Introduction to the special issue: Rethinking difference in India through racialization

ABSTRACT

The contributions in this issue forward a nuanced exposition of how the production of racial difference in India buttresses and is reproduced through Hindu nationalist, casteist, and colonial projects that generate tacit or explicit consent for continued violence against racialized others. At the same time, the articles look transnationally, examining how regional forms of racial difference marked by caste and tribe, for instance, have long articulated with historical forms of global racial capitalism. Ultimately, this special issue attends to the narratives and experiences of those living at the margins, who strategically deploy racial concepts to build international solidarity movements beyond the narrow confines of the nation-state. In so doing, it hopes to derive insights on the necessity of transnational translations, even as it directs renewed attention to the specificity of regional hierarchies that shape everyday life and death in India.

KEYWORDS:

• Racialization
• caste
• tribe
• indigeneity
• Hindu nationalism
• solidarities

Introduction

In mid-2021, as we write the introduction to our special issue, India continues to reel from the biggest spike in new coronavirus infections since the pandemic began in early 2020. As in many other countries, the pandemic revealed the deep fractures, hierarchies, and forms of everyday violence structuring the Indian nation-state (Bhattacharya 2021). As the country went into its first lockdown in March 2020, migrant workers stranded in cities – many of whom are landless Dalit-Bahujan¹ labourers, abandoned by the state with no source of income or public transportation – made their way back home on foot, some walking for miles and days. In the months to come, even as the pandemic raged nationwide, devastating the lives and livelihoods of millions, Oxfam reported that the wealth of Indian billionaires Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani skyrocketed, increasing by 35 per cent (Business Standard 2021). Dominant castes continue to vastly overshadow legislative, judiciary, and business domains (Thaiyaan 2021). Critical commentators have noted that the pandemic provided a cover for the Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to strengthen Hindu nationalist and Islamophobic projects while clamping down on any form of public dissent (Nigam 2021). The persecution of student activists, academics, and movement leaders, many languishing in prison without a fair trial, has led to growing alarm over fraying human rights in India (Oxfam 2021). Most recently, the death of Jesuit Adivasi rights activist Father Stan Swamy while in police custody, fuelled public outrage over the draconian and fascist nature of laws that criminalize dissent by Dalit, Bahujan, Tribal/Adivasi,² Kashmiri, and non-Hindu citizens as “seditious” and “anti-nationalist”. We open with this litany of injustices to make explicit what is at stake politically in engaging with theories of racialization and difference in India.

At the outset we, the special issue editors, acknowledge that being located in American and British academia, with our varied positionalities³ necessarily yields both limitations and openings in how we engage racial difference. Collectively, as scholars who consider questions of caste, race, and indigeneity and write against oppression in our scholarship, we propose that racism and racialization in India operate at the intersections of caste supremacy, brahminism,⁴ coloniality, Islamophobia, and Hindu fundamentalism, all of which are calibrated through shifting capitalist political economies. We understand the events currently unfolding as an intensification of the social stratification that characterizes India’s ongoing imperial ruination (Stoler 2016), the layering of prior unfinished histories of differential power into contemporary life in overtly and subtly racial terms.

Growing out of a 2019 conference titled “Rethinking Difference in India: Racialization in Transnational Perspective”, sponsored by the Antipode Foundation and the British International Studies’ Colonial/Postcolonial/Decolonial Working Group, the papers in our special issue write against absent or limited understandings of race by centreing critical analyses of racialization in the Indian context. A key question underlies and animates our special issue: can racial concepts be translated across contexts? That is, why go through the trouble of “importing” ideas like race, intersectionality, or indigeneity to the Indian context, given pre-existing categories of social difference specific to the sub-continent? To answer this question, we must first acknowledge the violences embedded in postcolonial nation formation and “the contested and tortured production of sovereign identity” (Krishna 1994, 508) that have delineated territorial and cognitive margins within the nation-state. As Jessica Namakkal (2021) reminds us, retooled forms of colonialism live on in India, paradoxically made possible precisely because of formal decolonization. Attending to the experiences of those living at the margins – those who were left out of the freedom promises pursued by the postcolonial state and who strategically deploy racial concepts to build international movements beyond the narrow confines of the nation-state – we hope to derive important insights on the necessity of transnational translations, even as we direct renewed attention to the regional and place-based hierarchies that shape everyday life and death in India.

Genealogies of racialization in the Indian context

Our issue explores how racialization plays out across multiple forms of social difference that are often considered in isolation, namely race, caste, tribe (or indigeneity), and religion, in conjunction with intersectional axes such as class and gender. The contributions in this issue forward a nuanced exposition of how racial difference in India buttresses and is reproduced through Hindu nationalist and casteist projects, which generate tacit or explicit consent for continued violence against racialized others. At the same time, the articles look transnationally, examining how regional forms of racial difference have long articulated with historical forms of global racial capitalism. In this section, we review intellectual genealogies on race relevant to understanding contemporary racialization in the South Asian, and specifically Indian, context.

