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Title: The
Dalit Challenge to Indian Academia: The "Untouchables" of
North India
Where
& When: March 25, 2008
341 Eggers Hall
12.30 pm
Type
of Activity: Speaker
Speaking: Ramnarayan
S Rawat, Post
Doctoral Teaching Fellow in South Asian History at the
University
of Pennsylvania
Summary:
A key objective of my talk is to
demonstrate the intellectual genealogy of the association
between untouchability and occupation which has been crucial
to framing existing understandings of the origins and
practice of untouchability in India.
Therefore, we must start by
unpacking existing anthropological and historical accounts
to examine the conceptual framework with which we have been
bequeathed, and to help us grapple with its implications for
the framing of a new research agenda for the study of Dalit
society and history.
I will show how pre-existing
assumptions have helped to shape the questions that have
been asked by later anthropologists and historians, further
reaffirming existing stereotypes rather than offering new
lenses for analysis, even in the face of radical changes in
both disciplines over the last five decades.
Further, I will argue that
rather than helping us to better understand the history and
society, not only of Dalits, but of Hinduism and India more
generally, the perpetuation of an analytic framework that
equates Dalit caste groups with supposedly hereditary
occupations has actually worked to obscure and erase
history.
Sponsorship:
The South Asia Center
