To be upper caste/to be a victim

Abstract

By treating the upper caste as an ethnographic category, this article shows what an endeavour of flipping the ethnographic gaze away from Dalits and onto the upper caste looks like. In studying upper caste victimhood, this article sees how being a victim acts as an important tool of mobilization and collectivization among upper castes. In interweaving cultural analysis and ethnography, I engage the complex relationship between regimes of affect, power, and caste as they implicate the production of a twisted, weaponized form of vulnerability. When contemporary Indian politics is saturated with narratives of upper caste pain, which thereby stand as a testimony to what it means to be a human, I understand upper caste affect via their wound to highlight the simultaneity of upper caste's humanity and their inhumanity. I argue that we should take seriously and examine upper caste ‘woundedness' as it helps us better understand the embodied nature of caste and its relationship with violence. In doing so, I re-create modes of citation and knowledge production using a language which doesn’t imagine the marginalized body to hold the burden of doing the work of pain, trauma, and violence.