Historian Shailaja Paik has become the first Dalit person to be awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. Known as the “genius grant”, the fellowship comes with a “no-strings-attached” award of $800,000 – a little over Rs 6.5 crore. To put the achievement and the term “genius” in perspective, since its inception in 1981, the fellowship has been given to only 1153 people. Among its recipients are literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr, Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, poets AK Ramanujan, Adrienne Rich, John Ashberry and Claudia Rankine, novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, jazz violinist Regina Carter, and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. It is a list of the best minds at work in the United States.
From growing up in a one-room tenement in Pune, Paik won major academic accolades and is now a professor of history and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Cincinnati, US. She works at the intersections of caste, gender and sexuality, building on the existing groundwork of Dalit feminism to broaden the scope of the questions that can be asked and finding new sources that can lead us to fresh answers.
Paik’s first book Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination, is the story of the struggles Dalit women underwent to secure educational rights in India. Her second work, The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India, traces the history and present of Maharashtra’s tamasha dancers, women invariably from marginalised castes sexualised for their performances, at once considered objects of desire and shame. Paik has been charting the story of Dalit women’s resistance and the meanings and possibilities these offer up to emancipatory thought.
In this conversation, Paik reflects on the significance of her achievement and what it means for her work.
Congratulations Shailaja – it’s an honour to be your publisher. What does this grant mean to you, and to the world of Dalit women?
To be a Dalit, is to be born Dalit, into a caste system that brands Dalits as impure, polluted, and hence Untouchables. Historically, even the shadow of Dalits, was deemed to be polluting and dominant castes did not allow Dalits to access knowledge or any form of learning, access public places, carry an umbrella, wear clean and new clothes, stand upright, build two-story houses, build taller doors in their house, or even wear footwear. To be a Dalit woman is to be doubly oppressed, that is both by the politics of caste and gender.
To be a Dalit woman is to be the “Dalit of the Dalit, slave of the slave.” I am ecstatic, exhilarated by this highest honour, to be named a MacArthur fellow. The foundation has recognised my hard work over many years and the impact of my work – educational, social, and legislative. This fellowship is a celebration of the enormous contributions of Dalits, especially Dalit women’s ideas, actions, history, and fight for human rights. It is a reminder of the contributions of Dalit studies, which includes my own labour as a Dalit woman scholar, to different fields of knowledge. After experiencing caste-, gender- and race-based discrimination, I have worked my way up and out with grit, determination, and hard work. Dalit women shared their lives with me and I am indebted to them as well as to my advisors, mentors, colleagues, and friends who were a part of this journey. I hope this achievement will strengthen the fight of Dalits and non-Dalits against caste discrimination in and beyond South Asia.
At a time when the Indian establishment shies from caste and clamps down on researchers looking at issues like caste and discrimination, how will the MacArthur grant alter perceptions?
I hope the MacArthur fellowship’s recognition of the impact of history, humanities, and Dalit studies will help deepen conversations on caste social inequities, strengthening anti-caste, anti-race, and anti-patriarchal work. The caste system pervades Indian society, politics, and economy. Nobody can shy away from this fact. High-caste elites love to pretend that caste does not exist, but they are oblivious to the casteist horrors of contemporary reality. The fellowship’s recognition of my work underlines the need to focus on the monster of caste, how it has operated over centuries, and continues to manifest itself in different forms to privilege those who are positively advantaged and disempower the oppressed, marginalised, and vulnerable.
The foundation says the grant is given to a select few American citizens who “show exceptional merit and promise for continued and enhanced creative work”. So, what are you going to do now? Does the grant free you from teaching work and help focus on writing?
The grant is given to American residents and citizens. I am currently working on my third monograph and two co-edited volumes. The fellowship will help me focus on my research and writing and continue my contribution to anti-caste, anti-patriarchy, and anti-race work.
What is your next book going to be about?
My next book will explore the “sex-gender-caste” complex, as I call it, in 20th-century India. I have discussed some aspects of this work in my book The Vulgarity of Caste. I am also working on two co-edited books – one is on caste and race and the other is a Dalit reader.
Will you consider writing a book for a wider general readership?
I hope to do so!
The last decade has seen the strengthening of new solidarities between Blacks and Dalits. How much do academic books, which are not widely read, impact this?
