CASTE, DOMINANCE AND RESISTANCE: Dalit Identity Politics in South India

This book explores the complex relationship between caste, power, and resistance in India through the lens of Dalit politics. Conceptualising caste as a system of graded inequality, it examines how caste dominance is sustained by economic control, social norms and reinforced by political and institutional authority, often through caste violence. Through an analysis of Dalit movement in South India, the book demonstrates how Dalit resistance played a transformative role in challenging entrenched hierarchies, drawing on anti-caste intellectual tradition inspired by thinkers like Mahatma Phule, B.R. Ambedkar as well as the grassroots movements that question social and political dominance, exclusion and marginalisation. Further, the book examines how collective action has forged a broader Dalit identity by transcending internal sub-caste divisions thus influencing party politics and electoral mobilisation through the formation of Dalit-led political formations and the negotiation of power within democratic institutions. However, despite these early gains, this trajectory later paved the way for processes of political cooption and accommodation on the one hand and renewed schisms within Dalit mobilisation, manifested in the form of subcaste identity assertion and demand of sub-categorisation of reservations, on the other. By situating Dalit politics at the intersection of social struggles, political regimes and electoral democracy, the book offers a nuanced analysis of how identity politics redefines caste dynamics, power structures and political agency in contemporary India. Srinivasulu Karli, till recently Professor of Political Science at the Osmania University, Hyderabad, is presently Senior Fellow, ICSSR. He is a member of the Board of Governors, Centre for Economic and Social Studies, Hyderabad.