The Monster in Your Path is an original and provocative look at why the global Left stumbles when dealing with historical structures of subordination like caste or race. Sharika Thiranagama examines rural communities in the South Indian state of Kerala, where decades of Communist Party rule has transformed life through land reform and social reorganisation. Despite Marxist ideals, new forms of caste disparities have moved from “public” space to private spaces and private lives.

Through an exquisitely crafted ethnography that centres Dalit women, the book explains how historical economies of humiliation and subordination continue to influence modern spaces like the private home. From histories of enslavement to an exploration of the houses and neighbourhoods through which Dalit communities build dignity and self-worth, Thiranagama sets a new agenda for caste studies in India and beyond.

SHARIKA THIRANAGAMA is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University and the author of In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka.

“breaks new ground in expanding the study of the private life of caste as it is experienced by Dalit and lower-caste communities . . . [shows] good ethnography and fieldwork as a necessary precondition to raise conceptual questions relating to inequality, gender, and labour” – ramnarayan s. rawat

“an elegant account of caste in twenty-first-century India . . . reveals the aftermath of a revolutionary politics in Kerala that has obfuscated the existence of caste hierarchy while perpetuating everyday caste violence through novel formations of domesticity and property” – durba mitra

“a groundbreaking study of caste in communist Kerala. Thiranagama’s compelling ethnography of homes, neighbourhoods, and women’s lives yields fresh and subtle insight into how the inheritance of enslavement and untouchability is negotiated in India’s most progressive state” – joel lee