This panel will explore the intersection of caste and performance to analyze its implications for historical method. The discussion will focus on the ways in which the potential of performance to tap into the ordinary repertoires of embodied social life can shed new light on the well-known relationship between caste and embodiment. We will ask, in short, what the study of caste through the frame of performance can tell us about the co-constitutive nature of historical archives and repertoires of embodied knowledge.

The participants in this panel adopt a range of methodological approaches to study histories of caste. Shailaja Paik analyzes ethnographies, films, and untapped archives to illuminate how Tamasha was produced and shaped through conflict over caste, gender, sexuality, and culture in twentieth century Maharashtra, Western India. Anna Schultz reads the archive for traces of colonial jealousy and Brahmin anger, arguing that these emotions serve as indices of the anti-caste—and ultimately anti-colonial—politics hidden within Christian kirtan performance. Rumya Putcha focuses on the use of media such as film songbooks, which featured photographs of singer-actresses alongside film song lyrics in the 1940s-1950s, and the implication of such media in establishing both caste hierarchies and racialized understandings of feminine beauty in Telugu speaking areas of south India. Vivek Narayan will engage with historical anthropology and performance studies to analyze Ayyankali’s villuvandi samaram (or, Bullock Cart Protest) of 1893 as a starting point to think about caste assertion and anti-caste resistance in south India. Taken together, the papers in this panel will reflect on historical method as it emerges at the cusp of caste and performance.