Introduction to the special issue: Rethinking difference in India through racialization

Abstract

The contributions in this issue forward a nuanced exposition of how the production of racial difference in India buttresses and is reproduced through Hindu nationalist, casteist, and colonial projects that generate tacit or explicit consent for continued violence against racialized others. At the same time, the articles look transnationally, examining how regional forms of racial difference marked by caste and tribe, for instance, have long articulated with historical forms of global racial capitalism. Ultimately, this special issue attends to the narratives and experiences of those living at the margins, who strategically deploy racial concepts to build international solidarity movements beyond the narrow confines of the nation-state. In so doing, it hopes to derive insights on the necessity of transnational translations, even as it directs renewed attention to the specificity of regional hierarchies that shape everyday life and death in India.

Towards Dalit Ecologies

“…To address this problem, the guest editors for this special issue of Environment and Society, Justin Hosbey, Hilda Lloréns, and J. T. Roane, call for a greater understanding of the "global processes of racialization and dispossession as experienced by Black populations, the regions/territories in which they live, and the landscapes on which they depend for sustenance. " In keeping with Black and Dalit scholarship that views caste-based discrimination, particularly the phenomenon of untouchability, as a form of racialization and racialized prejudice (Cháirez-Garza 2021;Natrajan 2022;Omvedt 2001aOmvedt , 2001bPrashad 2000;Rajshekar 2009;Visweswaran 2010;Wilkerson 2020;Yengde 2019;Zelliot 2010), 2 Dalit ecologies stands to make a unique contribution to global Black ecologies.…”

Mapping Racial Capitalism: Implications for Law

“…However, Nightingale argues that "segregation by race was the first type of urban residential segregation created by representatives of a single civilization and then spread across the planet" (ibid., 19; our emphasis). That is, segregation, like caste (see Cháirez-Garza et al 2022), has a prior history independent of race-making, but one that was adopted and perpetuated by it.…”

(Out)Caste language ideologies: Intersectional raciolinguistic stigma and assimilation from denotified tribal students' perspectives in rural India

“…Race in operation in contemporary India is premised on simplified biological compositions and roots in different regions, language families, and/or histories of migration (Cháirez‐Garza et al 2022, 2023), whereas caste is treated as a religio‐political hierarchy premised on divisions of labor and laborers (Ambedkar 2015, Slate 2011). In the very first census in India in 1872, race was roughly defined as “a group socially distinguished by others or by itself on the basis of its unique physical characteristics such as skin color, eye color, hair color and facial characteristics” though in operation, the basis of racial categories in India included “nationality, mixing of nationality and even religious identity” (Bhagat 2003, 687–689).…”

“…Scholarship, at times, makes contradicting references to formerly nomadic Banjara communities as a race or ethnicity, which indicates a slipperiness in defining and operationalizing race in an Indian context, especially for Banjara communities 2 . Through histories of colonial knowledge production and global capitalism, race and caste relate to narratives of “marking bodies, whereby essentialized identities, traits, and meanings are assigned to particular bodies as circumscribed by shifting political, cultural, and economic relations,” defined by Cháirez‐Garza et al (2022) within the Indian context as “racialization” (197). Because of the reality of history, an analysis of race without caste or caste without race, and any of their entanglements with each other and socioeconomic class, cannot be isolated from language.…”

“…Through interview excerpts illustrating language ideologies circulating about Banjara as a mother tongue and linguistic assimilation to educational language norms, I explore the social stigma that follows Denotified Tribal students and how that stigma is premised on a coalescing intersection of marginalities derived from historical precedence and contemporary configurations of a Banjara/Tribal race along with caste, social segregation, and socioeconomic class. Notions of stigma and discrimination inform students' own perceptions of language use within stratified social hierarchies (Cháirez‐Garza et al 2022, 2023; Flores and Rosa 2019; Rosa and Flores 2017; Rosa 2019). Ultimately, I seek to show how an intersectional raciolinguistic framework enables a more effective analysis of the social positions of Banjara students, a linguistically minoritized student population, through historical and structural processes that shape institutional norms and internalized expectations expressed by students that necessitate social assimilation through language.…”