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- [00:09]
A
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, Ajantha Subramanian, a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York. And joining me today for our inaugural episode are two fantastic scholars, Suraj Yengde and Anupama Rao. Suraj is India's first Dalit PhD holder from an African university, the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He's currently a W.E.B. du Bois fellow at Harvard University where he was part of the founding team of the Initiative for Institutional Anti Racism and Accountability. And he is headed to a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania where he will be jointly appointed in both history and Africana studies. Suraj is the author of the bestseller Cast Matters and a co editor with Dr. Anand of the award winning anthology the Radical in Critical Reflections. Suraj has also just completed a second monograph titled Cast A Global Story. Anu is professor of History at Columbia University, convener of Columbia's Ambedkar Initiative, and principal investigator for the project Global Racism's Cold War, Humanism and Just Futures. She has written widely on the themes of colonialism and humanitarianism and on non Western histories of gender, gender and sexuality. In addition to her 2009 book the Caste, Dalits and the Politics of Modern India, she's edited a volume titled Gender, Caste and the Imagination of Equality and is completing or perhaps has completed two other monographs, provisionally titled Ambedkar in America and Dalit Bombay. She's also co editing the Cambridge Companion to Ambedkar with Professor Shailaja, who will also be a future guest on this podcast. Welcome, welcome, welcome, Sergeant Anu, I am so grateful to you for helping me launch this podcast. I'm very, very happy to have you as our first guest. Thank you.
- [02:38]
B
Thanks so much. It's an honor to be here.
- [02:40]
A
All right, so since this is our inaugural episode and I expect that our audience, I hope that our audience will include listeners who who are curious about caste but not necessarily knowledgeable about what it is. I'd like to start us off with a kind of grounding question, and it's a grounding question, but it's also quite a difficult question. How would you explain caste to somebody who is unfamiliar with it? Anu, you want to go?
- [03:08]
B
So I would probably begin by saying that like race and class, caste is a social relationship. It always entails at least two in a relationship of power, privilege, domination, subordination. But that caste is somewhat different and distinctive because it's based on a philosophy of the body, one that tracks its origins to Hindu religion. Many of you know, the fourfold structuring of so called Varna hierarchy. And that casted itself is kind of born from an act of dismemberment, that the body actually is torn asunder. The Brahman born from the mouth, the Kshatriya, the warriors from the arms, the Vaishyas or the mercantile castes from the stomach, the Shudra or the artisanal and agrarian castes from the feet. And then the untouchables, of course, who actually hold up and give coherence to the structure of caste are nowhere in this imagination. Right. And then in terms of thinking about the modernity of caste, right. So it's got an origin in Hindu religion, but caste has really morphed and transformed that. We might think basically about caste as a form of inherited privilege. In many ways, caste sort of is a division of intellectual and manual labor. What we have is a kind of inverted pyramid where the demographic minority, the so called upper castes, control ideology and increasingly educational access and material resources. Then we might, as we start getting into a more complicated unpacking of caste, we might think about caste as a regime of structured inequality. It's complex, it's pernicious, and it's long standing, millennial. Right? And in this structure, social worth and economic status, or economic worth and social status, as you will, they're related, but in quite paradoxical ways. We might imagine that economic worth and status track each other or that the economy trumps status. But when we really think about questions of caste and how to describe it, I think it might be more interesting or worthwhile to think about it as a kind of double helix structure. Status, recognition, dignity are moving in one direction, plus it's an order of degraded labor and dehumanization of the laborer herself. So they intersect. Status and economic worth intersect. Sometimes they're combinatory, but at other times class and status diverge. So you could have people who have high caste status who may not have economic worth. And I think that's what makes caste difficult to get your head around, Right. It's not like other forms of inequality that we think about, modern forms of inequality, maybe. So caste changes, it modernizes, but it has roots in this religious ritual order that justifies also a kind of graded hierarchy and social stratification. So it's not a simple plus minus. It's not white, black. Right. But it's a structure where power is distributed. And that makes it that much harder to challenge caste, power and privilege.
- [06:30]
A
Suraj, you want to jump in?
