Caste A Global Story book launch UPenn

Added: 2026-04-28

[00:00:15][clears throat] >> Hello everyone.

[00:00:19]Hi.

[00:00:19]>> [laughter] >> Um my name is Divish Soniji. I am chair of the Department of South Asia Studies and uh it's my absolute pleasure to welcome you to this long-awaited launch of Dr. Soniji and his new book Caste A Global Story at Penn.

[00:00:35]Uh I'd like to thank the departments of history and Africana studies and the Annenberg School Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication for co-sponsoring today's event.

[00:00:45]I'd also like to thank my very distinguished colleagues, Professor Tukufu Zuberi and Professor Eve Troutt Powell, whom I'll introduce shortly, for engaging with us today. I'd also like to point out that copies of the book Caste A Global Story are available for sale just at the back there. Uh just scan the QR code, pay, and pick up your copy.

[00:01:05]Before I introduce Professor uh Dr. Suraj Yengde, I'd like to say that unfortunately Provost John Jackson won't be able to join us today due to an unexpected scheduling conflict, but he sent a brief one-liner that I'd like to read on his behalf. He writes, [clears throat] "I wanted everyone to know that I learned a great deal from Suraj's excellent and important new book. I was particularly impressed by the methodological rigor, theoretical nuance, and historical insight he's brought to bear on this important issue."

[00:01:36]It's now my great pleasure to formally introduce Penn's community to Dr. Suraj Yengde, who joined Penn as visiting assistant professor in the departments of history and Africana studies this spring.

[00:01:47]I wanted to say how incredibly happy we are at Penn to welcome Dr. Yengde to our community. I've had the great privilege of knowing Dr. Yengde for several years now and have been witness to how he has ushered in a new kind of public visibility and consciousness around caste that has come to be stewarded largely by a new brilliant generation of Dalit intellectuals.

[00:02:09]It is undeniable that Dr. Yengde and his pathfinding research has been at the center of a distinctly global intellectual engagement with caste and he has inspired a sea of young Dalit scholars to take the critical study of caste and culture into their own hands.

[00:02:25]We're very fortunate that Dr. Yengde is now part of our community here at Penn and as we will see today, his work bridges us between and across disciplines and methods in the humanities and beyond.

[00:02:36]Welcome once again to Dr. Yengde.

[00:02:39]Uh I'm now going to switch over into reading Dr. Yengde's formal bio to familiarize you with some of his long uh list of of scholarly and political accomplishments and interventions.

[00:02:51]Born into a poverty-stricken slum in India, Dr. Suraj Yengde has risen to become one of the most celebrated young Dalit intellectuals globally, a bridge between elite institutions and the world's most marginalized communities.

[00:03:04]He is one of the world's leading authorities on social inequality and justice. He holds two doctoral degrees, the first from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he studied African social theory and migration, and another from the University of Oxford in intellectual history that examined the genealogy and practice of caste and race.

[00:03:25]He is a trained lawyer with two degrees in law from India and a master's degree in international human rights uh human rights law from the UK.

[00:03:34]He has studied on four continents and has held fellowships at Harvard University and the Harvard Kennedy School.

[00:03:39]He has authored nearly 200 publications, including three influential books.

[00:03:45]He comes to Penn to launch an exciting new Ford Foundation-funded project titled The Global Caste Lab to study the deep systems that animate and uphold forms of social hierarchy around the world.

[00:03:58]Suraj's first book, Caste Matters, catalyzed anti-caste movements across India, Nepal, the US, and the UK. The book was selected as the best non-fiction book of the decade by The Hindu newspaper in India. It was translated into four languages with three more translation works currently in progress.

[00:04:16]Today we're here to discuss his new book, published just a few months ago.

[00:04:20]Caste A Global Story was simultaneously published by Oxford University Press in the US, Hurst in the UK and Europe, and Allen Lane in India.

[00:04:30]The book is an ethnographic study spanning 15 countries, was named History Today's Book of the Year, and is currently being translated into Chinese, Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam, and Hindi.

[00:04:41]Suraj's next book project with legal theorist Kevin Brown is tentatively titled Caste Comparison, Liberation Movements in India and the United States, and is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2027.

[00:04:55]He's also working on a video archive and documentary project on Dalits in the diaspora.

[00:05:01]I'd now like to take just a couple of minutes to introduce our two distinguished interlocutors for today, Professors Tukufu Zuberi and Eve Troutt Powell.

[00:05:11]Tukufu Zuberi is the Lassry Family Professor of Race Relations and Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies here at Penn.

[00:05:19]He's also the founder of the T Z Production Company and the writer, producer, and director of the award-winning documentary film and book African Independence.

[00:05:29]He's the author of four scholarly books and has written more than 70 scholarly articles and co-edited or edited eight volumes.

[00:05:37]At Penn, he's also served as the chair of the Graduate Group in Demography, the director of the African Studies Program, uh and the director of the Afro-American Studies Program. In 2002, he became the founding director of the Center for Africana Studies and has also served as the faculty associate director of the center.

[00:05:58]Eve Troutt Powell is an acclaimed scholar of the middle modern Middle East and the history of slavery in the Nile Valley and the Ottoman Empire. She's Christopher H. Brown Distinguished Professor of History and Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies at Penn.

[00:06:12]She's the author of several celebrated monographs, including A Different Shade of Colonialism, Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan, 2003, and Tell Tell This in My Memory, Stories of Enslavement in Egypt, Sudan, and the Late Ottoman Empire, 2012. She's also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and has served as the president of the Middle Middle East Studies Association and was also associate dean of graduate studies in the School of Arts and Sciences at Penn. Incidentally, I think of Eve as my first friend colleague at Penn, who very welcome who very warmly welcomed me when I came here from Canada about 9 years ago and truly you were the first person in Penn that I actually met and said hello to, so I'm very deeply grateful for that friendship.

[00:07:02]Um so I'd now like to finally invite Suraj uh to talk to us a little bit about the book, after which we will hear from Professor Zuberi and Professor Troutt Powell, and then we will open up uh our floor for conversation and discussion. Thank you all very much.

[00:07:21]Thank you so very much, Divish. Thank you everybody uh for coming um and those who are still coming. I appreciate you all for you know being here. This is very exciting.

[00:07:33]I'm going to start uh in formal thank yous and thank yous are not just meant to be formality. They're also meant to be um sincere appreciation on my behalf uh to begin with Provost Jackson. Um he was the first person uh whom we had restart when I was planning on coming to Penn.

[00:07:52]And he saw through the potential of the project, what I was going to do, and I'm here. Thank you uh also uh to Divish, who then uh chaperoned at his level, encouraged me throughout to think about Penn as a potential venue to work here, and I had no idea about Penn um cuz uh I was down in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Uh which apparently some people think is a better place um which which I >> [laughter] >> It's but truly thankful uh to Divish uh for his uh camaraderie, friendship, and a shoulder that I can lean on whenever I I have uh any issues to deal with uh grateful.

[00:08:35]Thank you to Professor Tukufu Zuberi.

[00:08:37]It just so happened um when the news of me coming here was was out, there was uh one professor reached out to me uh and and said let's meet for lunch, organize a lunch, and then and I was read the email, I was like, this is Tukufu Zuberi writing to me to say we are to meet for lunch. I said I said what a testament of humility um and also a camaraderie, a comradeship that uh Tukufu offered. Eve welcomed me with her smile, a signature smile that she carries at the history department and also in Africana studies.