Colonial histories: race science and civilizational discourse

At the outset, we recognize that the application of concepts of “race” to the Indian context is heavily contested; after all, racial thinking, refracted through a biological, colonial, and Eurocentric lens, has long been used as a justification to preserve caste hierarchies in India (Robb 1997). The concept of race in South Asia acquired a new level of complexity as it quickly mingled with notions of caste – an unsurprising conflation given that both categories offer explanations of social hierarchy. One of the clearest examples of this is the work carried out by Herbert H. Risley, a colonial administrator, ethnographer, and the Commissioner for the 1901 Census (Bayly 1997). Risley, influenced by the racial anthropological theorists who founded scientific racism, such as Topinard and Broca, used anthropometric methods (the measurement of skulls and nasal index, for instance) to argue that the Indian caste system reflected a hierarchy of races (Bates 1995). According to Risley, upper caste communities had a strong Aryan/European biological composition, making them more suited to rule or collaborate with colonial authorities, in contrast with lower caste people whose alleged non-European biology made them racially inferior and in need of colonial laws and government.

Interestingly, even though scientific racism was attempting to displace the discourse of caste, purity played a significant role in both conceptualizations. While ritual and religious purity were key in the hierarchical gradations of the caste system, racial discourses emphasized purity of blood. Rather than negating one another, the discourses of race and caste were syncretized in the nineteenth century to justify the ongoing oppression of people who were considered to be inferior. On the one hand, the “scientific” conceptualization of race justified caste inequalities in secular terms; religion was no longer needed to explain social hierarchies in India as the “universality” of scientific racism purported to clarify the racial origins of caste. On the other hand, caste supported scientific racism’s justification of colonialism by seeming to prove that racial inequality existed everywhere in the world, but under a different name. In other words, colonial sciences de-mystified caste differences by re-interpreting them through a racial scope; in turn, reading caste through scientific racism supported a civilizational argument for Western modernity as the avenue to comprehending and resolving all phenomena on Earth, including the elusive caste system. While the equation of caste with biological notions of race has been repeatedly discredited, the influence of scientific racism persists in contemporary understandings of caste and in Indian popular imaginations, as this special issue shows.

The impact of scientific racism and anthropometry also extended beyond debates about caste, heavily influencing colonial investigations of tribes. Bates (1995) notes that by the 1830s, colonial ethnographers had developed elaborate racial theories about both caste and tribe by combining brahminical justifications for caste supremacy with racist anthropometry. Risley’s colonial race science project, detailed above, articulated racial supremacy in civilizational terms to support the so-called “Aryan Invasion Theory”. According to one version of this heavily contested theory (see Ashutosh 2021), a race of people with European Steppe ancestry, to whom key elements of Hindu culture such as the Sanskrit language and Vedic texts are attributed, displaced India’s Indigenous populations, understood to be the predecessors of modern-day lower caste, Dalit, Bahujan, and tribal groups (Bates 1995; Rai 2021; see Gergan and Smith 2021 on “Mongolian” tribes). Colonial racialization of tribal groups covered a broad gamut: those who put up a fierce rebellion against British incursions were seen as “wild” or “savage” (Skaria 1997, 1999; Hussain 2015); mountain and hill tribes were romanticized as “noble guardians of Edenic sanctuaries” (Kennedy 1991; Po’dar and Subba 1991); still others were profiled as “criminal tribes” (Bhukya 2008). In short, for colonial ethnographers, tribes were the “natural antithesis of the brahmin” (Bates 1995, 234).

As Karak (2016, 268) observes, “neither the category of the “tribe” nor that of the “Adivasi” was created for the purpose of describing existing social realities. Rather, each is a site of intervention for producing, recognizing, and governing difference”. Colonial racialization of tribes is revealing of the racial logic at modernity’s core, where whiteness as a category is made possible only because of the “other”. Applied to India, communities categorized as tribes were understood as distinct from Hindu caste-based society; their religious practices, modes of production and property regimes, particularly those involving non-sedentary livelihoods like nomadism and shifting cultivation, were labelled as “primitive” to reinforce a civilizational narrative of modernity (Dirks 1989; Cohn 1990; Hussain 2015). In the 1940s, colonial anthropology’s prevailing discourses became the basis for Indian anthropologists studying tribes like Verrier Elwin and G. S. Ghurye. While they held opposing views on India’s prerogative towards its tribal populations – Elwin favoured isolationist and protectionist policies, while Ghurye proposed assimilation – they were unified in the belief that tribes were in need of the state’s paternal care. Thus, those categorized as “tribal” in India are simultaneously positioned at the bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy and regarded as “backwards” in relation to the teleologies of national development (Rao 2020; see Kikon 2021) and Hindu civilizational discourse (Xaxa 2005; Longkumer 2020; see Ghurye 1963 on tribes as “backward Hindus”).

Critical re-examinations: racialization and global racial capitalism

We re-examine the relevance of race in India in this issue, even as we write against colonial race science paradigms, with awareness that contemporary social hierarchies are molded by global imperialism’s intimate refashioning of who we are and how we understand ourselves (Lowe 2015). We thus follow critical caste, critical race, and Black radical conceptualizations by focusing on racialization and racial capitalism as key analytical concepts, while insisting on the situated entanglements between brahminism, coloniality, and global capitalism (Ayyathurai 2021b). We define racialization as a process of marking bodies, whereby essentialized identities, traits, and meanings are assigned to particular bodies as circumscribed by shifting political, cultural, and economic relations (e.g. Banton 1977; Barot and Bird 2001; Desmond and Emirbayer 2009; Baber 2010; Omi and Winant 2015; Gans 2017; Ramdas 2018; Zeev 2021). As a continuous process of ascription, racialization is a rejoinder to biological notions of race, a reminder that race is an unstable category (Omi and Winant 2015) advanced by colonial, capitalist and hetero-patriarchal projects. Crucially, according to Zaheer Baber (2010, 243), “for racialization to occur, it is sometimes irrelevant whether a group of people share certain uniform phenotypical characteristics or not”.

In Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson (2020) argues that racism is not incidental, but central to the operation of capitalist political-economic systems. The accumulation of value in capitalism “requires loss, disposability, and the unequal differentiation of human value, and racism enshrines the inequalities that capitalism requires” (Melamed 2015, 77). We concur with Jodi Melamed’s (2015, 77) declaration that “capitalism is racial capitalism”. However, to extend the analytic of racial capitalism beyond the geography of the Americas, we must reconceptualize racialization in relation to how regional formations of social difference intersect with global capitalism (Goldberg 2009). We theorize racialization in concert with scholars of global imperialism who have generatively elaborated on how the gendered and sexualized racialization of people from across Asia – for example, migrant labourers, as well as those living in imperial colonies – are intimately intertwined with the global production of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and settler colonialism (Lowe 2015; Tadiar 2015; Day 2016; Karuka 2019). Following Neferti Tadiar’s (2015, 145) call to “think beyond the discrete genealogies of particular racialized social groups”, we attend to the forms of racialization that are submerged within bounded categories such as “Indian”, “Hindu”, and “South Asian”.

In re-examining oppression in India in relation to racial capitalism, we find inspiration in Robinson’s own etiology of the race concept. Rather than binding race to the transatlantic slave trade and the origins of anti-Black racism, Robinson locates the origins of racial thinking in the “racialism” of social hierarchies internal to Europe that pre-existed and allowed for the emergence of enclosure and capitalism. European people self-racialized, establishing their superiority over Europe’s internal “others”, much like, as Anu Ramdas (2018) puts it, brahmins self-racialize, imagining themselves in closer proximity to purity, Aryanism, and whiteness (see also Ashutosh 2021). Following Robinson, we are interested in how Indian regimes of social differentiation along lines of caste, tribe, religion and cultural difference, including those which pre-date European colonization, are transformed, reproduced, and proliferated in service to global capitalism in new racial terms. We suggest that re-examining social hierarchies through the framework of racialization in India, a context in which “race” is not the primary marker of difference, may productively expand our understanding of global capitalism as racial capitalism, and illuminate capitalism’s “remarkable flexibility historically, exploiting each new frontier’s unique logics of exclusion and exploitation, where and how it finds them” (Khan 2021b, 87).

Under capitalism, people racialized as subordinate are devalued through two primary and interrelated mechanisms: land and labour. As a long anticaste Marxist tradition has elucidated, India’s economy maintains fundamentally feudal characteristics: surplus value was and is extracted by racializing untouchable castes, non-Hindu, and tribal peoples as disposable labour forces. Simultaneously the appropriation of land by dominant Hindu propertied castes ensures a perpetually landless, servile, and indebted class of untouchable labourers (e.g. Omvedt 1981; Ambedkar 2014; Viswanath 2014; see also Ranganathan 2021; Gupta 2021). Rather than disappearing under capitalist development, such semi-feudal relations have persisted due to recalibrations of caste power. However, to more fully understand Indian oppression in the modern context, we must also re-examine how the emergence of “race” as a global force – consolidated by the transAtlantic slave trade, by the European conquest of the Americas and the Caribbean, and by Indigenous genocide – also came to restructure existing regional hierarchies in South Asia along racial lines.

Recent scholarship productively extends the analytic of racial capitalism to the Indian Ocean World, illuminating why we must interrogate the “still vertical, yet never static, relations among the colonized that have often been flattened in the service of representing all colonized people as always abject” (Qadir 2019). For example, Mishal Khan (2021b) details how the production of Indian labour as a commodity was animated not by slavery, but by the advent of abolition. To sustain imperial capitalism after the British legally abolished slavery, new modes of racialized labour proliferated, repackaging the coercion associated with enslavement in more palatable forms through the “vocabulary of freedom” (Hartman 1997, 117; cited in Khan 2021b). Thus Indians came to be framed as “free labour” in contrast with enslaved Africans, promoted as an ethical alternate source of cheap labour. This categorization glossed over Indian caste and kinship hierarchies, which were structured through bondage and servitude by those deemed “untouchable”, thereby legitimating the indenture of lower caste, tribal people and landless peasants as “coolie labour” forces. Thus, understood as contractual workers rather than enslaved people, coolie labourers subsidized the continuation, expansion, and palatability of racial capitalism in Indian colonial plantations, as well as across the Indian, Caribbean, and Atlantic Ocean worlds (Khan 2021b; for discussions of descendants of indentured labourers in other contexts, see Kikon 2019 and Baruah 2020 on Northeast India and Jegathesan 2019 on tea plantation workers in Sri Lanka).

A case in point revealing how colonial racialization shapes contemporary oppression in India are the communities of African descendant Siddis and Kafirs who trace their ancestry to the much less discussed Indian Ocean Slave Trade (IOST). In contrast with the transatlantic slave trade, the IOST was characterized by domestic servitude, mercantile, and military slavery, rather than by labour for large-scale industrial plantation economies (Hofmeyr 2007). The IOST was composed of ethnically diverse populations from diverse geographical origins. Yet, following passage of the Indian Slave Act of 1843, slavery increasingly became equated with African descendance, on the one hand reifying the racialization of Blackness as self-evident, while simultaneously disappearing indigent Indian slavery in its many forms (Khan 2021a). Sureshi Jayawardane (2016) argues that the persistent discrimination of Africana communities in South Asia reflects endemic South Asian colorism and casteist ideologies compounded by imported Western ideologies of anti-Black racism – what she refers to as “racialized casteism”.

