Session Abstract

This panel honors the valuable contributions of two renowned, and recently deceased scholars of caste in India: Owen Lynch and Sharmila Rege. Both the scholars advocated interdisciplinarity and studied how caste, an important feature of social stratification in India, was entangled with the construction of gender, kinship, community, and the state. Drawing inspiration from them and building on their work the historians in this panel cross disciplinary boundaries to explore the interconnections between caste and built environment, state-making practices, education, and communalism. We draw upon the theoretical frames and conceptual tools provided by historians, anthropologists, literary critics, and scholars of women and gender studies to offer a fresh perspective on the role of caste in producing the matrices of domination, resistance, and subject formation in South Asia. We draw upon the feminist anthropologist Chandra T. Mohanty’s concept of cartography: an invitation to self-reflexively map the political-economic, social, and cultural processes that produce certain subjects in specific contexts and deepen scholarly analysis. We extend Mohanty’s synchronic analysis to study the diachronic analysis of caste in early modern and modern India. Cartography, in our usage, stands for the diverse processes through which caste subjects were produced in different regions of India between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.

The panel highlights the use of caste in dispossessing individuals and groups of material, social, and cultural resources. The papers combine research in state archives, with the study of pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers in regional languages, vernacular panegyrics, and oral histories to study the strategies deployed by these actors in navigating their subordination. Rochisha Narayan’s paper combines literary analysis with archival work to foreground the complexities of early colonial rule. She reads an eighteenth century Brajbhasha panegyrical text (which was commissioned by one Chait Singh, a “mixed-caste”) and juxtaposes it with Persian and colonial sources to draw attention to the discourses of caste and gender in the extractive practices of the colonial state. She proposes “vernacular history” as an optic to reveal the intricacies of competing claims of state-making. Juned Shaikh examines how built environment – which includes physical structures like houses, roads, factories, sewage systems and cultural institutions like schools – is shaped by the State, capital, and the people who stay within it and make use of it. He argues that class and caste stratification were mapped easily on to the built environment in twentieth century Mumbai. Shailaja Paik combines extensive oral interviews with archival research to challenge the triumphant narrative of modern secular education. She analyzes a variety of significant historical concerns to show that education transformed and failed to transform the lives of Dalit (“Untouchable”) women in twentieth century Maharashtra. Dwaipayan Sen explores the novel alliance crafted by the Scheduled Castes Federation and the Muslim League in 1940s Bengal, and the theory of Namasudra and Muslim unity on which it rested. He illustrates how the Federation and League cooperated to challenge the project of Hindu nationalism, and the upper caste anxieties it provoked in turn.