[00:09:08]I'll move to acknowledge Joe Park, Dean Joe Park, who's here, who's also been very supportive, very engaging, and encouraging, more importantly. Um Ashwin Punathambekar is not here, maybe he will join, but he's returned from uh India.

[00:09:22]Uh thank you also for kind of facilitating this. My students are here, Gabby, Emma is there, Daniel, Avery, Kate Where is Nick and uh yeah, thank you.

[00:09:33]Thank you all for being here. This is such a joy. Uh I forced them to come here.

[00:09:39]>> [laughter] >> So I don't think they'll they'll they'll have complaints. I think Also, special thanks uh to Lisa uh for and and Kit Kie in the Department of South Asian Studies, colleagues also in Africana and History and CEARC, and Edwin and and friends and comrades working behind this.

[00:10:01]Also staff Angela Kothini and and and everybody involved. Thank you.

[00:10:06]>> [clears throat] >> Now I should begin.

[00:10:10]The scholarship that comes out of India and is about India is often located in the discursive topics of all things social and cultural.

[00:10:19]The political aspect of the social and cultural agency in this case of the outcast is downcasted. This particular phenomena is not adequately examined.

[00:10:27]The reasons are apparent. A, lack of internal accessibility and experience with the states as a vulnerable character fending off the tensions happening within the community, family and society. One has to go through the fires of these cars to enable the theoretical understanding of an intimate topic that is so publicly visible but rarely seen.

[00:10:51]The seeing is codified in terms of caste that I have to filter through the vertical ranks of hierarchies.

[00:10:57]You have to go downwards into the descending order and with each group's gaze you develop newer political understanding.

[00:11:05]By the time you arrive at the lowest of the levels you are exhausted with the rationalizing gaze of the higher castes.

[00:11:11]But that is how the subject of the outcast is being remade into the realms of caste society the world over.

[00:11:17]Often times the scholarship Often times the scholarship on caste has been observed through the predetermined actors of abstract citizenships made by political elites. If not the top, the subject is the bottom. We seek to understand caste through the lens of Dalit. We seek to understand race through the lens of the experience of black subordinated group in America.

[00:11:41]It is the lens of the researcher's tiredness, the fatigue, the exertion on the body and the mind caused by repeatedly going downwards into the minds of social disparities to uncover pearls of knowledge.

[00:11:54]The special relationship of the researcher with their subject and the area of study conjures a magical realization. It is then the Upasana, the work, the meditative discipline that brings about a reformed and unrefined understanding of the field.

[00:12:10]More often than not the privileged sites of examining the world cultures have been Mumbai, New York or Los Angeles.

[00:12:18]The other worldly measures of people are authored in the consideration of world politics.

[00:12:24]Even the Dalit writers who write have an advantage of sight, pedigree and sometimes favored categories of representation.

[00:12:31]Big cities like Bombay, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi are all the sites that provide advantage points for the world to think about the culture and about the vantage and and about the people of those cultures. Nanded.

[00:12:45]What is even that?

[00:12:46]How is it pronounced? And where about do you live again? Are the affirmations directed at me as I navigate the toll booths of academic highways by paying the ransom of anonymity and giving away to the privileged sites. I developed a habit of hiding the name of my birthplace because it carried derision and unattractiveness. The locality of my presence started with secondary recognition of my being of my Dalit being. The factoid of having to live alongside other marginalized group but superior caste in Hindu India we were still the untouchables. We could not be equal to the other even suffering masses.

[00:13:24]The scholars who have been writing about movements have had a classical anthropological viewpoint of caste. The study of untouchable communities has been an interest in classics, music, art and sometimes theory. The Dalit vantage point, if it gets recognized, is rarely from the actualized struggles and politicals on the streets. I That is where I start my thinking. On the streets is not a metaphor but a reality of surviving in the ghettos that are marked by disease, police supervision and tight control of the aura of rebelliousness carried in our tender minds.

[00:14:00]Dalit is the radiant sutra of life that has been observed but rarely intermixed.

[00:14:07]When I started off as a young enthusiastic and morally upright Dalit man from the Dalit slum, the sewage canal that flowed 6 ft from where I ate my breakfast, lunch and dinner reminded me that I was destined to break out of the system but on the condition of higher morals set by the caste towers.

[00:14:23]I joined gangs and asserted my agency by taking to the streets for justice and equality.

[00:14:28]The community shielded me from the state assaults. I did not have the opportunity to engage with leading scientists, scholars, writers, activists who are often based in desirable cities which meant a 12-hour long journey squatting in or in my case sleeping under the benches of general compartments, I eat third class compartments.

[00:14:48]One memory that refuses to leave me is when I missed my overnight train connection to Nanded from Bombay.

[00:14:55]That night I slept on the floor on a neatly arranged mattress made up of single pages of newspapers. I had my favorite, The Hindu, because in 3 rupees you got nearly 30 pages.

[00:15:07]The visuals of police beating the potential thief who was malnourished and hungry as his face showed, but he was beaten by a cop and witnessing that sent me a signal to not breathe heavy should that arouse a suspicion in him.

[00:15:19]It is not difficult It is It is difficult not to internalize such outward actions because you knew you were because you knew you were always the next to be insulted or caught in between others' aspersions.

[00:15:32]I had to seek knowledge out there that I learned I that I learned was best to mimic but you cannot belong to it. Even my father's associates of Bombay did not think of him as equal, let alone see his son having page-long reportage in national dailies with a celebrity status.

[00:15:48]They were all surprised but also humbled to learn, one of whom was the founder of Dalit Panther, Raja Dhale, the fiery poetic literary maverick, the Buddhist, equipped that Milan Son, I eat my father's son, has gone higher in admiration. He's one of the founders of the Dalit Panthers. That is why my approach to the globality of caste of Dalit cosmopolitanism begins with Nanded, the site that I hid or did not bother to share due to the shame I carried. It is also a profoundly engaging site to think about world politics.

[00:16:17]One of the axioms global studies are not only metropolises with their financial ghettos but also their regular dim, power stricken areas where development led ideas do not empower but assertion does.

[00:16:33]The Dalit theory theory in contemporary times is trying to evolve into the middle class developing a sensibility of separated, confused consciousness.

[00:16:41]They are privileged by the arbitrariness of power and attention attached to the decried, befuddled attitude.

[00:16:47]That is why I make a case for locations alongside hierarchies that often do not get registered due to the paucity of resources of translation, transportation and transactions to create a meaningful transformation.

[00:17:03]>> [clears throat] >> The Dalit subject has to exist in obfuscation or confusion. The former is better for assimilation, the latter is okayed for the monkeyed discrepancy that it offers to the system.

[00:17:14]The study of the caste system and in turn Dalit life is bereft of the experiential autonomous Dalit agency.

[00:17:19]There are 300 million of us, yet there is no Dalit academic insight at prestigious universities this included.

[00:17:27]The explainable actions could be understood within the chambers of Southeast Asian studies departments or broader liberal arts and humanities where heretofore the context was always exteriorized like Brahminical orientalism. Caste was and is central to our cognition of making sense of ourselves. We are born into it and we carry it. The person with caste privilege can talk of inequality and hierarchy in the society but not in the tone of accepted cultural position. It's an honor or shame but it remains there.

