Author Archives: notsomeritorios

My sociological observation, based on closely watching my parents and other Dalits who grew up in rural settings, is that caste society historically exercised strong control over the everyday pleasures, desires, and social freedoms of Dalit communities. In many villages dominated by Brahmanical social norms, Dalits often faced severe social consequences — ranging from ostracism to violence — if they publicly consumed alcohol, engaged in sexual relationships considered “improper,” or crossed caste boundaries in intimate relations. This reflects what B. R. Ambedkar identified in Castes in India as the caste system’s dependence on regulating endogamy and intimate life, and what Uma Chakravarti later theorised as “Brahmanical patriarchy,” where caste hierarchy survives through strict control over sexuality, especially inter-caste relations.

Because of this historical atmosphere of surveillance and punishment, many Dalits from rural backgrounds came to associate restraint, moral discipline, and respectability with survival itself. What is often interpreted today as “moral conservatism” among sections of Dalit communities can therefore also be understood sociologically as a survival mechanism shaped by caste oppression and the constant threat of social sanction. In this sense, Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus becomes relevant: structures of domination gradually become internalised as everyday dispositions, moral attitudes, and behavioural strategies. Similarly, Erving Goffman’s work on stigma helps explain how oppressed groups often regulate their own behaviour to avoid humiliation, punishment, or exclusion.

For instance, if a Dalit man in a village were seen drinking alcohol openly or engaging in a relationship with an upper-caste woman, the consequences could historically be extremely harsh. Such reactions reveal how caste society attempted to regulate not only labour and social mobility, but also pleasure, intimacy, and bodily autonomy. Michel Foucault’s analysis in Discipline and Punish is useful here, as it demonstrates how systems of power govern bodies through surveillance, fear, and the internalisation of punishment. Likewise, Sharmila Rege argues that caste society disciplines Dalit bodies through notions of purity, pollution, and respectability.

From this perspective, caste hierarchy functioned not merely as an economic or ritual system, but also as a system of control over desire and personal freedom. At the same time, dominant castes often enjoyed greater social latitude in matters of alcohol consumption, sexuality, and leisure, highlighting the unequal moral expectations imposed across caste lines. Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, in Why I Am Not a Hindu, similarly critiques Brahmanical moral frameworks for regulating food, drink, labour, and bodily practices differently across caste groups while presenting upper-caste norms as universally moral.

Contemporary psychology and critical theory also suggest that prolonged social repression, denial of autonomy, restriction over intimacy, and lack of meaningful leisure can negatively affect psychological well-being and selfhood. Research in psychology increasingly links chronic deprivation of social intimacy, emotional fulfilment, and recreational autonomy to stress, anxiety, depression, diminished self-esteem, and poorer cognitive well-being. For example, Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs places intimacy, belonging, pleasure, and self-fulfilment among fundamental human requirements, while Erich Fromm argued in The Sane Society that societies denying emotional and existential fulfilment produce alienation and psychological distress. Similarly, Frantz Fanon demonstrated how systems of domination penetrate the emotional and cognitive life of oppressed populations, shaping both selfhood and social behaviour.

Critical theorists such as Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich further argued that systems of domination often regulate pleasure, sexuality, and bodily autonomy as mechanisms of social control. Their work suggests that repression is not merely moral regulation but also political regulation over human desire itself.

Therefore, the issue is not simply about morality in isolation, but about how caste society historically structured unequal access to dignity, intimacy, pleasure, leisure, and freedom, while simultaneously producing moral frameworks that oppressed communities often internalised as necessary for survival.

The university classroom is often projected as a sacred and neutral site of knowledge, but in reality it is also a political arrangement of power, legitimacy and recognition. The professor is not merely someone who “knows more”; rather, the professor is someone whose knowledge has been certified, institutionalised and stamped as legitimate by the state and its academic apparatus. Degrees, appointments, fellowships, peer-reviewed publications and university affiliations are not natural indicators of truth — they are mechanisms through which authority is socially manufactured. This is why a deeply capable individual outside the institutional structure may remain intellectually invisible despite possessing sharper insights than the professor standing at the podium. Modern academia operates through what Michel Foucault would call a “regime of truth,” where institutions decide who is authorised to speak, who gets heard, and who is dismissed as unqualified. The classroom therefore is not simply a place where knowledge is exchanged; it is a theatre where legitimacy itself is performed.

