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- [00:00]
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Ajanta Subramanian
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Malini Ranganathan
feel through the screen.
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Ajanta Subramanian
Your next obsession is waiting. Watch only on Prime Girl.
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Malini Ranganathan
Winter is so last season, and now spring's got you looking at pictures of
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Ajanta Subramanian
tank tops with hungry eyes.
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Malini Ranganathan
Your algorithm is feeding you cutoffs.
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Ajanta Subramanian
You're thirsty for the sun on your
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Malini Ranganathan
shoulders that perfect hang on the patio. Sundress those sandals you can wear all day and all night. And you've had enough of shopping from your couch. Done. Hoping it looks anything like the picture when you tear open that envelope.
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Quince Brand Representative
It's time for a little in person spring treat. It's time for a trip to Ross.
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Malini Ranganathan
Work your magic.
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Ajanta Subramanian
Welcome to the Cast pod, where we assemble scholars, activists, community organizers, artists and others to make sense of what caste is, how it works, how it's experienced, and how it has traveled and taken root both inside and outside of South Asia. What have people done to perpetuate, transform and even attempt to abolish caste? I'm your host, Ajanta Subramanian, professor of anthropology at the City University of New York and joining me today are Malini Ranganathan and Junaid Shaikh. Malini is an urban geographer and co author of two books, the Urbanization of Caste, Power, Land, labor and Environmental Politics in Bangalore, which is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, and Corruption Stories, Ethics and Publics of the Late Capitalist City, which was published by Cornell. Malini has also published several articles on caste capitalism in the city focusing on Bangalore, and she's an associate professor at American University's School of International Service in Washington, D.C. junaid is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His scholarship draws together interests in modern South Asia, labor history, urban history, comparative colonialism, and Dalit studies. Junaid is the Author of the 2021 Outcast, City Making and the Politics of the Poor, and he's working on a second book on the Indian Marxist Gangadhar Adhikari. So welcome to the podcast. Malni and Junaid, thank you and a
- [03:50]
Junaid Shaikh
pleasure to be here.
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Malini Ranganathan
Thank you so much, Ajanta. It's wonderful to be here with you.
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Ajanta Subramanian
I'd like to start us with an orienting question. We often hear distinctions drawn between the pervasiveness of caste in the Indian village and its relative absence or insignificance in the Indian city. So the rest of this episode is going to focus on the centrality of caste to the making of the Indian city. But I'd like to first ask what is behind such assumptions about urbanization weakening the hold of caste? Right. Who holds this to be true and why?
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Malini Ranganathan
So to answer this question, I think we can reflect on the hopes of Baba Sahib Ambedkar himself, who believed that the city would be a refuge for Dalits, a place that they could escape the village, a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, as he referred to it. Ambedkar believed that city life would weaken untouchability and the graded inequality of Hindu society via industrialization and mobility could have class anonymity or caste passing. I think to a certain extent this is true. The city does enable this kind of caste mixing, caste passing and anonymity. But I think it's a very widespread misconception that caste does not exist in the city. And we've seen the kind of creative ways that caste is urbanized from the more kind of subtle, you know, ways in terms of vegetarian only rentals or pure vegetarian restaurants or even the service lift, the service entrance and gated apartment complexes that are meant specifically for laboring classes, you know, who are often Dalits. But then you also have very overt forms of caste formation in cities, right? In terms of the segregation of urban areas, slums being largely Dalit majority areas. So I think against this white perception that is often embraced by savannas, by a kind of Brahminical ideology and an excusing of caste, that it's almost like that way we can relegate caste to a sort of, you know, relic of the past, sort of traditional cultural past. And the city is a very modern place. And I think this is a myth that really is quite pervasive and flies in the face of the very material and ideological bases of caste in the city.
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Ajanta Subramanian
Junaid, you want to add anything?
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Junaid Shaikh
Yeah, no, absolutely. The importance of making a myth that cities are casteless. There's some effort that has gone into it because even in the pre colonial period, in places like western India, for instance, cities like Pune, and I'm Talking about the 18th century, localities were divided by caste, right. That in the colonial period that, that strengthened the colonial government was aware that caste is an important factor and is an important feature of social life. Even cities like Bombay or coastal cities that came up under the colonial government, even those cities had caste localities that were dominated by particular castes. For instance, the potter colonies, the Kumbharwada, etc. Etc. Right. Then later on, when, in the early 20th century, etc, when the city was getting. When urban planning came into being, caste was recognized as the basis for organizing cooperative societies. So in urban cooperative societies that came up, started coming up in the 1900s and 1910s, et cetera, caste was an important feature of creating urban housing societies. That is why you have the Saraswat colony that Frank Conlin talks about or about lower housing societies, et cetera, that Nikhil Rao also talks about upper caste, middle class housing societies. Right. So the colonial government was definitely aware that caste was a feature of urban life. So then if the government was aware in from the 18th century onwards that caste is a feature of urban life, then the effort to forget that caste is there in urban life in the post colonial period seems to be an effort. There seems to have things that have gone into it. Maybe it's notions of modernity, et cetera, that India is now at least aspiring to become modern. And for that then they had to shrug off caste. Right. And I think some of that went into this perception that caste is now is only a part of rural life and not of open life.
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Ajanta Subramanian
Yeah, yeah. Jeanette, you had started to talk about the. The built environment of the city, right. As one sort of mechanism for the reproduction of caste. I wonder if we can sort of dig into that a little more so your work looks at late 19th and early 20th century Bombay, and this is a period when industrial capitalism is taking root, is catalyzing labor migration into the city. So you have this really nice encapsulated statement. You say capitalism shares a symbiotic relationship with caste at key moments in the process of accumulating and reproducing capital. And again, you're looking, you, you look at two things in particular in your book. One is the built environment and the other is language. And I'm going to bracket language for a second, and you've already started to address this, but can you say a little bit more about how the built environment materializes this symbiotic relationship between caste and capitalism, and then maybe also about how industrial capitalism in particular requires caste to even get off the ground? Right, absolutely. Yeah.
