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"Caste India Philosophy."
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Indian philosophy, Indian revolution : on caste and politics
In their brave and challenging book, grounded in political science and the Continental philosophical tradition, Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan engage with the resurgence of upper-caste supremacism in India and its justification via the legacy of 'the Aryan doctrine' and Hindu nationalism. Their essays were written from 2016 to 2023, when India's democratic institutions were subverted and caste-based oppression overflowed into public space-killing and menacing the lower castes of all religions, minorities, women, students and the media. This book chronicles the ascending oppression of democracy in India, a veritable biography of authoritarianism. Dwivedi and Mohan reject simplistic accounts of India's politics as the opposition between 'Hindu majoritarian nationalism' and 'the religious minorities', or between 'Hindu fundamentalism' and 'religious pluralism'.
BOOK
In the Name of Merit: Ethical Violence and Inequality at a Business School
This study examines how meritocracy as a collective social imaginary promoting social justice and fairness reproduces class and caste inequalities and fosters ethical violence. We interrogate discourse of merit in the narratives of the professional–managerial class-in-making at an Indian business school. Empirically, we draw on interviews, full-text responses to a qualitative questionnaire, and a student’s poem. We describe how business school students articulate merit as a neoliberal ethic, emphasizing prudential, enterprising attitudes, and responsibility. However, this positive, aspirational façade of merit masks practices of ethical violence, wherein individuals invoke an ethical principle as grounds for moral condemnation and linguistic injuries. These practices of ethical violence desubjectify disadvantaged students and result in silence as a form of inequality. We contribute to organizational research on inequalities by foregrounding ethical violence and desubjectification. We detail the possibilities of discursive agency in contesting and interrupting ethical violence.
Journal Article
Challenges and Insights from South Asia for Imagining Ethical Organizations: Introduction to the Special Issue
South Asia is a region that two billion world citizens call home. It connotes not only a geographical place but a discursive space that, despite its heterogeneities of ethnicity and political experience, is joined at the hip by a shared experience of colonialism, sovereignty, and globalized neoliberalism. As a result, South Asia is also a site of aspiration and struggle, as well as emancipation and exploitation. Research in business ethics has not adequately addressed the challenges faced by this region, and consequently overlooked the possibility that a fine-grained analysis of the organizational issues faced by this region can generate new insights on ethical organizations across the world. This special issue marks an important step in that direction and reveals potentially translocal insights about how ethical organizations can be reimagined.
Journal Article
Normative Violence in Domestic Service: A Study of Exploitation, Status, and Grievability
This paper contributes to business ethics by focusing on consumption that is characterized by normative violence. By drawing on the work of Judith Butler this study of kajer lok—a female subaltern group of Indian domestic service providers—and their higher status clients shows how codes of status-based consumption shaped by markets, class, caste, and patriarchy create a social order that reduces kajer lok to \"ungreivable\" lives. Our study contributes to business ethics by focusing on exploitation and coercion in consumption rather than in production and of woman rather than of men. It adds to consumer research by revealing how social distinctions not only manifest in status contests in which symbolic power is at stake but also may produce violent exploitation and ungrievable lives.
Journal Article
Educate, Agitate, Organize
Scholars of business and management studies have recently turned their attention to inequality, a key issue for business ethics given the role of private firms in transmitting—and potentially challenging—inequalities. However, this research is yet to examine inequality from a subaltern perspective. In this paper, we discuss the alleviation of inequalities in organizational and institutional contexts by drawing on the ideas of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, a jurist, political leader and economist, and one of the unsung social theorists of the twentieth century. Specifically, we focus on Ambedkar’s critique of the Indian caste system, his outline of comprehensive reform, and prescription of representational politics to achieve equality. We contend that an Ambedkarite ethical manifesto of persuasion—focussed on state-led institutional reforms driven by the subaltern—can help management researchers reimagine issues of inequality and extend business ethics beyond organizational boundaries.
Journal Article
Narrative Worlds of Frugal Consumers: Unmasking Romanticized Spirituality to Reveal Responsibilization and De-politicization
Extant literature romanticizes frugality as a lifestyle trait that helps in the spiritual evolution of consumers, which in turn enables them in overcoming the negative consequences of materialism and over-consumption. Extant studies have not paid attention to cultural contexts, such as caste and gender, which could outline the non-volitional enactment of frugality in societies such as India. We draw from the work of the political philosopher Alain Badiou to argue that frugality embodies non-volitional subjectivities and is linked to processes of responsibilization and de-politicization. We engage with layered narratives from three story-sites and conceptualize frugality as a socio-political subjectivity that disenfranchises consumers and normalizes inequality. Our study provides evidence of how consumers are made to adopt frugality to conform to political conservatism and unequal orders of caste and gender.
