Course Description

Caste and religion constitute two of the most important axes through which identity and  politics have been shaped in India from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century. This  course offers a deep conceptual exploration into the life of these two categories in modern  India, employing and analysing scholarship from a range of disciplines including history,  sociology, anthropology, law, religion, and economics. The course examines knowledge and  politics as part of a continuum, exploring how ways of knowing and writing about caste and  religion in colonial and Independent India shape the political realities we inhabit.

This is an advanced interdisciplinary course which builds on modules on caste and religion that students would have encountered knowledge production and seeking further critical  inquiry will also benefit. in other core courses in Law, Policy, and Social Sciences. Students  familiar with works on colonial subjectivity and Beyond its specialised focus on caste and  religion, a key feature that distinguishes this course from more established approaches across  disciplines is its sustained engagement with caste and religion as intersecting—and  competing—categories of frameworks through which people have been understood, classified,  and governed in modern India.

The course will be organised around interactive seminars, centred on the close reading and  discussion of prescribed texts. The overall aim is to generate original thinking and conceptual  pathways towards two categories which are at the heart of some of the most pressing social  questions of our times.

Module I of the course will lay out some frameworks to think about the production of  knowledge, and its relationship to identity and politics. Module II will critically examine the  construction of commonsense about caste in the academy, across the fields of law, economics,  sociology, and political history. Module III turns this gaze on religion, examining colonial  approaches to this category and the post-Independence remnants of this approach. Module IV  will combine the theoretical frameworks built so far to examine the caste-religion dynamic in  contemporary politics in India.