Of Class, Caste, and Marathi Marxism: A Conversation with Juned Shaikh

In 2009, Juned Shaikh, a postdoctoral fellow at the South Asian Studies Council, requisitioned files in the British Library pertaining to “Proscribed Literature” from the tumultuous decades of the 1920s and 1930s leading up to India’s independence.  A term used to designate printed material that was banned by the British colonial government, the proscribed literature Juned sought was produced by leaders of the communist movement who had been imprisoned for allegedly treasonous activities.

Speaking to the South Asian Studies Council about his research, Juned described how what began as a side project of his larger dissertation developed into a distinct and fully-fledged inquiry, resulting in the paper that he will discuss in the SASC colloquium on January 25, 2011.  Explaining the emergence of his inquiry, Juned observes that in the 1920s communist leaders imprisoned in jails in Meerut and Pune read and produced Marathi translations of works by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the hope that vernacular editions would allow their ideas to find wider audience and support, and foster the forging of worker solidarity across the division of caste.  Juned notes that his curiosity was peaked by the repeated use of the term Dalit, a word that translates as “oppressed” and which, through Ambedkar, gained currency as a popular and political term for India’s scheduled (formerly called untouchable) castes.  In his talk, Juned will explore historically the production of translations by imprisoned communist leaders, and examine how the translations themselves encode even as they seek to overcome social and caste hierarchies.

Juned’s examination of what he calls “Marathi Marxism” builds on his dissertation research, which explores how Dalits navigated urban life in Bombay from the late 19th to late 20th centuries.  His dissertation examines four central constituents of urban life: the public sphere, literature, the trade union movement, and housing.  During his tenure as postdoctoral fellow at the South Asian Studies Council, Juned has extended this research to explore how the concept of dignity was used by the state to govern what were then known as untouchable castes, but also afforded such groups the space to make claims for material and symbolic redistribution of resources from the state.  His time at the Council has fostered the opening of a further line of inquiry – how Dalits navigated Bombay’s legal systems and how questions of legality shaped the formation of Dalit selfhood.  He hopes to return to Mumbai to pursue further research on particular court cases that reveal the ways in which Dalit identity was negotiated within and through the legal system.

As a postdoctoral fellow, Juned is offering two undergraduate-level courses.  The first, offered in Fall 2011, is titled History of Modern South Asia. Spanning 500 years of history in the subcontinent, the course asked questions such as what does modernity mean? What is colonialism? What is post-colonialism? and encouraged students to make sense of the different post-colonial trajectories of countries in South Asia.  His current course, offered in Spring 2011, is titled Visions of the City and brings together urban history, labour history, and the history of caste and gender to examine the ways in which India’s cities have been created and governed.

After completing his fellowship year at the South Asian Studies Council, Juned will take up the position of Assistant Professor of History at Xavier University in Ohio.