense of what caste is, how it's experienced and how it has travelled globally.
Join us to discuss and share an extended excerpt is its widely published (check out her earlier books!) founder Ajantha Subramanian, Professor of Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center, and producer (with Lori Allen) of the “Violent Majorities” series here at RTB.
John and Ajantha delve into the founding of the podcast, and then enter into the business end of the series, which is to explore the complex interplay between caste, race and class as organizing features of economic inequality and its corresponding features of cultural discrimination and oppression.
Ajantha's extended conversation with Prachi and Ram of Savera, a multiracial, interfaith, anti-caste coalition of Indian Americans from The Caste Pod episode 10 lays bare its premise: to put scholars and activists into conversation and opens a space engineered for each to learn form the other.
Before introducing the Savera excerpt, Ajantha frames the topic by way of Isabel Wilkerson's influential (if problematic) book Caste and its neglect of class and economic issues, and also the case against Cisco for caste discrimination in California that in significant ways internationalized the fight around caste's role in perpetuating economic and political inequity.
Listen and Read Here.
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Coming Out as Dalit with Yashica Dutt
Monday, March 2, 2026 • Duration 57:05
This episode features Yashica Dutt, journalist and author of Coming Out as Dalit. We began with a discussion of her choice to write a memoir, the significance of the memoir as a genre of Dalit writing, the politics around passing as upper caste, and what her mother’s role in the life taught her about Dalit feminism as a counter to Brahminical patriarchy. We then moved on to what her work as a journalist in India and the U.S. has revealed about the differences in the operations of caste in the two contexts. Finally, we ended with her coverage of the Zohran Mamdani campaign, both its promises and its failure to address the caste question head-on.
Guest:
Yashica Dutt is a journalist and author whose writings can be found on her Substack, Featuring Dalits and in New Lines magazine.
Mentioned in the episode:
Yashica Dutt, Coming Out as Dalit
Rohith Vemula: an Indian PhD scholar at the University of Hyderabad whose suicide drew attention to widespread institutional casteism.
Kumari Mayawati: first Dalit woman chief minister in India who served in the state of Uttar Pradesh as the leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party.
BSP: Bahujan Samaj Party founded in 1984 and focused on representing the interests of Dalits, Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and religious minorities.
Origin: 2023 film written and directed by Ava DuVernay based on the life and work of Isabel Wilkerson.
ST/SC Act: Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 is a landmark Indian law designed to protect marginalized communities from atrocities, hate crimes, and discrimination.
Cargenie Institute study: 2024 Indian American Attitudes Survey conducted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
DRUM Beats: organization that mobilizes working-class South Asian and Indo-Caribbean communities.
Yashica Dutt, “I reported on the Zohran Mamdani Campaign for six months and documented South Asians' rise to power in New York City”
Yashica Dutt, “What Zohran Mamdani’s Campaign Says About the Quiet Erasure of Caste in US Politics”
Yashica Dutt, “If South Asians are prominent in the New York Mayoral Election, then where is caste?”
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Feminism and Critical Hindu Studies with Shreena Gandhi, Harshita Kamath, Sailaja Krishnamurt, and Shana Sippy
Monday, February 16, 2026 • Duration 01:01:13
This episode features a conversation with the founding members of the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective, also known as the Auntylectuals. We began with each of them reflecting on their pathway into Hindu Studies and how the questions of caste and gender shaped their approaches to this field. We then discussed their motivations for starting the collective and what interventions they hoped to make through it. This took us deeper into some thorny topics: caste as a form of embodied knowledge that is often accompanied by the denial of its continued social power; the politics of Hinduism in North America where Hindus are both predominantly upper caste and a racial minority; the relationship between Hinduism and Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism; the traffic in language and tactics between Hindutva and Zionism; and the efforts to push back against the movement to make caste a protected category in U.S. anti-discrimination law.
Guests:
Shreena Gandhi: Professor of Religious Studies, Michigan State University
Harshita Kamath: Professor of Telugu Culture, Literature, and History, Emory University
Sailaja Krishnamurti: Professor of Gender Studies, Queen’s University
Shana Sippy, Professor of Religion, Centre College
Mentioned in the episode:
Rajiv Malhotra: an ideologue of the Hindu nationalist movement in the U.S. and founder of Infinity Foundation
Harshita Kamath, Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance
Amar Chitra Katha: an Indian comic book publisher whose comics are hugely popular and widely available in India and the Indian diaspora.
