DYING OF CASTEISM: ON QUEER SOCIO-POETICS AND THE EMBODIED VIOLENCE OF CASTE IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA

Abstract

This dissertation chronicles the minor gestures, visceral and sensorial practices, and queer socio-poetics and politics of ‘anti-caste livingness’ amidst everyday regimes of structural casteism in contemporary urban northern India. Based on fine-grained ethnographic fieldwork between 2019-23 with queer Dalit/Bahujan doctors, community healthcare workers (ASHAs), Dalit-feminist poet-creatives and a collective of ‘lower-caste’ substance-users and their families across multiple sites in northern India, it offers novel theoretical and ethnographic insights into how assemblages of casteism, gender, sexuality, racialization and quotidian politics intensify and exceed the (hetero)normative modes/codes of postcoloniality, abjection and negation in South Asia, while striving to draw anthropological attention to the everyday conditions under which anti-caste consciousness (chetana) is produced through ordinary experiences of pain (dard), humiliation (tiraskar), debilitation (tootan/durbalta) and injury (ghav). By striving to put Dalit, Black, feminist and queer-of-color scholarship in dialogue with critical race and caste studies, cultural/medical anthropology, Hindi Dalit literature and anti-caste aesthetics, it also offers radical insights into the world-making potentials of Dalit/Bahujans to imagine, intuit, sense and hone radical practices of redress and repair. Importantly, by provincializing queer/race studies from the global South, it further offers a critical rumination on the possibilities of ‘queer hope’ and ‘caste-queer’ ways of re-signifying the carceral logics of casteism and racialization. In so doing, this dissertation also makes critical interventions in addressing the fraught relationships between caste, public health and everyday life-chances; sexuality, desire and the erotic life of embodied caste violence, and the queer intimacies animating everyday struggles for reparative justice for bodies ‘dying of casteism.’