Back to Events of Thursday 11th July 2024

Thursday
11
JUL

04:15 PM

Violence and Extraction: Caste and the Welfare Regime in Postcolonial Tamilnadu 1950s-80s. - Prof. Rupa Vishwanath - Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Departmental Colloquium Summer Semester 2024 - History Department | Session 7: 11.07.2024

Prof. Rupa Vishwanath - Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

The scholarship on politics in postcolonial Tamil Nadu is overwhelmingly in agreement that the state represents a laudable “exception” in the Indian subcontinent, an example of the electoral supplanting of traditional elite castes by the plebs, genuine democratization and the emergence of an
anti-caste, secular public culture. Identifying a series of interrelated methodological limitations and theoretical missteps in this literature, this paper proposes an alternative account of postcolonial political settlement in Tamil Nadu. It depends on a wealth of archival data on the governance of anti-Dalit violence in the state and the implementation of its caste-differentiated welfare regime—sources the earlier literature entirely ignores—as
well as a theoretical framework that explains how the postcolonial state’s regulation of land and labor sustains that violence.

Address

Südasien-Institut

Gebäude 4130, Raum 010.01.05

Voßstr. 2

69115 Heidelberg

Homepage Event

https://www.sai.uni-heidelberg.de/history/kolloquium/kolloquium.php

Organizer

Südasien-Institut

Homepage Organizer

www.sai.uni-heidelberg.de

Contact URL

https://www.sai.uni-heidelberg.de/history/kolloquium/kolloquium.php