The irony is that universities frequently preach critical thinking while simultaneously demanding obedience to institutional hierarchy. A student is encouraged to “question everything” until the questioning reaches the foundations of academic authority itself. The moment one problematises the professor’s monopoly over legitimate knowledge production, the hidden architecture of power becomes visible. What is often celebrated as “expertise” is partly genuine scholarship and partly symbolic capital bestowed by institutions. Pierre Bourdieu showed precisely this: academia reproduces intellectual hierarchies by disguising historically contingent forms of privilege and recognition as objective merit. The state, through accreditation systems and educational institutions, effectively decides whose speech counts as knowledge and whose remains mere opinion. Thus, intellectual exclusion is not always a consequence of incapacity; often it is a consequence of lacking institutional sanction.

This does not necessarily mean every outsider is correct or every professor is fraudulent. Rather, it exposes how modern societies confuse institutional recognition with intellectual worth itself. Some of history’s most transformative thinkers existed initially outside dominant structures and were mocked, excluded or ignored before later canonisation. The problem, therefore, is not expertise per se but the monopolisation of epistemic legitimacy. When the state and university become the primary gatekeepers of recognised thought, knowledge risks turning into bureaucracy. The professor then ceases to be merely a scholar and becomes an administrative embodiment of certified truth. To problematise this authority is not anti-intellectualism; it is to ask a fundamentally philosophical question: does truth emerge from institutional approval, or can thought possess validity even before power recognises it?

The Psychology of State Dependency and the Politics of Patronage

One of the most recurring patterns in human history is the emergence of classes and groups whose entire identity, prestige, and authority depend not upon their own independent capability, but upon proximity to political power. Such people rarely build autonomous institutions, productive economies, intellectual traditions, or military strength of their own. Instead, they attach themselves to the state and derive their legitimacy from it. Their survival depends upon recognition from the ruler, the court, the bureaucracy, or the institutional order of the time. Consequently, they become the loudest defenders of authority because without that authority their social standing collapses. The state thus ceases to be merely an administrative structure and becomes a psychological crutch for those who cannot sustain prestige independently.

This phenomenon is visible across civilisations, but South Asian history offers particularly striking examples of it. Throughout different periods — ancient kingdoms, Sultanate rule, Mughal administration, colonial bureaucracy, and even modern democratic governance — one repeatedly observes the formation of intermediary elites who seek rank, office, and symbolic superiority through state patronage. Their power does not emerge organically from society but is granted downward from above. Such groups often present themselves as moral, civilisational, or intellectual authorities, but their actual strength lies in institutional proximity rather than independent achievement.

The Mughal period demonstrates this logic clearly through the mansabdari system. Under this arrangement, nobles and officials received ranks, titles, land revenues, and military responsibilities directly from the emperor. Authority therefore became deeply tied to imperial approval. A person’s prestige was not autonomous; it depended upon court recognition. Historians such as Satish Chandra and Irfan Habib have extensively documented how the Mughal state organised society through hierarchies of patronage and bureaucratic dependency. The competition among elites was therefore not necessarily about creating independent centres of excellence but about securing access to imperial favour.

This relationship between hierarchy and political power was not limited to the Mughal state alone. Nicholas Dirks, in Castes of Mind, argued that caste structures were deeply shaped by political authority and administrative systems. Hierarchies became reinforced not merely through religion but through state recognition, land control, taxation, and institutional power. Colonial rule intensified this further. The British administration relied heavily on intermediaries — clerks, landlords, translators, bureaucrats, and loyal native elites — who functioned as extensions of imperial governance. These groups often derived status not from independent social contribution but from their role within the colonial machinery itself.

The tragedy is that this psychology survived even after colonialism formally ended. Modern democratic states inherited many feudal and bureaucratic tendencies of older regimes. Entire political cultures now revolve around state recognition, government employment, institutional certification, and symbolic entitlement. The obsession with “designation” often becomes more important than competence itself. Instead of creating independent intellectual, industrial, or entrepreneurial traditions, many individuals seek security through bureaucratic incorporation. The desire is not sovereignty but sanctioned status.

This condition can also be understood through modern sociological theory. Max Weber argued that bureaucracy creates forms of authority rooted in office rather than personal capability. A bureaucratic official possesses power because the institution grants it, not because society organically recognises it. Similarly, Pierre Bourdieu described how symbolic capital — titles, degrees, official recognition, and institutional prestige — functions as a mechanism of domination. Such symbols create the illusion of superiority while masking underlying dependency. Antonio Gramsci further explained how ruling systems maintain themselves through intermediary classes who internalise and defend dominant structures because their own status depends upon them.

