Reading Caste: Entanglement, Embodiment, Agency

Abstract

This dissertation offers for the first time a re-examination of caste as a problem of reading and regulation of habits of reading. In doing so it not only shifts the ways of examining histories and practices of caste but also offers a broader understanding of reading as a critical, discursive-material, entangled practice of worlding that never remains limited within the printed letters of a script. The dissertation proposes a new method and practice of reading called ‘aesthetic reading’. The dissertation examines the trans-continental and polycolonial influences through which the dominant methods and conceptual frameworks of understanding caste found their sedimentation over a longue durée and how these frameworks intra-acted with the native, precolonial and colonial vernacular views on caste. By identifying such differential becomings of caste, the dissertation shows how the same ‘sites’ of interpreting caste can be re-turned to in order and how one finds overlapping, counter-hegemonic ‘other’ histories within dominant histories of caste. After introducing the problem and history of caste in India as well as the conceptual underpinnings of reading as a practice of meaning- and world-making, the dissertation then moves through the following ‘sites’: by using symptomatic reading, chapters 1 and 2 highlight why caste needs to be (re-)examined as a problem of reading and embodiment. The chapters demonstrate the inconsistencies of interpreting caste within precolonial views on ‘jāti’, ‘guṇa’ en ‘varṇa’ as well as the contradictions within postcolonial social scientific approaches; chapters 3 and 4, by turning towards late 18th C and early 19th C Colonial Calcutta, identifies the diffractive becomings of caste within a singular historical ‘site’; and chapter 5 unpacks how an aesthetic reading of caste remains in dialogue with Ambedkarite politics and offers a scope identifying both the underlying symptomatic influences and their diffractive becomings in shaping differential acts of interpreting caste. Throughout the dissertation, I develop the concept of aesthetic reading and employ it for reading caste through its complex weave of narratives and entanglements which continuously diffract each other. The dissertation borrows such an approach from Ambedkar and his use of literary aesthetics through which he de- and re-situated the political con-figurations of caste within everyday social life and the polyvalent, counter-hegemonic vernacular responses to caste. This dissertation thereby extends Ambedkarite politics and challenges the hegemonic histories of caste by identifying the voids and overlapping becomings within each site. My ‘aesthetic reading’ of caste thus unpacks other, co-existing histories of reading caste within its hegemonic tradition.