In a seminar paper at Columbia University in 1916, a 25-year-old B. R. Ambedkar argued that caste is marriage closed within the group, held in place by controlling women, and that it spread by imitation and by exclusion.
Explains: B. R. Ambedkar, "Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development", paper read at Columbia University, 9 May 1916; Indian Antiquary 46 (May 1917), pp. 81–95. Reprinted in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, Vol. 1, pp. 3–22
Debayudh Chatterjee traces how India's communists, and the CPI(M) in West Bengal above all, dealt with caste over ninety years. He argues that the party slowly came to take caste seriously, but each time folded it back into its stance on class struggle, and that it did so most when it was losing votes.
Explains: Debayudh Chatterjee, "Class versus Caste: The Conundrum of Dalit Politics and the Communist Movement in India (1926–2016)", in Organizing Equality: Dispatches from a Global Struggle, ed. Alison Hearn, James Compton, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Amanda F. Grzyb (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022), 54–71. ISBN 978-0-2280-1196-5
The historian Chinnaiah Jangam reads the life and poetry of Gurram Jashua (1895–1971) as a Dalit life narrative, like the slave narratives of the United States. He argues that Jashua's poem Gabbilam (The Bat) brought the experience of untouchability into classical Telugu poetry and turned that poetry against caste.
Explains: Chinnaiah Jangam, "Desecrating the sacred taste: The making of Gurram Jashua—the father of dalit literature in Telugu", The Indian Economic and Social History Review 51, no. 2 (2014): 177–198
The political scientist P.M. Joshy traces Dalit landlessness in Kerala from slavery to the 'Kerala Model'. He argues that the Chengara struggle, like Ayyankali's movement a century earlier, built a Dalit identity around land across sub-caste lines, and that both were worn down by sub-caste divisions and by the ruling class, the CPI(M) included.
Explains: P.M. Joshy, "Reimagining Resources: Analyzing the Politics of Dalit Land Struggles in Kerala, India with Special Reference to Chengara", CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion 6, no. 1 (April 2025): 96–115
Two scholars at IIT Patna read Narappa and Love Story, both released in 2021, and argue that the films break with Telugu cinema's habit of showing Dalit women as silent victims. They also say the films were made by non-Dalit directors, and that this limits what they can show.
Sree Govind Bharatvaraj, a media scholar, argues that the Tamil films led by Pa. Ranjith grew out of the Ambedkarite movements of the 1990s, not out of earlier cinema's caste critique, and should be called Dalit cinema.
Explains: Sree Govind Bharatvaraj, "Contemporary Anti-Caste Cinema: Pa. Ranjith, Dalit Movements, Cultural Assertion and the Politics of Representation in Mainstream Tamil Cinema", South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 49(1), 2026, pp. 167–187
Pallavi Gupta, a geographer, interviewed cleaners at two Hyderabad stations in 2019. Machines cleaned the platforms officials see; Dalit women cleaned the rest with brooms, often unpaid on time and without their benefits.
Explains: Pallavi Gupta, "Broomscapes: racial capitalism, waste, and caste in Indian Railway Stations", Ethnic and Racial Studies 45(2), 2022, pp. 235–256
Researchers generated 1,536 images with Google's Gemini image model. Even for names that carry no caste marker, the model assigned work, settings and dignity along caste lines, they argue.
Explains: Divyanshu Kumar Singh, Dipto Das, Deepika Rama Subramanian, Koustuv Saha, Stephen Voida and Bryan Semaan, "Beyond Categories of Caste: Examining Caste Bias and Morality in Text-to-Image AI Models", FAccT 2026 (ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency), CC BY 4.0