Placing Caste: Spatialization, Urban Segregation, and Musical Boundary-Making

Abstract

AbstractIn the face of India’s enduring caste inequalities, their entrenchment or resistance is central to social and urban navigation. In this article, I locate music as an important site to investigate how caste comes to be spatialized, where place identity comes to symbolize group difference, with the effect of exacerbating social and spatial segregation. I use ethnographic field notes from attending musical events and 103 interviews with members of two live musical worlds situated in the southern city of Chennai: Carnatic music, which is seen as the preserve of Brahmin, or “upper” caste residents of the city; and Gaana music, which is associated with Dalit, or previously “untouchable” caste urban residents. I argue that for caste elites, symbolic power is constructed and maintained through norms and boundary work, thus producing hegemonic place identity and cultural power. For the caste oppressed, caste discrimination is experienced as stigmatized place identity, which is variously managed, reappropriated, or rejected through a range of strategies. The persistence of place-based stigma to devalue caste identity shapes the experience of caste-based urban inequalities that obstruct marginalized communities’ right to the city. In recent years, Gaana musicians are using their music to protest caste-based urban segregation, indexing the rise of a cultural articulation of an anti-caste assertion that challenges the marginalization of urban Dalits. This article advances sociological understandings of the forms that urban segregation can take when layered with caste as an axis of social difference and conceptualizes spatialization of caste as a driver of urban segregation.