The deeper issue, therefore, is psychological. Groups dependent upon political authority often confuse state recognition with self-worth. Since their legitimacy comes from above rather than from genuine productivity or independent social contribution, they constantly require validation from institutions. This produces an excessive attachment to authority and a fear of autonomy. Such people become defenders of whichever system offers them prestige — monarchy yesterday, colonialism later, bureaucracy today. Their ideological language may change according to the era, but the underlying mentality remains remarkably stable.

This is why throughout history one repeatedly encounters classes who speak in the language of morality, nationalism, religion, reform, or progress while remaining fundamentally dependent upon structures of power. They rarely question the existence of domination itself; they merely seek inclusion within the hierarchy. Their ambition is not freedom from the throne but proximity to it. As a result, political systems continuously reproduce loyal intermediary groups whose survival depends upon defending institutional authority.

However, an academically balanced perspective must also recognise that complete independence from the state has rarely been possible in complex societies. States historically controlled land, military power, taxation, education, and law. Participation within state systems was often necessary for survival, mobility, and influence. Therefore, not every engagement with political authority can simply be dismissed as weakness or dependency. Many communities entered state structures strategically in order to secure resources, protection, or representation. Yet the critique remains significant because it exposes how deeply societies can internalise the logic of patronage and institutional validation.

Ultimately, the issue is not merely historical but civilisational. A society that overvalues titles, offices, and state-sanctioned prestige risks producing dependent minds incapable of autonomous creativity. Genuine strength emerges when individuals and communities develop independent intellectual traditions, productive capacities, ethical frameworks, and social institutions that do not rely entirely upon political approval. Otherwise, history merely repeats itself in new costumes: the ruler changes, the bureaucracy changes, the ideology changes, but the psychology of dependency remains intact.

There is a deep irony in the politics of symbolic outrage practiced by a section of radical identity movements today. They spend enormous intellectual and emotional energy mocking Hindu gods, abusing deities, ridiculing rituals, and desecrating symbols that millions of ordinary people hold sacred, all in the name of “critical thinking,” “anti-caste consciousness,” or “liberation.” Yet the very same people often become intolerant, emotionally volatile, and morally absolutist the moment their own icons, leaders, or ideological figures are questioned. Suddenly the language changes from “freedom of critique” to “respect our sentiments,” from “smash oppressive symbols” to “how dare you insult our emancipatory icons.” This exposes a profound contradiction at the heart of selective radicalism: they do not actually oppose sacredness itself; they merely want to redistribute who gets to possess sacredness.

What emerges, then, is not a politics that transcends hierarchy, but one that simply reverses its direction. The culture of humiliation is not dismantled — it is reassigned. Symbolic aggression becomes morally acceptable so long as the target belongs to a socially dominant tradition. In this framework, insult is renamed resistance, mockery is renamed consciousness, and desecration is renamed progressive politics. But if humiliation is wrong in principle, then it cannot become ethical merely because the identity of the victim changes. Otherwise morality ceases to be universal and becomes purely tribal.

The deeper problem is that many such movements begin to unconsciously imitate the very dogmatism they claim to oppose. They develop their own sacred icons, untouchable narratives, moral policing, emotional censorship, and ritualized outrage. Criticism of their heroes is treated almost like blasphemy. The irony is striking: movements born in opposition to blind reverence often recreate new forms of reverence around political figures and symbolic identities. This is why much of contemporary symbolic politics increasingly resembles secular theology rather than rational critique.

Moreover, this obsession with symbolic antagonism often substitutes for substantive structural transformation. Endless online battles over gods, insults, statues, and emotional provocation create visibility and outrage, but they do not automatically produce better schools, economic mobility, institutional reform, healthcare access, or redistribution of power. Symbolic militancy becomes a performance economy — emotionally satisfying perhaps, but materially stagnant. And in the process, ordinary people who may have no role in historical oppression are collectively reduced into caricatures simply because they emotionally identify with a religious tradition.

A genuinely ethical politics would apply the same moral standards universally. If one demands dignity for one’s own memories, icons, and historical wounds, then one must also recognize the emotional and civilizational attachments of others. Otherwise the discourse of justice degenerates into selective resentment masquerading as moral philosophy.

