The Vulgarity of Caste

Awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant 2024

Winner of the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy book prize

‘The most distinguished work of scholarship on South Asia’—American Historical Association

Tamasha is a secular, traveling, public theatre practiced predominantly by Dalits for centuries. The artform spread like a wildfire in the entertainment market in colonial Maharashtra. Its mixture of humor, sexuality, and bombast offered a forbidding combination of the commercial and the lowbrow. Central to these performances were the Dalit Tamasha women who represented both the desire and disgust of a patriarchal society.

The Vulgarity of Caste offers the first social and intellectual history of Tamasha. Drawing on untapped archival materials, ethnographies, popular writings, and films, Shailaja Paik uncovers how Dalit performers, activists, and leaders negotiated the violence, brutality, exploitation, and stigma in Tamasha. She puts these women at the center, as they reclaim manuski (human dignity) and transform themselves from ashlil (vulgar) to assli (authentic) and manus (human).

 

Shailaja Paik is Taft Distinguished Professor of History and Affiliate Faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Asian Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (2014). In 2024, she was awarded the prestigious MacArthur fellowship. Read this interview with her conducted by Navayana’s Anand.

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In the Media:

‘Makes an original contribution to debates on the intersectionality of caste and gender … challenges the mainstream privileged position of feminists’—Pacific Affairs

‘A transformative work that illuminates the intricate and often contradictory lives of Dalit women’—CASTE

‘A powerful new book … a compelling critique of the Brahminical standards of purity and virtue’—South Central Review

‘Reworks our understanding of caste, asserting that caste cannot be studied by divorcing it from questions of gender, region, labour, and the regulation of sexuality’—Nidān: International Journal for Indian Studies

‘An excellent read which requires much patience and careful understanding’—Intersections

‘Courageously diagnoses the closures of anti-caste politics’ combative humanism … offers a way out of those by interrogating its conceptual tools through a situated critique’—Women & Performance

‘A new book examines Dalit women’s roles in the Tamasha and the brutality they endured for the form’—an excerpt from the book was published in Scroll.

‘Cataloguing what is high and what low—the primary pastime of Indian elites. With her new book, Shailaja Paik breaks the mould’—read our blog post announcing the book.

Shailaja Paik won the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship for her scholarship. Read reports on this news in The Times of India, the Wire, Scroll, NPR and BBC.