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- [00:00]
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- [00:32]
New Books Network Host
Hey NBN listeners. We're running our 2026 New Books Network Audience Survey, and we'd love just a few minutes of your time. NBN has been bringing you in depth conversations with authors and scholars for over 15 years. We haven't done a comprehensive audience survey since 2022, and a lot has changed since then. It's time to hear from you again. Here's why we're asking. We want to understand who's listening, what subjects and podcasts you love most, and where you'd like to see us grow. Your responses help us tell NBN's story to the publishers, libraries and institutions we partner with. When we can show that our listeners are serious readers, lifelong learners, and heavy library users. It opens doors to new partnerships, better resources, and ultimately stronger NBN for everyone. And one more thing, if you leave your email address at the end of the survey, you'll be entered to win a $100 gift card to bookshop.org a chance to stock up on books while supporting independent bookstores at the same time. The survey takes just five minutes. Your answers are confidential and your email will never be shared. Head to newbooksnetwork.com to take the survey today. We really appreciate your support. Now go take the survey.
- [01:53]
Ajantha Subramanian
Welcome to of 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 is Nico Slate, professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University. Nico studies democracy and social movements in the United States and India. He's the author of six books, including Colored Cosmopolitanism, the Shared Struggle for freedom in the US and India, 2012 Lord Cornwallis is the Struggle for Democracy in the US and India, 2019 and the Art of Kamala Devi Chattapadhyay and the Making of Modern India, which was published in 2024. Nico has also published numerous articles on the connected struggles for equality in the two, as well as an edited volume titled Black Power beyond the Global Dimensions of the Black Power Movement, which was published in 2012. So welcome to the podcast, Nico.
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Nico Slate
Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be with you.
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Ajantha Subramanian
All right, so I would like to begin by asking you to give our listeners a sense of how you came to study the historical connections between the US And India and why you chose to do so through the lens of solidarity. And I'm very curious whether your scholarship was inspired primarily by academic debates or are there aspects of your personal history or your political commitments that shaped your work?
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Nico Slate
Oh, thank you so much for this question. The short answer, it was beautiful example of the randomness of life. I think if you had, you know, interviewed me as a young man, I would have been a typical American in being remarkably clueless about all things related to South Asia. And so that whole facet of my work really came about because of the random twists and turns of life. In my case, I had the opportunity to go to South Asia when I was in college and just fell in love with that part of the world. Started learning some South Asian languages. I started with Malayalam, the South Indian language, and then moved into other South Asian languages. But when I applied for my PhD, I still had no plans to study anything related to South Asian history. It was something I'd become interested in, but not something that I thought I would study. I applied to do a study of American intellectual history. But then my first semester in graduate school, I had to write a research paper. And like many graduate students, I really had no idea what I was doing. I was new to history as a discipline, and so I just kind of racked my brain and I remembered that my family, my mother, my brother and I had visited the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the historically black university. And that there had been an exhibit there about the relationship between Gandhi and George Washington Carver, the famous African American scientist. And I just thought to myself, I don't know why. I have no idea why this happened, but it just stuck in my brain. I thought, I wonder what that was about? So I was able to get Carver's paper shipped to me on microfilm. And Gandhi's papers, of course, have been gathered and collected, and I was able to trace the relationship between these two figures. And I was fascinated to see that it went both ways. So it wasn't just Carver admiring Gandhi. Right. That story we're somewhat familiar with. African American interest in Gandhi is well known But Gandhi's interest in Carver I thought was quite interesting. And so then the next semester I thought, well, let me look at a few other South Asian figures and see what they thought of African Americans and African American struggles. So I cast this sort of slightly broader net and I found all kinds of fascinating things. And one of the things that struck me right away was that whereas most African Americans looking to India were looking to a nonviolent struggle and an anti colonial struggle, that when South Asians looked back at the US they saw not just issues of race, but also issues of caste. And I thought that was interesting. And so that was an early question for me. But I was sitting on an airplane. I still remember it vividly after my first year in graduate school, thinking about what I want to do my dissertation on. And I thought all of this, these connections to India and the US Were fascinating, but was it something I cared about enough to want to dedicate my life to studying? It was interesting, but did I care enough about it? And that's when I realized that the African American piece, the piece about US struggles against racism, does have a strong connection to my history. So my brother was a mixed race hip hop artist. He was the victim of a racially charged assault. That was a very influential moment in my life. My mom had, in her own way, participated in the civil rights and black power struggles. So the US piece of it was very central to me. The India piece was not. But a lot of the people I was studying were people who were rooted in one particular struggle, but were still deeply committed to struggles in very different parts of the world. Struggles that they had no personal connection to. And I think that's important. I think, you know, my own view is we're all called to fight for what we believe in, where we are, where we're rooted, wherever we happen to call home. But we're also called to, in some sense, be citizens of the world, some sense care about what's happening to people in very distant places. Because of course, one of the things history teaches us is that, you know, we've all been connected in all sorts of ways, you know, that we often ignore.
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Ajantha Subramanian
Yeah, that's an amazing segue to my next question, which. Which is about the scale of the relationships that you track. So across all of your work, the transnational scale is really important. So you're really looking at the circulation of ideas about race, about caste, the individuals who, you know, carry these ideas from one place to the other. And they often do so by crossing borders. And the borders that you attend to are not just local borders, they're national borders. Right? So I, I wonder if you could say something about why these kinds of relationships at a transnational scale are so important. And what does the transnational scale of circulation and interaction allow us to see that we might miss by limiting our understanding of anti racist or anti caste struggles to national borders?
