To Think Otherwise: An Interview with Anupama Rao
On the 10th anniversary of The Caste Question, Anupama Rao speaks to Kelvin Ng about the questions that her book addressed and the debates it raised. They discuss how the book shifted the debate on caste from questions of social justice and the state to problems of personhood and Dalit subject formation; the way in which it drew from writing on slavery, anti-slavery and emancipation; Ambedkar’s anger at the unavailability of the Dalit subject in history; the dilemmas of competing minorities: the emergence of the Dalit subject and the unmaking of the Muslim subject in South Asia; different receptions to the book; the convergence of subaltern thought with global history; and contemporary Indian politics as a contingent process.
Kelvin Ng: I want to start with your book, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. It has been 10 years since its publication. Congratulations! What historical questions, political exigencies, and ethical concerns did your work grow out of? How did the questions you were interested in addressing change as you worked on your monograph, and how have they continued to change since?
Anupama Rao: I mean, it’s a complicated trajectory, right? Because I think there's a way in which the book was both novel, and forecasted the end of one way of thinking about the question of caste, its relationship to democracy, and the Dalit question. It stands in a kind of interesting place if we think about the broader intellectual formation of South Asian history, historiography, anthropology, political thought.
The First Edition of The Caste Question. Published by University of California Press.
When I started thinking about the caste question, I was coming to this question as someone who had been trained both in anthropology and history. The anthropological question was actually the one that predominated for me and became the occasion for thinking through the genealogy of what one was seeing on the ground as a set of ethnographic questions and ethnographic formations, or how they came to be. I also came into this project by thinking about the question of violence. When I was in the field, the question of anti-Dalit violence—and, in some ways, the relationship between violence and the formation of the community—had been very, very present. People that I spoke to would bring this up, both at the level of suffering a structuring or structural violence, but there was also the very real issue of the kind of violence that people were experiencing: forms of social exclusion, exclusion from property, and the real experience of physical violence. The project actually began in a presentist vein, and then had to think itself backwards.
In terms of the ethical questions and the political concerns that I came to this with: It was really to think through rigorously, perhaps more systematically, about how a movement that was really quite distinctive to Western India had grown and what the everyday effect and social life of anti-casteism was like in a region that had a two-hundred-year history of it. To think about that problem ethnographically, but also to ask the historical question of how to move beyond something like an engagement with this question through a reiteration of events— this happened in 1989, this happened at some other point of time—is to look at the structure of systematicity, at repetition and recursivity, and also to ask about the political utopianism that’s organized that “thought space.” How do we think about such complications?
At that time, to argue that the question of caste was not merely a question of social injustice, but that the question of caste had actually structured selfhood, personhood, and the imagination of possibility—I think that was quite contentious. I did my Gender and Caste book before The Caste Question, and I remember that there were feminists in Maharashtra at that time who felt that they had always taken up the question of caste, but it had come up as question of livelihood, of political economy in their work. I think they felt that there had been an in-built critique of caste that they had offered many years earlier. I think they read the work as a real challenge to the ways in which they had organized their ethics and their politics. (I had argued in my introduction to The Gender and Caste volume that male anti-caste activists had a more complicated understanding of the relationship between sexual and social reproduction, and that their understanding of the conjoint nature of caste inequality and what we’ve come to call Brahmanical patriarchy had been ignored by contemporary Indian feminists). This was deeply uncomfortable for many people: for people who exclusively saw themselves either as anti-caste activists, or as feminists.
Similarly, The Caste Question challenged an entire tradition of South Asian history and anthropology writing, where the focus had been on how should we think about state formation, the colonial problematic, anti-colonialism, and all of its attendant institutions. I had replaced that with the question of subject formation: what is the problem of the subject? What is the problem of the political subject, taken as a problem of/for political thought? Moreover, how is the coming into being of the Dalit subject key to our understanding of this problematic? That, I think, was a challenge.
KN: What I view as the critical intervention of your book is its attempt to take serious Dalit emancipation on its own terms within a field of immanence: not as a superstructure of the capital/labor dialectic, nor as a spectral auxiliary of a modernized Hinduism’s anxieties, nor as an ahistorical amorphous category of identity politics. It is itself constitutive of certain radical claims about emancipation, subjecthood, and violence. How would you position your work in relation to the works that have come before and after you—thinking here, centrally, of Nicholas Dirks’s Castes of Mind and Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai’s The Cracked Mirror, but also of Dilip Menon’s Caste, Nationalism and Communism in India; and Vijay Prashad’s Untouchable Freedom—as well as the works across other disciplines, including those by Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Shefali Chandra, Rupa Vishwanath, Ram Narayan Rawat, and Shalaija Paik.
AR: Those are two very different kinds of questions. One is to say: where within a concern with the history of caste does this work stand? To come back to where I ended: to shift the problem away from questions of state towards questions of the political subject. If there had been a concern with the long social life of caste, it was to think about caste as an organizing analytic category with its own historicity; in a sense, to ask the question: what was caste? That question was very different from asking what was anti-caste? Caste and anti-caste, in a sense, became part and parcel of the same problematic and I think that's where the intervention actually lies in the book. It was saying yes, there is a certain kind of labor in thinking through the colonial state form, thinking about colonialism’s relationship to existing categories of social life— caste, religion, other forms of social difference being very important ones—but it was also to think through anti-caste thought as not merely doing away with existing social structures, but as posing the important question: what does it mean to have the right to think? In that sense, there is a genealogy of texts, or a textual tradition, that one was both writing within but also pulling [into the history-writing of caste] at the same time.
