Akhil Kang

AKHIL KANG, then a graduate student at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, was awarded funding in April 2021 to aid research on “The Wounds of Caste: A Dalit-queer Account of Savarna Injury,” supervised by Dr. Lucinda E.G. Ramberg. The abjection of dalits and adivasis has been studied extensively by anthropologists, as a way to understand caste inequality in India. Instead of focusing on dalits as a site of caste’s production, this project reverses the gaze to consider the deployment of “woundedness” by non-dalit or upper castes. Methodologically, this project combines a dalit-queer epistemology with the ethnographic practice of “studying up.” The grantee looks at how upper castes take hold of the language and performance of subalternity as a means of situating themselves favorably in Indian democratic politics. The research centers two questions: 1) in what ways do upper castes construct their personhood and identity through victimhood and woundedness; and 2) what are the legal, material, and political effects of the upper caste’s claim to injury? This project draws on 22 months of ethnographic research with two upper caste communities — jats and brahmins — in north India. This project examines the production of an affective and political identity that unites the subcastes of jats and brahmins into a broader “savarna” identity. By analyzing upper caste woundedness from a dalit- queer standpoint, this project aims to write against upper caste modes of knowledge production around caste that evade questions of accountability and positionality.