- [08:50]
Nico Slate
That's a wonderful question. Let me start with a cautionary note, one that I continually remind myself of as well as my students, and that is that I think it's far too easy to romanticize the transnational and to assume that anytime an idea, a practice, an individual is crossing a national border, that there must be something good coming from that. I think that, that, you know, it's an understandable perspective and I get it, and I am very, very susceptible to it myself. When I first started my dissertation, it was basically the whole, the whole argument was, look at all these amazing things. Crossing borders isn't that remarkable. And my advisors had to patiently point out to me, you know, it's not an argument. That's a good starting point, but what are you actually arguing? And one of the things I came to argue is that, and this is so obvious, but it still, it took me a while to get there, is that lots of bad things cross national borders too. You know, viruses, armies, even, you know, ideas, good ideas can cross, but very harmful ideas like racism, like casteism, these things also cross. So I've, I've learned slowly to be cautious of romanticizing the transnational. At the same time, I must admit I am still quite taken by the remarkable ambition and empathy that often accompanies this kind of transnational solidarity. And most of the folks that I study are folks that on some level or another, I admire. Not entirely. They're all human beings. They all have their foibles. There's struggles, there's complexities. Gandhi, who got mentioned, is a great example. Lots of things to admire, in my opinion, lots of things to criticize, in my opinion. But ultimately I do think that there is something transgressive in a powerful way about crossing national, especially at this moment in time. Right, of course. I mean, we're living in a moment, we have been for quite some time, where national borders are being increasingly militarized and policed and people are simultaneously being forced to move right for many different reasons. War, climate change, etc. So there's, there's vast migrations that are forced, refugees pouring across borders, and yet the borders are being militarized, strengthened, policed even more heavily. And so I think At a moment like now, it's especially important, I think, to reflect back on just how much our histories have been shaped by these kinds of transnational border crossings. If nothing else, hopefully it should inspire people to be less narrowly nationalistic, less narrowly chauvinistic, more open to recognizing that our histories have never been siloed off from each other.
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Ajantha Subramanian
Yeah, great caution. And as you say, especially for this moment, where there's this real instinct to, to foreclose those connections. Right. And mythologize forms of national homogeneity, unity. Right. Boundedness. I, I want to move to a question about language.
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Nico Slate
Yeah.
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Ajantha Subramanian
I mean, so much of these forms of cross border solidarity are obviously fueled by, by language. Right. So, and you say, and you say transnational analogies are a form of translation. This is the rest of the quote. As the scholarship on diaspora makes clear, even those markers of identity most readily assumed to be given, race, sex, nationality, have been constructed over time through imaginative feats of transnational translation. And of course, we can add caste to this list. Right. So I'd love to hear you say more about this notion of imaginative feats of translation. Why is a focus on language important for understanding political struggle and maybe more specifically, subaltern practices of claims making? Right. What do we need to understand about the centrality of translation to the forging of these solidarities?
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Nico Slate
Well, I really appreciate the question as well. I guess the place I would start is that language is always bound up with power. And so the language that we're given is not neutral, and it's not something that we are able to effortlessly bend to our own purposes. We're always inhabiting languages that have been given to us by histories that are structured by power. And we're living in worlds where particular words and phrases have often very explicit consequences. Right. I mean, and again, to come back to national borders, are you a citizen or are you not? And what does that even mean? Can have a huge impact on whether you can have freedom or not, whether you can live or not. And so the words we use are charged with power, and they're not entirely ours to do with what we please. With that said, I find remarkable the degree to which many people across history have artfully repurposed words in order to fight against injustice of one sort or another and afford solidarities with other people who are doing the same. The word that was at the center of my first book is color or. And. And its various, you know, related forms, like colored. And I expect many people listening will know that historically the word colored was used to describe African Americans. And they probably also know, of course, that in our world today, it's still used quite commonly in a phrase like people of color to try to cast a broader net, to pull in and to sort of reestablish solidarities of one sort or another. But what I found quite fascinating is just the remarkable degree to which people in South Asia claimed the idea of color and being colored as a way to forge solidarities with African Americans, with people in Africa, with people in other parts of Asia. It was a very explicitly transracial as well as transnational conception. And it was. You know, you can trace its. Its movements to some degree. The great African American intellectual and activist W.E.B. du Bois was central to these conceptions. But it gets picked up and reproduced by many figures in many interesting ways. So that word was central to my work. But here's where I think, again, we're called to be cautious. Many of the people that are establishing these remarkably, in some ways, inclusive and empathetic conceptions of color that are bridging these different struggles are simultaneously ignoring other kinds of inequity that exist within those sorts of groupings, cast as, I think, the most obvious example of this. So take someone like Kamala Devi Chattapadya, who, as you mentioned earlier, I just wrote a book about someone I admire in many ways. She's, I think, arguably, well, certainly one of the most committed South Asian activists to this idea of what I call colored cosmopolitanism or this transnational conception of colored solidarity between people fighting against racism. She really believes in it, and she advocates for it in ways that I think are important and consequential. But if, you know. But when issues of caste come up, she approaches caste very much like most socialists of her day did, which is to say she was against caste, but she also didn't want to spend a lot of time fighting against it because she thought it would naturally fall away when issues of class and classism got sorted out. Right. Once. Once you fixed capitalism, caste would naturally rectify its. And I think that was a very blinkered approach. You know, she had an unduly narrow vision, I think, of what struggling against caste or casteism would mean. And that was true for many advocates of colored solidarity. So on the one hand, they're able to deploy these remarkably inclusive and creative conceptions of color to bridge struggles. But then there's blind spots, right? Other figures, the blind spot might be sex and sexism, right? For Kamaravi it wasn't, but for others it might be. And then of course, looking the other direction, many African American figures looking to India, not all by any means. Right. There's a lot of exceptions, but many of them are ignoring caste because they're seeing the Indian struggle as a unitary struggle led by this great nonviolent figure against, you know, British imperialism. And so they don't want to talk about caste or they're not even knowledgeable of it. Again, there are many exceptions to this. There are African American figures who are keenly aware of caste and want to talk about it, but there are many that overlook it. So to come back to your question about language, I think language can connect, but it can also hide. And sometimes it does that both at the exact same time. Yeah, it can connect and hide simultaneously.
