Nikhil Pandhi

Nikhil Pandhi’s Love in the Time of Caste (2025) is a Dalit-feminist anthology of Hindi stories exploring love, intimacy, and anti-caste resistance, edited and translated for Zubaan Books.

on Feb 27, 2026

Nikhil Pandhi, an alumnus of Princeton’s Anthropology doctoral program, recently published Love in the Time of Caste (2025), a groundbreaking anthology of Dalit-feminist short stories with Zubaan Books, India’s leading feminist press.

The anthology brings together stories that Pandhi ethnographically assembled, edited, and translated from Hindi into English during his doctoral fieldwork in India (2021–23). The project emerged from his long-term collaborations with Dalit-feminist writers, activists, and community elders associated with the Dalit Lekhak Sangha (Dalit Writers Association) in Delhi.

A first-of-its-kind reparative Dalit-feminist anthology devoted to love as an “anti-caste affect,” Love in the Time of Caste features 17 writers across generations and locations within Hindi literary worlds. United by a shared commitment to social justice, the stories in the collection radically rethink entrenched caste and gender hierarchies in South Asia. They move beyond dominant narratives of Dalit suffering and pain to foreground intimacy, pleasure, love, and freedom as everyday sites of political imagination, liberation, and emancipation — marking the emergence of a new Dalit-feminist subjectivity, alongside a creative anti-caste aesthetics of repair.

In addition to editing and translating the volume, Pandhi authored the introduction. The preface is written by Anita Bharti, one of his long-term interlocutors and one of India’s most prominent anti-caste feminist writers.

Pandhi is a Lecturer in Anthropology and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College. He is currently completing his ethnographic book manuscript, Dying of Casteism, which brings medical and cultural anthropology into dialogue with critical studies of caste and race, as well as Black, Dalit, queer-of-color, and decolonial epistemologies.