Caste Matters

Caste Matters takes as its title a proposition that should be obvious yet is repeatedly denied by modern India: caste still organizes safety, opportunity, intimacy, and the right to be respected. First-generation Dalit scholar Suraj Yengde begins in the Dalit settlement where he grew up, carrying his grandmother’s care, hunger, humiliation, humor, and education into an account of public institutions. He calls the book an ethnography of caste sociality, but deliberately mixes memoir, political commentary, conceptual invention, and transnational comparison. Its subject is not only a vertical ranking system but a daily order that teaches people how to approach, avoid, love, and judge one another.

The opening chapter, “Being a Dalit,” develops ideas such as Dalit love, Dalit humor, and Dalit universalism to keep Dalit life from appearing only as an archive of injury. Sharing in impoverished communities, using jokes against humiliation, and caring for strangers are survival practices under deprivation and intimations of another ethic. Yengde especially opposes love to endogamy. Arranged marriage is not merely a family preference; it polices cross-caste desire and protects inheritance and group boundaries. Intimacy is therefore not an escape from politics but one of the channels through which caste most fears losing control.

“Neo-Dalit Uprising” and “The Many Shades of Dalits” refuse to make hundreds of millions of people into a homogeneous constituency. Region, subcaste, religion, class, political tradition, and access to education all produce differences, while mainstream media often summons an abstract “Dalit victim” only after atrocity. Yengde criticizes dominant-caste monopolies over representation as well as internal ranking and elite tokenism within Dalit politics. The purpose of such internal criticism is not to weaken solidarity but to insist that solidarity must be built through explicit engagement with difference and power.

His account of an immovable glass ceiling in politics, bureaucracy, the judiciary, universities, and journalism distinguishes caste from income poverty alone. Education and reservation can transform individual opportunity without erasing bias in hiring networks, surnames, accents, peer relations, or intellectual authority. A Dalit entering an elite institution may be expected both to represent an entire population and never to mention caste; achievement can then be discounted as quota rather than ability. The supposedly casteless language of professionalism becomes one of power’s most effective hiding places.

The chapters on the Dalit middle class and Dalit capitalism are the most contentious and productive. Yengde asks whether people who advance through public employment, education, or markets fulfill an obligation to “pay back to society,” and compares Dalit enterprise with Black traditions of commercial self-help in the United States. Ownership can challenge dominant-caste monopolies over capital and supply chains, but wealth does not automatically confer social dignity, and markets can reduce collective liberation to a few success stories. The question is not whether Dalits may prosper, but whether accumulation alters the structure of land, labor, credit, and representation.

The final chapter, “Brahmins against Brahminism,” holds allyship to a demanding standard. Public support for equality does little to dismantle Brahminism if endogamy persists in marriage, family networks, hiring, and religious life; anti-caste commitment must include relinquishing inherited advantage. Yengde also brings his global education into comparisons between caste and anti-Black racism, seeking a language for Dalit–Black solidarity. Such comparison can illuminate institutional functions and strategy, but it cannot make the histories interchangeable. Slavery, colonial rule, anti-Blackness, and South Asian caste require their own genealogies.

For feminist readers, the treatment of love, endogamy, family, and social reproduction is highly suggestive, but it also reveals a limit. The narrative center remains the formation and taxonomy of a male intellectual; Dalit women’s labor, sexual violence, movement leadership, and queer and trans lives do not receive equal depth. Critics have also asked whether categories such as “Dalit love” are defined too expansively, whether the account of the Dalit middle class homogenizes internal differences, and whether anecdote always supports the book’s largest claims. Treating these as propositions to debate is more faithful to its provocation than presenting it as a completed ethnography.

Read the six chapters as a sequence of corrections: from the lived world of “being Dalit,” through uprising and internal plurality, to class, capital, and allyship. For every new category, ask which experience it describes, whom it omits, and what action it can guide. Pair the book with Coming Out as Dalit on cultural capital and passing, Against the Madness of Manu on endogamy, Dalit women’s testimony to correct its male center, and carefully bounded work in Black political economy and critical race theory. Its decisive lesson for FemRes is that caste matters not only because atrocities continue, but because modern institutions still decide whose love, knowledge, ambition, and success count as legitimate.