- [18:14]
Ajantha Subramanian
Yeah. So you talk about two analogies in particular, right, that were sort of constantly in play. And one is the race colony analogy, right, which somebody like Kamala Devi Chattopadhya is very much trading in. And you know, an analogy through which sort of anti racist and anti colonial movements made common cause. Right. And through this, India appears as a kind of unitary colony, Right. That is, that's sort of oppressed by British imperialism in similar ways to African American oppression at the hands of sort of white supremacy. Right. So that's one analogy. And the second, of course, is race caste, through which anti racist and anti caste activists made common cause. So can you give our listeners a sense of the relationship between these two analogies? I mean, you've also, you already talked about it a little bit, but did their political uses overlap? Were they separated in time and did they typically. Could they work in tandem or were they typically set against one another? Did they work at cross purposes?
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Nico Slate
Oh, I really appreciate this question. So in terms of time, they both coexist from the 19th century onwards. But I would say, interestingly, the race caste analogy might actually have been earlier. You know, even though in the once once Gandhi emerges as a global figure, the race colony analogy will come to more or less dominate the way that most Americans think about these connections and most folks in South Asia. But that wasn't as true in the 19th century. So as you know, our colleague Daniel Immerwar wrote an article about this. I've written about this as well. Daniel's article is really good on the 19th century, looking at the way American abolitionists and other figures in the US really explicitly use the idea of caste in order to try to make sense of race in the U.S. now, that doesn't mean that they all understood caste. Well, in fact, most of them did not. Right. Their conception of caste is static. So they don't see caste changing. They see it as this eternal form. It's heavily filtered through, you know, European anthropology and you know, and related disciplines. So, you know, there's a fourfold division with Brahmins on the top and you know, then the so called Untouchables. Outside of the system, there isn't a, there isn't a recognition for the way that caste is contested, dynamic and complicated. Right. For most Americans it's a relatively simple, very static system. But it's still something that people are talking about, they're engaging, they're thinking about. And that I think will be the dominant analogy until Gandhi and the Indian anti colonial struggle come to dominate the way Americans think about South Asia. And then it shifts. But the race cast of course doesn't go away. It's still always there. And of course Dalits, both within South Asia and those that come to the U.S. right. Someone like Ambedkar who comes and spends time in the us they're very actively pushing back against the dominance of the race colony comparison. And there are African American, someone like Oliver Cox for example, who continues to be very interested in issues of caste and very thoughtful about it. So it's, I would say they're always there. You know, they're there in tandem. But in the 19th century, caste is a more dominant point of connection. And then in the early 20th, it comes back to being more dominant by the race colony comparison. In terms of can they be held at the same time? I think they certainly could be. Right? I mean like again, someone like Ambedkar is simultaneously opposed to imperialism and opposed to casteism. But it's complicated. I mean, you know better than I do, and I expect many listeners do. These are complicated questions in South Asia. They're also complicated when you look at these transnational relationships because there's only so much time you have to prioritize the issues you care about. And sometimes, Right. If you're thinking from say the perspective of, you know, Dalit activism in the 1920s and 30s, maybe you don't see the British Empire as your primary threat. I mean, maybe you do, maybe you don't. It's complicated. And so you, you find people often emphasizing different things. My favorite example of this actually is the way that Ambedkar and Lalalajpat Rai used the exact same comparison, a comparison between American slavery and untouchability. They use it in opposite ways, but I think both with laudable goals. So Lajpat Rai says that American racism and chattel Slavery in particular are far worse than caste or casteism. He's opposed to caste, but he wants to say, you know, slavery is worse. But he's writing to an American audience to try to undercut efforts to support British imperialism. So his goal isn't to in any way defend caste or casteism. His goal is to fight against American support for British imperialism. Ambedkara will flip the.
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Ajantha Subramanian
Explain that a little more for listeners. So Lajpat Rai's rationale was if you minimize caste oppression, it will remove one argument that the British were using to justify their rule.
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Nico Slate
I think that's, I think that's true to some degree. Although I think that his main way of thinking is just to tell Americans, stop using caste as an excuse for imperialism because look at how bad slavery and racism were in the U.S. so it's even, you know, I agree. I think you're right. But I think his primary goal is just to say, you know, look to your own house first, right before you try to criticize other people. But Ambedkar will flip that analogy and say, in fact, caste was worse than chattel slavery ever was. And he could be criticized for this. He people could say, well, you're minimizing the harsh realities of slavery. But he's writing within India for an Indian audience. He's not trying to defend slavery. His goal is to force people within India to grapple with the realities of caste. So I, you know, I, I'm always interested in the purpose to which an analogy is put right. I mean, people will often debate, is caste the same as race? Is race the same as caste? What are the similarities? And that's an interesting conversation to have. But for me, the more interesting conversation is always, well, why are we asking that question? What's our purpose here? And what's the motive behind our interest in these analogies? Because there's always a motive. And often the motive is either to shield your own inequity or injustice. Right. To say, I don't want to talk about racism in this country. You guys have cast over there. Don't tell us about. Right. So it's a defensiveness or it's an effort to attack an injustice. And I think both Lodge, but Rai and Ambedkar, although they're using opposite analogies here, they're both attacking injustice in ways that I think ultimately are laudable.
