When the Margins study back: studying upper caste victimhood

The abjection of dalits (ex-untouchables) and adivasi/indigenous tribes has been studied extensively by anthropologists, as a way to understand caste inequality in South Asia. Instead of focusing on dalit woundedness as the site of caste's production, my paper reverses the gaze to consider the deployment of 'woundedness' by non-dalit or upper castes. Methodologically, this paper combines a dalit-queer epistemology with the ethnographic practice of 'studying up'. Drawing from almost two-year ethnographic research with two communities – jats and brahmins – in North India, I look at how upper castes take hold of the language and performance of subalternity as a means of situating themselves favorably in contemporary Indian democratic politics. 

Through this paper I show how dalits studying upper castes alter the very understanding of world-making and un-makings. In centering questions of affect and body politics by studying upper caste victimhood and woundedness, I show the power of people in the margins studying those who have always studied the margins. By highlighting upper caste body politics, my paper reorients the kinds of citation that caste might have when one is not relying on the dalit body to do the work of standing in for caste. From a dalit-queer standpoint, my paper aims to write against casteist modes of knowledge production that evade questions of accountability and positionality. I build on political understandings of caste embodiment to see how elites rallying around notions of woundedness across the world are dramatically shifting conceptualizations of oppression and humiliation.