"Interrogating the historical discourse on caste and race in India" by Prof. Gita Dharmpal-Frick at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 22nd February 2012

Time : 3:00 pm

Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)

Place : Seminar Room, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library ( NMML ), Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg, New Delhi
Venue Info :  Events | About | Map | Nearest Metro Station - 'Race Course(Yellow Line)'

Event Details : The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library cordially invites you to a Public Lecture on ‘Interrogating the historical discourse on caste and race in India’ by Prof. Gita Dharmpal-Frick, University of Heidelberg, Germany.

Abstract : In this lecture it will be argued how the epistemological category of ‘caste’ was structured in colonial India through the transposition of European understandings of race into Indian social conditions. Whilst early modern European observers had a relatively fluid understanding of community structures in India (reflecting their perspectives on the quotidian power relations in the subcontinent where varna norms were superseded by exigencies of practical politics and social mobility), contrastively, from the late eighteenth century onwards, British administrators and scholars interpreted scriptural varna dictates through race-based hermeneutic frameworks. Economic and political subalternization of Indian communities went hand in hand with the colonial mapping of jatis into imperial grids of ‘racialised caste’ based knowledge. This stereotyping compounded with political hegemony and the new science of anthropometry facilitated the incorporation of service personnel into the civil administration (the so-called ‘upper castes’), on the one hand, and into the military machinery (the ‘martial races’), on the other, as well as the marginalisation and at times even extermination of rebellious rural communities (the ‘criminal tribes’). Confronted with this social engineering determined by racialised taxonomic systems, some Western-educated Indians deployed the superimposed colonial categories to assert parity with the British based on a supposed Aryan kinship. Others, including non-Brahmins from the Dravidian South as well as pan-Indian communities who had become economically and politically disempowered in colonial India, used the racial vocabulary to formulate ideas of subalternity and victimhood vis-à-vis the Brahmanised/ North Indian/Aryan and Western-educated literate groups, thus leading to seismic societal schisms, the resonances of which continue to be felt in Indian political and social discourse today.

Speaker : Prof. Gita Dharampal-Frick acquired an interdisciplinary academic training in literature, philosophy (Manchester, England and Leipzig, East Germany, 1970-74), social anthropology (Cambridge, England, 1976) and Indian cultural history (SOAS, London and Paris, Sorbonne, PhD, 1980), and completed her Habilitation (= German professorial dissertation) in early modern history (Freiburg, Germany, 1992). Her published research into pre and early colonial European documentation on India underscores the continuities and discontinuities between early proto-ethnography and later scientific Indology. She has also researched (as a Heisenberg Fellow, 1994-2000) into modernizing processes and resistance movements in post-independence India. Having held a visiting lectureship to Stanford University (Department of History, 1993-94) and the Dr. Radhakrishnan Chair to Hyderabad Central University (2006), her current interests, as Head of the Department of History at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg (since 2002), deal with topics ranging from maritime cultural history of the Indian Ocean region (1400-1800), medical history, religio-ritual transformations (1500-2000) and the socio-cultural and political history of the colonial period, in general, with a special emphasis on Gandhi’s movement of political and cultural resurgence.

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