1. I am writing to you from Bangalore. Where are you writing to us from?
 

I’m writing to you from Norman, Oklahoma, USA.
 

2. As an anthropologist, why was it important for you to engage with fiction? 
 

What ties anthropology and fiction together, for me, quite organically, is storytelling. To tell a story is never simply to report happenstance. It is an offering, a mode of imagining, an act suffused with intention; sometimes an incitement to give an account of/for oneself, sometimes a summoning of subjectivities that do not yet have a settled social form. Stories are among the most elemental ways we come to know what it means to be human, but also what exceeds the terms through which “the human” has been historically organized. I don’t think one can be a very good anthropologist without taking stories seriously—not as mere illustrations of ‘theory’, but as sites where quotidian theorization already abounds.

What fascinates me about storytelling as an everyday practice is precisely this capacity to rehearse and recalibrate social worlds before they become fully livable as shared realities. Stories can hold speculative yearnings for which the present has not yet made adequate room. That is part of what makes them so important to me as both anti-caste and queer forms: they allow people to inhabit relations, desires, solidarities, and modes of personhood that exceed inherited scripts, even if only provisionally. Yet, they can map the possible before it has acquired the normative security of a social world.

That is what drew me so powerfully to these Dalit-feminist love stories. Individually and collectively, they unspool the machinations of caste in ways that are not reducible to injury or pain alone. They choose instead to dwell with the risks of relationality; they politicize the political through passion; they make love, intimacy, desire, fantasy, and refusal into forms of anti-caste knowledge. In doing so, they quietly explore and explode Brahmanical notions of living, loving, and liberating human life from inherited hierarchies and dogmas. They also open up the everyday world of Dalit metaphysics and aesthetics plurally—linking love to humanistic consciousness, liberation, and social accountability. And, for me, that is where fiction becomes indispensable to anthropology: it can begin to furnish the frequencies of another social world.
 

3. In the introduction to Love in the Time of Caste you say that you were searching for “stories which contended that love was not only a way of exposing the caste blindness of metropolitan sociality and affect…but also equally pointing to a praxis of being human in anti-caste ways.” In a lot of the stories in this collection, we see that subversion and creativity are fundamental to Dalit feminism and its intersection with class, caste, gender. Could you please expand on how love then contributes/functions within this anti-caste way of being?
 

Love, like many emotions, is a way of marking and making our attachments to the world. What makes it distinctive is its capacity to incite relations, intensify connections, attune us to bodies, let us feel with and through the flesh, and create new potentials for being human together. In a caste society, however, those vectors of relation are always tinged by inherited prejudice, segregationist fantasies, prohibitions, and, at their most violent, death. We are speaking, after all, of deeply anti-human codes that come to reside not only in institutions or ideology, but at the level of instinct, sensation, habit, and the psyche. As a sensory anthropologist, I have long been interested in how emotions sediment into infrastructures of relation and everyday world-making: how what we feel orients us toward—or away from—other people, and toward the institutions and arrangements through which collective life becomes possible.

So when I describe love as a praxis of being human in anti-caste ways, I am interested in its almost pedagogical—but also insurgent—potential. Love can teach the body otherwise. It can reinvigorate embodied consciousness, rearrange the sociality and potentiality of affect, retool political consciousness, and refuse the anxieties and prescriptive moralities through which Brahmanism seeks to regulate intimacy and affiliation. This is part of what these stories know/feel so well: that love does not become politically consequential only when it announces itself as resistance. Sometimes its radicalism lies in the quieter work of reorienting a life—of making another body desirable, another relation imaginable, another future inhabitable. Love becomes a practice through which the terms of relation themselves can be tested and remade.

I insist on thinking about love in this way partly because of my own location as a queer person. As a gay man, I have often understood love as a mode of affiliation that can be wayward, seditious, and oriented toward the abundant excess of the normative. I think here of bell hooks, who said, “The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression.” Queerness has taught me that imagining, desiring, or fantasizing against the grain is never frivolous: it can be the first rehearsal for another kind of sociality. Before an infrastructure can be remade in the world, it often has to become thinkable—and sometimes feelable—in the body.
 

4. Some of these stories move between urban, semi urban, or rural spaces. The location changes, but the caste location of the characters remains attached. There is a certain haze that confuses or suffocates the person experiencing this duality. For example, Ambar in Shaili Kiran’s story Ambar, or Shaili in Anjali Kajal’s Haze. What does this tell us about caste, gender, and upward social mobility in contemporary India?
 

What strikes me in these stories is that mobility does not necessarily produce escape. A person can move from village to town, from town to metropolis, into education, salaried work, or even the middle class, and yet caste travels with them—sometimes less as an explicit prohibition than as an atmosphere. Perhaps that is what the “haze” in these stories registers: not confusion, exactly, but the disorientation of inhabiting a life in which one has moved and yet has not been allowed fully to arrive. Caste becomes ambient, intimate, even anticipatory; one learns to feel it before it is necessarily spoken.