Notably, while colonial India was a key node of racialized labour in the development of global capitalism, the histories and experiences of India’s indentured diasporas are rarely acknowledged, implicitly presumed to be irrelevant to understanding difference within the subcontinent. Revisited through the lens of racialization, however, colonial migration and enslavement in the Indian Ocean world – including indentured and domestic labourers, traders and “free migrants” – trouble the discrete genealogies of disciplinary silos organized in adherence to fictive categories of race (Lowe 2015). What practices of domination are masked within the Indian state’s discourses of a Hindu national identity (see Natrajan 2021)? What possibilities are engendered by re-examining the spatial ordering of Indian casteist society as a racial project (see Ranganathan 2021; Cháirez-Garza 2021)? A case in point is Ayyathurai’s recent (2021a) study of Guyanese Caribbean temples which identifies heterodox and casteless religious spaces that are also inclusive to Muslims and Christians, encompassing non-brahminical deities and practices considered taboo in orthodox Hindu temples. Such vernacular practices speak to the persistence and translocation of caste hierarchies, as well as, importantly, anti-caste societies amongst Caribbean diasporas that are erased in being labelled simply “Indian” and “Hindu”. We believe the analytic of racialization helps us attend more carefully to how India’s oppressive hierarchies, organized along the lines of religion, caste, and tribe, form the basis for the commodification of land and labour in global capitalism, revealing not only how exclusion occurs, but where disruption through transnational analytics and strategic comparisons may be possible and even necessary (Natrajan and Greenough 2009; Dhanda 2015; Manoharan 2019; see also Gergan and Smith 2021; Ranganathan 2021; Yengde 2021).

Contemporary debates: translating concepts of race

Despite the rich literature on global formations of racial capitalism and racialization discussed above, debates pertaining to race, caste, and tribe as coarticulating analytics have raged on through the twenty-first century. Even as biological race was losing ground and social-constructivist notions of race and racialization were gaining favour by the end of the twentieth century, social scientists like Andre Beteille (2004, 52) insisted that “treating caste as a form of race is politically mischievous; what is worse it is scientifically nonsensical”. In so doing, he shut down the potential for nuanced, historically careful, and internationalist theorizations across race, caste, tribe, and other forms of difference. The Indian state, likewise, has also thwarted opportunities for transnational solidarity by suggesting that caste does not merit inclusion in global forums on antiracism. The Indian state’s response to Dalit activists at the 2001 UN World Conference on Racism in Durban, for instance, invoked the boundaries of the nation-state, to reject caste as a form of racial discrimination, arguing that caste was an “internal matter” (Kaur 2001; Pinto 2001). In this, India’s rhetorics mirrored the Israeli and American governments’ stance against Palestinian activists who, at the same conference, condemned Zionism as racism and a “new kind of apartheid”(Alves 2003). The state’s defensive posturing against Dalit and Palestinians activists adopting a transnational grammar of racism conveys the political stakes of translation projects.

Within India, caste continues to be upheld as a religious and immutable category which is seen on the one hand as waning in import, and on the other as a unique cultural essence that cannot be used outside of the subcontinent; meanwhile, race has been framed as a flawed “Western” import unable to describe the complexity of Indian society. Such positions – harnessed by the Hindutva project, even as that project continues to criminalize, racialize, and persecute Muslims, Dalits, and other non-Hindu minorities – deploy opportunistic formulations of difference in order to bolster nationalism and stymie opportunities for transnational solidarities that seek to undo racism, casteism, and Islamophobia.

Against such parochial viewpoints, the publication of Isabel Wilkerson’s (2020) highly anticipated book Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents has added an opposing vantage, vastly opening up the potentialities of the caste analytic rather than closing them down. Drawing chiefly on the history of caste in India (and secondarily, Nazi Germany), Wilkerson goes as far as arguing that caste should supersede race as an explanatory framework for human hierarchy, especially in the U.S where, according to her, race obscures more than it reveals. Yet, Wilkerson (2020, 19) curiously resorts to biological understandings of race when she says: “Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place”. Her book has reignited the race-caste debates wherein American detractors have resurrected Trinidadian Marxist Oliver Cromwell Cox’s (1945) indictment of the “caste school of race relations” (at the time, associated with anthropologists Allison Davis, Gunnar Myrdal, and others) to slam Wilkerson’s superficial readings on race and capitalism (e.g. Burden-Stelly 2020).

In his emphasis on the fundamentally racial underpinnings of capitalism, Cox falls within a lineage of Black Marxist thought that has reevaluated capitalism as a world economic system racialized from its inception. Unfortunately, Cox does not extend the same nuanced Marxian analysis to caste. For Cox, caste is wholly unlike race because, whereas the former is relatively peaceful and harmonious, ordained by religious scripture, and is therefore unquestioned by submissive caste subordinates, the latter is rooted in class antagonism. As Gerald Berreman (1971) countered, Cox’s description of caste could not have been farther from the truth and strangely parrots what Berreman termed a “brahminical view of caste”, which frames caste as consensual and passively accepted.

