Abstract

“Caste” is among the most frequently used words in Indian public life, yet it is also among the least stable in meaning. It appears as a social fact, a moral accusation, a statistical variable, an administrative label, and a political identity. This paper does not treat caste as a settled object waiting to be measured; it treats caste as a problem of description. It asks what happens when a society begins to speak about itself through a category that has traveled through colonial ethnography, modern law, democratic policy, and everyday moral talk, acquiring new meanings in each domain. The paper explores caste not by offering yet another theory of its origin or essence, but by examining the different institutional settings in which the word does its work: the census and the survey, the certificate and the list, the court and the commission, the party and the movement, the neighborhood and the household. The central claim is modest: much of India’s conflict over caste is also conflict over what caste is supposed to name. Until this descriptive problem is taken seriously, public debate will continue to alternate between moral outrage and administrative arithmetic, without becoming clearer about the phenomenon it claims to explain.

Keywords

Caste, Public Life, Society, Ethnography, Political

Citation (APA Format)

Das, B., & Gaur, B. S. (2025). Caste as a problem of description: Notes on a category that refuses to stay still. International Journal of Politics, Law and Management, 4(4), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17989791