Mumbai: In her 2009 book The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India, Anupama Rao, PhD, describes Dalit emancipation as an unfinished project, but one that is central to the evolution of Indian democracy itself; and one that mirrors the centrality of slavery—and emancipation—to the emergence of concepts such as freedom and equality in Europe and the Americas.   

Yet, while caste-based discrimination remains rampant in India (Article 14 has reported on this here, here, here and here), and while caste impacts life expectancy, childhood health, even life in prison, it has remained invisibilised elsewhere. 

Corporate India’s diversity and inclusion efforts often sideline discussions on caste, and casteist slurs frequently lurk beneath top educational institutions’ stated progressive environment.   

Against this backdrop, and in the context of recent developments in identity politics in India where caste groups have been pitted against one another, Rao told Article 14 that caste politics and questions about social identity or reservations must be located in the context of Hindutva politics, and in the wider failure of investment in the developmental State with a commitment to  poverty alleviation. “Ideologically, the vision of social welfare  is no longer powerful, it doesn't occupy our imaginative and ideological life as it did earlier,” she said. 

Caste-oppressed students pushing for inclusion of caste in universities’ anti-discrimination policies, students leading a Dalit-feminist narrative that challenges mainstream Indian feminism and various other Dalit-Adivasi formations are exciting indicators of Dalit politics to come, Rao said. 

With a PhD in anthropology and history from the University of Michigan, Rao is director of Columbia University’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. She is completing a monograph titled Ambedkar in America. Her previous works include Memoirs of a Dalit Communist: The Many Worlds of R B More (editor, 2019) and Gender, Caste, and the Imagination of Equality (editor, 2018).

Excerpts from an interview:

Tell us about the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, the Ambedkar Initiative housed there and more broadly about shared engagement between American and Indian scholars on considering the questions of caste, race and solidarity in struggles for social justice. 

The Ambedkar Initiative has been working to build institutional and intellectual links, using the figure of Ambedkar and his presence at Columbia to think about long-term relationships between the world's largest democracy and the world's first democracy. (Ambedkar came to Columbia University in July 1913 to start a doctoral programme in political science. He graduated in 1915 with a Master’s degree, and later got his doctorate from Columbia in 1927.)

The Ambedkar Initiative started in 2018 with a set of annual lectures. We have followed up with lectures, discussions, and exhibits. I teach a course called ‘Race, Caste, and University’ that explores and uses our own university archives to get students to start thinking about the connections between race and caste. It looks at the way in which the social science disciplines have thought about questions of social stratification, hierarchy and inequality in a complex and global way.

There’s work on digitising archives, and public outreach. There is also the effort to think about Ambedkar not just as a leader and great constitutionalist—which he was—but also as a major democratic thinker. He belongs in the canon of intellectual history and political thought.

The initiative aims to mobilise global intellectual thought and political history as a way to think about the histories of democracy.

How does the Indian diaspora navigate caste today in the West, particularly in the US, where recent cases such as the one involving an employee at Cisco have brought the issue into focus? Additionally, how have efforts to integrate caste into anti-discrimination policies altered this experience of caste, particularly for students?

The question of the Indian diaspora itself is, of course, complex, right? You have a post-1965 history of South Asian migration into the United States, and before this, a history of movement and migration across the British empire and the period of decolonisation. The diaspora encompasses histories of indenture and working-class struggle, as well as elite educational achievement and success. 

The South Asian diaspora is very long in scope indeed. Consider indenture—the movement of peoples outside of the Indian subcontinent for labour, with indenture often considered a way-station between full freedom and enslavement.

The indenture contract involved forms of coerced movement and migration, in particular after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, when Asian “coolie” labour became extremely important. South Asians are very much part of that form of migration, and they moved into island societies, South Africa, Fiji, and other locations. This led to the creation of complex race-caste societies. 

That’s why the question of caste and diaspora requires careful periodisation.

To this point, Ambedkar, in his first published writing—a paper titled Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development that he wrote for a Master’s seminar at Columbia—makes a provocative point: Caste will go wherever Indians go. So, if Indians start moving across the world, caste follows them.

It’s a seemingly provocative but profoundly important statement about embodied identity, its force and mobility. Caste is always transforming. I call caste a Hydra-headed category, constantly morphing.

