At the dinner table, no one says the word. At the job interview, no one says it either. Yet something shapes who sits where, who gets called back, who is considered "the right fit." Caste has not left these rooms. It has simply learned to speak in a different grammar.
This is the argument that needs making plainly: the gradual disappearance of the word "caste" from polite conversation does not mark the erosion of caste. It marks its sophistication. When a system no longer needs to announce itself, it has achieved something more durable than legality — it has achieved naturalness.
The mechanism is not mysterious. Caste travels through proxies. "Merit" does the work when merit is measured by institutions that caste already shaped. "Culture" does the work when culture is used to defend practices that enforce hierarchy. "Network" does the work when access flows through communities whose boundaries were drawn by jati. The word changes. The logic does not.
Consider what happens in spaces that consider themselves post-caste. Marriage decisions are framed as family preference. Neighborhood compositions are explained through economics. Workplace homogeneity is attributed to pipeline problems. Each explanation is partial. Each deflects from the structural. Together, they form a language that makes caste illegible precisely where it is most active.
The counterargument exists: that these patterns are changing, that each generation is less caste-conscious than the last. Perhaps. But changed consciousness is not the same as changed structure. A person may stop thinking in caste while still inheriting its advantages and passing them forward.
What survives when the word disappears is not a ghost. It is the architecture itself — the sorted neighborhoods, the closed caste-nexus networks, the accumulated capital of centuries. To dismantle it, the first task is to see it again, in the language it is actually using now.