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Junaid Shaikh
Right. So let me start with the second part of the question and then I'll make my way to the first part. So to start industries, a, of course you need, you need credit, right? A lot of the credit to start industries was generated through cast networks. Apart from that, you of course also need cheap labor. Now how do you recruit cheap labor in cities in India, places like Bombay? Right. One way of doing that, of course, was tapping caste networks. So in order for, in order for, to recruit workers in the textile industry or in the docks, that people were sent off to recruit labor from villages, they tapped, they got particular caste groups, caste leaders, who tapped their networks and mobilized laborers, brought them to the city, helped them get some housing, etc. In the city. Right. And this is how a labor force for industrial capitalism was generated. That labor force, of course there is an inbuilt disciplinary mechanism because the jobber, the leader, the foreman who's recruiting the laborers is also the person who's disciplining the labor, but is also the facilitating the urban life, also getting them jobs, etc. Etc. Right. Sometimes leasing credit, all of that. So because of that, caste is, I think, very important for industrial capitalism to take off in cities right now with the built environment, I mean, with the urbanization, of course, you know, urbanization is accelerated under capitalism, and the city is the site for the concentration of capital. A lot of capital is absorbed in the built environment of the city. Right. So in factories and roads and bridges and urban institutions, etc. Etc. Right. So the time in which this urbanization is getting accelerated in various coastal cities is also the time in which the cast hierarchy is getting amplified. Right. And the caste hierarchy is getting. So it's happening simultaneously. And then when with Urbanization, if you have the commoditization of land or commoditization of housing. Right. That commodity is then sold off to particular caste groups in terms of housing, societies, etc. Etc. Right. Caste becomes important in housing, etc. And therefore, I think caste also becomes important in structuring the urban built environment. I think that way, if you start thinking of it in that way, caste, but also class. Of course, I'm saying caste, but, you know, class is also very important to it.
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Ajanta Subramanian
So, Junaid, I. I did want to get back to the question of language and how language worked as a reference of caste in Bombay. And you. You get at this through this fascinating analysis of how Marxism comes into circulation and is made available to Bombay's working classes. And you say that caste, even as these Marxists are disavowing the importance of caste. Right. In the building of an emancipatory politics, caste gets smuggled in through the very act of translation. Can you say something briefly about how that works?
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Junaid Shaikh
Yeah. It's, of course, as we know, Marxism becomes important in the late 1910s, and then in the 1920s, the Communist Party of India is formed in the 1920s, but before that, there are many activists traveling around the world, meeting each other, et cetera. Of course, with Marxism, one of the texts that becomes important is the Communist Manifesto. Right. And it's. Many Indian Marxists didn't have access to capital, Volume one, et cetera, et cetera. But the Communist Manifesto in the English language, in the German language, they had access to, because many of these intellectuals go to Germany, also to England, etc. And then the attempt is to translate that. So in that process of translation, I found the translation so interesting because in translating certain abstract categories, Right. Use value, exchange value, etc, the terms are very Sanskritized. It's Sanskritized. Marathi. Right. But in translating embodied categories, the terms are from the urban vernacular. Right. So there is a hierarchy in the operation of language, which I found very interesting, that embodied categories are translated in this way. And so that hierarchy of language is, I argue, that's how caste also gets smuggled in. Into it.
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Ajanta Subramanian
Yeah, because that hierarchy, it's between the conceptual and the embodied.
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Junaid Shaikh
Exactly.
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Ajanta Subramanian
Which mimics the sort of mind, body.
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Junaid Shaikh
Body dyad.
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Ajanta Subramanian
Dyad, right.
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Junaid Shaikh
Yeah, exactly.
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Ajanta Subramanian
Which is so central to caste. Yeah, yeah, that's super interesting. Junaid, you said something interesting, which was that in the colonial period, the colonial state had no illusions about the pervasiveness of caste, both in the countryside and in the city, but that with decolonization, you had this Sort of aspiration to a casteless urbanism. Right. But of course, as we see from Malini's work, that aspiration never came to pass. Right. And 21st century Bangalore, which is where your work is focused, Malini is very much a space where caste is not just alive and well, but in some ways is becoming even stronger. Right. It's becoming more powerful with changes in the political economy of urbanization. So can you pick this up and give our listeners a sense of how this symbiosis between caste and capitalism is operating today in urban India?