- [06:32]
C
That's amazing. Explanation definitions that Anu provided are really pathfinders for many of us to kind of engage in this question of caste. And I'm gonna really build on some of these points for a explanation of caste. Let's look at it three ways. The first is an academic exposition of this which has been of interest for several, you know, centuries, especially about the interest of the, the foreign eye, which is what I tried to do in the first chapter of my new book, Caste A Global Story, to look at how caste was observed as an academic exercise. And we continue to do that. And so that's one way to look at it. Second is an experiential dimension of caste. How do you experience caste? Do you experience it as a pernicious institution? Do you experience it as a normalized lineage carrying a legacy? Or do you really interpret caste as something that is very personal to your own psychological well being because that's how it has been, or you probably revolt against it. And the third way to look at is to explain to people. Now let's imagine you are Dabbawala in Bombay, or here you're packing a lunch. And each box has its specific ingredients. It's what one box is made for, I guess your main course. And then there is a salad and then there is a dessert and there is this coffee and everything is packed nicely as one of those Stanley bags. That really is a good explanation of what cast means. It's an airtight compartment where whatever is inside is meant to remain there for it to be frozen so that no other innovations and incentives enter this airtight system that we, and very rarely do we have this interaction of one box with the other because it's meant to be there right then. But yet it carries as a fluid society where one would think you belong to a group or you may think that you're outside the group, nevertheless you know that that is an airtightness that you have to accommodate yourself into. And you know that you don't have a power to jump over another because despite you releasing yourself of the caste metrics, this kind of COVID lid that is airtight upon you, the other group may not be as welcoming because they may be also closed. So it's, it really takes a kind of a groundswell, a very innovative approach. Caste is also like a chamber, a placeholder if you will, to explain various form of systemic hierarchical societies that draw legitimacy based on one's lineage, descent, bloodline and thereby maintaining purity about it. And you see this happening in many parts of the world.
- [09:37]
A
Just to pick up on the Dabavala again, this begs the question of whether intercoste marriage, whether crossing those boundaries, creating new kin relations, would that, would that destroy the caste system? I mean, is endogamy or you know, limiting marriage within the boundaries of caste, is that such a fundamental feature of the system that destroying that one element would destroy the system as a whole? So that's one question I wanted to ask you guys. And the other is about this kind of buy in right to graded inequality. The, you know, Ambedkar sort of famously talked about how caste is kept in place because of a kind of universal investment in rank, right, that you want to, you want to maintain your rank, that you know, yes, you may, below, you may be below someone else, but you're also above someone else. So that sort of investment in graded hierarchy is part of what makes the system as kind of supple and as enduring. Does that mean that caste is more kept in place through consent? That people are consenting to social ranking? Or is it kept in place through violence?
- [11:18]
C
With regard to the question of endogamy, I think, you know, I had written this article about, you know, Amitkar had talked about, you know, intercaste marriages and, and, and, and the future of it. But also he said annihilation of caste, that, you know, it would not be the only solution. And so oftentimes when people say how do we annihilate caste? People always go back to this one kind of, because it's easily a touchable idea about, you know, intercaste marriage. I mean, you know, go figure. And then you see the intercast violence on the same side. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's huge. So for us to really assess how caste would really prolong its life larger than the shelf expiration date, it is by the complicity of the institutions that are meant to challenge caste. And this could, this could operate with the state structures. This could operate within consciousness. This could also operate within what every individual holds dear to them, which is their beliefs, you know, or not believing. It's also a belief. This is something and this is very individual. And so institutions like various religious organizations play a regular part to remind people. Now my point is what are we trying to do by annihilating caste? Will it then give the desired agency and self Respect among the people who have been battered in their own minds by this caste system. Now, you know, the people, for example agenda who went to IITs, right. Who are the reserve candidates? I mean, let's say they came and you've interviewed few of them, friends of mine as well. Despite them going to iit Chennai or Bombay and getting a coveted job in this Wall street and you know, American epicenter of richness. Do they have this mental cognition to fully embrace themselves as being a person from a caste opera society? If the answer is negative, then the project of annihilation caste continues because here the person has just adopted the available measures to mask themselves into a different structure. They may be an individual, but they will represent themselves in a different form. And so that's the kind of question unless and until the self respect of that individual becomes part of annihilation of caste, where know, like for example, the people in America, the descendants of slaves, they have a strong memory of that and people still fall back to that memory. I am not sure how many people from outcast communities, lower caste communities, will be able to pull on that heritage. Oftentimes when you have a success out of caste system, one of the first thing you do is negate that experience that has been labeled to you throughout your life. So you are remodeling yourself in a very subtle but apparent way. And I think that's what is genius. He really brings Dhamma Buddhism. And the morality of Buddhism is not just another religion. It really is changing the axis of power, especially the agency of the outcast. Where there in Dhamma you might be a Brahmin, but Buddha exhorts a Brahmin and brings him into his Dhamma. So that inspiration for not just Dalit but everybody else is to see, yes, this is a potential project of utopia.
- [15:12]
A
So does Buddhism afford Dalit's access to an alternative past. Right. That then becomes the basis of a new self conception in the present. And you know, there are other kind of universalist religions that Dalits have converted to, right. To escape the strictures of Hindu, of the Hindu caste order. There's Islam, there's Christianity. I'm curious about those conceptions of universal equality. You know, how does Buddhism sit alongside those? I mean there have been mass conversion movements right. Throughout Indian history, not just among Dalits, but also among other kind of oppressed caste groups. Yeah. So I'm curious about these other traditions, right. That, that oppressed castes have availed of to reconceptualize themselves in terms that are not just derived From a kind of Brahminical order. Yeah. Anu, you want to talk about.
- [16:27]
B
Yeah, I mean, I'd like to also go back to your, your question about endogamy.
- [16:32]
A
Yes.
- [16:33]
B
And then I think this is. And, and to be a historian for a second in the response to your, in, in response to your second question about sort of consent, legitimacy, resistance, that entire kind of range of forms of either acquiescence or response, challenge and indeed a kind of refusal of caste. And then the religion question of course becomes really I think significant in that broader rubric. So I guess sort of just to begin by saying that, you know, I think the question about caste is as I said earlier as well, caste is both old and new. Right. It's both archaic and it's modern. And I think part of the issue when you have a kind of a sociological conversation about caste is that one doesn't allow for actually thinking about at least maybe two major moments of a kind of shift in, you know, how we're thinking about caste. Right. And so I maybe would want to sort of begin with that. I'll come back to that in a second. But I think your fundamental and really brief sharp question is endogamy and inter caste marriage and new forms of intimacy. The manner in which we can address the asocial sociality, as I would argue, and Baker makes this point as early as Cast In India, the 1916 essay that castes asocial sociality is predicated on this fundamental bar, the sexual regulation and the movement across castes. Right. And so I mean, if we're thinking about the present, yes, certainly those forms of intimacy, the fact that with all of the kinds of transformations that Suraj is talking about, which are temporal, which have to do with economic access, education, whether through fugitive forms or forms of passing as he suggests, or really a kind of claim to social, economic power that, you know, despite all of this, you tend to have forms of prejudice, various practices of everyday engagement and so forth where caste gets reproduced.
- [18:47]
A
Right.
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B
Yes. So in that, in that sense, I think the question of the possible transition or the movement across cast lines through not just inter caste marriage but forms of intimacy, sociality.
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A
Right.
- [19:06]
B
Making others into intimates. I think Suraj has talked elsewhere about, you know, forms of radical love. It doesn't just have to be who you sleep with and so forth, but I think it seems to me that that kind of ethical plus affective component, which is really an intimate component in terms of thinking about caste today. Yes, most certainly. Because the ways in which caste are being reproduced actually have to do with you know, the shadi.coms. and the fact, one might say that, you know, caste actually through marriage is even more strong today than perhaps the past. So if I could be the historian to the anthropologist, as it were, sort of adopting both, you know, using two sides of my. Of my training and my own sense of how I think about caste, I think, you know, one might want to think about certain important historical conjunctures. I mean, certainly the ancient past, the medieval past, et cetera. But it seems to me that the medieval, early modern period is extremely important. This is the period where Islamicate regimes, you know, the Mughal quote unquote empire, etc is absolutely critical for new caste formation. This is where dominant castes have their histories. The emergence of Marathas, Jats, Rajputs, et cetera, is part of that medieval, early modern formation. These are casts that did not exist, right, in some sense, but come into being through their relationship to forms of kingship, control over sovereignty and territory. The second important moment, of course, is the colonial moment where, you know, caste is bureaucratized. But also caste is bureaucratized because it becomes a kind of social category that loses its political pertinence. So that relationship between caste as the social and caste's political pertinence, and it's kind of hollowing out. I think, you know, it's very important for us to kind of think about in this period where caste is also becoming bureaucratized. Ajanta, to your point, as a form, form of social identity with a very particular kind of history. So identity history in this period is. Is also kind of reifying what might have been a much, much, much more complicated history of cast information.
- [21:27]
C
Right.
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B
And so that might be another conjuncture. I mean, I'm just, you know, being a little bit stagist. But it's good to think.
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A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- [21:35]
B
And then to think about the kind of constitutional moment and what happens to caste in the aftermath of that kind of constitutional moment. So just thinking about the state and its relationship to caste, these might be three important conjunctures. And we surely do need to think about caste's historicity in that context. I think it would really alter the ways in which we seem to be. This is my provocation. We seem to be reifying caste sociologically today if we don't attend to this complex historicity of caste. Right. And that, I think, brings me to your Buddhism question that I'll respond to very quickly. I think Buddhism is probably Ambedkar's most political act because by so doing, he's actually bringing Religion itself, it seems to me in crisis, quote, unquote. Religion as kind of a broad category. And that I think is really profound. Going back to what I think Suraj was saying about. About Buddhism. Well, is this a Buddhism that we know? Well, it's a Buddhism that we find traces of. It's an imagination. I mean, Suraj uses the term utopia. It is. It's a radical utopia. It's Meghampura, you know, call it what you will. Yes, I think that idea that the return to the past holds open the possibility of rethinking the present, right? And Ambedkar, unlike the other, you know, anti caste activists who are working within religion, thinking through, you know, forms of refusal within Hindu religion kind of radically breaks this open. He implodes the entire structure. That I think is both a modernist move we could not have had before fule, let's say, or a periyar. But we also have to put Ambedkar within a very different lineage which is not just Indian, right? Which is global. I mean, to also Suraj's point that this is. How do we think about these different vernaculars? But also, Ajanta, your question about, you know, the different forms of universalism that are operative. We would not have him in the 18th or the 19th centuries. He is a person of his time. Right?