You could, of course, ask questions about the British Empire, liberal imperialism, the question of the state, liberalism's own internal inconsistencies, the question of the so-called invention of caste—which is not, of course, ever to suggest that caste had been created or invented de novo by the British—these are not false problematics. Rather, it is to say that the British found a set of social forms that they repurposed, reproduced, and gave a new political purchase as an organizing frame. I was drawing from a slightly different intellectual tradition that was thinking about slavery, anti-slavery, and emancipation. To that extent, you could say there's a kind of French tradition—thinking Haiti; drawing on [Jacques] Rancière, [Étienne] Balibar. That was a way of thinking within the republican tradition, if you will, where slavery becomes quite central. Questions of slavery, enslavement, domination non-domination—there's a tradition of republican political philosophy that is centrally organized around these issues. There is a critical historiography that is thinking about slavery and its place in historical time. It seems to me—and because I'd also been very influenced by African American traditions of history and history writing—I very much saw and thought about Ambedkar through my own experiences with African American political thought. Reading people like W.E.B. Du Bois, the conversation between Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, this was very much a part of my own kind of intellectual training from the time that I'd been in high school.
The Dinbandhu, 1894. Keer Collection, Kolhapur. Photograph by Anupama Rao
I was channeling a very different set of questions: the question of enslavement, of radical political freedom, of emancipation. Emancipation was not a category that South Asian academics and historians were using as a framing device for thinking about the question of the subject. They were thinking about the state, about analytical categories, about community; they were thinking about the relationship between caste, community, and religion. Perhaps they were thinking about questions of Dalits and Muslims. Even then, it was thought not quite so much as a set of connected issues or as comparative minority formations. So, what I was doing was that I was calling on a different playlist, if you can put it that way. One was to think about a set of works that engaged with writings in French political philosophy; the other was work that was thinking about U.S. history, racial capitalism, and the forms of life, or the lifeworlds that challenged those structures.
Those were two spaces. The third, which was particularly important for me, was the question of minority. That became for me the way of coming back and engaging with Marx and the labor/capital dialectic. For me, the engagement with Marx was actually the question of personhood and the problem of minority. I think this question of comparative minority—something that is evident in the book in a couple of chapters; it's certainly evident in the discussion of Ambedkar as well as my discussion of constitutionalism—was also an innovation. People had not necessarily thought about minority beyond the question of Muslim minority and the question of Partition. This was to say that there was a different kind of a trajectory, a different history of thinking about minority; this becomes one where we can think the Jew, the Negro, the Dalit, and so on and so forth as part of a broader global problematic of thinking Black aberration, difference and universality, exception and universalism. That was another innovation that for me seemed important.
KN: In elucidating the complexity of Dalit political subject formation beyond, in your terms, “something other than the history of community” (10), you turn to a thorough engagement with the intellectual history of radical anticaste thought within the logic of its own immanent history. I am reminded here of Reinhart Koselleck’s notion of Begriffsgeschichte: a radical historicization of the categories of thought (and, attendantly, the processes of abstraction) forming the very basis for the intelligibility of “history,” in a manner that is neither hermeneutic nor teleological. Could you perhaps elaborate a bit more on your methodology and style of doing history, and why it was apposite for the project you were undertaking?
AR: This is a tough one. Method is always a very difficult question for people who both think methodologically, but do something else when they actually engage in the writing. [Laughs] One could speak to a productive discrepancy, or two ways of reading, or two ways of approaching this question. Very simply, I saw the non-teleological, immanent structures of anti caste thought, and indeed a project of Dalit emancipation. I pursued this question by structuring the book historically and ethnographically. In terms of method, there was a kind of simplicity to this: the book was structured around making and unmaking. It was to say that there was a real historical process where something was made possible, a moment where the political utopianism that structured the Ambedkerite project—thinking the Dalit subject capaciously as a global subject for our time—that his project was actually historically possible. It was possible in real historical time. And that there was another set of moments where, again in real historical time, that project became either impossible or perdured as a kind of horizon; something had been foreclosed. If I think about it now a little bit more explicitly—I don't think this was explicit to me at the time that I was actually writing the book—it is probably this moment. What was opened up, from the post 1857 period in Indian history to the interwar, and what then gets foreclosed once we actually move toward the formation of a nation-state and Partition. I was not engaging that dual logic except alluding to it: the dual logic of Constitution and Partition as explicitly structuring and foreclosing a set of possibilities.
From the Collection of Raja Dhale. Sourced to Borderlines by Anupama Rao.
That’s why I say there are ways in which some things become clearer to you as an artisanal way of managing the problem. When you're writing, you manage a problem—an intellectual problem, a theoretical or conceptual issue—in the way that you write and structure the book. I was arguing that there is a late-colonial history of making, and that that history is then also unmade and freighted with a new set of expectations, but also that there are other, new kinds of possibilities within the nation-state. Those are the ways in which the problem of the political subject becomes a problem of the bureaucratic and the juridical subject, with the management of the Dalit (or the Scheduled Castes) as a really existing constitutional category, therefore as someone burdened with a kind of hypervisibility, now forming a topic or problem for the state—rather than, perhaps, as a problem for thought that it was for Ambedkar during this time. That's something that I really struggled with. I managed it by saying there's making and then there's unmaking; there's emancipation, and then there’s the unmaking of those emancipatory possibilities in the reproduction of the Dalit as a specific—and indeed a modal—bureaucratic subject. That's the easy response of how I managed that problem of immanence and concept history.