The articles in this special issue offer clarity on this renewed debate. They roundly reject the position that caste is a “peaceful” construct and a signifier emptied of class, conflict, and capitalism, while they also reject the notion that caste can replace race-class as entangled analytics, as robustly theorized in Black Marxism. We find that both sides of this debate have missed a key point that we advance: race cannot be reduced to caste any more than caste can be reduced to race. Rather, both operate through continuous logics of racialization that yield profit and value through political-economic valuations of bodies and/in space; in brief, caste, like race, is inextricably bound with capitalism’s dehumanizing impulse. This is especially true of untouchability’s operations and is precisely why understandings of modern caste – that is to say, from the colonial period or roughly the sixteenth century onwards – cannot be complete without analyses of the workings of global racial capitalism and its strategic and profitable leveraging of untouchability across labour and property regimes.

In the final section, we summarize the key interventions of this issue through two key analytics: (1) how racialization functions through casteist socio-spatial logics to further racial capitalism; and (2) how the Indian state perpetuates racial oppression through nationalism both domestically and transnationally.

Key interventions of the special issue

Racialization and space

Perhaps one of the least explored aspects regarding the connection between caste and racialization concerns how social hierarchies are reproduced in space. As this special issue shows, racial logics are used by dominant communities to keep people in place in order to maintain their hierarchy among people they consider inferior. Gopal Guru (2012), like other spatial theorists (e.g. Lefebvre 1991; Massey 1994), understands space as socially constructed and intrinsically related to the experience of subjects within particular spaces at specific times. Within hierarchical societies, subjects are allotted a place (in physical and metaphorical terms) that comes to define and constrain them. Simultaneously, subjects construct, reproduce, and stabilize the spatial structure of power that transforms particular spaces into places associated with specific structures of power. Subjects’ experience of space is therefore fragmented and depends on their position within particular structures of power. A clear example of this is the division of Indian rural villages along caste lines where upper caste, lower caste and Dalit populations may be easily located (think of jati muhallas or bastis). Such a division of space depends on the readability of bodies and their placement within hierarchical structures of power. In other words, the ordering of space along caste lines depends on the racialization and self-racialization of specific communities, often achieved under the threat of violence.

The racial organization of space along caste lines is not automatic. The articles by Cháirez-Garza, Gupta, Ranganathan and Kikon analyse the deliberateness of this process, and how it has changed over time. Cháirez-Garza offers a historical analysis of the racialization of Dalits by looking at the writings of B.R. Ambedkar, one of the most important Indian political thinkers of the twentieth century. For Ambedkar, space was a key element in the oppression of Dalits. This did not mean the relationship between space and racialization of Dalits was immutable. As Ambedkar’s autobiographical notes show, there are particular spaces in which establishing the connection of people to a specific caste or race is hard to achieve. For instance, as Cháirez-Garza argues, Ambedkar’s memories of untouchability occurred in spaces where people are usually just passing by such as train stations or hotels. In these “in-between spaces” the racialization of someone as a Dalit or a brahmin is not certain and people may be able to push the boundaries of caste relations or attempt to pass as something they are not. Yet, these transgressions are risky and, as Ambedkar’s example shows, may end in violence and physical harm against those rejecting oppressive structures of power. In other words, even though “in-between spaces” may offer possibilities to challenge racialization or casteization, eventually, these places will be surveilled to maintain normative caste and racial hierarchies.

The pervasiveness of the spatialization of caste in modern settings can be appreciated through Pallavi Gupta’s analysis of the role of cleaners in railways stations in Hyderabad. Unlike Ambedkar’s experience in which his status as a Dalit was uncertain to the people around him, Gupta’s work shows how the gendered racialization of Dalit women is used to maintain the casteist order of the railway station. Gupta’s study took place in the middle of the governmental campaign Swachh Bharat which claims to strive for the end of manual scavenging and the modernization of sanitary services by introducing technologies such as mechanical brooms. However, as pointed out by Gupta, the use of mechanized cleaning technologies is only displayed in a minority of public spaces within railway stations, while the majority of spaces are cleaned manually and in a hazardous manner. It is here where Gupta locates the organization of space along caste lines, made possible through the micro-racializations of workers within the space of the station and their labour. For instance, Gupta shows how Dalit women cleaners are kept from jobs in which mechanized cleaning is involved. Rather, they are provided with brooms with short handles, specifically intended to perform menial jobs such as the removal of human waste, keeping them proximal to waste as their caste location demands. Here, the broom becomes a tool of racialization which determines and enforces the place of these women in the caste hierarchy within the railway station. Establishing a connection between caste oppression and racial capitalism, Gupta shows how despite their indispensable work, women cleaners are not only denied access to basic job rights such as having a changing area but are also treated as “disposable” and are not allowed to participate in labour unions. Thus, in Gupta’s analysis, the railway station presents itself as a space where caste, gender, and racial capitalism intersect.

