Articles
Power
Inside India's New Caste Economy
The language of newness hides an old mechanism. Read through Ambedkar's analysis of caste as graded social closure, the contemporary economy looks less like a break from the past than its most efficient continuation.
Ideas
Why Caste Cannot Be Reformed
Reform-of-caste politics keeps being practised — workshops, inter-caste dinners, diversity programs — and keeps failing. Ambedkar explained why almost ninety years ago, in a speech that was refused before he could deliver it.
Ideas
How Caste Began: Ambedkar's Endogamy Thesis
A twenty-five-year-old Indian student at a Columbia anthropology seminar in 1916 isolated the single mechanism that defines caste — and made most subsequent caste theory look like elaboration around a missing centre.