Textual geographies of caste: local, institutional and national-symbolic spaces in Dalit archives

Abstract

This essay explores the relationship between caste, gender and knowledge production through an engagement with the creative, political and theoretical writings of Dalits (ex-untouchable castes) in modern India. Collectively the texts explicate how caste hierarchies, intersecting with other forms of socially constructed difference such as gender and class, are reproduced through spatial practices that regulate the presence, movement and interactions of bodies. My analysis focuses on the ways in which these textual projects interrogate caste-gender discrimination across local, institutional and national-symbolic spaces, thus demonstrating their connectivity within a broader geography. As such, they disrupt dominant discourses of state and nation in which caste is confined to exceptional or innocuous spaces, in order to claim its diminishing significance in post-colonial India. Such forms of containment are reproduced in feminist research when caste is framed as a local, ‘internal hierarchy’ and in turn, of limited relevance to transnational analyses. As the archive interrogates and reworks the category of caste, it provides an analytics to interrogate caste privilege across multiple contexts. I draw on these analytics to consider how my access to and reading of an archive of Dalit politics is shaped by caste-class privilege and diasporic location.

Keywords:

• Caste
• Dalit
• intersectionality
• post-colonial
• transnational feminism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Harshita Yalamarty, Sharada Srinavasan and Josie Wittmer, for inviting me to present an early version of this essay at the Gender Issues in India Symposium and for providing critical feedback on the full-length version. I would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tina Virmani received her PhD in Political Science from York University, Toronto, with a specialization in Women and Politics and Comparative Politics. Her scholarly interests are in the areas of transnational feminisms, colonialism and its legacies, anti-caste activism and Dalit intellectual history. Her research explores the relationship of policy frameworks to nationalist and transnational discourses, focusing on the politics of caste-based reservation policy and Hindu nationalism in India. She is also conducting research for a comparative study of literary activism and issues of cultural appropriation, drawing from contemporary interventions led by Dalit writers in India and Indigenous writers in Canada.