This article reconsiders the past and the present of Dalit and lower-caste struggle in India, including recent efforts to link caste and race in order to make a common platform against discrimination at international fora. It explores the burden of colonial concepts and statist imaginaries in the shaping of objectified identities by Dalits, especially as they seize upon and crucially rework such categories. Critically engaging with the notion of coloniality, ‘the other side of modernity’, the article reveals the limits of categorical perspectives and intellectual theory in the articulation of social worlds. Instead, it points towards a global sociology that acknowledges and affirms ambivalence and contradiction as crucial attributes of thinking, writing and practice.