Caste in/as Humanities:

Unsettling the Politics of Suffering

Authors

  • Kalyan Kumar Das
  • Samrat Sengupta

Keywords:

Varna, Untouchability, Colonial Modernity, Experience, Self-narratives, Re-textualization

Abstract

 

From the time of early travel narratives on South Asia by western tradesmen, orientalist scholars like William Jones, Max Muller, narratives written by Christian missionaries like Mead or Caldwell or the denigrators of ‘oriental societies’ like G.W. F. Hegel and concerned critics like Karl Marx to much of our postcolonial socio-political struggles, ‘caste’ has been perceived as either an elusive, resilient hydra-headed monster or a unique feature of the Hindu society that pre-empts competition that western modernity brings about. However, caste could be read both diachronically as well as synchronically, as a historical formation as well as a structural imperative. This makes any easy understanding of the question of caste impossible. Textual evidences are not enough, neither are the various archaeological resources, as we know that each historical moment is also constituted by the logic of synchronicity and structure which produces its own form of aphasia and silence. This introduction to the Special Issue of Sanglap on ‘Caste in Humanities’ would show how question of caste is also about silence and therefore requires incessant and seamless re-textualization.

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Author Biographies

Kalyan Kumar Das

Kalyan Kumar Das, Department of English, Presidency University

Kalyan Kumar Das is Assistant Professor of English, Presidency University, Kolkata. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Dalit Studies, Department of English at the University of Delhi and he is presently an invited Guest Faculty at the Department of Comparative Indian Language and Literature, University of Calcutta. His research works on caste, Dalit Studies, Subaltern Studies, historiography and American Pragmatist philosophy have been published in leading academic journals like the Economic and Political Weekly, Dewey Studies etc. His most recent work is his Foreword to the South Asian edition of Aishwary Kumar’s book Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi and the Risk of Democracy (Navayana, 2019).

Samrat Sengupta

Samrat Sengupta, Department of English, Sammilani Mahavidyalaya, University of Calcutta

Samrat Sengupta is Assistant Professor and Head of the Dept. of English at Sammilani Mahavidyalaya. He has a PhD from Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. His latest publication is on Bernard Stiegler and Jacques Derrida’s take on teletechnology and modes of power, published in an anthology of essays on Posthumanism from Springerlink. His work exists in the fields of Gender theory, Post-structuralism, Memory Studies and Philosophy of literature. His forthcoming work included a co-edited volume on Bengali Author Nabarun Bhattacharya from Bloomsbury and a guest edited issue of the international journal Sanglap on “Caste in Humanities”.

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Published

2021-11-09

How to Cite

Kumar Das, K., & Sengupta, S. (2021). Caste in/as Humanities:: Unsettling the Politics of Suffering. Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, 6(1), 1–6. Retrieved from https://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/114