Sumit Guha's Beyond Caste seeks to detach the study of caste from the ritual and religious contexts within which anthropologist discourse, owing fealty to Louis Dumont on the one hand and nineteenth-century colonial arguments on the other, situates it. Following MacKim Marriot and Fredrik Barth, Guha suggests that caste is best understood as a bounded community, shaped and colored by the geographical niche that nurtures it, and held in place by endogamy and hereditary membership. Constituted by an internal ranking system that defines access to resources and power, the boundedness of caste has less to do with cultural harmony and more to do with an internal logic, sustained by force and economic circumstance. Understood thus, caste appears less a “Hindu” institution and instead emerges a civic institution with many lives. Guha draws on aspects of Sikh history and a rich archive of Muslim histories in the Deccan, particularly western India, to make his argument.

The book sets itself against the grain of what Guha considers tiresome scholarly truisms: that colonial rule inserted a radical break in the flow of subcontinental history; that caste is best understood as sustained by cultural and religious sanctions that have remained steadfast through time; and that in spite of being transformed and shaped by history, caste remains responsive in the last instance to religious and ritual imperatives. However, equally the book may be read as a cautionary text that joins historical argument to sociological debates around caste in contemporary India (evident in the writings of Surinder Jodhka, D. L. Sheth, and others).

Drawing on diverse histories of castes, clans, lineages, and tribes across the subcontinent, Guha demonstrates that as a civic entity, caste has always responded to the push and pull of state power and the economy inasmuch as it has heeded the realities of local realpolitik. He suggests that rule and political economy, coming as they did at the end of a long and exhausted eighteenth century, unmoored caste from its diverse locations, in village, nadu janapada, and imperial realm, and rendered it a normative and administrative category, thereby occluding its political significance.

Guha's longue durée history is fascinating (chapters 2 and 3 are particularly rich), but there are surprising omissions. For instance, he leaves out the brahmadeya, tax-free lands granted as gifts to Brahmins in peninsular India, in his discussions of the spatiality of caste; here was a historical instance where ritual authority mapped on to overlordship over land, rents, and captive labor, in ways that proved consequential. Likewise, in his discussion of the household in relationship to the larger world, he demonstrates how familial arrangements heeded political change, and were subject to as well as responsive to punitive public authority. But he is less eloquent on the gendered rhetoric that sustains household boundedness and state action. The last two chapters are devoted to the changed civics of caste in the colonial period, but even as he offers novel perspectives on the relationship between social and political identities and action, Guha remains silent on developments that cry for elucidation, such as the emergence of a new civics, inspired by radical republican ideals and exemplified in an organization such as the Satyashodak Samaj.

The sprawling scope of the study and the pastiche-like approach that stitches diverse histories into a complex conceptual patchwork make for bold historiography, yet the narrative remains curiously disjunctive. Guha's discomfort with ritual and norm, with matters to do with consciousness, make for a founded oversight: he does not acknowledge or account for the fact that the civic politics of caste is always and everywhere writ large on the human body. This lived and felt politics straddles the realms of food, sexuality, pleasure, and punishment, and its practice, in quotidian terms, heeds what Dr. Ambedkar famously described as an ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt. Guha's reference to the changing fortunes of valmikis in northern India makes this evident. For all their dynamism in adapting to urban life and demands, valmiki sanitary workers remain that—deemed to perform a task that others will not take on and which they cannot put by.

It is here that one needs to perhaps heed, as Dr. Ambedkar did, the historical claims of consciousness and norm. Mindful as he was of what politics could deliver, whether by way of rights or power, he yet felt frustrated by its constitutive failure. Even at a time when he reposed faith in politics, and held that the state needed to guarantee representation for the so-called untouchables in its institutions, he noted that it “will not be able to compel touchables and untouchables to be members of one family whether they liked it or not. Nor . . . make them love by an Act of the Legislature.”Footnote ²¹