‘Yes caste is important, (but)’: examining the knowledge-production assemblage of Dwij-Savarna scholarship as it invisibilises caste in the context of women’s prisons in India

ABSTRACT

Gayatri Spivak, Partha Chatterjee, and many other Dwij-Savarna (‘upper caste’) academics from historically privileged ‘Dwij-Savarna’ Indian castes like Brahmins pioneered subaltern studies in the context of South Asian studies. Their thrust towards decolonising led to an epistemic de-centring of Western hegemony in knowledge production on behalf of marginalised ‘subalterns’. However, Umesh Bagade points out that caste is not a homogenising identity and the politics of ‘Dwij-Savarna’ scholars themselves must be interrogated through an epistemic lens. With the exception of Sharmila Rege, very few Dwij-Savarna feminists have interrogated their caste privileges with respect to gender studies. As a result, a vast majority of gender studies work in India invisibilises epistemically the experienced marginality of women from oppressed castes and tribes. One such discipline where this is particularly visible is prison studies, where the scholars come from privileged ‘Dwij-Savarna’ communities and interrogate the social issues of the incarcerated who come predominantly from marginalised caste backgrounds. Our research interviews five leading Dwij-Savarna prison studies scholars who dialogue with intersections of carcerality and women’s issues. We engage with them about their work and conceptual perspectives on the role of caste, particularly in the context of gender. The researchers found that the Dwij-Savarna scholarship largely overlooks caste and refuses to engage with vulnerability and marginality issues emanating from caste locations within the prison system, doubly invisibilising the lives and narratives of the caste-oppressed women inside.

Gayatri Spivak, Partha Chatterjee et de nombreux autres universitaires issus des castes indiennes historiquement privilégiées dwij-savarnas (« castes supérieures »), comme les Brahmanes, ont été les pionniers des « subaltern studies » (études subalternistes) dans le contexte des études sud-asiatiques. Leur volonté de décolonisation a conduit à un décentrage épistémique de l’hégémonie occidentale dans la production de connaissances au nom des « subalternes » marginalisés. Cependant, Umesh Bagade souligne que la caste n’est pas une identité homogénéisante et que les convictions politiques des universitaires « dwij-savarnas » doivent elles-mêmes être interrogées à travers un prisme épistémique. À l’exception de Sharmila Rege, très peu de féministes dwij-savarnas ont remis en question leurs privilèges de caste dans le cadre des études de genre. En conséquence, la grande majorité des travaux entrepris dans le cadre des études de genre en Inde rendent invisible, d’un point de vue épistémique, la marginalité vécue par les femmes issues de castes et de tribus opprimées. L’une des disciplines dans lesquelles ce phénomène est particulièrement visible est celle des études carcérales, lorsque les chercheurs sont issus de communautés privilégiées « dwij-savarnas » et s’interrogent sur les problèmes sociaux des personnes incarcérées, qui sont pour la plupart issues de castes marginalisées. Dans le cadre de nos recherches, nous nous entretenons avec cinq éminents chercheurs dwij-savarnas en études carcérales qui dialoguent sur les intersections de la carcéralité et les questions relatives aux femmes. Nous discutons avec eux de leur travail et de leurs points de vue conceptuels sur le rôle du système de castes, en particulier dans le contexte du genre. Les chercheurs ont constaté que les travaux des chercheurs dwij-savarnas négligent largement les questions de caste et refusent d’aborder les questions de vulnérabilité et de marginalité émanant du positionnement des castes au sein du système carcéral, ce qui a pour effet de rendre doublement invisibles les vies et les récits des femmes incarcérées opprimées par le système de castes.

