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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to the CAST pod, where we assemble scholars, activists, community organizers, artists and others to make sense of what CAST 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, a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York. And joining me today are three scholars in the burgeoning field of Dalit studies. Ram Narayan Rawat is associate professor of History at the University of Delaware. Ram's work addresses racism and social exclusion, social subaltern histories and histories of democracy in colonial and postcolonial India. K. Sathya Narayana is professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad. Satya's work is in the fields of Dalit studies and literary history. Sanal Mohan is retired professor in the School of Social Sciences, Mahatma Gandhi University. Sanal's work is on colonial modernity, Dalit movements and Protestant Christianity in India. You can find their full bios in the show notes to this episode. So for now let me just note two important publications that we'll be discussing at more length in the episode. The first is Ram and Satya's co edited 2016 volume Dalit Studies and the second is the the 2025 co edited volume that all three of them co edited, which is titled Dalit Journeys for Dignity. So welcome to the podcast.
- [02:01]
B
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you very much.
- [02:05]
A
Yes. So I would like to begin by asking you to historicize the rise of Dalit studies in its contemporary form. So in the volume, the first, the 2016 volume Dalit Stud, you identified the 1990s as a critical moment of rupture. Right. When certain conditions of possibility for Dalit studies were created. So can you say a little bit about why the 1990s was such an important turning point?
- [02:40]
C
Okay, yeah, let me start. Yeah. So I think from the late 80s, so I would always look at these developments in the context of major massacres of Dalits in the country, starting from Bilchi Kilvanmani to Karamchedu Vempenta Chundur and other such kind of major killings of Dalits and followed by that. I think the important discussion followed by Garanchodu was in terms of the debate went up to Parliament then whether there was such an institution called caste, whether it is alive, we are in modern India. I think that was the nature of the discussion followed by that. Today we have that SAST atrocities act, which was a product of that movement, those debates and followed by that. By late 90s, then the. But exactly in the 1990s, the Mandel Commission, the implementation of Mandel Commission. Then the mobilizations in the university for the first time again, there are like these phrases like caste raised its ugly head and we are all modern. Whether the universities have anything called cast, whether the institution, the faculty, the students have anything called an identity of caste, whether caste relations inform anything of that. I think that was the moment where these questions have come up. And then I think there is also new set of activism, activists and also kind of scholarship which started revisiting the notions of university public spaces in general, institutions in general, and ending overall the society itself. A new kind of a perspective that emerged that moment. What Rajinu Kothari called two senses of politics today. Two senses of politics of caste. The one he would call is Dalit politics of caste. So Dalit politics of caste is different from the upper caste politics of caste. So I think that's the beginning where there is a kind of a new perspective, new agency to the marginalized kind of social groups. I think that is where we locate Dal studies. Because the question of knowledge, the question of, you know, representation in these various institutions, I think be in there for all of us.
- [05:27]
A
Ram and Sanal, do you want to add anything? Yeah, go ahead.
- [05:30]
D
I. I will just. I want to build on Sathya's comments in of 1980s and 1990s. And I want to highlight one aspect which is the. The role of creating a legal Act. The 1989 Prevention of Atrocities Act. The motivations and discussions leading to that act brought the question of caste into public domain. So I want to underline the fact that this discussion takes place around making rules and regulations and constitution making. And so that's, I think very important limit. And if you look at the developments that Satya is emphasizing in 1990s, it also has to do with, you know, the government act to extend affirmative action, the Mandal. So they're both kind of linked to rules and regulations. What these debates did is that they in. They broadcast into public domain in the way in which it was absent prior to 1990s. And so after that, you see late 1990s and early 2000s, you see a new body of scholarship that actually focused on the question of caste inequality and discrimination. I think that context, therefore, that context for us was both a personal as well as academic. Let me take a pause here.
- [06:53]
A
Okay, great. Sanal, did you want to add anything to that yeah.
