Durba Mitra, assistant professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, is author of “‘Surplus Woman’: Female Sexuality and the Concept of Endogamy” published in the February 2021 issue of the Journal of Asian Studies. Mitra’s first book, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought, was published by Princeton University Press in 2020. In the Q&A below, Mitra discussed her essay in conversation with Kelvin Ng, a Ph.D. student in History at Yale University who works on unfree labor migration in the Indian Ocean.

This is Number 9 in the “JAS Author Interviews” series at #AsiaNow. Click here to see all posts in the series.

Kelvin Ng: Let me begin by asking about your broader research interests in intellectual history and histories of sexuality. Your acclaimed monograph, Indian Sex Life, provides a fine-grained concept history of the “prostitute,” which emerged as central to both colonial and nationalist knowledge projects. How does the present article stem out of this constellation of interests, and how did you come to be interested in the conceptual history of “endogamy” specifically? 

Durba Mitra: My research analyzes the intimate relationship of sexuality and disciplinary knowledge and asks how deeply normative ideas of gender and sexuality shape the modern study of social life. In turning to the history of the concept of endogamy after the publication of Indian Sex Life, I wanted to make a methodological statement about how we might differently approach foundational theories that have shaped the modern Indian social sciences through a feminist genealogy of key concepts that appear as commonsense in the study of society. This essay on the concept of endogamy is part of an ongoing project of reimagining the lexicon of terms we use to study of social life in decolonizing societies. This project of imagining social scientific concepts anew, what I have termed a “femme-glossia,” critically engages the history of key social scientific terminologies that have often been used uncritically to describe social worlds in South Asia and beyond, terms like “endogamy,” “kinship,” “rank,” and “marriage.”

This approach to this history of key terms in the social sciences undoes any easy dichotomy between colonial and Indian epistemologies. Instead, I reveal the central place of gendered violence and the sexual subordination of women in modern social theories across dominant intellectual traditions of colonial military men, British ethnographers, and Indian social scientists. Evolutionary theories of the imminent promise of modern patriarchal civilization became a site of collusion for colonial and Brahmanical patriarchies, an epistemological resource that was used to justify colonial racial imaginaries of colonized social life as well as the deep history of Brahmanical domination and power. Even as I document modern epistemologies of dominance, I foreground powerful modes of dissent that contest these structures of knowledge in the Indian social sciences, most strikingly in B.R. Ambedkar’s earliest publication, “Castes in India” (1917). Ambedkar’s anti-caste thinking undoes the primacy of ethnological and Indological racialized ideas that pervade Indian social science. Yet his novel critique was all but ignored in most modern sociological studies that followed, perhaps because what Ambedkar called for made the modern study of caste as endogamy all but impossible except as a project of political unknowing.

Ng: Building on an earlier historiographical tradition on the colonial politics of knowledge (e.g. works by Nicholas Dirks, Ronald Inden, Bernard Cohn), recent scholars of Dalit history, feminist theory, and histories of gender (e.g. Sharmila Rege, Aniket Jawaare, Shailaja Paik, Lucinda Ramberg, Anupama Rao) have importantly highlighted the gendered, intimate, and familial violence constitutive of caste subordination. How would you situate your work within this historiography, and what are the stakes of returning to the concept of “endogamy” today? 

Mitra: I feel a strong resonance with theorist Katherine McKittrick’s approach to citation in her book Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press, 2020), where she describes citation as a kind of collective assembly that “breaches” norms and creates new possibilities of storytelling that “risks the sovereignty” of individual expertise. Citations are for me a form of alliance, a way to undo any singular claim to expert knowledge, and I say alliance here as a purposeful inversion of the “traffic in women” that structures social alliance theory. The story I tell in this one essay is built through rich and complicated historiographies on caste and knowledge, most especially through interdisciplinary scholarship on the gender of caste subordination. The story in this essay focuses on an unresolved problem: how have the modern social sciences in modern South Asia centered marriage in the study of “Indian society,” yet they have disappeared the problem of gendered violence and sexual control that sit at the heart of modern social theory of the evolution of societies?