- [23:57]
A
Right. Right. Suraj, I actually wanted to ask you. I mean, because I. Anu, part of what I hear you saying is that the. That certain absences in the historical archive require forms of radical political imagination, right? And Begum Pura is. Is. Is a stand in for those forms of radical political imagination, right? That one has to sort of in some ways create a past in order to envision a future. And that part of creating that past is about evacuating certain local vernaculars. But Suraj, I think for you those local vernaculars are really important, right? I mean, in talks I've heard you give. But also in the new book, you know, for you there is something about lived forms of sociality, right? The poetic registers, right? The. The other sort of genres through which social life is. Is manifest, is celebrated, right? Becomes a kind of counterweight, right, to the indignities of caste. That those things are really important for you. So how. What is the relationship, do you think, between those local vernaculars and a utopian imagination?
- [25:23]
C
It starts with this very location of a body that has been considered deplorable and something that doesn't carry any weight to partake in the reproduction of any form of value that the society may create as collaborative labor and. And that's where we see the difference between an outcast body, which is there, which is a very urgent, indispensable form of labor. Now, in. In this sense, if you look and compare these registers of the body that is trying to escape that repeated assaults, which are physical and also they are in everyday conversations and. And you see various kinds of epithets are directed against different kinds of group. And so you really have to then think about what would a group or what would we as individuals who have been marked by birth and now we have to negotiate the whole life to escape that. What would you do? That's your kind of a back kind of phantom that follows you in a very shallow shadow. So in this sense, the untouchable body is not just trying to get by, but is trying to also escape this sin of being born in a certain community to a certain womb. And that's why we see an act of a Dalit person always interacts with two gestures. One is to appreciate and appropriate whatever is out there. And the other is negotiate and rebel. And many thinkers, seers, saints, throughout the passage of history, we have seen have given us a important register that remain in the consciousness of people who thought they could do both of than simply self annihilate, which is appropriation of existing techniques of belonging. It could be in any way. It could be conversion in a very simplistic way. But also it could mean to follow into a rank of somebody who is saying, I could take you to a certain place. So you appropriated that and internalized that into your own kind of performance of your own self, culture and so forth. The other was oftentimes, you will see the Dalit body is constantly in a position of negotiation, because negotiation doesn't work in negation. And that is what the Dalit position is, is to not work with the idea of total non existence. So we see this group for over several generations, thousands of years, always defying the very fundamental ethic of Brahminism to annihilate or negate. It innovates his ways. And that's why you will see Ambedkar's move in this sense becomes so monumental because as Anu was pointing out, you know, the way she sees that the Buddhism as a profound political response of Ambedkar, I see it as also a deeply spiritual practice.
- [29:29]
A
Part of what both of you have done so beautifully in your work is not just dig deep, not just think, think vertically, but think horizontally. So I wanted to sort of shift us to thinking about those sort of horizontal connections and especially the sort of incredibly Long and rich tradition of caste, race, caste, race, thinking, Right. So why has thinking comparatively about caste and race been so intellectually and politically productive? I mean, you both, you know, I'm, I imagine you situate yourself within this kind of much longer genealogy of scholars, of activists who have insisted that caste is not simply, is not so peculiar to India or even to Hinduism that it defies comparison. Right. And that in fact, thinking comparatively, thinking about connections across, across territories is absolutely critical, right. To developing a critical vocabulary that allows us to change, to challenge certain caste formations and change them. So why, why is comparing and connecting caste and race so important? Anu, you want to go?
