Practicing Caste: On Touching and Not Touching

Practicing Caste asks what new ways of thinking about caste are enabled when we approach 'caste' ignorantly, that is, when we forget the weight of its millennial history and turn to caste less as an exception than an occasion to rethink the grounds of sociability. . . . In posing caste as a problem for ethics, Jaaware returns to that fundamental question of what it means to be-with-others in a startlingly new manner. Aniket Jaaware has written a breathtakingly beautiful book whose form and content mirror the provocation to unlearn what we think we know about caste. We would do well to travel a while with a text that has so much to teach us about being together and apart.-Anupama Rao, from the Foreword This spellbindingly orchestrated book develops its philosophical theory of caste as a practice of touching and not-touching, luminously disclosing caste as a way of regulating, coding, and living an originary and unconditioned touch. It reveals the ethics and politics of touchability as a secret structure of Indic and other modernities. Putting Derrida, Foucault, and Heidegger into conversation with Ambedkar and Phule, Practicing Caste explodes the discussion of caste from its South Asian enclosure. Required reading for anyone interested in a world-spanning comparative account of modernity.-Ben Conisbee Baer, Princeton University Practicing Caste attempts a fundamental break from the tradition of caste studies, showing the limits of the historical, sociological, political, and moral categories through which it has usually been discussed. Engaging with the resources phenomenology, structuralism, and poststructuralism offer to our thinking of the body, Jaaware helps to illuminate the ethical relations that caste entails, especially around its injunctions concerning touching. The resulting insights offer new ways of thinking about sociality that are pertinent not only to India but also to thinking the common on a planetary basis. Aniket Jaaware is Professor of English at Shiv Nadar University. He is the author of Simplifications: An Introduction to Structuralism and Post-structuralim; a volume of short stories, Neon Fish in Dark Water; and several translations into English and Marathi.Anupama Rao is Associate Professor of History at Barnard College. She is the author of The Caste Question (California, 2009).