By Daniel Schnake Venegas
Ghulam Hussain’s Architecture of Caste in Pakistan: Dalit Assertions in a Culture of Denial (Routledge, 2026, pp. 322) offers a groundbreaking analysis of the intersectional structures of caste, class, gender and religion sustaining an architecture of inequality that is officially and publicly denied. Through what he coins as “engaged anthropology,” he elevates subaltern voices and ontologies as central to the analysis of casteist society.
The struggle for caste justice is, at its core, a struggle for the very substance of democracy in Pakistan.
Ghulam Hussain’s recent work, Architecture of Caste in Pakistan exposes how the fundamental principle behind the formation of Pakistan, the two-nation theory and the religious binary it is premised on, have functioned to obscure caste hierarchies.
It demonstrates that democratization in Pakistan requires confronting this foundational erasure. Caste has often been conceived as distinctive to colonial and post-colonial India, and often presented as a challenge for Hindu endemic order. Hussain challenges this, revealing caste as a trans-religious entrenched living structure of inequality that encompasses Pakistan’s Muslim majority as well. According to him, caste in Pakistan is shaped and sustained by three identifiable and simultaneous discourses: liberal-secular social discourse, the discourse of Islamic normativity, and nationalist historiographical political discourse. He identifies patterns and systems of caste in Pakistan through the lenses of the Dalit Sujaag Tehreek (Dalit Awakening Movement; DST) that he co-founded.
For this purpose, Hussain centers his research on Sindh, his native region, which is home to the largest populations of both the Scheduled Castes—the colonial denomination for Avarna communities—and of Savarna Hindus, i.e., the dominant religious minority in Pakistan. The province also has the world’s highest concentration of Sayeds, who constitute the hereditary spiritual elite of the Ashraf Muslim privileged caste. Hussain documents what B. R. Ambedkar called a ‘system of graded inequality’ in Sindh and suggests that Scheduled Castes are a double minority: at once a minority within Hinduism as well as the broader Pakistani state founded on Islamic principles that naturalizes the religious binary between Islam and Hinduism.
Hussain draws from Ambedkar’s analysis of caste’s religio-ideological foundations, treating caste as a category to dismantle. He criticizes the confinement of the idea of caste within the Hindu religious framework. Instead, he proposes caste as a trans-religious category that is reproduced both discursively and materially. In doing so, he rejects essentializations of Pakistan as egalitarian and of casteism as merely ‘Hindu.’
He also shows how the idea of Pakistan, based on the principles of Islamic equality in 1947, remains contested and questionable in the face of everyday experience of discrimination lower-caste Pakistani Hindus and Muslims encounter.
Caste is a trans-religious construct, spanning Ashraf-Savarna elites and Pasmanda–Dalit subalterns. The two-nation theory that birthed Pakistan, though, cements religious majoritarianism fails to recognize the independent, multireligious nature of lower caste communities in Pakistan and instead labels them solely as ‘Non-Muslims’ or ‘Hindus.’
Pakistan’s classificatory regimes actively reinforce the image of a casteless society, especially among Muslims, where claims of Islamic egalitarianism are used to hide the structural inequality among Muslims and its equivalences and its translatability to the ‘Hindu’ caste system.
As shown in the chapters Politics of Naming and Belonging (132-150), this happens simultaneously as Scheduled Castes are officially defined as a minority irrespective of its status as a “majority within the officially defined ‘non-Muslim minority,’” as an activists put it (25-26). Ashraf-Savarna hierarchies thus remain unquestioned, and the caste reality is ignored by official naming practices. Presenting caste as an exclusively Hindu issue and framing Dalits as Hindu minority of Sindh renders the struggles of Sindh Dalits as ‘minority struggles’ and allows the Pakistani state to ignore the trans-religious nature of caste. As Hussain puts it, “[w]hile DST [Dalit Awakening Movement] sought to bridge Dalit and Pasmanda concerns, such convergences were often co-opted, silenced, or undermined by dominant identity-based logics,” (2026:39) such as the caste-blind liberal-secular, progressive, Islamic, nationalist and Hindu minority focused narratives he identifies.
