Caste Violence Research Articles

Voices from Within: A Tale of Caste and Oppression in Kashmir

Caste and identity have continued to remain sensitive issues in India for a very long time, and being so, they often get mixed up with other issues of the time. Theorizing the margins needs to go beyond the ‘visible’ Dalits and needs to pursue the inclusion of the cultures of the ‘invisible’ castes and communities. The caste, sub-caste and other castes that are not part of the organized and unorganized institutions need to be taken up as a topic of research by academics. Academic studies on caste and class in the context of the Kashmir Valley are also not free from this limitation. Moreover, there is a common perception among the intellectuals as well as in the academic world that Kashmir as an Islamic society is free from caste violence, which is, of course not true. This study tries to describe the everyday struggle undertaken by the members of the fishermen community, one of the sub-castes among Hanjis (Water Dwellers), who experience discrimination, alienation and exclusion due to their poverty and identity. They have not only been exploited by their fellow beings but also by the state from time to time. This peculiar ethnic group has been closely attached to water instead of land for centuries, and the various facets of their lives demand thorough investigation. This article also endeavours to peep into the socio-economic conditions of this community, with special reference to continuity and change.

Phenomenology of Caste Violence in Education and Limitation of Empathy: A Vimukta Perspective

This article is written from the author’s position as a Vimukta woman and an advocate of feminism. The article attempts to include the unique situatedness of Vimukta in the discourse on caste violence in education. In doing so, it critically revisits the decade-old ongoing debate over the question, can Savarna feminists write on the experience of Dalit, Adivasi, and Vimukta women? The article highlights the limitations of the claim that empathy makes the experiences of Dalit, Adivasi, and Vimukta women accessible to Savarna feminists. It engages with the writings on the website “Savari” in which women belonging to Dalit, Adivasi, Vimukta, and backward communities share their articulation about their situation in caste society and call out the violence in Savarna feminists’ academic endeavors.

Caste, Sikhi, and Undelivered Promises: Sikh Research Journal’s Interview of the Poetic Justice Foundation

This is the edited transcription of an interview with Anita Lal, Meena Hira, Dr. Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra, and manmit singh by Drs. Harleen Kaur and prabhdeep singh kehal (Co-Lead Editors of SRJ) that took place on September 20, 2023. In this conversation, they reflect on caste and caste violence in Punjabi and Sikh spaces by exploring their collective journey towards advocating for caste abolition within the framework of Sikhi. The panelists map out the current movements against caste violence in the diaspora and offer insights based on their current and ongoing organizing efforts to confront the silence of caste in Sikh spaces. The panelists discuss how this issue is crucial because it addresses the persistent yet frequently unacknowledged problem of caste and caste violence within Punjabi and Sikh communities. The panelists believe it is vital to actively challenge and advocate for the abolition of caste discrimination, aligning with the principles of equality and justice in Sikhi. They emphasize the urgency of this discussion in the current context, recognizing a growing awareness and movement against caste violence, particularly in the diaspora. This moment offers a pivotal opportunity to confront these deep-rooted issues and foster a more inclusive and equitable community. The full recording of the interview is accessible through the following link.

Dearer Caste and Cheaper Lives: The SC and ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act and the Double Violence of Law in India

The Constitution of India prescribes provisions to safeguard the lives of the Scheduled Castes. Special Acts are designed to address the existing challenges related to discriminatory practices and brutal violence against them by the dominant communities. However, the protective legislations have seldom acted to restrain the increasing display of cruelty against the historically marginalised. Mundane normalised violence compels us to question the authority of caste and the functioning of the legal system in India. The persistence of caste-based violence highlights the inability of state and bureaucracy to create order in society. It is, therefore, necessary to understand the nature of the social dynamic, causes of violence against Dalits, and the working of administrative and judicial machinery. This article presents a detailed analysis of a caste violence that occurred in 2006 in the Bura Bartara village in Uttar Pradesh. It examines the usage of violence by the dominant Lodhi caste to maintain and reproduce the caste-based social order. Simultaneously, it attempts to theorise caste atrocity as a form of violence.

Inequality and Caste-Based Crime in India

Using data from the National Crime Records Bureau and National Sample Survey data, this paper uses a spatial regression technique to examine the effect of intercaste inequality on caste-based violence in India. Our results show that when the socioeconomic gap between the upper and lower castes decreases, upper caste violence against the lower castes increases. This result is interpreted as the upper castes reacting to changes in threat perception caused by changes in the relative positions of these two groups.

Raving with Equality? On Protean Forms of Caste and Gender in the Women’s/Gender Studies Departments in India

Women’s and gender studies in the twenty-first century have transformed the question of theory and praxis across the globe. As a discipline, it is waging its struggle against diverse forms of power and patriarchy. Women’s studies in India started its own unique trajectory from the 1970s onwards. However, Dalit feminism critiqued the metanarrative of Indian feminism in the 1990s. Dalit feminists argued that they are oppressed on the basis of caste, class and gender. Dalit feminism subverted the internal and external patriarchy through its own powerful methodology and tropes. It debunked the partial, Brahminic, Indian feminism and its conspicuous silence on the relations of caste, gender, class and patriarchy. Dominant feminists included Dalit feminist discourse in the curriculum in a patronising fashion. Paradoxically, the social composition of those academicians was confined to the upper caste/class locations. This article engages with the experiences of Dalit women academicians who teach in the department of women’s and gender studies in India. It explores forms and practices of caste, class, and gender discrimination in such departments. These forms of domination and subordination show the contradiction between practice and theory. It reflects on the moral and ethical positioning to unpack the everyday caste violence that operates in the educational institutions. It maps the politics of women’s and gender studies in India. This article analyses the possibilities and impossibilities related to Dalit feminist engagement with capabilities and intersectional approaches in women’s and gender studies in India. The main thrust is to examine the real and utopian dimensions of the assertions of Dalit women academicians.

(Un)making the manual scavenger

AbstractIn contemporary Indian cities, sewage infrastructures hold out the promise of liberal modernity. But they have also become sites for the reinvention of “manual scavenging,” a legally abolished caste practice that degrades and kills ostracized communities by exposing them to human excreta. Amid official underreporting, activists estimate that hundreds of workers, overwhelmingly Dalit (ex‐untouchable) and hired on a contractual basis, die every year while clearing Indian sewers. Yet not a single person has been convicted of abetting manual scavenging. Cases of sewage deaths in Bengaluru, touted as India's Silicon Valley, reveal that abettors often escape prosecution, framing manual scavenging as an accidental effect of unruly sewage flows. The transformation of overburdened urban sewerage into an alibi for caste violence demonstrates how caste and contractual liberalism share a necropolitical interest in displacing ecological uncertainty onto Dalit bodies.

The enigma of caste atrocities: Do scheduled castes and scheduled tribes face excessive violence in India?

The dominant narrative on caste today asserts that the people belonging to the Scheduled Castes or “Dalits” and Scheduled Tribes or “Tribals” face pervasive and disproportionately more violence. The situation is considered further accentuated by the alleged “caste bias” against these communities in the police and the judiciary. The stringent legal provisions passed by the Indian Parliament, specifically to address crimes against these communities, have been presented as ineffectual or insufficient in curbing this violence. The official crime statistics are often cited as supporting these claims. However, a closer look at this data on crimes against SCs and STs, including the rates of crimes, court convictions and pendency, shows that these popular claims are not based on the evidence that the data provides. Further, a scrutiny of the claims itself reveals serious conceptual problems, fallacies, and errors. This article, while analyzing the currently available data on crimes against SCs and STs, also traces the source of the problems that have marred their understanding and interpretation. We specifically look at the evolution of the word ‘atrocity’ in the context of caste, how the term acquired a strange definition, how it came to mediate the understanding of caste violence and the collection of crime statistics, and how its usage is incredibly loaded to prove the point that there is excessive violence against SCs and STs.

Caste and Cultural Politics in Akhila Naik’s Bheda: A Perspective on Dom Caste in Rural Odisha

Caste has been a taboo subject in Odisha. Although there are multiple events of caste violence and atrocities against Dalits in Odisha, they hardly get any attention from the state, media and civil society. Like any other part of India, Dalits in Odisha also face the wrath of the caste system; sometimes, their houses are burnt down to ashes, or they are ostracized. Unfortunately, the everyday violence against Dalits is normalized by the cultural practices in Odisha. Popular religious cults and the Brahminic hegemony often overshadowed the caste issue and forced the Dalits to the boundary. Thus, their voice often goes unheard. Also, the rapid Hinduization of indigenous culture has served as a catalyst for caste violence and maintaining the caste order in rural Odisha. The successful integration of tribal and other backward communities into the Brahminical fold has made the life of Dalits more difficult. In most of the caste violence in Odisha, tribal and other backwards communities are pitted against the Dalits, which washed out the idea of ‘united subaltern groups’ or the Dalit-Bahujan unity. Thus, this article focuses on the cultural hegemony of the Brahmins and how it makes caste a complex affair in rural Odisha. In Akhila Naik’s Bheda, he unravels the caste questions in Odisha and how the arrivals of Brahmins and Marwaris in rural Odisha have corrupted the village ecosystem. The villagers are polarized in the name of caste and religion, and the village’s indigenous belief system and harmony are at stake.

Depiction of Caste Annihilation and Class Abrogation in Mulk Raj Anand’s UNTOUCHABLE and COOLIE

Since civilization has started caste system based on profession not by birth. Later on it turns into a power game and the whole human society were divided into four varnas. Manusmriti, widely regarded to be the important and authoritative book on Hindu law and dating back to at least 1000 years before Christ was born ‘‘acknowledges and justifies the caste system as the basis of order and regularity of society .’’(Web ) The caste divides Hindu into four main categories – Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras. Many believe that the groups originated from Brahma , The Hindu God of Creation. They are classified according to occupation and determine access to wealth , power and privilege. In recent years Violence has become a common phenomenon in India. It has engulfed the entire political, social, economic, cultural and even our personal lives. Violence of social justice and caste discriminations of complex characters have added additional burden to our society whereas we Indians have been specially advised to practice “non-violence”. The growing trend in violence thus provokes us to talk about non-violence and identify the roots of violence in India. Caste Violence is perhaps one of the most hazardous forms of violence in India. It often intermingles with the most political, social, cultural, and class atrocity. So caste discriminations and atrocities against the socially weaker sections with age- old traditional and unconventional norms deserve a careful historical investigation. Indian Caste system is the most widely discussed subject all over the world. Caste system is a social evil in which the higher caste people exploits and persecutes the lower caste people and forced them to live sub-human lives like beasts. This paper is based on caste and vulgarism of ‘Untouchable’ and ‘Coolie’ poignantly portrayed by M R Anand. It is an attempt to explore its origin, nature, gravity, and deprivation.

Mapping Caste Violence in the Domestic Front: Representation of the Caste Questions in Contemporary Malayalam Cinema

Conservative modes of representation of the Dalit lives and the caste questions in Malayalam cinema used to adhere to the stereotypical portrayal of caste-based violence as a tool to evoke pity, fear or laughter. However, recent movies emphasise the revolt of the subaltern both in personal and public domains of discourse. This paper attempts to analyse two recent Malayalam films, Puzhu (the Worm) and Malayankunju (The Malaya Child) released in 2022 that blatantly deal with caste-based violence operational in the domestic sphere. The critique is based on two major questions: how do caste identity and caste-based violence function in the domestic interiors and in what ways do the dominant patriarchal discourses complicate the subjective positioning of women within and outside the household? The study identifies various elements that contribute to the construction of subjectivity of the Dalit and discusses the issues embedded in caste pride leading to catastrophe at the home-front through ostracisation and excision (either through murder or through mutilation) processes of those ones who do not conform to the dictated norms of casteists. Within the theoretical framework of structural and cultural violence, the paper analyses how caste-based violence and gender-based violence are types of structural violence, and discusses the legitimation of it sanctioned by various cultural elements.

From Traditional to Modern Atrocities: Has Caste Changed in Independent India?

Committing atrocities is as inherent to caste as caste is to Hinduism. Maintaining these values by enacting atrocities on castes lower in the strata, combined with socio-economic-political developments, has massively changed the essence of caste in independent India. These developments have led to a ‘de-ritualization of caste’, persisting as a ‘kinship-based cultural community’—still stratified but functioning around politics and economics. This transition is in contrast to the tradition-rooted practices and ideology of pre-and colonial India. However, have caste atrocities changed since India’s independence? This article will showcase these post-independence social transitions in anti-Dalit atrocities despite and due to legal provisions formulated during and immediately after the colonial-era, and the economic reforms in post-colonial India. I argue that the caste system has deteriorated post-independence with an increase in the number of atrocities and their gruesomeness. This is explained through Anupama Rao’s assessment of legal provisions, Smiti Sharma’s analysis of the correlation between economic status and caste-based crimes and their effects, and lastly, Anand Teltumbde’s analysis of transformations in the motivations of crimes, perpetrators and performance of atrocities. Quantitative data is used to illustrate the failure of legal provisions in preventing the rising violence against Dalits and the growing economic disparity between different castes as one of its causes. A qualitative analysis of these developments assesses the changing social attitudes of dominant castes that use violence against ‘Dalit assertion’. Unpacking the 2009 Khairlanji massacre is pertinent to my analysis of atrocity to reveal all these sides of caste violence and the contributions of state, civil society, media and other institutions in its wake.