Gayatri Spivak, Partha Chatterjee y muchos otros académicos dwij-savarna (casta superior) de castas indias históricamente privilegiadas, como los brahmanes, fueron pioneros de los estudios subalternos en el contexto de investigaciones sobre Asia del Sur. Su impulso hacia la descolonización, en nombre de los ‘subalternos’ marginados, los condujo a un descentramiento epistémico de la hegemonía occidental al producir conocimientos. Sin embargo, Umesh Bagade señala que la casta no es una identidad homogeneizadora y que la producción de los propios académicos dwij-savarna debe ser cuestionada empleando una lente epistémica. Con excepción de Sharmila Rege, muy pocas feministas dwij-savarna han cuestionado sus privilegios de casta en los estudios de género. En consecuencia, la gran mayoría de los trabajos realizados en India en el ámbito de los estudios de género invisibiliza epistémicamente la marginalidad experimentada por las mujeres de castas y tribus oprimidas. Esto es especialmente visible en la disciplina de estudios penitenciarios cuando las investigadoras proceden de comunidades dwij-savarna privilegiadas e interrogan a las encarceladas, originarias predominantemente de castas marginadas, sobre los problemas sociales. Nuestra investigación implicó entrevistar a cinco académicas dwij-savarna, destacadas especialistas en estudios penitenciarios, quienes dialogan sobre las intersecciones entre la carcelaridad y los problemas de las mujeres. Nos involucramos con ellas en su trabajo y en sus perspectivas conceptuales en torno al papel desempeñado por la casta, en particular en el contexto del género. Las investigadoras descubrieron que, en gran medida, las estudiosas dwij-savarna pasan por alto la casta y se niegan a indagar en cuestiones de vulnerabilidad y marginalidad emanadas de las ubicaciones de casta dentro del sistema penitenciario, lo que invisibiliza doblemente las vidas y las narrativas de las mujeres encarceladas oprimidas por la casta.

Introduction

The caste system within South Asia has for over two millennia used artificially enforced birth-based social stratification to keep the monopoly of knowledge limited within certain castes. Under this system, the ‘priestly caste’ of Brahmins are supposed to be the exclusive keepers of knowledge atop a social hierarchy, followed by some limited conditional access to the ‘warrior castes’ and ‘trading castes’, constituting a power co-dependent political order comprising of these three groups. Finally, below them in the social order lay the serving castes called Shudras completing the chaturvarna or four-varna classification systems as mandated in the ancient text of Manusmriti (Malhotra 2022). Beyond the chaturvarna lie the indigenous Adivasis (tribal communities) and the ‘untouchable’ Dalit communities who have both been historically marginalised and excluded from the social economy. These communities have been excluded from cultural life, and along with Shudras, barred from knowledge-acquisition under the pain of death; these ideas have persisted in discourse to contemporary times wherein Brahmin judges, governors, and political leaders openly extol its virtues (Sawant 2020). In contemporary parlance, these oppressed groups mentioned in the Manusmriti largely overlap with the Indian constitutional categories¹ of Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST), and Other Backward Classes (OBC), and are an overwhelming majority of the current Indian population with estimates ranging from 75 to 80 per cent (Deshpande 2023). However, there has been extremely low representation of this vast number of historically oppressed communities within key institutions of postcolonial India despite many focused affirmative action plans and policies (Kumar 2023).

More crucially, the institutions of discourse, such as the mainstream media, academia, and civil society, are heavily dominated by ‘upper’ or Dwij-Savarna castes. A survey by Oxfam-Newslaundry (2022) found that almost 90 per cent of upper management and editors within Indian media came from the Savarna castes. Furthermore, across elite Indian institutions like the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), there are hardly any SC, ST, or OBC professors (Sharma 2019). This leads to a situation where oppressed caste students often feel marginalised and humiliated for their caste location, leading to widely documented mental health issues, dropouts, and student suicides (Kumar 2016). At the prestigious IIT Madras which is currently ranked as the number one institute in India in the official national rankings, within just three months of 2023, four students committed suicide from caste pressures (Chandrababu 2023). Within the same period, another high-profile case of caste suicide took place at IIT Bombay, ranked fourth overall within the same rankings (Shantha 2023a). In both institutions, there were hardly any institutional repercussions or serious deliberation on the issue. Since 2019, over 63 student suicides have taken place across IITs, IIMs, and National Institutes of Technology (NITs) in India (Express News 2023). This number does not include data from hundreds of state and central universities, law schools, and thousands of colleges across the country.

Beyond educational institutions, caste prejudices have also manifested in almost all social domains. One of the most transparent examples of this is the caste profile of people within the carceral system of the country. SC and ST groups are grossly ‘over-represented’ compared to their population proportion among the under-trials, i.e. people who are locked up in prisons awaiting trials (The Wire 2019). Within the state of Uttar Pradesh, which has the highest number of incarcerated people in India, over 75 per cent of under-trials come from SC, ST, and OBC groups (The Wire 2023). It should be noted that under-trials are not convicts. They are awaiting their trial and many remain locked up for years on end because they are not provided access to basic legal aid, awareness about inmate rights, and plea bargaining, including the right to bail. Recently, Indian President Draupadi Murmu, herself from an ST background, highlighted this issue, pointing out that thousands languish in prisons due to lack of means or access to legal aid, and the President made a plea to the higher judiciary to take a more compassionate view of the situation (Angad 2023). It should also be noted that India’s higher judiciary almost exclusively comes from Dwij-Savarna castes (Thakur 2023). This skew, as this analysis will now highlight, has roots in the colonial era administration and has shaped carceral politics thereof.

