Caste has long been treated as a peculiar social institution that sets South Asia apart from geographies structured by modern systems of classification. As such, claims to modernity in the subcontinent and in South Asian diasporas are often made through a disavowal of caste. A parallel strand of scholarship and politics insists on the historicity of caste and its role in constituting contemporary political and economic orders. Much of the latter work on the modernity of caste illuminates its continuing operations as a social structure of dispossession, enclosure, and accumulation, while a subset attends to how it simultaneously recedes from view. In this talk, Ajantha Subramanian addresses the dialectics of marking and unmarking through which caste remains an essential but commonly unremarked feature of contemporary social and political life, the fierce contestation over efforts to subject it to critical scrutiny, and the differences between elite and subaltern articulations of castelessness. She does so both in reference to her own books and ongoing projects and through an engagement with a wider set of scholarly and public debates.

Speaker

Ajantha Subramanian is a Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India (Stanford University Press, 2009) and The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard University Press, 2019). She is currently working on two projects on industrial and post-industrial life in a South Indian gold mining company town, and on the transnationality of caste in the United States.

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