The deeper question of how one thinks about the subject—the coming-into-being of a political subject who is only at some level accessible to us through ways of thinking or apprehending analogically, by thinking adjacency. This was the problem that I was trying to engage as well. So if you think about it as a problem for theoretical Marxism, then you have a very particular way of staging the entry of the political subject into fields of legibility. I did have that at the back of my mind. I was thinking through not just the self-sufficiency of the Dalit subject on her own terms—the mode of her entry, the means of her becoming, the means of her making and unmaking—but also to what extent one could think adjacently and analogically through a radical project of comparison, to understand both how she was specific and how she was like something else that we may know of. That’s a particular problem of language: what is the particular kind of language that one could use to think about, for instance, Jyotirao Phule’s discourse of the Shudra and the Ati-Shudra? How could one think about a politics of naming, where it is, and the performative politics through which the Dalit marks her entry as singular and substantive, and yet, calls upon entire traditions of other forms of thought and thinking that we’re much more familiar with? I do try to manage that, just to say: this is like something else we know. We know and we have an argument about racial capital, and the entry of the slave as the liberal subject. We have an argument about the political subject—the working class—that's coming into a kind of universality. This is like that and yet it's different. I was both trying to allude to something that people may know, and I was trying to use what we thought we knew as a way to mark a radical break. That would be one way of thinking through my own method.
That question of thinking capaciously about minority became my way of saying that the Dalit stands alone, the Dalit also stands with others in a distinctive problem of minority, where minority subjects actually cannot be collapsed one into the other. That the Marxian project of equivalence and commensuration actually must be thought negatively. In that sense, the methodology of the book—as I keep saying in my classes—is to always walk the dark side: to think the negative, to think from the position of destitution, of depoliticization and repoliticization. To think that edge of the negative as the place where something fugitive, something really productive, something that is unremarked but world-historical, is taking shape.
KN: That's a really interesting set of questions you’re raising: thinking along the lines of incommensurability and illegibility within the liberal state, I am reminded of Marx’s On the Jewish Question and Aamir Mufti’s Enlightenment in the Colony. To dwell a bit more on the question of singularity and difference, my question would be: what is the politics of minority? To use that Deleuzean term, what forms a politics of the minor?
AR: I think that’s where the “as is” structure of thought becomes significant. Again, coming to the present, I will speak a little bit about what structured or what lay at the back of this text in terms of real time South Asia. The book is written in and against a very different kind of a backdrop to what we find now: the Mandal Commission and efforts to think the minor, but also to differentiate hierarchically the project of minority politics. This is by saying we've got the Scheduled Caste, we've got the Scheduled Tribes, we've got the OBCs [Other Backward Castes]— that constant refinement, the minutiae of distinction and of hierarchy, even within the domain of the minor, in a place where the real subject of minority politics—that is, the Muslim subject—has gone missing. That was the South Asian project, if we're thinking about what's happening in India in the late 80s and the 90s. It's the making-disappear of the Muslim subject as having organized a millennial history of thinking about the region as much, of thinking about this geo-historical space called India, South Asia, the Subcontinent, whatever you will. It was important in terms of real politics to think about the ways in which the Ambedkarite project itself had moved away from the question of thinking the minority or the minor as a kind of horizon, to an effort to literalize (what was) a possibility in thought. Instead, one needed to think very actively about a very different way of constituting connections between minor subjects on the ground. What was required was a very different project of thinking and making a set of claims about a kind of radical project of universal inclusion, and not merely a balance of so many forms of difference.
That was a real tension; I talked about this as the “as is” structure of how one approaches law. One has to think about the law as being able to provide justice, even as you know in your heart of hearts that this is a failed project. Anything that actually takes shape on the ground is always going to be not just incomplete, but deeply unsatisfactory to the political project that you imagine. There was a project of radical emancipation, there is anti-casteism, there was the fact that people like Phule and Ambedkar are truly out of their time; they are out of joint. They are inaugural; they are insurgent and unacceptable. We know Ambedkar becomes the anti-nationalist nationalist when we think about him against Gandhi, which is why the arguments can be made that he is a British stooge, that he is using colonial categories, and that at best he is a strategic thinker. There is an out-of-jointness with the project of anti-casteism: once anti-casteism actually became part and parcel of Indian democratic politics, it loses that edge. One also had to be very realistic about the fact that one had lost that edge: that Dalit politics in Maharashtra had been deeply co-opted by Congress and had become part and parcel of a statist project of thinking through reservations. It was itself engaged in making a set of distinctions about good and bad minority subjects. It had gotten deeply invested in a project of thinking the minutiae of hierarchical differentiations between minority positions.
This is a very circuitous way to come back to the question that you posed, but it seems to me now in retrospect that if I had actually come back and thought about that simultaneity of Partition and Constitution slightly differently, that I might have been able to make a stronger theoretical argument about what happened with the relationship between Dalit, Muslim, and this project of territory and homeland. The reconstitution of the minority subject in India in the aftermath of that is also a project of mourning, if not noticing, the absence of the Muslim subject. That became for me the critical edge: to ask whether the politics in the postcolonial period was capable of reflecting on what was possible and was lost with the non-synchronous synchronicity of the Dalit problem vis-à-vis the Muslim.
In a very weird way, my book takes up the question of what happens to the Dalit subject on the Indian side of things. Faisal Devji’s Muslim Zion takes up the question of what it is that happens with Pakistan, and here he [Devji] is able to mourn that Muslim subject, or the possibility of a project of Muslim emancipation that was possible, at least as a problem of thought in the late colonial period for Muslim politics. There it is: a question of language. It's the language of loss, it’s melancholy. It's a kind of political melancholy for the lost subject and the lost possibility. It is, in a very real way, mourning what happened to that weird moment of Partition and Constitution. With the Indian state becoming a hegemonic space in South Asia in its aftermath, it seems to me that even for radical Dalit politics, pushing them [Dalit activists and allies] to think through what was lost, or how a kind of radical Dalit politics could be reconstituted once we had resurrected the relationship to Muslim politics was important.