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Malini Ranganathan
Absolutely. And I want to really build on a lot of what Junaid said. But just to start with a quite funny anecdote, not too long ago saw an advertisement for a Brahmin only township on the outskirts of Bangalore. So talking about subtle mechanisms and not so subtle mechanisms, we can see that absolutely caste is alive and kicking and can be quite brash and naked sometimes in the space of the city. We've seen this as particularly in the last few years. So exactly. As Junit said, if the early 20th century Indian city was planned for colonial order and industrial capitalism, then the 21st century Indian cities planned for neoliberal order and some sort of mix of real estate, tech, finance, capitalism. You certainly see a kind of similar logic of the co constitution of class and caste and capitalism and caste in the 21st century city, but also some key differences. And one thing that I'd like to really talk about that Junaid did not mention, although the processes of labor recruitment are very remarkably similar in the Bangalore case, is the rise of the OBCs and the dominant castes, the agrarian castes that come to town. We have the Waqaligas coming to town. We have the Lingayats coming to town. We have the reddies from erstwhile united Andhra Pradesh coming to town. And what's happening here, Ajanta, is what I've called caste capital switching. The switching of rural landed capital into urban circuits of labor contracting and real estate construction and land acquisition. If you think about it, those same landlords, let's say the Wakaligas, who had that cultural clout, in fact had that ability to instill fear and respect through cultural humiliation on the Dalit caste. They are using that clout to grab land, particularly Dalit granted land at the peripheries of Bangalore. And of course they are now also occupying the lower bureaucracy. Earlier 20th century, the Brahmins, who constituted some 4% of southern India, occupy 90% of government posts. And Fuller and Narsiman have traced the urbanization of Brahmins As a middle class. In their book you've also traced the ways in which Brahmins are able to leverage educational capital into the space of the city. But whereas that was the case in the early 20th century, you have because of the backward classes movement, because of reservations, you have these landed castes, these dominant castes entering the lower and medium bureaucracy, even the higher bureaucracy. And then of course you have their entry into electoral politics. So in the space of the city in Bangalore, you have a tight interlocking between electoral politics, land politics and labor contracting. And so in my book, which is co researched and co authored with two intellectual activists based in Bangalore, Siddharth and Isaac Arul Selva, the latter of whom actually started Kannada based slum magazine called Slum Jagatu which aims to recover the untold Dalit and anti caste histories of the city through oral histories. We have been really kind of ethnographically looking at these landlord castes who you know are triple agents. They may run for elections right at the local municipal level or they might level run for assembly elections, of course, and even more money. If they're in MLA then they would have gotten that money through real estate. But I've interviewed some of these political landlord castes who also have leveraged their capital into labor recruiting. So for instance, especially if they're from the ready caste, they can recruit and they can draw on their networks to draw on Madika Dalits, Telugu speaking Dalits to work in various more manual labor sectors, you know. And so you have for instance the Kapus who are a Telugu caste and the Kamas who are the contractors in Bangalore recruiting Dalits for sanitation work. So you have a kind of re articulation of the caste pyramid in Bangalore. But of course caste is never constant. So you have a kind of class mobility of the landlord caste and I'm calling them the Lionel caste. Some others have called them the feudal caste. K. Balagopal, who was a prolific activist, lawyer, writer, has really traced the kind of caste habitus, if you were, of these Reddis, these Kamas, these Kapus castes in Andhra Pradesh. So I think these are all important to also locate in the space of the city.
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Ajanta Subramanian
That's really fascinating and I like that you said there's the rearticulation of the caste pyramid, but there are also transformations, right? The rise of OBCs, the fact that they come to constitute the local state, which in some ways crystallizes this nexus between caste and the state in new ways. Right. Really fascinating. You actually use this really interesting term, the cast clique, right. To talk about this the, the funneling of capital from land into real estate. But more importantly that the caste clique is, it's, it's a network which is not just about blood. Right. It's a network that exceeds blood. So can, can you say something about that? Because that also seems like an important way to complicate sort of common sense assumptions about what caste is.
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Malini Ranganathan
Absolutely. You know, Sushmita Pati has a great book on the Jats of northern India and their role in being rental landlords in Delhi. And she talks about these, this concept of the baichara, right, the brotherhood. I mean literally this is a brotherhood. One can call it a boys club. And they're not all, of course, co sanguine, they're not all of the same blood lineage, but there is a very much of a quid pro quo. You know, in Kannada you'll say so and so is non relation, right? Someone so and so is my relation. They'll actually use the English word which doesn't mean they're part of my family, but it means that they are part of this so called community which of course we know is code word for caste. And they recognize this mutual interest. And so I call it a clique because it's a kind of very policed boundaries, collective formation. You know, others have referred to it as caste networks. Junaid just referred to it as caste. Caste networks in Hindi you might call baichara. There is the notion of khap Panchayat in northern India which again is very rural and very, very violent in the way it exacts patriarchal rules, including honor killings.
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Ajanta Subramanian
Right.
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Malini Ranganathan
This is a form of a kind of club into which non caste affiliates are not allowed into the club and they keep capital tightly bound within that club. So we spoke to, you know, Dalit activists who are trying to reclaim their land through the prevention of the Transfer of certain Lands Act PTCL, which was passed in 1970s partly because of the efforts of the Dalit Sankarsha Samiti, which is the Dalit political organization in Karnataka. So it's a progressive act. So they're trying to recover land. But they're telling us about how basically the person who is the landlord for the village also knows the revenue collector, who also knows they're all from the same community who also know the police officer. And again, this is a kind of network, social network, social glue that I think is the basis upon which capitalism runs in every society in the world. You talk about white plantation owners who are part of a clique. You talk about police networks in the US It's a kind of racial class network that also is in non western context. This is India. It's a caste class network. It's a boys club in many ways. And we cannot think about capital accumulation in the city without these. And they are not outdated, traditional relics of some bygone past in the village. They are well and alive in the space of the city.
- [27:35]
Ajanta Subramanian
Yeah, I think that that's a really important point to, to not exceptionalize non Western capitalism as somehow operating according to archaic principles in a way that capitalism in the west does not. Right. That this is actually the way capitalism works everywhere.
- [27:52]
Malini Ranganathan
Right, Absolutely.
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Junaid Shaikh
Very comfortable with difference capitalism. Yes. We think that capitalism will get rid of difference. It's very happy to cohabit with difference, work through difference.