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Ajantha Subramanian
That's interesting. Just another question about this very common tactic of selecting certain features of another society. Right. In order to throw into relief the injustices of one's own. Right?
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Nico Slate
Yeah.
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Ajantha Subramanian
And you know, you say at one point, I don't remember where I got this quote from. It's from one of your various publications. You say that the majority of historical actors who analogized caste and race evinced little or no regard for the internal complexity of either. Right. And we've talked about that. Concerned with the political impact of race, caste analogies, they ignored what was lost in translating messy particularities of identity, status and hierarchy into the words race and caste and then again, translating between these words. And I was. I sort of paused at that quote because it made me wonder whether, you know, this move from particularity to generality is ne. Isn't it always necessary when you're trying to forge a political category? Right. Even in the analytical use of such categories.
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Nico Slate
Yeah.
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Ajantha Subramanian
You. You have to move from the messiness of everyday experience to some degree of abstraction. Right. And an example of a very influential recent work that, that analogizes by sort of papering over all the complexities of caste is Isabel Wilkeson's 2020 book. Right. Cast the Origin of Our Discontents, which was incredibly successful.
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Nico Slate
Yeah.
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Ajantha Subramanian
So I, I wonder if you could say something about that move from particularity to generality. Right. As. As. As a feature of all political mobilizational work or even a feature of sociological analysis.
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Nico Slate
Right, sure.
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Ajantha Subramanian
And whether that's necessary to forge solidarities, that you have to move from the hyper particular, which perhaps doesn't allow for making common cause because you're so entrenched in the sort of specifics of your own condition. Right. So, yeah. I mean, just is. Is that kind of move to generality necessary for politics?
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Nico Slate
My short answer is yes. Yeah, I think it is. I think you just explain why quite well. But I also think there's always a danger in dwelling solely in the generality, and the danger isn't just that you're going to get it wrong. Right. As a scholar, of course, you know, part of our job as scholars is to say, well, but when you say this, do you really mean this or do you mean that? I mean. Right. Part of our job, I think, is to be nitpicky and try to break things down, complicate them. Right. I mean, that's the overused word in every graduate paper. Right. I'm going to complicate this simple story. That's part of what we're called to do. But I also think on a political level, there is something dangerous about dwelling entirely in overgeneralization because certain people's identities or struggles will be lost, will be subsumed, and may Never come back. Right. So you, you know, you can say, oh, well, we'll get back to that messy thing later once we're done with this thing here. But will you really? So I guess my ideal, if one were to sketch this out in an ideal way, would be to find some kind of middle ground where people are able to come together and say, look, for right now, let's not worry about all these messy particularities. Let's start by finding our common ground. What do we share? What's bringing us together? And what are the words or ideas that give us a sense of shared identity? Right. And so for the people I study, sometimes that's this idea of being colored. Right. Fighting against racism. But there are a variety of other kinds of key words that people can deploy to try to see themselves on the same side of things. Right. Whether they're fighting for something like, I want to fight for freedom, I want to fight for democracy. Sometimes it's okay to just fudge what one exactly means by that. If it's going to bring people together and find some kind of common ground or some sort of solidarity, maybe that's the right thing to do. But then also to recognize, okay, we're going to focus on this now, but let's also talk about these other kinds of inequities, other kinds of injustices, so that they don't get lost entirely. And so that we're building a struggle that's both inclusive but also variegated in a way that recognizes the, you know, multiple forms of injustice that we have in this world.
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Ajantha Subramanian
I mean, perhaps it's a sort of dialectical movement. Right.
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Nico Slate
Yeah.
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Ajantha Subramanian
And you see this in. In many struggles where there is an umbrella term that is mobilized, which is partly incorporative but also partly exclusionary.
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Nico Slate
Yes.
- [31:36]
Ajantha Subramanian
And those who don't feel represented fully by that term then push back.
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Nico Slate
Yes.
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Ajantha Subramanian
And. And insist on their own recognition. On the recognition of their own specific condition. Right.
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Nico Slate
Yes.
- [31:48]
Ajantha Subramanian
And the para. And ideally, the parameters of the struggle expand. Right.
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Nico Slate
Yes.
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Ajantha Subramanian
I mean, that's not always the case, but. And perhaps that's one way to think about the relationship between the race colony and the race caste analogies that the race colony analogy obscured, some of the specifics of cast inequity that the race caste analogy then sort of pushed back against. Right. So there's this sort of.
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Nico Slate
Yeah.
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Ajantha Subramanian
This kind of dialectical relationship between the two. Right.
- [32:21]
Nico Slate
I like that way of thinking about it. Absolutely.
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Ajantha Subramanian
Yeah. Yeah. You know, you had also said that it's easy to romanticize transnationalism but there are also lots of bad things that cross borders. Empire, capital, all sorts of stuff, right. That. That crosses borders and reproduces inequalities. Can you give examples of the use of these, especially of the race caste comparison to entrench inequality? And when you attend to these sorts of uses of the analogy, do you see these as misuses or misinterpretations or. Or are they all just as selective and instrumental? Except, you know, sometimes it's put to, you know, the. It's put to the advancing of freedom, and sometimes it's put to the suppression of freedom. Do you understand the question?
