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Below is the edited transcript of a speech delivered online by Professor Anand Teltumbde, on April 17, 2026, at a seminar on Brahmanisation at Jadavpur University.

Long ago, while speaking about the annihilation of caste to an audience like you, I put forth my view in the form of a paradox:

Annihilation of caste is not possible without a revolution. And revolution is not possible without the annihilation of caste.

It may sound like a clever formulation, but it is not. It succinctly captures the reality of what ailed India as a civilisation. It is a living, breathing description of the trap that Indian society finds itself in. It will tell you why every movement for social justice in this country either stalled, got co-opted, or was strangled before it could walk.

I may use this paradox as a framework for today’s discussion too.

So today, I want to do two things. First, I want to make the case for why caste must be annihilated – not reformed, not managed, not accommodated, but annihilated. And second, I want to speak about how – not through the comfortable illusions of reservation politics or constitutional tinkering, but through the far harder, far more demanding work of structural and psychological revolution.

Before we can talk about annihilating caste, we must understand what caste actually is. And I submit to you that most people – even those who oppose it – do not fully understand it. As you all know, I have been writing on these issues for over five decades and have seriously gathered this impression. I published a book recently, The Caste Con Census to explain what caste is.

Caste is typically described as a system of social stratification. A hierarchy. A ladder with Brahmins at the top and Dalits at the bottom, with everyone else arranged in between. Ambedkar analogised it as a multi-storey tower without a staircase connecting the storeys. This metaphorical description is not wrong. But it is radically insufficient.

It depicts caste as a stagnant, fossilised, frigid system without life. This understanding still informs much of anti-caste activism which starts and ends with abusing Brahmins and selectively citing Ambedkar. No, castes have evolved and they are still evolving; castes are not what they were in Buddha’s time. They are not what they became in Mauryan period or Gupta period or in medieval times or in colonial times. Castes are not even what they were spoken or written about or fought against by Ambedkar.

Our contemporary castes have since evolved. They are largely shaped by the constitution and the post-colonial political economy. That is why I called them as “constitutional castes”. You may see it in my book, Republic of Caste. They are the contemporary castes that we are faced with.

A simple way to understand caste is to see it as a structure that is homomorphous with Indian society itself. What does homomorphous mean? It means that caste does not merely exist within Indian society as one institution among many. It means that caste and Indian society share the same form. The same shape. The same skeleton. To say that caste is homomorphous with Indian society is to say that if you were to remove caste from Indian society, you would not have Indian society minus caste. You would have something fundamentally, structurally different. Something that has never yet existed.

Think about what this means. It means caste is not a feature of Indian society. It is the architecture of Indian society. It is not something that sits in Indian society. It is something that Indian society sits in.

Look at the economy. The caste division of labour is not incidental to Indian economic organisation. The hereditary assignment of occupations – the fact that certain communities were confined to sweeping, to tanning leather, to carrying night soil, to washing clothes, to fishing, to farming – this was not a market outcome. This was not voluntary specialisation. This was a forced economic architecture in which your birth determined your labour, your labour determined your income, your income determined your life chances, and your life chances were deliberately kept asymmetric to reproduce the hierarchy across generations.

Look at land. Land ownership in India has always been, and continues to be, substantially a caste phenomenon. The agrarian structure of this country – who owns the land, who tills it, who is landless – still follows caste lines with remarkable consistency. When you see Dalits being denied land rights in villages across UP, Bihar, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu – you are not seeing isolated incidents of prejudice. You are seeing the economic structure of caste reproducing itself.

Look at marriage. Endogamy – marriage within the caste – is the biological mechanism by which caste reproduces itself across generations. This is what Ambedkar identified as the key to caste. Not untouchability. Not pollution. Not even hierarchy. Endogamy. Because as long as people marry within caste, caste reproduces. As long as caste reproduces, everything else that flows from it – the........

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