Research Project

Caste in the Indian context does not move on a linear timeline. It flickers between past and present, between local forms of belonging and imperial technologies of rule. This project explores how colonialism restructured caste into a hardened, bureaucratized system, and how those transformations echo in unexpected places: not only in postcolonial India, but in American classrooms. Long before the British arrived, caste operated as a fluid, regionally specific system of social organization. It was colonialism—through the census, codification, and the logic of governance—that fossilized caste into the rigid hierarchies we now take as given. Drawing on the work of Nicholas Dirks, Divya Cherian, and archival sources on British administration, this research traces the shift from caste as practice to caste as category. But the story does not end in the subcontinent. It follows caste into the diaspora, into the U.S., where New Jersey’s educational policies and textbooks continue to narrate caste through colonial eyes. These narratives often erase the violence of the empire and reproduce the myth of an ancient, unchanging Hindu social order, flattening a complex history into a civilizational cliché. By analyzing curriculum frameworks, textbook language, and pedagogical standards, this project reveals how education becomes a vessel for the quiet endurance of colonial epistemologies. It argues that caste, as taught and institutionalized today, is not merely a relic of tradition but a product of empire, still structuring how students learn about South Asia, identity, and inequality. In centering this transnational arc from colonial classification to diaspora pedagogy, the paper calls for a critical re-evaluation of state education policies. It advocates for curricular reforms that foreground anti-caste scholarship, decolonial historiography, and the lived experiences of marginalized communities. To teach caste ethically in the U.S. demands more than inclusion, it requires structural reckoning.