I cite a wide range of thinkers as you note in your question, in particular scholars who have documented how gender and sexuality shape the workings of caste power. These feminist ideas have been transformative for me in this genealogy of the term “endogamy.” In particular, this essay for me builds on the wide-ranging insights of Sharmila Rege, who in her editorial introduction to Ambedkar’s “Castes in India” in her brilliant Against the Madness of Manu (2013), argues that Ambedkar laid the foundations for the feminist critique of caste. This essay follows this line of inquiry to argue that the control of women’s sexuality is the very genesis of the concept of endogamy and places Ambedkar’s early publication in a long genealogy of theories that naturalize endogamy that came before his essay and thrived long after Ambedkar’s intervention. These theories of endogamy, from McLennan to Risley to Ketkar to Ghurye and more, saw endogamy as a neutral descriptor and foundational concept that was a true reflection of caste difference. Today, the supposed neutrality of endogamy as the primary organizing principle for Indian society has been fully upheld as it has been incorporated as a keyword into contemporary Hindutva projects of the racial genetics of caste.

The stakes of such a feminist history of social scientific concepts are high, and such a project of rethinking is collective. Terms like endogamy perpetuate the idea that communities, castes, subcastes, religious groups are hermetically sealed entities, contained and discrete units that reflect the static timelessness of custom in Indian social life. Our inherited social scientific vocabularies naturalize these ideas, and today, dominant social groups and state governments are sanctifying these interdictions into law. When scholars write about inter-caste and inter-religious marriage now, they continually confront the inadequacy of concepts like endogamy. In rethinking this ethnological lexicon built on the control and erasure of women’s sexuality, I am, like so many scholars, thinking about what kind of social science might need to be thought now, in the crisis of our present.

Ng: Your article traces the emergence and development of “endogamy” as a social-scientific concept across both British colonial administrators (e.g. John F. McLennan and Herbert H. Risley) as well as Indian intellectuals (e.g. S. V. Ketkar, B. R. Ambedkar, Govind Sadashiv Ghurye, M. N. Srinivas, and Irawati Karve). What accounts for the mutability and translatability of this concept across distinct fields of knowledge and disciplinary traditions? What are the afterlives of this concept of “endogamy,” either within the social-scientific disciplines or in social life writ large? 

Mitra: I think endogamy has an enduring life in the study of South Asia across European ethnology, colonial ethnography, much of Indian sociology and anthropology, and now Indian genetics because it functions as both as a mode of description, i.e., a group practices endogamy, and as an explanation, a form of reasoning used to “prove” the historical durability of caste hierarchy and social difference. From John F. McLennan’s invention of the terms endogamy and exogamy in his ethnological theory of “primitive marriage” in the 1860s, he claimed endogamy to be a universalist, “scientific” concept that could be used to assess the primitivity of any society. The term was structured through its opposing term “exogamy.” Together, endogamy and exogamy were be used to diagnose all social structures in an either/or scheme of social practice. And then H.H. Risley established the terms as essential to the modern study of caste through his comprehensive studies of castes and tribes and the Indian census, organized through the assessment of groups as endogamous or exogamous. Risley sets the terms for studies of caste that follow, even for Indian scholars who set out to dispute Risley. Endogamy is used again and again by upper-caste Indian social scientists like the Marathi Brahman S.V. Ketkar who created a complicated justification for caste through the racialized language of ethnological evolution. In tracing the origins of these terms in social theory, I point out that both endogamy and exogamy are premised on the control and erasure of female sexuality from the very inception of these terms. By control, I mean the structures of social enforcement from compulsory patriarchal marriage to sexual violence in the rape of women in the stage of “bride capture.” By erasure, I mean quite literally the erasure of women through the social death of widowhood and femicide, the killing of girls and women in social theories that justified female infanticide through the language of “population control.”

B.R. Ambedkar’s 1917 critique offers an innovative intervention in the genealogy of the term “endogamy” in direct opposition to studies like Ketkar’s that came before, but using Ketkar’s citational apparatus. Ambedkar proposes a third possibility for endogamy, not as a social scientific description or explanation, but as a political imposition, an intentional act of upper-caste enforcement. And with the introduction of that third possibility of understanding endogamy, Ambedkar subverts the power of endogamy as a neutral social scientific term that explains caste to instead function as a system of violent caste power enforced by upper-castes through interdictions that control women’s sexuality. Yet Ambedkar’s recasting of endogamy as political superposition is largely overlooked in the Indian social sciences that follow. I suggest we might turn back to Ambedkar’s critical call to radically re-imagine the sociological lexicon that shapes the study of Indian societies.