- [28:06]
Ajanta Subramanian
Junaid, I wanted to ask you a question about the rural urban linkages. So Malini, you make a really strong case for Bangalore as an instance of what you call agrarian urbanism. For all the reasons that you just stated that there are these. It's difficult to understand real estate capital without connecting it to landed capital, et cetera. Right. And these caste cliques are spatially expansive. Right. They connect the village and the city. What about you, Jeanette?
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Malini Ranganathan
Do you.
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Ajanta Subramanian
How do you see the relationship between the rural and urban at the. Towards the end of your book, you had this really fascinating mention of peasant support for striking mill workers in the early 1980s. The fact that this is still these, these, these ties are still live in the 80s suggests that the village and the city have not been prized apart.
- [29:07]
Malini Ranganathan
Right.
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Ajanta Subramanian
But are there other ways that the village extends into the city? Are there other ways that the village, or I should be more specific, are there other ways that sort of rural caste relations. Right. Extend into urban space?
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Junaid Shaikh
No, Absolutely. With urbanization, it's not just restricted to the city. The process of urbanization encapsulate parts outside the city, encapsulates rural areas and encapsulates villages. So that's of course one part of it. With particularly as historians have also mentioned, I'm thinking of Raja and Chandavarkar, but also some of the feminist historian like Priyanka Srivastava etc, who have mentioned the social reproduction of labor in the city was dependent on villages. Right. So lot of the birth and et cetera and the, the upbringing of children, etc. Of urban laborers happened in. In villages. Right. So the villages subsidized an urban labor force. Workers couldn't afford that. They would often go back to villages, send partners back to the villages. Sometimes, of course, the wife lived in villages and did not accompany workers to the city, which is why you had a very skewed workforce in the city, very predominantly male workforce in Bombay. Right? So those networks were always there, continue to be there, as Malini is also pointing out. And yet something also does change, right, in the city. The casteism that's there in the villages, which is violence, brutal can be instances of brutal violence or lack of access to education, something like that. When you land up in a city, you have access to access to, but in a contradictory way you have easier access, access to it in the city. If you identify yourself as a caste subject, right? So you, in places like Bombay, there were schools for Dalits in the early 20th century, primary schools for Dalits in the early 20th century. Later on with affirmative action, etc, you identify yourself as Dalit to get access to schools, lower level work, etc, etc, etc, all of that. So this is where the continuities, you know, they're there. But continuity is with change.
- [32:07]
Ajanta Subramanian
I mean one, one thing that perhaps is worth noting is maybe a change in the scale at which caste consolidates. Right? So it, you know, for example, in the city, if you're gaining access to certain resources, whether it's education or something else through a governmental category like scheduled cost, that's a different scale of affiliation than say Madiga or, or Paria. Right. So the scale of cost might shift in the urban setting, right?
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Junaid Shaikh
Absolutely.
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Ajanta Subramanian
And I mean I, I wonder also about how labor itself, urban labor itself might reconstitute caste. So Malni, you had this really interesting comment on castification through segmented labor. I think it's Dana Kornberg who writes about this, right? How low caste Muslims may come to a place like Delhi and take on labor which is associated with Dalits and in that way in some ways become conscripted into the category of Dalit. Right. So what about that? Those kinds of transformations both in the scale of caste affiliation, but even in who comes to be associated with certain caste categories by virtue of doing certain forms of labor.
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Malini Ranganathan
No, precisely. I think that there is, as we've talked about all along, you know, the CO constitution between caste and class, the CO constitution, but also the shifting nature of caste and labor in the city. So just to give our listeners some context, I think that throughout India you're seeing the out migration from northern India, you know, West Bengal and also Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, of course, in from very agriculturally distressed regions. Some of these regions are actually also experiencing flooding. Is another part of my work on looking at climate induced migration. So you're seeing Poor, landless, largely SCST groups from northern India traveling further and further distances. They used to go to Delhi, Pune, Mumbai, but now they're coming to Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad as well. And they are working in the most precarious jobs. Because of the explosion of the city into peripheral areas, the, the greater Bangalore authority now is unable to service waste management in these peripheral areas. So who takes care of it? It is your West Bengali Muslim waste worker who comes from Murshidabad or Nadia district or north or South Paragonas and is literally sorting trash all day. And then they are treated partly because of religion then mixed with the kind of authorization of Muslims, particularly Bengali speaking Muslims, by the majoritarian government. You know, there are layers upon layers of precarity and there are layers upon layers of racialization and caste defication, you know, of these groups. And they are sort of the new, if you want to say, Dalits of the city in terms of the kind of perception of their untouchability and where they live. And so I think especially waste work, but also construction, where there's very few safety protocols that are followed for construction. Laborers have become a very disposable group. Migrant laborers are highly disposable in India's cities. We saw this in particular during COVID but that was when apparently the veil was ripped off of the invisibility of the migrant workers. But it's always been that way, at least in the 21st century. So I, so I think this is really important and I think it's also important to see then there has been some mobility for southern Indian Dalits. So you have this interesting phenomenon now where Chalovadi Dalits, or you know, in some cases even Madiga Dalits have kind of climbed the pyramid as far as waste work go. Of course, you know, the one large segment of power, Karmikas, what you would call Safai Karamcharis, in northern India, there are, the sanitation workers are still largely Madhega women who are in that sector. But in terms of this private waste contracting, you have some of the upward mobility of southern Indian Dalits. And then the lowest rung of the work is then performed by, you know, Muslims, Bengali Muslims, also Muslims from Assam state and Bihar. So that's a very interesting, but also, I think, quite troubling reconstitution of the labor pyramid that now draws in other forms of bigotry that we have to understand. Working in conjunction with casteism.
