This panel interrogates the intersections of race and caste in South Asian Diasporic writing. In recent days, the issue of caste discrimination within the South Asian American community has emerged in the public sphere due to the caste ban ordinance in Seattle, a similar ordinance in the Toronto school district, and the ongoing case against Cisco for employee discrimination on the basis of caste. Many think that caste is a “new” problem because of the increase in the number of South Asian immigrants post 1965. However, a look at the history of South Asian immigration to the United States demonstrates that caste has always been central to the racial identity of South Asians as exemplified in the Bhagat Singh Thind vs United States case where the petition for citizenship was argued on the question of Aryan and upper caste identity of the petitioner. Currently, the majority of South Asian immigrants to the United States and Canada are upper caste and professional people and thus they insist that “caste is not an issue.” However, as studies by Equality Labs, memoirs such as Thenmozhi Soundarrajan’s The Trauma of Caste (2022), Yashica Dutt’s Coming out as Dalit (2019), and Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants (2017) testify, caste is a virulent and hidden problem in the South Asian American community. Studies of South Asian American writing have largely remained silent on the question of caste and have focused almost exclusively on South Asian American racialization. The caste blindness in the political milieu of the South Asian American community is reflected in the literary works produced by them as well. Whereas post 1965, we have seen an explosion in South Asian American writing by such writers as Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Divakaruni, Jhumpa Lahiri, Mohsin Hamid, S.J. Sindu, Nayomi Munaweera, Soniah Kamal among others, these writers have not interrogated caste although they have spoken eloquently about the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, religion, and nationality.This panel’s aim is threefold: 1) to make questions of caste visible in diaspora studies; 2) to insist that we cannot discuss South Asian racialization without understanding caste; 3) to interrogate South Asian racialization in the context of anti-Black racism. Because this study of caste and race in South American Diasporic writing is relatively new, three of the presenters are graduate students whose work exemplifies this exciting and important direction in South Asian American literary studies. Shaibal Dev Roy examines the writings of Dhan Gopal Mukerji and Sudhindra Bose who migrated in the early twentieth century and whose writings while erasing caste nevertheless built bridges between the anti-colonial movement in India and thinkers like W.E.B. Dubois and Agnes Smedley. Nico Millman’s paper explores entanglements of caste and race in the life writing of M.N. Roy and Pandurang Khankoje who were exiled to Mexico to compare understandings of caste in South Asia and Latin America. Saumya Shailendra studies two contemporary Dalit writers, Daya Pawar and Sujata Gidla, to examine the translational capacities and failures of Anglophone and vernacular writing to produce a globalized critique of caste. Aparajita De’s paper studies digital archives and texts of the Black and Dalit diasporas to examine hegemonies, solidarities, and subversion that occur through what she calls “digital counterstories.”
This panel on Race and Caste in South Asian Diasporic Writing opens new ground for examining the intersections of race and caste in South Asian immigrant writing in North America. Studies of South Asian American writing are relatively few and include the pioneering work of Rajini Srikanth. Other scholars such as Bakirathi Mani, Nalini Iyer, Pallavi Rastogi, Maryse Jayasuriya to name a few have also published articles and book chapters on the topic. However, there has not been a systematic examination of the issue of caste as it manifests in South Asian Diasporic writing and the topic of caste discrimination has recently entered the public sphere due to activism amongst South Asian groups who seek to enact legal protections for caste oppressed groups. Three of the speakers in this panel are graduate students whose work is opening new avenues of thinking about South Asian immigrant writing and the fourth is an established scholar in the field who is exploring discourses of resistance comparatively between Dalit (oppressed caste) and African American discourses. Shaibal Dev Roy examines the work Dhangopal Mukerji and Sudhindra Bose to show how both writers deployed Eurocentric ideas of humanity, race, and nation to navigate their authorship and identity in an intense anti-immigrant culture. In doing so, however, they have built a transpacific solidarity between Indian anticolonial activists and U.S. anti-racist thinkers, such as W.E.B. DuBois and Agnes Smedley, among others, by reworking on the ideological power embedded in the racial violence and imperialism.Nico Millman examines the life writing of M.N. Roy and Pandurang Khankoje who were communists exiled in Mexico. He juxtaposes these autobiographies to reveals a shared cultural imagination that joins Indian and Mexican histories to one another, while also providing a perspective into the multileveled encounter between South Asian and Latin American paradigms of caste and race. Saumya Shailendra studies the works of Sujata Gidla and Daya Pawar, two Dalit writers They locate Gidla and Pawar as distinct contrapuntal currents of contemporary Dalit writing within
the English and Marathi public spheres and trace the rhetorical means through which
Dalit writing enacts a multiscalar mode of resistance that actively critique the formation of caste
at the local, national, and global level. Aparajita De studies digital archives of Dalit and African Diasporic communities. She argues that in extending the counterstories in digital archives by Dalit voices with the counterstories of African Americans not only do digital spaces revitalize and recenter on conversations of reparations, solidarity, and inter community solidarity networks, but reignite the possibilities of disrupting, subverting, and challenging ideological hegemonies.
The Presider will provide the context for the panel for about 5 minutes and each speaker will have 12 minutes to present their work. The rest of the time will be made available for Q&A and discussion.