Annual Gandhi Lecture - Sharika Thiranagama - The Private Life of Caste in India

Gandhi's propositions around caste remain one of his most enduring and contentious legacies. Drawing from my book "The Monster in Your Path: The Private Life of Caste in India," the talk will reflect upon the persistence and situated histories of caste and enslavement in the South Indian state of Kerala, most often understood as India's success story given it’s engaged left movements and comprehensive welfare state. In the talk, I discuss how new forms of caste disparities, as well as caste formations, have become sedimented not in the “public,” the center of most contemporary work, but rather in the new kinds of private spaces and private lives that arose after Kerala’s land reforms and communist transformation. In doing so, I suggest new ways to think about contemporary inequalities within historical economies of humiliation and subordination, as well as what new kinds of dignity projects look like for Kerala’s Dalit communities. About the Speaker: Sharika Thiranagama is Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research explores violence, inequality, and intense political mobilization through a focus on intimacy, gender and generation. She has been the author of multiple works on Sri Lanka including In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Her most recent book The Monster in Your Path (University of California 2026) focuses on Dalit communities in Kerala, South India examining the gendered inheritance and life of enslavement, caste and work.