Unpacking caste within the colonial legacy of the Indian judicial system

The current Indian judicial system is very much a continuation of the legal processes and institutions set up by the British during their colonial rule in the region. The major acts of contemporary Indian criminal law such as the Indian Penal Code (1860), Indian Evidence Act (1872), etc., have colonial origins and from its inception; the control and establishment of order among its colonial holdings was a key goal of this system as the rule of law was necessary for economic control and exploitation of resources (Peers 2013). These legislative priorities took precedence over creating an equitable social order. In 1871, the British created the Criminal Tribes Act, which criminalised entire communities that were deemed ungovernable as ‘born criminals’. The colonial legal, police, and prison practices were codified to deal with such ‘habitual criminals’. The postcolonial Indian state replaced the Criminal Tribes Act with the Habitual Offenders’ Act (1956). Award-winning journalist Sukanya Shantha, who has extensively reported on the conditions within Indian prisons, reports that the contemporary prison manuals being used by Indian prisons still follow many of the colonial stereotypes of engaging with prisoners, and labour within the prison is assigned based on caste (Shantha 2020). ‘Clean’ jobs such as cooking, etc., are assigned to Brahmin and other ‘upper’ caste prisoners while oppressed caste prisoners are assigned sweeping and sanitation work. These prison manuals are not available in the public domain. Shantha (2023b) suggests that the prisons reflect the society they are located in, and caste inequities of everyday life get doubly replicated inside. Access to research within Indian prisons is deeply gatekept, ostensibly for security reasons, and as such only individuals and organisations who are co-opted by the carceral system are allowed in. Unless the organisations working for prisoner’s rights ignore the systemic abuses of the prison system, they are not allowed access. This ensures there is no structural critique of the system. But Shantha suggests there are ways around it, by speaking to ex-prisoners and bypassing the prison permission systems by conducting interviews in lower courts when prisoners are brought there for their hearings. She wonders why these strategies are not being adopted by prison studies scholars in India despite the obvious lack of scholarship in this regard.

Audre Lorde (1984) makes a case for underlining racial, class, and sexuality differences between women and using that as a starting point for personal power, not invisibilising differences as white feminists of the day were advocating in the name of women’s solidarity. She pronounced that ‘the master’s house cannot be dismantled using the master’s tools’. This creates space for a deeper conversation on understanding how the ‘master’s tools’ operate in the first place, i.e. in the context of the politics of knowledge production and hostility within academic discourses – what is the role of the knowledge pedagogy and praxis itself, in perpetuating the hegemonic or master’s ideological predispositions? Crenshaw (1989), based on court proceeding inadequacies in cases pertaining to Black women, suggested that Black women’s experiences were much broader than the discrimination discourse of gender or race alone provided. She famously made a case for intersectional understandings of the vulnerabilities of Black women by expanding both anti-racism politics and feminist theory. Anoop Kumar (2016) has also made a similar point about intersectional vulnerabilities of marginalised caste first-generation learners in India. He suggests that hostility from academic spaces for such learners is based on both caste hatred and constructs of ‘merit’ which are a product of intergenerational literacy and class privileges. Such students are hence considered doubly ‘unmeritorious’ and unworthy of learning and producing knowledge. Subramanian (2019), in her study on the IIT Madras, corroborates the idea of merit in Indian academic spaces as deeply linked to caste privilege, and entire communities of affirmative action students are seen as unable and unworthy of quality education. This performance of merit manifests in multiple ways in everyday classrooms. Hole (2021) narrates how ‘English’ as a language, or rather its cultural weaponisation, a product of both intergenerational caste privilege and cultural gentrification, terrified first-generation learners such as herself in elite Indian classrooms. Kisana (2023b) outlines that a fundamental anthropological behaviour of Brahminism is ‘knowledge performance’, not necessarily knowledge production. Such academic performance has colonial inspirations, but its ritualisation predates coloniality and stretches beyond academia. It has its roots in Brahminical priesthood and its legitimising potential rests on knowledge/ritual performance. Academia thus becomes a more contemporary arena of this performance and lends itself to this peculiar characteristic where the predominantly Dwij-Savarna teachers ‘perform’ intellectuality within such spaces which appear as unfamiliar, obscure, and unrelatable to the vast majority of oppressed caste students who are then classified as unmeritorious and undesirable. It is from these discourses that the need arises to interrogate knowledge epistemologies and reorient the knowledge production paradigm via decolonisation.

