Decasting Caste: Spatiality and Sociality

Abstract This essay undertakes a critical exploration of the intellectual and political debates surrounding caste-based reservations within the Indian context. It positions itself as a series of interrogations into the concept of universality and its spatial embodiment in the institution of the university. The past three decades—often demarcated as the post-Mandal era or Mandal II in Indian politics—are read here as a crucible for the deconstruction of universal knowledge, exposing its contingent and exclusionary foundations. The analysis advances a nonmimetic approach to caste, seeking to uncover the liberatory potential inherent in such a framework for reconfiguring caste subjectivities and collective political practices. By engaging with the semiformal and informal Ambedkarite study circles proliferating across university campuses, the essay foregrounds the “indisciplinarity” of knowledge as articulated through the factional and insurgent dimensions of Ambedkar's thought. Finally, it asserts that Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi political formations epitomize a politics of becoming, demanding an urgent engagement with the critical ontology of the present—a moment when the contours of knowledge, identity, and emancipation are contested and reshaped.