Beyond Hereditary Labor: Caste, Craft, and Artisan Agency in South India, 1700–1900

Beyond Hereditary Labor: Caste, Craft, and Artisan Agency in South India, 1700–1900

In colonial archives and art-historical accounts of South Asia, discussions of caste and craft tend to oscillate between two interpretive poles: either caste is treated as a rigid structure that predetermined occupational life, or craft objects are foregrounded while their makers recede into anonymity. This presentation brings these strands into conversation by examining South Indian artisan communities as both political actors who mobilized through caste and skilled practitioners whose material knowledge was constitutive of caste identity itself. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it traces the reciprocal formation of caste and craft through the cases of textile weavers in southeastern India and ivory carvers in southwestern India.