- [06:58]
B
So thank you very much for this event. I wish to bring back some of the debates in the area of history writing. So the early 1980s must have been the time when all this in a new histories and historiographies were evolving like subaltern studies etc. So that actually was a time when I was in my postgraduate classes, early 1980s. So that was a real con. Situation which, or let's say the real context that made a lot of thinking possible. But as it has been made clear by you know, the subsequent critiques, there was many absences in those historiographies. Long standing issues of hierarchy, exclusion, oppression, etc in Indian society which definitely came out of caste and it's different kind of expressions in various parts of India. So this is something which was very much there. And we know that the radical historic office of the 1980s failed to address these questions. But the fact of the matter is that they opened up some of these questions which in fact continued to, you know, circulate in the scholarly world. So I think that's very important and for many students at that time, and I'm yet to see many of them, but I think there was at least a substantial sections within those who were influenced by such historic, you know, continue to work on this sort of things. But when it comes to darling studies, I. I don't know, I guess sometimes a certain kind of lived experience, you know, certain guideline lived experience becomes very, very crucial because I always think why this sort of histories had to wait for such a long time or such a social science engagement had to wait for such a long time. We don't find many in this mainstream sociological enterprises of history writing trying to problematize, know, questions of cast hierarchy and things of that kind from a critical vantage point offered by Dalit experience that was not actually happening. So even the radical historiographies don't. Did not do that. So therefore, you know, there was, I don't. It is right to say that something that was already in the making, something that should have been anticipated, or it was just trying to emerge in a different manner. So the 1990s political and social ch created perhaps a larger context, as our colleagues have already mentioned. But then this intellectual kind of, you
- [10:35]
C
know, know,
- [10:38]
B
context in social science writings in the 1980s definitely was giving a lot of possibilities.
- [10:48]
A
That's great. There's four key features of this intellectual formation that your volume foregrounds that I thought were really interesting. And the first is the shift from seeing Dalits primarily as objects of reform. Right which you gloss as the hygiene perspective. So a shift from that to seeing Dalits as the subjects of history. Sanal, you've already talked about Subaltern Studies as providing a kind of opening, right, to rethink subaltern agency. But what is it that Dalit studies offers to this question of historical agency that Subaltern Studies was not able to fully address?
- [11:38]
C
Yeah, so these are, I think, two key kind of aspects of, I think, both our values. And so thank you for identifying these two kind of key issues. One is that, as I already mentioned, about representing Dalits as Harrisons, representing caste as a feudal relic or untouchability as a social evil, as a kind of old practice or a bad practice, but not as something that has to do with the experience of discrimination, experience of humiliation are a lived reality. So those kinds of, again, problems with the perspective of horizon. So that is where I think in the 90s and late 90s, this whole issue of the rise of the Dalit subjects, looking at the reality from a Dalit kind of a perspective, I think that kind of opened up quite a lot of things, including the problem with the arisen perspective itself and the reform perspective itself and so on. So that is one point I would say let my other colleagues add the second point about the Dalits versus the Subaltern Studies. But I have also kind of grown up reading Subaltern Studies as a kind of radical historiography, highly influenced because of their own interest in theory and narrative and so on and so forth. But when the Dalit question kind of emerged in the public realm, then I was quickly disappointed because you did not find, in fact, literally, you did not find any essays on the Dalit question or even touchability and caste till about 11th or 12th issue. And also, you don't even have any Dalit scholar writing in those Dalits is quite kind of obvious. Then the other, more I think theoretically important point is that the marginalized, I think, have to be insurgents are armed rebels and they'll be fighting against the colonial state or even Indian state. So those are the ones who are the eligible subjects to be part of that historiography. But whereas the Dalit question that emerged, since you mentioned the term reform, they emerged in the socio religious realm. That's where they emerged. That's where they're raising all the questions about the social equality, all the questions about religious equality, the issues that we took up in the second volume, I think that's the ground where the ground is the social and the religious. But I think that ground is completely ignored. By Subaltern Studies. I would stop here.
- [14:43]
D
Yeah, I. I just want to build on what Satya said and try to connect with where Sanal stopped earlier, which connects very nicely with your questions. One, I think one of the interesting things that we discover while editing, I think while writing our own books, but also editing these two volumes is the legacy of nationalism on our historiography. The legacy of nationalism on our histography has been so powerful and so embedded in the nationalist framework. Whether they're Marxist or Subaltern Studies, the project is deeply embedded in a nationalist framework. So the colonial state, and the colonial state is seen in those prisms. But Dalit histories and even women activists in the 1920s or Adivasi groups in the 1930s were all trying to engage with the state as much as with the imperial state, as much as the elite groups were engaging with the elites, with the imperial state or the colonial state. But those kind of histories were absent in these accounts because they were not seen as legitimate or radical. And so I think Dalis studies has tried to challenge that. You know, so I was recently reading Divya Charian's book, and so for her, this, this framework, pluralism versus nationalism, is something that it is necessary to step outside to write histories of caste.
