Liberalism in the Vernacular: Recovering the Dalit Public Sphere in Late Colonial India

In this talk, Professor Ramnarayan Rawat will discuss a set of categories created by Dalit poet-activists in early 20th-century North India to articulate an emerging politics of representative government. Poet-activists belonging to a Dalit literate public used song genres to intervene in debates on equality, freedom, and representation, and to document the long history of caste inequality. Rawat also introduces the idea of ‘mohalla collections’ to highlight the role played by Dalit activists and Dalit Hindi presses in generating important historical archives. Rawat argues that ‘mohalla collections’ have played an important role in the emergence of Dalit Studies and in making possible the recovery of Dalit histories.

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Speaker:

Ramnarayan S. Rawat is a historian of South Asia with research interests in caste, race, and social exclusion. He is completing his second book, ‘The Language of Liberalism: The Dalit Public Sphere in Late Colonial India.’ Rawat recently co-edited book, Dalit Studies, with colleague, K. Satyanarayana, based in Hyderabad (India), Duke University Press, 2016. His first book, Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalit History in North India, received Joseph W Elder Book prize (2009) awarded by the American Instituted of Indian Studies and Honorable Mention in the Bernard Cohn book prize (2013) awarded by the Association of Asian studies. Most recently, Rawat was a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

Moderated by Sharika Thiranagama, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University