Caste Identities and Life Narratives in India and its Diaspora

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Life narratives (biographies, autobiographies, facebook posts, testimonials, personal essays, memoirs, blogs, confessional poetry) are an important site for the construction as well as dismantling of identities. This panel explores the intricate linkages between caste identities and representations of a life in diverse modes within India and its diaspora. Caste, often seen as a distinctively Indian form of social formation, is a protean social category based on hierarchy and heredity, and ideologies of contamination, stigmatization and exclusion. This panel is interested in critical examinations of a variety of narrations of lives lived under structures of caste, while also drawing insights from the distinctiveness of anti-caste critiques. The panel extends its analysis to include the Indian diaspora because structures of caste were often carried abroad by Indian migrants. The panel asks how and why circuits of production and available repertoires of representations of lives reveal and veil intersections of caste with other social categories such as gender, class, ethnicity, religion and nation. Through life narratives, it attempts to show that stories of lives marked by caste tell us as much about the private as the public, the self and the nation, the individual and the community, the intimate and the social. It further discerns how narratives of suffering and quotidian violence, while central to caste lives, can sometimes give way to ‘positive’ ethical assertions of life. Life narratives thus provide spaces for readings of caste subjectivities, and help us engage with the paradoxical social, political and literary constitution of caste selves.

Area of Study

• South Asia

Session Organizer

• Charu Gupta, University of Delhi

Chair

• Subramanian Shankar, University of Hawai'i at Manoa

Individual Presentations

• Witness to Caste: Santram and the "Jat Pat Torak Mandal" - Charu Gupta, University of Delhi

• “Other Women May Want to Cut My Tongue”: An Upper-Caste Woman’s Reflections on Her Life and Caste - Shobna Nijhawan, York University

• Caste and Sexual Labor: Investigating Lives of Tamasha Performers in Maharashtra - Shailaja Paik, University of Cincinnati

• Spaces of Belonging: Hindu Homes, Caste Identities, and Life Narratives of Immigration and Settlement in the U.S. - Puja Sahney, University of Albany, SUNY