Caste Sensorium of Campuses: Embodied Experiences Searching for Words

The elite higher educational institutions (HEIs) in India have often turned out to be sites of struggle for Dalitbahujan (DB) students rather than fulfilling their egalitarian promise. Since the early 2000s, the anti-caste, Ambedkarite student movements have created a sense of resistance against prevalent forms of caste discrimination on campuses. Despite this, DB students experience implicit and explicit forms of caste discrimination, often leading to a high number of drop-out rates, indescribable forms of trauma, and sometimes even suicides.

Other than overt forms, caste discrimination is also perpetuated through unspoken, embodied acts which are harder to articulate. These habituated everyday forms of differentiation and discrimination beyond legal parlance make the HEIs dreaded sites where, leave alone thriving, even surviving becomes tough. This silent and normalized casteist embodiment of the HEIs keep outcasting DB students on campuses. In short, the HEIs perpetuate a savarna sensorium, i.e., an aesthetics and ethos which negates not just the intellectual pursuits of DBs but also casts their bodies and ‘being’ as unwanted in these spaces. Based on ethnographic accounts of DB women students, the paper signposts the need to understand embodied, affective forms of interactions as crucial to unpacking caste on Indian campuses. 

Carmel Christy K J is an assistant professor of journalism at Kamala Nehru College, University of Delhi. Currently, she is a postdoctoral research associate at The Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut. She has published on the intersectionality of caste and gender, the interrelationship between land, caste and gender; caste discrimination in Indian higher educational institutions as well as on displacement, religion and urban space-making. She is working on her next monograph about urban space-making in postcolonial India with reference to the questions of inequality, environment, protest movements and spatial justice.