Dr. Indrani Chatterjee: „Historicising Caste, Decolonizing Slavery“

BUDDHISM AND CASTE INITIATIVE SPRING 2025 LECTURE SERIES

Talk:
Dr. Indrani Chatterjee, „Historicising Caste, Decolonizing Slavery.“
Professor of History and Distinguished Chair on Democracy and the History of South Asia

February 28, 2025
10am EST / 8:30pm IST (on zoom)

Please register here for this talk: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/c2c16cde-e68e-437b-b501-f1de5bd4843b@ba5a7f39-e3be-4ab3-b450-67fa80faecad

Abstract: 

Historians such as Rosalind O’ Hanlon and Sumit Guha have established that varna was an ideological formation that had a contentious political and social relationship with jati-formation in early modern western India. Taking my cue from these historians, I will read a set of documents from regional archives in which members of particular jatis sold themselves and their immediate family members. By tracing out the implications of such sales, I point to the variability of purity and pollution codes, supposed to constitute the core of varna ideology, and reveal its limits in early modern eastern India as well. I propose that we use such historical data to interrogate the plantocratic model of slave-labor for its grip on the imaginations of early Indologists who translated Brahmanic texts and reaffirmed ‘caste’ on a scriptural basis, regardless of the ongoing historical transformations of the eighteenth century. 

Bio:

Dr. Indrani Chatterjee is the John L Nau III Distinguished Professor of the History and Principles of Democracy at the Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA. A historian of South Asia, she researches the intersections of gender, religion and politics between the late 17th and 20th centuries. She is the author of Gender, Slavery and the Law in Colonial India (Oxford University Press, 1999), editor of Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (2006) and co-editor with Richard Eaton of Slavery and South Asian History (2007). With the aid of two grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and a fellowship at the Yale Agrarian Studies Colloquium, she published Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages and Memories of Northeast India (Oxford University Press, 2013), which won the Srikanth Dutt award from the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (New Delhi, India). She has also contributed chapters to edited volumes, essays to print and electronic journals. Currently, she is revising a manuscript on the intersections of caste, gender and wealth and how they shaped subjectivities in South Asian pasts.