There is a peculiar contradiction visible in many contemporary university spaces. A section of urban, educated, self-described “progressive” students often celebrates alcohol consumption, recreational cannabis use, nightlife culture, and a rhetoric of personal freedom. At the same time, many among the same circles casually deploy moral labels such as “drunkard,” “addict,” “uncultured,” or “problematic” toward others whose drinking practices fall outside the boundaries of what their own class culture considers respectable. This contradiction is not merely individual hypocrisy; sociologists would argue that it reflects deeper structures of class, symbolic power, and moral distinction.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that cultural practices are often used by educated classes to mark distinction and superiority. Drinking itself is not the issue; rather, how, where, what, and by whom alcohol is consumed becomes socially coded. Wine at an intellectual gathering, craft beer in an urban café, or cannabis framed as “countercultural experimentation” may be treated as progressive and sophisticated. The same behaviour among poorer, rural, lower-caste, or socially marginal groups is frequently stigmatized as vulgarity, lack of discipline, or moral failure. Thus, substance use becomes filtered through class aesthetics and cultural capital rather than through any consistent ethical principle.

Sociological research on stigma supports this contradiction. Studies on alcohol and drug stigma show that societies often attach moral judgments not simply to substances, but to the social identities of users.   The sociologist Howard Becker, through labeling theory, argued that deviance is socially constructed: people become “deviant” not merely because of actions they perform, but because institutions and dominant groups attach labels to them.   In this framework, a university student drinking imported whiskey at a liberal arts gathering may be viewed as socially refined, while a daily wage labourer drinking local liquor may be branded a “drunkard,” despite both engaging in alcohol consumption.

Similarly, scholarship on cannabis culture demonstrates that educated youth cultures often normalize their own drug consumption while maintaining stigma toward others. Research on cannabis normalization in Europe found that even in liberal environments, users continue to experience selective forms of stigma and social distinction.   The issue therefore is not simply whether substances are consumed, but who possesses the social legitimacy to consume them without losing moral respectability.

This contradiction is also tied to what sociologists call performative progressivism. In many elite university environments, progressive identity is partly constructed through visible symbolic practices — supporting social justice causes, speaking the language of mental health, gender equality, minority rights, and personal freedom. Yet these same spaces can reproduce old forms of classism and moral hierarchy in subtler ways. The language changes, but the mechanism of exclusion remains. One may reject conservative morality publicly while privately reproducing distinctions between the “cultured consumer” and the “degenerate addict.”

The sociologist Erving Goffman described stigma as a process through which societies mark certain identities as socially tainted. Substance users often become targets of such stigma, especially when they belong to marginalized groups. Modern liberal spaces may appear tolerant, but tolerance itself is often conditional and selective. The “acceptable” drinker is usually one who possesses education, class privilege, urban sophistication, and the ability to present consumption as lifestyle rather than dependency.

Scholars of moral panic and deviance have long noted that societies create symbolic “folk devils” to preserve social order. Stanley Cohen famously argued that moral panics emerge when certain groups are constructed as threats to social values.   Interestingly, contemporary liberal environments can participate in this same process while imagining themselves free from conservatism. They may reject traditional religious morality yet still enforce social respectability through new moral vocabularies — wellness discourse, productivity culture, emotional intelligence, or “healthy lifestyles.”

The contradiction therefore is not accidental. It reflects a broader sociological reality: modern societies rarely eliminate moral judgment; they merely reorganize it. Liberal university cultures may reject older conservative codes, but they often create new symbolic hierarchies based on class, aesthetics, language, and performative respectability. Alcohol or cannabis use becomes acceptable when embedded within elite cultural capital, but shameful when associated with poverty, lack of education, or visible social disorder.

In that sense, the label “drunkard” is less a medical or ethical category and more a social one. It reveals who has the privilege to appear “experimental,” “free,” or “progressive,” and who is denied that legitimacy.

The Theatre of Position: Experience as Theory, Assertion as Knowledge

What passes today as sociology increasingly resembles a peculiar kind of intellectual shortcut, where the labor of thinking has been replaced by the performance of location. The older demand—articulated in different ways by figures like C. Wright Mills—was that one move from the immediacy of experience to the abstraction of structure, from “what I feel” to “what can be demonstrated.” Even phenomenology, beginning with Edmund Husserl and refined through Alfred Schutz, never mistook description for explanation; it treated lived experience as something to be carefully analyzed, bracketed, and situated within intersubjective worlds, not elevated into self-sufficient truth. What we are witnessing now is a decisive mutation of that tradition: phenomenological experience is no longer the raw material of theory but is increasingly presented as theory itself. The move is subtle but devastating—one narrates an experience, adorns it with the vocabulary of structure, and the need for mediation simply disappears. The distance between “I experience” and “this is how society works” collapses, and with it collapses the entire methodological spine of sociology.

