Architecture of Caste in Pakistan

This book is a groundbreaking and original contribution to understanding the intersectionality of caste, race, and class in South Asia. Grounded in rich ethnographic fieldwork, it situates its analyses in Pakistan to reveal how caste—often denied or obscured by nationalist, religious, and liberal-progressive discourses—continues to shape everyday hierarchies, moral imaginaries, and political structures. It unravels how both privileged and oppressed caste groups invoke the past to construct identities and contest histories in the present, showing how systemic discrimination has pushed Scheduled Castes and Pasmanda communities to the lowest rungs of the social, economic, and political hierarchy. Moving beyond the familiar frames of Indian caste practices, the book demonstrates that caste in Pakistan is not a relic of the past or a “Hindu problem,” but a transreligious and deeply entrenched social structure sustained across Hindu, Muslim, and Christian communities alike. Foregrounding caste as an analytic category and a fundamental marker of identity, the book interrogates the role of hegemonic actors—religious, nationalist, and secular—in strategically denying or reasserting caste to preserve structures of privilege. Combining theoretical sophistication with moral and ethnographic engagement, Architecture of Caste in Pakistan compels a rethinking of caste, religion, and equality in Muslim societies. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of caste and discrimination studies, critical Dalit and Pasmanda studies, sociology, social anthropology, and South Asian studies.