- [33:28]
Nico Slate
I do. No, I do. I think the. Let me start with the second part and then I'll. I'll think about the best example for the first part. So in terms of how one approaches sort of the valence of these kinds of comparisons, I would say as a historian, I always try to focus on explaining and understanding rather than judging. But of course, I have my own sympathies and they guide my work in a variety of ways. And this is true for all scholars. And I tend to be sympathetic to those who are deploying these sorts of analogies in order to try to make the world a better place. I mean, that's very overly purposefully generic there, but that means, for me, it does come down to intent and I think to circle back a little bit to what we're talking about before. Often it's a question of defensiveness versus some sense of activism, some sense of trying to make things better. Right. I feel like often when these analogies are deployed, on the one hand, it's people who are saying, we need to do something to address this injustice. And then on the other end, often it's not always people who are expressly trying to advance an injustice, although we can come up with plenty of examples of that. Again, racism is an incredibly global phenomenon, and there's actually a lot of good work being done on ways in which racists collaborate across national borders in our world today, but also historically. Right. South African authorities designing apartheid look to the American South. Right. As an example to learn from. So there's lots of examples of people using these kinds of transnational ideas very expressly to exploit and oppress. But when most of the history, I'm looking at the villain, if you want to put it that way, the folks that I'm less sympathetic to aren't necessarily expressly trying to oppress someone. They're more just trying to silence a particular argument or debate in order to refocus attention in Another direction. So I think, you know, well, let's come back to Gandhi. I mean, he's such an interesting example. I mean, in. In many ways. But I think if, you know, if you look at Gandhi's relationship to race and caste, I would say, and again, it's my opinion that overall, over the course of his life, he becomes, you know, more progressive, if you will, more engaged with the injustice of these issues on both race and caste. He becomes more critical of racism. Goes from, you know, some people, I'm sure listening will know in his early years in South Africa, he's really buying into a very racialist conception of civilization that separates Indian migrants in South Africa from black South Africans. But towards the end of his time there, he really reverses and he becomes much more focused on forging coalitions with black South Africans. And later in life, he's very committed to this sort of transnational conception of people of color fighting against racism. Similarly with caste, I think he becomes. He goes from buying in, even though he's critical of untouchability, he defends a certain kind of Varna system and he's defending caste in various ways. He becomes more critical over time, but it's never his prime goal in the way that it is for someone like Ambedkar. And he's always willing to put it lower down the, you know, the priority scale. And so when these sorts of connections are forged between African Americans and the Indian independence struggles, they pick up on that. And many black figures who are looking to Gandhi see him as a champion of the rights of Dalits, right? As a champion of the rights of untouchables, because that's the frame that gets passed on to them. So it's. This is what I'm saying when I'm saying most of the people I study aren't expressly trying to oppress. I think Gandhi, in my mind anyway, isn't trying to defend the caste system as it was. He was a critic of it. But he is willing to deprioritize it. And, you know, he's putting it as a secondary struggle in a way that then gets ramified and picked up in the prevalence of the race caste analogy.
- [38:26]
Ajantha Subramanian
I mean, there's a few interesting things here. One is, you know, how does a figure like Gandhi get so much more traction, right, amongst Americans of his day than in Ambedkar? I mean, Ambedkar is far less known, right? And partly it has to do with Gandhi's prominence within the independence movement. But it's also who are the intermediaries, right? Who Sort of carry, you know, carry Gandhianism to the United States. Right. So I think there's that question of who the intermediaries are, who. Who give certain historical figures more political purchase than others. And then, I mean, in terms of Gandhi's sort of growing criticism of caste. Right. His own shifting position on the caste question, did Gandhi ever reach a point where he could think of Dalits as historical agents in their own. Right. Right. Who could advance their own struggle rather than as subjects of patronage. Right. Of certain forms of Hindu or upper caste patronage? So I think that that's another question that emerges from within these sort of solidaristic struggles. Right?
- [39:54]
Nico Slate
Oh, yeah.
- [39:54]
Ajantha Subramanian
Who's the vanguard and, you know, whose rights are being championed?
- [40:00]
Nico Slate
Yeah.
- [40:03]
Ajantha Subramanian
And when does their own sort of emergence into historical agency threaten a sort of existing coalition? Right.
- [40:10]
Nico Slate
Oh, yeah, absolutely. What. Where my mind goes is to the Du Bois novel Dark Princess, which I'm sure you're familiar with. I expect some listeners are as well. But, you know, it's such a fascinating work. And one of the things I find really interesting in that work is that, you know, for those who don't know the story, the short version is it. It revolves around an effort to build a transnational liberation movement of people of color fighting against racism that is led by sort of mysterious Indian princess. But then the main protagonist is an African American former medical student who gets pulled into the struggle. But right away, the medical student realizes that, okay, there's all these different people from different parts of the world. There's a Japanese man and an Egyptian man, and they're all working together. But a lot of the tension revolves around, well, who's going to be in charge, whose struggles are going to be represented, whose struggles are not going to be represented. So you're right, there's always that issue of vanguard, and there is the issue of, as you put it, sort of who has agency here. And I think you're right that even when someone like Gandhi is trying to address an issue, it doesn't mean that he's doing so in a way that recognizes the agency of those who are actually being oppressed in that struggle. And. And I. I think this is true on the American side as well. Right. I think, you know. Well, again, if you go back to the 19th century in the US and think about abolitionism, you know, the. One of, I think, the great tensions in the abolitionist movement that then carries forward into struggles against American racism is this. Who's. Who's driving this forward?
