Yengde's book is a study of how caste survives by crossing borders

Caste: A Global Story   by Suraj Milind Yengde

Published by Allen Lane

388 pages ₹899

 

To understand India, you must understand Scaste. Why do the same 15 surnames appear at the top of every industry? Why does untouchability persist in a nation that constitutionally abolished it 70 years ago? Why are certain human bodies deemed polluting? Certain professions deemed degrading? Certain people deemed inferior? Why do the village priest and the Silicon Valley engineer share the same unspoken hierarchy? Why does a village in 2025 still have two separate wells? Caste. Always caste. 

But what happens when caste boards a plane? Suraj Milind Yengde, a scholar and inheritor of Ambedkar’s intellectual legacy, asks these questions in Caste: A Global History,  tracing how a system has survived modernity with remarkable ingenuity.

Caste multiplies as it migrates, shaped by class, geography, and what one has to lose. “No singular perspective can fully explain caste. The challenge with studying caste, a complex and elusive structure, is its undefined and non-geographical nature,” Mr Yengde notes. 

Perhaps nowhere is caste's adaptability more legible than in Trinidad. The indentured labourers who arrived were overwhelmingly Dalit and lower-caste. Yet, hierarchy reasserted itself through the one avenue still available: Rituals. Brahmanical surnames such as “Maharaj” were adopted so widely that they gave rise to a local phrase: “Brahman by boat” rather than “brahman by birth.” Organisations such as the Pandits’ Council of Trinidad and Tobago and the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha formalised what had begun informally, maintaining Brahmanical control over Hindu ceremonies. 

It would be convenient to blame the rigidity of caste entirely on ancient texts. But modernity, specifically colonial modernity, introduced new architecture, as the British census imposed a taxonomic order that India's fluid social realities had never quite possessed. “Colonial officials found the idea of Dalit autonomy and independence from Hindu and Muslim faiths unimaginable. In Punjab, census collectors overlooked Dalit religious practices that didn't subscribe to Hindu gods,” Mr Yengde writes. 

No matter the evidence—statistical, historical, criminal, personal, visceral, economic—the upper castes have perfected the art of not seeing. And this isn't purely a right-wing phenomenon. As Mr Yengde correctly points out, “The Gandhian approach, for its part, patronized people in a demeaning way without realizing the violence it perpetrated upon the victims. For their part, communist and left discourse, although intended to create a revolution, assumed the Dalits formed a class of peasants, thereby neglecting the intersections of caste and class.” 

Denial, when threatened, becomes active suppression. When Indian diplomats in the 1940s rallied against racism directed at Indians in South Africa, they meant a very specific Indian, i.e., the upper-caste professional, the “cultured” émigré. India’s United Nations (UN) representative, B N Rau, suggested extending citizenship to a token number of upper-caste Indians as proof of racial equality. At multiple UN conventions, like at the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, the Indian government had moved to block international attempts to draw a parallel between racism and casteism. Even “the dominant-caste Indians’ opposition to the racism of white people merely consolidates their own elite position,” Mr Yengde writes. 

The hypocrisy isn’t limited to the diplomatic chamber; it follows the dominant-caste Indian into the drawing room, into the Twitter thread. “It is no exaggeration to say that the case of George Floyd received more attention in India among the urban middle classes than any of the recent incidents in India’s endless onslaught of caste crimes,” Mr Yengde remarks. The same communities that practice in-house colourism and enforce caste endogamy will post black squares because of the cover it provides. 

The book’s counter-move is to restore Dalit agency; to go beyond what was done to them to how they’ve resisted. From Gopal Baba Walangkar’s 19th-century journal attacking dominant-caste supremacy to Pandit Iyothee Thass and Rettamalai Srinivasan publishing newspapers that gave Tamil Dalit communities a voice to Kanshi Ram’s construction of Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation (BAMCEF) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) into a pan-Indian political force to the cross-continental solidarity forged by M N Wankhede and Janardhan Waghmare to introduce Dalit readers to Du Bois, Baldwin, Hughes, and Wright, the anti-caste tradition runs deep. When Dalit youth in 1970s Bombay came across the Black Panthers, they built their own movement in response, with Namdeo Dhasal, Raja Dhale, and J V Pawar founding the Dalit Panthers in 1972. 

Caste has waited out empires, outlasted reform movements, survived the constitutional abolition of untouchability, adapted to the diaspora, found new languages in new countries. Its persistence is the result of active maintenance, performed by those with the most to lose from its annihilation. But for every mutation caste has managed, resistance has followed, adapting with equal ingenuity, building infrastructure where none existed, forging solidarities across faraway distances. Caste is a global story. So, increasingly, is its refusal.

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The reviewer is a journalist, writer, and editor fascinated by the stories that shape our world. Instagram/X: aroomofwords