In Residential Buildings Suited to India (1931) and Cheap and Healthy Homes for the Middle Classes of India (1935), two construction manuals from Poona, British India in the 1930s, engineer Raghunath Shripad Deshpande instructed his upper-caste middle-class readers on how to build their own single-family homes based on modern standards of daylight and ventilation. The manuals’ sample house plans combined international modern ideals with a regional house typology to reshape production and consumption selectively within their vision of small-town Hindu upper-caste domestic modernity. This article argues that the manuals’ conflation of ritual cleaning and actual cleaning recursively replicated temporal and spatial inequalities via the modernisation of caste-based domestic labour relations.

By all classical orthodox definitions, most early modern Vīraśaivas were not brāhmaṇas. Vīraśaivism, we have presumed, is a devotional religion of social protest, and thus by definition must have disavowed the trappings of Sanskrit scripture. And yet, in early modern south India, evidence shows that Vīraśaivas across regions invested significant energy in composing, circulating, citing, translating, and commenting on Sanskrit texts. What sense can we make, then, of the disruptive presence of Sanskrit in the space of social protest? This article makes the case for a sustained and open encounter with South Asia’s multilingual archive that would allow us to provincialize the association of the Sanskrit language with brahmanical systems of caste oppression. By recovering the history of such other Sanskrits, we might instead enquire into how the systemic modes of oppression that endure today can be, and have been, otherwise.1

The epigraphic corpus of medieval South Asia constitutes a dense record of the loquacious lives of artisans and other literate professionals who worked with their hands. While the labour of inscription was—and continues to be—dismissed as non-intellectual, caste-marginalized artisans used the space they were granted in stone at the bottom of epigraphs and at the bases of sculptures as an opportunity to assert their own epistemic values and their own hierarchy of knowledge. These artisans worked closely with poets and scribes from privileged castes in shared poetic, political, and intellectual projects, often labouring in conjunction with the same scholars over the course of many years. At times echoing the ideologies of writing, language, and education that were enunciated in elite literary circles, and at times standing in opposition to them, these artisans articulated a vision of erudition distinct from that often associated with pre-colonial South Asia. Following these artisans allows a significant revision of the role literacy played in pre-colonial South Asia. And it offers a moment to reconsider how artisan literacy continues to be used in narratives of divergence that invoke the history of technology. This article shows how novel understandings of the status and intellectual labour of artisans were developed in the medieval period and continued to be deployed into the early modern period—and indeed, in the caste-inflected print cultures that emerged around the decennial census.

The early history of the institution of varṇa, rendered sometimes as caste and sometimes as social estate, is poorly understood, and to date there is no real working model for its development. Brian K. Smith’s Classifying the Universe retrojects a timeless and immutable caste system deep into Vedic prehistory as though in ancient times this institution resembled the exact same one that appears in the later Dharmaśāstras. Authors like Brian K. Smith, however, have readily translated texts that mention the rājanyà with ‘Kshatriya’, presupposing the two terms have an identical semantic because that is so in the Dharmaśāstras. I will argue that these two terms have distinct semantic domains. While rājanyà is restricted to enumerations of varṇa in Vedic texts, the term kṣatríya is never a part of this list. The term rājanyà seems to refer to a certain ritual situation, and I argue that the rājanyà is, tout court, a valid candidate for the rājasūya or ‘royal consecration’, but not yet a rā́jan himself. A kṣatríya, on the other hand, referred to a specific type of rā́jan, who led the coalition of the Vedic clans during the winter. This office was complemented by that of the maghávan, who led the coalition as summer rā́jan. When the institution of seasonally distinct rule was moribund, later generations reanalysed the term kṣatríya as a synonym of rājanyà and the term maghávan as merely one of Indra’s many epithets.

Pigs played a varied role in the history of colonial North India depending on whether they were wild, semi-wild, or domestically reared. While colonial elites hunted and ate wild pigs, Muslim elites and upper-caste Hindus were ambivalent towards them. But both these groups stigmatised domestic pigs and the Dalit groups that raised them. The latter used domestic and semi-wild pigs to affirm their identities and as a source of power and resistance against the upper castes and Dalit groups that sought to distance themselves by adopting Brahmanical practices. Domestic pigs also became a source of silent resistance for Dalits because they formed an important part of their everyday cultural, ritual, and economic lives. Members of these groups later joined Dr B. R. Ambedkar’s political and constitutional movement to fight for civil and human rights but continued to use pigs and consumed pork at public feasts to reaffirm their identity and resistance.

This article revisits the debate on the relationship between capitalism and abolition from the perspective of South Asia. It argues that bringing the antislavery debate into conversation with the extensive literature on caste opens up new comparative possibilities. Commercial slavery in the early modern Indian Ocean world is now well established, but global histories of slavery have rarely inspired global histories of antislavery. The dominant interpretation of abolition in South Asia remains focused on the contingent requirements of colonial governance. Through an analysis of legal conflicts over the status of slavery in the eastern Indian province of Bengal in the 1820s and 1830s, I argue that this approach obscures the ethical-political significance of abolition in a context shaped by caste and agrarian slavery. The emancipatory potential of abolition, however, was undermined by a colonial state committed to revenue extraction and social order, as well as by the global capitalist context of counter-revolution. By situating the colonial archive within this wider historical conjuncture, the essay shows how both the possibilities and limits of abolition emerged from the contradictions of liberalism and global capitalism. It thereby puts the South Asian case in conversation with broader histories of revolution and counter-revolution.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a major global public health threat which disproportionately affects low- and middle-income countries. It intersects with other public health issues including climate change and its impact is compounded by existing socio-economic inequities. In the South Asian setting, persistent gender and caste-based discrimination create differences in infection susceptibility, health-seeking behaviours, accessibility and affordability to essential antibiotics, and quality health care and appropriate diagnosis by healthcare providers, resulting in disparities in healthcare access and outcomes. We report on the deliberations from a cross-disciplinary workshop held in Bengaluru, India, focusing on the Indian context of AMR and its intersections with gender, caste, and climate change—contexts that often apply to the rest of South Asia. The two-day workshop brought together healthcare professionals, public health experts, gender experts, climate experts, researchers, activists, and community members to explore institutional and community-level issues in AMR, gender, caste, and climate change. We also present a conceptual framework to understand how caste-based discrimination influences antibiotic use and AMR in India and other South Asian countries. Finally, we discuss the key recommendations highlighted by the experts to address the gender and caste blind spots in existing data collection methods, surveillance, and policy measures related to AMR.

This reflective practitioner essay asks what it means to teach law ‘as a conversation’ and who is heard as speaking law within that conversation. Drawing on teaching notes from an elite Indian law school writing classroom, the article analyses a staged counter-factual dialogue among four legal thinkers (Nicholas J. McBride, Patricia J. Williams, Kiruba Munusamy and Angela D. Gilmore). ‘Counter-factual pedagogy’ names a method that stages an ‘as-if’ encounter that is structurally unlikely within conventional legal education in order to make institutional defaults newly visible, including neutrality as epistemic rigour, professionalism as merit and doctrinal learning as separable from social power. The article reads the exercise through five literature-informed lenses (voice, neutrality, performance, justice, discomfort). No student quotations, paraphrases or artefacts are reproduced.

In Mumbai, the live slaughter of meat by Muslim butchers is an intergenerational caste practice and a source of livelihood and labour, supplying ritually slaughtered halal meat for Muslims, and fresh quality meat for others in the city. Yet in the neoliberal Hindu Nationalist imagination, the very sights, smells, and sounds of butchering are a sign of Muslim abjection, a source of disgust to be eradicated from the “world-class” Hindu city. Muslim butchers are further subject to an intra-Muslim caste politics of disdain, in which their contact with blood is thought to render them impure (na-pak) and untrustworthy. At butcher stores and meat markets, economic development, urban sanitation, and ritual ideologies recruit the senses into a politics of disgust and disdain. These affects are reflexively embodied in ways that reveal the intimate relation between individualising forms of Islamic piety, Muslim infrastructural marginalisation, and the making of a sanitised neoliberal Hindu city.