The intersections between racial capitalism and caste extend beyond the railway station into large areas of urban India, particularly Dalit majority slums. Malini Ranganathan explores how racialization and environmental casteism, operating through criminalizing discourses and planning policies, organizes Bengaluru’s urban spaces and ecologies by containing, disciplining and evicting Dalits from particular areas of the city. Contrary to the popular misconception that caste dissipates in cities, Ranganathan finds that the racialization of labour and property regimes very much underlie what she refers to as “environmental unfreedoms”. Environmental unfreedoms disproportionally affect poorer Dalit communities, translating into a lack of access to safe water, unsanitary conditions, and insecure land rights. Looking in particular to “encroachment”, a term with a long colonial history, Ranganathan follows how Dalit communities are stripped from land and labour rights to justify neoliberal real estate development. By bringing together theories of racial capitalism, property, and personhood along with an analysis of urban caste and brahminism as manifest in the urban environment, Ranganathan shows how racialization helps us understand the processes through which capitalist accumulation reproduces and recalibrates hierarchical and segregated urban spaces and ecologies.

The policing, exclusion and segregation of bodies from particular spaces in the city is not limited to Dalits or lower caste people. Rather it is extended to Indians from regional peripheries who are racialized as foreigners in their own country, such as Northeast migrants living in Delhi. As Dolly Kikon shows, Northeastern migrants often face discrimination in their attempts to find housing as their racialization not only marks them as outsiders to the area but also as people with a “backward” tribal culture which clashes with “civilized” upper caste traditions and practices. In particular, Kikon analyses how food cultures are used to justify discrimination against Northeast Indians, demonstrating how “casteism and racism literally feed off each other”. Kikon shows how discourses promoting vegetarian food “as the model of nutritious and good food in India” are used to denigrate non-vegetarian delicacies linked to Dalit and North-eastern culinary cultures as polluting, filthy or dirty (ganda) food. Kikon argues that descriptions of dishes made of fermented beans, plants, fishes and meat as offensive to the national sensory and social order, legitimate racist harassment in public spaces on the basis of casteist notions of cleanliness and purity. The labelling of such food as dirty thus becomes associated with the Northeast in the national imaginary, serving to obscure and justify ongoing state violence in the region.

Racialization and the (Trans)National

The modern Indian state is fundamentally a “racial state” (Goldberg 2002); racialization is integral to how the state manages, perpetuates and at times, exacerbates social hierarchies. The articles in our issue explore the racial ideologies underlying contemporary state governance, such as Aryan supremacy, Islamophobia, and colonial discourses of tribes as “primitive” and “backwards”. In the present conjuncture, we see racism operating most explicitly in how Muslims are racialized as foreign to India (see Natrajan 2021). The racialization of Muslims as India’s “others” has been used to justify neoliberal policies of dispossession and eviction, disenfranchisement of Muslim immigrants through the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act, and the opening of Kashmiri lands for Indian “settlers” with the abrogation of Article 370 (Osuri and Zia 2020). Crucially, however, our contributors also make clear how racialization does not emerge in regional isolation, but through transnational flows of ideologies and capital. The reframing of Indian national identity as an explicitly Hindu brahminical identity both excludes and appropriates Dalit politics (Jangam 2017). At the same time, this process parallels and bolsters the global Islamophobic discourses of anti-terrorism, security and democracy that rely on and revive Orientalist tropes of Muslims as the irreconcilable other of Western modernity (Rana 2011; Kumar 2012). The Hindutva campaign to consolidate a unitary Indian (read Hindu) identity has even appropriated the language of “decolonization”, purportedly to cleanse itself of British colonization’s effects (Upadhyay 2020; Rao 2020); meanwhile the Indian state has ideologically and politically embraced and aligned with Western imperial and settler colonial states (see Ashutosh 2021), revealing India’s imperial aspirations in the contemporary global order (Anand 2012; Osuri 2017). Thus, far from being static, racial categories and ideologies shift, mutate, and travel. With the rise and expansion of fascist Hindutva nationalism, we find racialization to be an indeterminate battle, fought between the authoritarian state project of contemporary Hindutva and those subjugated by modernity and the nation-state who have forged anticolonial and internationalist alliances (see Yengde 2021).

Under the BJP’s current fascist regime, the Indian state’s consolidation of power involves politicizing and fixing caste and religious hierarchies through differential racialization, as Balmurli Natrajan’s article demonstrates. Natrajan argues that Hindutva’s capture of electoral power at the national scale “depends on the ideological construction of two main social identities – an external Muslim Other and an internal Dalit other”, populations who are abjected in order to consolidate a monolithic and hegemonic Hindu national identity. Pointing to the rise in lynching of Muslims and Dalits by vigilantes claiming to operate as “cow protectors”, he suggests that Hindutva is best understood as a form of “authoritarian populism”, underwritten by the discursive production of subaltern identities as “enemies of the people”. Natrajan argues that Hindutva manages and capitalizes upon difference through two interdependent strategies. On the one hand, Hindutva emphasizes difference through the racialization of Muslims to reinstate Hindu and Muslim as irreconcilably separate selves, requiring policing and extermination. Simultaneously, Dalit struggles against Hindu caste society are repressed, ethnicized as “benign difference rather than a brutal hierarchy”, nominally incorporated into Hindutva as multi-ethnical plurality and patriarchal family. Arguing that Hindutva’s hegemony is sutured through the ideological fixing of identities, Natrajan suggests that the intersectional demands of Dalit Muslims and Dalit feminists, as well as Dalit, Muslim and Leftist alliances that reject racialization and insist on the inherent heterogeneity of Indian society pose a potent challenge to Hindutva’s claim to a unitary national identity.

