That Which Casts is Caste: Grammar, Ontology, and the Ethological Foundations of Social Differentiation in India

This paper reinterprets caste not as an essential identity but as a dynamic process of social casting—emerging through learning (karpu), habituation (marapu), and functional differentiation (vakai). Drawing on Tamil and Sanskrit grammatical traditions, Indian linguistic philosophy, and postcolonial critique, it challenges colonial and modern essentializations of caste. By rethinking caste through the ontological layers of speech (vāk), from Parā to Vaikharī, the paper shows how caste is misrecognized at the level of social expression but is absent at the deeper ontological levels of consciousness and relation. Integrating insights from thinkers like Bhartṛhari, Judith Butler, and Ronald Inden, it argues that the “caste system” was historically frozen by colonial epistemology, particularly through census, law, and ethnographic misreadings. The paper concludes by proposing a grammar of liberation—a return to relational emergence and critical ethology—as the ethical foundation for a decastable society. This work invites scholars and practitioners to move beyond identity politics toward a politics of becoming, guided by fairness, mutuality, and shared emergence.