Journal Article
Shaking Up (and Keeping Intact) the Old Boys’ Network: The Impact of the Mandatory Gender Quota on the Board of Directors in India
Prior research on the impact of mandatory quotas in one dimension of diversity, on other dimensions, shows contradictory results. We seek to resolve this puzzle by relying on theory in social psychology on homophily and recategorization processes in hiring. In the context of a law mandating a gender quota on Indian boards, we predict and find that boards respond to the law by hiring new women directors who are similar to existing directors in terms of caste and community dimensions. We find that this homophily eifect is impactful to the extent that even high-status women directors cannot overcome it. At the aggregate level, these organizational-level practices result in caste and community inequalities remaining intact despite the introduction of 1309 new women directors. We contribute to research on inequality, board of directors, and affirmative action.
Journal Article
The power of the ‘universal’: caste and missionary medical discourses of alcoholism in the Telugu print sphere, 1900–1940
This article explores missionary medical discourses in three Telugu journals published in the early twentieth century, to analyse how caste pivoted denunciations of alcohol, especially toddy and arrack, in the Madras Presidency and the Hyderabad state. It argues that one women’s missionary journal, Vivekavathi, deployed medical knowledge to formulate subtle and occasionally explicit condemnations of toddy and arrack as unclean and unhealthy substances. The journal relied on universal medical and missionary, British and American knowledge frameworks to mark out Dalits and other marginalised castes as consumers of these local beverages. This stigma was conjured through medical narratives of marginalised castes as lacking in the knowledge of alcohol’s relation to digestion, toddy’s role in ruining maternal and child nutrition, the unhygienic environment of arrack shops and their propensity to ‘alcoholism’. However, this article also traces counter-caste voices who too invoked ‘the power of the universal’ to dispel caste stigma against marginalised castes. While both sets of voices deployed medical ‘enslavement’ to alcohol as an interpretive move, they differed in their social imperatives and political imaginaries, defined in caste terms. This article explores a third set of implications of the term ‘universal’ by analysing global medico-missionary narratives of alcohol in two other Telugu journals. On a methodological plane, this article also pushes for a hybrid reading of what counts for ‘scientific instruction’, where hymns, catechisms, parables and allegories are considered alongside conventional scientific experiments. In that sense, it upholds vernacular missionary publications as an invaluable resource for the social history of medicine.
Journal Article
Pre-colonial irrigation technologies from Bundelkhand, Central India: Can history teach us some lessons?
According to Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas, 2023, 25 countries, including India, which has 1/4th of the world’s population, are exposed to extremely high water scarcity annually. Bundelkhand region, in Central India, is also facing an acute water crisis, which has led to water wars and other conflicts
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bhopal/water-crisis-in-bundelkhand-village-triggers-caste-conflict/articleshow/49715555.cms
(Accessed on 15 January, 2024)]. According to Samra (2008, p. 143), during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the area suffered from a severe drought every sixteen years, which rose by three times between 1968 and 1992. However, things weren’t always the same; archives, native language sources, folklores, etc., provide a different context based on indigenous water management and irrigation techniques in pre-colonial Bundelkhand. Within this context, the research uses historical/archival methodology in conjunction with field narratives to identify water technologies and practices in pre-colonial times, aiming to theoretically contribute to the water history field to tackle contemporary water issues and challenges.
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Journal Article
Race as a political frontier against caste: WCAR, Dalits and India’s foreign policy
This article explains why caste has not become part of the international approach to eliminate racial discrimination by examining a paradigmatic debate in India on the relevance of caste at the 2001 World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa (WCAR) and its ‘Review Process’. In 2001, the NGO-led organisation, National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, made an attempt to include caste-based discrimination in the Durban Declaration; however, the Government of India prevented this development on the grounds that caste was irrelevant in international law. Caste and race became contested political concepts, and the rationale of the Dalit campaign was challenged. Furthermore, the Indian government’s diplomatic opposition to include caste in the WCAR was consolidated by adopting a strict concept of race to create a political frontier against an international human rights regime. The ‘Durban process’ thus reactivated a hegemonic discourse in India concerning race to avoid international scrutiny of caste discrimination.
Journal Article