Shailaja Paik
I am Charles P. Taft Distinguished Professor of History and Affiliate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Asian Studies. My research, writing, and teaching interests lie at the intersection of a number of fields: Modern South Asia; Dalit studies; women's, gender, and sexuality studies; social and political movements; oral history; human rights and humanitarianism. As a historian, I specialize in the social, intellectual, and cultural history of Modern India. My first book Dalit Women's Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (Routledge, 2014 ) examines the nexus between caste, class, gender, and state pedagogical practices among Dalit ("Untouchable") women in urban India. My second book The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (Stanford University Press, 2022; https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=34163) analyzes the politics of caste, class, gender, sexuality, and popular culture in modern Maharashtra. I am working on my third monograph Becoming "Vulgar": Caste Domination and Normative Sexuality in Modern India. My research is funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, Stanford Humanities Center, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Institute of Indian Studies, Yale University, Emory University, the Ford Foundation, and the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center, among others. (See the latest news https://www.uc.edu/news/articles/2020/02/n20893114.html). I have published several articles on a variety of themes, including the politics of naming, Dalit and African American women, Dalit women’s education, new Dalit womanhood, and normative sexuality in colonial India in prestigious international journals. My scholarship and research interests focus on anti-colonial struggles, transnational women’s history, women-of-color feminisms, and particularly on gendering caste and subaltern history. I co-organized the "Fifth International Conference on the Unfinished Legacy of Dr. Ambedkar" at the New School of Social Research direct the Ambedkar-King Justice Initiative at the University of Cincinnati.
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the social, cultural and intellectual life of post-Independence
India. This article focuses on the discourse of chumban bandi
(banning kissing) in the 1950s and 1960s Maharashtra and analyses
how it became a particularly unique index of heightened
transgressive pleasure. I situate this discourse within a larger
public debate, where dominant caste middle-class elites took
upon the responsibility to shepherd supposedly recalcitrant
dominated castes and low-class masses towards decency, civilized
action and citizenship. Many elites energetically worked on their
ideology, which was rooted in high-caste, middle-class and
patriarchal values to create Marathi manus and nation. Drawing
upon hitherto neglected Marathi language texts, I show how
elites policed the kiss to both ban on-screen kissing and paradoxically
harness its energy to engage in the politics of Marathikaran
(creating Marathi regional identity) and create a new Marathi
identity as modern, moral and dec
Building on and departing from the Ambedkar-centered historiography and movement-focused approach of Dalit studies, Paik examines the ordinary and everydayness in Dalit lives. Ultimately, she demonstrates how the choices that communities make about culture speak to much larger questions about inclusion, inequality, and structures of violence of caste within Indian society, and opens up new approaches for the transformative potential of Dalit politics and the global history of gender, sexuality, and the human.
the social, cultural and intellectual life of post-Independence
India. This article focuses on the discourse of chumban bandi
(banning kissing) in the 1950s and 1960s Maharashtra and analyses
how it became a particularly unique index of heightened
transgressive pleasure. I situate this discourse within a larger
public debate, where dominant caste middle-class elites took
upon the responsibility to shepherd supposedly recalcitrant
dominated castes and low-class masses towards decency, civilized
action and citizenship. Many elites energetically worked on their
ideology, which was rooted in high-caste, middle-class and
patriarchal values to create Marathi manus and nation. Drawing
upon hitherto neglected Marathi language texts, I show how
elites policed the kiss to both ban on-screen kissing and paradoxically
harness its energy to engage in the politics of Marathikaran
(creating Marathi regional identity) and create a new Marathi
identity as modern, moral and dec
Building on and departing from the Ambedkar-centered historiography and movement-focused approach of Dalit studies, Paik examines the ordinary and everydayness in Dalit lives. Ultimately, she demonstrates how the choices that communities make about culture speak to much larger questions about inclusion, inequality, and structures of violence of caste within Indian society, and opens up new approaches for the transformative potential of Dalit politics and the global history of gender, sexuality, and the human.