For me, this is also why these stories proclaim the emergence of a distinctly contemporary Dalit-feminist subjectivity—and, in places, give us glimmers of a new middle-class Dalit subjectivity whose relationships to gender, class, ideology, and power demand new modes of reckoning and representation. These women are not simply figures of oppression, nor are they uncomplicated symbols of upward mobility. They inhabit education, work, urbanity, sexuality, aspiration, romance—spaces that supposedly signify modern freedom—but they enter them with extraordinarily sharp knowledge of the hierarchies that structure those freedoms. Gender intensifies that contradiction: mobility often expands the field of desire at precisely the moment that caste and patriarchy become anxious about who may desire whom, marry whom, touch whom, or imagine a future with whom. The anthology is deeply interested in that friction, in the unstable space between structural inheritance and individual refusal.

And I find that instability exciting rather than tragic. The more normative (even Brahmanically tinged) sociology of caste so often asks whether caste is disappearing or persisting, weakening or enduring. It sets up a futile binary. These stories ask a more experimental question: what new forms of personhood become possible while caste is itself mutating? The characters are simulating new arrangements of pleasure, gender, love, class, and selfhood without any guarantees that those arrangements will hold. That is where I think the radicalism of these stories lies—not in offering emancipation as a completed destination, but in showing people improvising lives inside structures they are already beginning, however partially, to exceed.
 

5. Do you have any favourite characters from these stories, anyone who might have inspired, or perhaps, surprised you?
 

I think I should be honest in saying that the characters in these stories called out to me for very different reasons. They are moved by desire, injury, ecstasy, exhaustion, humiliation, and, at times, by a profound disavowal of the Brahmanical codes that structure caste logic. What interests me is that these codes do not only shape the terms through which ‘Dalitness’ is named and affirmed; they can also shape our expectations of what resistance to caste ought to look like. The characters, however, rarely submit to such neatness or moral reductionism. They inhabit uneasy, unruly positions, and through gestures both minor and consequential, unsettle the essentialist taxonomies of caste while also resisting the demand that rebellion announce itself in a singular or recognizable form.

There is Ambar, the young Dalit corporate executive who is as disenchanted by her mother’s “orderly” village existence as she is by her own amorous experiences in the big city. There is Shaili, the ambitious Dalit journalist who refuses the Brahmanism of her profession and its purveyors, while remaining equally alert to the misogyny of her Dalit-Bahujan male partners. And then there are quieter characters like Anu, a Dalit professor who does not allow the apparent clarity of ideology to resolve the difficulty of her own desire for an upper-caste man. She allows that contradiction to remain alive within her, rather than forcing it into coherence. Equally moving to me are Pragya and Samar, a Dalit couple slowly reckoning with the end of a relationship whose dissolution feels especially charged because the relationship itself was forged through the intimacies of anti-caste activism.

What I find remarkable is that many of these rebellions take place in ways that do not immediately announce themselves as political resistance. They unfold in the intimate, the contradictory, the ambiguous, the exhausted, and sometimes even the irresolute. That, perhaps, is what caught my attention most: the extent to which the struggle against caste can be lived through refusal, through the unfinished textures of ordinary life, and through staying with the trouble and tenderness that love and desire bring in their wake.
 

6. How/when did the Dalit Lekhakh Sangh come into the picture? For our readers, could you please share more about this writer’s group and their work?
 

As part of my doctoral fieldwork, I worked and apprenticed (as an archivist and translator) with the Dalit Lekhak Sangh, or Dalit Writers Association, in Delhi for over a year. At first, I knew relatively little about them, partly because they did not have a single point of contact, a fixed membership, or even a website — in fact, I don’t think they still do. Over time, I began to understand that this diffuse mode of being, this refusal to be fully institutionalized, was itself a kind of radical invitation. The DLS was, and remains, an expanding collective of anti-caste writers, thinkers and creatives committed to breaking the caste system through literature, aesthetics, and acts of the artistic imagination.

When I was planning this anthology, I came to know that 2022 would mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Dalit Lekhak Sangh. Anita Bharti was then its president, and she became—and remains—an important mentor to me. I met several writers after that. The DLS has a long history of writing, documenting, and archiving Dalit struggles in Hindi literature. The collective I worked with was primarily composed of Hindi writers, but its political and intellectual world has never been confined to Hindi alone. Its members maintain rich connections with Dalit literary movements in other Indian languages, and are very much part of a broader, multilingual history of anti-caste thought and cultural production.

What continues to fascinate me, as I remain in conversation with this world, is the emergence of these intergenerational textures within the Dalit literary sphere: older and younger writers, critics, poets, activists, and artists speaking across different aesthetic and political inheritances. To me, this vitality is one of the clearest signs of the continuing effervescence of Dalit politics in India, particularly in the realms of art, literature, and culture.
 

