‘Education helped me flee the slum. It can be like a magic wand for Dalits’: Shailaja Paik

Indian American historian Shailaja Paik has had quite the week since she was made a MacArthur Fellow and received a ‘genius grant’ of $800,000. Her inbox is full of emails, her schedule is packed and social media has had a lot to say. But the comments don’t bother Paik, 50, who grew up in Pune’s Yerwada slum and now teaches at University of Cincinnati. She is singularly focused on her research on the challenges faced by Dalit women. Paik talks to Ketaki Desai about the relationship between caste and sexuality

What has the experience of winning the MacArthur genius grant been like for you? What research do you plan to focus on using it?

I am overjoyed and happy about this highest honour. It’s a huge felicitation of my hard work. I am very grateful as an Indian American woman to be included in this genius, creative group of people from the US. I have a number of book projects already in the pipeline. I am working on my third monograph which is tentatively titled ‘Caste Domination and Normative Sexuality in Modern India’. I also have some co-edited books that I am working on. One is a Dalit reader, where I will be putting together translations of historical documents from Marathi to English. I think that should be a very good resource for people who want to be able to engage with these primary sources. I’m also working on a co-edited book which is titled ‘Caste, Race and Indigeneity in and beyond South Asia’. I am collaborating with about 24 international scholars working in a range of disciplines —sociology, anthropology, geography, religious studies, and women’s and gender studies.

In what ways did your childhood impact the work you do?

Growing up belonging to a particular social and economic background, having limited resources when I grew up in Pune has had an impact. But I always thank my parents and my uncle who focused on education. Education and escaping the slum became a chapter in my first book. Education became a magic wand, not just for me but for millions of people. Higher education opens up so many possibilities.

Your last book focused on Tamasha artists in Maharashtra. How do sexuality and caste intersect through such folk forms?

This is what I call the ‘sex-gender-caste’ complex in my book, ‘The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India’. I analysed how caste gets intersected with gender and sexuality and oppresses women, especially marginalised women. I focused on Dalit Tamasha women. They have to fight double discrimination due to both caste and gender. They were under the constant threat of sexual and caste violence. This is because Tamasha women are looked upon by the larger society as ‘public women or loose women’. I’ll give you one example. Mangalatai is an artist whose five generations of family are in Tamasha. She mentioned how when she was a teenager, she was performing in a village, she was made to dance on a bullock cart that would go around the village. Many men frantically danced around the cart, tried to jump on the cart, to touch her or get to her.

Dalit women have long been targets of sexual violence in India. What role does caste discrimination play in this violence?

On one hand, we have the law and things are being done on paper, but at the same time, on the ground, atrocities against Dalits are increasing. Caste violence intersects with gender to produce Dalit women’s sexual vulnerability. Historically, dominant castes have used violence as a tool, as their right and entitlement to perpetuate caste hierarchies. This is their centuries-long accumulation of power and privilege. Dalit women are poor and lacking in autonomy. Aloysius I.S.J., Jayshree Mangubhai, and Joel Lee’s edited book explores the qualitative nature of violence against 500 Dalit women within and without the family (2011).

You wrote about Ambedkar’s speech to Dalit women who were sex workers. How did he view their work?

Ambedkar was very aware of what I call the sex-gender-caste complex. Both the colonial British and elite Indians depicted Dalits as ‘childish,’ ‘immature,’ or ‘effeminate.’ On top of this, Dalit women would face even more discrimination because they were looked upon as ‘sexually promiscuous.’ In 1927, when Ambedkar was putting together funds for the Mahad Satyagraha, Patthe Bapurao (a Brahmin man Tamasha and Lavani artist) offered funds to support Ambedkar. But Ambedkar refused because as he argued, they were accumulated by making Dalit women dance to music which is looked upon as erotic. He didn’t want Dalit women to be commodified because it further led to sexual exploitation. As we move further in the 1930s, he worked with different pressures socially, politically, ideologically, and religious — he declared he was going to convert to Buddhism. When he did that, in 1936, there was an opportunity where he gave this speech to the so-called public women which included prostitutes, Tamasha women, and jogtinis. There, he said that women should leave these so-called ‘dirty professions’ and convert to Buddhism. On first glance, it may seem patriarchal. However, one should pay attention to the larger contexts of what he was fighting with. Dalit liberation was the main agenda in order to carve out human dignity for Dalits. This was intrinsically connected with Dalits and the community as a whole which has not enjoyed the privilege of being called humans.

There has been a long history of upper caste academics working on Dalit issues. Is there value in people from the community studying it?

Many upper-caste academics have worked on Dalit issues. However, to work from a Dalit women’s vantage point, as I have done throughout my work is to unlearn, relearn, and participate in situated and reflexive ways. It is to attend to historical contexts and pay attention to the unnoticed, excluded, and underappreciated. I am reminded of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus’ that explains the socially conditioned dispositions shape how we work. You cannot separate the background and context of the scholar from the work they do. When I was doing fieldwork, I was an ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ at the same time. People I interviewed for the book referred to me as ‘our madam’. Ever since I started doing fieldwork from 2000 onwards, people have called me a daughter of the community. My inbox is full of so many emails from young Dalit and non-Dalit scholars who are inspired by my work. They hope that they will also be able to leave a mark one day, and shine, which I know they will.

Courtesy : TOI

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