“We Cannot Write About Complicity Together”: Limits of Cross-Caste Collaborations in Western Academy

Grounded in a friendship that began in the academy, we write together to problematize collaborative writing across our distinct caste positionalities. Writing as caste-oppressed Pakistani Muslim settler (Patel) and dominant caste Indian settler (Da Costa), we write primarily across caste power lines to focus on the failure in our own efforts at collaborative writing. This article, initially meant to focus on our complicities in white settler colonialism in its present form, reflects on the detours we undertook to arrive at this place of certainty that “we cannot write about our complicity together.” Specifically, we reconsider some assumptions underlining prominent methodological commitments of transnational collaborative writing across uneven locations in, for, and beyond the academy. Collaborative writing has been championed for its capacity to generate dialogue across disagreements, praxis grounded in social change, a challenge to the academy’s notions of individual knowledge-production and merit, and as a means of holding people across hierarchies accountable to structures of violence that remain at work within social movements and collective struggles. Considering the contours of what Sara Ahmed (2019) calls structural “usefulness” of collaborative writing to the colonial and neoliberal academy, we use historical and life-writing approaches to make caste violence legible in order to refuse the cover that collaborative writing provides to dominant caste South Asians engaged in research with Indigenous, Black, Muslim, caste-oppressed and multiply and differentially colonized communities. Our purpose is to foreground the historical and ordinary violence of caste as it shapes North American academic relationships, intimacies, and scholarship, in order to challenge the assumption that caste-privileged South Asian scholars of postcolonial and transnational studies in western academia are best poised to collaborate with Indigenous, Black, other racialized, and Dalit scholars and actors toward a decolonial, abolitionist, and anti-casteist feminist praxis. While focusing on writing across caste lines, our analysis can also be read as offering a space to engage ethically with complexities informing collaborative projects across differential horizontal and vertical power relations informed by race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, north/south and other differences. In the process of writing this article, we have also paid particular attention to our citational practices.

Viral Assemblages and Witnessing Extraordinary Times: Queer Patchworks of Intimacy, Precarity and Affect in an Indian City

ABSTRACT This article is based on ethnographic field work conducted in Kolkata during 2019–2021 with queer and trans people during the COVID pandemic. This article develops a new framework of queer patchworks and discusses the various ways through which queer and trans communities are navigating survival during these non-normative times. This paper particularly responds to how digital media is being used by individuals and organisations as a form of witness, belonging, intimacy and care. Queer people in India live within different forms of marginality and precarity, homophobia, caste violence, unemployment and homelessness. This article brings together patchworks of whatsapp texts, broken zoom conversations, cooking gossip and addas on the banks of river Hooghly as a nod to these new realities which are reshaping queer identities; thus, offering new ways to also acknowledge, accommodate and ‘queer’ what counts as knowledge. A particular focus was moving away from totalising narratives and instead examine the tensions of being queer in contemporary India alongside the many contradictions. In turn, this engenders wider questions about queer desire, nationalism and belonging.

Spotted Goddesses: Dalit Women’s Agency-narratives on Caste and Gender Violence

Spotted Goddesses: Dalit Women’s Agency-narratives on Caste and Gender Violence

Dr Ambedkar and the ‘Prostitute’: Caste, Sexuality and Humanity in Modern India

ABSTRACTDalits’ (Untouchables) most democratic and productive politics relentlessly returns to questions of caste violence, sociality, sexuality and ‘inclusion/exclusion’ in the larger Indian body politic, thus producing a new matrix and mode of power within the category of the human itself. This article analyses the intellectual and anti‐caste leader Dr B. R. Ambedkar's (1891–1956) multi‐pronged – social, cultural and political – strategies of creating manuski (human dignity), dharmantar (religious conversion) and respectable samaj (community) in a doubly colonial – British and brahmanical – context. It offers the first analysis of Ambedkar's hitherto under‐examined speech of 16 June 1936 and other fragmentary evidence in Marathi by focusing on the changing contexts, complex conjunctures of socio‐sexual and material forces and political transformations that Dalit women engaged with to carve out their womanhood and humanity. The article examines the unmitigated contingencies of particular interlocked social, political, cultural, economic, emotional and moral battles of constituting a new political Dalit. It illuminates the ways the most stigmatised, ‘immoral,’ ‘corrupt’ and multi‐dimensional ‘prostitute’ emerged as a conceptual and categorical limit and embarrassment to Ambedkar's strategies of building Dalit power. The article's focus shifts away from imperial and European contexts and discourses to write histories of caste, gender and colonial sexuality from the vantage point of local Dalit women. This approach highlights the importance of writing histories of transnational and multilingual epistemologies that reorganize social and sexual norms in colonial and postcolonial societies.

