Against Casteist-Statist Order: Naming Death in the Grammar of Peace

This essay interrogates the coherence of “peace” within a caste-structured social order by foregrounding the death and routinized violence obscured by dominant vocabularies of harmony and stability. Extending critiques of the liberal peace, it argues that what is invoked as peace in contemporary India often signifies the stabilization of Brahmanical order rather than the absence of violence. To make this argument, the essay (1) conceptualizes caste as an order of violence and internal war, (2) examines how Brahmanical nationalism and securitization frameworks produce a violent imaginary in which peace is equated with order, and (3) asserts that dignity and the annihilation of caste are indispensable to rethinking peace. In doing so, it aligns with and extends critical anti-caste and decolonial peace scholarship on the ontological and epistemic conditions through which domination becomes intelligible as peace.