While Natrajan addresses the domestic governance strategies of the Indian state, Ishan Ashutosh shows how Hindutva ideology emerges in transnational dialogue and relations between white and Hindu right-wing nationalists. Ashutosh presents a rich and layered account of how nationalist ideologies in the early twentieth century India and the United States coalesced around Aryan racial theory, linking these conversations to the right-wing resurgence in both countries and illuminating the Hindu Indian diaspora’s role in buttressing these processes both at home and abroad. Ashutosh begins with an introduction to Savitri Devi or Maximiani Portas, a native of Greece whose writings sought to revitalize the supremacy of the Aryan race and restore civilizational ties between the descendants of this “noble race” in India and Europe. Prominent Hindu nationalist leaders in pre-independent India, drew on Aryanism to combat notions of Indian racial superiority, championing the “out of India” theory that claims Aryans migrated from India. Concurrently in the United States, Aryanism influenced not only white nationalist movements like the KKK, but also the Indian diaspora, who made claims to American citizenship on the basis of Aryan ancestry. Ashutosh also attends to the resonances of this history in contemporary politics, showing how Trump and Modi’s brands of cultural nationalism seek to uphold a mythic past while erasing social heterogeneity, and detailing the role of the Hindu Indian diaspora in shaping ideologies of race, nation, and civilization. However as Ashutosh shows, the claim to Aryan racial supremacy does not go uncontested, as seen in contemporary protests against race and caste supremacy in India and the U.S. that have challenged the intersecting logics of Hindu and white nationalisms.

Yengde’s paper examines the difficult groundwork required to challenge race-caste supremacy, arguing that the organizing efforts of Dalit activists and scholars in forging anti-caste transnational networks is continually undermined by academic gatekeeping. Yengde makes the case for the global applicability of caste through the analytic of “global caste”, which he defines as a “layered mechanism of immovable social hierarchy and absolute control that aims to dehumanize certain forms of labour through both structural and economical position … [and] cultural practices of endogamy”. Rejecting impoverished theorizations of caste that see it as a “harmonious” religious system unique to the Indian subcontinent, Yendge paints a complex picture of how twentieth and twenty-first century academic debates on race and caste worked to impede and undermine transnational anti-caste organizing efforts. Building on the tradition of anti-caste internationalism, he centres the “phenomenological experiences of the unheard outcastes”, tracing the organizing efforts of Dalit activists and scholars in international advocacy forums such as the 2019 International Congress on Discrimination based on Work and Descent. Such platforms provide crucial spaces for the “left-out underdogs of postcolonial nationalism” to air grievances, strategize with disenfranchised others, and develop mechanisms to hold their respective nation-states accountable. Yengde’s article provides a powerful study of how academic gatekeeping in its commitment to canons, methodological conventions, and dominant epistemologies is utilized by vested interests to confine caste to India’s boundaries, and suggests that a “supple global caste theory” must be free from such rigidities. Despite tremendous opposition, Dalit organizers continue their efforts across scales, building international movements and momentum beyond the confines of the nation-state.

Gergan and Smith explore the utility of racialization as an analytic tool for understanding tribal identity in India by theorizing how the movement and mobility of Himalayan tribal youth exposes them to both racism and opportunities to forge contingent solidarities with racialized others. They develop a theory of tribal racialization based on two “movements”: first, the travel of race-science along with British imperial expansion, and second, the migration of tribal youth from diverse Himalayan and Northeastern states to metropolitan Indian cities where they are lumped together by mainland Indians in the racialized category of “Northeastern”. Their ethnographic research with Ladakhi tribal youth explores how they encounter, adopt, and resist the British colonial race science category of “Mongolian” that persists in the India state’s identification of its northern borderland, predominantly tribal states. Gergan and Smith contextualize how the racial imaginary implicit in the British categorization of India’s mountainous northern frontiers as its “Mongolian fringe” has been reconstituted to varying ends. They see racialization’s reverberations in how the region’s physical, and perceived racial proximity, to neighbouring China and Southeast Asia is a persistent source of geopolitical anxiety for the Indian state; however, racialization also informs how Ladakhi and Naga struggles framed their desires for sovereignty and self-determination. Crucially, in movement and encounter, they identify the possibility for “a vector of excess” in how tribal youth reckon with their racialization, a collective yet contradictory “identification … that orients them both towards and away from the state and the nation”.

Conclusion

While recent scholarly debates on South Asia are productively moving beyond disciplinary and area studies parochialisms, we see the need for greater attention to be paid to the ongoing processes of imperial ruination and reconstitution that are shifting the geopolitical constraints and possibilities for racialized subjects in contemporary India and the diaspora. In particular, migration is a productive area of study to trace how social hierarchies internal to India are reproduced within transnational labour flows, and conversely, how the shifting contours of global capitalism are producing new fault lines within India. For instance, the racist violence targeting African workers and students migrating to Indian cities is a form of anti-Black racism operating within the historical context of “racialized casteism” (Jayawardane 2016) and postcolonial South-South geopolitical relations (Davis 2018), specifically the Indian state’s competition with Chinese imperialism in Africa (Negi and Taraporevala 2018). We see echoes of the colonial racialization of Indian “coolie” labourers in the contemporary situation of Muslim migrant workers from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India in forced labour regimes employed by neoliberal states and multinational corporations seeking fungible and disposable labour forces (see also Kikon and Karlsson 2020 on Indigenous migrant labour). Tracing migration histories through the lens of racialization is revealing of how migrant labourers are made disposable and subject to coercive disciplinary mechanisms. For example, in the Arabian Gulf region, the term “Indian”, while appearing to serve merely as a marker of nationality, refers to the active racialization of migrant workers who, despite long histories of cultural and economic entanglement, are segregated, sexualized, criminalized and otherwise denied belonging to justify their exploitation by states intent on promoting essentialized identities of “Arabness” (Vora and Le Renard 2021).

