His doctoral field research (1958–61) concerned the relationships domestic ritual purity-pollution practices had with the health and sanitation issues in a low-caste village near Lucknow.

Khare spent 1972 doing additional fieldwork in Rae Bareli (Uttar Pradesh), explicating the value-practice structures of Indian food, kinship, and ritual systems.

The latest phase (2006-present) has concerned the studies of and issues in Indian modernity amid social diversity; anthropology of globalizing South Asian foods; and the post Cold War reshaping of India-Europe/West cultural dialectics.

At Virginia, he founded and led (1976-1992) an interdisciplinary faculty scholarly activities committee, sponsored by the Center for Advanced Studies and its director, Dean W. Dexter Whitehead, a physicist scholar-administrator.

[2] These led to showing how ideologically deeply rooted and distinct were the conceptions of Indic personhood, agency, social relations, food thoughts, social-ritual practices, and the associated cosmological semiotics.

[4] For Khare, studying Dalits also meant, inter alia, critically reevaluating approaches of Louis Dumont and McKim Marriott to Indian caste society and civilization.

[5] Similarly, Marriott's rigorous attempts to create a comprehensive parsimonious transactional model for “the Hindu world” also excluded the crucial moral-spiritual self-locations (e.g. of reformist devotional saints) and their attendant intentional practical-political messages and agencies.

[7] It showed how Dalit ascetics (among other saints) had long identified an activist spiritual-moral self to launch potent moral-social-political critiques of the upper-caste world and its biased and truncated worldview.

[9] As thus both esoteric and exoteric India struggled, if mostly messily and imperfectly, amid the challenged ideals, norms and social privileges, then a suitably readapted sociology-anthropology was also sought (e.g., as Srinivas's studies showed).

[12] Posing this change, D. Shyam Babu, a Dalit researcher-journalist, in collaboration with Khare, assembled a cluster of autobiographic narratives to show how, in actual life, one still encountered caste inequalities in India.

[13] Among Khare's professional contributions, two broad areas stand out, one relating to the interdisciplinary initiatives and organizations developed mostly at or from University of Virginia, and the other in starting and establishing the International Commission on Anthropology of Food.

Composed of distinguished university faculty members, the committee engaged wide-ranging topics by inviting scholars, holding conferences, lecture series, symposia, or single-day colloquia.

Reconfigured and with a major focus on the European and American countries and western cultures, the commission now operates in Barcelona, Spain, under Prof. Dr. F. Xavier Medina's leadership.