Sailaja Krishnamurti, “Learning about Hindu Religion through Comics and Popular Culture,” David Yoo and Khyati Y Joshi eds. Envisioning Religion, Race and Asian Americans, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 207-226, 2020.
Babri Masjid: a 16th century mosque that became the target of Hindu nationalist mobilization and was destroyed by vigilante mobs in December 1992.
Marko Geslani, “A Model Minority Religion: The Race of Hindu Studies,” American Religion, forthcoming.
Thenmozhi Soundarajan, The Trauma of Caste
Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others
Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective, “Feminist Critical Hindu Studies in formation”
Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective, “Hindu fragility and the politics of mimicry in North America”
Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective, “Hinduphobia is a smokescreen for Hindu nationalists”
Shana Sippy and Sailaja Krishnamurti, “Not all Hinduism is Hindutva, but Hindutva is in fact Hinduism”
Shana Sippy, “Strange and Storied Alliances: Hindus and Jews, India and Israel,” manuscript in progress
Shana Sippy, "Victimization, Supremacism, Solidarity, and the Affective and Emulative Politics of American Hindus"
Tomako Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, Or How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism
Shreena Gandhi, “Framing Islam as American Religion Despite White Supremacy”
Equality Labs is a South Asian Dalit civil rights organization.
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The Caste Question with Suraj Yengde and Anupama Rao
Sunday, February 1, 2026 • Duration 01:01:21
TCP’s inaugural episode features Suraj Yengde and Anupama Rao, two scholars whose academic work and activism have helped to set the parameters of the contemporary debate on caste. In our conversation, we addressed the challenge of defining caste, their individual pathways into researching and writing on the caste question, and the virtues and limitations of comparing caste and race as two enduring forms of social stratification. We ended with a discussion of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, the runaway bestseller that made caste and its relationship to race a topic of mainstream debate in the United States.
Guests:
Suraj Milind Yengde: Assistant Professor of History & Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Anupama Rao: Professor of History and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University
Mentioned in the episode:
B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste
IITs: the Indian Institutes of Technology
IIMs: the Indian Institutes of Management
Reserved candidates: beneficiaries of India’s system of affirmative action
B.R. Ambedkar, “Castes in India”
Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Anupama Rao, The Caste Question
Suraj Yengde, Caste Matters
Suraj Yengde, Caste: A Global Story
Shaadi.com: an Indian matrimonial website
Phule: Jyotirao Phule was an anti-caste social reformer and writer from Maharashtra.
Periyar: E.V. Ramasamy Naicker, commonly known as Periyar, was a writer, social revolutionary, and politician who was one of the principal ideologues of the Self-Respect Movement.
Begumpura, or “city without sorrow” expresses the notion of a casteless, classless utopia and was first formulated by Sant Ravidas (c. 1450-1520).
Dalit Panthers was a revolutionary, anti-caste organization founded in 1972. It was based in Maharashtra and drew inspiration from the American Black Panther Party.
Oliver Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948)
Divya Cherian, Merchants of Virtue
Meet the Savarnas: 2025 book by Ravikant Kisana
Ramesh Bairy, Being Brahmin, Being Modern
Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus
Daniel Immerwahr, “Caste of Colony?”
Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction
Ajantha Subramanian is Professor of Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center and host of The Caste Pod.
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Caste and Music with T.M. Krishna
Monday, June 29, 2026 • Duration 01:09:40
This episode features a conversation with Carnatic vocalist, T.M. Krishna, who is also the author of two books on this musical tradition. We began with his first book’s account of the modernization of Carnatic music through a set of social, technical, and spatial processes that transformed it from a more socially diverse practice into a predominantly Brahmin performative genre. We moved on to discuss a figure who is at the heart of his second book: the maker of the Carnatic percussion instrument, the mrdangam. This took us into an extended discussion of the changing relationship between mrdangam makers, who are predominantly Dalit, and mrdangam players, who are predominantly Brahmin, and what the complex mix of inequality, stigma, artistry, and pride suggests about the specificity of this inter-caste relationship. The episode ended with Krishna fleshing out his distinction between classical music and art music and the reasons why he rejects the former in favor of the latter.