This collapse is often smuggled in through a vulgarized reading of standpoint theory associated with thinkers like Sandra Harding and Patricia Hill Collins, whose far more careful claim—that marginalized locations can generate critical insight—has been flattened into the far more convenient assertion that location guarantees truth. Once this inversion is accepted, positionality ceases to be a limit on knowledge and becomes its credential; the question is no longer whether a claim is argued, compared, or substantiated, but whether the speaker can convincingly situate themselves within a recognizable grid of identity. What follows is not the democratization of knowledge but its peculiar moralization, where disagreement is recoded as insensitivity and critique as violence, because to challenge a claim grounded in experience is to risk appearing to challenge the person who articulates it. Here one encounters precisely the problem that Michel Foucault would have warned against: experience itself is not outside power but is already shaped by discourse, which means it cannot serve as the unquestioned foundation of theory. To treat it as such is to mistake the effect for the cause.

Layered onto this is what Eva Illouz describes as the therapeutic turn, where emotional articulation acquires a peculiar authority in public life, and what Nancy Fraser diagnoses as the shift from redistribution to recognition, where visibility and validation begin to eclipse structural transformation. In such a configuration, experience becomes not just data but currency, and the ability to narrate oneself in the correct idiom becomes a form of symbolic capital in the Bourdieusian sense. The result is a field saturated with claims that feel compelling but remain analytically thin: singular experiences inflated into general truths, narratives insulated from falsification, and a proliferation of micro-theories that cannot speak to one another because each is grounded in an authority that cannot be interrogated without moral risk. Sociology, which once insisted on mediation—on the difficult work of moving between the particular and the general—finds itself hollowed out, its language circulating without its discipline.

What emerges, then, is not an excess of sociology but its evacuation. The form remains—terms like structure, power, marginality—but the substance has shifted from explanation to expression. Phenomenology, stripped of its rigor, becomes a license for assertion; positionality, stripped of reflexivity, becomes a badge of authority. And in this flattened landscape, the distinction between knowledge and narration begins to dissolve. Everyone can now produce what looks like theory, because theory itself has been reduced to the ability to convincingly narrate one’s experience in a morally legible way. The tragedy is not that experience has entered sociology—it always belonged there—but that it now threatens to replace the very processes that once made it intelligible.

From Care to Control: How Liberal Mental Health Discourse Converts Dissent into Diagnosis

There is a subtle but powerful transformation underway in contemporary liberal culture: the language of care has begun to function as a language of control. Nowhere is this more visible than in the casual yet telling phrase—“who hurt you?”—often deployed in moments of disagreement. What appears at first glance as concern is, in fact, a highly condensed cultural gesture: it shifts the terrain of conflict from ideas to emotions, from structures to psyches, from politics to pathology. Scholars like Eva Illouz and Nikolas Rose have long argued that modern societies increasingly “psychologize” social life, translating political antagonisms into therapeutic narratives. Within this framework, disagreement is no longer engaged as a product of material conditions or ideological difference; it is instead reinterpreted as a symptom of emotional injury. The question is no longer what is being said, but what must have happened to the person saying it. In this move, argument is quietly displaced by diagnosis.

From the perspective of Michel Foucault, such a shift is not accidental but deeply political. Modern forms of power, he suggests, operate less through overt repression and more through subtle regimes of classification and normalization. To frame dissent as the product of being “hurt” is to pathologize it—to transform a political stance into a psychological condition. This is a particularly effective form of soft power because it avoids direct confrontation while simultaneously disqualifying the speaker. One does not need to refute the argument if one can instead recast it as an expression of damage. In this sense, “who hurt you?” is not merely dismissive; it is disciplinary. It marks the boundaries of acceptable discourse by implying that certain tones, affects, or intensities of critique are illegitimate because they signal emotional dysfunction.

This dynamic is further illuminated by Lauren Berlant’s analysis of affective norms within liberal societies. Liberalism does not merely prescribe political values; it also produces an emotional ideal—the calm, self-aware, non-confrontational subject who engages in measured, “healthy” discourse. Within this moral economy, anger becomes suspect, intensity becomes excess, and sharp critique becomes evidence of instability. The figure of the “well-adjusted” individual emerges as both a psychological and moral benchmark. Against this backdrop, the phrase “who hurt you?” functions as a mechanism of emotional policing: it enforces the expectation that legitimate speech must be affectively regulated. To fail in this regard is to risk being recoded not as wrong, but as unwell.

Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, we can see how this operates as a form of symbolic boundary-making. Liberal spaces often define themselves through the performance of civility, empathy, and emotional intelligence. These are not merely virtues but markers of belonging. When someone violates these norms—through anger, sarcasm, or uncompromising critique—they are subtly expelled from the moral community. The invocation of psychological damage becomes a way of maintaining distinction: it separates the “evolved” from the “regressive,” the composed from the excessive. In this way, the language of mental health becomes intertwined with the production of hierarchy. It is less about understanding the other than about positioning oneself above them.