- [16:18]
B
Now, in all this we have the colonial versus anti colonial kind of frame. Now, I think in the context of Dizz, it has been made clear by now the idea was to move beyond that as much as possible, or trying to move beyond this and then talk about problems which were not necessarily, you know, becoming the central concerns of such historic graphics, like as the second volume here opens with the question of dignity, for example. Now if you go into the genealogy of that, so we can have a lot of discussions on this, how we talk about this. But one of my concerns would be following what Raman Sa said to see if this idea of dignity that we want to open up would take us beyond this questions of the nation state, state centric, historic, nation state centric, historic, where these issues would not be thought of as central because you have this great struggle or fight against colonialism. Now the same problem remains there when you use, when. When one uses the word like origin, which of course we all know that's very paternalistic and it has this highly anachronistic kind of religious connotation and so on. In fact, the very idea of dignity, I guess, is completely against that sort of thing because it, this whole idea of horizon, in fact, denies dignity to individuals who are thus categorized. And then when we rethink History from Dalit perspective, we really want to open up all those issues, you know, which were sidelined in historic talking about the experiences of people, different forms of oppressions, not necessarily untouchability alone, because I think that's a very major problem. In fact, when you want to talk about the Dalit experiences in various parts of India and you find there are in a way reducing everything to untaceability becomes really problematic to the extent that, for instance, we hardly talk about a question like slavery. So in Indian historical, I don't, I don't think anybody talks about this as a serious problem, but this was a reality for millions of people in India. So therefore Dalit historiography or Dalit studies, let's say dal studies would have to problematize these issues, which are not there in Indian social sciences, which are not there in Indian historical, etc. Sometimes when I, as I live in this part of India to talk about South Asian studies becomes a big misnomer because it doesn't capture the reality of, you know, what is happening right now here in academia, in social science writing, in history writing and so on. So therefore, one of the big challenges this is my point is to really open up new research questions, identify new problems, and then create, you know, insurgent knowledge in certain place. I wish to use that sort of word, you know, to make this knowledge production possible which will challenge the, the edifice of Indian social sciences. So I think that is one possibility. I mean, it doesn't mean that we alone do this. In fact, there are quite a number of other colleagues based in India and elsewhere doing similar kind of research. But the idea that these two volumes tried to address was to, you know, really create a platform for researchers to think about it and then develop new ideas. And this is the kind of thing. So therefore here, Dalit's centric kind of social science, critical social sciences, quite a departure from old kind of. I mean, even the kind of social science writings that are familiar to us. So these are invitation to real, you know, moving beyond many of these concerns. Yeah. Earlier issues and then thinking afresh about these problems.
- [21:18]
A
So, okay, the first thing I'd like to have you say a little more about is how Dalit studies forces us to reconsider colonial modernity. Right. Which from within nationalist historiography appears simply as, you know, the antithesis of freedom. Right. So how does a Dalit studies perspective, and especially Dalit engagements with colonial institutions, with colonial discourses, how does that help us move beyond that binary that ram you mentioned? Right. Between the colonial and the national. And also how does it help us engage with modernity more broadly as a sort of set of possibilities? And then the second is this question of dignity is so interesting. And yeah, as you said, the second volume really hones in on this right, dignity as a key analytic for understanding Dalit history and politics. And in that volume, you know, you talk about the need to foreground the Dalit social right. So for you, this sort of notion of the Dalit social is really key for capturing movements for dignity. But Sanal, you ended by saying that untouchability is an important focus, but if we really want to have a capacious conception of dignity, we have to move beyond untouchability alone to consider things like slavery, which bring in the question of the economic right. And in that volume, you also say a lot about how addressing the Dalit social, addressing the inequities and disabilities of caste, necessarily involve engaging with political institutions. Right. So my second question is, what does it mean to set apart the Dalit social as something that is distinct from the political and the economic?
- [23:45]
B
Yeah.
- [23:45]
C
So in fact, if you think of Indian kind of debates within the social sciences and humanities, I think the anti caste thinkers, most of them are accused of being, you know, pro colonial or pro imperialist. So that is the charge I think most of the anti caste thinkers have been kind of faced with. So that is an issue that I think, I would say the contemporary Dalit writers have addressed extensively, like Emirati writers, like Baugul and others have addressed that in great detail. And so I would like to just mention what Bogul says. Bogul says something like, colonialism has always been thought of as army and prison. Colonialism is thought of as these oppressive institutions. And therefore the only response is that join the nationalist struggle and then oppose the army. Once you send away the British army and British institutions, then we'll have freedom, we'll have independence. So this is kind of an argument that the nationalists have addressed. So I think, as opposed to this kind of an understanding. So colonialism actually represents many other things. This is a very narrow kind of a monolithic understanding of colonialism and something that is posited by nationalism itself, and more particularly Gandhi. And nationalism itself had posited this kind of an understanding. But nationalism also meant educational, institutional. Sorry. Colonialism also meant education, health and many other such social aspects. And of course, we are talking about conversion in the second volumes. It is also part of that. And I always quote Sanal in this context because Sanal has this interesting kind of a formulation. He always refers is that it is for the first time that it is the missionaries which looked at the Dalit body as a body that requires medicine, it requires food, it requires clothing. So this is the kind of a perspective. So what is colonialism there? Colonialism, obviously something very, very different and so on. So I think so as because of that, all the anti caste thinkers, whether it is Ambedkar PUL or many other local scholars, they have always had a strategic relationship with colonialism. So they have taken a different kind of route, very strategic route of negotiating in various kinds of domain for mobility, for dignity, for equality and so on. I think this is the way how they really kind of reread colonialism as something more than kind of army are simply as oppressive kind of a regime. But it is something that, it's a context that opened up many other possibilities and you have to negotiate with that. You cannot simply say we are anti colonial, therefore.