Read the transcript
Guest
T.M. Krishna is a vocalist in the Carnatic tradition and the author of two books and numerous articles.
References
T.M. Krishna, A Southern Music: The Karnatik Story (Harper Collins, 2016).
T.M. Krishna, Sebastian and Sons: A Brief History of Mrdangam Makers (Westland, 2023).
Devadasi: refers to a historical practice of “marrying” girls to a temple deity. In the pre-colonial period, Devadasis held a respected place in society as literate, land owning women who were highly trained in music and dance. During colonialism, their sexual relations with male patrons came to be seen as a threat to householder society and they became targets of moral reform. The Devadasi system was abolished in 1947.
Sadir: a dance form historically performed by the Devadasi community that was the precursor to modern Bharatanatyam.
Bharatanatyam: a modern dance form now widely performed by upper castes.
Khayal: vocal genre of North Indian music.
ICS: Indian Civil Service, the higher tier of colonial administration in British India that became the basis of the post-independence Indian Administrative Service.
The Music Academy: the main performance space for Carnatic music in Madras (now Chennai), India.
Kutcheri: term for the venue where Carnatic music is performed.
Thanjavur: city in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu known for its art and architecture.
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The Diasporic Hindu Right with Savera
Monday, June 8, 2026 • Duration 01:15:45
This episode features a conversation with Prachi and Ram, organizers with Savera, a multiracial, interfaith, anti-caste coalition of Indian Americans and partners standing together in the fight against the rise of the transnational far right. After laying out Hindu supremacy as an ideology, we considered the different phases of consolidation of the Hindu right in the United States from its late 20th century orientation around homeland politics to its 21st century effort to forge a Hindu American identity, first through an alignment with U.S. civil rights organizations and then through a realignment with white supremacist forces. We delved more deeply into the role of caste within this formation, in particular the longstanding efforts of the Hindu right in both India and the U.S. to forge Hindu unity by opposing anticaste politics. This took us to a discussion of the Hindu right’s embrace of the pro-Israel lobby’s tactics, especially its weaponization of Hinduphobia as an echo of the weaponization of antisemitism, to battle criticisms of the Modi government in India, and the need to distinguish this from the real rise in both anti-Hindu and antisemitic sentiment. We ended with Savera’s efforts to forge a broad-based antiracist, left majority as a counterweight to the multiracial far right.
Read the transcript
Guests
Prachi Patankar is a writer and activist based in New York. Her speaking and organizing is grounded in feminist, anti-caste, and solidarity commitments. Her writing has appeared in outlets including The Guardian, Indian Express, Al Jazeera, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Jacobin. She has been interviewed in media including Democracy Now, Jewish Currents, and National Public Radio.
Ram Vishwanathan is an organizer with the Savera coalition based in New York City.
References
Savera, “The Global VHP’s Trail of Violence,” January 2024.
Savera, “Cut From the Same Cloth: the VHP-A’s Ties To Its Indian Counterpart,” April 2024.
Savera and Political Research Associates, “HAF Way to Supremacy: How the Hindu American Foundation Rebrands Bigotry As Minority Rights,” October 2024.
Jyotiba Phule: an anti-caste social reformer and writer from Maharashtra.
Satyashodhak Sangh: a social reform society founded by Jyotiba Phule in Pune, Maharashtra in 1873 that addressed caste and gender injustices.
Golwalkar: M.S. Golwalkar was the second supreme leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right-wing paramilitary organization that advanced the ideology of Hindu supremacy and mobilized around the transformation of India into a Hindu nation.
Pracharak: refers to a full-time organizer of the RSS.
Houston 2019: “Howdy Modi” was an event organized by the Texas India Forum to welcome Narendra Modi to Houston and featured a joint address by Modi and Donald Trump.
Ahmedabad 2020: designed as a reciprocal counterpart to Howdy Modi, “Namaste Trump” was an event organized to celebrate Donald Trump’s official state visit to India and hosted by Narendra Modi in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.
Article 370: article of the Indian Constitution that granted a special autonomous status to the state of Jammu and Kashmir. This status was abrogated by the Modi government in 2019.
