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 Kerala, where decades of Communist Party rule transformed life through land reform and social reorganization. Despite Marxist ideals, new forms of caste disparities have moved from “public” space to private spaces and private lives. Through exquisitely crafted ethnography that centers Dalit women, the book explains how historical economies of humiliation and subordination continue to unfold in modern spaces like the private home. From histories of enslavement to the houses and neighborhoods through which Dalit communities build dignity and self-worth, Thiranagama sets a new agenda for caste studies in India and beyond.

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Author

Sharika Thiranagama

Sharika Thiranagama is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University and author of In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka. Sharika Thiranagama's work has consistently explored how political mobilization and domestic life intersect, focusing on highly fraught contexts of violence, inequality, and intense political mobilization. This work and broader comparative theorization rests on understanding how people actually live together, often in highly fractious and unequal ways, situating these processes in specific historical formations of vernacular “privates” and “publics” in South Asia. Her work is based in Sri Lanka and in Kerala, South India. In Sri Lanka, her primary research (In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka 2011) was on civil war, political violence, home, displacement, militarization, family particularly intergenerational and gendered relations in wartime and post war life. This work takes these themes through the lives of Sri Lankan Tamil and Sri Lankan Muslim minorities. Other work includes the history of railways, the BBC world service, masculinity, leadership and popular militancy, etc.

Chair

Christophe Jaffrelot

Christophe Jaffrelot is Avantha Chair and Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at the King's India Institute and also the Research Lead for the Global Institutes, King’s College London. He teaches South Asian politics and history at Sciences Po, Paris and is an Overseas Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was Director of Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po, between 2000 and 2008. He takes part in the editorial board of several journals and is the senior editor of a Hurst book series that he has founded in 1999, Comparative Politics and International Studies. He is a regular commentator on Indian and Pakistani politics in France, UK, north America and in India.

Discussant

Srilata Sircar

Dr Srilata Sircar is Senior Lecturer in Critical Geography at King's India Institute. She received her doctoral degree in Human Geography from Lund University, Sweden in 2017. Prior to that she studied History at the University of Delhi and Development Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, India. She received the Antipode Right to the Discipline Grant in 2021 and the European Research Council Starting Grant in 2024. Dr Sircar's doctoral and postdoctoral work focused on subaltern urbanisation, the politics of caste and gender in urban infrastructure, and the archival practices of contemporary urban protest movements. She is currently leading the ERC funded project titled Critical Caste Geographies: Mapping the intersections of law, labour, and mobility (CRITCASTE). The project investigates the relationship between caste networks, international migrations, and social mobility. Her work has been published in leading journals such as Geoforum, Urban Geography, and Gender, Place and Culture. She is the host and producer of the Confronting Caste podcast.