Tracing decolonisation of knowledge and carceral caste politics in India

In the rapidly changing post-Second World War political landscape, the end of colonial empires brought with it a wave of social optimism in large parts of newly independent nations of Asia and Africa. Youth unrest, social mobilising, and intellectual movements pointed towards the remaking of an old order. As social rights movements gained momentum around the world, there was a growing call to challenge the very foundations of knowledge assemblage and discourse-making.

Malcolm X (1965), in his political speech ‘The ballot or the bullet’, makes the point about the epistemic situated-racism of white society within the US, calling for Black communities to be able to elect their ‘own leaders’. In his framework, the ‘whiteness’ of US politics was a situated reality of social hegemony and not a question of individual morality. Fanon (1952) wrote about how Black people are forced to internalise a sense of inferiority within the context of white culture. These interventions pointed out in the context of racial politics that systems of thought and cultural reproduction are dependent on prevailing societal hegemonies. The second-wave feminists of the era, like Dworkin (1987), built similar arguments challenging the inherent structural patriarchy which was influencing the way men made meaning of the world in ways that were inimical to women’s interests and well-being. Amidst the churn of anti-imperialism, postcolonial, Leftist intellectual movements centred around structural politics of capital, race, gender, and sexuality, somehow caste was not incorporated into the emergent academic globalisms by Dwij-Savarna scholars from India. This was despite the fact that Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar (2011) had already pointed out that the structural violence of caste was embedded in Brahminical Hinduism itself which had historically been challenged by the emancipatory Dhamma of Buddhism. The significant advances of Dalit communities across India, especially within Maharashtra where Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar initiated a movement in 1956 for the mass conversion of Dalits to Buddhism so as to reject the caste hegemonic humiliations of ‘Hinduism’, were strangely overlooked by Indian sociologists and critical-thinking academia (Kisana 2023a). This historic overlooking by Dwij-Savarna academia is even more bizarre considering that the epistemic anti-caste reflexivity of this ongoing-conversion movement was abundantly clear to some of the poorest, uneducated, and most vulnerable people in the world.

Even as Brahmins and other Dwij-Savarna groups took charge of the levers of the colonial apparatus created by British rule, their efforts to reinvent and return to a precolonised ideal past did not engage with politics of caste privilege accrued by these communities during the colonial intervention (Shobhana 2019). In Historiography, for instance, the role of Dwij-Savarna caste collaborations which made British rule possible were largely overlooked even as the fortunes of families who controlled the newly emergent nation were intrinsically linked to such co-operations (Dalrymple 2019). Caste was not linked to coloniality and was seen as largely independent of it, even in the face of powerful tribal and Dalit mobilisations. Subsequently, it was the Brahminical mobilisation of bringing oppressed caste groups under the ‘umbrella’ of a Hindu identity, while still maintaining caste hegemonies over them, that gave shape to the postcolonial identity of the Indian nation-state (Dwivedi et al. 2021).

It would not be till the 1980s that Ranajit Guha and Gayathri Spivak brought into focus the Subaltern Studies Group, as part of revisiting colonial legacies of historiography. Guha (1983), in particular, criticises the colonial history-making of India as one that obfuscates the marginalised narratives by privileging the colonial gaze. Spivak (1988) takes on what she theorises as Western epistemic assaults on processes of history-making within South Asia, making a claim to give voice to the marginalised within its methodological and narrative processes, without which she categorises ‘doing history’ as a method of reinforcing imperialistic hegemonies. Along with other subaltern studies scholars, almost all of whom were trained in the West, the group made a significant intervention in asserting their ideas as radical and breaking from convention, challenging the hegemonic heft of Western academia on behalf of the overlooked subaltern. Postcolonial theory and decolonising of knowledge systems, especially pertaining to South Asian scholarship, pivoted extensively around subaltern studies, cementing Spivak as one of the most cited and well-known intellectuals of the era.

