This book shows how everyday discourses on caste and lived religious practices in Sindh expose a privileged caste secular–Sufi order built on the erasure of caste and the disciplining of Dalit and Pasmanda religiosity.

With this, Ghulam Hussain reveals caste as a transreligious structure that reshapes the moral and political limits of tolerance in Pakistan. The author challenges the longstanding image of Sindh as a caste-free land of Sufi tolerance, pluralism, and interfaith harmony. Integrating with critical caste studies, postcolonial theory, and the anthropology of religion, the book argues that this celebrated narrative does not correspond with everyday caste and religious practices. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with Dalit and Pasmanda communities in lower Sindh, it demonstrates that caste is not peripheral to Sindh's secular–Sufi ethos but foundational to it.

The book contends that secular-Sufi pluralism regulates rather than accommodates subaltern religious agency. Examining movements such as the Rampali Kabir Panth, the erasure of living Buddhists, and the suspicion surrounding Dalit and Pasmanda conversions to Islam, the book shows how theological renaming, ritual refusal, and transreligious mobility constitute ethical self-authorship and epistemic disobedience.

By theorizing caste as a transreligious and trans-secular formation, this book reconceptualizes secular tolerance as a technology of hegemony, dominance and governance that aestheticizes coexistence while obscuring structural violence, offering a new vocabulary for understanding inequality in Pakistan and the wider Muslim world.