- [26:58]
D
Yeah, I just want to add a couple of things to what Satya said. So colonial modernity.
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C
And
- [27:08]
D
I think it's. I feel, I think that's one of the things Dalit studies volumes are doing is. And writings by people who've been doing work on Dalit studies in the last two decades is trying to show that we need to move beyond thinking of colonialism as an ism. But actually colonial state and colonial society had multiple possibilities and layers of opportunities, layers of possibilities and structures of exploitation. And, you know, so in the Dalit studies volume two, I think we have a quote from Bethkar, who argued that people who think that the state is more powerful are actually wrong because he argued that it's the society that has much more powerful tools in its hand than the state will ever have. I think he was gesturing towards the caste rules, that caste rules are more powerful than the British rules and regulations, particularly the penal code. So he was actually arguing that the state is less powerful than the rules of manufacturing and Manuspuri, you know, so that actually underlines what the kind of challenge that Daris leaders in southern India, northern India, all parts of India, were trying to see. Not colonialism or state, but a number of opportunities that have opened up for Dalits that were absent for the last 2000 years in index society. So, for example, to list the set of possibilities, you know, access to education in schools and also building on that, the access to secular work, like you can start work in railways, you can start your business, you can work in construction industries. Dalits were very much present in the construction industry business, opening up restaurants, hotels, shops. So they were really entering into an arena of businesses and trades that was. That became open to them for the first time in the late 19th century and early 20th century. And then the third possibility that Satya emphasized is the engagement with, not just with the colonial state, but also with missionaries that allowed them to think about, you know, who they are and the kind of respect and engagement that they were able to do was something they found really refreshing. So because it provided access to schools, access to. And I think one of the point that comes out in the second volume is that being considered as equal human beings, missionaries, the debates and the way in which missionaries were treating them was being engaged in sometimes in most contexts, as equal human beings. And that's one of the big point that Ambedkar writes in Annihilation of Caste, that our struggle is to be recognized as equally human beings.
- [30:12]
A
Sanal, did you want to say something more about either colonial modernity or this focus on the Dalit social and whether that is distinct from the economic and the political?
- [30:24]
B
Yeah. So thank you very much. So I just follow what my colleagues just mentioned here. One of the things that comes out of our discussion is to see the complexities, or let's put it as the complex nature of colonialism. And it also depends on where you are, which segment of society you are, and what sort of political economy is there to which you are part of as a worker, as an enslaved person, or as an agricultural laborer, you know, that kind of, you know, different varieties of work in which these people are engaged. So, so you there we find a very complex kind of regime existing. For a very long time, this regime has been, you know, exploiting people. So the political economy argument comes very important. Now. Colonialism opens up quite a lot of possibilities as it remains as a very complex kind of power structure. So for us, it is always important to see the. The power structure within which different Dalits communities were already locked up and they were performing the kind of work which they were forced to perform. So therefore, any possibilities of moving out of that, any relaxation in terms of understanding the people as people with feelings, emotions, you know, their own desires, their own dreams, their pain, all these, you know, as real living human beings, these are the people who exercise their agency at any given point of time. Now, this recognition happens in the context of colonial modernity, as we put it, for due to a variety of reasons. So now, even today, when we, you know, do this ethnography kind of research, we hear people talking about this, which they have heard from their great grandparents or parents, etcetera, Saying that if you are approaching a white person. I put it a very crude way. Even if they are not going to help you, they will not harm you. This we had in. In a. In a con. Context of social science field work. In my village, the village where I grew, people have been talking about the possibilities of escaping caste oppression within Christianity. They are able to meet, heat up with Jesuit missions and missionaries of the Jesuit orders. So, therefore, what we need to do is to look at this complex nature, you know, the social existence, and then see how people have been experiencing colonialism through various kinds of agencies, and then see how they think about themselves in a very different way. So where these intimate emotions becomes really significant. In fact, we do not have that kind of a history in any of these genres of historiography that we have been talking about. See, hardly we find historiography of the private life of the. And I wish that would be a fantastic moment if you are able to write a private. The history of private life, whereas we have the history of private life. Fantastic books by scholars dealing with the dominant social groups. So can we think about the history of that kind or about the emotional aspects of the social life, individual life and so on? So therefore, colonial modernity brought in these possibilities. This is something that I think is very, very important.