An then there’s also the radical emancipatory politics that Marxism held forth. A heterodox Marxism, the early history as it were—something that Jai Bhim Comrade brings up—that there are a set of heterodox Marxian possibilities. It doesn't live in the communist parties, but it is a possibility that inheres nonetheless in the ways in which the Dalit subject could think about her exceptionality always against the better-known problem and project of Marxian universality. It is both the loss of a utopian Marxist possibility and the loss of the Muslim subject that Dalit politics has to engage with if we think in terms of political philosophy. That’s the problem that Dalit politics had or needed to engage with in the aftermath of 1947. Sitting from where I sat at that time looking at Maharashtra and so on, it was this project that was not taken up, and it was what led to a deep and troubling vernacularization of not just Dalit politics in Maharashtra. It led to a vernacularization of Maharashtrian politics, i.e. the production of the Shiv Sena. So, you could even say that the kind of bilingualism that people had: people working in a post-Persian world of understanding Marathi; people reading English; the early modernist experiments with the little magazine movement; or even Dalit politics with the Dalit Panthers. That multilingualism is lost. Without that multilingualism—coming back to what I said about always thinking specificity, singularity and comparison—one can't engage with that dual problem sufficiently.
KN: On the topic of the synchronicity of the non-synchronous—a sensibility that reminds me of Ernst Bloch’s work—could you elaborate a bit more on the question of temporality in your work?
Bezangaon Dalit Community Center. Source: Anupama Rao
AR: I want to come back and say a little bit about method. One keeps thinking about method and one keeps it returning to this because it's such a deeply significant question. I’m becoming more clear about this because I've been thinking about it in my teaching, including in the class that you took and others are taking on History and Theory. There was, in the book, a real effort for me to think about social history: the modalities, the forms of description, the methodologies that accompany social history in the best sense of that term, which is a kind of thick description and engagement with the everyday. The engagement of immanence because social history tries to think about social totality—not adequately in theoretical terms, but it certainly tries to do this at the level of thinking thick description, of thinking through multiple mediation, multiple forms of causality. It at least opens that up in terms of the interests of everyday life: the ways in which we live, the ways in which we inhabit space. You think about E.P. Thompson, you think about Judith Walkowitz, you think about others who are really able to, through the work of social description, give you a sense of living in a kind of time out of joint or living in multiple times. Human subjects actually live in many different kinds of time—that is what social history is able to do quite beautifully.
As someone who does not work with social description (or is not able to work with social description) in quite that way, it was an aspiration for me in the book and I wanted - to the extent that I possibly could - to signal this at least in the way that I structure the text. Perhaps the deeper question for me was this relationship between social theory and social history. In social history, I was coming in to a way of thinking universality, social difference, exception, negation, lack, aberration, and finally—thinking in philosophical/historical terms—the question of the remnant or the archaic. So, the way the methodological shift between social theory and social history was enacted at the level of the book was by thinking about the Dalit as a figure for the future and the Dalit as an archaic or a remnant: that the Dalit inhabited a kind of millennial deep time. Again, the connection with Buddhism, and the connection with the heterodox challenge and questioning that Buddhism itself stood for. It was also a signifier. If we think about it in the way that Ambedkar was, it was not about Buddhism in real time, nor was it about Buddhism and state formation. He is partly interested in that, but it was Buddhism as a signifier of an internal challenge within the domain of the religious in challenging the very structures of belief, faith, religiosity, equality. The Buddhist poses the question which can't be answered, if we come back to the question of caste as the question: it can never actually and adequately be answered.
The way of managing this problem of time and temporality for me I had to do with the way in which the political subject emerges as historically unavailable. Remember that Ambedkar’s great anger is the fact that he can't find the Untouchable in historical time. She has no history. As that unavailable subject of stigma and untouchability, she is the organizing and enabling rubric, but will always go missing when you go find her [in history]. There is no Dalit to find; there is no Dalit Buddhist to find; there are no broken men really to find. It becomes an imaginative engagement with the historical record, and it is an angry denunciation of a historical record that can never actually engage in a project of (historical) adequation or completeness.
That became the temporal horizon: there’s a millennial problem of Ambedkar’s anger at the unavailable Dalit subject, and then there is the equal and opposite (if you will, very simplistically put) imagination of a subject of plenitude that can answer that call of invisibility. So, you think of the Thompsonian condescension of the historical record, the condescension of the historian in terms of the working class. The Dalit as a figure of the future become becomes, again, a subject that can never be adequate to herself because the work that she's being asked to perform is the work of millennial redress. And who on Earth can do that? How can that be a possible project adequate to itself? It must necessarily fail. Every radical effort of real Dalit politics has to fail against that millennial call. I think that for me was the question of time: time out-of-joint at the level of the thinkers who thought anti-caste—Phule and Ambedkar are my main guys, and they are guys, but also quite radical feminists who were thinking this issue—but I think perhaps methodologically it was to think of time and temporality through a millennial structure of invisiblization and historical redress. If one thinks through that arc, then the political subject is never adequate to either becoming the figure of a future universal, or a past of degradation and invisiblization so huge that it literally can't be expressed. The existential horror of the degraded untouchable subject is so huge that she can't be reckoned with in historical terms.
KN: I am interested in thinking about this structuring absence in tandem with critical interventions in Black studies, particularly Saidiya Hartman whose work is guided by a reckoning of "the impossibility of fully recovering the experience of the enslaved and the emancipated” and, concomitantly, “"the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure.” Do you see yourself as engaging in a similar methodological practice?
