This reading group aims to engage with recent scholarship that has explored the intersections between caste and labor in early modern and modern South Asia. Caste, as a lived, embodied experience and order of inequality, operates simultaneously at the level of the quotidian and the spectacular. It exists and persists on multiple scales — the local, regional, and global. We hope to bring the theme of caste then, in conversation with labor, which itself is rooted in a rich scholarly (predominantly Marxist) tradition that speaks to multiple geographical and experiential registers. How was the experience of caste in mainland India different from (if at all) that in South Asia’s borderlands? What do global, connected histories of caste look like? Additionally, we seek to examine how the caste-labor nexus operates across different temporal scales. Can we use the same Marxist frameworks for the early modern as we do for the modern? Can these frameworks be cast retroactively, or is there a need to imagine new frameworks and methodologies for different temporalities? These are some of the questions that drive our inquiry. 

This group aims to bring together a diverse set of readings that will help take stock of the current field and identify avenues for further exploration. It will engage with scholarship that questions nationalist frameworks and highlights histories that cannot be encapsulated within anti-colonial nationalisms. We will look at scholars who have tried to historicize caste and, in doing so, highlight the role of colonial knowledge in fixing caste identities. Furthermore, we are interested in exploring the importance of intersectionality, especially gender and religion, in thinking about caste. 

Fall Schedule:

We aim to meet once every two weeks.