Ajantha Subramanian. 2019. The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. x + 374 pp. Notes, references, index. $49.95 (eBook).

It was in the 1950s that Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) began to be established across India, with the aim of enhancing Indians’ scientific and technical knowledge. IITs were positioned as being meritocratic, away from the structural inequalities of caste and class. Scholarship, though, has explained how merit remains culturally embedded, and a popular lens adopted to uncover this is of class (social backgrounds and use of English language). Subramanian’s book takes this enquiry further not simply through the lens of class but caste, laying bare the ‘interplay of ascription and achievement’ (p. 3) that constitutes merit. Furthermore, she does so in the context of India’s sanctum sanctorum of merit, namely the IITs. This work, then, furthers scholarship on caste identities (how they became fixed and play out in contemporary times) and also positions itself in emerging works on the study of elites that are concerned with explaining how inequalities are reproduced, particularly in elite educational institutions (Khan 2010).