Symposium on Global Caste
In the wake of recent landmark efforts in the United States to address caste discrimination in the workplace and in educational settings, caste, as a form of social stratification and as a set of practices upholding a hereditary system of social exclusion, can no longer be seen as a problem confined to South Asia. This symposium will bring together scholars exploring the global ramifications of the caste system, through comparative and multidisciplinary perspectives, and to discuss the challenges of anti-caste work in the context of globalization.
PANELISTS
Chinnaiah Jangam, Associate Professor, Department of History, Carleton University, Canada.
Katherine Newman, Chancellor for Academic Programs, Senior Vice President for Economic Development and Torrey Little Professor of Sociology, University of Massachusetts
Thenmozhi Soundarajan, Dalit Rights Activist and Executive Director of Equality Labs
MODERATOR
Diana Kim, Assistant Professor, Asian Studies Program, Georgetown University
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PANELIST BIOS
Chinnaiah Jangam is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, Carleton University, Canada. He holds a Ph. D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He was awarded the Felix Fellowship and Harry Frank Guggenheim Dissertation Fellowship for Doctoral Studies. Jangam was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the International Center for Advanced Studies, New York University. He writes on the social and intellectual history of Dalits and the anti-caste histories as a counter to the Hindu Brahmanical ideology that produced and perpetuated caste inequality, oppression, and exploitation of women and oppressed castes in South Asia. His first book, Dalits and the Making of Modern India published by Oxford University Press in 2017. The book presents Dalit perspectives on nationalism and argues that Dalits were equal participants in the imagination and the politics of the formation of an independent India. Dalits argued for abolishing untouchability and ending caste inequality, with accompanying humiliations, as preconditions for independence. Dalits imagined a nation founded on justice, liberty, equality, and human dignity that became the foundational principles of the Indian Constitution drafted under the guidance of B.R. Ambedkar, a Dalit. The book was translated and published in Telugu in 2020. Jangam also translates Dalit writings from Telugu to English. His latest translation Gabbilam (Bat): A Dalit Epic, is published by the Yoda Press, 2022. Gabbilam was written by Gurram Jashuva, father of Dalit literature in Telugu, in 1941 in classical Telugu in poetic form. Gabbilam debuted Dalit as a protagonist in a written text in classical Telugu. Gabbilam vividly describes the everyday sufferings of Dalits and presents their misery melodiously. It challenges the caste system and dehumanization of Dalits. It questions the meaning of freedom from colonialism without freedom from caste oppression and exploitation.
While writing history as an emancipatory project and teaching courses on modern South Asian history, race and empire, decolonization, and Indian Ocean history, Jangam is passionately involved in anti-caste and social justice activism and community engagement. He co-founded the South Asian Dalit and Adivasi (Indigenous) Network (SADAN) that organizes educational seminars, talks, events, workshops, and protests on the caste oppression and violation of human rights of Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and Adivasis and advocates social justice, inclusion, and equity.
Currently, Jangam is engaged in writing three books: One entitled Caste Contract: A History of Inequality, which presents the long durée history of caste tracing its roots in ancient history in the origin of Sanskrit centric Brahmanism and its transformation and inscription as a ruling ideology at different phases of history. The book shows that the colonial revival of Brahmanism through Sanskrit literature predicated on the success of colonialism with caste as a foundational structure that enabled surplus extraction, subordination of women with antiBlackness, and contempt for indigenous knowledge and ways of life. The second book is re-editing and publishing the first Dalit biography in colonial India, M. Nagloo (Nagayya): First Hotel Entrepreneur in Colonial India, published in 1908. This pioneering biography was written by M.N. Venktaswami, son of Nagloo, is the first known life narrative of a Dalit. Moreover, Nagloo, while witnessing the consolidation of British colonialism, made fortunes as a contractor and pioneering hotelier in Central India as Railways spread but died as a pauper due to caste discrimination. The third book is, Forgiving Men: Lifeworld of a Jogini is a memoir about my mother, Chinnubai. She was a Jogini and dedicated to the family goddess Chilukala Chinnamma. The biography documents her struggles and survival as a Dalit without a husband and single mother. It also narrates my family’s survival of social ostracism and the defiance of caste and patriarchy.
Katherine Newman is the University of Massachusetts System Chancellor for Academic Programs, the Senior Vice President for Economic Development and the Torrey Little Professor of Sociology at UMass Amherst. She was previously the Interim Chancellor of UMass Boston, Senior Vice President of the University of Massachusetts system, the Provost of UMass Amherst and prior to that, the James B. Knapp Dean of the Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. Newman is the author of fourteen books on topics ranging from technical education and apprenticeship, to the sociological study of the working poor in America’s urban centers, middle class economic insecurity under the brunt of recession, and school violence on a mass scale. She has written extensively on the consequences of globalization for youth in Western Europe, Japan, South Africa and the US, on the impact of regressive taxation on the poor, and on the history of American political opinion on the role of government intervention.
Dr. Newman has served as the Forbes Class of 1941 Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs and Director of the Institute for International and Regional Studies at Princeton, the founding Dean of Social Science at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study and the director of Harvard’s Multidisciplinary Program on Inequality and Social Policy, where she served as the Malcolm Weiner Professor of Urban Studies in the Kennedy School of Government. She taught for 16 years in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University and for two years in the School of Law at the University of California Berkeley.
Her most recent book, Downhill From Here: Retirement Insecurity in the Age of Inequality (2019) analyzes the impact of pension collapse, two tiered labor contracts, municipal bankruptcy, and the emergence of the “grey labor force” on the nation’s retirees. Her next project, coauthored with Elisabeth Jacobs, is provisionally entitled Solving for Poverty: What Tight Labor Markets Do for the Poor which will be published by the University of California Press.
Thenmozhi Soundararajan is a Dalit American artist, community organizer, technologist, and theorist. Currently, Thenmozhi is the Executive Director of Equality Labs, which she co-founded. Equality Labs is the largest Dalit civil rights organization working to empower caste-oppressed people in the US and globally. Through her work at Equality Labs, Thenmozhi has mobilized South Asian Americans towards dismantling eons-long systems of oppression, with the goal of ending caste apartheid, gender-based violence, white supremacy, and religious intolerance. Thenmozhi previously co-founded Third World Majority, an international media training organization and collective that supported people from disenfranchised groups in telling their own stories, in their own way.
Her intersectional, cross-pollinating work—research, education, art, activism, and digital security—helps to create a more generous, global, expansive, and inclusive definition of South Asian identity, along with safe spaces from which to honor the stories of these communities. Thenmozhi’s work has been recognized by the U.S. Congress, The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, The Producers Guild of America Diversity Program, The Museum of Contemporary Art, The Sorbonne, Source Magazine, Utne Reader, The National Center for the Humanities, The National Science Foundation, The Ford Foundation, and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She is a frequent contributor on issues related to South Asia, caste, gender, and racial Equity, as well interfaith issues and peace building, and has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, Guardian, ABC, and NBC news. She was also an inaugural fellow of the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist, Atlantic Foundation for Racial Equity, and is a current fellow at Stanford Center for South Asian Studies. You can order her new book The Trauma of Caste from North Atlantic Books to learn more about her work around caste equity, abolition, and healing.