Discussant: Harsha Anantharaman, Department of Geography, Environment & Society

How do ideologies of ascriptive difference structure capitalist economies? How do subjects of such ideologies experience and interpret their own ascribed differences? What forms of collective politics do they articulate? How do their political projects reconstitute the terms of ascription? These are the broad conceptual questions that knit together two of my projects. The first, older project that resulted in the book, The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India , is on the social and political lives of alumni of the Indian Institutes of Technology, some of whom were part of the post-1965 wave of professional migration to the United States. A subset of this group -- Tamil Brahmins -- is the population that I’ll be focusing on in this paper. The second, new project is on the social and political lives of Tamil Dalits who worked as the underground labor force in the Kolar Gold Fields, a gold mining company town in South India. While at first glance, these seem to be wholly divergent histories, there is considerable overlap. Both Tamil Brahmins and Tamil Dalits were conscripted into capitalist labor regimes that naturalized caste difference . Conscription into these labor regimes catalyzed mobility across political borders and into new spaces of social stratification. These spaces of labor and life produced novel articulations of caste and class that hinged in part on a sense of relational geographies. They also animated new forms of collective self-representation and claims to post-caste futures. In this paper, I consider these histories together to see what the comparison illuminates about the dialectics of caste ascription and future-making.

Co-organized by The Kofi Annan Institute for Global Citizenship (Macalester College), Macalester Departments of Religious Studies, Philosophy, History, Political Science, Asian Studies, and Anthropology.