The critique of Umesh Bagade et al. (2023) of subaltern studies focused on its inherent ignorance of caste realities and the inability/unwillingness of the subaltern scholars, most of whom came from privileged caste backgrounds, to understand caste as a system of graded inequality which decimates the idea of a homogenised subaltern class. Furthermore, over the course of their long careers, the privileged caste scholars of subaltern studies group reproduced the caste hegemony of Dwij-Savarna scholarship by failing to centre oppressed caste and tribal narratives. Rege (2013) have made the case that the category of ‘woman’ was constituted differently within South Asia based on how caste systems overlapped within multiple patriarchies. Kisana (2020) writes about privileged Dwij-Savarna women positioning feminist discourse from a position of privilege to punch down on men from SC, ST, and OBC backgrounds without comparative privileges of agency or articulation. Intersectionality within the Dwij-Savarna feminist discourse does not bend to address structural asymmetries of caste privileges of intergenerational wealth, education, and discursive power. Kumar (2021) adds that in the context of knowledge production by SC ST scholars, higher education spaces within India break their organic linkages with the community and they are not able to claim the richness of the community in terms of history, culture, and the movement. Instead, the gaze of theorising and meaning-making of society is situated with the Dwij-Savarna academics, who historically interpret social realities by over-scrutinising oppressed caste and tribal worlds, and treating their own location as normative and ‘casteless’. Late tribal activist Abhay Xaxa (Choudhury & Aga 2020) critiqued this intrusive Dwij-Savarna gaze in his searing poem, ‘I am not your data’, the opening lines of which read as:

I am not your data, nor am I your vote bank,

I am not your project, or any exotic museum project,

I am not the soul waiting to be harvested,

Nor am I the lab where your theories are tested.

These interventions suggest that knowledge production within academic domains, even those that engage with the praxis of intersectionality and decolonisation, may carry an ignorance about caste when performed almost exclusively by Dwij-Savarna scholars. The case of prison studies within India is rife for such an investigation because it represents a field of analysis wherein the academic specialists come overwhelmingly from caste privileged backgrounds but an overwhelming number of incarcerated people hail from caste-marginalised backgrounds.

Method

Prison studies within India have not really had a lot of academic discourse. A big part of that has been the issue of access which the prison system guards closely. But as Sukanya Shantha (2023) has pointed out, there are strategies to circumvent the same, not too many scholars have been innovative in that respect. As such there are very few contemporary academic ‘experts’ in the field and most are located in elite institutions with an overwhelming representation of Dwij-Savarna caste academics. For this investigation, through purposive sampling, we identified five such scholars from domains of social work, social sciences, criminology, and related disciplines who have previously published academically on prisons and/or been part of civil society interventions and reports on the same, especially at the intersections of gender and women’s prisons. There have been gender scholars who have engaged in dialogue with some dimensions of vulnerability with respect to the judicial and carceral system but their primary body of work lies elsewhere; such scholars were not made part of the investigation. As such, our set of interviews broadly interrogate ‘prison studies’ scholars whose primary engagement has been with the carceral system and gender, even if they are housed in departments in different social science domains.

Once identified, consent for the research was taken by the interviewers and telephone interviews were conducted. An open-ended qualitative in-depth interview technique was used and the discussion guideline focused on the respondents’ understanding of the prison system, the social inequities thereof, the role of caste within the aforementioned framework, and their opinion as experts on the domain of prison studies itself, its gaps in knowledge in research as well as pedagogical challenges. Each interview lasted between 40 and 60 minutes. The interviews were conducted in English but occasionally Hindi or Marathi words crept into the conversation. The interviews were recorded and later transcribed for analysis. Themes were identified from the responses and shared in the following section.

Dodging caste specificity: semantics of prisoner categorisation

Within the Indian prison system, not all prisoners are treated equally. There exist many sociocultural variables that determine the relative hierarchy where the prisoner will be placed in relation to others. We asked our respondents to comment on what variables determine the prisoner’s capacity to negotiate amenities and dignity within such a closed system:

You pay money, you can get things done. But it is not like your social class outside carries clout within the prison. There is no direct association as such. (Scholar 1)

This was a consensus that while money mattered, it did not have the final say within the prison system. The scholars agreed that simply being wealthy did not grant access to better facilities within Indian prisons:

It does not matter who you are on the outside. It matters only to an extent, within the prison you are also dependent on how much of that you can make it matter inside. (Scholar 3)

When probed on what then matters beyond financial wealth and clout within the prison system, multiple scholars brought up ‘education’ as a variable. A vast majority of the prisoners are illiterate or poorly literate. English proficiency is a massive differentiator among prisoner ranks. As per the education status individuals get work and English-speaking prisoners usually get more respect among all other criteria. Moreover, such prisoners get prison work related to documentation (writing) if they wish for it. Documentation work is considered to be the most prestigious within the prison as it stations the individual in an office where they mostly interact with the police staff and outsiders.

