This reflective practitioner essay asks what it means to teach law ‘as a conversation’ and who is heard as speaking law within that conversation. Drawing on teaching notes from an elite Indian law school writing classroom, the article analyses a staged counter-factual dialogue among four legal thinkers (Nicholas J. McBride, Patricia J. Williams, Kiruba Munusamy and Angela D. Gilmore). ‘Counter-factual pedagogy’ names a method that stages an ‘as-if’ encounter that is structurally unlikely within conventional legal education in order to make institutional defaults newly visible, including neutrality as epistemic rigour, professionalism as merit and doctrinal learning as separable from social power. The article reads the exercise through five literature-informed lenses (voice, neutrality, performance, justice, discomfort). No student quotations, paraphrases or artefacts are reproduced.

In Mumbai, the live slaughter of meat by Muslim butchers is an intergenerational caste practice and a source of livelihood and labour, supplying ritually slaughtered halal meat for Muslims, and fresh quality meat for others in the city. Yet in the neoliberal Hindu Nationalist imagination, the very sights, smells, and sounds of butchering are a sign of Muslim abjection, a source of disgust to be eradicated from the “world-class” Hindu city. Muslim butchers are further subject to an intra-Muslim caste politics of disdain, in which their contact with blood is thought to render them impure (na-pak) and untrustworthy. At butcher stores and meat markets, economic development, urban sanitation, and ritual ideologies recruit the senses into a politics of disgust and disdain. These affects are reflexively embodied in ways that reveal the intimate relation between individualising forms of Islamic piety, Muslim infrastructural marginalisation, and the making of a sanitised neoliberal Hindu city.

This article examines the ideological and organizational evolution of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the world’s largest Hindu Nationalist organization, in response to the challenges posed by the anti-caste politics in post-Independent India. Focusing on the leadership of Balasaheb Deoras (1915–1996), the third sarsańghacālak of the RSS, it situates the period between 1973 and 1990 as a critical yet understudied period in the history of the Sangh, marked by a significant departure from the organization’s earlier defence of caste hierarchy. Unlike his predecessors, Deoras publicly rejected the caste system in the early 1970s and paved the way for the Sangh to adopt the rhetoric of Sāmājik Samarastā (Social Harmony), which became the central pillar of the Sangh’s engagement with the question of caste in its bid to create a wider Hindu community which posed itself as caste-neutral and caste-assimilative. The article argues that the Sangh’s engagement with caste was neither superficial nor a new feature of its post-2014 avatar. Samarastā helped the Sangh develop a conservative model of caste reform, one that invoked the language of social change without challenging the Brahmanical ideas inherent to its Hindu Nationalism.

This article examines the kidnapping and forced marriages of women under the Peshwas, investigating whether the state prioritized justice for victims or its Brahmanical credentials, given that the annulment of fully performed marriages was prohibited under the Shastras. Far from passively upholding the inherited order, the Peshwa regime actively leveraged intersectional dynamics of gender, caste, and religion to transform that order into a consolidated patriarchal Brahmanical system, reinforcing and totalizing caste-based customs, hierarchies, and governance through judicial and administrative interventions. The article also reveals a binary governance model, highlighting distinctive modes of justice between the capital city of Pune and the countryside. The article interrogates the ambiguity and fluidity of categories used to denote abduction, as well as the associated normative frameworks and penalties, showing how the discursive deployment of familial, communal, caste, ritual, pride, and political dynamics denied women’s agency and subsumed alternative narratives, such as elopement and/or consensual cohabitation. It demonstrates how coercion against women as well as women’s agency were viewed and conceptualized. Moreover, the government’s adherence to patriarchal Brahmanical ideology, derived from the Shastras, not only shaped legal responses but also actively contributed to the ongoing perpetuation of abductions and forced marriages.

This paper advances current debates on majoritarian state-making by bringing into dialogue theoretical debates on linguistic polysemy, legal hermeneutics, and digital authoritarianism. It analyses hate speech accusations in India as a polysemic discourse, which allows majoritarian regimes to create new public hierarchies of interpretation that equate “hate speech” with critique of Hindu nationalist (Hindutva) ideologies. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography with legal professionals, police, and hate speech accused in North India, the paper analyses how adherents of India’s Hindutva government mobilise a dual strategy of online virality and procedural, judicial dismantlement to create a system of majoritarian legal hermeneutics: a self-reinforcing complex of interpretation that exploits the indeterminacy of legal terminologies to imbue criminal provisions aimed at safeguarding equality with anti-democratic meanings. In the process, legal actors are turned into active participants in the creation of a public of wounded Hindus that views minorities as a threat to their identity.

This article considers the material practices of forging ‘Hindu’ spaces in colonial India, through an examination of a cremation charity’s movement against a mechanical crematorium in interwar Calcutta. Established around 1926, the mechanical crematorium was advertised by the municipality as a cost-effective alternative to traditional Hindu pyres, disposing of unclaimed corpses and dissected parts by employing stigmatized Dalit labour, in a region of the city marked for ‘offensive’ trades. However, by 1932, a cremation charity led by municipal councillors and Indian capitalists contested the existence of the crematorium, arguing that its technological process, labour practices, and location were an affront to Hindu sensibilities. This article examines the rise of the charity and the decline of the crematorium within the context of electoral politics, the politics of the location, and the broader impact on interwar labour crises and famines in Calcutta. By analysing the anti-crematorium movement, this article offers a colonial material history of the construction of the emotional resonance in ‘Hindu spaces’ in India, outlining how it emerged at the interstices of communal and caste boundaries.

How do social hierarchies affect patterns of discrimination in democratic contexts? While studies of identity politics in diverse societies often focus on relations between groups formed around parallel identities like ethnicity, these same societies often feature hierarchical identities that rank individuals into stratified groups. This paper examines how culturally embedded caste identities, inherited at birth, continue to shape everyday life. Drawing on an original survey of 2,160 Senegalese citizens, we show that caste remains a salient axis of perceived discrimination despite its formal abolition over a century ago. Individuals from occupational caste and slave-descended backgrounds are significantly more likely to report experiences of exclusion such as the denial of basic services. Most respondents attribute caste-based discrimination to cultural norms rather than economic competition, religious instruction, or biological differences. Moreover, we find that high-status individuals systematically overreport tolerant attitudes in face-to-face interviews with lower-status enumerators, suggesting that social desirability can obscure the extent of status-based attitudes. These findings shed light on the persistence of caste hierarchies and their impact on citizenship in societies otherwise considered tolerant and democratic. These findings contribute to research on identity politics by highlighting the need to distinguish between ranked and unranked forms of social difference.

How has caste influenced entrepreneurship in India in the past and how does it do so in the present? Using the Industrial Census of 1911, this paper provides the first detailed caste-level mapping of firms in Indian business history and links it to the present by an analysis of the Economic Census of 2013–2014. It finds that while trading castes were dominant, there were significant regional variations and nontrading castes were far more important than usually posited in the literature. Over the course of a century, the social base of entrepreneurship has widened slowly but significant barriers remain. The paper argues that “caste embeddedness” through the nature of wealth distribution, social capital, and ritual purity affects entrepreneurial choices and presents a typology of “caste,” “caste-advantage,” “caste-restricted,” and “noncaste” businesses that characterize the economic life of India.