This book is born out of privilege. As a US-born member of the South Asian diaspora, my identity as a Syrian Christian has allowed me to benefit from inherited caste- and class-privilege. Syrian Christians are a “privileged minority” that falls within the roughly 8 percent of the population of India, which the 1980 Mandal Commission report identifies as “‘forward’ non-Hindu castes and communities.” My family origins in Kerala and upbringing in the United States have provided me with innumerable resources and sources of advantage.

In the lengthy period that I have taken to write this book, I have spent considerable time trying to make sense of my observational and interview data. I am indebted to the vast body of scholarship and related activism of towering figures such as Jotirao and Savitribai Phule, Iyothee Thass, and B. R. Ambedkar and continuing in more recent writings of historians, social scientists, and activists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (detailed in my bibliography) that document the nature of caste hierarchy and its durability despite ongoing change and challenge. This scholarship has allowed me to contextualize my findings, despite my many blind spots, and pushed me to ask and answer questions about the institutional structures and ideologies that help to concentrate power and perpetuate gross inequalities and indignities across generations.

I am immensely grateful to the numerous people who shared their time and knowledge with me while I was conducting fieldwork in Bengaluru and other locations throughout India between 2011 and 2016. This project is only possible because of their generosity and patience. I am also extremely beholden to research assistance from Shalini Jamuna Kotresh, Arasi Arivu, and Devanshu Singh, who created a database of newspaper coverage, while Shalini also interviewed enumerated households. I am very appreciative for a research affiliation at the Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC) in Bangalore that provided me with an academic home while conducting fieldwork between 2012 and 2013.