Race and/or caste: What is at stake?

This brief response raises a few key questions emerging from Suraj Yengde’s lecture and suggests a critical direction they can be steered towards. It considers in what sense caste may deserve an epistemology of its own. It suggests that we must look at what is at stake in answering the conundrum of which framework to use as primary, though a comparison between anti-racism and anti-casteism is preferable to one between race and caste. A continuing challenge is to bear witness to the experience of the subordinated. What is at stake is the intellectual and political consensus necessary to move towards action – to bring about an institutional or social change. Therefore, what is at stake is the power of the concepts deployed to communicate with and convince agents of change, principally, the activists. During these trying times, revisiting conceptual histories to provide a fresh perspective is immensely challenging; Suraj Yengde has done well to bravely undertake this challenge.