[00:17:56]That is why a person born of dominant womb thinks of it personally even though they may espouse progressive political positions such as the attacks on Muslims invite so much attention that they create a currency of Muslim violence in South Asia. But for the Dalit the person thinks of him or herself within the coded social algorithms of caste.

[00:18:18]There is a torturous fascination with caste reality that it sticks by.

[00:18:23]Even though you may despise the acts of molestation committed by the priestly castes in the temple arena you stick by the non-caste narrative because that involves your kin and in turn you.

[00:18:34]That is why the person with caste ranks does not risk committing cultural suicide to be reborn in the life world as complete human.

[00:18:43]There are a few and they are amongst us and with whom I proud to associate.

[00:18:47]Call them my friends and family.

[00:18:49]Otherwise, it is a frightening theater of the macabre.

[00:18:53]The Dalit, if he or she has to exist, has to carry out the program of approbation or risk the taunts and insults practiced like normative habit among caste carrying humans. While we have plenty of armchair pundits who gather definitive authority on thinking many stick to stitching the loose ends of politics and the professional wordsmiths bespeak the attitude of the dormant thinker.

[00:19:15]While I was out on the field becoming the subject as well as sample of my own study, it took 15 years for me to realize that my scholarship can conduct its own politics based off my practical and theoretical underpinnings. That is how I write and structure the scholarship suturing truth with experience and attitude with action as happens in this text as we will see.

[00:19:36]Nanded becomes a site. This is uh uh This is This is uh This is when uh in 2001 Durban conference happened well against racism. That was my dad right there. Um him and his associates had organized a dharna as a protest where Indian government refused to acknowledge caste as one form of discrimination. And this was way back in Nanded. 12 hours they have to reach small town. And you can see this bunch of people sitting and kind of thinking about politics in 2001.

[00:20:11]That's how the kind of nature of relations worked.

[00:20:14]This Panther J.V. Pawar, one of the co-founders of the Dalit Panthers.

[00:20:19]Panther J.V. Pawar had a very interesting out insight where we had kind of organized this Dalit Black Panthers meeting when Dalit Panthers celebrated 50 years of their existence. Um we put together this conference in the home city of Nanded to really bring about a lots of uh celebrated thinking but also critically analyze of the golden jubilee and something I ended up doing a special issue with a magazine, a weekly in India called Outlook on Dalit Panthers. And we did it around the the framework of India's independence where Raja Dhale, one of the founders had written an article on Independence Day calling it black Independence Day.

[00:20:56]Uh and he said the Independence Day didn't really carry the value it had to carry. And on the question of national flag the national flag was considered a on honor. And he said this is like a rag if this piece of cloth can't protect the dignity of a Dalit woman. It's better to shove it in the ass. And obviously that created a huge uh rumor um lots of furor around that.

[00:21:17]This is where J.V. Pawar writing uh and he had this long cherished dream of hangout with the founders of Black Panther movement here. And we in fact established uh connections with Bobby Seale and so forth. It was during COVID times. But he really had this desire for his letter to be delivered to Kathleen Cleaver. And he kind of wrote that I mean I wrote that but he he told me to write that.

[00:21:42]>> [laughter] >> That's my This is um where the meeting took place in Nanded.

[00:21:55]That's him, Panther inaugurating the uh inau- inaugurating the book. When I had my first book I had him come along with my family members because I thought that was their a way of acknowledging the yesteryears of generation, the kind of Panther spirit and it continues.

[00:22:12]Uh many people don't know that Dalit Panther was was is usually assumed as a Marathi or Maharashtra-based organization but it had outfits in nearly four others eight other states.

[00:22:24]One of this uh was um uh they were they were few. Well, this is Uttar Pradesh but also Gujarati Dalit Panthers existed. And you can see the iconography kind of works out around the the kind of expression of this.

[00:22:36]We come to this book where this book actually engaged with this kind of conversation about caste existing goes to Trinidad looking at indentured era kind of migration which we'll come to shortly.

[00:22:49]There's something that we noticed that one of the first or rather the first university-led Ambedkar which we have tomorrow Ambedkar's birthday celebration at at Penn which took many years. Uh this was organized in Harvard University in DC where the Black Students Council kind of got together and celebrated this. So this kind of legacy goes back uh to the times. Uh they already started organizing in the '80s but '90s was the when. And the event has itself a much more animating cuz the government refused to give visas or Indian government refused to give passports to many of the Dalit activists who couldn't come. And so there's lots of letter and this this is it's in this archive that we're developing. There's an interesting letter where one an activist called Mr. Lakshmi Berwa, a retired airman oncologist he writes to India's Prime Minister seeking an audience to really convey to her that there are atrocities committed upon Dalits. And this is what she replies, I have your letter. My forthcoming is already full. Ours is like one government that has gone all out to help the weaker and poorest sections. There are many special facilities and programs to help children catch up. It's basically what an AI will tell you if you type something of this nature.

[00:23:53]>> [laughter] >> Uh um and this is what he this is and this is what he did. Lakshmi Berwa goes to protest against Indira Gandhi with his son.

[00:24:03]Washington um Times carries this like a head uh lines. And Lakshmi Berwa very kindly says I must congratulate the photographer which is here he writes a letter here. Uh uh and and what he says is that uh I was demonstrating [snorts] because Indira Gandhi turned down our request to meet her and express our concern for the atrocities suffered by the Indian untouchables. The editor who who put the child's photograph in parallel with Mrs. Gandhi is a very gusty man. You have treated the commoners and head of state as equals. Your newspaper has broken all rules of conventional wisdom of journalism. It is rare to see a commoner and a head of state treated equally in the press. There's lots of activity that happens across the board in America.

[00:24:43]Down the line it's very interesting how we see when the event this is this is way back in '82 when the Dalit becomes the president of India, the kind of nominal head. And then he's sending a message of congratulations to people especially at the Harvard University event that I just showed.

[00:25:02]Uh politics of Congress continued but him being a Dalit, K.R. Narayanan from South India kind of took on the politics and and sent them a congratulatory notice almost uh 16 years later.

[00:25:12]He's here right here uh protesting.

[00:25:15]And as you can see the protest is is around the same time when the Babri mosque was demolished.

[00:25:20]Um and and that's how this kind of issues of uh anti-caste and anti-Muslim violence kind of went hand in hand with the progressive politics.

[00:25:29]Uh something that kind of legacy continued down Boston as well where there were several initiatives uh ever since at least I joined to kind of explore this connections and commonalities. And I think Tukufu and I are going to teach a course down the line on Du Bois and Ambedkar. I had promised him and hopefully we'll do it [laughter] uh very soon to kind of explore this kind of established connections.

[00:25:52]And there's something I've also kind of when there was Black Lives Post uh movement we kind of showed up.

[00:25:58]Um that photo is me holding it. Uh uh we kind of created this new kind of iconography around the time to kind of really say that there is a bigger history, longer history, long durée that has been in communication. Very quickly on Trinidad. Now the one of the things we don't know about Trinidad and indentured era migration is majority of the indentures were Dalits. If not Dalits, they were Shudras. Nearly 90% of them were from the lower caste. There was no business for a Brahmin or dominant caste to travel because you had resources at your disposal. Why would you take the treacherous journey of three to four months and go and work in slave-like condition? That immigration pass really carried a character of caste. So your caste was already known.