- [30:58]
B
I just want to create a kind of divide again, just heuristically between experience and analytics. And I also wanted to bring up the fact that, you know, who gets to define caste? This question that I brought up, it's really important. I grew up in the U.S. i came here when I was 10. I came from a South Indian Brahmin Deshasta Brahmin family. So this is a very different experiential formation. It is also a diasporic formation, but it's very different from the kinds of experiences that Suraj is putting forward. A lot of the current conversations, you know, I don't believe that identity is history or destiny. And so one must challenge that in terms of having a kind of broader intellectual conversation about these issues. But surely the question of our social positions really matters. And so for me, as somebody who came from the kind of family that I did not invested in Hindu performance and ritual for a set of other reasons for which I'm very thankful, but nonetheless, right, caste always kind of is with you if you think about it, especially when you claim that it doesn't matter or you never thought about it. So that formation is a very particular South Indian techno formation. Right? Engineers, atheists, Nehruvian, etc. That is itself a kind of caste formation. It produces the IITs and the IIMs and forms of kind of technocratic command and expertise that is also part of education and intellectual life and so on. But be that as it may, I mean, you know, I did not think about, I thought about caste intimately because I grew up with a grandmother who was very interested in, you know, like God stories and so on, but with the kind of profound sense of Puranic versus non Brahmin Hinduism. You always had sort of like women in the family thinking about things like Mother Goddess traditions. And so in retrospect, I'm saying this in retrospect, this is not the way that A child experience it. But I think for me, as someone who came to the US as a 10 year old and grew up until I went away to college in inner city Chicago, my experience actually was about racial formation and racialization. And I grew up in Chicago, which is a profoundly segregated city, but also with an intense history of great migration and just a complicated African American formation.
- [33:29]
A
I mean, it's interesting, Anu, because the obverse could also be true, right, that, that the experience of racialization, and we, and we know this to be the case now in the kind of, you know, fierce battles around the legal recognition of caste discrimination happening in the United States today, that the experience of racialization can lead to a further erasure or occlusion of caste privilege. Right. Where Indians in the diaspora think of themselves principally in terms of racialized minorities, and that prevents them from fully contending with the caste inheritances that allowed them to be mobile subjects in the first place. Right? So I think that it could, it could, it could cut both ways, right? I mean, I think for you it cut one way, but for a lot of people it's absolutely. It can cut the other way. Right. I'd love to hear more about how you connect your own kind of personal history and an experiential reality. Right. To your, to your intellectual formation. And again, to go back to the sort of question, I started with, why the kind of analogizing with race or thinking about historical connections, not just analogizing, but thinking about historical connections between, you know, Dalit and African American experiences is so important to you?
- [35:01]
C
No, thank you. You know, so my own trajectory was. I was not sure what I would do in my life, you know, because the highest achievement I thought one could have who came from my neighborhood was to go to Bombay. And if you had gone to Bombay and if you had just come, returned from Bombay, it was like you were like a superstar. Like they were. There was a, there was a big charisma around you. There was, you know, people were asking questions. And I would then drop my Nandir accent and try to emulate the Bombay accent, just try to have an added advantage. I would buy the 80 rupees white shirt, which was basically a discarded, you know, if you go through one of those church kid stations or, or there's big fashion streets and even that was like a very priced commodity. It was almost like I had gone to a foreign country and returning with some goodies. And there was also this kind of expectation about me being suddenly smart because I went to Bombay. So that's why the space Matters really, you know, even if in the trajectory of the Dalit movements, Right. Even Ambedkar's limitation was that it was very urban centric. Only later in his life did he become rural in his approach to caste, radical politics. And he wept. He lamented later in his life that this is what has happened. I mean, also it was necessary of course, for his time. And so as I kind of looked at, you know, when I remember, I. When I was studying law, it was an accident. You know, there were so many accidents that. That turned out to be where I am right now. It was never decided and never, you know, meant to be done some way. The most one could do was, you know, get a little job and hustle around. And you know, that's what I mean. If you have to, if you have to look at what Suraj would have been, just have to look at what's happening right now in Nanded, in my neighborhood. And that pretty much is a picture the. That the time is almost unmoving. It is there. And so I was approaching caste studies, reading Ambedkar or reading Foul A or reading literature on caste. I mean, reading this human rights reports and you know, Anu book was out and all of that time it was out of interest to say, what can I do? What can I learn from this literature that I can use in my advocacy against the caste? Because as an academic project, it never happened. I mean, I. I mean I've never studied caste academically until my second doctorate when I went to study at Oxford, which was again the caste, the study of caste. The