For the first installment of our inaugural faculty interview series, co-editor-in-chief Isabella Garcia Bernstein and managing editor Alice Bai had the honor of sitting down with Professor Anupama Rao to discuss her course on race, caste, and university, which she which she successfully taught last spring focused on utilizing the university’s archives for historical research. Dr. Rao is a professor in the History and MESAAS departments and director of the Institute of Comparative Literature. Specializing in critical conceptual work on the colonial genealogies and postcolonial legacies of race, caste, and gender, she has directed projects such as “Global Racisms, Cold War Humanism, and the Imagination of Just Futures” supported by a grant from the Mellon-funded Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (2022-2026), and “Geographies of Injustice” anchored at the Columbia Center for the Study of Social Difference. She is the convenor of the Ambedkar Initiative, which was inaugurated in 2018 to bring the world’s oldest and the world’s largest democracies into a shared field of engagement with Ambedkar, the individual, and Columbia, the university where he studies between 1913-1916 as a mediating link. She is currently revising her book, Ambedkar in America: Reading Castes in India for publication.
Dr. Rao attributes her deep engagement with the thought and writings of B.R. Ambedkar to her robust academic training in historical anthropology, working with the relation between history and power. Anthropology brings a kind of “ethical sensibility”, she states. “There is a fundamental ethical transformation of the subject. There is something in the encounter between self and other or others that ought to be transformative at both ends.” In this sense, when examining the history of anthropology as a discipline, she questions the historicity of difference as it appears in written records, and combines this with participant observation and language immersion. Therefore, she urges individuals in the discipline to embrace “anthropology speaking back to history” as one method for understanding how ideas and ideologies rooted in social and cultural specificity change. This mindset encourages the notion that ideologies embedded in social, cultural, and economic life can be tracked, notably through the archives. She brings this interdisciplinary approach to her engagement with Ambedkar's world, and to comparative studies of race and caste in order to explore the diverse roles and functions of a notoriously elusive “archive”.
Ambedkar and the Archive
Dr. Rao’s path to studying the scholarship of Ambedkar at Barnard and Columbia was quite natural. She began her career researching Western India (present day Maharashtra State) during the 19th and 20th centuries. Community, caste, and identity were crucial concepts that led her to Ambedkar’s work with the Dalit community [1]. He notably debated Gandhi in 1932, arguing in favor of abolishing every aspect of caste instead of Gandhi’s idealized belief in the cooperation of castes. After writing her first book, she took greater notice of the fact that Ambedkar studied at Columbia from 1913 to 1916. Through teaching and engaging with students, she observed that Columbia possessed a sizable archive, albeit one that required collection and curation:
“[What we have produced] is a fugitive, student archive. [But] we can begin to think about the ways in which [Ambedkar] he’s formed, the ways in which he’s shaped. We can ask questions about whether (and how) he begins to think sociologically about caste. Through his engagement with anthropology and sociology at an early moment of their formation as disciplines.”
Critical pedagogy, a theme which we will later discuss in further detail, led Rao to situating the archive in time and place: Ambedkar in the university and the “university” in a broader socio historical context. She describes the Ambedkar project as an opportunity for generative learning, as we not only have the ability to learn about Indian history but also that of the United States. Underlining the complex locale of the university generally as an engine for social mobility and democratic education and more specifically as a place of racial, urban segregation, Rao asks students to imagine how Ambedkar’s time at Columbia, and its proximity to Harlem might have impacted his conceptualization of caste. Through this fugitive archive, which Rao describes as a “work in progress”, we also learn about the Black experience and become more invested in the comparison of U.S/Indian notions of caste as being mutually informative. In studying Ambedkar through multiple perspectives, his materials have been transformed into a found archive.
“It's an imagined archive. I wouldn't quite go in the direction of critical fabulation. But it is an archive that is trying to bring together many of the social forces and intellectual ideas that might have surrounded Ambedkar at the time. As a way to ask a broad set of questions about histories of democracy: How do we do political thought, right, how do we teach and learn about it? But also, where can we find [ideas of freedom and equality]?”
