Description
This paper interrogates how caste is (re)produced in the feminist classroom, reflects on the authors’ diverse roles in perpetuating and resisting this violence, and is an invitation to collectively embrace - and hold each other accountable to anti-caste feminist pedagogy. The starting point for this undertaking is a recognition of caste as a structure of violence that is materially and discursively reproduced through pedagogic encounters. Attending to the simultaneous brutality and banality of caste violence (Patel and Da Costa 2022), our approach to recognising and resisting caste in the feminist classroom embraces the shift from analyses of caste as spectacular violence to a framework of everyday violence (Ambedkar Age Collective 2015, Bhoi and Gorringe 2023), mapping and interrupting the routine, ordinary mechanisms through which caste hierarchies and their damaging effects take root in and through feminist pedagogy.
Our aim is not so much to single out and chastise feminist classrooms (including our own) for their failings, but to recognize the gap between rhetoric and reality, aspiration and realization, that continues to haunt them, and uncover the ways in which this gulf is fundamentally structured and maintained by caste. The paper opens by situating the authors and inquiry within our respective (and multiple) social, epistemic, ideological and locations, explaining our choice of research ‘sites’, outlining our collective approach and the epistemic and political allegiances and imperatives that inform them. We then offer an analysis of caste in the feminist classroom, drawing on anti-caste literature and our own experiences to categorise a series of savarna moves to innocence through which caste is disappeared, displaced, or domesticated in the classroom, while also attending to how the violence of caste (re)articulates precisely as it is disguised. Finally,we offer some tentative reflections (and surface tensions) on building and sustaining anti-hierarchical feminist classrooms and futures.
