CRITICAL RACE THEORY IN THE CONTEXT OF INDIA: TRANSLATING CONCEPTS, ENGAGING CASTE

This paper examines the analytic potential and limits of Critical Race Theory (CRT) when applied to the Indian social and legal context. CRT, emerging from the U.S. legal academy to explain and contest racialized structures of power, offers conceptual tools—intersectionality, interest convergence, structural analysis of law and whiteness, storytelling/testimony—that have proven generative beyond their original setting. Yet India’s primary axis of ascriptive social exclusion—caste—has different historical roots, social organization, and juridical accommodations. This paper argues for a careful, non-derivative translation of CRT into Indian studies through Critical Caste Studies (CCS) and comparative racialization frameworks. It’s kind of castration, or pushing aside one over the other and a keen link can be stretched to America’s issues on race and struggle, marginalization, subjugation, side lining, submissiveness, discourse formation, etc are tools enabled in the back stage. Drawing on scholarship that maps the similarities and disanalogies between race and caste, legal and educational case studies, and contemporary policy debates, the paper proposes a synthetic framework that preserves CRT’s focus on structural power while attending to caste’s specificities: endogamous descent groups, ritual-hierarchical cosmologies, occupation-linked jatis, and constitutional reservation regimes. The conclusion outlines methodological guardrails and policy implications for scholarship and activism that seek to deploy CRT-inspired analysis in India.