Critical Caste Studies

Gajendran Ayyathurai

“stands for the uprooting of all forms of colonialist casteist impositions, policies, institutions, and practices of caste inequality on casteless Indians during the Western imperialism in South Asia…”

“argues for decolonizing the pre-Western colonization of brahminism and its race–caste (varna–jati) impositions, dispossession of water, land, resources, products, homesteads, and environments of the casteless Indians, and their displacement in the subcontinent and beyond.

“engages with a systematic (re)centring of the linguistic, semiotic, philosophical, cultural, artistic, religious, economic, knowledge, technological, environmental, and historical perspectives of hitherto caste-oppressed Indian communities.”

“defends intellectual and transformational interventions towards the making of casteless societies by realization of their common humanity.”

“As a new field, it also signals the drive towards the creation of casteless social sciences and natural sciences, in which understanding the foundations of anticaste consciousness of the casteless vernacular Indians across diverse space and time, their casteless individual and collective moments and movements against caste/casteism, and their inclusive ethical humanism in South Asia and the Indian diaspora assumes centrality.”

Picture1

A casteless couple of Tamil Nadu, 985 CE.

Picture by Gajendran Ayyathurai

Gajendran Ayyathurai

About Me

  I am an anthropologist and a historian from

Göttingen, Germany