Caste – Decolonising Global Health Archive

By Cecilia Coale Van Hollen

As news spread that more women died from breast and cervical cancer in India than anywhere else in the world in the early twenty-first century, global public health planners accelerated efforts to prevent, screen, and treat these reproductive cancers in low-income Indian communities. Cancer and the Kali Yuga reveals that women who are the targets of these interventions in Tamil Nadu, South India, hold views about cancer causality, late diagnosis, and challenges to accessing treatment that differ from the public health discourse. Cecilia Coale Van Hollen’s critical feminist ethnography centers and amplifies the voices of Dalit Tamil women who situate cancer within the nexus of their class, caste, and gender positions. Dalit women’s narratives about their experiences with cancer present a powerful and poignant critique of the sociocultural and political-economic conditions that marginalize them and jeopardize their health and well-being in twenty-first-century India.

Read the book here.

By Juned Shaikh

Juned Shaikh’s richly researched and perceptively argued monograph, Outcaste Bombay: City Making and the Politics of the Poor, subverts the idea that the various processes of modernity, including urbanization and industrial capitalism, would eventually diminish caste hierarchies and engender new social dynamics. As Shaikh shows, such modernist hopes remained unfulfilled in the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial center of Bombay. Instead, “caste hid in plain sight in the city” (5). It not only sustained the growth and expansion of capitalism by facilitating industrial investments through caste and kinship credit networks but was also vital for the recruitment, disciplining, and housing of the city’s labor force. The book examines this “symbiotic relationship” between caste and capitalism by focusing on the built environment—housing policies and urban planning—and the language of Bombay’s Marxist and Dalit literature. In existing social histories of capitalism and labor in Bombay, questions of caste appear as inconsequential. Shaikh rightly points out that in the historical narrative of modern Bombay “Dalits are a marginal presence because they appear fleetingly in [official] sources like the Labour Gazette” (35). Shaikh has addressed this gap by exploring an impressive Marathi language archive and by incorporating the insights of Dalit studies into his excellent work.

Read the full book here.

By Shiva Shankar and Kanthi Swaroop

Manual scavenging is the practice of ‘manually cleaning, carrying, disposing of, or otherwise handling, human excreta in an insanitary latrine or in an open drain or pit’, and its existence is a crime of genocidal proportions. The vast majority of people forced into this degrading occupation are women from Dalit castes. The Government of India has outlawed the practice through two Acts of 1993 and 2013, yet it continues everywhere in the country. This essay argues that the persistence of this crime is a consequence of the criminal indifference of a casteist society, and that resistance to it has largely been the heroic effort of the victims alone.

Read the full essay here.

By Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai

This book develops a radically new way of understanding the social by focussing on different experiences we have of the everyday empirical reality. This book offers a new way of understanding the social processes of societies in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, all of which have complex experiences of the everyday social. The authors begin with the argument that the everyday social is the domain where the first experiences of the social are formed and these experiences influence to a great extent meaning-making of the structural social. Following a critique of some dominant trends in social ontology, they discuss in detail, and with many common examples, how the social is experienced through the perceptual capacities of sight, touch, sound, taste, and smell. They then discuss the relation between experience of belongingness and the social, and show how the social gets authority in a way similar to how natural gets authority in the natural sciences. Moreover, the social appears through the invocation of we-ness, suggestive of a social self. The everyday social also creates its sense of time, a social time which orders social experiences such as caste. Finally, the authors explain how the ethics of the social is formed through the relationship of Maitri (drawn from Ambedkar) between the different socials that constitute a society. This is not just a new theory of the social but is filled with illustrations from the everyday experiences of India, including the diverse experiences of caste.

Tag: Caste

Cancer and the Kali Yuga: Gender, Inequality, and Health in South India

Outcaste Bombay: City Making and the Politics of the Poor

Manual Scavenging in India: The Banality of An Everyday Crime