In India, literacy and caste status have been heavily linked and correlated. The Dwij-Savarna castes, especially Brahmins, have historically had the resources to invest in elite education centred around English proficiency (Shobhana 2019). To allude that educated, English-speaking prisoners are able to negotiate better positionality within the prison system raises a question whether we can correlate this finding with the caste background of the prisoners.

However, not a single scholar interviewed agreed with any correlation with caste when probed on the matter. Some tangentially referred to it being a variable by saying that ‘it may be a factor but does not appear to be the main issue’ (Scholar 3). Caste as being a determining factor of class and social privileges, education, etc., which are pretty standardly accepted sociological indicators within even Dwij-Savarna academia, are strangely and selectively not invoked here.

To reinforce this ignorance, one only needs to look at the categorisation and jobs assigned to oppressed caste prisoners, especially from SC backgrounds. Shantha (2023) has previously shown that cleaning and sanitation jobs, or kundi jobs as they are called, are usually assigned to SC prisoners, and most of the scholars concurred with this finding. However, there were certain gaps in causal association within the same:

‘The upper caste’ will never do this because it is against their caste identity. Other lower castes will do it as they will get a good incentive. (Scholar 4)

Within this statement, the scholar is attributing a normalisation of sanitation work being carried out by oppressed caste prisoners and suggests that even incentive is not good enough for ‘upper caste’ prisoners to undertake this work. This assumes two primary things, first, that the oppressed caste prisoner does not prioritise their dignity as the ‘upper caste’ prisoner does on account of their caste identity and, second, that material incentive, not caste stereotyping, compels oppressed castes to take on this work. This taken together with the fact that most prisoners doing documentation, or ‘respectable’ work, are educated and English-speaking privileged castes – the case for not considering caste a prime variable in how prisoners are categorised and assigned work becomes unviable. Yet this is what the scholars adamantly refuse, obfuscating behind supposed nuances:

Not everything is about caste, there is a tendency to overread its influence. Inside prison, a lot of identities co-exist, no one sees you just as your caste. (Scholar 2)

Approaching prison work and ‘subaltern’ communities

As mentioned previously, the vast majority of prisoners, including under-trials, come from historically marginalised ‘subaltern’ groups. One of the most important epistemic interventions of the subaltern studies and postcolonial theory has been to check the ‘gaze’ of the so-called habitual researcher and prioritise the narrative and agency of the ‘subaltern’. Positionality and intersectional analysis have now been the cornerstone of sociological research and civil society intervention for a while, yet within prison studies these interventions seem inexplicably missing. While they do form part of the curriculum within various disciplines ranging from social work to sociology, etc., most of the scholars employed a different methodological approach to their fieldwork.

One scholar suggested that many women prisoners from marginalised communities are so satisfied by the reformative incentives being provided within the prisons, that they do not want to be free and return to their communities:

They say ‘hum bahar nhi jana chahate hai, humei yaha hi accha lagata hai bahar log marate hai’ – that is they do not want to go out. They like it here [inside prison]. ‘Outside’ people beat us. They don’t want to apply for the bail. Most of them don't know about the bail also. (Scholar 4)

There was no further commentary on why the prisoners may not know about the possibilities of bail and what may be informing their commentaries suggesting they ‘liked it’ inside prison, given the fact that any access/interview to prisoners is heavily mediated by prison authorities who are very conscious of any negative commentary being reported to ‘outsiders’. On being probed on this question, Scholar 4 dismissed the question by suggesting that there was no need to second guess the responses because the women had no reason to lie. Here the dynamics of the interview must be noted, Scholar 4 is a senior scholar from a Dwij-Savarna location while the interviewing researcher is a junior researcher and comes from a marginalised background. Because she is seen as simply a postgraduate, without a PhD or an academic job, she is seen as not intellectually competent to probe Scholar 4. Her halting English is perhaps also a factor in this equation since the interview is conducted in English which is assumed to be the default language of academic conversation by Scholar 4, and the interviewer’s skills in Marathi and Hindi – which are great assets while working with women prisoners – do not help her in this situation. As addressed in multiple narratives (Kisana 2020; Kumar 2016; Punia 2021), scholars from marginalised backgrounds often feel hostility in academic environments. During debriefing, the researcher reported feeling intimidated and insecure about her line of questioning due to the impatient dismissal of the scholar as if her line of questioning itself was frivolous and she was not a serious enough scholar.