AR: That question of imagination—not just of emancipation—was maybe one that I alluded to. So, for Saidiya Hartman and others, efforts of fabulating the subject and imagining the subject that could have been are precisely in place because she is unavailable to us. That imaginative exercise was not one that I could undertake for two reasons: one, because we did not have either an architecture or an archive of the kind of work that I was doing that would have allowed me to take what would have been considered leaps of fancy within a broader tradition of writing South Asian history and historiography. We can challenge the veracity of history, and we can challenge or think about the project of imagination, but nobody really had quite done it for South Asian historiography. So to do it with the Dalit question as an upper caste academic situated in the U.S. context—to engage in the kind of work that's being done in African-American history and literary criticism—I felt that it would have been extremely dangerous and intellectually hazardous, and that it would have opened me up to charges of a casteism, of wanting to evade responsibility and complicity right for the ways in which the caste question had been structured politically and intellectually.
I was trying to engage in that difficult dance: to explain at one level the historicity of caste and questions about the history of caste—all of the earlier work that you just gestured to in the “colonial politics of knowledge” tradition: Bernard Cohn, Edward Said, Nicholas Dirks, Ronald Inden, and others. I was both trying to gesture to why anti-casteism had gone missing from that account, and I had wanted to create a kind of positive argument or a positive footprint for anti-caste thought that others could follow. To open up the question of imagination. would have been extremely hazardous intellectually and we didn't have that space in South Asian history.
KN: The archival form, as Ann Stoler reminds us, is rife with the social epistemologies and affective registers of imperial governance. While The Caste Question has extensively drawn on archival sources—in the state archives of Maharashtra; in district and high court archives as well as police archives; in private libraries and collections; as well as at the India Office Library—you importantly stress that the archival form itself is organized around—and indeed, enabled by—an excluded negativity, the abandoned figure of the Mahar. Could you elaborate a little on your practice of reading: what are your methods of reading and your sites of reading?
Inside Ambedkarite Scholar Vasant Moon’s Library. Source: Anupama Rao
AR: In real, material archival terms, one of the ways of reading and unreading happens through my use of the actual colonial archive—the Maharashtra State Archive—and these ephemeral sites, where I was trying to read traces of anti-casteism. I was also working with a very different register of language. If you look at Satya Shodhak manuals, chapbooks, a lot of the writing that it produced is literary and poetic. It gestures to a possible critique. It puts in place a very complex reformulation of language itself, both in its capacity to describe and its capacity to explain. One saw with Phule—Ambedkar is very different—the urge to lay claim to precisely everything that is denied. I consider him, therefore, to be one of our clearest and most capacious thinkers for social science and anthropology.
My way of working was to think about the actual archive and where it lives and to think of archival formations —the colonial archive, the colonial records—and then to constantly toggle between that and archives in less institutional spaces: archives held, for instance, by Vasant Moon, who also is the one who's responsible for the volumes and the production of the BAWS [Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches] volumes. To look at other archival formations. Others had used material there without actually speaking to his own act of collection in creating and making, because you know that archive was very carefully thought through as an archive of the social history of Maharashtra and the place of anti-casteism in that order. There is an effort to think very capaciously about archival formations.
So the way of archival reading was—in a very real material sense of the doing of it—was literally to go out and find just as many archives as I could find: where are the Dalit Panther archives, where do we find Satya Shodhak writings, where do we have the election pamphlets, and so on. But the important distinction also was to begin to use the legal and police archives, to say that there is an archive of state in which the legal and the bureaucratic subject was being created.
I was constantly toggling between a set of very different kinds of archives. I was engaging holdings that did not have the status of an archive and, in many ways. I began to think about that as an archive in connection to the archive of state. I am very interested in the archive of state and I find them to be extremely interesting and important. I think that the archive of state gives us a very strong way of understanding the many ways in which the archival project fails, more so than people who engage in what I would call interested archival formations. You can't read in a private archive a narrative of what went missing; it is actually the archive of state that allows us to do that. You go to somebody who has documented Dalit literature, let's say. That interested archive makes it much harder for you to read against the grain than the archive of state. The state imagines itself as the sole arbiter, the only autobiographical subject. Therefore, its claims to totality are very significant.
The first public screening of Jai Bhim Comrade in Bombay at the BCIT Chawls. Source: Anupama Rao
There is this great effort to think about dark archives, hidden archives, archives that have not been available to us. Well and good, bring them into zones of archival visibility. Elaborating a literary archive is part and parcel of the problem of Dalit political subject formation. Thinking through a heterodox archive of soundscape, in the way that Jai Bhim Comrade does, is a necessary archive of the formation of the modern Dalit political subject. However, those archives do not allow us to think the underside or the other side in quite the same way. To that extent, I'm perhaps more classically located or classically inspired as a historian and ethnographer.
I think about this pedagogically as well. I don't ever begin teaching, whether it's undergraduate students or graduate students, by teaching the critique. I think it's important to actually go back and deal with the forbearers who don't allow us to find ourselves in those records. I think it's really important that we engage, as South Asian historians, with British history—even a British history where we don't ever appear. That's fine. I actually don’t mind at all. It's really important that we go back and read a political philosophy where we don't appear. My project is to come to that slowly. It's to come to that rigorously. You use the term immanence to think about the critique as being immanent to the project of carving out a space in the mainstream, rather than beginning with the feminist critique or the anti-racist critique first. Maybe that has to do with my own formation. I'm not as troubled if I don't find my politics, or my way of doing intellectual history or political philosophy, in the archive. I'm okay with waiting, because I think I've got something in my pocket. [Laughs.] I think I can I can do that pretty imaginatively but also rigorously only by knowing first what that broad space is, so I would always work through the state archive first. I would never suggest to someone that they go out and find hidden archives and dark archives and begin their search there.