In the United States, racialized divisions amongst the monolithic category of the “Indian diaspora” are becoming increasingly apparent due to the sustained advocacy of activists and scholars (Equality Labs 2017). The significance of a transnational approach to racialization is clearly illustrated by a recent pivotal case that raises the question of whether caste discrimination may be considered racial discrimination (Krishnamurthi and Krishnaswami 2020). A 2020 lawsuit filed by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing alleges caste discrimination by software giant Cisco Systems Inc. against a Dalit engineer employed by the company, not in India, but in the U.S, shining a spotlight on the transnational flow of brahminical casteism. While visa regimes ensure a level of political precarity for technical workers (Rudrappa 2009), the lawsuit illustrates how the operations of caste, coded as “merit” within Indian higher education institutions (Subramanian 2019) are reconstituted through global technical migrant labour pools. Framing questions of difference in India through racialization and racial capitalism also allows us to dialogue with critical race, Indigenous, and Black and Africana Studies scholars, a testament to the generative potential of transnational translations (e.g. see Jegathesan 2021 for a transnational application of Black feminist analysis). Indeed, transnational analyses are emerging from grassroots movements for survival and dignity built by those whose territories, bodies, and futures are in peril – such as Dalit-Black-Muslim dialogues on solidarity (Soundararajan et al. 2021), Indigenous internationalist efforts like the Naga campaign for sovereignty (Iralu 2021), and Kashmiri-Palestine solidarity initiatives (Osuri and Zia 2020). Such solidarities reveal “the operation of state power and its effects on gendered/racialized bodies and communities around the world” (Mohanty 2006, 15), and present a challenge to “hegemonic citizenship projects”.

Ultimately, we find inspiration in Shailaja Paik’s (2014, 75–76) writing on the shared struggles of Dalit and Black women, especially within upper-caste and white feminist spaces. Paik positions herself as committed to “the reciprocity between scholarship and activism” and offers a “margin-to-margin” framework as a way to “invite different social actors, including scholars and activists, inside a region, nation, or even transnationally to construct shared goals and new bonds of sentiment as well as bodies of knowledge among those most exploited, excluded, or pushed aside”. Our intervention in this special issue is inspired by the tireless work of generations of activists in India who, having first-hand experienced the violence of the nation-state and multiple racisms, turned to transnational networks to exchange ideas and strategies. They continue to conspire to build alternative futures. We hope that by bringing the framework of racialization to bear on India, we make strange taken-for-granted assumptions about the production of difference in this context, and provide sturdier grounds to continue to build transnational scholarly conversations and movements for justice.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Antipode Foundation and the British International Studies Association Postcolonial/Decolonial Working Group for funding our 2019 conference out of which this special issue arises. We would also like to thank all our contributors and the anonymous reviewers for the time taken to revise and review papers for our special issue, especially given the challenges of the Covid pandemic. Finally, we are grateful to Amanda Eastell-Bleakley at Ethnic and Racial Studies for her enthusiasm in the idea of this special issue and for all her support along the way.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The term “Dalit” (literally, “broken” or “crushed” in Marathi) was first used by nineteenth century thinker Jotiba Phule to refer to ex-untouchable castes. Dalit, as a political identity, was used by B.R. Ambedkar in his Marathi speeches, but the concept was not popularized until the emergence of the Dalit Panthers and a lively literary movement in the 1970s (Narayan 2006). The term “Bahujan” (translating to “the majority people” and found in Buddhist texts) is a broader category that includes other oppressed castes, such as the Shudras.

2 The term “Adivasi” (meaning “earliest inhabitants”) is used by Indigenous groups in peninsular India as a political category. In Northeastern and Himalayan states, the term Adivasi has not gained traction and only “Indigenous” or “Tribal” are used. The term “Tribal”, though archaic, is widely used in the Indian context given the official state category of “Scheduled Tribe” (Xaxa 2021).

3 Our editorial group comprises of Cháirez-Garza, a Mexican historian based in the UK working on the political thought of B.R. Ambedkar; Gergan, a geographer belonging to the Lepcha and Boti tribes of Sikkim and Ladakh respectively, working on Tribal/Indigenous politics in the Indian Himalaya; Ranganathan, a geographer of Indian dominant caste (brahmin and warrier/ambalavasi) descent, working on environmental casteism and environmental racism in India and the U.S. respectively; and Vasudevan, a geographer of Indian brahmin descent, working on global racial-colonial capitalism with a primary focus on the U.S. South.

4 We follow Gajendran Ayyathurai’s (2011) lead in using lower-case “b” for “brahmin”, a name that refers to the self-proclaimed “highest” caste of the Hindu varnashrama dharma or caste order. Ayyathurai (2011, 20) uses the lower case “b” to “problematize the legitimacy that this category has gained among English speaking writers, academics, and the public (of brahmin caste origin mostly) as well as the dictionary meanings that occlude the domineering power behind it”.