- [37:54]
Ajanta Subramanian
I wanted to take us into sort of oppositional politics. And you know, there's so many ways to get at Pushback against these forms of caste, class domination that, that accompany and fuel urbanization. But I'd like to focus on the slum and. Because it's sort of, you know, this is a category that runs through both of your work and it's, it's, it's this multifaceted phenomenon, right? I mean, the slum is a target of urban planning. It's a source of industrial and informal labor. It's a site of housing and sociality, and it's the basis of political claims of various kinds. Right? So, I mean, I think in this, in this sense, the slum is this really important sort of window onto both domination and contestation, right. Of caste, class, power. And Jeanette, in, in your work, you, you look at the slum as a really important focus of Dalit literature, right, in the 1950s and 60s, and how the slum becomes a sort of,
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Junaid Shaikh
what
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Ajanta Subramanian
to call it a. Almost a figure, right? A figure in this literature through which lived experience, the texture of lived experience. Right. Is represented. But also that, you know, people who are writing the sort of Dalit authors of this time weren't just focusing on kind of the hyperlocal forms of lived experience. They were also drawing from revolutionary histories, from other world literatures. So they were kind of scaling up and down in this really remarkable way. And the category of Dalit kind of coalesces, you say, as both quite specific to untouchable castes, but also as this almost like utopian category, right. That can be capacious and include the oppressed of the world. So can you speak a little bit about the slang and this literature which is just, I mean, it's just a fascinating way to get at non state archives, right? Like this is an archive. This is an incredibly rich archive in its own right that affords you. That makes things visible that are not visible in either state archives or even in left, more orthodox left writings, right? Yeah.
- [40:33]
Junaid Shaikh
And non state archive is a great term, right? Because if you want to do histories after 1947, and you know, people now, historians want to acknowledge that history doesn't end at 1947, and you have to get into the post colonial period too. But the problem is there are no archives that are easily available in the post colonial period. Nobody's opening up archives. And I would have loved to go to the Bombay Municipal Corporation Archive and see what are some of the discussions happening around slums and urban planning there. Unfortunately, I couldn't. Right. And therefore, I mean, one of them, one of the reasons why I turn to literature is also historic is a Conundrum for historians is that there are no archives. So you, you know, you make do with whatever is there and then you find alternate sources, alternate things to look at. And literature was one of them. Right? But literature is a thing of its own. It's, it's just such a fascinating place. It's a fascinating field. Many of these Alit writers of course grew up in the slums, but they're, they're as literary figures their opposition to his established Marathi literature, which they think is formless, etc, Right. Which is more in their rendition, brahminical. Right. So to shock that audience to. They bring up the figure of the slums. There is a hyper realism in their narration. You see life in the slums, et cetera, the depredations of life in the slums, the violence, etc, everyday violence, all of that. They're not shy, squeamish about Talking about sex, etc. Etc. Right. It's a way of making an intervention in Marathi literature and critiquing Marathi literature. So and then in their, you know, these are, these are intellectuals, right? And these are intellectuals, which is why they are reading things from all around the world, translated in Marathi languages. But they are, their interlocutors are, you know, some of the upper caste Marathi literary figures, scholars and many Bombay writers, etc. That meeting them, talking to them, hearing them, listening to them, making sense of world literature, getting exposed to world literature. They're traveling. So some of them, some intellectuals travel to the US I mean Ambedkar has this idea that you should produce a Dalit intellectual class and they should get scholarships initially from the colonial government, the post colonial government and for some time that worked. But later on, one of these intellectuals is this person called MN Vankede who had the scholarship but who couldn't travel in the early 1950s because he fell sick, et cetera, but then got a Fulbright fellowship and Traveled to the US to attend graduate school, does a PhD in literature in black literature from University of Florida, gets familiar with black literature, etc. And goes back to Bombay, works as a bureaucrat, but then also starts magazines, etc, you know, cultivates this group of young writers around him. So that's one of the sources in which they get exposed to black literature apart from various other. I mean it's also the moment, it's also the 1960s. Many activists, etc are famous, Frantz Fanon is famous, Angela Davis is famous, the Black Panther movement is famous, etc. But my point is there are different ways in which they are exposed to this world. Literature, and they are inspired by it and their initial impetus to shock the established Marathi literature and create a field called Dalit literature. And then that Dalit literature gets recognized, gets awards, but that also creates a problem. So by problem, I mean, so when the Dalit Panther movement is started, some of the people who are getting the awards are not at the forefront. They are involved in the discussion, but they are not at the forefront. These are writers who have started a Dalit Panther movement in order to respond to the violence that is now rampant across India because of the change in political economy, etc. For that, they have started this Dalit Panther movement initially started by writers, they were joined by activists, etc. But some of the leaders who are getting the awards are not the ones who are at the forefront of it. Right, so that's what I mean by. That also creates some complications, et cetera.
- [45:45]
Ajanta Subramanian
Interesting. Right. So there's a. There are these literary representations which are gaining a certain kind of recognition, but they don't necessarily translate into material transformation.
- [46:00]
Junaid Shaikh
It does make a difference, actually, because one of the things. Because slums can be evicted, etc. Right. One of the claims of the Dalit writers who start the Dalit Panther movement, one of the demands is some guarantees for slums.
- [46:17]
Ajanta Subramanian
You call them durable slums.
- [46:19]
Junaid Shaikh
Yeah, durable slums. Lisa Weinstein. Yeah, Lisa Weinstein's term. Weinstein's term. Right. And so it becomes durable. And it's. It's because of this, because they're making those demands in public space about slums. Slums are becoming durable and therefore making a material difference too.
