This innovative work of historical anthropology explores how India"s Dalits, or ex-untouchables, transformed themselves from stigmatized subjects into citizens. Anupama Rao"s far-reaching account challenges standard thinking on caste as either a vestige of precolonial society or an artifact of colonial governance. Focusing on western India in the colonial and postcolonial periods, she shines a powerful light on South Asian historiography, both popular and academic, and on ongoing caste discrimination to show how ostracized persons without rights came to possess them and how Dalit struggles led to the transformation of organizing terms of colonial liberalism, such as "rights," "equality," and "personhood."