What emerges, then, is not simply hypocrisy but a structural contradiction. Liberalism, especially in its contemporary form, elevates mental health as a central ethical concern. It speaks of trauma, care, and well-being with increasing sophistication. Yet this discourse often remains abstract—most comfortable when detached from actual conflict. In moments where disagreement is sharp, where critique challenges comfort or exposes structural inequities, the language of care is abruptly repurposed. Empathy gives way to dismissal, and concern becomes a rhetorical strategy. This is what some critics describe as “managed” or “performative” empathy: a form of care that is expansive in principle but selective in practice.

This contradiction becomes particularly stark in contexts marked by deep structural inequalities, such as caste. Expressions of anger from marginalized communities are frequently rooted in historical and material realities—experiences of exclusion, humiliation, and dispossession. Yet these expressions are often reframed within liberal discourse as signs of personal resentment or emotional excess. The political is translated into the psychological, and structural critique is reduced to individual grievance. In this process, history itself is depoliticized. The question is no longer about injustice, but about the emotional state of those who speak of it. “Who hurt you?” thus performs a quiet erasure: it displaces systemic violence onto individual feeling, rendering the former invisible.

What we are witnessing, ultimately, is a shift in the function of care itself. Care is no longer simply an ethical relation; it becomes a technique of governance. By setting norms for what counts as “healthy” expression, liberal discourse regulates not just what can be said, but how it can be said—and by whom. Those who conform to these norms are recognized as legitimate participants; those who do not are subtly pathologized and excluded. In this way, the language of mental health operates as a soft disciplinary regime, one that governs through affect rather than force, through suggestion rather than prohibition.

The phrase “who hurt you?” may seem trivial, even banal, but it encapsulates this entire apparatus. It is the everyday vocabulary of a culture in which disagreement is increasingly intolerable unless it is emotionally sanitized, in which critique must be tempered by composure to be heard, and in which the boundary between care and control has become difficult to discern. What is lost in this transformation is the possibility of taking dissent seriously—not as a symptom to be interpreted, but as a position to be engaged. And perhaps that is the most unsettling implication of all: that in a culture saturated with the language of empathy, genuine engagement becomes harder, not easier.

One of the less examined tensions within contemporary anti-caste politics is the question of risk—not as an individual trait, but as a political orientation. Over the past decades, significant gains have been made through constitutional provisions, reservations, legal safeguards, and increased access to education and employment. These gains matter. They have altered lives, created openings, and enabled forms of mobility that were previously denied. But precisely because of their importance, they have also produced a new condition: a politics increasingly oriented toward securing what has been achieved, rather than risking what has not yet been imagined.

This is not a failure of courage. It is a consequence of history.

When access to resources, dignity, and institutional presence has been so hard-won, the instinct to protect these gains becomes powerful. Security is not trivial—it is survival. The fear of losing even a small foothold in hostile structures is real. Jobs, degrees, representation—these are not abstract achievements; they are fragile positions within systems that remain deeply unequal.

Yet this orientation toward security can, over time, begin to shape the horizon of politics itself.

When the primary goal becomes the preservation of gains, politics risks narrowing into management—of quotas, of representation, of institutional access. The focus shifts from transformation to maintenance, from rupture to negotiation. What was once a radical demand—the annihilation of caste, articulated by B. R. Ambedkar—is gradually translated into a series of incremental adjustments within the existing order.

This is where the question of risk becomes unavoidable.

Because transformation, by definition, involves uncertainty. It requires stepping beyond what is already secured, beyond what is already recognized. It demands forms of action that cannot be fully predicted or guaranteed. Without this dimension, politics can become contained within the very structures it seeks to challenge.

The tension, then, is not between risk and safety in the abstract, but between different temporalities of politics.

A short-term temporality focused on protection and consolidation A long-term temporality oriented toward structural transformation

Both are necessary. But when the former dominates entirely, the latter begins to recede.

This dynamic can also be seen in how institutions are approached. Entry into universities, bureaucracies, and professional spaces has been a crucial site of struggle. Yet once inside, there is often pressure—both internal and external—to conform, to stabilize, to avoid actions that might jeopardize one’s position. Risk becomes costly, not only individually but collectively.

As a result, dissent can become carefully calibrated—expressed, but within limits.

This is not unique to anti-caste politics; it is a broader feature of movements that enter institutional spaces. But in the context of caste, where access itself is contested, the stakes are particularly high.