way I approached was not through South Asian lens per se. I was looking more into a broader kind of comparative intellectual history point of view. So I remember when I enrolled in my, you know, PhD program, first PhD at Wits, they were people who had studied subaltern studies. They had, they know Rajini Kothare, they know Ashish Nandi. And these were the. These were cohorts who were from India. And they spoke in reference to the existing scholars, right? So for example, their concepts and then followed by the person. So I felt really kind of. Because that was not my trajectory. I mean, I never studied as a. For my masters or I had a graduate, something like that. You know, it was all over. Like, you know, if one has to draw a kind of a genealogy of this intellectual trajectory, you will struggle to draw a straight line towards. You know, there will be so many turns and. And then the approach continued still is the project is not to fashion, make, you know, bring the vogue idea of caste. But to also see what can I, what can I do? The project has remained still the same, which is what can I do? And this becomes personal, this becomes professionals. And it's very difficult as you all know, especially what has happened with the rise of the specific excluded communities in the past 10, 15 years rather 10 years. The vocality, the sonic nature has become so loud, the decibel has increased and so the accountability, rightfully so, is there. And, and then the question of who can speak and all of that. Now, now it is very important. It is important. But, but the quota for that who can and how to approach caste cannot be equated the way it happens in America because we have very few people like unlike America, which is a fountain of so many intermixes and stuff like that. And again, African American community is modern in the sense of the evolution of America in African American register is modern. The history is very short for that history to continue. It's a history of diaspora, exile. It's. It's something that's trying to still find its homeland. From Marcus Garvey to. Until today, you know, African Americans are still trying to figure out their own lineage. Whereas the Dalits, for example, knew where they exactly belong and they knew exactly who their gods are and they exactly know how to resist certain kinds of dominations. And we see that through this kind of intimate embrace of their own cultures. Right. In that sense we have to then look at like my position on the black studies or black movement was coming out of movement. My father was part of the Panthers. In fact my name Suraj was a difficult, it's an easier version of my original Marathi name which was Suradeh Surade Kind Heart. It was a jargon and it was given by Raja Dhale, the one of the high intellectual intellects and founders of Dalit Panther. So I grew up in that. So I knew there was this black something resistance. And this is me from Nandir. I mean you would. The biggest town from me was six hours drive which is Hyderabad or Aurangabad. Right. And so this is like. And still having that imagination of something is in America.
- [41:35]
B
To your question, you know, how does one or what does comparison enable maybe two just brief kinds of responses. One, I think thinking sociologically always involves thinking comparatively or has because the question of kind of universalism and difference or developmentalism and a kind of telos that's kind of contained within the ways in which we use and maybe even abuse categories. Right. Caste versus class, you know, caste moving towards class and so on. There's a kind of developmentalism, but also a kind of comparison, it seems to me, that's built into sociological thinking. And so there's a kind of two way process here, right. That one is that one wants to deprovincialize caste, given that the entire kind of force field of, you know, anthropological and historical thinking around caste in South Asia has been to both profoundly provincialize it and then to complicate it. And so the deep provincializing move to say that caste is a form of embodied difference and distinction that can be generalized with other forms of inequality. Subordination, Right, that, that I think, you know, that deprovincializing move is really significant. That would be the work of analogy and comparison. But the second move might really be to turn around then and say, how is it that we all know so much about the Harlem Renaissance and African American thought and black philosophy and so on, but that the effort to really both, you know, think in a complicated fashion about genealogies of caste, but to think through caste other than Wilkerson's. And there's a whole critique there too. And we'll get to that. I know, but that, you know, how is it that it's easier to think race? Why has it become the global trans historical oftentimes signifier, right. For thinking through the broader problem of embodied difference, hierarchy, distinction, inequality. So I think that two step of deprovincializing caste and then to sort of think about what caste offers is really significant.
- [43:45]
A
I wanted us to end with, with Wilkerson. I think part of what. Part of what Wilkerson is trying to do is def. It's, you know, Anu, you were saying about defamiliarization. She wants to defamiliarize race by using caste as an analytic. Right. In part because she thinks that the sort of debate about racism has become too predictable to be illuminating. So, you know, like Khipl Nandaid reaching for the Black Panthers in order to sort of rethink their own condition. Here you have this sort of obverse being the case, right, where she's reaching for the. For caste as a kind of category to rethink the condition of American racism. So I wanted you guys to just reflect briefly on why the book made such a big splash. Like, what do you make of its success? Were you surprised by it? Is there something about the way she analogizes race and caste that made it palatable to an American audience? Yeah, maybe we can just end with that question.