- [34:47]
A
I think that point is really well taken that all three of you have made, that we need to disaggregate colonialism, right. And think of it as, you know, a sort of complex political terrain which different Dalit groups have engaged with and negotiated for various ends. Right. But also to recognize that, you know, the. The possibility of an escape from either caste labor or caste social disability is only ever partially achieved, right. Either through conversion or even through the exit from caste, marked forms of labor. Like, you know, there's plenty of work on discrimination within Christian churches. I mean, Sanal, your work deals with this, right. But also how caste enters even industrial spaces of labor, right. And produces new forms of segmentation that one really has to attend to the kind of complex historicity of caste. So that we think of it not purely as a relic, but also not as having been done away with because of the advent of modernity. Right. I mean, it's kind of become. It's been reconstituted in new ways. It's a really interesting problem that I think maybe argues for this focus on the Dalit social. Because you might think that, you know, the legal outlawing of caste or the. The emergence of wage labor, that these things would get rid of caste once and for all. And of course, that doesn't happen. Right.
- [36:49]
C
Yeah.
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D
So when we talk about that is social, I mean, I think Ambedkar, this idea comes from. Ambedkar talks about, you know, that does, you know, as we showed in religion, you know, in the introduction, we talk about religion is social, where we number of quotes from Bethkar about the question of Dalits being recognized as equal human beings and whether this, whether this is possible within the framework of a Hindu social life.
- [37:18]
A
But can I, can I just jump in there for a second? So, but, but what are the stakes of equating the problem of caste with Hinduism? How does your second volume in particular navigate this, this kind of. What I see as a tension between the kind of scriptural definitions of caste which, which always lead back to Hinduism and seeing caste in more sort of socio structural terms.
- [37:52]
C
I will not directly address that. We'll come to that a little later. Dalit social as a notion is something that we claim. And also the others also kind of attribute this to Ambedkar's own distinction between social and the political and why the national movement is focusing on so much on political agendas, not on social agendas. Unless you have a social revolution, you cannot have a political decision. That's how it starts. But when it comes to the 80s and 90s and later, what happens is that there is, I think, the reassertion of that kind of a dominance in politics after independence, from the 50s to later completely the political takes over and the state took so over. The development takes over. And in fact, the Karan Cherdu was a consequence of the post independent Indian states development legend of green revolution, of agrarian reforms which really strengthened the dominant caste, emerging commerce and then regional political formation, India coming into politics and so on. In a way that the social is again completely kind of suppressed and there is a certain kind of a new political emergence. That is where I think the more recent mobilization of Dalits and the articulation of the Dalits social as a kind of very important issue. I would say that it's a reassertion of the Dalits social and where the central question would be human dignity. And in fact in the atrocities. So the central issue raised was that what about the fact that we are human beings? What about human worth? And of course this is an issue raised by several other scholars in the beginning that there are human beings and they have to be respected and so on. But it is the marginalized group recognizing and then asserting that we are human and we have to be recognized. And that is where human dignity. And in fact the interesting thing within the Dalit social domain is that till that time, even within some of the modernist perspective, even within Amit Gharat perspective, Dalits is seen as stigmatized, dehumanized, wretched people. The only solution to their problem is that you just kind of clean them up and make them modern citizens. Just clean them up. They're too dirty. Just clean them up and make them citizens and they will become citizens. So this is the idea that's an implied kind of an idea. But with the rise of the Dalit social In the late 90s and 2000, what happens is that Dalit reappears in all its forms as scavengers, as sub castes, as people who are eating rats, as people who are doing various kinds of things, claiming that these are the kinds of people and this is the labor that we are doing, these are the rituals we are performing, and these are the performances we are doing. We are hungry with poverty, and this is the complexity of our life, and this is the nature of our life. And we are not feeling humiliated. We are not kind of completely intimidated by this and we claim ourselves. So I think that sense of the re. Emergence of the social is the most, I think, important thing in the kind of recent context.
- [41:30]
A
And I think your. Your focus on literature is really key to capturing this. Both the diversity and the richness of Dalit life as life.
- [41:45]
D
Right.