Caste as a social category attaches itself to South Asians, and we see it across every religious community—not just Hindus, but Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs also exhibit various forms of caste exclusion. In that sense, the South Asian diaspora, with its worldwide presence, carries and contains caste in very complicated ways. 

With nearly 1.92 billion people today in this diaspora, caste affects them implicitly and explicitly, manifesting overtly or latently, producing other forms of solidarity.

So, when you ask, “Is there caste in the diaspora?” one has to begin by saying “yes,” but also asking “in what ways?” Then we can start specifying.

About how caste manifests in the diaspora, caste operates in the US as a form of  structured inequality within communities that are themselves minority communities in multicultural societies where difference is respected. In that sense, multiculturalism is a policy that respects and manages religious, or cultural differences. This was an operative mode by which communities from the postcolony were accommodated in the UK and the US in the aftermath of World War II and then post-1965. 

So, multiculturalism is state policy, really. But caste functions as a complex form of social inequality within these multicultural communities. So it's about the rights of a minority within a minority. 

Today in the US, conversations around caste conflict and workplace discrimination—like in the Cisco case— are governed by rules regarding American workplace discrimination. These are rooted in laws regarding equal opportunity and civil rights, which regulate such cases through HR departments in the private sector.

Let me address your second question regarding caste in American universities versus India. 

Over the last few years, broadly coinciding with COVID, there has been an extraordinary set of conversations happening about caste on campus, caste in the classroom, and efforts to extend commitments to civil rights and social protections to include caste in anti-discrimination policy.

This has happened at the large state universities as well as at Ivy League universities. 

A push to make caste part of Barnard’s  anti-discrimination policy happened with little to no pushback. 

Columbia’s university senate, driven by student organising, initiated discussions that led to a positive vote for it.

But the question of caste in the classroom takes a slightly different shape. Many of us teach about caste. If you're a social scientist, there is no way you can avoid teaching about, for instance, caste, religion, and gender. These are the main arcs of social difference that organise and produce the thing we call Indian society, right? 

Questions of caste are very present in the classroom, because analytically, academically, there is a very long tradition of engaging caste as an analytic category, a social formation. But we do not have affirmative action for Dalit Bahujan students—South Asians are not considered to be an ‘underrepresented minority’ in the US by law. Because of that, we don't have a way, for instance, to bring in Dalit or caste-oppressed students into our classrooms via explicit policy. We don't have support for international underrepresented minorities. So far as admissions go, it is a kind of catch-as-you-can kind of a policy rather than explicit commitments to affirmative action.

If you were to ask someone  how many caste-oppressed students might be in the classroom, one doesn't fully know. I would say it's very few. People hesitate to identify, there is embarrassment around discussing this, and it would be hard to survey this for factual data. You need supportive structures for this to happen.

Graduate students, many identifying as caste oppressed, rallied to put caste on the table at Columbia regarding anti-discrimination policy. They've been very strong and vocal, involved with the Ambedkar Initiative and other caste-related initiatives on other campuses.

For Dalit students, in particular, the American universities can be a space of emancipation, finding solidarities with African American histories, or histories of  indigeneity, for instance. Also, being exposed to things like critical social theory. Here, the caste question doesn't have to be just identitarian—identifying with your social identity, which I think can often be limiting—you have much broader exposure to questions of exclusion, inequality, models of social justice..

We’ve had two back-to-back elections in Maharashtra in which the dominant discourse among people was related to caste—the Congress-led INDIA bloc’s contention in the general election that the incumbent NDA was seeking Constitutional amendments to alter India’s policy on reservations for SCs and STs; a rallying of Marathas in the state to seek a status of backwardness and reservations from within the OBC quota; and then the OBCs counter-mobilising to vote strategically in response. As a historian how do you read these developments?

This is a rather complicated question about the history of reservations and affirmative action in India in terms of Constitutional commitments to social redress, and its aftermath. It’s interesting to see where we are now, and what's happening in terms of emerging class and caste fractions when the developmental state, and the project of developmentalism, has been radically transformed. This has happened since the liberalisation of the economy and certainly over the last two decades.

Today, caste politics and questions about social identity or reservations have to be located, it seems to me, in the context of Hindutva politics— that is, corporate Hinduism and projects of Hinduisation that we are witnessing. This project has worked at the interstices of both caste and class formations.

