1 Chapter 5 The Politics of Social Theory: A Critical Analysis of the Caste-Modernity Paradigm Gayatri Nair 1. Introduction This paper was originally intended to be a study on the biography of caste in India. However, it is almost impossible to undertake an exercise of that nature without encountering the question of modernity. The relationship between caste and modernity is both close and complex. The debate on the relationship between caste and modernity has marked the history of sociology in specific and social theory in general. The latter especially has spurned a school of thought – Post-colonialism - that often shares an uncomfortable relation with modernity. Post Colonialism has found favour amongst a whole range of scholars and has made for itself a comfortable home both within Indian and western academia. As Vivek Chibber (2013, p.1) notes in his critique of Post Colonialism (henceforth PoCo), the New Left after a brief period of interaction with materialist methodology shifted focus to culture and ideology. As culture became a significant category of analysis, scholars often looked to literary theory to steer the way. It was amongst these frameworks that postcolonial studies came to reign supreme and became an item of export to other disciplines. For scholars working on what is known as the Third World, Chibber notes, the cultural turn led to the adoption of PoCo as a framework of study. This has meant that many of the subjects of study that were once restricted to the disciplinary domain of the social sciences now receive attention from scholars from field such as literary theory, culture studies etc. A major intervention of the PoCo school has been a move away from larger theories that were charged as being Eurocentric and unable to explain the 'peculiarities' of the Indian experience of capital and modernity. In doing so these works argue for a privileging of experiences as a way to understand social formations such as caste, forcing a re-think on what constitutes the foundation for theory building. Can individual experiences be the basis for this or must we rely on larger patterns that we see as dominant? This paper, while relying on Chibber's pointed critique of PoCo, will focus on elaborating on the nature of the caste-modernity relationship through an examination of certain critical sites, which contributed to the dominant understanding of caste and modernity. These sites have been identified as the period of colonial rule and the nationalist movement in India, the post independence period where caste is used as an exclusive marker of the lower castes, and the contribution of Indian sociology, given its complex links with the previous two sites. In light of this, the contribution of PoCo theory is critically examined. Through this the