Panel 51: Dalit Questions

Chair: Nikhil Menon, University of Notre Dame

Panelists

Subhas Yadav, University of Notre Dame, “Caste/Race Conundrum: Proposal from South Asia”

Last month at Kellogg Institute, a scholar of public policy convincingly told me that “Caste is an Indian reality” and that it should be seen separately from Race. However, the foremost scholar on the problem of caste, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (1891-1956), an avid scholar and freedom fighter, who himself hailed from Dalit (used to describe the ex “untouchable”) community in India, during his stay at Columbia University viewed the problem of “Blacks” as his own. In a letter to W.E.B. Dubois, he tells him the similarity between the “Untouchables” and “Negroes”, now both the terms carrying similar pejorative connotations are replaced by the terms “Dalit” and “Black” that also signals towards a comparable phenomenon. Ambedkar emphasized that race and caste problems and the position of Blacks and Dalits were so similar that “the study of the latter is not only natural but necessary”.

Recently, Elizabeth Wilkerson in her work, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020) explored a peculiar crossing between these two major discriminatory notions and opened the debate once again. My proposal is that it is “natural and necessary” to look at the race and caste and create a common theoretical ground where an exchange of critical notions could provide a macro-spatial and macro-temporal understanding of the problem. The strong foundation of contemporary Dalit theory, thus, could help understand and decode racialized cultural texts and vice versa.

Tathagata Bhowmik, Case Western Reserve University, “The Creation of Neoliberal Cultural Commodities out of Subaltern Artists: The Case of Indian Baul Musicians”

The ethnographic study aims to determine how the exchange value of the creative labor of subaltern (socially disadvantaged groups because of their caste and class identities in post-colonial societies) artists is determined. The study focuses on the Bauls, a group of folk performers, mostly Dalits, from the socio-economically marginalized pockets of West Bengal in India, and their interactions with elite urban audiences and intermediaries in the marketplace for employment. The study finds that despite the art of subaltern artists having a high cultural value, they face increasing economic vulnerability and precarity. The precarity is intensified by the hierarchical nature of social relations the artists form with their upper-class and upper-caste audiences and intermediaries. It results in commodification or subjugation of the use value of their creative labor to exchange value. In other words, the art ends up being consumed and not experienced. With the audiences, they face dehumanization (due to guided orchestration of performances through a sense of entitlement, conscious foregrounding of class and caste identities, constant sustenance of rural identity, and standardization of creative labor) and alienation (due to lack of acknowledgment as commercial actors and consumption in neglect), and with the intermediaries, they experience a loss of agency in negotiating terms of exchange (due to information asymmetry and a lack of recourse). The results from this study contribute to the existing knowledge of power arrangements in post-colonial societies with a sharp focus on its interaction with the cultural economy and creative labor.