That may be one point of critique and challenge, perhaps with younger scholars or perhaps even with anti-caste scholar-activists who might begin with moments of protest, sites of exclusion, Dalit suicide: to begin from that outside, and then work our ways back in. It is also a question of deep, serious issue of entitlement, one I think that that must be acknowledged, and it's a question of complicity and responsibility. One is working within an institutional site that gives one power and reach, including what one is able to see. My own sense of responsibility is to be responsible to that bigger space, that broader world, and then to take some responsibility for where I sit and where I do the work I do. To acknowledge the fact that I may have political predilections, that the work may have serious ethical and political consequence, but that I don't work as someone who is engaging issues, questions, facts on the ground in some sense of immediacy. I would like to use the slow time that my position allows me to think through that.
KN: Thank you for that. That was really generative for me, in terms of thinking about my own archival practice. To return to, for example, the India Office Records, various national archives—sites that would usually be thought of as sites of exclusion—but simultaneously trying to sit with that discomfort and registers of exclusion. Just to shift gears slightly, I begin this question with the acknowledgement that categorical equivalencies between analysis and outcome are always fraught with peril. Nonetheless, I’d venture to ask: could you elaborate on the afterlives and itineraries of your work? How has the book been received in the ten years since its publication, and how has it shifted the subsequent theorizations of Dalit subjectivity in activist spaces? Do you remember the times when you received the most resistance to your work? How did you deal with that?
AR: I don't know how it's been received. [Laughs.] I can venture to gauge. It’s an awkward thing to do because you release a book into the world, you realize in its aftermath that the book was early in certain ways, inaugural at the stage of a debate that then has become common sense now. So, what I can do is maybe think through those moments of discomfort, and about the moments where there is an impasse of communication, moments of misunderstanding. I think those are important.
Intellectually, I thought there were real resistances at the time that the book came out. We are in such a different moment, and I do also want to think about the different moment that we are in now. But at that time, there were two things: one, the idea that secular, progressive upper-caste academics, trained in a space of the South Asian academy that was itself deeply hierarchical (and replayed all of the minutiae of caste). We are living with that kind of academic formation. It was not just invisible but it was invisiblized to a number of people. I think I was able to say this because I came from the American academy, I was someone who had grown up here [in the States], I was coming from a very different politics of identity and knowledge production, sitting in the United States, from the real problem that South Asian academics trained in South Asia experienced: not just the sense of discomfort, but the sense that this was a specific personal calling out. Second, with Gender and Caste, as I said to you, there were feminists in Maharashtra who felt personally assailed and thought that this was denying to them the good politics that had mobilized a life’s work. Indeed, at some level, one could say this was true: these were people who had been in the field, who had been activists for twenty or thirty years for the radical project of caste undoing, remaking, and giving up your caste formation. This was all very real, and the critique then came to them as a deeply personal assault on them and a questioning of their political ethics.
I do remember two situations. One is of going in and making an argument about caste and gender in front of a very prominent feminist theorist and anti-caste activist in Hyderabad. I was told - when I talked about the politics of identity as an existential problem for Dalit life: dignity, remaking the self, recognition— that I was being an American feminist who only thought in identitarian terms, and that we [non-American feminists] didn't actually think in those kinds of identity categories. [Laughs] I had to remind [the gathering] that the most important journal of Dalit writing was called Asmitadarsh (Mirror of Identity). But given this upper caste feminist resistance, how do we think social difference? How do we think community but also how do we think of the long life of a certain kind of progressive politics that made it very difficult to think not just the question of state formation or community formation, but also the question of subject formation? What are the new categories for thinking emancipation? Is it emancipation? Is it dignity? Is it self-making? Is it recognition—that important term that I use? Let's think about this and what makes it possible and not in the full Hegelian sense.
From L-R Motiram Pawde, Anupama Rao, Subodh More, and Kumud Pawde. Source: Anupama Rao
I also remember that I had some important Subaltern historians who told me that my book was too theoretical. I found it very interesting that it was alright to draw on Foucault and Gramsci when discussing anticolonialism, but not when approaching the worlds of India’s most important and extensively trained political thinker. [Now, we are all working on Ambedkar. Laughs]. I think it was deeply disconcerting for people because I was actually saying that it was not just about the right to think; it was about saying that there is a recognizable political philosophy into which we can embed anti-casteism, especially somebody like Ambedkar. So much has changed in the ten years between when the book came out and now: to make an argument that Ambedkar was not merely a thinker of the sociopolitical Dalit movement. We need to think about him as a theorist, not just of minority, but of radical democracy. This is really what was opened up with my engagements with Balibar and Rancière, posing the endless paradox of emancipation and the political subject. I think it was very discomforting and the way that people addressed how one took on some of the fundamentals of both postcolonial thinking and theorizing. And to do that from the space of feminist theory and theorizing— we should talk about the gendered nature of the academy, the question of girls doing theory. I think you know many of us who have done this kind of work have faced that problem because we have a very particular male or masculinized academic formation. It is very interesting that post-colonial critique is also male and gendered in very interesting ways. I will never forget this: I was told that—and perhaps this was apposite—that this was a theoretical project that didn't seem to hew close to Indian reality. I had to turn around and ask whether Gramsci made sense, and to what extent these were categories that were self-generated by Indian thinkers on the ground.
Analysis always has to maintain a critical relationship of distance from social reality. This is of course to return to the question of social theory versus social history. The social historian somehow appears to believe finally that, in and through her thick description, she can find class on the ground. To that, the social theorist has to say you can never find class on the ground; this is my category, it is an imposition. It is an imposition for thinking rigorously, but there ain't no class on the ground. Even the most astute, aware, politicized person cannot in that sense find class on the ground because social life and everyday life is too heterogeneous for that. That moment of agonism is also a moment of removing oneself from the impress and the immediacy of the everyday, in order to be able to engage in some level of immanent and abstract thinking— again, the Marxian problem of thinking the abstract and the concrete.