Ng: Ambedkar’s study of endogamy, in many ways, posed a radical break with earlier Indological studies of caste by inaugurating a powerful critique of caste hierarchy. How did the framework of “surplus” enable his critique of sexual violence vis-à-vis the political enforcement of endogamy? How was his study of caste informed by his disciplinary training in economics and philosophy? In what ways are there continuities between his early 1917 study with his later Annihilation of Caste (1936) or Who Were the Shudras (1946)? 

Mitra: For me, the concept “surplus” reflects Ambedkar’s disciplinary transgression, the way Ambedkar’s critical thought inverts norms by uniting economic, sociological, legal, religious, philosophical and political thought into a single epistemic field. In his concept of the “Surplus Woman,” Ambedkar diagnoses how a strange calculus of compulsory heterosexual reproduction pervades the study of Indian society, a calculus that has an enduring presence in the study of post-colonized societies today in the language of sex ratios and birth rates. Ambedkar’s novel interdisciplinary analytic reflects the breadth of his knowledge and training in everything from philosophy to economics to ethnology. It also reflects the immense difficulties faced by non-Brahman intellectuals who sought to challenge claims to objectivity in the Indian social sciences, because Brahmanism appears in such a wide range of social science as the natural and neutral language of social science. My goal in this essay was to trace endogamy from its invention in ethnology as an idea that was always Malthusian and steeped in sexual control and violence at its inception, and then situate its place in Ambedkar’s field-changing essay and in the social sciences that followed in the twentieth century.

The economic in Ambedkar cannot be disaggregated from the social and political, and he regularly insists in his writings that scholars must assess socio-economic, political, and religious institutions through intersecting issues of class and caste subordination. For example, in Who Were the Shudras? (1946) Ambedkar offers a theory of labor subjugation and occupational power in his critiques of the Indological origins of the history of caste. Traces of his early critique of endogamy can be found in his later condemnation of eugenics and racial theories of caste, as Ambedkar insists across his corpus of work that there is no racial difference between castes. As he argues in Annihilation of Caste (1936) and again in Who Were the Shudras?, Indian society was always but one racial group. In doing so, he reveals the perpetuation of the myth of endogamy in South Asia, arguing that endogamy and its attendant social interdictions of intermarriage were not natural divisions, but upper-caste ideologies of caste domination recast in the false language of racial difference. As he argues in Annihilation, caste is always a negation, a system of violently enforced prohibition, never a positive mode of choice. Again and again, Ambedkar undoes any static social scientific idea of caste through an interdisciplinary exegesis of caste as a system of political enforcement and violence. An extraordinary exegesis of Ambedkar’s thought regarding endogamy in this essay and over his oeuvre can be found in the deeply thought lectures of V. Geetha, entitled “Let’s Read Dr. Ambedkar” published in March of 2020 by the Ambedkar King Study Circle USA (see especially V. Geetha, “Lecture 2 – Caste: A New Vocabulary”). V. Geetha offers some of the most innovative and learned readings of Ambedkar’s many writings in these comprehensive lectures.

Ng: Toward the end of your article, you take up Ambedkar’s call to “kill the ghost of Manu” with reference to recent theorizations on the embodied phenomenology of caste (e.g. Aniket Jawaare’s conception of touching/not touching). This turn finds resonances in cultural studies and literary theory on hapticality, embodiment, and affect. How might these methodologies offer a new conceptual vocabulary for thinking caste?

Mitra: In the essay, I argue that the modern social sciences in India naturalized patriarchal Hindu caste supremacy through the seemingly neutral language of the social sciences of marriage based in the overlapping fields of ethnology and Indology. Ethnological theories of caste and marriage posited patriarchal power and sexual violence as inevitable stages in the making of modern civilizations. Ethnological terms like “endogamy” have historically been used in Indian social science to conceal the mechanisms of political enforcement and upper-caste interdictions that shape caste supremacy. In doing so, both colonial social science and much Indian sociology constituted caste hierarchy as a historical inevitability with racial origins that could be traced in Sanskrit text.