- [42:00]
Ajantha Subramanian
Yeah.
- [42:01]
Nico Slate
And whose voices do we need to try to amplify? And to what degree can leadership pass down to those who are most oppressed? And I think the transnational in some ways can subvert hierarchies within national borders and allow those that are oppressed to come forward and have a new stage to speak. It can amplify those voices, but it can also silence voices because, of course, it creates an even larger stage. And then all of a sudden your particular struggle can just be, you know, used by whoever is in charge of that particular coalition or collaboration, and you just kind of get pulled in. So that's. It comes back to that dialectic you were talking about earlier is when is joining this larger transnational struggle empowering and when is it silencing? And maybe sometimes it's both. And you have to find a way to. All right, I'm going to join in and I'm going to fight for this larger struggle, but I'm also not going to completely grow silent around the issues that are defining who I am and, you know, whatever communities I happen to come from.
- [43:12]
Ajantha Subramanian
Yeah, yeah. You know, when you were speaking, I was reminded of that 2001 conference in Durban. Yes, the UN Conference against Racism in Durban, where there was a real standoff between the Dalit contingent and the, the con. The. The sort of contingent representing the Indian state. Right. I wonder if you can say something about that, because that seems like a, A perfect example of this kind of scale jumping that the transnational affords to subaltern actors. Right. Who. Whose cause might be suppressed within a kind of national context, but which can get an airing in a, In a transnational setting.
- [44:00]
Nico Slate
Yeah, well, I think that, I think is one of the best examples in my mind of when a, an official body, in this case, you know, the official Indian delegation, is moved to a defensive posture, a defensive stance that is ultimately unjustified. And again, in my reading of the situation, I think what is lost by being willing to consider the many rich connections between race and caste. I mean, we haven't dived in directly yet to just how similar are these different phenomenon and how similar have they been over time? And to my mind, the answer to this is, of course, race and caste are not the same thing, because as that quote you mentioned earlier or recited earlier about this sort of double translation I think is trying to get at is just that, you know, race itself is this vast idea that contains all sorts of complexity. And the same is true of caste. So you can't just say these huge, complex ideas are somehow the same. Yes, we can find all sorts of Interesting differences, but there's also a whole lot of similarities there. And there's, there's good reasons why over time people have compared issues of race and caste and racism and casteism. So to my mind, should a convention that's focused on issues of race and racism address issues of caste 100%? Yes. I mean, what's to be lost in doing that? It doesn't mean that one overlooks the differences or oversimplifies, but I think the main reason why, again this is my reading, that the official delegation was opposed to including caste is just national defensiveness. And in this case it, you know, was unjustified. Again, from my, my standpoint, it depends on the context. So if, you know, there's a New Yorker cartoon, I can't remember if it ended up in my first book. I think I didn't. I could never get the rights to publish if I remember. Maybe I did. But it's a New Yorker cartoon that came out around the time of the Montgomery bus boycott in the mid-1950s and says the, the, the basic idea of it is, you know, people in India are making such a big deal about racism in the U.S. but they're not, they don't want to talk about caste in India. Right. So in that context, the race caste analogy is being used to defend American racism in durban in, you know, 2001. I think it's the refusal to engage in those connections is being used on some level to silence issues of caste and to buttress the Indian nation. So anyway, that's my reading of it. I think it's a really good example where the very real differences between race and caste there are of course, differences were used to silence what I think could and should have been a more productive conversation about overlaps and similarities and what one can do to fight all these different forms of, of, you know, hierarchy, inequity, oppression. Right. I mean, these are, there's so many basic connections between these different phenomena. I think they should be discussed simultaneously even though we need to recognize those differences.
- [47:21]
Ajantha Subramanian
Yeah. And we're seeing echoes of it now with the, the effort in the United States to make caste a protected category.
- [47:31]
Nico Slate
Yeah.
- [47:32]
Ajantha Subramanian
In U. S. Anti discrimination law and the fierce pushback on the part of people aligned with the Hindu right who either say caste doesn't exist in diaspora or say that this is an internal matter. Right. You know, this is something that is social or cultural and to sort of, that a legal intervention is, is, is a violation of religious or racial minority rights. So you see that same effort and close caste within either Hinduism or within the nation in order to foreclose debate about its inequities. Right.
- [48:18]
Nico Slate
Yeah, yeah. Oh, absolutely. Right. And you know, of course, there's a long history of American misunderstandings of caste and American discrimination against India and against Hinduism in particular. Right. That, you know, Americans have seen, you know, go back to Catherine Mayo and Mother India as an example. It's a complicated example, but I think it's a pretty good one of a prominent American book that uses some truth but then distorts it in order to attack India writ large. Right. And. And Hinduism writ large. So I think that that history of broad based discrimination can then be twisted and distorted in order to try to silence important efforts to address the realities of caste, whether in, in India or in. Or in the diaspora. I think, you know, to my mind, it, it just strikes me as very clear that this does. I appreciate you connecting it to Durbin because it is another example of defensive efforts to silence a conversation that is important and should happen.
