Practicing Caste

"The book is a remarkable exercise in showing what is possible when we attend to caste as if we were confronting it for the first time, bracketing the extensive scholarship about it, and refusing to adopt a ready political stance against caste discrimination and inequality. Practicing Caste asks what new ways of thinking about caste are enabled when we approach 'caste' ignorantly, that is, when we forget the weight of its millennial history and turn to caste less as an exception than an occasion to rethink the grounds of sociability. . . . Jaaware is deeply resistant to [the] politics of identity that has resulted from the institution of Dalits as figures of social suffering in the contemporary political public sphere. Instead, his own effort is to read Dalit literature as destitute literature, as writing that stages caste's persistent and brutal dehumanization as occasion for ethical decision. In posing caste as a problem for ethics, Jaaware returns to that fundamental question of what it means to be-with-others in a startlingly new manner. Aniket Jaaware has written a breathtakingly beautiful book whose form and content mirror the provocation to unlearn what we think we know about caste. We would do well to travel a while with a text that has so much to teach us about being together and apart."---Anupama Rao, from the Foreword
"This spellbindingly orchestrated book develops its philosophical theory of caste as a practice of touching and not-touching, luminously disclosing caste as a way of regulating, coding, and living an originary and unconditioned touch. It reveals the ethics and politics of touchability as a secret structure of Indic and other modernities. Putting Derrida, Foucault, and Heidegger into conversation with Ambedkar and Phule, Practicing Caste explodes the discussion of caste from its South Asian enclosure. Required reading for anyone interested in a world-spanning comparative account of modernity."---Ben Conisbee Baer, Princeton University