CAA/NRC: the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) are policies introduced by the Modi government. The 2019 CAA fast-tracks the naturalization of populations identified as victims of persecution by Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan and explicitly excludes the eligibility of Muslims. The 2019 NRC aims to create an official record of legal citizens of India. Critics and human rights organizations argue that the policies together discriminate against Muslims. If a nationwide NRC is implemented, individuals who lack the required documentation to prove their citizenship could be excluded from the final registry. Because the CAA allows non-Muslims to claim citizenship if they fall through the cracks, Muslims left off the NRC list would face disproportionate risks of statelessness, detention, or deportation.
Edward Blum: a conservative legal strategist and the president of the American Alliance for Equal Rights and Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), an organization that fought to overturn affirmative action on the grounds that it constitutes "reverse discrimination" against white and Asian applicants.
Dan HoSang: professor of American Studies at Yale University.
“Violent Majorities: Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism,” Recall this Book/New Books Network, Episodes 118, 119, 120, 143, 144, 145.
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Dalit Feminism with Thenmozhi Soundararajan
Monday, May 25, 2026 • Duration 51:03
This episode features a conversation with Thenmozhi Soundararajan, founder Equality Labs and author of The Trauma of Caste. We discussed her own coming to consciousness of caste as the child of Dalit parents who were “passing” and how her work as an organizer has involved sustained engagement with anticaste thought, Black feminism, and Indigenous epistemologies. The conversation then turned to the practice of solidarity as the building of meaningful and not just transactional relationships and the importance of recognizing the potential of political alignments that may be foreclosed at one moment, only to be given new life in another. Finally, we addressed the need, in our current moment of dying empires and failing democracies, to both work with and beyond the law in order to open new horizons of political imagination and practice.
Guest bio
Thenmozhi Soundararajan is founder of the Dalit feminist organization, Equality Labs, and author of The Trauma of Caste.
References
Thenmozhi Soundararajan, The Trauma of Caste
Shramanic faiths: ancient Indian traditions focusing on asceticism, self-reliance, and liberation from the cycle of rebirth that rejected the authority of the Vedas and Brahmanical authority.
Ravidassia: religion based on the teachings of Guru Ravidas, a 14th century Indian saint. It was considered a sect within Sikhism until 2009 when it was proclaimed a distinct religion.
Bhopal gas tragedy: On 3 December 1984, a leak at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, resulted in what is considered the world’s worst industrial disaster.
Reservation: India’s system of caste-based affirmative action.
Linda Burnham: activist and writer who co-founded the Women of Color Resource Center and was a leader in the Third World Women’s Alliance.
Combahee River Collective: pioneering Black lesbian feminist organization formed in Boston in 1974.
Gloria Anzaldúa: American philosopher and scholar of Chicana feminism, cultural theory, and queer theory
Iyothee Thass: Tamil anti-caste thinker and writer who converted to Buddhism and called upon members of his own Paraiyar caste to do the same.
Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule: anti-caste social reformers and pioneers of women’s education from Maharashtra.
Ruth King: Founder of the Mindful of Race Institute
Rhonda Magee: Professor Emerita at University of San Francisco and teacher of mindfulness
Resmaa Menakem: psychotherapist and creator of Somatic Abolitionism.
Eduardo Duran: Native American clinical psychologist, scholar, teacher and healer
Collective Future Fund: a philanthropic intermediary fund that works with movements mobilizing toward a collective future free from violence.
Kolar Gold Fields: former gold mining region in Karnataka, India
Equality Labs: a South Asian Dalit civil rights organization.
BAPS: The Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Akshardham in Robbinsville, New Jersey is the largest modern Hindu temple outside India. It is the subject of a lawsuit filed by Dalit workers from India accusing the temple of human trafficking and labor exploitation.
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Caste and Urbanization with Malini Ranganathan and Juned Shaikh
Monday, May 11, 2026 • Duration 01:12:29
This episode features a conversation with urban geographer, Malini Ranganathan, and historian, Juned Shaikh, on the centrality of caste to urbanization in India. Through a focus on 20th century Bombay (now Mumbai) and 21st century Bangalore (now Bengaluru), we explored the symbiotic relationship between caste and capitalism manifest in the political economy of urbanization from the heyday of industrial capitalism to contemporary neoliberalism. We also delved into the continuities between rural and urban caste relations as seen, for instance, in caste networks that remain key to the movement of capital from rural land to real estate. In addition to the centrality of caste in shaping urbanization, we also considered changes to caste wrought by its role within urban processes. The final part of the episode shifted to a discussion of oppositional mobilization among the urban poor, from the upsurge of literary and political activity among Dalits in Bombay and Bangalore in the 1950s-70s to the ongoing pushback against the threat of dispossession and displacement by real estate and finance capital.