What we are seeing now is the failure of investment in that developmental promise of poverty alleviation. The poor themselves constitute a Constitutional category, one that rises above but includes a number of lower castes. Ideologically, the vision of social welfare  is no longer powerful, it doesn't occupy our imaginative and ideological life as it did earlier as a substantive commitment.

And then, there is the agrarian crisis. In many ways, the current Indian state has been radically transformed. We are in the midst of a deep agrarian crisis and efforts to privatise agriculture. The farmers' protests are very much part of that transformation of Indian capital and its relationship to the state.

I think those failures are actually animating what's happening now. We have now had decades of jobless growth, the growth of the informal economy, massive agrarian distress and urban precarity, forced migration, displacement—and so the forms of subsistence life, as it were, are under radical pressure. I don't want to offer a deterministic argument that because people are in economic distress they turn to authoritarian ideologies. I don't think that kind of determinism operates at all.

But this material condition of everyday life is, I think, extremely significant.

It allows for various forms of outrage politics. It also justifies social predation. 

Increasingly, the relationship between State and violence is inverted, deformed. Rather than law preventing social violence, it  mimics these forms and often justifies them. Those cycles of extensive and intensifying political violence are shaping the context of what we are discussing.

So where are we in terms of reservations and affirmative action, or class politics? The Indian Constitution is remarkable. Like many other post-colonial Constitutions, it actually names categories of people to whom social redress is due. The poor are named. But most importantly—and I always use this term by Justice Krishna Iyer—the STs and the SCs are a “super-nominated” category. They are part of the Constitution. The entire history and the thinking of reservations follows from how we address these exceptional, degraded, and discriminated groups. Thus, reservations are a mechanism for enacting historic redress.

From the SCs and STs to the OBCs, there is one trajectory of expanding democratisation through caste. The history of the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) and Maratha reservations, it seems to me, is part of something distinctive. These efforts utilise policies whose origins are rooted in an ideology that is quite different from the claims.

As a historian, what is very interesting to me is that, across the 19th century, there was an effort to distinguish Marathas from what was called the Maratha-kunbi cluster; this led to the emergence of Marathas as a dominant caste.

Castes like Marathas, think Gowdas, Reddys, Jats, Rajputs… These dominant castes tried very hard to distinguish themselves from the agrarian peasantry. Maratha politics in the 19th century focused on distinguishing the ‘Shahannava Kuli’ (the 96 great Maratha families) as elites, with control over land, kingship—families such as the Bhonsles or the Scindias are all part of that trajectory. And Marathas often aligned themselves with Rajput lineage. 

In Maharashtra, by 1930, the Congress itself was dominated by Marathas; an anti colonial party was also controlled  by the dominant castes. 

How interesting that a caste which, across the 19th century, claims distinction by associating with Kshatriya ideology, now finds itself amid agrarian crisis and loss of livelihood and land, demanding reservations.  

The OBCs and Marathas in Maharashtra are numerically almost equivalent to each other. That also has to do with Maharashtra's very distinctive pre-colonial and colonial history. Unlike, for instance, states where there are a number of dominant castes, the Marathas are the main dominant caste in Maharashtra. 

Now, in terms of power, we see local struggles for political visibility plus association with the ruling national party. We are seeing a broader transformation as state federalism is giving way to nationalisation, along the lines of the US. 

Here we are mimicking in some ways the US two-party system and maybe increasingly in India, single-party rule, where the national party actually has been able to take over mindshare in an attention economy, thus overwhelming state distinctions and local party politics, or subsuming them to itself. The politics of majoritarian identity is sometimes in conflict with local permutations of caste and class politics, but increasingly subsuming them under an anti-minority politics.

What are your thoughts on Dalit politics in present-day India, and its role in engendering real change for marginalised communities? How do Dr Ambedkar's views resonate with the challenges posed by contemporary identity politics and reservations?

If I may say so, you know politics is not merely about elections or the vote, though these are very important.

You have the rhythm of elections, there is money, licit and illicit monies organise the spectacle of elections, their public performance. And surely this is important because, you know, this is a large, complex, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and regionally distinctive electorate. And in Maharashtra, one saw too that there is a good deal of spatial unevenness. The history of the areas with sugar cooperatives and agrarian modernisation is very different, say, from drought-prone regions in Marathwada, Vidarbha. 

Parties and party politics are very important, but politics as such goes before and beyond, it extends outside of elections, and their spectacle. 

