Toward a Transreligious Reckoning

This study has explored the complex terrain of Dalit activism in Sindh, where identity formation, claims of belonging, political assertion, and everyday resistance unfold within deeply entrenched caste structures. What it reveals is that caste in Pakistan is not a vestige of a bygone social order but a living, constitutive structure— an enduring architecture of power , to borrow Talal Asad’s formulation. 1 This architecture is sustained through the interlocking logics of liberal-secular reason, Islamic normativity, and nationalist historiography, which together shape the moral, legal, and epistemic frameworks that define social belonging. Within this architecture, the Hindu–Muslim and religious–secular binaries are not merely religious distinctions but governing logics that displaces the question of caste, rendering its structural violence illegible within dominant narratives of minority rights and secular tolerance.