- [41:48]
A
And. And the. So seeing it as more than just a lack. Right. That it's. That it's a sort of. That it doesn't measure up to some normative standard that has to be reached. And the way to bridge that gap is through something like citizenship. Right. So, I mean, this seems to be a really important aspect of the kind of literary renaissance. Right. Is to reclaim not just the dignity of Darat life, but the. The refusal of a single normative conception.
- [42:23]
C
Yes.
- [42:24]
A
Of what it is to be like a deserving subject.
- [42:29]
D
I just want to story size what Sathya said about Dalit social, to say that even Ambedkar, when he organizes a number of satyagras, you know, temple entry movements and Maharashtgra and the discussion for rights for citizenship, separate and proportional representation in the discussion in franchise and expansion of franchise.
- [42:53]
C
So
- [42:56]
D
those satyagras were seeking to engage with dominant sections to treat us as equal citizens by allowing us to drink water from Mahar. And that was a. That was after the mahar council in 1924 passed a resolution making Mahar water tank accessible to all. So it was a legal act and legal issue. And then Ambedkar said, let's find out if we can be treated equally by the citizens of Mahar. So when they go to Mahar, they were denied entry and they were actually attacked. And, you know, similarly in the temple entries, those temples were closed for years so that the. The lists were not allowed to enter. So if you see the social struggles and then you see the engagement on the question of proportional representation and legislative assemblies, increasingly, you know, Ambedkar begins to recognize, as Satya was saying, that the social is being debated through the medium of religion. You know, so that the question of caste can be addressed after independence was the refrain. And as Satya just mentioned, after independence, caste disappeared from the public domain, which is what Dalit groups argued will happen. That after independence, caste we disappear from discussion. Only after 1980s and through electoral participation and a bit of prosperity that these issues again opened up. So both in the context of Ambedkar also, it was an effort to engaging through political movements, engaging with the state and engaging with Gandhi and congress leaders to address the question of caste when they were completely denied and refused acknowledgement. Then he begins to think more ambitiously about, okay, what is happening here? Why are we not being treated and recognized as equal? Yeah, you know, so that's why. Then it goes to the question of religion. So it's only in the mid-1930s begins to argue that we have to change our religion. And that's what in fact, all of them begin to argue.
- [44:52]
A
Yeah, you know, so there's something that Buddhism, the kind of universality that Buddhism offers exceeds the universality of the law. Right? That there's. That that law has a certain limit in its. That in its enactment, you see the limits of legal universalism. And so he reaches for religion as a kind of more capacious universalism.
- [45:19]
D
The question of religion is tied to the question of how, as you said yourself, secular laws and politics is mediated. You know, they're kind of related. For example, you know, who can enter the temple in a village, you know, when in my village, when I was growing up, who can go to which social spaces is governed not by law, but it's governed by social customs?
- [45:42]
A
Yeah, yeah.
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D
You know, so. So that there's no state there. It's just that, you know, they're governed by religious laws, you know, that you can access temples and we cannot. Who can go to certain places where they sit. They're all social, as it were.
- [45:58]
A
In fact, all three of your pieces in the first volume really foreground the question of space. Right. I mean, space becomes this really important instrument both of domination and of Course, oppositional claims. Sanal, in your, in your piece, you know, you talk about Ayan Kali and the, the, the, the need to transgress segregated caste space. That, that's one of the sort of first acts of collective assertion, right?
- [46:36]
B
Yeah.
- [46:37]
A
And that those segregated caste spaces are socially regulated.
- [46:43]
B
Thank you very much. It's a very interesting discussion that has opened up a lot of things. I wish to go back to one point which agenda raised which is connected with structural conditions, which is not, which should not be seen through the Hindu religious Madrid. I think this is really significant in understanding quite a number of issues that is in other religions space. So I wish to bring in the question of the social there which all of you have been talking about. Now this is my personal kind of doubt. Are we how far we are safe to separate the social and political? Because they are in many ways, you know, queries. You know, they exist in a layered manner. Some most often appearing as one and the same. So as just now, Ram said, when you want to go to the temple in a village and where you want to go, who wants to go where in all these are decided. So the question there is a politics there, is the question of politics there, there is a question of social there. So what unites them could be the question of power which operates in Indian society. Whichever part of India we want to talk about, we are talking about. So when we talk about del social I think one central question is to bring in this idea of power, to see how power gets configured through this. So therefore I think if we want to look at when Ambedkar talks about, you know, the social questions, you know, needing immediate attention, which in fact is, I think it's a political kind of argument possibly he was making or I think let's think of it as a political demand, a political argument whereby ultimately the idea is to dismantle the power structure of a village society or a semi urban or an urban society. Because we know that urban India is not free from cast at all. Although some political scientists would say that, you know, there is no caste in urban India and all that, that kind of stuff. But we know that, you know, this is there almost everywhere in India. So therefore bringing back to our discussion the structural conditions to which agenda had referred to will be to refocus our attention on the question of power. And then these are manifested in, I mean these are articulated, not manifesting various ways. And you know, people really experience this, you know, the question of power over there. And when we raise the question of human dignity, as Satya said, In the case of Karma children and all that, how this, you know, new kind of politics was emerging, the kamas, you know, rising. So we find similar kind of social groups asserting in many parts of it, even today it is happening. So therefore I think one question is to, you know, really, as I said earlier, you see the complex nature of this and make it further complicated so that we are able to understand it. Although we want to segregate these things to see how they operate, we also need to bring together to see how, you know, really social power operates. And that is when we see how caste, castes get re articulated today, you know, particularly when in a contemporary context caste becomes very, very important.