The danger is not that people seek stability. The danger is that stability begins to define the limits of imagination.

When the horizon of politics is shaped by what is already achievable within existing structures, the possibility of more radical transformation can appear distant, impractical, or even undesirable. The system is critiqued, but also navigated, adapted to, and in some ways stabilized through participation.

This is the paradox: entry can both enable and constrain.

To raise the question of risk, then, is not to dismiss the importance of gains, but to ask what lies beyond them. What forms of politics become possible when the goal is not only inclusion, but reconfiguration? What kinds of actions, alliances, and imaginaries are required to move beyond incremental change?

This does not mean abandoning institutions or rejecting existing protections. It means recognizing that they are means, not ends.

A politics that only secures gains risks becoming defensive, always reacting, always protecting, always negotiating. A politics that includes risk retains the possibility of offense—of setting terms, of redefining structures, of imagining futures that are not limited by present arrangements.

The challenge, then, is not to choose between security and risk, but to hold them in tension—to protect what has been achieved while refusing to let it become the boundary of what can be imagined.

Without this tension, politics risks settling into a form of managed inclusion—where presence is secured, but transformation remains deferred.

And in that deferral, the deeper structure of caste continues, not unchanged, but sufficiently intact.

Status Hunger and the Dalit Condition: Desire, Recognition, and the Trap of Prestige

There is a discomfort that anti-caste discourse rarely confronts directly: the intensity with which status circulates within it—not as a superficial trait, but as a structuring force shaping aspiration, language, self-presentation, and even political imagination. In a caste society where dignity has been systematically denied, the desire for status does not arise out of vanity but out of historical deprivation; yet precisely because of this, it becomes more charged, more urgent, and more dangerous. Status here is not merely about success—it is about becoming visible in a system designed to render one invisible. This is why the pursuit of elite education, institutional affiliation, global recognition, and symbolic legitimacy takes on such force: these markers do not simply signal achievement, they function as proof—proof that one has escaped the position assigned by caste. But this proof is unstable, because the very structures that grant status are also those that reproduce exclusion. They do not dissolve caste; they reorganize it, allowing entry while preserving the terms of hierarchy.

This produces a persistent paradox that anti-caste politics cannot easily resolve. On one hand, there is a clear and repeated critique: merit is a myth, prestige is inherited, institutions are exclusionary. On the other, there remains an undeniable pull toward these very markers, a pull that does not disappear even under critique. Over time, this coexistence produces a sharper condition: a politics that critiques prestige while being structured by its absence. It is here that status ceases to be a strategy and becomes a trap. Once status becomes the horizon, the terms of struggle shift—from dismantling hierarchy to navigating it more successfully, from collective transformation to individual mobility, from structural critique to symbolic inclusion. Recognition becomes the goal, validation the endpoint, and in that shift, the system quietly reasserts its dominance.

The deeper danger lies in the internalization of hierarchy itself. When success is measured through proximity to elite institutions, fluency in dominant language, and alignment with upper-caste norms of respectability, upward movement begins to reproduce the very structure it seeks to escape. Hierarchies do not disappear; they reorganize within. Some lives become more “successful,” some voices more “legitimate,” some expressions more “acceptable.” Power does not simply resist critique—it survives by embedding itself within aspiration. At its most intense, status is no longer just a tool but a form of desire: not only to enter institutions, but to be recognized by them, validated by them, seen through their gaze. In this moment, the gaze that once excluded becomes the gaze that confirms existence, and the Dalit subject is no longer only resisting the system but also seeking itself through its recognition.

Even the figure of B. R. Ambedkar is not untouched by this logic. His radical critique of caste is frequently accompanied by an emphasis on his foreign education—as if his authority must be certified through global prestige. This repetition reveals how deeply the language of status has penetrated even anti-caste imagination: annihilation becomes more legible when backed by credentials, critique more acceptable when already validated. What appears as reverence begins to resemble dependence on institutional aura.

When status becomes central, politics itself is quietly reshaped. The focus shifts from dismantling structures to achieving recognition within them, from transforming the system to succeeding in it. What emerges is a politics that may sound radical but remains contained in practice, because it does not break the system—it learns how to move within it. The problem, then, is not aspiration itself but the capture of aspiration by the logic of prestige. A different orientation would require using institutions without reverence, gaining credentials without internalizing them, refusing to measure worth through elite validation, and building spaces where recognition is not externally granted. Ultimately, the challenge is to refuse to let status define the horizon of liberation, because a politics that ends in recognition has already accepted the structure that distributes recognition. The Dalit condition, in this sense, is not only about exclusion but about the compulsion to seek recognition from what excludes; status becomes proof, then desire, then trap—and the real break lies not in acquiring it, but in refusing to let it determine what it means to exist.