I think people were discomforted, and the way they showed their discomfort was to argue that this was a difficult book. It was a difficult book because it was introducing a subject that we thought we always knew and it was putting it in a framework which was not about movements for community self-sufficiency or self-reform, or even a challenge of the colonial state; instead, it asks this question in the biggest possible terms: global projects of emancipation. I see the caste question as a commonsensical term being bandied about all over the place now; the question of caste has been recognized as a structuring question. Given that my book is about the politics of naming, it’s been received as too difficult, too dense, too impenetrable—and it is, because thinking differently is always that. If you actually give to these thinkers their own space and their own domain, then what they're doing is also really difficult. Ambedkar at that time was a recessed figure. Ambedkar today is the thinker through whom India (and the project of the nation-state) is being rethought: whether it is Modi and Hindutva, or new youth political formations and Dalit formations that are themselves internal critiques of precisely the making of a hardening and stultifying of Dalit politics that I had tried to gesture to.
Ambedkar has become so many things; there are so many Ambedkars. It goes back to Upendra Baxi’s beautiful piece on the many Ambedkars: the Constitutional Ambedkar; the emancipatory Ambedkar; Ambedkar the Buddhist convert, and so on. The figure of Ambedkar poses a set of challenges for how to keep him stationary in order to think about what he was up to. Today, in real social space we have those many Ambedkars. I don't want to suggest that my book played some singular role in that; I think there is also just the press of historical events. It's been a very interesting think to consider how Gandhi has been replaced by Ambedkar. Nobody can say no to Ambedkar today. You may want to remake him as a figure palatable to Hindutva by selectively reading his writings on Partition, where he appears to suggest, in a sense, that Partition inaugurates a very different kind of social space and the possibility for a different sort of political formation. We can bring him within the folds of majoritarian thinking. We also have the rediscovery of a Marxist Ambedkar: the Ambedkar of political economy— that many Dalit movements forgot about—who addressed the question of Dalit dispossession and poverty. Historical events and issues have fore fronted Ambedkar. My work, which thought about and returned to the question of rethinking the histories of caste through anti-casteism—not through a critique of colonial categories of what caste was and had become—that project also has taken a kind of shape and found some purchase. Ambedkar’s uniqueness allowed me to put the question of political philosophy to the question of a theoretically sophisticated field of social, political and cultural history in South Asia.
KN: In recent years, there has been a growing call among such historians as Andrew Sartori and Samuel Moyn for a global intellectual history to be written, emphasizing the history of ideas between and across seemingly disparate temporal and spatial domains. Similarly, attempts at excavating theory from the South have insisted that the enabling conditions and constitutive conditions of global political modernity was, from its inception, a world historical production. In your own work, you importantly argue that Dalit emancipation is a key chapter in the global history of liberal secularism and political emancipation, laying bare how the terms of citizenship and equality—both historical forms—are subject to political negotiation and revision. How do you view the relevance of your work in relation to contemporary historical methods?
AR: This is a great question. My answer will be partial. At the same time that there was a there was a radical challenge to history writing for South Asian studies, there was also a challenge here for the way the global intellectuals thought about its own figures. I view this as a project of subaltern political thought as it meets global intellectual history. So far, the project of global intellectual history, which is thinking about non-synchronous synchronicities, is posed around the question of the right to think and where thought lies. One of the things I could gesture to is that it still seems to be rather textually focused; if the aim is to engage in comparison, it is still to find similarity rather than difference. What do we do with Senghor and Fanon? How do we think of Du Bois as a global figure not just as an African American thinker?
One of the issues is: how do we address the fact that these are thinkers for whom the relationship between the existential and the political requires a very different kind of reading? It requires the reading of a literary thinker, to think about the project of political utopian imagination at the same time that they can bring to bear on the rigorous ways in which we read political philosophy. With Ambedkar and Du Bois, the project of a global subaltern thought might actually be expanding not just the archive of text and its outside, but an archive of possible readings. We do need to be able to think through the questions literary historians are able to work with: questions of affect, of imagination, of the problem of existence of such, in addition to the kind of political question of rights and entrance into the domain of recognizable political citizenship with all of its pertinences (state, recognition, citizenship, rights, social resources, entitlements, etc.).
Bhujanga Pahilwan, BRA Bodyguard. Source: Anupama Rao
Global intellectual history has introduced new categories. A thinker such as Gandhi, who is itinerant and erratic, is conventionally regarded as interesting but nonetheless not engaging in forms of systematicity and concept-building that we call for. Isabel Hofmeyr and Ajay Skaria’s work on Gandhi, for instance, takes on an itinerant, erratic, non-systematic thinker—someone lying beyond the pantheon of the great liberal thinkers—and gives us certain tools, techniques, and technologies for reading. What is distinctive here is that this is indeed the project of thinking the human, the rights-bearing subject, the citizen-subject from the side of the negated and the dehumanized. It presents an alternative global intellectual history. The modalities of actually putting forward a set of demands for recognition for entry into the domain of politics and social legibility is quite distinctive; we need to be attentive to those languages deployed. The nature of the claim is completely different because the claim is about historical redress, a claim for remediation, and for thinking injustice. There's a very particular way in which local political thought or subaltern political thought—its concept world, to come back to Koselleck—is awkwardly related to a global intellectual history. For example, Iqbal uses a different category of geography, or someone else uses a very different way of thinking of the question of subjectivity through religiosity. Let's think about the fact that there’s a plural set of worlds through which we can think about what actually constitutes intellectual life, intellectual work, and intellectual formations.
