School of Social and Political Science

Description

Suraj Yengde is one of India’s leading scholars and public intellectuals. Named as one of the '25 Most Influential Young Indians' by GQ magazine and the 'Most influential Young Dalit' by Zee, Suraj is an author of the bestseller Caste Matters and co-editor of award-winning anthology The Radical in Ambedkar.

His lecture is:

The Biologism of Race and Caste

The fundamental difference between race and caste is its interaction with modern capitalist forces and the similarity between them is that of the genealogy. Race becomes race (which eventually became white as opposed to the rest) when it was faced with the early modern material world. It developed from concrete to abstractness. In the Greek and Roman Empire, darker people were not enslaved for being black or looked down upon. In fact, records show that black people were kings and generals in the Graeco-Roman world. That didn’t stop the overwhelming sight of scorning of the black skin in the Greek version, although for different reasons. It was not an outright racist colorism but merely a consequential thought. This thought influenced the Islamic Slavery which was transported into the Enlightenment phase in Europe. In this talk, we shall look at the instances of interactions between the forces of the Caste regimen with that of the Race and racializing project. The story of race is quite recent compared to the jati-based varna caste order. The influx of European settler colonization in athwart the colonial empire of the past three centuries produced complex versions of Racialized Castes and the Indian Racial Caste system. These complexities are now attempting to gain visibilities in the intense politics of the twenty first century.