This roundtable explores the relationship between caste and craft in colonial and postcolonial India, highlighting its interaction with state power. We raise the question of how caste—in the way it was framed by state power and by artisans themselves—was relevant to artisans’ lives, and to what extent caste-occupation pairings operated in modern pedagogical institutions and artisanal social life. The British colonial state in India saw artisans as laboring bodies through a caste lens and attempted to engage them through colonial political economy and through various projects of modernization: art and industrial schools, imperial exhibitions and museums, and ethnographic knowledge production. These projects of integration and transformation were met with a variety of artisanal responses which were structured by their social, material, and cultural life. This roundtable highlights the relationship between caste-occupation variation, political artisanal mobilization, and artisans’ attempts to engage with modern education, employment, and state power.