‘So called caste’: S. N. Balagangadhara, the Ghent School and the Politics of grievance^**

** A very different version of this paper was presented at the British Association of South Asian Studies Conference in Nottingham in 2017. I would like to thank my co-panellist, Shalini Sharma, discussant, Ed Anderson, the two anonymous reviewers and John Zavos for their insights and suggestions.

Abstract

This article is concerned with the small but coherent lobby of political scholarship that has emerged from a lineage of research supervision which centres on the charisma and ideas of S. N. Balagangadhara, a philosopher from the Centre for the Comparative Science of Cultures (Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap) at the University of Ghent. In particular, it examines the deployment of his ideas in a spate of recent scholarly and social media declarations that reject the existence of caste and, by extension, caste discrimination. This scholarship – characterised by circular reasoning, self-referencing and a poverty of rigour – has established a modest, if contentious and poorly reviewed, presence in academic spheres of dissemination. The ‘Ghent School’ describes a group of scholars who rely conspicuously on Balagangadhara’s concept of ‘colonial consciousness’, a crude derivative of Said’s thesis of Orientalism. The Ghent School maintain that all extant scholarship on Hinduism, secularism and caste represents an endurance of colonial distortions that act to defame India as a nation. This politics of affront finds considerable traction in diasporic contexts but has little, if any, resonance when mapped against the far more complex politics of caste in India.

Keywords:

• Balagangadhara
• Ghent school
• caste
• caste violence
• Hindu nationalism

Notes on contributor

Deborah Sutton teaches modern South Asian history at Lancaster University. She has published on nineteenth and twentieth century environmental, political and cultural history and is currently Managing Editor of South Asian Studies, journal of the British Association of South Asian Studies. She recently completed a book manuscript on the construction of the Hindu temple during the colonial intervention in South Asia.

Notes

** A very different version of this paper was presented at the British Association of South Asian Studies Conference in Nottingham in 2017. I would like to thank my co-panellist, Shalini Sharma, discussant, Ed Anderson, the two anonymous reviewers and John Zavos for their insights and suggestions.

Note from the Editor: this Viewpoint article has been fully double blind peer reviewed.

1 See Caste under Colonialism – Discussion 5/8 Panel 1 part 4 (19.40-20.15mins). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-TPlVr8RS0&t=1227s, accessed 17 November 2017.

2 Young, Robert, personal communication email correspondence with author, 5 November 2017.

3 VLIR project: Development of a Centre for the Study of Local Cultures at Kuvempu University (2007-2012). http://www.cultuurwetenschap.be/events/details/291/section:1, accessed 8 November 2017.