Talk by Ajay Rao: Historicizing Caste Exclusion

Historicizing Caste Exclusion by Ajay Rao, Associate Professor, University of Toronto, March 21, 2024 at 4:00 PM EDT, Birks Building, Room 100 (Senior Common Room), 3520 University Street.

The argument in Vedānta interpretations of the apaśūdrādhikaraṇa (1.3.34-38) for a rigid hierarchy of knowledge represents perhaps the most extensive evidence available to us of premodern theoretical justifications for caste exclusion and the cultural oppression of śūdras and Dalits. Taking these Sanskrit philosophical abstractions as socially symbolic acts, I examine how they give voice to brahminical anxieties about non-brahmin cultural power and knowledge at a time when "śūdra" had undergone radical transformation as a social category.

From McGill's School of Religious Studies and Institute of Islamic Studies.