- [46:40]
Ajanta Subramanian
So. And Malni, this slum obviously figures in your work as well. You mentioned this magazine titled Slum Jagatu, Right. Which. Which is based in Bangalore. And. Yeah, so the slum is kind of politically mobilized. Right. In. In the current moment as well. And of course, this is a moment that, you know, where displacement is. The threat of displacement is in some ways as stark as ever because of soaring land values. Right. So. But you, you also talk about the ecological dimensions of urbanism, you know, which is sort of another angle on your work, which I think is really important. So can you say something about how the slum gets mobilized for certain kinds of material rights and then how does it figure in environmental politics?
- [47:46]
Malini Ranganathan
Yeah, Before I do that, I do want to connect with what Janay was saying in terms of the lineage of the Dalit Panthers and Maharashtra. I think the DSS in Karnataka has some really fascinating parallels with the Dalit Panthers.
- [48:02]
Ajanta Subramanian
Like the Dalit Panthers, the Dalit Sangharsha
- [48:05]
Malini Ranganathan
Samiti, which is formed in 1974. And like the Dalit Panthers, you know, this was a movement originally formed and born out of protesting caste atrocities, untouchability, humiliation. And it expanded to land struggles, right? Especially the dispossession of Dalits as far as land goes. But from the outset, just like the Dalit Panthers, the DSS was very literary and very intellectual. In fact, there was a genre of Dalit literature known as Bandaya literature or rebel literature, right, which wrote against the Bhusa, which literally means rice husk, but in English one can translate to fluff of Brahmanical literature. And there was a very impassioned speech made by then minister called Basavalingappa about the fluff or the rice husk of Brahmanical literature and how Dalit literary traditions were a kind of fiery counter, a kind of a rebel literature tradition against this. And so you had very many notable Kannadiga Dalit authors, Dalingaya, Devan, Noor, Mahadeva Du Saraswati, you know, have all been instrumental in kind of merging cultural production and activism. There's always a kind of very strong writerly angle into activism and awakening and anti caste politics, even in the Karnataka movement. So DSS is very active in NAN struggles, often in rural Karnataka. But then it gets involved in urban struggles in different ways. And so you see the DSS joining with some struggles on occasion. You see many activists from the DSS, from different kinds of Dalit political organizations also joining the slum movement. And so this was really inaugurated at the height of kind of neoliberal urban in the 1990s, with the birth of a kind of resource center called Janasayog, which was supposed to build capacity of organic slum leaders, many of whom were Dalit, to wage battles against evictions, but also around water infrastructure, around flooding, around tenure security. And then in 2007, we have a very interesting moment which I write about my book, where there was a very explicit articulation of the fact that most slums in Bangalore are Dalit. And therefore this is not by accident, but this is a kind of strategic way in which to both exploit and extract the labor of Dalits, but also spatially peripheralize them. And so Selva actually talks about the, for instance, the Agrahara being reproduced in the space of the city with the Brahmin dominated areas in the center, and then the Dalitkeris or the colonies, hologeris, the slums on the outskirts. So there becomes a very explicit spatial critique of urbanism through an anti caste lens. The Karnataka Slamjanandolana is formed in the 2000s and that's a network of slum organizations. I think there's also some amount of resistance to resident welfare associations which are quintessentially middle class savannah caste cliques in many ways. There's these organizations that seek to police private property, cleanliness, lakes, you know, the kind of greening through an ecological casteism, if you will, of the city. And so some of these slum groups are also involved in contesting eviction through what Amitabh Bhavaskar has called bourgeois environmentalism. What others Mukul Sharma called environmental casteism. So that also starts happening in the city. And of course there's a long way to go and there's fits and starts and there's internal issues with the Islam movement, no doubt. But all is to say that I think it's notable that there is now an explicit anti caste critique as far as housing and slums go. I also want to quickly add that this has entered the labor organizing sphere. So for instance, and this is also quite ecological, although one has to have a very capacious understanding of environmental politics as also the labor of sanitation workers. I think the literature on environmental justice has shown that you have to bring working class concerns into the fold. Otherwise environmentalism will remain gardening, right, as Shekul Mendez famously said. So in Bangalore we've seen the successful mobilization over the last decade by a communist affiliated union, the All India Central Council of Trade Unions, AICTU and dalit groups over the rights of female sanitation workers. As I mentioned earlier, they're called power karmikas in Canada. And so a friend who's part of the union and has led the union AICCTU for many years, Clifton, he's also a lawyer by trade training, has been instrumental along with his comrades in the union, but also in the, in the Dalit movement of advancing a very sharp critique of caste, class and gender oppression in Bangalore and has won significant rights for Dalit female workers. So I think these movements, these oppositional movements as you framed it, are cross, you know, both housing and land, housing and labor. And I think, you know, help us define the environment in a much broader way than just a clean lake or just, you know, a neighborhood free of trash. It's about the dignity of workers. It's about their own access to basic, you know, life oriented infrastructure such as water and sanitation. And this is what I also try to do in my work, you know, have this much more class and caste critique of environmentalism and version of environmentalism in my work.
- [54:25]
Ajanta Subramanian
Mali, I wanted to ask you about the archives that just as Junaid turned to literature to capture some of these lived experiences of Islam life and the kinds of arguments that Dalit writers in the mid 20th century were putting forward at the book that you co authored, Corruption Plots doesn't look just at novels, it also looks at films. Right. So, you know, and I think, you know, people who work on subaltern politics have always had to diversify their archives. Right. But I wonder if you wanted to say something as well about tapping different kinds of archival sources in order to flesh out the relationship between, you know, structure, experience and politics.
- [55:20]
Malini Ranganathan
Yeah, absolutely. And this reminds me of also you were asking about Slum Jagatu, which is a very interesting Kannada language magazine. It's a magazine that gets published about once every month. And it's been going on for a few decades now, particularly from the 2000s published by Selva. And it really, you know, uses Colloquial Canada to render these stories of activists, you know, slum activists, but also everyday residents who are basically making the city.
