The ‘Critical’ in Critical Caste Studies: Exploring a Practice

Caste as a social practice have been attempted to be theorized through the lenses of domination, exploitation, redistribution vis-à-vis recognition etc. However, these themes run across many other analytical categories like race, gender, linguistic identity etc. Critical Caste Studies, as an interdisciplinary field, attempts to examine the production and dispersion of such forms of marginalization and aims to undo academic silences by engaging in intersectional analysis. The current essay delineates major landmarks of dealing with categories of domination and exclusion in Critical Race Theory and then goes on to mark the limitations of transatlantic theorizations to capture the lived manifestations of caste within the Indian social structure. It ends the argument by an attempt to utilize the approaches of Critical Social Theory to arrive at experience-near theorizations through the promise of Dalit Studies. By doing so, the essay attempts to outline the possibilities of Critical Caste Studies as an academic practice.