Guest Editor’s Introduction: Critical Philosophy of Caste and Race

Abstract

The descent-based system of oppression called caste has been disturbingly absent from the broad multidisciplinary project of critical philosophy of race. At least two connections with caste should have been essential to examinations by the project: the genealogies and concepts of nature and man that produced racisms and those who exposed and would combat them. First, caste had held extraordinary significance for both race theorists like Nietzsche and antiracist thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois. Second, the attention to colonialism in processes of race-making had constantly fallen also on the Indian subcontinent, whose postcolonialist theorists and subaltern historians have found a prominent place in the critical discussions of race. Yet caste has remained the isolated object of “South Asia studies,” while “India” and its native traditions as victims of—and in—the “West” alone has been registered in this project.This special issue of the journal Critical Philosophy of Race is an initial contribution to break this sequestration of caste within critical race studies where it constitutes a double “epistemology of ignorance,” as Charles W. Mills defined it (1997, 18). For the absence of caste from critical race studies has sustained the high moral self-regard of the very practitioners of caste who appear as victims of “Western” racism to the world. And it has ignored and suppressed the interrogation of caste oppression in the subcontinent despite forceful oppositions by its real victims, the lower-caste peoples in both scholarly and political domains. Reprising and furthering their contributions are, therefore, far from “internationalizing” a “local” problem or enhancing the plurality of race issues. Rather, it confronts the serious implications of the enforced forgetting of caste through which South Asian decoloniality became a prominent component of contemporary theoretical frameworks for addressing the plural and multiaxial character of racisms and antiracisms.In modern times, anticaste thought, theory, and historiography by members of the oppressed castes and untouchable groups took literary, scholarly, and philosophical forms since at least the mid-nineteenth century, with Jotirao Phule (1827–1890), Iyothee Thassa Pandithar (1845–1914), Periyar E. V. Ramasamy (1879–1973), finding its acme in the multidisciplinary genius of B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956). They are the pioneers of what has come to be critical caste studies, but also of searching interrogations of the concepts of “nation,” “religion,” “society,” and “equality.” While upper-caste “India” exhibited its anticolonialism and “independence,” the early impetus and insights against the caste order continued to be developed during the late twentieth century by scholars such as Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, Sharankumar Limbale, and Sukhadeo Thorat; activists such as the Dalit Panthers; writers such as Bama and Omprakash Valmiki; and politicians such as Kanshi Ram and Mayawati, to name only a few. They announced their fight against caste under the new self-designations of “Dalit” (the crushed) and “Bahujan” (the majority). Together these terms have translated the history of casteist appellations and interpellations (such as “lower” and “untouchable”) by exposing caste as the oppression of the majority population of the subcontinent. Their production of knowledge about and against caste was excluded from administration, media, universities, syllabi, and scholarly citational practices through the same function of the “lived spatiality” of caste, which had previously segregated all institutions of public and interpersonal life except those involving the extraction and exploitation of the oppressed. Today another generation of the Dalit-Bahujan opponents of caste has already begun to disrupt the reproduction of upper-caste control over theory and knowledge production by making the archives of anticaste thought and scholarship irrupt into academia, even as parallel spatialities, such as the renowned online publication Roundtable India,1 remain the strongest testimonies to exclusion and its Dalit critiques. The interventions that have had a transformative impact on humanities and social sciences include Anand Teltumbde’s writings on the history of Dalits and Hindu nationalism, Gopal Guru’s on humiliation and the segregationist Indian academia, J. Reghu’s on anticaste thought in Kerala, G. Aloysius’s on nationalism, Raj Kumar and K. Satyanarayana’s on Dalit literature, and Shailaja Paik’s on gender and caste, to mention only a few. They are said to have cumulatively established the multidisciplinary groundwork of what Gajendran Ayyathurai has recently called (for) “critical caste studies” (2013).Most of the contributions in this special issue are by Dalit-Bahijan scholars who represent voices that are still not heard enough in the world. They can also be called “Ambedkarite,” wherein the name Ambedkar is the author function that goes beyond his own life and works and nominates the founding of a whole new discursivity in the same sense of “author” that Foucault found in Freud and Marx: Ambedkar and Phule established the grounds for divergent, collective, collaborative, and emancipatory anticaste discourse. These articles are participants in the birth of critical caste studies but are equally the most recent voices interrogating the disciplines in which they are embedded. They are components of the Dalit point of view, exploring a philosophical stance on the world that does not forthwith accept as the grounds of coexistence either culture, tradition, or locality but rather responsibility toward the oppressed other, freedom, and the fight for freedom. This special issue is then necessarily multi- and interdisciplinary in the same way that critical philosophy of race “is also interdisciplinary insofar as it draws heavily on a number of other subjects, including legal studies, history, anthropology, sociology, comparative literature, African American studies, Latino/a and Hispanic studies, and others,” to quote the inaugural issue of this journal (Bernasconi 2019, v). It belongs also to the critical philosophy of race to examine the current assumptions that confine race and racism to Eurocentrism while other agents of oppression are averted from scrutiny. This interrogation should come to inform the questions that critical studies of racisms set for themselves, especially if they are not to be confined to the contexts of the United States. The two academic formations can therefore sharpen each other, especially as the caste order has migrated along with the South Asian diaspora and establishes itself as the caste-cosmopolis beyond the subcontinent.Aarushi Punia demonstrates that the lived experience of Dalits in Indian academic institutions is structured as a trap for the most vulnerable groups: to avail the affirmative action policy of