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 Yengde: scholar, public intellectual, and anti-caste activist.
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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