New Books in Anthropology

This episode featured a conversation with Rahul Sonpimple, founder of the All-India Independent Scheduled Castes Association. Our conversation began with Rahul’s conception of Indian history and the place of anti-caste struggle within it. We delved further into Rahul’s own understanding of “anti-caste” as deeply rooted in Ambedkar’s own argument about the necessity of force in emancipatory social transformation. Rahul was especially forthright about the political cost of elevating meekness as a moral condition, a choice that he associates with the rise of a Dalit middle class focused primarily on securing its own representational authority. This took us to a discussion of the need for an independent and consolidated Dalit politics rooted in the lives of the Dalit poor with sufficient leverage to negotiate terms with the state. The last part of the episode focused on Rahul’s critique of both Ambedkarites and Indian Marxists for their disregard of caste as a material question. He spoke at particular length about the failure of Indian Marxists to advance a materalist critique of caste and how their analytical separation of caste and class has played into the hands of the Hindu Right. We ended the episode with Rahul laying out his own definition of Ambedkarism as a material and spiritual politics that recognizes the Dalit poor as a revolutionary class with the potential to rebuild society.

Read the transcript here

Guest

Rahul Sonpimple is author and founder of the All-India Independent Scheduled Castes Association.

References

B.R. Ambedkar, The Buddha and his Dhamma, 1957.

B.R. Ambedkar, Small Holdings in India and their Remedies, 1918.

B.R. Ambedkar, Buddha or Karl Marx, 1956.

B.R. Ambedkar, “Mr. Russell and the Reconstruction of Society,” 1916.

Rahul Sonpimple, “Against Hindu Rashtra: Ambedkar’s Buddhist Rashtra as Nation,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, May 4, 2026.

Rahul Sonpimple, “Remembering Babasaheb Ambedkar: The Unfinished Task of Burying Manu,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, April 14, 2026.

Rahul Sonpimple, “Kanshi Ram Sahab: Beyond Bureaucratic Dalit Passivity,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, March 15, 2026.

Rahul Sonpimple, “Spontaneity in Ambedkar: Beyond the Passivity of Popular Dalit Discourse,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, April 16, 2025.

Rahul Sonpimple, “The End of Independent Ambedkarite Dalit Politics?” Round Table India, July 12, 2024.

Rahul Sonpimple, “Dalit conversions: An act of rebellion against caste supremacy,” Al Jazeera, 14 June 2018.

Himsa and ahimsa are foundational ethical concepts in Buddhism. Himsa refers to injury, harm, or violence and ahimsa to non-harming, non-violence, or compassion. Ambedkar critiqued extreme, blanket doctrines of ahimsa as unworkable and often hypocritical.

Chokhamela was a saint-poet from Maharashtra, India who belonged to the Mahar caste and was a devotee of Vitthala.

Bhakt: devotee

Vitthala: Hindu deity worshipped mainly in the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka as an avatar of Vishnu.

Kabir and Ravidas: medieval poet-saints who were part of the Bhakti movement (7th-17th century), which emphasized devotion to a personal god, rather than rituals and scriptural knowledge, as the path to spiritual liberation.

Samata Sainik Dal: a social organization founded by B. R. Ambedkar in 1927 with the objective of safeguarding the rights of all oppressed sections of Indian society.

Bhima Koregaon: a village in Maharashtra that was the site of an 1818 battle between the army of Peshwa Baji Rao II and an East India Company force comprised mainly of Mahars, a Dalit caste. This battle has attained legendary status for Dalits who view it as a victory of Mahars over the Brahminical Peshwas.

Baniya: refers to mercantile castes primarily from the states of Rajasthan and Gujarat.

Kanshi Ram: Indian social reformer and politician who founded the All India Backwards and Minorities Communities Employees' Federation (BAMCEF) in 1971 and the Bahujan Samaj Party in 1984.

Jogendra Nath Mandal: Bengali politician and Dalit leader who held the law portfolio in the 1946-47 Interim Government of India and served as the Minister of Law and Labor in Pakistan from 1947-50.

Rajah: M.C. Rajah was a Tamil politician and Dalit leader who served on the Madras Legislative Council in the 1920s and founded the All India Depressed Classes Association in 1925.

Kamble: B.C. Kamble was a Marathi politician and Dalit leader who led the Republican Party of India for decades.

BAMCEF: All India Backwards and Minorities Communities Employees' Federation

UGC Bill: officially the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026, is a set of regulations aimed at ending discrimination against marginalized communities in higher education. Following widespread protests and a public interest litigation (PIL), the Supreme Court of India stayed the regulations in January 2026.

Bhagwa kapda: saffron clothing

Scheduled Caste Federation: a political organization founded in 1942 by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar dedicated to advocating for the rights and political self-representation of the Dalit community.

Republican Party of India: a political party established by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar in 1956.

PESA: Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) Act, 1996 is a landmark legislation enacted by the Government of India to ensure self-governance for tribal communities living in Fifth Schedule Areas.

Manusmriti: a text that served as a foundational legal and societal framework in ancient India.

EWS: refers to the Economically Weaker Section, a government classification referring to those within the unreserved (general) category eligible for a 10% quota in government jobs and educational admissions.