At the end of my article, I open up the question of what is at stake now in returning to Ambedkar’s critique of endogamy that undoes the seeming inevitability of caste difference. Ambedkar’s essay is a call for an epistemic abolitionism. This critique of the neutrality of social science is largely ignored by upper-caste Hindu scholars who write sociology and anthropology in the decades that followed Ambedkar’s “Castes in India” (1917). This immense task, to “kill the ghost of Manu,” shapes Ambedkar throughout his life, quite literally in his public burning of Manu on December 25, 1927 in a “crematorium for Manusmriti.” It is this challenge of annihilation that is taken up by wide range of anti-caste thinkers in the twentieth century, in Dalit feminist critiques of the dominance of Manu in contemporary India, including today in ongoing demands for the statue of “Manu” to fall in front of the Rajasthan High Court. The philosophical works of scholars like Aniket Jaaware present another site for the project of abolishing Manu. Jaaware’s phenomenological approach starkly critiques structuralist theories of caste as wholly inadequate. He puts them aside and instead radically reframes caste through the question of touching and not touching. Jaaware’s text offers an alternative framework for thinking the intricate workings of institutions of caste dominance, exclusion, and humiliation at the intersections of capital and Hindu patriarchal upper-caste power. From the long genealogy of the term “endogamy,” we learn that the abolition of patriarchal caste supremacy requires the systematic undoing of the Hindu Brahmanical patriarchal vocabularies that undergird modern disciplinary knowledge about South Asian societies. The conceptual vocabulary that such a project might yield must undo exclusionary patriarchal claims to expertise and scientificity that made terms like endogamy indispensable. It is a collective political project, not only of critically tracing and undoing inherited concepts like endogamy, but of imagining other ways of knowing.

This is Number 5 in the “JAS Author Interviews” series at #AsiaNow. Click here to see all posts in the series.

Elizabeth Chatterjee is Lecturer in Regional and Comparative Politics at Queen Mary University of London. Chatterjee’s article, “The Asian Anthropocene: Electricity and Fossil Developmentalism,” appears in the February 2020 issue of the Journal of Asian Studies. In the interview below with Utathya Chattopadhyaya (University of California, Santa Barbara), Chatterjee discusses the wider research project the article is a part of, as well as the conceptual and analytical stakes of her argument.

Chattopadhyaya: Let me start by asking about the broader project that the article is a part of. How does your argument about fossil developmentalism prefigure, or open up space to explore other questions in your upcoming monograph? 

Chatterjee: It is in the huge, energy-hungry countries of Asia that our environmental future will be determined, and electricity generation is the single largest contributor to the region’s carbon emissions. Yet, much existing scholarship inaccurately treats Asian energy histories as a mere adjunct of narratives extrapolated from a narrow set of European and American examples. My research is motivated by the idea that accurately understanding the determinants of Asia’s energy regime can help us to understand both the region’s environmental predicament, and the factors that will constrain its sustainable energy transition in years to come. In the present article, I particularly foreground the role of postcolonial states in expanding the fossil economy across much of Asia—a trend I call fossil developmentalism—and how this opened the door to popular conceptualizations of cheap electricity as a national good and an entitlement.

My book, Electric Democracy, explores the political, economic, and environmental dynamics that have shaped the energy regime of India in particular since the first arrival of electricity utilities in the late nineteenth century. The leading role of the postcolonial state is one part of the story, and challenges the far-too-neat equation of colonialism, capitalism, and climate change that has achieved immense scholarly popularity in recent years. But the history of Indian electricity also unsettles some other tenets of environmental history and infrastructure studies. The history I tell refutes the common idea that the expansion of “the grid” automatically extends state power, revealing that state control over electricity flows is ongoing and contested. These contested flows also call into question the assumption that big business has successfully come to dominate Indian politics since the 1980s. In the end, I hope to show that energy deserves a central role in Indian political economy and environmental history alike.

Chattopadhyaya: In your article, I was struck by your attempt to capture the moral economy of state-led electrification in post-colonial contexts. Given the role of the popular in illuminating moral economies, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about the relationship between state-building, movements for energy provision “from below,” and the moral and political axes of energy justice that inform your work? What kinds of popular movements or energy justice discourses would you place at the heart of post-colonial moral economies of energy?

Chatterjee: Thanks for pushing me to expand on this point. There has been an interesting interaction in postcolonial Asia between top-down drives for electrification and popular pressures “from below.” We might think of this in terms of the sociologist Michael Mann’s concept of infrastructural power: The modern state increasingly exercises power by penetrating society, but this is a two-way relationship—societal pressures then penetrate the state in turn. In building the electricity grid, the postcolonial state extends its reach, but the grid also opens up new opportunities for societal groups to compete for power.