[00:26:38]And majority of these groups who left India uh had their caste certificate mentioned. This is 1886.

[00:26:45]This narrative sort of continues. This is a story of a person who I kind of document. He's from a non-Brahmin caste, a Shudra. He's a pundit and he struggled to become a pundit which is usually associated with a Brahmin caste. Uh and he's kind of struggle to have his own temple on his own ancestral property something Trinidad really offers us this kind of case study of what happens to caste without Dalit cuz I ended up I was looking for Dalits if there were any cuz uh 19th century, some part of 20th early part of 20th century there were Dalits who were going with their own caste names. But by now there is no Dalit there. If you ask anybody I think the answer is no. So the assumption that I had that caste system cannot exist without Dalit was kind of actually failed there because caste system is there but there are no Dalits. There may be but they have changed their names and they have really assimilated into an order where there are caste names such as Maharaj doesn't have any etymological caste origin but really kind of resurfaces to assemble. So majority of these are Dalits and and that story remains to be told and that's what something try to explore in this.

[00:27:48]He's somebody who is a man who is wearing Trinidad's attire, Trinidadian flag.

[00:27:54]Um and he is organizer of the Hindu right uh group. They're very assimilationists in in this sense and looks at Trinidad in the sense of this long passage of Indian history.

[00:28:06]Uh I I I convinced Eve to say that the book was having Middle East portion. There was little bit and she agreed to it and then she used this up.

[00:28:15]>> [laughter] >> So uh but but again one of the reasons we look at parallel economies that are existing also in the Gulf states is majority of workers. You travel through Doha, you travel to Dubai, you'll see lots of Indian workers. And we we rarely at all talk about their caste origins.

[00:28:30]What are these kind of And one of the ways was to look at uh their caste compositions and they really exist within the camp. Though the Middle Eastern within the camp sites you can't exercise caste but the affiliations and groups that happen is is irrevocably about caste and how they kind of uh parallel their each other's struggle in into this is something that I thought was also kind of worth noting in in in this case. And and and I think uh finally uh there is more to uh this kind of narrative that functions around these ideas of how the state and as well as the politics of the state really changes when it comes to understanding the question of Dalits. And as so as the research continued in about uh 15 countries they were just much more visible that a new Ambedkarite politics is shaping. There are organizations named after Dr. Ambedkar in various uh uh in various uh uh states uh where people are proudly espousing there and being an Ambedkarite is to being vocally anti-caste which is also to kind of put out there that uh you may have a identity of uh South Asianist but there is it's a bigger tent to cover. Thank you so much.

[00:29:51]>> [clears throat] >> Good afternoon.

[00:29:56]I I really appreciated this book, Caste: A Global Story.

[00:30:03]Uh in ways that are very important, I think, for the study of difference, the study of what it means to be a human being.

[00:30:15]As I was reading the book, the magnitude of it was not lost on me.

[00:30:22]And it really provoked me to think of the work of uh you know, and and and he does a wonderful job of covering a lot of terrain, but it really provoked me to think seriously about the work of Angela Davis, the work of uh Kimberly Crenshaw, the work of Patricia uh Hill uh Collins. And uh the reason that it made me think about these authors is that they attempted to do something with the idea of race, which was superseding the notion of race. In some ways, their theorizing asked us to go back to what it is to be a human. It asked us to consider the various theoretical orientations that may exist about what it means, but then to consider the actual human in this process, which requires that we in a big way go past the various theories that we have. These theories, at any rate, are always very incomplete.

[00:31:35]And these authors have attempted to to ask us to do a little bit more. In reading the book, I was introduced to many scholars uh in India. I was introduced to many movements in India over a very long period of time. And it is worth coming to terms with these scholars, with these movements, with these transitions around what caste means in India, what caste means outside of India. Uh there has been uh in in the United States at the theoretical level, many scholars of race tangentially deal with the idea of uh caste. And they talk about it. It goes back to Allison Davis using the idea of caste as a way of saying why uh the theories of the race relation school at the University of Chicago failed to explain the situation of black Americans. He used the parallel, the kind of relationship with caste to talk about the unassimilability of the black population. If you had unassimilability, then the race uh cycle of the Chicago school uh falters. It It doesn't it doesn't work. Um even by the time we get to Oliver C.

[00:33:12]Cox, there's no uh no clear you know, it's it's kind of like he's clearly taking on what is We might not agree with what he took and what he concluded, but he took it very serious to talk about uh to talk about caste, to talk about caste and its relationship to class, to talk about uh class and its relationship to race. Now, how these scholars talked about these things gave us a very firm ground uh for offering a critique of some of the standard notions of race.

[00:33:53]Um and now we have entered a moment where uh it is it is it is it uh it or a colonial historical narrative to justify people at different points in time. And those kinds of definitions change over time.

[00:34:16]Okay.

[00:39:40]>> kinds of definitions change over time.

[00:39:44]Okay.

[00:39:45]Are y'all with me?

[00:39:47]Yeah.

[00:39:48]So, I I I gave the book a very close reading in this sense, and I have too many notes to read here in my 15 minutes. So, I just want to kind of give you a highlight of what I see as very important. Um I In in my work, I have been very concerned about how we use different methodologies to understand what it means to be different and what it means to be the same, what it means to be a human. And I think in some ways the comparative ambition, the lack of the use of universalizing language in order to identify who the cast are, that the w- my work converges with uh with with with with the outline, with the theory produced in uh the book. Uh in some ways uh he's cons- he's insisting that cast is too important a lens to remain confined to South Asian studies. It is too big of a subject to remain in India. It is had too big of an impact on human beings to just be isolated as something that is just talking about cast and something that is in itself, by its existence, rendering the Dalit people the Dalit community into a space of marginalization. So, cast becomes a form of this marginalization. To be a Dalit is to be marginalized within the context of India, and that marginalization has taken on various forms over time, and it has not just remained one thing.

[00:41:45]In much of the conversation about the social construction of race, this is also what people recognize. There is no recognition of the permanence of race.

[00:41:56]That is, there is no race per se, there is racism per se. There is no individual who just carries blackness in their bones because blackness does not exist in their bones. It is classified in a certain way and used as a consequence of that classification. So, I think that we we agree in this because of the development of even what are the Dalit people. I mean, where does this idea come from?

[00:42:26]And then even it's a wonderful narrative about once the British get there, they have their own ideas about what they want to do with cast, much less what they want to do with the Dalit people, but the Dalit people become a very important uh a a part of their narrative in explaining what cast is. So, just being a high cast is not something that's free from the creation and consolidation of the kinds of exploitation that are confronted by the lower cast. And these forms of exploitation are by definition.

[00:43:03]So, if you are by definition of the high cast, it is because of the rendering of those who are in the lower cast.

[00:43:13]But, you know, more than just that, it is the idea that there are European experiences that produce themselves as the universal standard for a conversation.

[00:43:26]And in this particular narrative, by going through not only the conversations that the Dalits are having with themselves, having with their marginalizing experiences, but also having with their consciousness of struggles that are happening in other parts of the world. A lot of the interaction that the author mentions about the uh uh relationship of the Dalit community to the uh the the African-American community is is very telling. Because in some ways it's not a two-way street. Now, of course, people like Martin Luther King Jr. always talked about his own relationship to India and, you know, and Gandhi and non-violence and and that kind of thing.

[00:44:18]But, this is a different cross, right?

[00:44:21]This is a cross where you might say that it is demanding an intersectional analysis, not just the intersectionality of Cren- Crenshaw, that is, of these different things, of gender, of class, and of these things, but an intersectionality more in the way that Angela Davis talks about it, which is the intersectionality of movements, the intersectionality of struggles. And that makes it more consistent with what Stuart Hall called the co-constituencies of various forms of oppression and domination. That is, it is not so much that you are trying to layer gender with class, with race, with nationalism, with citizenship. It is more so that you understand the ways that these have been in themselves part of matrix of domination, very much in the Patricia Hill Collins sense.

[00:45:20]That is, they are not necessarily one alone, but that you have the kinds of sexisms, the kinds of classisms, the kinds of racisms we have today, it is important that they be in communication with each other. Not definitely they be imp- it's important that they be in communications with each other with each other within a nation-state, but it is also, especially in these moments, important that they be in communication, in conversation, even if it's just at the theoretical level, across geographic spaces. And in some ways this calls for that, that it it calls for it not just the Dalit community to be reading African-American authors, African-American literature, to be fashioning a Black Panther Party, but it is demanding that the Black Panther Party here recognize the struggle of the Black Panther Party in India. It is demanding that the literature, you know, I'm not as There was certain barriers, so this couldn't happen at an early point because of just the translation of writings and having the access to language, but there's no excuse now. But, to understand more about the struggles of the Dalit community.

[00:46:40]You understand what I'm saying? That is, they were already They have been already and have a history, and you see it when you read the flavor of this book or even the uh Cast Matters book, you you get a s- a sense of of this this engagement with African-American literature. And I already mentioned already a couple of other African-American scholars who took the concept of cast as a critique of the ideas of race. Now, I think that, you know, this is a a beautiful moment to consider the possibility that there is more of an appreciation of the cast situation. People use the word, especially those who are trying to talk about racism but don't like to use the word racism, or those who are trying to talk about the African-American community but trying to run fast from being able to talk about the African-American community. Uh you know, I think sometimes I think they're on the verge of making it illegal in these days, but if if they do, I will be guilty of this crime continuously.

[00:47:50]In good company. In good company.

[00:47:53]So, uh how am I doing on time? Um Am I all right? Oh, what? I need to close it up here. Yes, the chair. Yes. I I need to close it up. [laughter] Okay.

[00:48:03]All right. Okay. Okay.

[00:48:06]All right.

[00:48:07]>> [laughter] >> So, I think, you know, if if I read the book through these lens that I've tried to articulate uh for you, uh then you see that necessarily the task of this project is extremely difficult. He's trying to talk to people who have not taken the time to understand the Dalit community or their plight.

[00:48:37]And he's expressing already a sympathy with that struggle, with the black struggle, with the struggle of oppressed people all over the place. So, he already is a aware of that, and you have an entire community which is aware of that, and they are ready for it that struggle. But, on the other side is the kind of ignorance. And some of the ignorance is intentional, right? Because people go down the paths which are written, and then there's the whole kind of economy of the academy which demands that people pay attention to uh to what is already in front of them.

[00:49:18]And so, there is this idea that he is proposing to cross those barriers, to insult those disciplinary grounds. I mean, you know, you heard all this list of degrees he's walking around with, so it wouldn't be too difficult for you to think you need to cross some lines. I can get that. But to do that, it is not uh an interesting thing to do.

[00:49:46]A global caste analysis that operates simultaneously across uh all of these theoretical points that I'm presenting uh and refuses the installation of any of these single epistemic center that is is trying to go beyond establishing his own essentialism in a moment where the reality of the essentialisms are already debunked. That is, the notion that you are this thing rather than you are in this space, therefore your standpoint makes you who you are is where he's trying to go, I think.

[00:50:28]So, he's understanding caste as a co-constitutive idea. That's Hall's thing, right?

[00:50:40]With race, with gender, with capitalism, you know, and so in in that way, what what he is doing is taking the intersectionality of Crenshaw with the intersectionality of uh of of Davis and kind of adding a point which looks at domination, looks at hegemony, looks at power, and looks at kind of where you stand in terms of your social positionality to articulate about these things. That's where you get this whole autobiographical uh uh a tinge uh to his work, and that's how I I um I read that. So, that these intersections are part of the foundation rather than just a supplementary um a notion in terms of what he says.

[00:51:36]So, he is actually attempting to do something that many theorize about in a book about people that people don't pay a lot of attention to, and that they haven't received the same kind of attention, but they have experienced a brutal form of oppression. Now, if we just ignore, right, and not try to get in the oppression Olympics and see who wins, definitely the Dalit community is in the running. Okay? They're in the running, and they've they've been in the running for, you know, thousands of years. So, the very idea that they're almost not known, and that the struggle and their desire to connect their struggle across spaces is not known is a challenge, and I I appreciate that you've taken this challenge. I think uh the book is a wonderful read.

[00:52:31]If you read it, you will get a lot of information. If you read it in companion with uh uh Caste Matters, you will come out of it with a good sense of a critique of this moment in which our ideas about domination and about dominated people does not include a true reading of the Dalit experience, and especially for those who can't see the comparison with something like the African-American experience, with something like the Black Brazilian experience, with something like the experience of those black people who were enslaved in the Americas and their own interaction with members of the Dalit community who came as indentured servants.

[00:53:19]I will stop there.

[00:53:26]>> [clears throat] >> I'll pay you later.

[00:53:33]>> [laughter] >> Nobody likes speaking after T Kufuzu Betty, but I'm going to do my best, okay? [laughter] Um I'm also going to ask the people who are talking to honor me by not talking while I'm speaking.

[00:53:52]Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that very much. Um so, I just want to say I'm going to start off with the good stuff, and then I'm going to leave you with a little criticism. So, you don't have to pay me, and I'm not expecting a hug, okay? [laughter] No, no, it's okay. So, this really is Actually, it's a book that made me very sad, and I it's not that I wasn't overwhelmed with the triumphal with the triumph of what Suraj is trying to do.

[00:54:22]It's not that I wasn't overwhelmed by the incredible scholarship, which is really really um amazing.

[00:54:29]Um it's one of the main things that I got from this book is the unbearable pain, the unbearable sorrow, and the unbearable the unbearable silence that has gone on. And the pain of it, as I think what I left I found myself crying several times as I read this book.

[00:54:51]Um so, I'm just going to mention the points of of pain. Um um and then I'm going to just talk about just one thing. So, um I'm I >> [clears throat] >> How can I start this? Suraj, you opened my eyes. You really did. I was not unfamiliar with the the history of the Dalit.

[00:55:16]Um um I um co-taught a course with uh Romi's uh Srinivasan um we looked at partitions, Middle Eastern and Indian and Pakistani partition, and a lot of Dalit um um um issues came up that at first um I have always believed that there was um a similarity between Can you hear me if I move back? Okay. I I have always believed there was a similarity between racism and then the being Dalit, you know? I I had always felt that.

[00:55:53]But um this book challenged some of my assumptions, and so I'm just going to go into what the assumptions are, and some of and part of the [clears throat] pain is that I think you challenged an assumption that I'm building my new book on, which is really painful moment for me.

[00:56:07]Not for you.

[00:56:08]>> [laughter] >> Anyway, um >> [clears throat] >> um um The first one is I I really want to talk about the people who pass.

[00:56:20]I was incredibly moved by how many Dalits in different situations tried to pass, and the ways that that and the ways that the vocabulary of passing is used in your book. It's so fascinating, and right there you have such an amazing um comparison not just African-Americans, but a tremendous one to African-Americans. It it's Passing is in here, and then when you get to Trinidad, and it almost seemed like they all accepted just passing in a way, you know? And so, um so, let me tell you the shibboleth that I have been working with that this completely demolishes, which is um I have focused my work, and my work does not look at African-Americans.

[00:57:13]I look at racism in the Middle East, and I look at not just anti-black racism, but I look at other types of racism, which is racism. There's all kinds, okay?

[00:57:25]Um Um and one of the things that I have uh >> [clears throat] >> really, you you know, gone to battle about is that I always feel that racism comes from wherever there was African slavery. The little baby that left was racism. You know? And I think you're challenging some of this and making me I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it. I'm probably going to have to, you know, write a chapter and bug you about it here. But I'm I'm I I I would be very interested in what the audience thought about that and whether you agree with my theory that, you know, wherever there has been slavery, you have a tendency to find anti-African, anti-black um racism. But then you then you then you you have to contradict that, cuz that's still an American white versus black binary, okay?

[00:58:20]Um and I want to get back to that binary in a second. But what I have become more interested is looking at where this happens where no Americans were even involved. All right? So, let's look at, you know, for instance, how the Sudanese in Egypt were treated and remain treated. And then um um and then you have to look at the entire state and so much of the cultural and political history of Sudan and South Sudan.

[00:58:45]Um are you disagreeing with me, or are you just moving your neck? Oh, okay. All right.

[00:58:49]>> [laughter] >> Cuz um I I mean, if I'm wrong, I I thought I was right on that. And I'm really fascinated by the way people that, you know, in an American context would automatically be identified, not necessarily identify themselves, but be identified as black doesn't work, you know? And there are people who look, you know, people who you I, you know, you might identify as black who will look at you like, I am not black. I can prove that I'm not black.

[00:59:20]Um I can go back eight generations to how long my grandparents my grandfather came to this land.

[00:59:26]So, I think your book is a tremendous addition in this direction, that it's not just white folks, everybody, you know, and that there are ways I mean, we're not going to stop blaming them.

[00:59:40]I'm sorry.

[00:59:41]You white folks.

[00:59:42]>> [laughter] >> I mean, I really mean it. I don't mean to make you feel uncomfortable, but this is real.

[00:59:48]Um but what I am trying to say is that, you know, um um [clears throat] that's a that's there's more in here and I think that is really um um something I wanted to bring up um that this book touches in me.

[01:00:05]Um and I then I want to get back to um to So, I want to uh talk a little bit about your engagement with gender.

[01:00:15]Um your next book should be cast and women.

[01:00:23]Okay.

[01:00:24]And I I I want everyone to buy this book, but if you're looking for the history of women, this is not the book you're going to find it in. That's okay.

[01:00:31]It's really important that the history that Suraj is telling is being told.

[01:00:36]That's okay, but Suraj hints at it quite a bit in the book and this is really important. And I like this about smart people who like to write books and are as productive of this miracle that we're all acknowledging today. Really, is that you know that Suraj will come up with another example about about cast and how it works out. But you hint at I mean, you and Takufu both talked about Angela Davis. You know, but there are important Dalit women here and you talked a lot about how the issue of of cast, race always centers on the dignity of the women.

[01:01:13]Always centers around who's protecting the women. Always centers around who's violating the women.

[01:01:20]You know, and and and this is one of the places where I think what a fascinating conversation you could have between Dalit women and African-American women. You know, what an incredible I mean, it will just take what you are trying to do here in this in this This book is a call to movement. You know, and I just think that that is one of the ways women bear the bear the scars of these stories, too. And I and I I but I spent a lot of time Suraj imagining people.

[01:01:56]And that's one of the things about the book that's so literally illuminating and that's a great example of the word illuminating is what it makes you stop and sit even if you're trying to skim. It makes you stop and sit and think about Suraj has pointed out that these women were completely dishonored, violated, raped, you know, and you just have to sit there and hold it and imagine.

[01:02:23]So, this book has uncovered and unsilenced, is that a word? Unsilenced so many different things. Um um and I think Takufu really covered a lot of the other parts that I was going to say about African-American history. Um um And finally, I I just I'm writing a book about miscegenation.

[01:02:53]Okay, I'm writing a book about miscegenation um through from Senegal to um My map is Senegal to Haiti, oh, France, Haiti, uh um Cairo and um Khartoum in the uh late 7 late 18th century through the 19th century and you just made me think a lot more about what it is to be a miscegenation as well.

[01:03:22]Thank you, Suraj. Thank you, everybody.

[01:03:24]Really looking forward to the Q&A.

[01:03:32]Thank you, everyone. And uh I think now we're ready to move on to to Q&A. I think, if I'm not mistaken, we actually have a mic that's going to be floating around.

[01:03:42]Yeah, I'm here.

[01:03:45]Suraj, maybe I'll let you Yeah, I mean Yeah, two seconds.

[01:03:49]>> [laughter] >> Thank you very much for your work. I want to start with a very honest admission that I only made it 50% through the book, but I do have um some questions for you. I've been writing and thinking about color theory and I was wondering whether or not the two specific examples in the book might actually help you to flesh out a little bit the perception of gender and how that works with erasure inside of the book. One, this concept of uh sort of Indian attachment to the fiery red of Mars and what that means in terms of like a kind of balance or contrast. I'm not sure which it is because it's not my country, all right? Um my country of study. Um but then also the dark waters of the post, you know, um independence or post-colonial, however you want to construct you know um migration to Trinidad and what that means to kind of like develop a social construction of race that is still very much attached to the color of blackness and the color of red.

[01:04:56]Maybe we should just answer the questions. Isaac, I'm okay. Thank you.

[01:04:59]Um I will also take this opportunity to also respond to some of the pointers raised excellent points raised by Takufu and Eve. I think thank you and thank you all for sticking around. Um you know, there's this um So, my PhD thesis um kind of goes deep into this kind of comparative uh notes of genealogy of race and cast. And I look at through the movements perspective.

[01:05:28]That's where I think and I'm so grateful you mentioned Angela Davis and I think I'm going to work with that intersectionality of movements part and I think there's more to that. Um and and I think um I mean, it's it's interesting. I never published my PhD thesis actually. Even my first and even the this So, hopefully hopefully sometime down the line, but there is more.

[01:05:48]I also I know, I I wanted women to be represented. And I was looking for the actors.

[01:05:55]Unfortunately, this it's very gender-driven.

[01:05:58]Um and and I was like especially the ethnography that I was kind of collecting. But then and it's it's weird to say, not this book, but the next book has an entire section on Dalit women leaders in diaspora. Which which kind of goes back to 1960s. There's a whole story about that. I just felt that if I do this it may just be that extra little salt and it might just give the taste a different flavor. I I was very excited to kind of work. But I I take this kind of point.

[01:06:28]And I in fact um not not gender part.

[01:06:33]>> [laughter] >> No, uh the the narrative cuz I just wanted to give like one little narrative and and just drop it off. I thought, you know, if there's more exposition. In fact, I facilitated a meeting meeting between Dalit and African-American uh women scholars in Bangalore a few years ago. And that was a that's was place where I was facilitated, but I left. Cuz that's not, you know, I wanted So, whatever happens on that front, if it is kind of, you know, reported. Shalini Randeria has written a piece on on this, but there's more kind of uh And one of the things I think when you work with three publishers is the reviewers.

[01:07:11]It it was very interesting how it was getting, you know. So, the Oxford reviewers uh were surprisingly gentle.

[01:07:18]And I'm not sure if they're in the room, but but but they were very uh gentle in the sense of they pushed me towards the direction that I thought I would not take, which is telling more about the story of where this theory cuz cuz cuz for me the Nandy part is part of the global theory. I mean, But the UK publisher had it's You know, it's kind of interesting how this publishing industry works cuz um they had a very kind of colonial observations that they wanted me to make. Uh and and I think in in in that um I had a section uh Whatever I'm saying now will come out in a some form in print. So, uh so the the qualms that I raised here are very well acknowledged and welcome. And and what I'm grateful to right now is to really think about those thinkers very closely.

[01:08:16]Patricia Collins and Kimberly Crenshaw and there's so many others. Uh you know, Angela Davis had actually come to India.

[01:08:22]Um but she was invited by a left-wing kind of group.

[01:08:26]And she missed out the boat cuz she looked at the the the the Dalit angle and cast question in a very um uneducated fashion.

[01:08:36]And that was kind of a miscall. Cuz she had come to give a a lecture and I it felt like Angela Davis would would, you know, engage with the politics. But unfortunately, she was also uh she also missed that opportunity. And and I think then there there remains a responsibility for most of us. However, the theoretical kind of contributions kind of, you know, come about and I think that's the more affiliation. I think the color theory is still kind of evolving uh within the cast context as well. And that's why I make this chapter called Dalit Republic of Trinidad. So, many of these Caribbean republics that we see who have a kind of Indian population, they have the lower cast kind of groups or majority in that.

[01:09:18]He's there.

[01:09:20]Thank you for um the talk.

[01:09:23]As you know, India's 1991 reforms moved the company sharply towards free market capitalism and now there's substantial evidence that those that those reforms have been very beneficial for Dalits.

[01:09:34]Dalit poverty has fallen at a faster rate than India as a whole. Home and vehicle ownership for Dalits have risen.

[01:09:40]Food and housing quality have improved and practices like tea stall segregation have declined. With capitalism many Dalits have been able to transition away from traditional occupations like agricultural labor raising their standards of living and social position.

[01:09:55]So prominent Dalits like Chandra Bhan Prasad in the DICCI have argued that capitalism has led to meritocracy which has improved the position of millions of Dalits. What do you think about this theory? I mean actually my first book I have an entire chapter on them on Dalit capitalism and they didn't like it.

[01:10:14]And and Chandra Bhan Prasad is actually a good friend to me and he still didn't like it. You know that friend >> [laughter] >> how the friends like it. Because the critique of capitalism for me as much as I was not against the the principle of capitalism it was more about how I mean in India capitalism or in any caste society and that's what I'm you know that's the this kind of my doctoral thesis at Oxford was exploring about the the inevitability of caste like standards that exist in any society that are ranked where the ascription of your category of identity may be something but what you decide with that is to do with market forces. That's how you know the state is eventually a market force you know that's how modern states have been formed. But my but my I am not a negator of the idea of Dalit capitalism. I don't want to dismiss it.

[01:11:09]But I wanted them to tell me concretely what was their project about. So it's like they they thought the way the black entrepreneur politics did there's the whole kind of black industry and stuff like that. They thought they would do it. But unfortunately they were concerned with a tiny percentage of governments outsourcing of content. That's not capitalism. That just that just is meant to be make me part of the market share.

[01:11:40]But which is like 2% or something like that or even less which basically means and the capitalism that they were talking about was not about heavy industries.

[01:11:49]They were talking about small scale industries.

[01:11:51]And it's such a stereotypical way that small scale industries is meant for these kind of small scale people but the majority macro capital like the industries that really govern and that kind of regulate the inflow of capital through you know import export no Dalits to be seen.

[01:12:07]And that's where I see how do we really understand capitalism? Then we see you know the neoliberal forces the way we understand is to is to make sense of identity as a saleable commodity. So you can be a Dalit and you can negotiate and sell your identity by capitalism or by environmentalism or whatever you whatever you call it right? So if they would have said Dalit neoliberalism that would have made more sense because then that's what the new policies is like.

[01:12:34]However your point is well taken the the rates have been declined in since 1991 and there's been reforms. But also on the other side the disparity continues right? In the sense of it's it's like a sword that you swing in any direction is is meant to it's meant to hurt. And what's the what's the response? Now there are many people who say let's abolish capitalism or whatever you know. I'm like you do it and I bet I bet you know you're not going to succeed cuz this idea is great. I'm not you know the idea of abolishing capitalism and stuff like this is great but pragmatically speaking there are groups who need that advantage of capital. But does that mean capitalism? I'm not sure. People really conflate and I think we need a lecture.

[01:13:16]Maybe I need to give a lecture on Dalit capitalism to really explain how capital C and lower c capitalism really functions so that more workers students can get better jobs.

[01:13:27]>> [laughter] >> Yes.

[01:13:47]>> Hi um I'm Carolina. Thank you so much all for being here. Um I had a question about um what Dr. Zuberi Zuberi um was talking about specifically with um intersectionality and finding common ground from intersectional um like the acknowledgement of the like intersectionality as part of a struggle against um matrices of dominance um and how specifically important it is to find common ground internationally and within different um societies.

[01:14:27]But I guess my question is um so as you talk about the intersectionality of struggle against marginalization and matrices of oppression um as far as when groups from different societies come together and form um potential solutions or uh policy proposals or just uh philosophical approach to potentially overcoming um those barriers then how and uh you could answer this or whoever um could these be successfully sort of disseminated from a central uh collective effort um into the sort of specifications of each society um and so that they work um they they work within different um context of different nations with uh specific institutions um or specific factors that are stronger in some nations that lead to um these discriminations such as if religion is a stronger factor um or if skin color is a stronger factor like how do you see that um then coming out [clears throat] of a collective action?

[01:15:45]Thank you.

[01:15:47]That's my student yes say um he so he he was my way of trying to offer a subtle critique is I gave uh basically the names of four theorists that I thought uh he could pay more attention to.

[01:16:08]And they are all theorists of gender and black feminist thought and how we can increase our understanding of uh of race and of class by of more of an accentuation of gender. So I was I was I was agreeing with uh what Professor Yes. Yes.

[01:16:39]Yeah.

[01:16:40]What she was saying Professor Trouillot was saying that is I what I was what I what I was what I was trying to suggest is that if you want to really uh uh develop a theory which is a global theory about caste and you're very concerned about how that theory interacts with race and class that there are already some theoretical arguments that have been presented about how to do that.

[01:17:17]Now one notion is intersectionality.

[01:17:21]So one way to think about intersectionality is to think about how it positions in an individual's understanding of their own identity.

[01:17:32]But another way to think about intersectionality is to think about groups and organizations or movements which are trying to change the world. And how those movements those organizations benefit by recognizing their co-constituent issues and how they are fighting against different dimensions of something which is multi-dimensional.

[01:18:04]But by uh coming together and intersecting with these movements that there is a benefit in their actions.

[01:18:14]There's a benefit in the individual in their identity. There's a benefit in these movements attempting to make social change in what they do. A classic example is the fight against apartheid in South Africa which many people around the world saw that as a movement which intersected with their own movements of social change.

[01:18:40]Now the Dalit community already saw this. They had an intuitive they didn't I don't know if they read this book by Angela Davis I don't think so because they did it before she wrote the book and before she expressed the idea. But they had already this notion of an intersectionality with a movement. So they already felt an intersectionality with the black movement in the United States. And so what I was suggesting is at a theoretical level because in some ways this book is about theory. And this book is a critique of how theory is being written, especially race theory and class theory. And it is suggesting that race and class theory need to find a way together. And so what I was suggesting is that rather than essentialize any movement into itself, that once a movement is identified, once a group of people are oppressed and they are collectively fighting against that oppression and they identify it, that they find strength in relating their movement to other movements. And and this is why we're saying with class, with nation, with citizenship, I mean, you can imagine the issue of citizenship, for example, in the United States today. It finds a natural allegiance, if you will, with those individuals who are attempting to leave crushed societies in one way or another, and they're attempting to move to Europe. And they're being stopped at the borders of Europe. And the US has created a a wave of activity to punish individuals who are here and their citizenship is ambiguous and it is being used as a vehicle for their domination.

[01:20:48]I hope that helps answer your question.

[01:20:53]So I think we have time for one more question.

[01:21:05]Congratulations, Suraj, and thank you, Professor wonderful commentary on that.

[01:21:11]It's great great to learn. I haven't read the book yet, and I'm going to buy the copy and and by today. The one observation, like maybe it's a reflection I would like to hear from Suraj and others. Uh when you read and reviewed, I was thinking about um the the intergenerational knowledge transfer from the the the previous generation to this generations and uh how that has been shifted, particularly when she's talking about, you know, why it's a sad, sorrow, pain.

[01:21:46]And is there like any conversion has been happening towards the Dalit joy?

[01:21:52]And what is the like in the global story of caste?

[01:21:57]Where does the Dalit Dalit joy lies in?

[01:22:00]And where that the joy is?

[01:22:04]And which part of the world it's emerging? Whether it's origin from the India itself, or it's goes from somewhere else, or is it's intersecting from the new generation to the old generation, or the knowledge is converting from the old to a new.

[01:22:23]So And and if if at all if you want a story of a caste, whether it has to stay in the pain and sorrows and and and sadness, or it also come from the other side of it.

[01:22:42]And what would be the new generation to view it?

[01:22:47]And I'm thinking about like, you know, we're specifically talking about how we in another side, when you when you're like a trying to break this why the caste has to be attached with only with Dalits?

[01:23:01]And what is like the caste stories of the others? And then when they intersect with uh either with like, you know, other races?

[01:23:15]And if it is intersect with other races, how that emerging out of of it and then what that intersectionality building as a movement if it is moving building as a movement?

[01:23:29]And what that movement will look like and then how that that movement will emerge as a new intersectional theory?

[01:23:38]So just just to reflect.

[01:23:41]I'll stop here.

[01:23:43]Thank you.

[01:23:50]Thank you for that question. Um you know, it's interesting that it's so interesting the way you talked about these stories and everything.

[01:23:59]One of the things that's very um and I think a a of population that can help answer this question is the Palestinian diaspora. And you know, I was just with a Palestinian family, friends of mine, who live in in Doha.

[01:24:16]And their little girl, who's 5 years old, has never been to Palestine, and she can name every single village in Palestine. And this is very common. This is very common and and the way the stories of the actual villages are told also by Maronite Christians from Lebanon in the diaspora, in order to keep this memory of home always and so it's passed down through story after story after story. And certainly, in the case of Palestinians, has created a huge movement. You know, I mean, this is what keeps the movement going. This is exactly this kind of memories passed down from a reality of the past that might not have not even be as real, but but the pain is real.

[01:25:03]Passed down through story through story through story, thus being able to create, you know, um >> [clears throat] >> fighters for memory, if you will, Hamas or something like that. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:25:19]Can I say something about joy?

[01:25:22]So I went to the biennale in in São Paulo.

[01:25:29]And so I talked I was talking to Suraj about I'm going to biennale, you know, I'm I'm hanging out with all these people.

[01:25:37]And he introduced me to a collective of Dalit artists who had uh there was a a section of black Brazilian artists who had a booth and they are collective of artists and behind them was this collection of art, and Dalit art. And uh am I saying that right? You don't want me to get something wrong.

[01:26:04]Okay. Okay, good. All right. All right.

[01:26:07]And the but the the the paintings were beautiful.

[01:26:12]Now, and and they gave me some joy, although some of them were about very sad things, you know.

[01:26:19]Uh which is not unusual in art, right?

[01:26:22]Some of the most beautiful things can give you some can be expressed through some of the most uh sad notions. It's like a really good love song. It will sound beautiful, but if you take the words literally, my god. Uh you know, the romance is gone. So just uh thinking about how joy itself is not just found in the in the celebration of some some sometimes it's found in the presentation of that reality. And these artists were creating beauty at the same time they were keeping the narrative of what the what the lives of Dalit people have been.

[01:27:06]Um so, you know, I just like to think that joy is not always just bubbly in your mouth.

[01:27:15]Sometimes it's very much giving you access to the reality.

[01:27:23]Also just as a footnote, there there are I think a group of young Dalit scholars today who actually really understand that that gap around joy. And so, for example, there's a wonderful young woman scholar who's working on a PhD at Columbia right now on Dalit humor, for example, and specifically from Dalit women's perspectives. So really, you know, bringing that idea of joy center stage, but really contextualizing it in terms of gender and that gender question around, you know, Dalit women's the in the the even greater invisibility of Dalit women's joy in particular, right? And sort of trying to foreground that as an as an analytic. So Yeah. Thank you. No, thank you for raising very briefly, you know.

[01:28:10]Actually, I wrote about this very Dalit humor part in Caste Matters.

[01:28:15]Uh there's a whole section and also talk about love of Dalits.

[01:28:18]And I talked to my grandmother um this kind of intergenerational aspect of what that love means and how that kind of develops. Um but then this is such an interesting invitation to think about solidarities formed based on joy.

[01:28:32]And what really joy does to a movement.

[01:28:38]What I love this is about Tukufu's point was about, you know, this intersectionality of groups, movements and people. It's not like, you know, it's not pedigree.

[01:28:47]Um it's not temporal. It's it's and I'm going to run with that idea somewhere. And you really planted something crazy and I think it has to be done. So I really appreciate that.

[01:29:04]All right. Thank you. All right. Well, we are officially out of time. So I'd like to thank all of you who've who've stayed on, and I would like to again thank our wonderful colleagues.

[01:29:15]And of course, a huge thank you to to Suraj for uh for sharing the book with us.

[01:29:22]Thank you all very much. Thank you.