Dr Sambaiah Gundimeda, Associate Professor, Politics, SIAS delivered a talk titled ‘Caste Sovereignty and Constitutional Authority: Intimacy, Honour Violence and Fraternity in Dandora’ at the Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad, on 22 April 2026.
About the Talk:
The talk developed the concept of caste sovereignty to understand caste as a socially organised claim to authority within India’s constitutional democracy. Moving beyond approaches that treat caste solely as hierarchy or identity, it examined caste as a non-state power regulating intimacy, honour, punishment, and belonging through extra-legal mechanisms. Using an interpretive reading of Dandora, it showed how inter-caste love is framed by dominant castes as a violation of endogamous order, often provoking collective violence. The subsequent prosecution under the SC/ST Atrocities Act highlighted the conflict between caste authority and constitutional law. The talk concluded that law alone cannot dismantle caste power, and that fraternity remains a fragile and uneven democratic aspiration.