Dalit politics has always functioned as a kind of political and ethical horizon. Dalits are imagined as a subaltern majority. If you think about the Dalit Panthers, what was their understanding of who Dalits were? They were workers, the lumpen, women. So this is a multitude, those who suffer from dispossession, marginalisation, exploitation, social exclusion and economic exploitation.

Ambedkar, from the Poona Pact onwards, thinks about the so-called ‘Depressed Classes’ as a constituency. They don't exist. He needs to create their unity, bring them into focus around shared interests and history. 

One of the ways he does this is to make sure that the community will refuse to consent to being part of the Hindu general electorate in the colonial period. He does this when he demands separate electorates, which would have allowed Dalits to create an interest bloc by political means, through policy design, if you will.

So the politics that he plays is a politics—and I've made this argument in my book— that mimics the logic of the general strike. The general strike is about withholding labour. It's not about resisting, but it's about saying, I actually show my power by withholding consent to a dominant order. 

It is in that sense that Dalit politics functions as a political-ethical horizon. That is the role that it has played from the late colonial into the post-colonial period. In terms of realpolitik, other than the BSP, which managed partly because of the demographics in Uttar Pradesh to become the main player rather than a sidekick, no other party has done that.

But if you look at what's happened in Maharashtra, there is a kind of mismatch between the insurgency of the politics on the ground, the kind of claims groups are making about the historical past, the claims about public space, that is, broader kind of ethical and political vision and on the other hand the politics on the ground that very often ends up being tokenistic. Or, Dalit parties end up being a coalition partner. Dalit politics very often ends up being “co-opted”.

They're now going to be snuffed out, clearly, unless they form part of a viable coalition. Prakash Ambedkar has, I think, been trying very hard to do that. He has actually tried to mobilise around this idea that regular politics could include the multitude, the kashtakari, if you will. How successful this will be is a long game.

Dalit politics plays the very important role of political interruption, at certain points, acting to redirect the direction that politics is going. This is what I meant when I say it functions as a kind of political-ethical horizon. 

Student politics that we're seeing has been most inspired by this vision, it is imaginative, in many ways, unafraid and insurgent.

Indian universities are the one place where you do have random cross-caste interactions. I think who is in the classroom matters greatly, but also what students bring to the table in terms of their vision, imagination, and energy. 

Students have been really important in putting forward an imagination of politics, whether it is Dalit and queer politics, which is very important in putting pressure on the queer movement and on feminist organising, or whether it is Dalit feminism that is really challenging mainstream Indian hegemonic feminism. Or the kind of Dalit and Adivasi formations that we're really seeing coming to the surface through student politics but then coming out into local politics on the ground.

We see here some inklings of the kinds of formations, cross-caste, taking up questions of gender, taking up other questions of precarity, perhaps limited in what they're able to achieve immediately but also perhaps signaling the shape of that politics to come.

Tell us about the Ambedkar Initiative’s projects on public memory, anti-caste thought, particularly in India.    

We are organising a set of thematic lectures and a symposium. There are efforts to do similar work in India. 

We are thinking through questions of public memory, public history, and the histories of anti-caste thought, and how questions of race and caste might create occasion for political solidarity and affinity.

On the other hand, the race-caste comparison can also be a space of conceptual misfire. There isn’t an absolute complementarity or equivalence between the two categories. Many African American thinkers, for instance, have used caste as a framework to think about complicated forms of inequality. These include status distinctions and hierarchy, as well as histories of enslavement and post-emancipation in the US.

But race and caste are not equivalent categories. They are analogical: The Ambedkar Initiative thinks through forms of social and political mobilisation that could be inspiring. There are also sociological and anthropological ways in which the race-caste comparison has worked as a form of translation across uneven global histories.

Some projects of the Ambedkar Initiative will be India-based, and what a happy circumstance it is that, rather than Delhi, we have Columbia’s Mumbai Global Center, which has been a pleasure to work with. 

I've worked with the Global Center for a long time now and it has meant that one has been able to do things that are local, and to build sort of capacity in ways that are very significant. I mean, Mumbai is as much the home of Ambedkar as Columbia is. In that context, we are extending into some of the work that we have been doing at Columbia by thinking about the archive, public and private archives, ways that people can think about collection and curation.

(Kavitha Iyer is a senior editor with Article 14 and the author of ‘Landscapes of Loss’, a book on India’s farm crisis.)  

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