- [49:34]
Ajantha Subramanian
Yeah, yeah. I had a question about the scholarship. I mean, so far we've talked primarily about political movements. Right. And how race caste comparisons are deployed within various forms of political struggle and also kind of opposition to some of these emancipatory projects. Right. But of course, race caste comparisons have also informed scholarship. So you had the caste school of American race relations. Right. In that flourished from the 1930s to the 50s, where a lot of the scholars involved were using cast to understand the Jim Crow South. And you had mentioned Oliver Cox, and I think he has an interesting. I mean, I think he, he actually refuses the comparison as a way of arguing for the relative dynamism and internal contestations of race society.
- [50:46]
Nico Slate
Exactly.
- [50:46]
Ajantha Subramanian
As opposed to caste society.
- [50:48]
Nico Slate
Right, exactly.
- [50:49]
Ajantha Subramanian
Now, I, I mean, I may, you know, you know this scholarship better than I do, but my sense that the, the, the race cast analogizing kind of dies out after the 1960s and has. Is experiencing a kind of revival now. Right. So scholars have returned to race caste comparisons. I myself teach a course on race and caste, and I've noticed that there are similar courses that are offered in various other institutions. I wonder if you can give us a sense of the kind of waxing and waning. Of this kind of scholarly focus. I mean, are there conjunctural factors that explain why it sort of takes off at particular moments and then dies down at other moments?
- [51:42]
Nico Slate
That's a fascinating question. So let me return to a different analogy briefly because I think it might be illuminating. So I mentioned earlier that this issue of color and Being colored was at the center of my first book. And one of the things I found most interesting in studying that history is that there is exactly the same pattern you just mentioned, almost exactly the same times. So you have this surge of uses of this idea of colored solidarity in the 30s, 40s into the 50s. But by the 60s it starts to drop off. And then it's not really until the 90s that this idea of people of color starts to become more common. And you get increasing uses of this idea of color, at least within the US it never returns to having a similar cachet on the global stage. In that case, it was pretty easy for me to come up with an argument about this because I think what happens is that the idea of solidarity between people of color has purchase when most non white parts of the world are colonized, right? When Africa is still almost entirely under colonial rule. Asia is just coming out of colonial rule. So it's easy for people to see this broad brush connection. But once all of these countries start to get independence, then of course you get the sad history of, you know, post colonial struggles. You get civil wars, you get, you know, Cold War driven conflicts with the US supporting one side. So you're supporting. So these dreams of colored solidarity kind of run bam, right into the realities of the post colonial world. And it takes a while for these notions of people of color to then come back up within the US context. This makes me wonder to what degree the race caste analogy is also influenced by the decolonial moment. Right. That part of what maybe silences some of these comparisons in say the 50s, 60s, into the 70s, is the complexities of that particular post colonial moment. I don't know. It's not as obvious to me around the question of color. It's very obvious to me in the question of race and caste. I could imagine that actually scholars would be especially interested in these comparisons at a moment in which the race colony analogy loses its purchase. Right. And you have Dalit struggles surging. You get the Dalit Panthers in the early 70s, and yet scholars, I think, are not picking up on it in the same way that they might otherwise have been. I don't know exactly why that is. I mean, perhaps part of the story in the US if you're thinking about like US academia, just has to do with the diaspora and the lag in terms of, you know, like, you know, you get this surge in South Asian migration and starting in the late 60s, right into the 70s. And I think with that comes, you know, eventually you get enough people in the Us that you, you. You can't ignore as easily the realities of caste within the diaspora. If you look earlier, you know, there are of course, Dalits that come to the U.S. and the teens and the twenties and the thirties. Right. But the population is so small and racism is so prevalent against that community that it's easier to overlook those realities. Perhaps. But maybe, you know, part of what we're seeing now is just that the diaspora has gotten so large and you get, as you pointed out earlier, these organized movements to try to recognize caste as a category of discrimination in this country. Maybe that's helping poll scholars more in. I don't know. Again, I have this. I. Who knows if it's accurate, but I have a pretty neat narrative about the waxing and waning of these sorts of colored connections, the race cast. I would have thought, you know, 70s, 80s, that you'd have this outpouring of interest in these comparisons. But you're right, you really don't until closer to our current moment where people are definitely diving in and engaging these issues in stronger and I think more compelling ways.
- [56:18]
Ajantha Subramanian
I mean, it may also just be a kind of methodological nationalism within scholarship. Right. Where the, the impulse is not to think about transnational connections.
- [56:31]
Nico Slate
Yeah.
- [56:33]
Ajantha Subramanian
And to instead see, you know, these forms of strat. Stratification is entirely distinct and.
- [56:41]
Nico Slate
Yeah.
- [56:41]
Ajantha Subramanian
And national in character.
- [56:44]
Nico Slate
Yeah, yeah.
- [56:46]
Ajantha Subramanian
So it may be that as well, that in some ways, with the end of empire, that kind of impulse towards methodological nationalism gets kind of consolidated not just within the nation state system, but within scholarship within the academy, you know.
- [57:03]
Nico Slate
Right. No, no, that's a smart. It's a smart way of thinking about it.
- [57:06]
Ajantha Subramanian
Yeah. I had one last question and I. This was. I wasn't sure if I was reading this right, but I thought that there was a kind of a tension between the sort of argument in colored cosmopolitanism where you sort of contrast the notion of racial diplomacy with colored cosmopolitanism. Right. And you seem to you. I thought that you characterized racial diplomacy as sort of more identitarian and kind of delimited in comparison with colored cosmopolitanism. Whereas when I read the stuff about black power and the kind of globalization of black power there, it seemed like that the argument was really for race as equally capacious a category as. As color. Right. That, that, that race could unify. Race as a kind of umbrella term. Right. Could unify as well as divide, which to me felt like a shift in your conception of racial politics. But I wasn't sure whether I was reading that. Right.