- [44:53]
C
I mean, Dalit is also a modern subject in the sense of the identity, the way it is constitutionally Constructed the way it is presented and so forth. But now if you look that and draw kind of analogies, the closest link is African American community simply because of the two reasons. A this kind of internationalist activism done in the 20th century, predominantly by black American scholars, writers, political activists and so forth, who really looked at third world and colored world and solidarity. What Isabel Wilkerson does, and I've said this and I've written about it, that is, is to really, you know, to really do what a good journalist investigating their own malady would do. And in history, you see, there is this kind of independent, autonomous categorization of, of slaves and, and post slave society where it was constructed as a caste society. And we see, I mean, there's so many sociological schools that have been notwithstanding that there was also protest against that. But there was a very prominent school, Lloyd Garner, his team, I mean, a Harvard anthropologist. And this is very much the early years of anthropology's American dream, so to speak, where they then looked inward to America, not just going Herbert Melville and so forth, going outside. And you know, there's so many schools and boas and stuff like that. I mean, that's another set of debate. But right now here there is a larger, much more interesting history that is colorful, especially in the African American sphere. And one of that history was to look at how America informs itself about its situation. And most often it does is through Christian, a kind of theological perspective. India, on the other hand, becomes a very important reference point for these people. So Wilkerson relying on that interesting existing archive is to just brief the world and her situation through that kind of. Through kind of that idea. And caste again takes its own form here. It becomes color caste, Du Boisian term, or it becomes racial caste in the sociological term. It also becomes comes what you call caste as intra group tensions that exist within the class dimensions tells us the tensions between this white working class or white peasant with black peasant there is a distinction which betrays the kind of class dynamics that were there. And so caste provides. Obviously Oliver Cox thinks it's purely in an orthodox Marxist tradition to say no, no, no, this is how the class needs to be understood. Caste really doesn't make sense. Caste is a very Hinduized system. And so we see that debate. Wilkerson bringing that debate to the front is just to be respectful of the archive that has been there for the most part.
- [48:05]
A
We've talked about Dalit histories, you know, needing to account for certain sort of both experiences and political formations. But both of you have also called for more work on caste elites and on caste privilege. I wonder if you know, just as a, as a sort of parting comment, if you would say why you think that's important.
- [48:33]
C
About. Can you repeat that question about the caste?
- [48:39]
A
That it's important and that caste privilege is still fairly understudied and needs to be as much an object of caste analysis as disadvantage.
- [48:51]
C
Caste is basically a relative institution. It's an organization that cannot exist on its own. It has so many tentacles that it informs caste. It's almost like it's like a tripod, various kind of things. You know, if you remove one it will fall. And so that's why I think caste analysis equally important though that the focus is on the Dalit somehow limited. It has been with the Shudra and more kind of out of question is with the Brahmin or, or even only recently we've seen the Marwad kind of Divya cherry work and you know, which is, which is what will tell us the complexity of it. Or else we exist in binaries now. Binaries or Pan India level comparison. We fail. South Asia, let's not even talk about it. Right. That's why I was thinking like. And that's why we need a critical research on how privilege constitutes itself.
- [49:43]
A
Right.
- [49:43]
C
Through an important indicator like caste in various communities. Privilege itself is a very recent term in caste studies. It we have studied lack of privilege disadvantage more sumptuously. But now if we could focus on also how and where privileges inform the studies of caste, which is not just about group or individual privileges, but the relative privileges. I mean I may have access to. Yeah, I may be a barber, so I may have access to relative privilege, but I do have access to that. And I think that. And maybe we need to invent a word that could be much more robust than just saying privilege. Privilege sounds very, in a way very much given.
- [50:27]
A
I mean, I think this goes back to Anu's like very first point about caste being a social relationship. Right. And it's not just a social relationship. It's a dynamic, historically constituted social relationship. So it doesn't remain in place. Right. I mean the forms of relationality shift over time. Right. So the basis of privilege, the basis of inherited advantage might shift over time as well, right?
- [50:55]
B
Yeah, I think that's right. You know, and indeed to, you know, think about this, I love the way that you say it's a form of historically constituted privilege, but also that, you know, it's. There are new caste antagonisms, right. That are constantly forming because of this, because of this social Fact on the ground, it's very much the case that new caste antagonisms are both emergent. And coming back, ajanta to your question at the start, is cast a form of violent communication? And this is indeed the argument that I've made that it is actually a form of violence, euphemized, you know, it's structured, but it's also conjuncturized. And that's what we see happening with all of the incidents of cast atrocity today, which really are targeting gendered forms of empowerment. The idea of quote, unquote honor killings, you know, inter caste. Coming back to something you asked about as well, the deep violence, you know, by family members. It does seem to me that, you know, we've had a. A good run thinking through castable ternity and trying to sort of complicate that. But it seems, seems to me that without a responding acknowledgement of both responsibility and the structures of complicity.
- [52:15]
A
Right.
- [52:16]
B
One doesn't really get to see at least the two sides of this. A social relationship involves at least two.
- [52:22]
A
Yes. Yeah. And.
- [52:23]
B
And so it seems to me that, you know, Ramesh Bhairi's work, I was just looking at the, the book Meet the Savannas, which also seeks to really kind of unpack what it is that's happening in kind of neoliberal India in terms of the euphemization of cast privilege.
- [52:38]
A
Yes.
- [52:39]
B
The ways in which caste privilege is now about culture, lifestyle.
- [52:44]
C
Right.
