The Monster in Your Path breaks new ground in expanding the study of the private life of caste as it is experienced by Dalit and lower-caste communities in the Palakkad district of Kerala. The book reminds readers of good ethnography and fieldwork as a necessary precondition to raise conceptual questions relating to inequality, gender, and labor.--Ramnarayan S. Rawat, coeditor of Dalit Journeys for Dignity: Religion, Freedom, and Caste The Monster in Your Path is an elegant account of caste in twenty-first-century India. Sharika Thiranagama reveals the aftermath of a revolutionary politics in Kerala that has obfuscated the existence of caste hierarchy while perpetuating everyday caste violence through novel formations of domesticity and property. Thiranagama's beautiful ethnography not only reveals the durability of caste subjection but also demands that we recognize the dignity of Dalits and all lower-caste people.--Durba Mitra, author of Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought The Monster in Your Path is a groundbreaking study of caste in communist Kerala. Thiranagama's compelling ethnography of homes, neighborhoods, and women's lives yields fresh and subtle insight into how the inheritance of enslavement and untouchability is negotiated in India's most progressive state.--Joel Lee, author of Deceptive Majority: Dalits, Hinduism, and Underground Religion