Perhaps no other arena in modern India is the site of such charged political and social contest as education. India is the most unequal society in the world wherein the hegemonic capture of socio-economic power by an oppressor savarna/“upper caste” minority has operated through violent control over knowledge, and the exclusion of the vast majority of oppressed Dalit-Bahujan/“lower-caste” communities from basic access to education. The power of education as a route out of intergenerational oppression was recognized by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian constitution, in his exhortation, “Educate! Organize! Agitate!”, and operationalized through affirmative action policies by reserving seats in educational institutions, that sought to democratize access to educational institutions of historically marginalized communities. Savarna/ “upper-castes” have responded by mobilizing a poisonous discourse of “merit” against affirmative action. Dalit and oppressed caste students are routinely subjected to humiliation and aggression, marked out as “undeserving” students, by their “upper-caste”/savarna classmates. This routinized humiliation is most tragically exemplified in the spate of suicides by Dalit and oppressed caste students in elite institutions of higher learning such as the IITs.

However caste discrimination is not sequestered in India. Fifty years of Indian immigration to the United States has operationalized caste as a virulent transnational structure of oppression. While Indian Americans represent themselves as “caste-less”, and caste as a quaint phenomenon of the past that has been left behind in India, caste is alive, well, and thriving in the United States. The CISCO case brought by a Dalit employee against his upper-caste employers, forcefully exploded the myth of castelessness in Silicon Valley, making caste a question of public discussion.

In the past three years anti-caste activists and scholars, and their allies, have succeeded in drawing attention to caste discrimination on US campuses. This struggle has succeeded in many universities, such as Brandies University, Brown University, and the University of California State University system, adding caste as a protected category in anti-discrimination codes. This panel reflects on, and draws linkages between, struggles over education in India and the transitional histories of caste struggle in the United States, with the hope that, through rigorous critical engagement with structures of oppression and the discourses they engender, it may be possible to build a more just and egalitarian future.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Program in Critical Theory, Department of English, Global Metropolitan Studies, The Center for Race and Gender, Institute of South Asian Studies, and Department of Anthropology.