Caste in everyday life: Experience and affect in Indian society

Following Jodhka and Manor’s (Contested Hierarchies, Persisting Influence: Caste and Power in Twenty-First Century India, Orient Blackswan, 2018) call to ‘treat caste as an empirical and dynamic reality, constantly changing and evolving with varied trajectories’, this volume brings together a range of empirical papers that illuminate the workings of caste in different contexts. The chapters in this book draw together research from rural and urban settings, from public and private spheres and from different regions of the country. In this introduction we seek to set out the conceptual framework and central arguments of this book. We begin with a discussion of caste and how it has been theorised and conceived in academic work to date. Following this we outline our focus on the everydayness of caste and the insights that experiential accounts can offer. In so doing, we foreground approaches (Guru & Sarukai, Experience, Caste and Everyday Social, Oxford, 2019; Lee, Encyclopedia of Indian Religions, Springer, 2021) to the study of caste that emphasise the need to grasp the affective, embodied and lived aspects that produce and reproduce caste