- [55:53]
Ajanta Subramanian
Right.
- [55:53]
Malini Ranganathan
The city is made by the workers, and the workers have stories to tell about their rural origins, you know, their hopes and dreams for their children, their experience in the city. And so that's a really, as Junaid was saying, you know, there's non state archives. These are. These are very rich sources of telling and narrating the city. But of course, in my work, thinking about contestations around land grabs, around class power, around the kind of usurpation of the public by private interests, by the very wealthy, by the elites, is something that runs through both popular genres of film. If we talk about mainstream Indian cinema and Bollywood, but also regional cinema and books, novels on the city. And so working with a scholar of literature and another geographer is sort of how to bring these stories to life that I think add a lot of texture to even social movements and political movements around corruption and land grabbing, you know, it was very coincidental as we were writing the book, this very well known Tamil Dalit director called Pa Ranjit makes the film Kala, Right. And that is about sort of fictionalized, but also quite based in truth and reality about Dharavi and its origins. And he actually has this lovely kind of history of how the Tamils, you know, migrated the Ali Darvidas, right, to produce Bombay. And they were the workers of the city. They turned the marshland into housing. And he has this great history of that. But I think even the symbolism around Brahmanism is so poignant in that movie because you have this politician, Haridada, who always wears white and he performs purity, doesn't drink water. And Kala's house, Kala is the slum leader. Untouchability kind of in its most grotesque form is like there in front of you in film form. Right. And it does something in a way that I think writing can't. So, yeah, we draw on the symbolism, the songs, you know, even the indexing of black hip hop culture in the movie. It's all very, very vibrant and I think gives a more hopeful vision actually of the city. The city. The city for everyone, not just for the few. The city is an inclusive space.
- [58:23]
Ajanta Subramanian
Yeah, that's great. Okay. In the few minutes that we have left, I wanted to turn us to racial capitalism as a framework. I mean, you've both been part of this collaborative effort to critically assess the relevance of racial capitalism for understanding political economies of caste and, you know, thinking through what the implications are. Right. Of extending a framework that is most closely associated with the societies shaped by Atlantic slavery to other parts of the world. So Malni, in an essay you wrote in 2022, you made a case for the broader relevance of racial capitalism and you say the following. The lens of racialization reveals the continuous nature of caste differentiation under capitalist political economy while also affording opportunities towards transnational solidarity that have been thus far thwarted or obscured by scholars, the Indian state and caste supremacist agendas. So in this quote, you're arguing both for the importance of racial capitalism as an analytical concept and as a basis for these cross border affiliations. Right. And I find it quite interesting that in, in a more recent piece which hasn't been published yet, you, you seem to flip this argument by pointing out several ways that caste analysis might expand our conception of racial capitalism. Right. So not the other way. And so I just wanted to take up two points that you make. Right. And one is you say that, you know, caste analysis, because of the focus on the role of non state agents in advancing capitalist dispossession and accumulation. This, that, this is something that could be extended to racial capitalism which typically focuses on state sanctioned violence, right. You know, policing prisons, borders, et cetera. And so that was one thing which I thought was really interesting. And then the second is, and this is something you've already touched upon, that one of the sort of interventions of environmental justice was precisely to point to social inequality, Right. As the necessary basis for a non bourgeois environmentalism. Right. And, but you, you use this other term, you, you call it environmental unfreedoms. And you, you, you Say that you want to use the term unfreedom as opposed to injustice, which is typically the term that's used by environmental justice movements in the global North. So can you say a little bit more about both of these points? And then I want to turn to Junaid's own engagement with racial capitalism.
- [61:19]
Malini Ranganathan
Yeah, thanks a lot. Actually, I've gotten, you know, provocative and very helpful generative critiques around. Why is it that the question is always, you know, how does racial capitalism or theories developed in the Western academy apply to caste capitalism rather than the other way around? I find that a very generative critique. And I do think that there are extraordinary insights about the co constitution between caste and class, and caste and capital, caste, class and gender that are very helpful for the racial capitalism literature. One of which of course, as you have pointed out, the role of, for lack of a better term, for now, vigilantes, people who are outside of the state, who enforce state power, who act like the state. And you see, for instance, in majoritarian India there's now quite a few people who take it upon themselves to police beef eating, for instance, and they get full impunity and sanction by the state. And so there is a variety of realms outside of what we call the state that I think function as these appendages of caste capitalism or majoritarian capitalism, or now we even have oligarchical capitalism, you know, that do the dirty work in many ways. And I think that's something that the racial capitalism literature is quite myopic on because the state often is also left unpacked, by the way. Right. And that's something we get from post colonial literature that the state is quite heterogeneous. There's different arms of it. There are certain arms you can actually work with quite productively. There's certain arms that are more regressive. Right. Disaggregating the state is an important staple, I think, of the post colonial controversy, as is then looking at these extra state actors in their roles in advancing state power. So that's one way, I think, I think also what you mentioned about looking towards solidarity, we cannot afford to in this moment exceptionalized caste as like that thing that just occurs in South Asia and that thing that is just within South Asian Hinduism. Right. It's so quirky. I don't understand it. It's outdated. We can't afford those kinds of dismissals.
- [63:42]
Junaid Shaikh
Right.