Channeling the question of the archive through the figure of Ambedkar has allowed Rao to ponder its institutional aspect: what types of documents are preserved and valued and which records are not? How are documents grouped together? What stories are told and according to what narrative? A major part of the reconstituted Ambedkar archive is the fact that he was a student who hosted indirect dialogues with other thinkers as part of his intellectual development in New York City and beyond.
“It's akin to a project of reorganization if I can put it that way. So, what I wanted to think about was a model, a kind of archive that could begin to approach through multiple frames of influence in the ways in which we might begin to read. But also, to push some of these figures. I mean, these are major figures for [the study of] intellectual history, for political thought, and so on. I wanted to kind of push the ways in which those figures themselves had been thought about to ask: Was there something that they were also [learning] through their engagement with the student who came in and kept talking about caste, and kept pushing them to think about [differences between] caste and race, and wrote an important essay in, you know, 1916, called Caste in India, and so on. This idea behind [this] reconstituted archive, is to begin to bring together people together who may not naturally belong with each other. And to begin to create a new set of associations.”
Rao goes on to counter the structure of traditional archives, and thus challenges the very institutions that have enclosed intellectual material: “The fugitive archive allows us to be a bit playful. It allows us to experiment with putting unlike sources together.”
Fugitive Learning and the University
The university as it exists in a colonial and neocolonial world problematizes the archive. In neoliberal society, the ongoing narrative is that education is inherently emancipatory. However, as we have seen historically and presently, the university as an entity is also exclusionary. Dr. Rao emphasizes that universities like Columbia, especially during the time in which Ambedkar studied, bore (and continue to bear) legacies of slavery, racism, elitism, and gentrification. As a response to this dispossession, a learning itself takes on a fugitive or insurgent character. Hence, university schooling has served as an important site for anti-caste politics because of education’s role in developing critical attitudes towards promoting counter-histories.
“Schooling happens. And again, it can happen in fugitive ways, too. Right? People sitting at home watching someone who’s upper caste learn and imbibing what’s going on through that right? Douglas writes a little about this and you have, you know, various African American autobiographies, for instance, who also speak about this fugitive mode of learning. And so, education allows you to challenge caste itself as an order of superstition, something argued by many anti caste thinkers. It’s an order of superstition. Where you believe that this is a God given system, Brahmins have almost a kind of divine right to you know the Sanskrit Scriptures, to forms of ritual specialization. They dominate society because of this intellectual colonization. And challenging the hierarchy of caste, of high and low, is one of the ways that you challenge superstition.”
The university is not a static body but rather an agent that fosters certain agendas and practices. Viewing archival work as a critical practice, Rao encourages us to “think about, but also virtualize the space of the University and thought by creating this kind of fugitive, reconstituted, or reorganized archive, which aids in creating a counter history… But really, that's what I meant by archival practice. The archive is real. But we also need to how the archive itself is framed and formulated. Who gets to enter the archive? Why is it that some archives are acquired, others are donated, and many archives are lost or ignored?”
Likewise, the concept of exchange and accessibility is a focal point of the Ambedkar initiative. Dr. Rao reflects that “we would like to find interesting ways to communicate with people, with students and faculty, that is, academics, but also artists and activists about a figure like Ambedkar, whose influence is now widely acknowledged. And so there were the annual lectures. And then there was the question of the archive of research in relation to teaching, critical pedagogy. As I started thinking about the archive, I started realizing that it had to be a collaborative project. No individual can take this on and they shouldn’t especially when we approach the archive as a practice and not merely an object, or location. We made some really powerful podcasts during the COVID lockdown where the students interviewed each other about their archival research, their findings. We used this as an occasion to begin to think about what they had learned but to also share this with others, to make the research process vivid, vibrant.” The critical pedagogy embedded in this project challenges everyone to read against the grain and destabilize what we know. This type of teaching and learning builds new research tools, to be sure, but it also challenges disciplinary silos, and defies the idea that the university is a place for reproducing social privilege, which is something that anticaste thinkers like Ambedkar intended to subvert. Often, this happened through the mere fact of their presence on campus.