7. Which Hindi magazines, or other resources, did you engage with in your search for these stories? 
 

The search for these stories was deeply ethnographic: meandering, fortuitous, and often surprising. I combed through established Hindi magazines and journals such as Hans, Kathadesh, Samakaleen Bharatiya Sahitya, Yudhrat Aam Aadmi, and Haashiye ki Awaz, as well as smaller publications like Kadam, which I often encountered through word of mouth and writerly referrals.

Along the way, Dalit writers and activists also opened their personal archives to me—sometimes quite literally handing me pen drives containing unpublished stories, drafts, and other electronic records. And those writerly networks extended into social media as well: one writer would put me in touch with another, sometimes through Facebook or other online platforms, so that the search gradually moved across magazines, private archives, and digital circuits. Part of my work as an anthropologist, interlocutor, and eventually as a translator, involved sitting with writers and sorting through these materials together. I feel very grateful to have become, in some small sense, a co-custodian of this remarkable and still-unfolding archive. Some of the work that began in those encounters is still emerging for me.
 

8. At the Bangalore launch of the anthology, you brought up the idea of ‘translation as hospitality’ with regard to finding the right words to translate desire, a sex scene, or even a certain sensibility of one language to another. Can you tell us more about this idea of translation as hospitality?
 

I have always been a little suspicious—perhaps even bored—by the pedantic language of accuracy and fidelity that so often surrounds translation. There is a strange normativity tucked into those terms: the fantasy that there is one proper relation between an original and its translation, one correct way for a sentence to belong elsewhere. What disappears in that formulation is play, mischief, drift—the possibility that language might become more alive precisely by refusing perfect obedience.

So when I speak of translation as hospitality, I think of something closer to a queer, transient domesticity: a form of making room that is tender precisely because it does not pretend to permanence. Translation, for me, is not about domesticating a word until it becomes perfectly at ease in another language. It is about letting it stay slightly strange, letting it alter the room, letting desire arrive with its accent, shame, humour, caste, gender, memory, and heat still clinging to it.

Perhaps that is what feels queer to me about translating: a home that does not require assimilation, an intimacy without ownership, a domestication that remains partial. Tender in its transience, yes, but also alert to the small insurrections that always lurk beneath the idea of home.
 

9. You are both the editor and translator of these stories. Before this book, your translations had already received international acclaim and interest. How/when did you become a translator? Also were you always a reader, when did your literary journey begin?
 

I think I came to translation first through a fascination with languages themselves—not only as mediums of expression, but also of evasion, longing, and reaching toward worlds beyond one’s immediate grasp. Some of my earliest experiments in translation go back to my undergraduate years at Delhi University, when I taught myself some Swahili (after failing to find someone to teach me!), and tried translating Swahili poems and prose into English. Later, at Princeton, I had a chance to learn Portuguese for a few years, which opened up another literary, emotional and cultural world for me. I think of those early efforts as experiments in crossing over—tentative, playful, queer, and undoubtedly a little undisciplined.

I came to translation more urgently through anthropology, during my doctoral fieldwork in India. There I encountered the extraordinarily luminous world of Dalit writing in Hindi—not simply as literature sitting quietly on a page, but as something alive in circulation, moving through social worlds and emerging counterpublics: being read, shared, debated, and exchanged among writers, activists, doctors, Dalit-Bahujan readers, and others. I became interested in that circulation itself—in how radical ideas can inhabit the small, intimate, ordinary, and minor textures of life. Translation became a way of attending to the granularity of that life, and forging a radical relation to it. My association with the Dalit Lekhak Sangh sharpened this further, as did my desire, as a queer anthropologist, to resist essentialist accounts and analyses of caste, and to accompany the writers I was working with as they produced aesthetic and political vocabularies that worked against the normative imprimatur of Brahmanism.

And yes, I have always been a reader, and in some sense always a writer too. I have moved between the practice of poetry, ethnography, journalism, criticism, and translation, never feeling that these genres needed to remain entirely separate. So, as a social scientist now, I don’t experience translation as a secondary (or distanced) practice, or even as something adjunct to anthropology. For me, it belongs to the same larger praxis of attunement: listening for how people make and unmake worlds in language, how words acquire lives beyond the intentions placed upon them, and how a sentence can become the afterlife of possibilities—political, aesthetic, intimate—that the ether around it has not yet learned how to accommodate.
 

10. What are you reading currently?
 

I feel like I’m always reading—or rereading—something by Sara Ahmed; that’s the extent to which her ideas continue to speak to me! At the moment, I’m returning to Queer Phenomenology for perhaps the umpteenth time, while also reading Marlon James’ The Disappearers, Gayatri Gopinath’s Unruly Visions, and Claudia Rankine’s Triage. I’m almost always reading across genres. I like having very different texts sitting alongside one another—sometimes they begin conversations that I hadn’t anticipated. Also, there is something quietly queer, perhaps, about allowing such unlikely companions to tarry, and seeing what kinds of affinities emerge!