reservation assuredly profiles them as inferior (lacking “merit”) and leads to ostracization; to renounce reservations is to be burdened with the existential anxiety of either passing or impossibly denying their Dalit experience. This casteization “weeds the Dalit from public spaces” by deploying strategies of liberalism. Punia draws resources from Dalit literature and parallels with the Negritude movement to propose the assertion of “Dalitude” to combat the enforced self-disappearance of Dalits.Yashpal Jogdand analyzes the role of humiliation in reproducing caste inequality and the subjectivities of subordination. He delineates the way in which humiliation is inflicted directly through assaults as well as indirectly via their monstration to proximate and distant witnesses through social media. Jogdand also interrogates the very discipline of psychology, which has theorized affective experience with reference to individuals rather than intergroup dynamics in coercive and inegalitarian contexts. Finally, he goes beyond the debilitating impact of humiliation to explore its transformative possibilities for resisting and dismantling caste.Kalyan Kumar Das addresses similar questions of affect by emphasizing the revolutionary dimension of rage. Examining the Brahmanical canon, especially the Manusmriti, to show how undesirability of rage codified oppressed existence as Shudra subservience, Das also analyzes Nietzsche’s fascination with caste as order of rank. He complicates the Nietzschean difference between taming and breeding, which contrasts with the reality of caste-based subjugation as a combination of the two. Dalit rage continues to be invoked to denigrate the lower castes as unruly, immature, and less than human, and to control its emancipatory charge and the ideas of dignity and agency that anger carries.Through a close reading of the Tamil text Indhirar Dhesa Sarithiram by the anticaste and anti-Brahmanical intellectual Iyothee Thass, Dickens Leonard takes the discussion beyond “affective communities” toward an interrogation of whether caste and race can or should be the grounds of communitas at all. Writing in the late nineteenth century, Thass posed a double challenge to the Brahmanical arrogance and dominance of self-designating “Aryans” and to the relegation of southern India, the racialized Dravidian identity, Buddhism, and the Tamil language. Leonard locates a creative hermeneutic in Thass that constructs “a caste-free” and pre-caste Buddhist civilization to undo caste, and provides an “ethico-ontological pedagogy.”Khalid Anis Ansari argues that thinking in terms of “religious majority-minority” has prevented recognition that the major part of Muslim populations of India (and indeed South Asia) are primarily identified and oppressed on the basis of caste. Focusing on the lower-caste Muslim contestations of their oppressed (literally Pasmanda) status since the early twentieth century, Ansari explains how the “religious majority-minority” paradigm benefits the Muslim and the so-called “Hindu” upper castes and feeds religious fundamentalisms. Extricating caste from religion, this article invites reconceptualization in political theory, religion studies, and studies of Islamophobia.Sowjanya Tamalapakula undertakes an intersectional study of the role of lower-caste religiosity in perpetrating caste-based oppression on Jogtas and Joginis (devoted)—Dalits forced into sacralized transgender performance roles in lower-caste festivals and rituals that continue to be governed by Brahmanical ideology. The article theoretically unravels the histories and layers of caste-based discrimination and its gendered forms, which are enforced at the level of the livelihoods of the economically vulnerable ritual performers. Frameworks of masculinity and womanhood as well as tradition unfortunately ensure that the rape of Dalits is not even considered rape, and the emasculation of a Dalit man extends to the emasculation of the Dalit caste group.Umesh Bagade’s scathing critique of the Subaltern Studies project was first published in Marathi in a prestigious anticaste journal in 2007. His article locates subaltern theory within the upper castes’ anxiety to recover a native self and an oppositional consciousness based on religion and tradition. Their “subaltern” is homogenized and thus erases the very operations of the caste order. The subaltern is in fact always upper or dominant caste, and thus coercion appears as “solidarity,” casteism appears as “religion” and “consciousness,” and enforced endogamy appears as “kinship,” while oppression appears as “agency” and “autonomy.” Bagade calls out the constitutive forgetting of caste in each of the key decisions that composed this school of historiography and political theory and that make it useless as a framework for critical caste studies. The translation by Vaishnavi Bagade and Yashpal Jogdand breaks down the language and caste barriers that have prevented this article from entering the canon of critical caste studies. Umesh Bagade’s article is included in this special issue thanks in the first place to Jogdand, who proposed it in response to the call for papers. Besides his annotations, Jogdand has provided an introduction that contextualizes the Dalit response to “subaltern historiography” and is also a tribute on behalf of himself and a generation of Dalit graduate students who were guided by Umesh Bagade’s article as they navigated the casteist atmosphere and pedagogy of academic institutions.The last article, “The Evasive Racism of Caste,” aims to show that caste and its apologists in all academic disciplines have been evading its interrogation as the oldest race theory and racist practice. Far from being unique and unlike race until colonial epistemology racialized it, caste was at the very origins of modern race theories. European racists grasped the self-exclusion of the “Aryans” or upper castes as the core of the denigrate-dominate function, which inferiorized the rest of the subcontinent for millennia and could do the same for Europe and its colonies if a racial link to the “Aryans” could be claimed. The postcolonialist historiographical and theoretical conclusions have hidden caste’s systemic racism by shifting the upper-caste investment in maintaining caste onto “colonial modernity”: they reduced the lower castes’ analyses of caste and the multifaceted struggle for its annihilation to “politicization of caste.”The enormous resources of resistance to the annihilation of caste that the upper castes continue to command in India and abroad still impede the decasteization of knowledge and critique. Critical philosophy of race can be a productive space for emancipatory frameworks and concepts to address caste and its racisms in a world that is more mixed but also growing more fascist. Philosophy as such has to address caste and also confront its own upper-caste-aligned history, especially in India, where it has been most Brahmanical and resistant to all disciplines to the critical anticaste attention.