The Caste Pod

This episode features a conversation with urban geographer, Malini Ranganathan, and historian, Juned Shaikh, on the centrality of caste to urbanization in India. Through a focus on 20th century Bombay (now Mumbai) and 21st century Bangalore (now Bengaluru), we explored the symbiotic relationship between caste and capitalism manifest in the political economy of urbanization from the heyday of industrial capitalism to contemporary neoliberalism. We also delved into the continuities between rural and urban caste relations as seen, for instance, in caste networks that remain key to the movement of capital from rural land to real estate. In addition to the centrality of caste in shaping urbanization, we also considered changes to caste wrought by its role within urban processes. The final part of the episode shifted to a discussion of oppositional mobilization among the urban poor, from the upsurge of literary and political activity among Dalits in Bombay and Bangalore in the 1950s-70s to the ongoing pushback against the threat of dispossession and displacement by real estate and finance capital. Guest bios Malini Ranganathan, Associate Professor, School of International Service, American University Juned Shaikh, Associate Professor of History, University of California, Santa Cruz References Khumbarwada: a historic potters’ colony now located within Dharavi, Mumbai (Bombay). OBC: shorthand for Other Backward Classes, a Government of India classification for socially and educationally disadvantaged castes who are beneficiaries of affirmative action. OBCs are distinct from and considered to be relatively more advantaged than the Scheduled Castes, or Dalits, and Scheduled Tribes, or Adivasis, who also benefit from affirmative action. SC/ST: shorthand for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (see above). Malini Ranganathan, David Pike, and Sapna Doshi, Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City (2024) Malini Ranganathan, “Towards a Political Ecology of Caste and the City” (2022) Malini Ranganathan, “Caste, racialization and the making of environmental unfreedoms in urban India” (2022) Juned Shaikh, Outcaste Bombay: City Making and the Politics of the Poor (2021) Juned Shaikh, “Imaging Caste: Photography, the Housing Question, and the Making of Sociology in Colonial Bombay, 1900-1939 (2014) Frank Conlon, A Caste in a Changing World: The Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmans, 1700-1935 (1977) Nikhil Rao, House, but No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898-1964 (2012) C. J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan, Tamil Brahmans: The Making of a Middle-Class Caste (2014) Ajantha Subramanian, The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (2019) K. Balagopal, Probings in the Political Economy of Agrarian Classes and Conflicts (2020) Sushmita Pati, Properties of Rent: Community, Capital, and Politics in Globalizing Delhi, Cambridge University Press (2022). Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900-1940 (1994) Priyanka Srivastava, The Well-Being of the Labor Force in Colonial Bombay: Discourses and Practices (2018) Dana Kornberg, “From Balmikis to Bengalis: The 'Casteification' of Muslims in Delhi's Informal Garbage Economy,” Economic and Political Weekly (2019) Amita Baviskar, Uncivil City: Ecology,. Equity, and the Commons in Delhi (2020) Mukul Sharma, Dalit Ecologies: Caste and Environmental Justice (2024) Liza Weinstein, The Durable Slum: Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai (2014) Siddalingaiah, A Word With You, World: The Autobiography of a Poet (2013) Dharavi: a residential area in Mumbai (Bombay) considered one of the world’s largest slums. Chico Mendes: a Brazilian rubber tapper, trade union leader, and environmentalist who fought to preserve the Amazon rainforest and advocated for the human rights of Brazilian peasants and Indigenous people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My conversation with Nico Slate began with him reflecting on his own path into the study of historical connections between South Asia and the United States. We then moved to a wide-ranging discussion covering the importance of the transnational scale for an understanding of antiracist and anticaste politics, the repurposing of ‘race’ and ‘caste’ through creative acts of transnational translation, the interplay between the race-colony and race-caste analogies in solidaristic politics across the late 19th and 20th centuries, and the conjunctural factors that have shaped the rise and fall of race-caste scholarship. Guest bio: Nico Slate, Professor of History. Carnegie Mellon University. References: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay: Indian social reformer, nationalist, feminist, and socialist who promoted handicrafts, handlooms, and theatre. W.E.B. Du Bois: American sociologist, historian, and Pan-Africanist who authored some of the most consequential works on the global color line and racial capitalism. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist, and political thinker who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule. Daniel Immerwahr, “Caste or Colony? Indianizing Race in the United States” (2007) Oliver Cox: Trinidadian sociologist of race relations. B.R. Ambedkar: Indian jurist and anticaste thinker who chaired the committee that drafted the Indian Constitution and served as the independent India’s first Minister of Law. Lala Lajpat Rai: Indian revolutionary, politician, and author. Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020) W.E.B. Du Bois, Dark Princess (1928). Katherine Mayo, Mother India (1927). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode features a conversation with Ravikant Kisana, Dean of the School of Liberal Education and Languages at Galgotias University in India, about his book Meet the Savarnas: Indian Millennials Whose Mediocrity Broke Everything. We discussed the term “savarna” and how his personal experiences as a student and professor in liberal institutions led him to write the book, the performativity and insularity of upper castes, the importance of endogamy to caste social reproduction, and how to understand the recent shift from claims to castelessness to overt assertions of caste pride. Guest Ravikant Kisana, Dean, School of Liberal Education and Languages, Galgotias University, India References: B.R. Ambedkar, “Castes in India” Babasaheb: an honorific for B.R. Ambedkar meaning “respected father.” IIMs: Indian Institutes of Management Mayawati: first Dalit woman chief minister of India who served in the state of Uttar Pradesh as the leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party. BSP: Bahujan Samaj Party founded in 1984 and focused on representing the interests of Dalits, Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and religious minorities. OBC parties: see above Veds/Vedas: ancient Sanskrit scriptures Kayasth: scribal and administrative caste originating in Maharashtra, Bengal, and Odisha. Marwari: mercantile caste originating in the Marwar region of Rajasthan. Baniya: mercantile caste originating in the states of Rajasthan and Gujarat. Baniya and Marwari are overlapping categories. Jat: agricultural caste originating in the regions of Sindh and Punjab. Noida: a city in the National Capital Region that falls within the state of Uttar Pradesh Congress: Indian National Congress, one of India’s main national political parties founded in 1885. MGNREGA: The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005 is an Indian labor law guaranteeing at least 100 days of paid, unskilled manual work per financial year to rural households. Read the transcript here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode features a conversation with the founding members of the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective, also known as the Auntylectuals. We began with each of them reflecting on their pathway into Hindu Studies and how the questions of caste and gender shaped their approaches to this field. We then discussed their motivations for starting the collective and what interventions they hoped to make through it. This took us deeper into some thorny topics: caste as a form of embodied knowledge that is often accompanied by the denial of its continued social power; the politics of Hinduism in North America where Hindus are both predominantly upper caste and a racial minority; the relationship between Hinduism and Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism; the traffic in language and tactics between Hindutva and Zionism; and the efforts to push back against the movement to make caste a protected category in U.S. anti-discrimination law. Guests: Shreena Gandhi: Professor of Religious Studies, Michigan State University Harshita Kamath: Professor of Telugu Culture, Literature, and History, Emory University Sailaja Krishnamurti: Professor of Gender Studies, Queen’s University Shana Sippy, Professor of Religion, Centre College Mentioned in the episode: Rajiv Malhotra: an ideologue of the Hindu nationalist movement in the U.S. and founder of Infinity Foundation Harshita Kamath, Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance Amar Chitra Katha: an Indian comic book publisher whose comics are hugely popular and widely available in India and the Indian diaspora. Sailaja Krishnamurti, “Learning about Hindu Religion through Comics and Popular Culture,” David Yoo and Khyati Y Joshi eds. Envisioning Religion, Race and Asian Americans, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 207-226, 2020. Babri Masjid: a 16th century mosque that became the target of Hindu nationalist mobilization and was destroyed by vigilante mobs in December 1992. Marko Geslani, “A Model Minority Religion: The Race of Hindu Studies,” American Religion, forthcoming. Thenmozhi Soundarajan, The Trauma of Caste Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective, “Feminist Critical Hindu Studies in formation” Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective, “Hindu fragility and the politics of mimicry in North America” Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective, “Hinduphobia is a smokescreen for Hindu nationalists” Shana Sippy and Sailaja Krishnamurti, “Not all Hinduism is Hindutva, but Hindutva is in fact Hinduism” Shana Sippy, “Strange and Storied Alliances: Hindus and Jews, India and Israel,” manuscript in progress Shana Sippy, "Victimization, Supremacism, Solidarity, and the Affective and Emulative Politics of American Hindus" Tomako Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, Or How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism Shreena Gandhi, “Framing Islam as American Religion Despite White Supremacy” Equality Labs is a South Asian Dalit civil rights organization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices