Confronting Caste: Panel Discussion on Anti-Caste and Anti-Racist Politics in Contemporary Times

Confronting Caste is a series of conversations hosted by the King’s India Institute at King’s College London, to bring analytical attention to the question of how caste operates in contemporary society. This means not only studying caste-based discrimination and oppression across trans-national contexts, but also investigating how this relates to other structures and systems. With this aim in mind the Spring 2021 events under the theme of ‘Understanding Race and Caste’ will interrogate the political and intellectual challenges and possibilities of approaching race and caste as overlapping, intersecting, and mutually reinforcing fields of power.

With the publication of Isabel Wilkerson’s (2020) Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents the conversation around race and caste has received fresh attention. While some have lauded Wilkerson’s unprecedented centring of caste as an analytic for race relations in the USA, others have decried the conflation of the two systems of oppression, pointing to the resulting historical erasure. In either case, this presents us with an opportune moment to map the empirical and conceptual terrains for understanding caste and race.

This panel will take a closer look at aspects of anti-caste and anti-racist politics in contemporary times, dwelling on the ways in which they intersect and the fault lines they expose. It will engage with the philosophical, practical, and ethical dimensions of understanding caste and race. How does anti-caste ideology approach the issue of racialization? How can anti-caste and anti-racist impulses be lived synchronously? How does vocal anti-racism in some quarters come to co-exist with silence on issues of caste? These are some of the questions that will be addressed by the speakers through the following presentations.

The panel will be moderated by Srilata Sircar and Vignesh Rajahmani

Panellists and Titles

Dr Karthick Ram Manoharan (University of Wolverhampton): The Black Shirt Challenge: Periyar contra Aryanism

Karthick Ram Manoharan is Marie-Sklodowska Curie Fellow and is working on the political thought of Periyar E.V. Ramasamy, a rationalist anti-caste leader from South India. He will be supervised by Prof. Meena Dhanda for the course of this project. The European Commission's evaluation summary report of the project gave it a score of 98.8 percent. He is the author of Frantz Fanon: Identity and Resistance (Orient BlackSwan 2019) and the co-editor of Rethinking Social Justice (Orient BlackSwan 2020). Taking a transdisciplinary approach, he has authored several academic and non-academic articles that deal with political theory and philosophy, intellectual history, identity, modern Tamil politics, caste, and cinema. His research on Periyar has been recognized as a novel and critical intervention in highlighting the thoughts of an important anti-caste thinker in the academia. He received his PhD from the University of Essex in 2015.

Professor Meena Dhanda (University of Wolverhampton): The concurrence of anti-racism and anti-casteism

Meena Dhanda is Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Politics and leads a research group Language, Power and Society. She arrived in the UK from Punjab, India in 1987 with an award of a Commonwealth Scholarship for her doctoral work in Philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford University. In 1992 she began teaching a broad range of areas in philosophy at Wolverhampton. From 2007 she is engaged in doing empirically informed social, moral and political philosophy and is internationally recognised as a leading academic in the development of diaspora Dalit studies. Her research focus is on understanding injustices, prejudices and misrepresentations suffered by powerless groups, which she pursues through transdisciplinary studies, specifically connecting caste, class, gender and race. Meena is interested in guiding research in social and political philosophy, ethics, cultural politics, identity, feminist philosophy, theorists of anti-racism and anti-casteism.

Dr Hugo Gorringe (University of Edinburgh): Changing Caste Cultures

Hugo’s research in India focuses on the socio-political mobilisation of Dalits (ex-Untouchables) and their struggle to achieve equality and deepen Indian democracy. This research is the basis for book: Untouchable Citizens, which explores the interplay between Dalit movements and Democratisation in South India. He has also written about Dalit politics, collective violence, identity politics, institutionalisation and the construction and negotiation of social space. He is currently working on the institutionalisation of the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi.