Conclusions

Abstract

The last chapter briefly summarizes the book and reflects in some detail on the uncomfortable question of the persistence of caste based conservatism despite the current dominance, so to say, of caste-based democratization in the Indian polity. It tries to make visible the limitations of ‘caste politics from below’, as it is being imagined today, a politics that remains arrested in the mentalities of the governmentality of the state on the one hand (which defines caste as a biopolitical category that must retain its primordial customs if it is to obtain state-sponsored ameliorations) and the neoliberal structure of the same state on the other hand (that continuously creates a crisis of resources that can be sought for caste ameliorations, as it shifts them out of the public sector). It makes a plea for a radical re-imagination of caste as an identity that does not require a self-perpetuation of the primordial aspects of caste to purse the opportunities offered by modern democracy, but one that can facilitate the empowerment of caste through the pursuit of the ameliorations on offer as well as the annihilation of caste, as eventually mutual goals.