European imperial powers did not simply gift electricity systems to their colonies; they were often surprisingly indifferent to the industrial significance of electricity outside the metropole. The perception of lagging behind encouraged many Asian nationalists to grant electricity enormous prominence in postcolonial state-building efforts, the moral valences of which were clear in Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous statement that hydroelectric dams were the temples of modern India. The notion that embracing the fossil energy regime was in the national interest—part of the widely shared state-led project that I call fossil developmentalism—is one that has received short shrift. This is especially from scholars who are more interested in blaming some undifferentiated force of global capitalism for our entry into the Anthropocene, the proposed new epoch in which humans are acting as a geological force on the level of the Earth’s systems.

Due to the huge investments required to build electricity grids, national governments continue to play a leading role. However, postcolonial states have not always been able to retain control over the flows of electricity, nor direct it primarily towards industrial uses. The state-led developmentalist project took on new momentum as new groups of citizen-consumers have laid claim to a greater share of cheaper electricity. Protests over electricity shortages and tariffs have become ubiquitous across Asia, from Bangladesh to Myanmar and Cambodia. In rural India in the 1970s, farmers’ organizations successfully mobilized to secure lower prices for electricity. In rural China, farmers resorted to sabotaging electrical equipment to resist unfairly high prices. In Pakistan, an Islamabad resident told the sociologist Ijlal Naqvi that he steals electricity because “it’s our right.” In some South Asian cities, cutting such illegal connections is so unpopular that electricity officials must be escorted by armed police.

This is why I conclude that the expectation of cheap energy undergirds the moral economy of the modern nation-state. In all these cases, the idea that electricity is a commodity to be governed through a market logic—that tariffs should be set sufficiently high that utilities can make profits to reinvest—has been decisively rejected. Instead, cheap electricity is increasingly regarded as an entitlement, and states that fail to deliver it lose legitimacy. E.P. Thompson explained eighteenth-century food riots as the result of thwarted moral expectations that the price of bread should remain at a customary level, in the face of the cash nexus. As cheap energy begins to be seen as a necessity, scarcity and price rises can provoke somewhat similar protests—albeit directed at the state that is expected to provide it.

To call these movements for “energy justice” in the twenty-first-century sense—implying a concern with environmental sustainability as well as universal energy distribution—risks anachronism. The most effective movements have generally not been those of the most marginalized. The great beneficiaries of the electricity subsidies secured by India’s farmers’ movements were comparatively wealthy agriculturalists, who owned land and could afford tubewells. In Delhi, middle-class residents have similarly organized to resist tariff increases. Outside urban areas, it is less common to see protests of the poor for brand-new connections. The most marginalized tend to have low expectations of the state and its responsiveness at the best of times.

Chattopadhyaya: Thank you for laying that out so thoroughly. You also argue how the history of democratic re-allocation of energy away from commodification and capital accumulation towards consumption, while fraught and unequal, reveals the decommodification of electricity and its re-molding as a national good in the last half century. However, do the historical inequalities of access to electricity, coupled with the tense aspirational politics of entitlement, also limit the fuller possibilities of decommodification in your argument?

Chatterjee: At least in India, the big losers from the new “aspirational politics of entitlement”—I like your phrase!—have been large industrialists and commercial corporations. In most states, they pay much higher tariffs than everyone else does, and since the 1970s, state-level politicians have often preferred to divert scarce power away from factories rather than important electoral constituencies. This is something that ill fits the theory that Indian political life is now dominated by big business, or the popular notion that the global energy regime is underpinned by corporate capitalist interests in a simple and homogenous way. It also highlights a significant tension that has gradually emerged between the conception of electricity as a national good and its decommodification. Rising demands for subsidized energy—even the agricultural subsidies at first justified as crucial for India’s national food security—have drained many public utilities of both power and financial resources to reinvest, threatening the long-term prospects for India’s industrial and economic development.

Of course, inequalities of access remain glaring: as I say in the piece, the democratization of energy consumption has been partial and incomplete, and the right to cheap energy is one often honored in the breach. Huge numbers of rural households in Asia still lack electricity connections or reliable supply; World Bank data actually shows that access to electricity has fallen in rural Pakistan since 1998, due to the country’s longstanding electricity crisis. At the street level, these inequalities open up space for new, informal markets. City dwellers may pay professional electricity thieves or frontline utility workers to secure illegal electricity connections, for example, while wealthy farmers sell water from their subsidized electric tube wells in markets governed by existing social hierarchies of caste and kinship. These socially embedded markets were brilliantly documented by my sometime collaborator, Navroz Dubash, in his 2002 book Tubewell Capitalism. The fact that claims to cheap energy are often honored in the breach in this way helps to explain why electricity is so politicized across much of the Global South, while it remains essentially invisible in many high-income countries.

