The Caste of Merit

Subramanian, Ajantha

doi:10.4159/9780674243477

Cited by 189 publications

(15 citation statements)

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“…Existing sociological studies demonstrate that there exist various forms of caste discrimination in many of the Indian universities, institutes and colleges (Chadha and Achuthan, 2017; Kondaiah et al, 2017; Pathania and Tierney, 2018; Tierney et al, 2019). Anthropological and sociological studies also confirm that caste-based discrimination and bias is not absent in leading Indian universities such as Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) (Henry and Ferry, 2017; Rao, 2013; Subramanian, 2015, 2019). Historical studies show that the question of caste was never taken seriously in the discussions on Indian science.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Brahmins as scientists and science as Brahmins’ calling: Caste in an Indian scientific research institute

Thomas

2020

Public Underst Sci

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The domination of Brahmin and the upper caste scientists have given a Brahmanical identity to science in India. They have been perceived to be the natural inheritors of scientific practice, an assertion reaffirmed by scientists and researchers during my fieldwork in Bangalore, India. Furthermore, merit and passion for doing science was reinscribed and calibrated to denote the alleged castelessness and objectivity of science, obfuscating the deep hierarchies of caste in the practice of science in India. By using ethnographic methods, the article attempts to demonstrate how Indian scientists constructed their identities as casteless beings. The article calls for a public understanding of caste in Indian science, and suggests that public engagement has the potential to democratise the nature of science by addressing the question of exclusion and discrimination in Indian scientific institutions and universities.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Brahmins as scientists and science as Brahmins’ calling: Caste in an Indian scientific research institute

Thomas

2020

Public Underst Sci

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“…We also draw attention to critical research which has explored ways through which nineteenth-century racial sciences-themselves promoting notions of bio-moral difference between and within populations or 'races'-not only were deployed to bolster social hierarchies in the colonies as much as the metropoles, 3 but were 'appropriated by the indigenous elites to justify South Asian hierarchy on the one hand, and to assert parity with the European upper classes on the other' (Guha, 1998, p. 428; see also Bates, 1995;Sebastian 2015). Colonial scientific discourse, that is, provided a novel, secularized language for the articulation and assertion of caste-based hierarchies and discriminations, expressed this time in terms of 'natural' (positive or negative) socio-cultural dispositions towards embracing colonial and post-colonial modernity (Natrajan, 2011;Subramanian, 2009Subramanian, , 2019. We can see such a logic at work in the management of the 1896 plague (see, e.g., Arnold, 1993;Kidambi, 2004), but also in the 1970s sterilization campaign which unfolded during Indira Gandhi's emergency (see, e.g., Tarlo, 2003;Williams, 2014).…”

Section: On Bio-moral Marginalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Covid on the Coast: Pandemic Governance and Protests in Fishing Villages in South Kerala, India

Jament

Martin

Visakh

et al. 2023

Journal of South Asian Development

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In this article, we reflect on the consequences of COVID-19 interventions on coastal communities in south Kerala (India), and the responses of the local population to the latter. In particular, we map out the events which led to spontaneous protests in a number of fishing villages during the second wave of the epidemic in July 2020. We will show that whilst during the first wave of the epidemic, coastal communities remained supportive of government intervention, such an initial support begun to wane as the epidemic unfolded over time and became more aggressive and widespread. We argue that such a shift in fishing communities’ attitudes was a response not only to the consequences of a more forceful policy of containment of the epidemic but also to a sudden identification of coastal communities as the main locus of contagion in the district. We suggest that the consequent restrictive measures enforced on coastal communities were driven as much by epidemiological concerns as by a media-driven social panic built upon widespread negative stereotypes that have historically worked to marginalize, and even criminalize coastal communities in Kerala. We deploy the notion of bio-moral marginality to reveal ways through which the attribution of specific—and largely stereotyped and negative— physical attributes and moral dispositions to the bodies and behaviour of people belonging to fishing coastal communities constituted the ground upon which the social panic concerning the spread of the COVID-19 virus unfolded in south Kerala, thus leading to fishers’ militant response.

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“…Therefore, caste power haunts both the designation of the public as the site of "modern" governance and the private as a realm of timeless "tradition." This binary, as postcolonial, feminist, and anti-caste scholars have traced, irrevocably transformed how caste society reflected on its practices-the insistence on "family firms" among mercantile castes (Birla, 2009), the gendered caste practice of widow immolation (Mani, 1998), imaginations of bondage and enslavement (Mohan, 2015;Prakash, 1990;Viswanath, 2014), caste enumeration (Dirks, 2001), and occupational stigma and privilege (Pandian, 2009;Prashad, 2000;Rawat, 2011;Subramanian, 2019). In each case, colonial liberalism, in anxious collusion with caste hegemony, arbitrarily reformed some aspects of caste practice while labeling others as private expressions of cultural tradition (Rao, 2009;Viswanath, 2014).…”

Section: The Caste Position Of Volition Impunity and Refusalmentioning

confidence: 99%

(Un)making the manual scavenger

Sreenath

2023

American Ethnologist

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In contemporary Indian cities, sewage infrastructures hold out the promise of liberal modernity. But they have also become sites for the reinvention of “manual scavenging,” a legally abolished caste practice that degrades and kills ostracized communities by exposing them to human excreta. Amid official underreporting, activists estimate that hundreds of workers, overwhelmingly Dalit (ex‐untouchable) and hired on a contractual basis, die every year while clearing Indian sewers. Yet not a single person has been convicted of abetting manual scavenging. Cases of sewage deaths in Bengaluru, touted as India's Silicon Valley, reveal that abettors often escape prosecution, framing manual scavenging as an accidental effect of unruly sewage flows. The transformation of overburdened urban sewerage into an alibi for caste violence demonstrates how caste and contractual liberalism share a necropolitical interest in displacing ecological uncertainty onto Dalit bodies.

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The Caste of Merit

Cited by 189 publications

References 0 publications

Brahmins as scientists and science as Brahmins’ calling: Caste in an Indian scientific research institute

Brahmins as scientists and science as Brahmins’ calling: Caste in an Indian scientific research institute

Covid on the Coast: Pandemic Governance and Protests in Fishing Villages in South Kerala, India

(Un)making the manual scavenger

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