Caste-identity is thus a deeply political phenomenon. Hussain argues that Dalits’ internalized negation of their own realities complicates anti-caste engagement. This is the argument of the Dalit Sujaag Tehreek (DST), the Dalit Awakening Movement co-founded by Hussain. Parallel organizations in Sindh, like the caste-specific Bheel Intellectual Forum, Kolhi Sujaag Tehreek and Mutahida Meghwar Forum, served as places from which Hussain participated in “engaged anthropology.” This “engaged anthropology” bridges research and social action, analyzing movements from within as agents of change. It facilitates an honest recognition of the impossibility of neutral research, exemplified by Hussain’s acknowledgement of his own Pasmanda position and his symbolic adoption of the Dalit name Baghri during fieldwork. This approach fosters a deeper understanding of people’s struggles, an insider view that uncommitted scholarship would not be able to access.
Self-stigmatization leads some to pursue ‘Ashrafization-Savarnization’—the unreciprocated process by which Pasmandas and Dalits respectively seek upward mobility by adopting upper-caste names or customs—and reject the ‘Dalit’ label, but they do not escape caste frontiers. Similarly, conversion to Islam or Christianity, often sought to escape humiliation, fails to erase the stigma; converts are simply re-categorized as ‘New Muslim’ or ‘Christian Dalits.’ Hussain’s framing of caste as trans-religious explains this, showing how converts remain trapped by a system not limited to Hinduism. Conversion is often problematized and perceived by upper-caste Hindu minorities as a question of ‘jihad,’ ignoring the structural motives pushing Dalits out from identification with upper-caste Hinduism, as is shown in the book’s section Beyond Forced Conversion Narrative (117-121).
It is the rigidness of caste boundaries and the permutability of caste stigma that prompts some Dalits and—to a lesser degree—Pasmanda activists to seek annihilation of caste (Ambedkar, [1936] 1979) through acknowledging their caste classification and reframing their histories and self-worth from within, instead of seeking intermittent superficial elite recognition.
These movements’ revolutionary potential is both great and fragile. Challenges include the stigma of Dalitness, state pressure, co-optation by mainstream political parties, and entanglements with international NGOs. Frameworks focusing on the ‘Hindu minority’ limit caste visibility and empower upper-caste alliances, while caste among Dalits and Pasmanda Muslims is largely ignored. Meanwhile, caste intersects with gender, racial, and class inequalities that remain marginally integrated into anti-caste struggle, as the book’s account of these organizations’ instability and dissolution shows in its chapter Symbolic Empowerment and the Limits of Recognition (200-266). Nevertheless, organizing against caste continues in new organizations with the still diverging and competing lessons learned from these contestations.
Despite theoretical strength and its pioneering “engaged methodology,” the book’s broad ambition occasionally works against it. Some formulations reappear frequently, slowing the book’s momentum. More significantly, this repetition hints at a deeper tension: the book’s powerful analytical framework sometimes moves too quickly past the rich ethnographic material it so carefully gathers. The reader is left wanting the book to offer an even wider and deeper analysis of how gender and class intersect with caste in daily life, and to further explore the complex dynamics of self-perception and internalized stigma among Dalit communities.
This is less a failing than a call to action.
Ghulam Hussain has opened a vital field of inquiry that scholars, activists, and students alike will find indispensable. The next task for scholars working in this tradition will be to take his foundational insights and push them further, particularly in these underexplored areas.
What the book sometimes compresses, future research must expand.
Architecture of Caste in Pakistan is inspiring for its research principle and theoretical strength and may set a standard for subaltern anthropology in Pakistan and beyond. In my view the term ‘architecture’ in the title of the book refers to caste not as a static structure, some unchanging fact or some immutable principle. The term, by itself, brings forth the idea of an openly constructed, and thus contested, space. That is how Ghulam Hussain’s framework manages to retain revolutionary optimism for caste abolition in Pakistan. The constant reframing and reorganization of collectives for caste annihilation serve as a clear example for the author’s claim that, “[i]f the future of caste justice in Pakistan remains uncertain, it is also alive with possibility, animated by those who refuse to be invisibilized” (449-50).
Anthropology of injustice and inequality becomes anthropology against injustice and against inequality. Ethnography as description becomes ethnography of action.
Architecture of Caste in Pakistan becomes as such an ethnography on success and failure in political mobilization, on identity politics and on class politics and the challenges posed in the search of emancipatory and deeply democratizing struggles for liberation in Pakistan. Engaged anthropology renders anthropology a force for revolutionary, bottom-up democratization to name, challenge, and remodel political architectures beyond the binaries of religious and national divides.
Daniel Schnake Venegas is a Chilean social and cultural anthropology Bachelor student and Research Assistant at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich.