The violence of odors: sensory politics of caste in a leather tannery

ABSTRACT Leather is a sensuous object marked by complex affects of desire and disgust. In India, this disgust is amplified due to the association of leather with caste. This paper examines the leather tannery as a space produced through the sensuous discourse of caste violence, which functions by marking leatherworking bodies with odors, that in turn perpetuate affectual and material possibilities of humiliation and discrimination. This violence of odors has no place in the deodorized discourse of law and yet in the sensuous ordering of caste there is nothing more repulsive than to carry the stench of tannery on oneself. The paper examines this intangible and sensual character of caste violence by closely following Paul Stoller’s methodological argument that sensuousness forms the field on which phenomena play out and through which they can be understood. Keeping in mind the value-laden and subjective nature of sensuousness, the paper also reflects on the ways in which the sensory politics of caste frames the interactions between the field and the body of the researcher – both of which are determined by the norms of caste. The ethnographic descriptions of caste and violence in the tannery on which this paper is based are thus mediated by multiple sensorial perceptions, including those of the researcher.

Including caste and caste-based sexual violence in teaching

In India, sexual violence today is a routine form of violence directed against Dalit women—those from the most subordinated castes of India. Dalit women constitute nearly 8% of the Indian populatio...

“We have achieved great feats…but our struggle is far from over”: Centering caste difference in feminist discourse of the Bodhgaya Land Movement of Bihar, India

This paper situates ‘difference’ in terms of caste to deepen feminist discourse about the Bodhgaya Land Movement (BGLM) of Bihar, India. Urban, educated, elite activists initially read the BGLM as a successful women's movement because it resulted in landless and marginal peasant women obtaining titles to land. Activists and scholars then saw it as having had only limited success when some of the women passed the land to men in their families. The recollections of Bhuiyan Dalit elders who participated in the BGLM provide a more capacious reading of the movement. Stories of their early history as kamia (bonded laborers), the increased caste violence that accompanied the state's attempts at land reform and redistribution, and their activism in the 1980s show that the movement not only intervened in the patriarchy, caste hierarchy, and other power inequities in the region, but produced a new subjectivity amongst formerly subjugated, disenfranchised people. Accounting for caste difference in women's experiences of the land movement uncovers a complex process of Dalit becoming and belonging. Their narratives push feminist scholars to broaden historical readings of the movement to understand how women who have been involved in social activism may be empowered and gain agency despite an intransigent patriarchy.

Casteism and Caste Intolerance in India: A Study on Casteism of Contemporary West Bengal

‘Casteism’ and ‘politicization of caste’ are common phenomena of Indian society since the beginning of the twentieth century. Violation of social rights and caste discriminations of plural characters have added additional complexity to them. Casteism has thus appeared as a burden of postcolonial Indian society. As a subject of study, it is, however, not a comfortable one. Being a sensitive issue, it often gets mixed up with political, class, cultural and regional conflicts. Thus, academic scholars, general readers and policy makers do often face serious trouble in highlighting the basic premises of casteism. Academic studies on casteism and caste-discrimination in the context of West Bengal are also not free from this limitation. Moreover, there has been a common perception among the intellectuals as well as in the academic world that West Bengal is free from caste violence. Print, electronic and social media have also equally contributed to the creation of this perception in the late twentieth century, especially for considering ‘caste’ merely as a parameter of ‘class’. This ‘invented notion’ on caste has encouraged the people of the state to understand ‘caste’ simply as a social phenomenon irrespective of its social and class differences. However, it would be an utter lie to accept the general propaganda that casteism has no presence in West Bengal. Rather, our field surveys either through interviews or ‘face-to-face group discussions’ as well as contemporary media reports reveal that psychological, oral and behavioural casteism are social realities of West Bengal. Thus, this article is an attempt to highlight the nature of casteism and caste intolerance as faced by the Scheduled Castes (SCs) of West Bengal because of their birth in a particular sub-caste.