I agree that academic books have a narrow circulation, though they can be very impactful, if carefully and strategically advertised beyond academic fora. Alongside academic explorations, non-academic workshops, conferences, and public discussions will help strengthen new solidarities.
Tell us a bit about what drew you to Tamasha artists.
Tamasha is a popular form of public theatre practised predominantly by Dalits. It is considered traditional Dalit cultural performance art – a secular travelling public theatre that involves music and dance. It is often branded ashlil (vulgar) by the larger society. I grew up watching Tamasha, and even danced to and sang some of its songs. However, as a child, I had no idea about the inherent politics of caste, gender, and sexuality.
It was in 2003 while I was conducting interviews with a range of Dalit women, that I first encountered Tamasha artists. I was always intrigued about them because I had always watched them on local TV but I hadn’t talked to them in real life. After I finished my first book, I decided to devote my attention to understanding the lives of Tamasha women and how they were tied to male leaders, poets, and state patronage and regulation, which disproportionately affected them. Scholarly and popular treatments of Tamasha have rarely commented on the conditions of disempowerment, poverty, and caste violence under which women performed. These studies have perpetuated Tamasha’s reputation for sexual innuendo and moral depravity, displacing Tamasha women from the centre of their commentaries and reducing Tamasha women to objects of pleasure that serve only to corrupt men and shape Touchable men’s subjectivity. Tamasha is thus looked at as a commodity through which men’s emotions and masculine fantasies are created, circulated, and regulated.
Everybody praises high-caste poets, writers, and details abound of the music and musical instruments. The sexual and gendered arrangements of the caste system as they operated to oppress Dalit Tamasha women remained unexamined. These are the reasons I chose to study Tamasha as a microcosm of how caste domination operates. I have written in detail about my focus on Tamasha and my new methods in my book The Vulgarity of Caste.
Your work breaks new ground compared to the work of researchers, both Savarna feminists and Dalit men, in framing how the freedoms of Dalit women, especially Tamasha artists, have been contained and limited. You’ve also been critical of Dr Ambedkar’s thinking in this regard. What do you hope the impact of your intervention is in how we think of gender and sexuality in its intersection with caste in our daily lives?
I have made critical interventions in how we think about caste oppression as it intersects with gender and sexuality in our daily lives. For example, I have theorized about the “sex-gender-caste” complex, by which I mean the sexual and gendered arrangements of the caste system as they oppress Dalit Tamasha women. The control of sex and female sexuality leads to the social reproduction of caste. Women are to be regulated in terms of sexuality because any transgression would threaten caste hierarchy. The sex-gender-caste complex cunningly amalgamated a range of dancers, singers, and Tamasha women into the category of “prostitute”. The caste-based feudal agrarian slavey limited Dalit freedom to act, speak, think, dress, and have honour, virtue, education, and wealth – dominant and high castes forced them to follow prescribed occupations not of their own choice. By studying these arrangements, I hope to show how such inequality continues into the present.
From the Round Table Conferences in the 1930s to the World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001 to you being awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, marginalised communities in India have often found themselves gaining recognition abroad that is seldom available in India. How do you reflect on this pattern, and what does it say about Indian society?
I am happy the MacArthur Fellowship has recognised my unique contributions and the impact of history, humanities, and Dalit studies. Over the last 25 years, I have also received many fellowships to support my research and writing, including the Frederick Burkhardt fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Stanford Humanities Center fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities – American Institute of Indian Studies senior long-term fellowship, the Ford Foundation fellowship, the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center fellowship, the Luce Foundation fellowship, among others.
My research and writing have made deeper impacts – educational, social, and legislative – and my books and articles are read by academics and non-academics in different parts of the world. Activists have used my scholarly writings to initiate change. The MacArthur fellowship celebrates my outstanding contributions to the global conversation on anti-race, anti-patriarchal, and anti-caste movements and transnational feminism as well as has provided me an opportunity to strengthen this even further. The answer to this last question you raised, lies in the statement you made earlier that the Indian establishment “shies away from caste and clamps down on researchers looking at issues like caste and discrimination.” I hope reviewers (and the Indian society at large) recognise the value of excellent scholarly contributions and the significance of new perspectives, unique methods, and the creation of new knowledge that is important to bring about change.
S Anand, the publisher at Navayana, who published the Indian edition of The Vulgarity of Caste, conducted this interview with Shailaja Paik over email.
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