The Question of Caste and Race
We then turned towards the question of the fraught relationship between caste and race, that is the focal point of Dr. Rao’s ongoing work and the theme of her highly successful seminar taught at Columbia. The concept of caste as it is taught in the American academic context is either seen as a totally foreign concept, or it has often been compared with race since both function as forms of social hierarchy and categories of descent-based difference. Dr. Rao points to the common imperial origin of both caste and race as European notions for understanding difference. While conceptually distinctive, Dr. Rao encourages her students to view the two as inextricably linked through histories of empire and colonial knowledge-formation.
“You can think about caste and race as terms that organized people across an early modern imperial formation, one that covered the entire globe. So, think about how the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic world were knit together through the work of imperial contact and control in the Luso-Iberian world, for example.”
The commonalities between caste and race have been identified throughout history in the fluid usage of the terms to describe similar situations of subordination, hierarchy, humiliation, and control. Dr. Rao raises the example of missionaries finding caste to be a form of “ritual and religious enslavement” which resembled the forms of bondage they found under conditions of racial capitalism inaugurated by the Atlantic slave trade. On the other side of the coin, African American thinkers have employed the term caste to describe their condition as “a form of subordination that could not be reduced to the merely economic [...] so they used caste as a term to describe a more complex social formation of domination.” Dr. Rao specifically advocates for the benefits of using a comparative framework not to create equivalences between categories of caste and race, but because putting them side by side “might actually allow us to see something new [...] it really becomes important analytically and politically for creating new kinds of solidarity and affinity amongst minority communities.”
Indeed, at the site of collision between caste and race also lies the broad-based solidarity that they inspired between anti-caste and anti-racist thinkers. Rao notes that recognizing that ideas of race and caste had created deeply unequal, discriminatory social orders engendered a radical reimagining of liberation, of human freedom and equality. Her scholarship has explored how anti-caste thinkers like Ambedkar, among others challenged the discriminations of caste by creatively repurposing Western ideas of rights, civic dignity, and self-respect:
“In the process of caste being redefined, we begin to see a very complex thought space, let me call it anti-caste, that emerges. These were people who thought about caste as society itself, organized around absolute deprivation, marginalization, exclusion, historical discrimination, a fundamental violation of personhood! So, they begin to use emancipatory categories, the terms of political liberalism with a radical twist. Du Bois, Fanon, Ambedkar - they repurposed concepts drawn from the Enlightenment such as ideas about rights, recognition, selfhood, and self-dignity. These ideas are very, very important to them. These are modern concepts, right? But they used them to fight on behalf of subaltern, stigmatized, and historically dispossessed communities. As these thinkers begin to use those terms, the terms begin to affect a different or a distinctive kind of magic. So now caste is not just something we accept. Instead, the question becomes, how will you break caste? How will you annihilate it? It’s this act of radical abolition, a revolutionary possibility of imagining a world of freedom and an expansive equality that is made possible when people begin to think comparatively across regimes of inequality.”
Current Challenges in the Academy
Returning to the question of the university, the conversation with Dr. Rao took a turn towards the personal in sharing reflections on the current challenges in the academy. In addressing the particularly pressing current moment of activism, Dr. Rao emphasized the importance of the academy itself in mobilizing activism within and without its walls, and the power of thinking, learning, and personal transformation.
“The activism is generative, it is generated from within this space through speaking, writing, and engaging in the critical and creative work of imagination. I also think in the most fundamental sense that every engagement in the classroom is a moment of political ethical transformation; it's a way in which you model a possible ethics of being. So, I think the classroom is a profoundly important space. This is what we do. This is how I earn my daily bread, and so I should be held responsible for what I do. At this point we must stand in support of our students, their right to free speech and the right to protest. We are standing in support of their right to think otherwise, to imagine a more just and humane world. That's the gift, you know. That's the gift that we receive from our students.”
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On this closing note, the Columbia Journal of Asia would like to thank Dr. Rao for her continued support of our independent publication. We would especially like to highlight the generation establishment of the B. R. Ambedkar essay prize which will be awarded in Spring 2025.
NOTES:
[1] The term for “untouchables” in the highly structured and intricate Hindu caste system. For more information on the history of Dalit self-fashioning, read Anupama Rao’s The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India” University of California Press, 2009).