Karan Johar: an Indian filmmaker, producer and television personality.

Dharavi: a residential area in Mumbai (Bombay) considered one of the world’s largest slums.

Adani: Gautam Adani is an Indian billionaire and chairperson of the multinational conglomerate, the Adani Group.
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Sustainability has become a touchstone for development worldwide,
promising an antidote to environmental degradation and capitalism's
excess: waste. Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe (Stanford University Press, 2025)
presents a fundamentally different account of sustainability and waste
itself by uncovering the intersections of international environmental
reforms and racialized labor. In Bulgaria, Roma comprise the bulk of the
country's waste workers, while anti-Roma racism casts them as socially
disposable. Without their labor, however, the country cannot meet the
sustainability targets required by the European Union. Drawing on
fieldwork that spans twenty years, including eleven months working
alongside Romani women street sweepers, and years embedded in waste
organizations, political campaigns, Roma NGOs, and activist groups,
Elana Resnick examines the power hierarchies that shape both waste
management and European geopolitics.

Instead of focusing on only environmental harms or toxic distributions, Refusing Sustainability approaches
Romani life-worlds as spaces of creative production, and also tells
several larger stories: of postsocialist racial capitalism,
environmental progressivism, democratic failures, mutual aid, and the
power of women's friendships. Through these stories, Resnick illuminates
how ordinary people, racialized as discardable, resist systems that
simultaneously rely on and exclude them.
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In the spirit of Hannah Arendt's natality principle (that new things are always and should always be being born, each one unique and endowed with limitless potential) we at RTB love it when a new podcast appears. Especially one as thoughtful and original as The Caste Pod, which assembles scholars and activists to make sense of what caste is, how it's experienced and how it has travelled globally.

Join us to discuss and share an extended excerpt is its widely published (check out her earlier books!) founder Ajantha Subramanian, Professor of Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center, and producer (with Lori Allen) of the “Violent Majorities” series here at RTB.

John and Ajantha delve into the founding of the podcast, and then enter into the business end of the series, which is to explore the complex interplay between caste, race and class as organizing features of economic inequality and its corresponding features of cultural discrimination and oppression.

Ajantha's extended conversation with Prachi and Ram of Savera, a multiracial, interfaith, anti-caste coalition of Indian Americans from The Caste Pod episode 10 lays bare its premise: to put scholars and activists into conversation and opens a space engineered for each to learn form the other.

Before introducing the Savera excerpt, Ajantha frames the topic by way of Isabel Wilkerson's influential (if problematic) book Caste and its neglect of class and economic issues, and also the case against Cisco for caste discrimination in California that in significant ways internationalized the fight around caste's role in perpetuating economic and political inequity.

Listen and Read Here.
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What does Blackness look like? In Forms of Blackness: Race and Visibility in the French-Speaking World (Duke University Press, 2026),
Cécile Bishop argues that this seemingly simple question has no
straightforward answer. Instead of treating race as something
immediately visible, she explores how Blackness emerges through the
interplay of perception, language, and history.

A central theme of the book is that visibility is never neutral.
Through examples ranging from photographs of the Liberation of Paris to
works of art such as Portrait of a Black Woman, Bishop shows that
Blackness cannot be reduced to what is seen. Instead, she introduces the
idea of Blackness as form, emphasizing the importance of representation, opacity, and aesthetic experience.

Engaging with thinkers such as Édouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon,
Bishop invites readers to rethink the assumption that seeing is the same
as knowing. Forms of Blackness offers a thoughtful and original account of how race is shaped not simply by appearance, but by the ways we learn to see.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an
Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of
religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African
diasporic communities in the Netherlands.
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Stove
improvers have been designing and promoting “clean” or “efficient”
biomass cookstoves in India since the 1940s and have been frustrated to
find their carefully engineered stoves abandoned in trash heaps or
repurposed as storage bins, while the traditional mud chulha retains a
central place in the kitchen. Why do so many Indian women continue to
use wood-burning, smoke-spewing stoves when they have other options?

Based on anthropological research in Rajasthan, Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women’s Technology in India (University of Arizona Press, 2024) by Dr. Meena Khandelwal argues that the supposedly obsolete
chulha persists because it offers women control over the tools needed
to feed their families. Their continued use of old stoves alongside the
new is not a failure to embrace new technologies
but instead a strategy to maximize flexibility and autonomy. The chulha
is neither the villain nor hero of this story. It produces particulate
matter that harms people’s bodies, leaves soot on utensils and walls, and
accelerates glacial melting and atmospheric warming. Yet it also
depends on renewable biomass fuel and supports women’s autonomy as a
local, do-it-yourself technology.

Dr.
Khandelwal, a feminist anthropologist, describes her collaboration with
engineers, archaeologists, and others. She employs critical social
theory and reflections from fieldwork to bring together research from a
range of fields, including history, geography, anthropology, energy and
environmental studies, public health, and science and technology studies
(STS). In so doing she not only demystifies multidisciplinary research
but also highlights the messy reality of actual behavior.

Cookstove Chronicles
critically examines why, despite extensive development efforts, use of
the chulha persists. It offers an important new framework for looking at
development, technology, environmental change, and human behavior.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 
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