Intersections between Race/Caste and Religion in Literature
Virtual Session
Description
The intersection between religion and race may seem unlikely at first, but history shows a continuous pattern where religion aligns with social hierarchies like race and caste. Geraldine Heng (2018) highlights how religion, especially in medieval times, played a key role in race-making by linking religious difference with racial difference. Heng takes the concept of race beyond just epidermal race and to a period before ‘race’ as a term comes into use. Paul Taylor (2022) adds that the idea of heritable human difference emerged in the 15th century, marking a shift from anti-Judaism to race-based prejudice through the notion of ‘anti-Semitism’. This shift is illustrated by the term ‘raza’ in the 1611 Spanish dictionary, which referred to both horse breeds and Moorish or Jewish ancestry. Taylor reveals how, for the Iberian Christian rulers, there was something deeply different about the conversos (Jewish converts) and moriscos (Muslim converts) who had been forced to convert to Christianity. Similarly, Gil Anidjar (2007) argues that the concept of ‘Semites’ has been constructed and used in ways that reveal underlying cultural, racial, and political tensions, challenging the notion of Semitic identity as a natural category.
In the eighteenth century, the relationship between religion and race continued to evolve. Stefan Wheelock (2015) demonstrates how Black antislavery writers like Ottobah Cugoano utilized religion for political critique and liberation, while Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X further illustrated the centrality of religious thought in modern Black liberation movements. In India, Gail Omvedt examines how caste and religion intersect in the works of reformers like Ambedkar and Phule. Omvedt (1971) emphasizes that Phule saw religion as a basis for a liberation movement, critiquing traditional Brahmanical literature for promoting caste through religious doctrines. The many ways in which ancient Brahmanical literature propagates caste through the guise of religion are best critiqued in the multivolume works of B.R. Ambedkar.
From a literary perspective, novels often explore themes of spirituality and faith in relation to race and caste. How are these themes and concerns depicted? How do race- and caste-oppressed individuals navigate their identities through religious or secular frameworks? In other words, how do we engage with these questions in a post secular era? This seminar seeks to engage with race and religion in broad and global terms. On this note, Loomba (2013) suggests the comparison of caste and race allows us to track the politics of comparison and the politics of denial of comparison. Once the association of race with color is removed, Loomba suggests, the term retains a broader range of possibilities to understand the problem of racism in different times and contexts. If you have questions, please write to [email protected]
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Antony Arul Valan is a PhD candidate at Ashoka University, Sonipat, India. Valan has submitted his dissertation and is awaiting defense viva. His paper explicating the method of ‘playing’ to think about caste was recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Caste: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion published by Brandeis University.
Speaker Bio
Roger McNamara is an associate professor of English at Texas Tech University. He has published a number of essays and a book entitled Secularism and the Crisis of Minority Identity in Postcolonial Literature (2018). His research interests focuses on how literature explores religion in Postcolonial and American fiction.
Speaker Bio
I, Abbolla Sai Suma, am an independent researcher based in Hyderabad, and this study is co-authored with Dr. Mohan Dharavath from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad. Our research delves into the complex intersection of caste and religion, focusing on the lived experiences of Dalit Christians in Nizamabad, Telangana. It addresses the systemic discrimination these individuals face as they navigate their dual identities while grappling with the challenges of maintaining Hindu Scheduled Caste status on legal documents, despite their conversion to Christianity. This study contributes to understanding how caste prejudice transcends religious boundaries, highlighting the unique struggles Dalit converts encounter within both their original caste communities and their new religious affiliations.
Speaker Bio
Steven S George is a Ph.D. Scholar at the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia.
He was a Visiting Scholar for Oceanic Studies at the University of Witwatersrand, South
Africa (2021-2022), Summer Fellow for Digital Humanities at Michigan State University,
USA (2022), and received the Research Fellowship Award (2023) from Christian Institute for
The Study of Religion and Society. He has published research papers in esteemed international journals and books and has presented his work at various international conferences, including those at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Southampton, and Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (Germany). He co-edited the book Panorama of the Pandemic (Routledge, 2025).
Papers
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Badusha P M is an Assistant Professor of English at Siddartha Educational Academy Group of Institutions and is pursuing a Ph.D in English from the School of Social Sciences & Humanities at VIT-AP University, Vijayawada, India. He holds his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in English Literature from the University of Madras, Chennai, India. His research interests are Contemporary Indian English Literature, Dalit literature, Dalit Muslim literature, and Urdu Feminist Poetry.
Speaker Bio
Izza Ahsan is an artist, anti-caste thinker and a PhD student in Ethnomusicology at Yale University. Her research interests are Anti-Caste Studies, Caste-Race relations, Gender, Culture and Religion. Her Masters thesis titled ‘What is a Female Voice? The Caste-ing of The Female Pitch: Caste and Gender Through Malayalam Film Music’ looks at the construction of the social meaning of female vocality in Indian Film Music within the framework of Brahmanical Patriarchy. Outside of her research, she also enjoys creating music.
Speaker Bio
Saurav Rai is a researcher associated with The Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, with intersectional interests in law, media and literature. His research includes media representations of policing in North India, digital archival practices, jurisprudence and anthropology of affirmative action policies, and contestations over Nepali language and literature in the age of large language models.
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Papers
Speaker Bio
Aniruddha Nagaraj completed his PhD in Comparative Literature and Intercultural Studies from Ambedkar University Delhi. He is now Assistant Professor of English in Delhi.
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Shameer K Sulaiman is an independent scholar who has had two decades of experience in academic publishing as an editor. Shameer Holds MA in English Language and Literature and is associated with Other Books and Cactus Communications. He has translated and published Hidayat al Adkiya, a 16th poetic treatise, in English.
Speaker Bio
Dr. K. Satyanarayana is a professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at EFL university, Hyderabad. He has designed and taught a set of courses under the rubric ‘Dalit Studies’ and published books and essays in the broad field of Dalit intellectual and literary history. He has co-edited two volumes of new Dalit writing: No Alphabet in Sight (Penguin 2011) and Steel Nibs Are Sprouting (Harper Collins, 2013), along with critical anthologies Dalit Studies (Duke,2016), Dalit Text (2020), and most recently, Concealing Caste (OUP,2023). At present, he is most interested in thinking of questions of dignity and equality in Indian literary cultures, intellectual traditions and cultural practices. He teaches courses on cultural theory, Indian cultural history and Dalit studies.
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Vismaya PK is an independent scholar and holds a master's in Comparative Literature from Ambedkar University Delhi. Her primary Research interests are Translation studies, Philology, with a focus on Malayalam and Tamil Literature.
Speaker Bio
Ali Ahsan is Doctoral Candidate and Instructor at the Department of Comparative Literature & Intercultural Studies at University of Georgia in Athens, USA. His areas of interest include the intersection of literature, race/caste and religion. As instructor, he teaches introductory courses on Asian American literature, Black Diaspora literature, and Children's literature.