Other scholars have suggested a deliberate caste–religion-ignorant approach to their fieldwork because the same is necessitated by the conditions of doing prison research and social work among women prisoners. To navigate the prison environment successfully, scholars cannot be seen as engaging with identities of religion and caste. More specifically, they themselves want to be seen as entering the prison from a caste-neutral or caste-ignorant position. They felt that seeking out caste dynamics was extraneous and impractical:

It was never our focus that we look at what is someone’s caste or religion. Anyone who needs our help, according to their situation we work things out. We have never worked with that level of consciousness that oh which person is a lower caste, who is upper caste, who is Hindu and who is Muslim – this is not how we work. (Scholar 5)

Most scholars reported a similar approach to the granular nuances of identity among prisoners. To the Dwij-Savarna scholars, all prisoners had a similar identity – one that was linked only to their carceral status and crime:

Caste identity becomes secondary to the crime profile. Inside prison, the crime you have come in for becomes a more important marker of who you are than any other thing. In many ways you can say the crime identity itself becomes like a new caste identity within the prison. (Scholar 5)

Repeatedly, the researchers found this recurring theme of dismissing social variables, particularly of caste wherein the scholars prioritised their criminalised identity of carcerality as the primary calling point as an ‘individual’ and ignoring or overlooking structural and social interventions.

This kind of narrative is directly contradictory to any approach grounded in intersectionality as underlined by Crenshaw (1989). In the context of caste, this seems to validate the point highlighted by marginalised caste scholars that in praxis, Dwij-Savarnas invisibilise caste as an axis of vulnerability. This obfuscation of caste identity under broader categories of crime, which are easily ‘visible’ to the Dwij-Savarna gaze and which are non-critical of the prison social structures, seems to be the defining pivot of scholarship within the domain. When asked more directly, many of the scholars admitted they did not have enough data on caste and gender intersectional issues with respect to prisoners:

When I was writing on prisons, I just wrote what I heard and saw. There was not enough data on who was from what background. All ‘categories’ were there, so I wrote about everyone. (Scholar 1)

In other cases, there was an attempt to dislocate caste within the discourses of communal politics. Muslims have been one of the largest minorities in India who are over-represented in Indian prisons. Says Scholar 2:

To be honest, most of the issues ‘inside’ are not do with the caste. A lot of it has to do with Muslim community. That is reality. When we work with them, we work with them as an individual within a social structure.

Khalid (2023) points out that caste is a primary variable among Muslims within Indian society and that Pasmanda or ‘backward’ Muslims constitute the bulk of the marginalised section among their community within the region. To theorise about Muslims as a homogenous communal bloc and obfuscating the variable of caste among Muslims, at a time of ascendant mainstream attention on the question, showcases suspect academic intent. Recently, even the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi who is a Hindu directed his party to reach out to oppressed caste Muslims or Pasmandas as they constituted more than 85 per cent of Muslim society in India (Tripathi 2022); it is therefore puzzling why Dwij-Savarna academia does not acknowledge caste of the prisoners, even if they are Muslim.

Well-meaning ‘advice’ and ‘after words’

Both researchers undertaking this investigation come from first-generation learner backgrounds from historically marginalised communities. The traditional power equation between such students and Dwij-Savarna scholars from elite institutions has been one of a disproportionate skew towards the latter. As pointed out earlier, the campus environment itself is hostile to many oppressed caste and tribal students, and there are many narratives attesting to the role played by Dwij-Savarna scholars in gaslighting their intellectual processes or directly attacking them to leave them isolated and vulnerable.

In an interesting finding, the researchers found that multiple scholars wanted to have an ‘after word’ beyond the interview. This centred on providing unsolicited advice on caste research and career trajectory. In many cases, the interviewees tried to guide how the researchers were framing the research question. Unsolicited advice was given to the primary interviewing researcher since she was a junior scholar and from an oppressed background. She was advised not to seek responses on caste identities directly.