Here, the question is: what does equality come to mean? What does the human come to mean? Our concepts might be quite distinct; they might be both more limited, more reactive to a North Atlantic political philosophy of these terms, and at the same time they push us to think globally. One might need to think a little bit more rigorously about putting in play a defined set of terms and then seeing the ways in which they are rethought and redeployed, rather than just saying religion also produces intellectual history, or science also produces intellectual history. Some of the inspiration or the aspiration of the global intellectual history moment was to move away from an exhaustion with the political, after three generations of people working on decolonization, anti-colonialism, postcolonial societies and state formation: where's the political, where is politics, what is political, who is political? Global intellectual history became a way of articulating that not every question has to be a political question, neither does it necessarily lead to a complicated set of political outcomes.
I am interested in saying, there are particular questions, particular problematics and particular terms, particular concepts around which we do want to keep working. So my project is not to say bhakti texts reveal a prehistory of anti-casteism, but I am interested in the modern break. Drawing on some of Andrew Sartori’s more recent work on liberalism in empire, I find very productive the argument that colonial capitalism effects a break in the possibility of thinking social abstraction. It’s an innovative and imaginative break; there is no way we can prove that. Of course, I can do the work of the social historian and think about the fact that Phule is thinking about the Shudras and the Ati-Shudras as a new category of universality because he's in the world of colonial capitalism, because he is engaged with new forms of social abstraction and new kinds of equivalences that are being formed. He is an astute observer of social life and the debt economy of the Deccan acknowledging that the dispossessed agrarian subject is having caste-like qualities suddenly: same forms of degradation, same forms of precarity, same forms of migrant wandering that any dispossessed caste subject may experienced.
Now there’s an innovative argument there: to say that there is a shift in common sense where there is a homology between the break of colonial capital and these new ways of thinking. I'm quite persuaded by that kind of an argument: equality enters the world as a possibility at a particular point in time, and its relationship to distinct forms of inequality is historically specific. To that extent, perhaps one wants to think the global intellectual project slightly differently. It's not about pluralizing the domain of thought, it is actually about thinking through the front and the back side, the scaffolding, the conditions of possibility for globalizing that category both in and out of its time and place.
KN: Let’s turn to to Walter Benjamin’s prescient and probing observation that the status quo is the state of emergency for our last question. Amidst endemic and escalating forms of political violence and social persecution—not simply against Dalits, but also against Muslims, against adivasis, against Maoists both alleged and actual, and against a besieged Kashmir—under an increasingly assaultive fascist regime, frames of emancipation have precisely assumed a renewed and reinvigorated relevance. I find interesting your attentive discussion of Balibar’s characterization of politics as a contingent, conjunctural process, with the political subject best thought of in terms of a right to politics rather than a discrete set of political rights. What, then, is the import of your work on contemporary Indian social and political life, and how might it leave open the possibilities of transformative and emancipatory junctures?
AR: That’s a big question. It's also asking for a diagnostics that one is perhaps not equipped to respond to, but I'll take a stab at it. Each event is an example. Each figure is a possibility. That's how I will respond to the question that you're asking. The making of a set of Dalit possibilities for Dalit action and activism—it's an event and it's an example. It's an example that can be thought with or thought against, but it enters an archive of the politically possible. To that extent, the book suggests that there are unforeseen, uncertain and fugitive possibilities that inhere. In the grander sense, no space should be left unattended and no possibility is too small, because from there grows something quite extraordinary. Any moment is possible and has the capacitance to be activated for a new politics. That I think is important.
Indu Mills takeover by the Republican Party of India. Source: Anupama Rao
Let's take the example of Rohith Vemula and the Dalit suicides. Out of those events emerge examples of caste as long-standing institutional privilege, with the foreclosure of the right to think in the real context of the classroom for the lower caste or the Dalit student. So many things grow from that particular event; it becomes a possibility for more capacious thought and offers the capacity for repoliticizing something that we thought had been settled (through affirmative action, reservations, or other forms of bureaucratic management of what is a deep social and political problems). The event matters; the ‘eventedness’ of the event matters. The one reminded us of the many that had come before.
That is the astuteness of the activist; that is not the astuteness of the academic. If I can just make a very bald statement—and I know that these two hats that one wears are never discrete—that moment of seeing politics is a moment of deep affinity, imagination, and social locatedness. The Dalit political subject or the project of emancipation opens up for us a rereading of the entire archive of the twentieth century: minority as a term or concept, as well as minority politics and new sets of inclusions.
Today, there are two things happening at the same time in somewhat the same space. How is the scrapping of Article 370 and so-called inclusion within the state related to the politics of exclusion and what is happening in Assam? How do we see these two logics as being combined? To think otherwise, to think unexpectedly, perhaps even to think comparatively—particularly at a time when everybody believes that theirs is the only social movement and the only cause—might afford some possibilities. I'd like to think that the book does something about it. It says, hey, it might be cool to think. We may want to bring together sites that are apparently connected, and ask what the deeper logic of comparison is? To that extent, this politics can be activated or reactivated, but they can also be squelched. To use the same argument for Assam and Kashmir is not going to work. One is a project of inclusion taking the shape of a problematic exceptional law; the other is the creation of exclusion through what is seen to be an inclusive law. Always think difference, distinction, the negative, and the non, rather than similarity, assimilation, accommodation. For global intellectual history or comparative politics, the project is to think the underside and to think what can't belong together.
Kelvin Ng is a doctoral student in the Department of History at Yale University. His research interests broadly lie in the intellectual history of anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit. Specifically, his research focuses on forms of unfree labor migration that emerged to be generative of new spaces, novel forms of thought, and radical political claims around race, caste, nationality, and sovereignty.
Anupama Rao, is Professor of History at Barnard College. She specializes in the history of anti-colonialism, caste and race, and non-Western histories of gender and sexuality. She is the author of The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India, and is currently working on a book on caste and equality that focuses on B. R. Ambedkar (who studied at Columbia University 1913-1916); as well as a project on colonial and postcolonial Bombay. She is Senior Editor of of the journal Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME).