Abstract
Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai’s work explores the nature of the ‘everyday
social’ focusing on the particular experience of caste as a problematic ‘social’ peculiar to
India. This philosophical archaeology of caste as a concept offers ways for radical cri-
tique. In being ‘more interested in finding appropriate ways of talking about the social in
Asia and Africa’ (p. 15) as opposed to the ‘West’, the authors strive to address the crises
of displaced concepts and contexts in philosophical thinking by postcolonial cultures.
Despite widespread sociological discourse on caste – the controversial social category
particular to the Indian context that has been cause of complex intergenerational violence
and injustice in society – mainstream philosophy has done little to examine it, making
this book a much-anticipated philosophical work. At the heart of this philosophy of the
social is the argument that the self is a collective concept whose agency is not as evident
as is claimed by the singular notions of the self.