This article examines the ideological and organizational evolution of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the world’s largest Hindu Nationalist organization, in response to the challenges posed by the anti-caste politics in post-Independent India. Focusing on the leadership of Balasaheb Deoras (1915–1996), the third sarsańghacālak of the RSS, it situates the period between 1973 and 1990 as a critical yet understudied period in the history of the Sangh, marked by a significant departure from the organization’s earlier defence of caste hierarchy. Unlike his predecessors, Deoras publicly rejected the caste system in the early 1970s and paved the way for the Sangh to adopt the rhetoric of Sāmājik Samarastā (Social Harmony), which became the central pillar of the Sangh’s engagement with the question of caste in its bid to create a wider Hindu community which posed itself as caste-neutral and caste-assimilative. The article argues that the Sangh’s engagement with caste was neither superficial nor a new feature of its post-2014 avatar. Samarastā helped the Sangh develop a conservative model of caste reform, one that invoked the language of social change without challenging the Brahmanical ideas inherent to its Hindu Nationalism.

This article examines the kidnapping and forced marriages of women under the Peshwas, investigating whether the state prioritized justice for victims or its Brahmanical credentials, given that the annulment of fully performed marriages was prohibited under the Shastras. Far from passively upholding the inherited order, the Peshwa regime actively leveraged intersectional dynamics of gender, caste, and religion to transform that order into a consolidated patriarchal Brahmanical system, reinforcing and totalizing caste-based customs, hierarchies, and governance through judicial and administrative interventions. The article also reveals a binary governance model, highlighting distinctive modes of justice between the capital city of Pune and the countryside. The article interrogates the ambiguity and fluidity of categories used to denote abduction, as well as the associated normative frameworks and penalties, showing how the discursive deployment of familial, communal, caste, ritual, pride, and political dynamics denied women’s agency and subsumed alternative narratives, such as elopement and/or consensual cohabitation. It demonstrates how coercion against women as well as women’s agency were viewed and conceptualized. Moreover, the government’s adherence to patriarchal Brahmanical ideology, derived from the Shastras, not only shaped legal responses but also actively contributed to the ongoing perpetuation of abductions and forced marriages.

This paper advances current debates on majoritarian state-making by bringing into dialogue theoretical debates on linguistic polysemy, legal hermeneutics, and digital authoritarianism. It analyses hate speech accusations in India as a polysemic discourse, which allows majoritarian regimes to create new public hierarchies of interpretation that equate “hate speech” with critique of Hindu nationalist (Hindutva) ideologies. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography with legal professionals, police, and hate speech accused in North India, the paper analyses how adherents of India’s Hindutva government mobilise a dual strategy of online virality and procedural, judicial dismantlement to create a system of majoritarian legal hermeneutics: a self-reinforcing complex of interpretation that exploits the indeterminacy of legal terminologies to imbue criminal provisions aimed at safeguarding equality with anti-democratic meanings. In the process, legal actors are turned into active participants in the creation of a public of wounded Hindus that views minorities as a threat to their identity.

This article considers the material practices of forging ‘Hindu’ spaces in colonial India, through an examination of a cremation charity’s movement against a mechanical crematorium in interwar Calcutta. Established around 1926, the mechanical crematorium was advertised by the municipality as a cost-effective alternative to traditional Hindu pyres, disposing of unclaimed corpses and dissected parts by employing stigmatized Dalit labour, in a region of the city marked for ‘offensive’ trades. However, by 1932, a cremation charity led by municipal councillors and Indian capitalists contested the existence of the crematorium, arguing that its technological process, labour practices, and location were an affront to Hindu sensibilities. This article examines the rise of the charity and the decline of the crematorium within the context of electoral politics, the politics of the location, and the broader impact on interwar labour crises and famines in Calcutta. By analysing the anti-crematorium movement, this article offers a colonial material history of the construction of the emotional resonance in ‘Hindu spaces’ in India, outlining how it emerged at the interstices of communal and caste boundaries.