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This innovative work of historical anthropology explores how India's Dalits, or ex-untouchables, transformed themselves from stigmatized subjects into citizens. Anupama Rao's account challenges standard thinking on caste as either a vestige of precolonial society or an artifact of colonial governance. Focusing on western India in the colonial and postcolonial periods, she shines a light on South Asian historiography and on ongoing caste discrimination, to show how persons without rights came to possess them and how Dalit struggles led to the transformation of such terms of colonial liberalism as rights, equality, and personhood. Extending into the present, the ethnographic analyses of The Caste Question reveal the dynamics of an Indian democracy distinguished not by overcoming caste, but by new forms of violence and new means of regulating caste.

This short essay introduces readers to Dipesh Chakrabarty's The Calling of History and the major concerns of the book: the institutionalization of history in a colonial society, Indian history's preoccupations with its Mughal past, and the central figures involved in propagating ideas of historical truth and archival method.

In this introduction, Rao discusses the importance of The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, edited by Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko, and the resulting Kitabkhana, or book forum. The contributors to the Kitabkhana address The Birth of Chinese Feminism as an inaugural text for two reasons: first, for the manner in which the author-editors have framed and conceptualized the distinctive nature of He-Yin Zhen's interventions; and second, for the text's ability to address histories of modern gendering in non-Western locales, thus generating a global consideration of the social and political interventions that staged gender as a problem of both embodiment and inequality.

Rao's piece introduces the six essays included in "Insurgent Thought," the special section of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, volume 34, number 1. These essays feature a group of emerging scholars who are concerned with understanding the relationship between forms of life and modes of thought. The "thought" under consideration is distinctive for its commitment to remaking political and ethical life, and attention to the fugitive or unruly forms by which insurgent thought is transmitted, e.g., through poetry, fiction, and autobiography in addition to standard polemical tracts and sustained treatises. In turn the insurgent thinker-activists around whom this section is framed are figures who challenged established traditions of thought and action—critical theory as such—by imagining political and ethical possibilities that were global in scope yet deeply engaged with forms of subaltern difference.

InSociety Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault characterizes the permanent, conflictual relationship that exists "between the two groups that constitute the social body and shape the State [as] in fact one of … permanent warfare" (2003: 88). Foucault argues that acknowledging that "race wars" constitute the substructure of the state enables a new conception of power, one that is simultaneously implicated in knowledge regarding the source of that power: re-conceptualizing the bases of power also demands a shift in knowledge practices. This problem (of power/knowledge) was administrative/managerial from the start: it constituted the conditions of possibility for the exercise of sovereign power, and was itself sovereign-like. "The administration allows the king to rule the country at will, and subject to no restrictions. And conversely, the administration rules the king thanks to the quality and nature of the knowledge it forces upon him" (ibid.: 128–29). Foucault asserts that historical knowledge is produced at precisely this juncture, as a form of counter-knowledge that is the outgrowth of a race war or class war, in which the nobility seek to defend society—their society—from new challengers, "the people," for example, as well as from the sovereign himself. Thus, modern history germinated as a form of knowledge against absolutist sovereign power, but it was grafted onto the edifice of the state to buttress the sovereign's threatened legitimacy. Thus, "From 1760 onward we see the emergence of institutions that were roughly the equivalent of a ministry of history" (2003: 130 ff).

Discusses the 1963 stripping & parading of four naked dalit women in the village of Sirasgaon, India, to explore the production of knowledge about dalit women & the nature of anthropological narratives dealing with issues of caste & gender. The relation between dalit women's caste-specific differences & mainstream Indian feminism is explored, along with the judicial discourse surrounding the incident in Sirasgaon. It is argued that the avoidance of descriptions of the atrocious event itself in the documents, & the lack of serious legal consideration given to questions of untouchability or violence against women, reveal how various forms of untouchability are elaborated & disciplined, as well as how dalit women are constituted through critical events managed by legal mechanisms. Other issues explored are the position of certain aspects of Indian society in the domain of juridical reason, & the political basis for how the identities of dalits & others are expressed in legal arguments. The need to rethink modes of intellectual inquiry & practice in relation to gendered caste violence is discussed. 45 References. J. Lindroth