Rupa Viswanath Speaks of Producing the Social in Colonial South India

As part of the South Asian Studies Council Colloquium Series, Rupa Viswanath, Professor of Indian Religions at the Center for Modern Indian Studies, University of Goettingen, will deliver a paper titled: “Religion, Rights and the Social: Subordination and Space in Colonial South India”.

October 3, 4:30pm • Room 203, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue

In the Madras Presidency in the late 1910s colonial statecraft and caste-specific political activity together produced a new domain of governance, the social.  A story that has been told in some political theoretic accounts of European modernity, viz., that a formerly religious conception of communal life was replaced with a secular conception of “society,” is not adequate to the task this essay takes up.  In her paper, Dr.Viswanath argues that the production of the social in Madras was intimately connected with the regulation of the movement of the Pariah subpopulation (today collectively called Dalits, former agrarian slaves and members of the lowest castes) through public space, and with setting limits on the legitimacy of rights claims made by that subpopulation.  In so doing she address the specific histories of the categorical logic that underlies colonial and postcolonial rights discourse in India.  And from there, she opens the question of how the particular content of three newly distinct realms —“the public,” “religion” and “the social”— was itself the outcome of a multifaceted struggle over the proper stance of government with respect to the Pariah.

In addition to her current appointment at the University of Goettingen, Professor Viswanath has held positions at the University of Pennsylvania and Cambridge University, where she remains a Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College.  Her research and writing primarily address the practices of secular regimes, histories of slavery in colonial South Asia, the political economy and politics of caste, the politics of conversion, and the practices of postcolonial citizenship.  Her book, The Pariah Problem: Religion, Welfare and Caste in Modern India is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.  One current research project examines how the concept of a democratic “people” emerged in the vernacular in late colonial and postcolonial south India, and the kinds of reconfiguration this required of religious subjects and of concepts of “society” and of “the political.”  Another addresses the evangelistic practices and forms of sociality among multilinguistic Pentecostal congregations in Mumbai’s slums.