The Caste Contract explores how dominant-caste supremacy pervades Indian society, protected by contemporary government, education, and culture. In his groundbreaking book The Racial Contract, Charles W. Mills argued that the social contract celebrated by moral philosophers exists at the direct expense and exploitation of non-whites. Here, Da Costa brings Mills’s framework into conversation with Dalit leader Dr. B.R. Ambedkar to examine caste, a 2500-year-old system of dehumanization.
Rather than accidental or exceptional, Da Costa argues that dominant-caste ignorance is purposefully organized to ensure complicity. Seeing caste ignorance as a material structure of the state, Da Costa challenges the caste-neutral ideologies that travel with the diaspora into every corner of the planet, including Canada and the US, where caste is made illegible to mainstream, multicultural society.
With intimate personal narrative and rigorous academic research, Da Costa explains how caste, brahminical supremacy, and willful ignorance continue to shape the world today.