Gyanendra Pandey, “A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States” (Cambridge UP, 2013)

A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2013) is the latest book by Gyanendra Pandey. The book analyses prejudice and democracy through a comparison of African Americans and Indian Dalits. Pandey’s method of exploring these disparate populations and enormously complex themes, is to focus on particular case studies that are at once both very private and public, and thus allow for a truly unique, subtle and delicate analysis of what would be unwieldy topics in another’s hands. Simultaneously small and large, the book’s protagonists and author’s questions remain in the reader’s mind, long after putting down the book.