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In this talk Thiranagama will draw from her book The Monster in Your Path: The Private Life of Caste in India on the situated histories of caste and enslavement in the South Indian state of Kerala, most often understood as India's success story. Thiranagama will discuss how new forms of caste disparities, as well as caste formations, have become sedimented not in the “public,” the center of most contemporary work, but rather in the new kinds of private spaces and private lives that arose after Kerala’s land reforms and communist transformation. Thiranagama suggests new ways to think about contemporary inequalities within historical economies of humiliation and subordination, as well discussing the dignity projects embarked upon by Kerala’s Dalit communities.

Sharika Thiranagama is professor of anthropology at Stanford University. Her research explores violence, inequality, and intense political mobilization through a focus on intimacy, gender and generation. She has been the author of multiple works on Sri Lanka including In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Her most recent book The Monster in Your Path (University of California 2026) focuses on Dalit communities in Kerala, South India examining the gendered inheritance and life of enslavement, caste and work.

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