- [51:05]
A
So perhaps it's. It's less that the social is distinct from the political and more that the social affords a more comprehensive account of power. Right. That isn't limited simply to the modern state. Right. The social is something that can accommodate institutions of authority, whether it's the caste council or whatever else, but it can also accommodate economic institutions, right? Like, like debt, right. Through which bondage gets reconstituted in new ways. If we take Sanal's cue to think of it as a space of variegated power, it can accommodate all of these different kinds of phenomena which a narrow conception of the political as purely the state would not. Right.
- [52:11]
C
Just to add to that one example I wanted to add one well known economist from Andhra Pradesh, the then Andhra Pradesh was part of the planning commission, made this point in one of the meetings sometime back is that until 1986, caste is not an indicator or a determining factor in assessing poverty. As part of the Planning Commission until 1986 they were studying poverty for years, but without caste as an indicator.
- [52:43]
B
The other point I want to bring in, see when you. Which I'm sure in the northern hemisphere you would know more about, like how enslavement had deprived across generations, you know, the possibilities of a decent life for human beings. You know, so that has been quite well documented and studied. But here in our country, this part of the world, we hardly ever people thought of all this until recently. Maybe people have a realization. But I don't know how far people talk about these vestiges of inequality impacting across generations, down to seven generations, etc. Some people would say, and if you are deprived of, you know, nutrients in your, in your mother's womb, then it affects continuously, you know, it has a reach across generations in future. So therefore this sort of issues of poverty and you know, deprivation and you know, caste slavery, which is almost like race, I think These are issues that we really need to, to bring in along with what Sathya said.
- [54:00]
D
I think Satya's example about caste and its absence in planning commission is, you can take it as an example of wider issues about the study of South Asia and the complicated history of caste as a category from the late early 20th century. How it was implicated with nationalism that anything about caste was seen as anti national. To talk about caste was seen as being anti national. Yeah, you know, so that's the legacy of nationalism. And so, yes, it's only, you know, it's only in the last, after 99 days, you know, that people began to reluctantly talk about caste, you know, because it was absent.
- [54:45]
C
I just want to come back to this point because you raised it two, three times about Hinduism and caste. So following our discussion now, we can safely conclude that all the kind of older forms of caste as a kind of ritual are endogamous, customary, kind of a practice is completely kind of changing and changing into a new kind of a modern kind of a form. As in the case of your work on the IITs or the others work on IT industry or many other deaths every day, burning of Dalits or the honor killings. These are all really tell you that it really transformed and it has really taken a new form.
- [55:31]
A
The three of you work in different regions of India, you know, north, southwest, southeast. How have you accommodated that regional complexity in your conception of Dalit studies? And for me, you know, reading your pieces really called into question the coherence of the very category of Dalit. Right? Because the experience of the Chamars is very different from, you know, Pulayas in Travancore. Right. Like, these are such diverse histories. So, or even if you look at Andhra Pradesh and the Mala Madiga conflict, I mean, these are such, they give you such different angles on the history of caste, on the contemporary politics of caste. So how does the category of the Dalit both cohere and somehow refuse to cohere? And do you address that? Yeah, yeah.