Decommodification is thus far from complete, as you suggest. My point is not that Asian countries have successfully liberated all their citizens from the cash nexus—that would be a ludicrous claim. I am arguing that it is, in part, the popular aspiration for and expectation of cheap energy that makes energy systems so difficult to change. Fossil-fired electricity is still cheaper than any other source across much of Asia, especially if the additional costs of transmission and backup power for renewables are included. If our histories ignore this positive case for fossil energy, they remain blind to the wickedness of the dilemma we face in trying to tackle climate change today.

Chattopadhyaya: This makes me think of infrastructure. Decarbonizing electricity today, as the article points out, highlights specific infrastructural problems and pressures in Asian countries. Could you flesh out some examples of how mega on-grid projects have squared up against micro-grid alternatives, and the challenges facing more decentralized supply infrastructures in light of the infrastructural priorities of electricity production?

Chatterjee: For a long time, its advocates have argued that renewable energy will bring a more decentralized and democratic future as we shift to local micro-grids. Micro-grid alternatives do have some purchase in remote areas. This optimistic prediction looks less plausible once we take into account the logics of state power and consumer demands just discussed.

On one side, Asia’s politicians and bureaucrats have often been reluctant to cede control over electricity supplies, and so favor centralized solutions. As early as 1958, Nehru himself warned of India’s “disease of gigantism” in the power sector. This has carried over into the renewable age. Governments like India’s have favored an approach that encourages the development of huge solar parks—like Charanka in Gujarat—rather than decentralized supply, even at the cost of mass displacement and local ecological damage. If renewable storage technology becomes feasible, this bias towards centralization may even become more pronounced.

On the other side, micro-grids often struggle to meet rising consumer expectations. A couple of years ago in Kolkata, I interviewed one of India’s early renewable energy pioneers. He was despondent about the way that the grid had chased out microgrids installed earlier in remote areas of West Bengal. Grid power is always better than off-grid for many consumers, he told me, because they are not content with merely running the lightbulbs and TV that small-scale systems can provide. So the off-grid solar schemes he pioneered became obsolete, because people preferred to receive subsidized power from the grid instead. In addition, we should not be naïve about just how democratic some of these schemes are in practice: entrepreneurs are often all too willing to cut people off from private micro-grids if they cannot pay.

Indeed, the biggest impact of micro-grids may eventually be a decidedly undemocratic one. Perhaps the most likely scenario is that wealthy industrial and commercial consumers, frustrated by the high tariffs they pay and the low quality of supply they receive from struggling public utilities like India’s, will choose to abandon the grid in favor of their own solutions. That will leave utilities facing what they fearfully call the “death spiral,” as lucrative consumers exit while only the poor and subsidized remain. This would not deliver the promised energy democracy, but a two-tier future—accompanied, I suspect, by intensifying protests.

Chattopadhyaya: Protests remind me of the association between water and power in India. How would you characterize the relationship between the complex politics of mass electricity consumption, whether hydroelectric or coal, and the emerging scarcity of water itself? What might look different if we put water at the center of analysis while looking at connections between poverty, resource-entitlement, and fossil developmentalism?

Chatterjee: The nexus between water, electricity, and food is critically important in understanding both the political economy of electricity and the ecological damage it has wrought in South Asia in particular. It was the Green Revolution—the great rise in agricultural productivity in the 1960s, thanks to the U.S.-sponsored rollout of new high-yield varieties of crops like wheat and rice—that helped to forge this nexus, a history that Sunil Amrith’s Unruly Waters (2018) recounts with characteristic eloquence. The new crops required vast inputs of water, and so South Asia’s first great wave of state-sponsored rural electrification arrived to energize the private tubewells that irrigated the fields of wealthier farmers. By 1980, India had overtaken the United States as the world’s largest consumer of groundwater; today, its consumption dwarfs the United States and China combined. Large swathes of both India and Pakistan are now contemplating the very real risk of water scarcity.

Meanwhile, coal-fired power plants themselves require huge amounts of water for cooling. This intensifies the freshwater crisis even as water shortages force plants to stop generating, presaging a future of rising rural-industrial competition for water alongside that for electricity. Focusing on water emphasizes how important it is to study the natural environment in tandem with political economy.

These interlinkages show that it is not only the demand for cheap energy that holds the status quo in place. So many popular and entirely justifiable expectations for modern life—cheap water, cheap food, cheap clothing—are similarly underpinned by ecologically devastating processes, from irrigating water-intensive cotton to the use of natural gas for producing fertilizers essential to feed the world’s growing population. This is the true tragedy of the Anthropocene: the story of dramatic poverty alleviation and the story of environmental degradation are in many ways one and the same.

Chattopadhyaya: That story, in Asia, is also fundamentally centered on the state. In analyzing Asian electricity histories and techno-nationalism, you fruitfully distinguish between democratic nation-states and one-party states. Given that the present nationalist regime in India, especially in the last two years, has successfully invited multinational capital into solar and wind energy sectors using strategies like reverse auctions, how would you place the current techno-nationalist politics of state-making in relation to, say, those undergirding the mega dam projects earlier?

Chatterjee: The present regime has certainly given techno-nationalism a new foreign policy dimension. The Paris Agreement of 2015 saw India take a somewhat less stubborn stance on North-South responsibility for climate action, and through high-profile renewable energy targets and the International Solar Alliance, the government has successfully burnished its international reputation as well as investor interest.

Nonetheless, the return of multinational capital is recent and still modest compared to India’s huge total infrastructural investment requirements. Multinational investors were scared off from the Indian electricity sector by the fiasco of Enron’s Dabhol power project in Maharashtra, which underwent multiple renegotiations before being mothballed after Enron’s collapse in 2001 (the plant is now in state hands). While the renewables sector has played host to a belated return of foreign direct investment, the last two years have actually witnessed slowing solar growth, thanks to the reluctance of the subsidy-laden public utilities to buy pricier power and their struggles to pay their debts on time.

As this suggests, there have been more continuities than changes. Even a powerful national government in New Delhi cannot compel subnational governments to comply with its mandates. The weakness of public utilities continues to hobble the sector. State financial institutions still play a crucial role in channeling investment; indeed, New Delhi’s infrastructure lending binge from 2003 to 2008 has saddled the state-dominated banking system with bad loans that are a big reason behind today’s overall economic slowdown. Coal-rich eastern states are especially resistant to the renewable energy transition, and even the government forecasts that the “black diamond” will continue to dominate power generation until at least 2030—not least to satisfy the growing demand for cheap electricity. I don’t think we can declare the arrival of a new phase of Indian capitalism just yet.

This is Number 1 in the “JAS Author Interviews” series at #AsiaNow. Click here to see all posts in the series.

Historian Navyug Gill, Assistant Professor at William Paterson University, recently published an article, “Limits of Conversion: Caste, Labor, and the Question of Emancipation in Colonial Panjab,” in the Journal of Asian Studies. Gill’s research interests include modern South Asia, the political economy of caste and labor, and comparative histories of global capitalism. Currently he is working on a book manuscript, Labors of Division: Caste, Class and the Making of Agrarian Hierarchy in Colonial Panjab.  In an interview with Mukul Kumar, an urban geographer based at the University of California, Berkeley, Gill discusses histories of caste and conversion, agrarian labor and historical materialism, as well as anti-colonial politics and the question of emancipation within the context of colonial Panjab.

MK: In your article, you discuss the limits of a politics centered on conversion. What are the ways in which the political economy of Dalit conversion in colonial Panjab reveals the limits of B.R. Ambedkar’s arguments in The Annihilation of Caste (1936)?

NG: In a basic sense, the political economy of Dalit conversion in colonial Panjab reveals a far deeper and more insidious quality to caste hierarchy than has usually been imagined. A major theme of Ambedkar’s “Annihilation of Caste” speech—which was supposed to be delivered in Lahore in 1936—is the call for Dalits to leave Hinduism and convert to an egalitarian and emancipatory religion. By the early twentieth century, however, I try to show that Panjabi Dalits had by and large already “left” Hinduism in favor of Sikhi, Christianity, Islam, and their own Ad Dharm faith, and yet were still excluded and exploited as landless agricultural laborers. In other words, caste was not annihilated by a rejection of Brahminical precepts and rituals or by denouncing the laws of Manu. In fact, it manifested more tenaciously through a novel alignment of caste with occupation as the basis of land ownership. This speaks to a broader issue I attempt to take up implicitly, which is a critique of the generic, “all India” framing of questions such as caste and conversion. Things begin to look very different once we shift the parameters of inquiry from the assumed perspective of the imperial or national center.  

