Recent events in South Asia and across the globe have once again brought questions of caste to the forefront of public discourse. Confronting Caste is a series of conversations hosted by the King’s India Institute at King’s College London, to address these questions. The series will expand the scope of academic engagement with caste as a system of social power, with the aim to dissect and dismantle its modes of operation within coloniality-modernity.

During the first semester of 2020-21, Confronting Caste will host three online panel events, release three independent podcast episodes, and foster further conversations across platforms. To find out more about the series, propose collaborations, and get involved, please contact Srilata Sircar (srilata.sircar@kcl.ac.uk) and Vignesh Rajahmani (vignesh.rajahmani@kcl.ac.uk)

The Caste and City panel will focus on urban planning as a site of operation of caste power and explore how caste relations are getting reconfigured by the politics of land and infrastructure in the growing cities of South Asia.

Drawing on field-based and archival research conducted in different parts of India, the speakers will highlight how colonial and postcolonial planning practices interact with extant caste relations and anti-caste political assertions.

It is well-documented that the planning process in India unfolds through a series of negotiations between state, capital, and society across political scales and institutions. This panel will centre the role of caste in mediating these processes. Through this the panel will explore how colonial modernity, postcolonial capitalisms and evolving caste dynamics shape the contemporary urban form in India.

Chair
Christophe Jaffrelot - King’s College London & Sciences Po
Christophe Jaffrelot is Avantha Chair and Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at the King's India Institute and the Research Lead for the Global Institutes, King’s College London. He is also a senior research fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris.

Panellists
Bhuvaneswari Raman - Jindal Global University
Professor (Dr) Bhuvaneswari is trained in architecture, urban planning and social sciences. Her research interests are in the areas of transformation of urban land, urban politics, economic geography governance, research methodology, gender and urban poverty.

Kalaiyarasan A - Brown University
Kalaiyarasan is a Fulbright-Nehru post-doctoral fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs in Brown University and an Assistant Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India. His academic interest lies in the intersection of caste and economic processes in India.

Malini Ranganathan - American University
Malini Ranganathan serves as the Interim Faculty Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center and is an associate professor at American University. She is a critical urban geographer with a broad interest in environmental justice and antiracist, anticaste, and decolonial politics.