Practicing Caste attempts a break from the tradition of caste studies, using versions of phenomenology, structuralism and post-structuralism; and gives a description of touchability and untouchability in terms of a rhetoric and semantics of touch.

Foreword by Anupama Rao vii Introduction 1 1. Touch and Its Elements and Kinds 11 2. Touch—An A Priori Approach 37 3. Touch in Its Social and Historical Aspects I 61 4. Touch in Its Social and Historical Aspects II 93 5. Touch and Texts: Ancient and Modern 119 6. (Un)touchability of Things and People 148 7. Society, Sociality, Sociability 170 8. Recapitulation with Variations 190 Coda 205 Notes 209 Bibliography 223 Index 233

“The book is a remarkable exercise in showing what is possible when we attend to caste as if we were confronting it for the first time, bracketing the extensive scholarship about it, and refusing to adopt a ready political stance against caste discrimination and inequality. Practicing Caste asks what new ways of thinking about caste are enabled when we approach ‘caste’ ignorantly, that is, when we forget the weight of its millennial history and turn to caste less as an exception than an occasion to rethink the grounds of sociability. . . . Jaaware is deeply resistant to [the] politics of identity that has resulted from the institution of Dalits as figures of social suffering in the contemporary political public sphere. Instead, his own effort is to read Dalit literature as destitute literature, as writing that stages caste’s persistent and brutal dehumanization as occasion for ethical decision. In posing caste as a problem for ethics, Jaaware returns to that fundamental question of what it means to be-with-others in a startlingly new manner. Aniket Jaaware has written a breathtakingly beautiful book whose form and content mirror the provocation to unlearn what we think we know about caste. We would do well to travel a while with a text that has so much to teach us about being together and apart.”