MK: In addition to your engagement with B.R. Ambedkar, you discuss Karl Marx’s concepts of public citizenship and private property. What does Marx’s idea of “double existence” suggest about the contradictory experiences of Dalit laborers in colonial Panjab? 

NG: Marx’s essay, which I must say is perhaps one of the most endlessly fascinating pieces of modern writing, offers a possibility to de-naturalize the common sense division between public and private, and all that it has come to entail. Although he begins with religious discrimination, I would argue it has little to do with Judaism or religion per se. Instead, he is challenging the notion that any form of debilitating difference—of religion, or more crucially, property or wealth—is to be remedied by banishing it from a public sphere of at least formal equality and confining it to an openly disparity-ridden private sphere. Thus, even if a state becomes explicitly secular, or removes income requirements for participation in civic life, the difference of religiosity or poverty remains intact as a feature of a private self, exempt from redress. For colonial Panjab, I attempt to explain how Dalits faced a similar (though not identical) contradictory predicament. Under the leadership of Mangoo Ram and the Ad Dharm, they could achieve a kind of emancipation by publically rejecting a faith that expressly humiliated and subordinated them. But in private, as landless laborers in the agrarian economy, they had little alternative but to continue in a position of abject exploitation. This is the contradictory double existence that nearly everyone living under the modern rule of capital is forced to endure.

MK: You mention a Dalit laborer who traveled from Panjab to pick fruits in California’s San Joaquin Valley and joined the anti-colonial Ghadar Party in 1913. Could you tell us more about this story of anti-colonial politics and how it relates to your broader argument concerning the question of emancipation?

NG: There are several scholars who have studied the history and politics of the Ghadar Party with rewarding detail and insight, among them, Harish Puri, J.S. Grewal, Maia Ramnath, Darshan Singh Tatla, Radha D’Souza, Malwinderjit Singh Waraich, and Seema Sohi. The wider story of Panjabi laborers along the western U.S. and Canada in the early twentieth century is simply extraordinary, and one that poses a fundamental problem for narratives of anti-colonial resistance, mainstream nationalism (Indian or later Pakistani), and revolutionary socialism. Specifically in this case, the fact that Mangoo Ram describes how he, as a Chamar, found deep affinity with a group of largely Sikh Jatts in creating a movement to overthrow British rule in South Asia upends nearly every convention about the relationship between oppression and liberation. It demonstrates a remarkably tactile complexity, the ability to pursue multiple commitments and convictions irreducible to a single cause. There was no static ranking of subordination; ending colonial rule did not merely compete with opposing caste discrimination. Rather, at different moments and under changing conditions, priorities shifted to make new political possibilities, and demands. Mangoo Ram’s involvement with Ghadar captures how the most exploited in a society could and did have aspirations not only to alleviate their own suffering, but to fight for the liberation of all. We have few instances of such a forceful imagination, and have yet to come to terms with it.

MK: Your article engages with a wide range of historical and political questions, from Dalit politics and agrarian political economy to the Ad Dharm movement and the limits of conversion. How does the history of Dalit conversion in twentieth-century Panjab shed light on the politics of caste and conversion in the current historical moment? 

NG: This is the sort of question I would especially prefer to hear your thoughts on! But, if I must hazard an engagement, I would say the history of Dalit conversion in early twentieth century Panjab suggests a much more capacious future than the one currently sought by almost every mainstream political party in India. The most the latter aspire to is a degree of adjustment of a status quo that by design perpetuates strikingly brutal forms of inequality and inequity. However, what seems to have been lost—or, perhaps more vividly revealed—in the intervening decades is a realization that various kinds of ascrpitive difference could be accommodated (gradually, if fitfully) within the existing economic hierarchy. Dalits were able to convert out of Hinduism but not out of the constraints that structured their subordination precisely because exploitation itself was not seen as a form of discrimination. In other words, as long as caste is limited to a debate over the logic of purity and pollution but not of property, its dissolution cannot result in an egalitarian society. Mangoo Ram approached this horizon, and even made gestures toward traversing it, whereas now it has largely receded into the distance. The only partial exceptions in east Panjab might be some of the radical rural labor unions who have articulated a demand for land redistribution, terming their members “be-zamin kisans” [landless peasants] as opposed to “khet mazdoors” [field laborers]. Facing unremitting hostility from both dominant caste landowners as well as the state, they continue their struggle nonetheless.

Read the February 2019 issue of the Journal of Asian Studies at Cambridge Core—with free open access to all through April 15, 2019.