South Asian Studies Council EST Colloquium: “Meritocracy and Democracy: The Social Life of Caste in India”

Event time: 
Monday, November 18, 2019 - 4:00pm
Location: 
Anthroplogy Building, Room 105 See map
10 Sachem Street
New Haven, CT 06520
Event description: 

The South Asian Studies Council EST Colloquium presents: 

Ajantha Subramanian, Anthropology, Harvard University:  “Meritocracy and Democracy: The Social Life of Caste in India.”

How does the utopian democratic ideal of meritocracy reproduce historical inequality? My larger project pursues this question through a historical anthropology of technical education in India. It looks at the operations of caste, the social institution most emblematic of ascriptive hierarchy, within the modern field of engineering education. At the heart of the study are the Indian Institutes of Technology, or IITs, a set of highly coveted engineering colleges that are equally representative of Indian meritocracy and, until recently, of caste exclusivity. In this talk, I hope to show that the politics of meritocracy at the IITs illuminates the social life of caste in contemporary India. Rather than the progressive erasure of ascribed identities in favor of putatively universal ones, what we are witnessing is the rearticulation of caste as an explicit basis for merit and the generation of newly consolidated forms of upper casteness.

Ajantha Subramanian is a Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at Harvard University. Her first book, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India (Stanford University Press, 2009) chronicles the struggles for resource rights by Catholic fishers on India’s southwestern coast, with a focus on how they have used spatial imaginaries and practices to constitute themselves as political subjects. Her forthcoming book, The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard University Press, 2019) is on meritocracy as a terrain of caste struggle in India and its implications for democratic transformation.

For more information, please contact Elena Adasheva elena.adasheva-klein@yale.edu.
 

Admission: 
Free
Open to: 
General Public