1 CASTE, THE ACADEMY AND DALIT WOMEN Kalpana Kannabiran [Published in The Hindu, edit page, 17 June 2001] The ongoing debate on caste and race is taking place in the context of a larger advocacy on discrimination and dalit human rights and has centred on the articulation of caste as discrimination, and the various forms of that discrimination – exclusion, untouchability, denial of constitutional rights and guarantees, violent subjugation and histories of slavery – as resonant of internationally recognised forms of racism. This essay will focus on two aspects of the issue that have not been touched upon so far: questions for the sociology of caste and the articulation of caste as race by dalit women. Caste has formed the centrepiece of sociology for close to a century now. While the practice of caste has been opposed and consistently resisted by anti caste movements in the country, caste as a knowledge system in sociology has tended to follow the well worn paths of a “depoliticised” social anthropology, creating sharp disjunctures between social practice and knowledge systems within the academy. Further, the disaggregation of social practice in the curriculum of sociology, into various “topics” and “papers”, by situating caste for instance in Indian Society or in Social Institutions, and the politics of caste within social movements, erases the potential for a radical pedagogy, and invisibilises the radical politics of anti caste movements within the academy even while “teaching” them. While this has undoubtedly begun to change, with sociologists like Sharmila Rege raising these issues within the university system, the power of traditional authority on caste is difficult to dismantle. We also know from our experience over the last half century at least that sociologists have periodically been called into the service of the state, particularly to supply “knowledge of society” that could then inform policy. And this knowledge must, by definition lend itself to disaggregation and be apolitical, in short, the knowledge that the sociologists generate is expected to keep the status quo. In reiterating its stand that caste and race are not only dissimilar, but also practices that cannot be compared, let alone brought within the purview of the same international