Anti-Caste as Situated Conformism: The Paradox of Resistance Within Structure

Anti-caste politics is often imagined as the most radical critique of Indian society—a project aimed at dismantling hierarchy, exposing injustice, and transforming the social order. It draws its intellectual force from figures like B. R. Ambedkar, whose call for the annihilation of caste remains one of the most uncompromising political visions of modern India. Yet, when anti-caste thought moves from radical imagination into everyday practice—especially within institutions, academia, and liberal discourse—it often undergoes a subtle but significant transformation. It becomes what might be called situated conformism: a mode of resistance that operates within structures, critiques them, but simultaneously adapts to their limits.

This is not a failure of intent. It is a condition of location.

To exist within institutions—universities, NGOs, media, legal frameworks—is to engage with systems that are already structured by hierarchy. Anti-caste politics, when practiced within these spaces, must translate itself into forms that are legible to them. It becomes discourse, policy, curriculum, representation. It is articulated in the language of rights, equality, and reform. These are necessary moves—they allow for visibility, recognition, and incremental change. But they also introduce a constraint: resistance must become acceptable to the very structures it seeks to challenge.

This is where conformism enters—not as surrender, but as adaptation.

Anti-caste discourse in institutional spaces often takes on a particular tone. It is careful, reasoned, and theoretically grounded. It critiques caste, but in ways that can be discussed, cited, and circulated. It exposes injustice, but often within frameworks that do not fundamentally destabilize the system. The radical edge of annihilation is softened into the language of inclusion, diversity, and representation.

This shift is not accidental. It reflects the conditions under which anti-caste politics is allowed to operate.

Within liberal frameworks, critique is welcomed—up to a point. It can question, analyze, and even condemn. But it must remain within the bounds of civility, legality, and institutional coherence. Anything that exceeds these bounds risks being dismissed as excessive, irrational, or illegitimate. As a result, anti-caste politics often becomes self-regulating, shaping its expression to fit the expectations of the space it inhabits.

This produces a paradox.

On the one hand, anti-caste politics gains visibility and influence. It enters classrooms, policy discussions, public debates. It shapes discourse and brings attention to issues that were previously ignored. On the other hand, its transformative potential is constrained. It becomes part of the system it critiques, contributing to its reform rather than its rupture.

The figure of B. R. Ambedkar is instructive here. Ambedkar operated within institutions—law, politics, education—but his project was not confined to them. His call for annihilation was not merely a policy proposal; it was a demand for a fundamental reorganization of society. Yet, in contemporary contexts, Ambedkar is often invoked in ways that align with institutional frameworks—his radicalism translated into constitutionalism, his critique into governance.

This translation is both enabling and limiting.

It allows anti-caste thought to circulate widely, but it also risks reducing it to a set of principles that can be accommodated without significant disruption. The system adapts, incorporates critique, and continues.

This is the essence of situated conformism: resistance that is shaped by the very conditions it opposes.

It is important to note that this does not render anti-caste politics ineffective. On the contrary, many gains—legal protections, increased representation, shifts in discourse—have been achieved through such engagement. But it does raise questions about the limits of this approach.

What happens when critique becomes part of the system’s functioning?

What happens when resistance is anticipated, managed, and absorbed?

These questions point to the need for a different kind of engagement—one that does not abandon institutional spaces, but also does not rely on them entirely. A politics that can operate both within and beyond structure, that can use the language of rights while also challenging its limits.

This is where the idea of excess becomes relevant. Excess refers to forms of expression and action that cannot be fully contained within existing frameworks. It includes anger that is not easily translated into policy, practices that do not fit institutional norms, and forms of community that exist outside formal recognition.

Such excess is often viewed with suspicion, precisely because it resists incorporation. But it may also be necessary for keeping the radical potential of anti-caste politics alive.

Ultimately, the concept of anti-caste as situated conformism is not a dismissal, but a diagnosis. It recognizes the complexity of practicing resistance within structured environments. It acknowledges both the possibilities and the limits of such practice.

The challenge, then, is not to escape this condition entirely—an impossible task—but to remain aware of it. To recognize when critique is being absorbed, when language is being softened, when radical demands are being translated into manageable forms.

In that awareness lies the possibility of pushing beyond conformity—not by abandoning structure, but by refusing to let it define the horizon of what is possible.