Caste, Identity, and Development

The text. Ambedkar's undelivered speech is the most powerful and unsparing analysis of caste ever written, and it remains the necessary starting point for anyone working on Indian inequality. The Navayana annotated edition includes Roy's long introductory essay, "The Doctor and the Saint," which sets the speech against Gandhi's response and is itself a major contemporary intervention.

A contemporary Dalit intellectual's account of caste in everyday Indian life — academic, political, social, and intimate. Yengde's chapter on "Dalit capitalism" and his critique of liberal multiculturalism are particularly useful for development practitioners who want to understand why reservation policies have not, by themselves, dismantled the underlying structure.

A more politically charged book than Yengde, but indispensable. Teltumbde argues that economic liberalisation and Hindutva politics have together produced new forms of caste violence and exclusion. The chapters on Khairlanji and Una are difficult reading; they should be.

The most comprehensive empirical economic analysis of caste-based discrimination in India. Deshpande's work on labour market outcomes, hiring discrimination, and the inadequacy of "merit" as a frame is foundational. Read together with her later book on affirmative action.

Thorat's audit study evidence — sending matched CVs differing only by caste-coded surnames — was among the first rigorous quantification of contemporary caste discrimination in Indian hiring. The replication and extensions across sectors form a small but important canon.

Muralidharan's body of work on Indian education and welfare delivery includes some of the cleanest empirical evidence on how caste shapes the gap between programme design and on-the-ground implementation. The evaluations of teacher attendance and welfare biometric authentication are especially useful for evaluators.

A Dalit Christian woman's autobiographical novel, and one of the most important texts in modern Tamil literature. Karukku describes from inside what caste discrimination feels like in school, at work, and in religious life — the kind of texture that most evaluation literature cannot reach.

Independent journalism on caste in contemporary India in long-form audio. Particularly strong on labour, sanitation work, and the politics of land. Useful for development practitioners who want to hear how caste shows up in places their evaluation instruments don't reach.

A long-running platform for Dalit and anti-caste writing on contemporary politics. Worth subscribing to for the breadth of perspectives and for the regular reminder that most mainstream Indian commentary on caste is written by people who do not experience it.

The clearest single-author treatment of why reservation policies were designed the way they were, what they have achieved, and the empirical case against the standard "merit" critique. Useful both for designing inclusive programmes and for arguing against bad-faith critiques of inclusive design.

Although classified above as political-economy ethnography, Red Tape is also one of the most important books on how caste operates inside the bureaucratic machinery of welfare delivery. The closing argument — that structural violence is enacted through ordinary procedural practice — is essential for understanding why "implementation" failures are not random.