- [56:41]
D
I think one of the important points you raised is the question of mobility that Dalit actors were able to use in the 19th and 20th century. You know, for example, in Andhra Pradesh, a lot of Dalit groups move, went to Burma, and going to Burma became a source of wealth, you know, in the early 20th, late 19th and early 20th century, you know, and access to, you know, you know, lands irrigated by canals in Andhra Pradesh region. And similarly you have, in certain regions of, you know, western western Uttar Pradesh, you know, groups, you know, because of the 10 year relationships were able to enter into more commanding, you know, positions, you know, but despite. So no. So you have this material, you know, mobility that they were able to acquire. But at the same time, as we said earlier in the discussion, they were all socially, spatially and religiously bounded, you know, especially, you know, so you could, you know, so there are these, as you said, complex histories that it's not just about, you know, material power ultimately succumbs to the caste boundaries, you know. And so that's one of the kind of feature, one of the things I learned as I was writing my first book. And, you know, that there are, you know, caste boundaries which really overtake your material prosperity, you know. So that's why, you know, in North India, whether it is the Adhar movement in Punjab or Adi Hindu Mahasara movement, these two Dalit movements were asking for certain set of political rights through affirmative action because they realized that it's impossible to acquire it in politically equal terms. So the caste boundaries therefore become so much powerful. And that's why keep coming back to how do we understand these caste boundaries? To me, that's been a kind of a fundamental question in the last 10 years. What Sanal Mon called, the word Sanal Mon uses structures of power. How do you understand what are the mediums and how are they made visible to people? They're not, you know, as what are the conditions that make them visible to me is very important to understand, you know, so is it through religion? Is it through, you know, land, how they come together?
- [59:21]
C
Let me come back to this differently in the sense that, yes, it is true that these communities are different. They are all in different parts, different kinds of experiences. In fact, they fight with each other in various kind of regions. So all that is there. So those have to be. That heterogeneity, I think, must be recognized. But on the other hand, this Dalit has always been confused as a kind of empirical category. Dalit is almost seen as some kind of a caste or some kind of a name and so on. So I think, let me invoke Gopal Guru, a very important scholar in this field, that Dalit is a pedagogic category. It's not a real empirical kind of a term. It's more of a revolutionary pedagogic term as the RIT Panthers have invoked it. So you could actually think of mobilizing various people, even acknowledging differences, even to sort out the differences. This could be an important pedagogic, political, revolutionary project. So that is where the unity in some kind of heterogeneity I think that's how I would kind of describe the listeners project.
- [60:40]
A
Tanil, you want to have the last word?
- [60:45]
B
Yeah, that's a great demanding job. But I think this is real significant observation that all we have made following what Agenda said about the heterogeneity of these groups. And Sathya said it's like a revolutionary pedagogic category ultimately, which demands new set of ideas, new set of parameters by which we think about our histories and experiences, to talk about them in our everyday context and look for a future of possibilities. So I think one of the things that I have come across in my research was to see how people, although it that might appear very amorphous kind of thinking, talked about a good life, a possible future. These are the two things that would keep coming when we read the archives or we do the ethnographic fieldwork, etc. These are the two things that are coming and now that is connected with, you know, a revolutionary activity of social, economic and other forms of what we broadly call social change or transformation. So one of the things is to talk about a good life. And then that will take us back to this heterogeneity, as you said. Now there, there are two things to me. One is to think in terms of writing history or political social science. Now the moment I'm forced to think of this when I listen to what Ajita said, like the differences between the prayers in Rahangur and the chamars in Uttar Pradesh that will make somebody to write, I mean, think about certain kind of radical histories. Like the moment when I think about this, as I have been doing, I think to always doing comparative histories with questions of slavery, race, etc in other parts of the world. This is one possibility we have as far as studies is concerned. I still remember when Ram thought about the first conference, he invited his colleagues from African American studies departments over there to reflect on this question. So this is one possibility in terms of economic knowledge, product direction that we have. Similarly, you know, today historians talk a great deal about these Indonesian studies and things of that kind. The example of untouchables moving across the ocean. We need to think about it, you know, what sort of histories they carried, how they cultivated, their kind of, you know, life lies over there. So there are a lot of things that we can think about. So this heterogeneity in fact would help us to really, you know, develop radical histories and social sciences. When I use the term radical, I cannot define exactly what I mean. So my idea is to think in terms of a possible good life, where more democracy should prevail, where there is an understanding of not just humans, but also, you know, the problems of environment, justice, etc. These are things which should flourish from the bottom layers of our society. We have that ethical. As Satya and Ram had been talking about moral stamina today, when we talk about our moral stamina, it is, it has to embrace all these issues that we are facing today in the context of, but, you know, the debates in the area of Anthropocene and so on. So therefore, I think we have all possibilities as we deal with DAL studies. We do have possibilities. And yeah, these are the things that come to my mind. Thank you.
- [65:05]
A
Thank you so much. This was an amazing conversation. I really appreciate the engagement, that sort of open engagement. We could keep talking, but we must stop.
- [65:17]
B
Yes.
- [65:17]
C
Yes. Thank you. Thank you.
- [65:19]
D
Thank you. Thank you for inviting us.
- [65:31]
A
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,