Reproduction of Caste Privilege in Elite Educational Institutions

This article, embedded in empirical work in two colleges of a central university in Delhi, focuses on how caste privilege is legitimized and reproduced within elite higher educational institutions. Unlike non-elite educational institutions, these spaces claim to anchor themselves in notions of social justice and equity. These institutions claim progressive pedagogical processes, meanwhile obscuring upper caste dominance in college as well as in the curriculum. Scholarly insistence on looking at caste only as a form of marginality within the discourse of education also conceals the way in which caste privilege is reproduced through curriculum as well as college culture. The paper also centres absence of caste in curricula and how dominant epistemology sidelines caste-critical knowledge. Taking critical caste theory as a theoretical framework, the study aims to look at caste relationally to explain how students navigate these institutions.