In other cases, some scholars had questions about why the researcher was interested in interrogating caste as a specific point of intervention in research in prison studies. On being told that the investigation was interested in uncovering the pedagogical thrusts pertaining to caste within the discipline, there was an attempt to both underplay the role of caste as well as the lack of caste-based research in their own careers. One of the interviewees even warned the researcher that asking questions on caste to the prisoners might be risky since the prisoners ‘did not think of themselves’ as coming from a certain identity. There was no qualifying proof for this statement, nor is this corroborated by conditions within the prisons where, as discussed before, work is allocated based on caste. Another scholar advised the researcher to not focus on caste ‘so much’ and suggested that they look at social identity as a ‘whole’ within the prison. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, the interviewing researcher often felt intimidated by the dismissive and often patronising tone of the scholars, some of whom openly questioned the significance of the project and suggested that pursuing such ‘closed topics’ would not be helpful for their career growth.

This is in keeping with the broader theme of Dwij-Savarna scholars dismissing, undermining, and invisibilising caste as an important variable in knowledge production and analysis, especially when the research features scholars from marginalised caste backgrounds by using cues and clout to signal the legitimacy of research.

Conclusion

Decolonising knowledge represents an important moment in postcolonial academia wherein the epistemic and methodological violence of thought structures imposed by erstwhile colonisers are meant to be interrogated, challenged, and ultimately dismantled. In the context of South Asia, specifically India, much of Indian historiography and socioanthropological understanding has omitted grounded perspectives rooted in the voices of the marginalised, invisibilised subalterns. However, precolonial and colonial mechanisms of social hegemony were not innocent of internalised violence and all the colonised cannot be homogenised into a category of opposition, especially in caste societies like India. The historical role of Brahmins and other Dwij-Savarna groups’ collusion with the colonial rule must also be reinvestigated as not just co-operation but also building coloniality itself. In independent India, we see caste being structurally invisibilised as a variable of analysis by underplaying, obfuscating, and mitigating its centrality, as well as institutional intimidation and scholarly coercion of marginalised caste researchers’ perspectives on caste research. We see these themes playing out in our investigation of prison studies in India. The tacit co-operation of academics and activists alike with prison authorities across decades, in the name of access and practical methodology, indicates a larger system of Dwij-Savarna caste interests colluding, given that a vast majority of the prisoners are from marginalised castes. All the scholars interviewed admitted that caste was an important variable but in the course of their talk, proceeded to muddle its centrality. The verbal tone of the scholars, all of whom were Dwij-Savarna, to the marginalised caste researchers was one which bordered on polite patronising and aloofness, and as mentioned in cases even suggesting how researchers can improve their technique and go about career planning. This casualness must not be overlooked as it is a domain of Dwij-Savarna’s intellectual domination of marginalised castes, which is historically based on knowledge supremacy performance. This domain requires a more focused critical anthropological intervention, and expansion into other academic continuities where knowledge-making assemblages intersect on lines of gender, identity, class, and caste. The promise of ‘subaltern studies’ as an approach to decolonising needs to centralise the role of Dwij-Savarna caste scholarship in its knowledge formulation hierarchies for it to truly deliver on its scope.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ravikant Kisana

Ravikant Kisana is an Associate Professor at Woxsen University, Hyderabad, India. Postal address: 72, Tirumala Enclave, Pothreddipalle, Hyderabad 502295 Telangana, India. Email: [email protected]

Durga Hole

Durga Hole is a researcher at Nalanda Academy, Wardha, India and has previously completed her Master’s in Social Work (Criminology & Justice) at TISS, Mumbai.

Notes

1 Beginning in the colonial period, the efforts for inclusion by marginalised communities led to the creation of constitutional categories wherein caste groups were listed into schedules for affirmative action and policy interventions. Scheduled Castes (SC) are castes who are socially identified as ‘Dalits’, groups who experienced social untouchability owing to their historical caste-based occupations. Scheduled Tribes (ST) are tribal communities and indigenous peoples who have historically been ‘outside society’, in geographic isolation, and experience overall social backwardness. Both SCs and STs have been defined in Article 342 of the Indian constitution. Other Backward Classes (OBC) is a vast category created to accommodate Backward communities, semi-nomadic tribes, ex-criminalised tribes, and groups otherwise excluded from SC or ST listings.