Guest bios
Malini Ranganathan, Associate Professor, School of International Service, American University
Juned Shaikh, Associate Professor of History, University of California, Santa Cruz
References
Khumbarwada: a historic potters’ colony now located within Dharavi, Mumbai (Bombay).
OBC: shorthand for Other Backward Classes, a Government of India classification for socially and educationally disadvantaged castes who are beneficiaries of affirmative action. OBCs are distinct from and considered to be relatively more advantaged than the Scheduled Castes, or Dalits, and Scheduled Tribes, or Adivasis, who also benefit from affirmative action.
SC/ST: shorthand for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (see above).
Malini Ranganathan, David Pike, and Sapna Doshi, Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City (2024)
Malini Ranganathan, “Towards a Political Ecology of Caste and the City” (2022)
Malini Ranganathan, “Caste, racialization and the making of environmental unfreedoms in urban India” (2022)
Juned Shaikh, Outcaste Bombay: City Making and the Politics of the Poor (2021)
Juned Shaikh, “Imaging Caste: Photography, the Housing Question, and the Making of Sociology in Colonial Bombay, 1900-1939 (2014)
Frank Conlon, A Caste in a Changing World: The Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmans, 1700-1935 (1977)
Nikhil Rao, House, but No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898-1964 (2012)
C. J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan, Tamil Brahmans: The Making of a Middle-Class Caste (2014)
Ajantha Subramanian, The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (2019)
K. Balagopal, Probings in the Political Economy of Agrarian Classes and Conflicts (2020)
Sushmita Pati, Properties of Rent: Community, Capital, and Politics in Globalizing Delhi, Cambridge University Press (2022).
Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900-1940 (1994)
Priyanka Srivastava, The Well-Being of the Labor Force in Colonial Bombay: Discourses and Practices (2018)
Dana Kornberg, “From Balmikis to Bengalis: The 'Casteification' of Muslims in Delhi's Informal Garbage Economy,” Economic and Political Weekly (2019)
Amita Baviskar, Uncivil City: Ecology,. Equity, and the Commons in Delhi (2020)
Mukul Sharma, Dalit Ecologies: Caste and Environmental Justice (2024)
Liza Weinstein, The Durable Slum: Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai (2014)
Siddalingaiah, A Word With You, World: The Autobiography of a Poet (2013)
Dharavi: a residential area in Mumbai (Bombay) considered one of the world’s largest slums.
Chico Mendes: a Brazilian rubber tapper, trade union leader, and environmentalist who fought to preserve the Amazon rainforest and advocated for the human rights of Brazilian peasants and Indigenous people.
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Caste and Race: Ambedkar and King with the Ambedkar King Study Circle
Monday, April 27, 2026 • Duration 56:50
This episode features S. Karthikeyan and S. Subbulakshmi, the Convenor and Secretary of the Ambedkar King Study Circle, an anti-caste organization based in Silicon Valley. Our conversation began with a discussion of the choice of B. R. Ambedkar and Martin Luther King Jr. as the titular heads of the organization, then moved on to a conversation about its membership-based structure, the anti-caste struggles in which the AKSC has participated, and the significance of California in general, and the Silicon Valley in particular, as an epicenter of caste consolidation and anti-caste mobilization.
Guests:
S. Karthikeyan is an IT professional based in Silicon Valley and regular contributor to public outlets such as The Wire.
S. Subbulakshmi is a postdoctoral fellow in cognitive neuroscience and has been a member of AKSC since 2024.
Mentioned in the episode:
B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste
Martin Luther King Jr., “Where Do We Go from Here?”
Savera is a multiracial, interfaith, anticaste coalition of organizations and activists.
S. Karthikeyan, “The Hindu Supremacist Disinformation Campaign Against the Caste Discrimination Litigation in US”
S. Karthikeyan, “How Protections Against Caste Discrimination Are Being Opposed in the US”
S. Karthikeyan, “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing”
Ajantha Subramanian, The Caste of Merit
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