- [63:43]
Malini Ranganathan
Of caste. And so there is a very strategic imperative. And I think Junaid's work shows so nicely how the Dalit Panthers looked to the Black Panthers. Looked to authors like Fanon and Angela Davis to situate their predicament as a more global phenomenon. And so there's also utility in doing that. Personally, why I use the term unfreedoms is because I think it also gets to the literary strain within Dalit revolution that has talked about the fundamental sort of dignity robbing and dehumanizing tendencies of casteism and classism. Right. In a way that I think environmental scholarship hasn't really wrapped their heads around. Yes, there's a good amount of environmental justice scholarship that talks about the poisoning of our water and health and all that, but really taking the experience of dehumanization as a centerpiece of environmental violence and environmental harm, that's what that word unfreedoms tries to capture as also resistance outside of the courts in and outside of the courts in the U.S. it's very juridical, it's very legally oriented. There's this concept of justice, like with a capital J. You know, you fight environmental justice through the civil rights law. Has that got us far? No. Now the civil rights law is being weaponized against black and brown people. It's such a regressive moment in the United States. So unfreedoms also gets at the larger sense of freedom and that's what the battle is for ultimately.
- [65:22]
Ajanta Subramanian
Yeah. Junaid, so let's end with you. And so reading your work, it seems like you also have two ways that you're engaging with racial capitalism. And first is an argument for the socio historical embeddedness of capitalism. Right. So you know, you, you say capitalism unfolds on a global scale, but relies on different political and labor regimes and non economic institutions for accumulating wealth. So, and you know, we've talked already about the, the, the centrality of difference, right? Difference, differentiation, difference making to the operations of capitalism. But you also say that just as capitalism takes root through the social particulars of specific places, so too much must racial capitalism become particularized or have resonance for its political potential to be realized. And to quote you again, you say the category's potential for building solidarities is undeniable. After all, it captures an important movement of capital, its reliance on difference to sustain itself. But if it remains just another abstract universal, a ghostly presence in the entanglements of castism and capitalism, anti caste activists in India may find only limited use of it. Its success will depend on the political thinking and subjectivities that it inspires among people oppressed by caste capitalism and patriarchy. And of course, as Malni pointed out, one of the clearest Examples of this inspiration is the formation of the Dalit panthers in the 1970s. Right. So do you want to say something about what the Dalit Panthers as your window onto this sort of. Yeah, yeah. The imaginative solidarities of anti racist and anti cast, whatever. Yeah. However you want to address it.
- [67:13]
Junaid Shaikh
No. It's also a brief history of how my engagement with racial capitalism and for the longest time I was sitting on the fence because I had not thought about too much about it, so I didn't know whether I'll end up using the term, finding it useful, etc. But then in the process of writing, I thought one of the great things about the category Dalit itself, from which the category then that from the Dalit Panther movement is formed, is that when it's formulated, it's not a state sanctions category. It's an attempt by intellectuals who identify as Dalits to escape state sanctioned categories like scheduled caste, right. Or Mahars or madigas or etc. Etc. And formulate a category going back to an earlier question, which may seem that it's open and utopian. Right. But that's precisely the power of that category. The attempt is to emancipate yourself, just like Malini was talking about freedom. Emancipation is another term that is brought up and is important, is to move beyond the power of state categories and come up with something which is the Dalit Panther. And in that they start of course, engaging with the Black Panther movement and etc. Etc. And create a movement called the Dalit Panther movement in which they see parallels in some of their experiences of being marginalized, of being ghettoized, et cetera, et cetera. And it's an attempt to build then some solidarities. They're learning from each other, they're learning from the third world movement, thinks the radical movements of the third world in the 1960s and 70s, Vietnam War is important, Algerian independence is important, African movements are important, all of that. So they are learning with that. Which is why then when the turn to racial capitalism happens, I was a little skeptical. I think the UN reformulated nationalists in me came out when I was sitting, when I was saying I was sitting on the fence that why should we embrace racial capitalism as this category? And that is why. But because. And that's why I was sitting on the fence, right? But I see now that it's an attempt by scholars and activists and intellectuals to build some form of solidarity across national nation state divisions. It's an attempt to again, to move beyond the nation state and state sanctioned categories. And in that imagine some certain types of solidarity. Racial capitalism still has problems. Why it's come up in the 2010s, et cetera. There's a context in which it comes up too. And the context is of course the recession, but also the first black president, etc. And the continued experience of racism, et cetera, all of that. So racial capitalism can also become very insular, or at least, but in the way some of the Dalit intellectuals are wanting to use it, at least it can be an attempt to build certain solidarities. And I'm appreciating that. I think in the process of writing, I'm appreciating that process of building solidarities more what may eventually happen of racial capitalism. You'll see. I am still not convinced. I mean, if, as I'm saying, if it just becomes an abstract universal right just to be invoked, I don't think people will find much use of it if it's just an empty invocation of that category. But if you see it as this attempt by intellectuals and activists to build certain connections, etc, etc, then there are possibilities there.
- [71:47]
Ajanta Subramanian
All right, thank you guys. This was wonderful. Really appreciated this conversation. It was so rich and wide ranging. Thank you for coming on the podcast.
- [72:01]
Junaid Shaikh
Thank you so much, Ajanta.
- [72:03]
Malini Ranganathan
Thank you, Ajanta.
- [72:14]
Ajanta Subramanian
Thanks to all our listeners for joining us. The cast pod can be accessed through our website, thecastpod.org and through our partner, the New Books Network. Sound editing and website design are managed by Siddharth Ravi. And the opening and closing theme music is from the song Combat Breathing written by Vijay Iyer and performed by Vijay Iyer. Linda May Han. Oh, and Tishan. Sorry. If you enjoyed today's episode, please be sure to share it on social media and send us your suggestions for Future episodes@thecastpodmail.com this is Ajantha Subramanian signing off. Until next time,