- [52:45]
B
The kinds of the new global formations that you're connected with. And so I think this is important. I think this is difficult work and could be accused of a kind of navel gazing. That's the other part of this. Right. Here we are back again to thinking about privilege rather than disappointing disinheritance and inequality. But every structure of, or claims to equality and recognition require that we kind of rethink the structures and the formations of inequality. And I think it's from that perspective. And then quickly to your point about Wilkerson, that the conversation. I have a kind of complicated reaction to the book. One part of me wants to say that we actually needed, given the kind of foreclosures by many African American colleagues, to thinking in complicated ways about caste.
- [53:40]
A
Right.
- [53:40]
B
The reverse. You know, it doesn't always operate. It was absolutely critical that you had somebody working within a US context and an African American scholar who said, let's think about caste actually as trans historical, older, more ancient, and in fact something that encompasses the ways in which we might be thinking about modern race. To Suraj's point, I Don't think any of us could have done that. Suraj included, with all the kind of, you know, wonderful, incredible labors of solidarity and kind of conceptual mobility and fluidity that, let's say, you know, Suraj's own work has kind of shown. I think we needed somebody who was participant, participating in the national history, so to speak, a structural. But I'm deeply appreciative of that. There are very important conjunctures here that are missing. I mean, I think Suraj was talking about Du Bois. Well, Du Bois actually speaks about the fact that racism emerges. And it's very interesting because, of course, we've got, you know, this also refers back to old, older South Asian conversations. Dumont versus, you know, Gerald Berryman, that famous appendix in Dumas Homo Hierarchicus where he says that racism is a problem of universalism, universality.
- [54:59]
A
Right.
- [54:59]
B
Equality produces racism, hierarchy. It's a form of encompassed holism. We cannot have racism within a structure of caste. So one thinks back about all of this, you know, hierarchy versus inequality. And so. So we've been playing this game for a long time, and it seems like, you know, every 20 years, there's a kind of, you know, return of this. There's a return conceptually, there's a return politically. The book comes out with, you know, George Floyd. It comes out with Dalit Lives Matter. It gets taken up as well at that moment because, yes, it's reframing Ambedkar for a global audience. It's introducing a range of figures who were very much part of a specialized South Asian conversation. But, you know, Daniel Immerwar, Nico Slate, Manon Bis, you know, there's a large number of people who had already seen, seems to me, done that kind of work, and perhaps in more complex scholarly ways, speaking as an academic. So this book does open this up to a really broad conversation about solidarity in a moment of deep crisis and catastrophe. Let's not forget where we are five years after that book comes out. We are really having to rethink the very question of genocide as an operative category. So there's a kind of weird return to earlier moments in conversations where I think political possibilities existed in ways that seem deeply foreclosed to us now. So I appreciate the book for that kind of public work that it does.
- [56:37]
A
Yeah. Yes.
- [56:38]
B
The scholar in me feels deeply uncomfortable. Of course, we know the cast school of social stratification. We don't have Du Bois, who perhaps is the most sophisticated reader of caste, color, caste, moving from racial caste and souls to color, caste and black reconstruction. But predicating it, as he says, on two things. One, the problem of equality only arises with the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. It's only when you have formal equality that the question of substantive racialized inequality becomes a problem at all. That's not a question for the slave life. The slave needs to take up arms in order to, you know, there's a whole question about, you know, violence and the general strike and so forth as well that he engages in, in black reconstruction. So I think that's one kind of, you know, hewing to this idea. Do you need to have an idea of universal equality in order to think racism? Right. And I think the second, as I said, is this, this kind of triangulation of race, caste and, and class and, and whether, you know, caste and the kind of material substrate that we keep forgetting. And this would be, I think, a critique of kind of the way that anti caste struggles and the Dalit movement in particular has gone. But it's also an auto critique. Right? Because when you follow in a sense, a movement and a social movement and a set of political possibilities, you're always going to say, but, but what happened to the caste question and labor? What happened to caste and capital? What happened to a kind of profound thinking of caste, capital, land, imperial conditions? And it seems to me that that was a lost possibility for Wilkerson. Not to mention the idea of looking at it was not just the US And India recall, it was not to.
- [58:29]
A
Germany, it was also Germany.
- [58:31]
B
All of this here then comes back to something which is deeply problematic, which is the idea of bloodline impurity and hence endogamy.
- [58:40]
A
Right.
- [58:40]
B
Endogamy is blood purity as actually the final dividing line in societies, as she says of race.
- [58:48]
A
Oh, this was wonderful. This was really wonderful. So much to think about. Thank you, Anu. Thank you, Suraj. Thank you.
- [58:59]
B
Thank you. This was wonderful and an honor helping.
- [59:02]
A
Me conversation with this. Yes. I couldn't, I couldn't have asked for a better conversation and two better interlocutors to get this thing off the ground. So thank you so much.