- [58:28]
Nico Slate
So that phrase, racial Diplomacy that I deployed in the first book was one that I meant to deploy fairly narrowly, I think, for a variety of reasons, as an analytical concept. I think it ended up being messier than I wanted it to be. I was really trying to use it narrowly, just as you said, as a foil for what I saw as colored cosmopolitanism. The figure I had in mind here was Marcus Garvey. There are many other examples of this, but, you know, Garvey is very interested in India and the Indian struggle. He, you know, exchanges some correspondence with Gandhi, but his way of conceiving of things is with these incredibly unified, you know, identitarian blocks of human beings. So there's the black people of the world, then there's the Asian people of the world or the Indian people of the world. And he wants them to collaborate. He wants them to work together. So there is an effort at bridging these divides, but he's really sweeping under the rug all of these different forms of complexity. And I contrast to someone like Du Bois, who is also interested in forging these sorts of alliances, but is much more attuned to complexities of gender, of class, and to some degree, even caste, although not as much as some other African American figures would be. So with racial diplomacy, what I was really trying to get at was this idea of the downsides to transnational alliances that force a kind of unitary identitarian politics on one block. It wasn't a critique or wasn't meant to be a critique of race or the idea of race itself. And you're right, absolutely, that in the Black Power book and other writings as well, I'm very interested in the way that race can be used and was used to bring people together across divides in ways that were empowering and could
- [60:45]
Ajantha Subramanian
be,
- [60:47]
Nico Slate
you know, deployed without that kind of unitary identitarian politics. I think certainly one of the things I saw my first book doing, and the rest of my scholarship as well, is pushing back against a kind of colorblind narrative that is still sadly, very prevalent in this country, where people say, well, anytime you make a reference to race or you identify in racial terms, well, it must be an example of racism and must be right. This is just a standard, I think, you know, way to try to undercut efforts to address ongoing inequities and injustices. And I wanted to push back against that. Right, and say, no. In fact, you know, the concept of race has been used to oppress people, but has also been used again and again very obviously to fight against injustice. And sure, there are, you know, examples of colorblind rhetoric in the American civil rights movement. You know, Martin Luther King is always quoted to that effect. But the American civil rights movement was a black led struggle in which black identity and the idea of black solidarity was absolutely central. And there are many examples across the world of people identifying within racial frames, but in an anti racist way and struggling against racism. So that, that was what I was
- [62:17]
Ajantha Subramanian
trying to get at, what you said about the. The kind of recourse to a sort of post racialism as an. As a counter to racial justice politics. You know, there's a sort of. There's a clear analog in the kind of. In the use of cat, you know, cast blindness. Right.
- [62:42]
Nico Slate
Yeah.
- [62:43]
Ajantha Subramanian
To thwart efforts at forging these kind of anti caste political coalitions.
- [62:50]
Nico Slate
Yeah.
- [62:50]
Ajantha Subramanian
And it's a very similar thing where, you know, you point out cast castism and you become the cast. Is. Do you have any, like, final thoughts on. Yeah, just the, the kind of moment that we're in right now where it's not. It's no longer the liberal moment of post racialism or post casteism. Right. What we're seeing is this sort of willful and, you know, robust embrace of. Of racial and caste description.
- [63:26]
Nico Slate
Yeah.
- [63:26]
Ajantha Subramanian
A kind of commitment to conceptions of naturalized hierarchy. Right. And the use of the state to advance these supremacist projects. I mean, do you have any thoughts on, you know, how your scholarship kind of helps us understand this moment, Perhaps I'll offer two.
- [63:47]
Nico Slate
They're both incredibly obvious, but I think important points, but things I remind myself of and I hope my students hold on to as well. One is just that things can get worse and they often do. I think this is perhaps again, a very obvious point these days. But I think it's important to recognize that one of the key things history teaches us is that things can get worse and often will if people of goodwill don't try to fight back. And then the kinds of social and political movements that we often hold up as moments of real transformation, things like in this country, the American civil rights movement don't come out of nowhere. And so I think at times like this, it's important to recognize that, you know, what, what the great civil rights activist Ella Baker called spade work, sort of patient labor of preparing the ground for these kinds of solidarities to flourish is something that needs to happen and that we can all contribute to in our own ways. Even if it at times feels like it's not going anywhere. Even if at times we feel like things are just getting worse. I think we can be surprised by how the work that we do can help prepare the ground and maybe even plant some seeds for the kinds of solidarities that will address a range of injustices and will empower people to fight for themselves and for others.
- [65:22]
Ajantha Subramanian
That's a very hopeful note to end on, so let's go ahead and finish. Thank you so much, Nico. This is wonderful.
- [65:30]
Nico Slate
Thank you. It's been a real pleasure.
- [65:42]
Ajantha Subramanian
Thanks to all our listeners for joining us. The cast pod can be accessed through our website thecastpod.org and through our partner the New Books Network. Sound editing and website design are managed by Siddharth Ravi. And the opening and closing theme music is from the song Combat Breathing written by Vijay Iyer and performed by Vijay Iyer. Linda May Han. Oh, and Tishan. Sorry. If you enjoyed today's episode, please be sure to share it on social media and send us your suggestions for future episodes at thecastpod@gmail com. This is Agenta Subramanian signing off. Until next time.