Textual Lives of Caste Across the Ages

Prathama Banerjee is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, India. A historian of 19th- and 20th-century India, her research interests include political, intellectual and cultural history. Her most recent book is Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South (Duke University Press, 2020).

• Introduction, Prathama Banerjee (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India)Part II: Caste and Philosophy 1. Systems of Philosophy for and against Caste, Pradeep P. Gokhale (Savitribhai Phule University, Pune, India)2.The Philosophy of Caste in 17th Century India, Samuel Wright (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Germany) 3. The Curious Career of Shunya: Politics and Metaphysics of Caste Thinking in Eastern India, Prathama Banerjee (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India) 4. Caste Hierarchies and Dissent in Tamil Manuscript Culture, S. Gunasekaran (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India) Part II: Caste and Heterodoxy5. Anti-Brahmana or Anti-Brahmanical: Reading Early Buddhist and Jain Legends, Chandrabhan P. Yadav (Delhi University, India)6. Dissent in an Indian Intellectual Tradition: Limits and Possibilities, Meera Visvanathan (Shiv Nadar University, India) 7. Distinct Figurations: Thassar’s Buddha and Civilizational Memory, Dickens Leonard (Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India) Part III: Legends and Stories 8. The Matanga King Trisanku and History from Below, Kanad Sinha (Sanskrit College & University, Kolkata, India) 9. Antaja kings in Mlecch Land: The political between caste and law in early eighteenth-century Hindustan, Samyak Ghosh (Columbia University, USA) 10. In Need of an Avatar: Sri Sri Harililamrita and Anti-Caste Thought in Matua Dharma, Praskanva Sinharoy (Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, India) Part IV: Views from the Outside 11. Translating Caste: A Study of Select Perso-Arabic Texts’, Md. Sajjad Alam Rizvi (Presidency University, Kolkata, India) 12. From Battuta to Makhdum II: Savarna Habitus, Corporeal Shields, and Caste Acoustics on the Malabar Coast, P. K. Yasser Arafath (University of Delhi, India) 13. The Textuality of Caste in Sharad Patil’s Marxism-Phule-Ambedkarism, Rahul Sarwate (Ahmedabad University, India) Part V: Body and Caste 14. Rewriting Life: Caste, Body and Time in Tulsi Ram’s Murdahiya, Shivani Kapoor (Jindal Global University, Sonepat, India) 15. Drawing Caste to Fasten the Nation, Prabhat Kumar (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India) Bibliography Notes

This important collection moves seamlessly between premodern and modern iterations of caste to illuminate philosophically rich and diverse regional debates which challenge any singular focus on caste’s coloniality. Their inquiry into the historical ontology of caste across diverse disciplinary domains opens new horizons for future research while recalling the depth, duration, and remarkable durability of an anticaste philosophy.