Centre for South Asian Studies

Description

A century after Dr Ambedkar launched his campaign against untouchability, and contrary to the expectations of India’s founding leaders, discrimination against Dalits is still very much alive. This Ambedkar lecture focuses on how caste oppression has changed over time while at the same time persisted. It argues that co-constitution of class relations and social oppression is entrenching Dalits at the bottom of social and economic hierarchies. During the decades of high economic growth and modernisation, Dalits - together with Adivasis - have become a new discriminated and exploited underclass as they are moving out of agriculture into low-end circular migrant labour jobs. This has gone hand in hand with significant changes to the relations of oppression and discrimination under neoliberalism. This is substantiated through evidence from long-term fieldwork in rural Utter Pradesh as well as elsewhere in India, other studies and all-India data. The lecture also suggests that in spite of differences between ‘race’ and ‘caste’ this persistence of and changes to caste oppression is best understood as part and parcel of global racial capitalism. This opens up for perspectives on how to overcome discrimination and oppression.

Speaker Bio: 

Jens Lerche is Professor Emeritus in the Development Studies Department, SOAS University of London. He works on caste and racial discrimination and oppression, and agrarian and labour relations in India. He has done extensive fieldwork on Dalit class-caste oppression and rural labour relations in Uttar Pradesh and across India. Recent publications include the book Ground down by growth: tribe, caste, class and inequality in 21st century India (A. Shah, J. Lerche, R. Axelby, D. Benbabaali, B. Donegan, J. Raj and V. Thakur, 2018, Hindi edition 2019); Understanding patterns of structural discrimination of migrant and other workers in some countries of South and West Asia (I. Bosc, J. Lerche, Jens, A. Shah, M. Fajerman, and N Wadhawan, Neha 2022, Geneva: ILO) and ‘Black lives matter, capital, and ideology: Spiraling out from India’ (A. Shah and J. Lerche, Journal of British Sociology 2021).

*This year's Annual Ambedkar Lecture is organised in association with the Ambedkarite Society of Edinburgh and the Students’ Federation of India- United Kingdom