On the day that our first emails were exchanged, the Supreme Court of India had just declared that caste-based division of prisoners should stop. A small step, after 77 years of Independence, but still a milestone for those who have fought for the end of caste discrimination, decades on end. At the other end of the email is Dr Shailaja Paik, who has just won the MacArthur Foundation award for ‘exploring the intersection of caste, gender, and sexuality in modern India through the lives of Dalit women’. An award that would bring her USD 800,000 in grant, an award that doesn’t ask for applications but is bestowed on those the foundation deemed worthy.
Shailaja, a Dalit historian and PhD holder from Maharashtra, has been affiliated, since 2010, with the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, where she deals with women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and Asian studies. Her award, which recognized her work on caste, gender, and sexuality, has sparked backlash from right-wing and casteist groups online, who hurled malicious comments at her. In our interview, she chose not to dwell on it, but subtly remarked that we can let our work educate them.
Much has been done, she says, but there is still a lot of work. “The issue of caste discrimination needs to be strengthened at the international level. Women are educating and exploring new avenues, and transgressed many hierarchies; yet they cannot move freely in the society, they are trolled for their views, they are called upon to be “decent” mothers, sisters, and wives and to fall in line,” Shailaja says
As a Dalit and woman raised in a slum, she says she could not move freely in the evenings and nights as boys and young men did. As a woman she has faced gender and racial discrimination.
And always, the sword of humiliation based on caste hung above her. “Living in a slum on the margins of the city and with limited resources was the first real lived experience of being a lowly outcast Dalit. The social and spatial background haunted me to no end and I did my best to avoid speaking to my friends about it,” she says about her childhood in Maharashtra.
Shailaja was born in a village called Pohegaon and raised in a slum in Yerawada in Pune. After finishing her Bachelors and Masters in Arts from the University of Pune, she took her PhD from the University of Warwick in Coventry, England.
“I was interested in UPSC (Union Public Service Commission) and I also appeared for the main [exam] twice. However, my father died and I had to take up employment to sustain my family. I took up a senior lectureship in Mumbai,” she says. In an interview to NPR, Shailaja spoke about her father attending night school while working odd jobs during the day and becoming the first Dalit man from his village to get a Bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Sciences.
When he passed away, it fell upon Shailaja to support her family, along with nursing her dreams for education and employment. She tells us, “While I was teaching, I got the ICSSR (Indian Council of Social Science Research) Fellowship to start my PhD. I knew how education had helped me escape the slum and I was interested in finding out about other women, especially Dalit women — the oppressed of the oppressed, Dalit of Dalits. After I started working on the topic, more gaps in scholarship emerged — there were quantitative works on Dalit women’s education, but no qualitative, in-depth work. Hence, I decided to study their access to and process of formal education.”
In her first book, Dalit Women's Education in Modern India - Double Discrimination, she addresses among other things the question of how education has benefited the lives of Dalit women. Education proved to be a magic wand for many Dalit women, Shailaja says. “It propelled social and economic mobility, and at the same time it also created some constraints. It was a mixed blessing. Many women gained access to primary, secondary, and higher education. Due to their education, they could escape the slum, entire middle-classes, explore new employment opportunities, and build new futures. At the same time, many Dalits also faced much discrimination that manifested in new ways in schools, colleges, and employment sectors.”
She was, for example, made to stand up in her class “because the peon wanted to register us”, she says. The primary concern of her first book, she writes in the introduction to it, is to analyse the contradiction between the promises of education as envisioned by leaders such as Jotirao Phule and BR Amedkar and the form of education provided in practice by the modern Indian state.
In a short speech, shared by the MacArthur Foundation, she says that to write and understand the stories of the marginalised and the excluded, you need a different method. “Because their stories are not archived, they are not documented. So I created my own archive of oral histories with Dalits who have never had an opportunity to be able to speak to anyone about their ideas, about their lives.”
In Shailaja’s second book The Vulgarity of Caste that came out in 2022, she explores what she calls the sex-gender-caste complex. By that she means the sexual and gendered arrangements of the caste system as they operate to oppress Dalit women. The book focuses on Dalit Tamasha women, who perform a form of public theatre that involves song and dance, and is considered traditional Dalit performance art. However, they have been time and again branded ‘ashlil’ (vulgar) by the larger society, Shailaja writes in her book.
“The control of sex and female sexuality leads to the social reproduction of caste. Women are to be regulated in terms of their sexuality because any transgression would threaten the caste hierarchy. Tamasha women were constantly under the threat of physical abuse, caste and sexual violence, because of the sex-gender-caste complex. They would have to dance to the tunes of dominant caste men or else their homes could be burnt, they could be raped, their family members could be threatened and attacked,” she says.
In her speech, she addresses this concern – how the ways in which you move around are seen as decent or indecent and how it is rooted in the politics of caste, gender and sexuality. “It is because of these gaps in scholarship that we need to focus on the most deprived if we want to build the most inclusive and the most democratic and transformative politics. It helps us understand the way inequality and exclusion functions in different societies as well as how we can contribute to the story of human emancipation globally,” she says.
With her award, Shailaja hopes to collaborate with other MacArthur fellows in creating different opportunities to work on social justice.