Shailaja Paik, Professor at University of Cincinnati, Discusses The Vulgarity of Caste

Tamasha, says Shailaja Paik, Taft Distinguished Professor of History at the University of
Cincinnati, is a word with many meanings. Most fundamentally, it can be a show or a spectacle.
Colloquially, it suggests fun or nonsense. It can mean work, violence, play, or amusement. And
it describes a form of public theater that brings together skits, farce, poetry, and erotic themes
and which is traditionally performed by Dalit women (historically known as untouchables).
Tamasha (the genre) is native to Maharashtra, the western Indian state that includes Mumbai.

Paik discussed Tamasha and more in her South Asia Colloquium Spring 2023 talk on “The
Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India,” which was organized by
South Asian Studies Council on Thursday, March 31. Paik took part in a panel discussion
moderated by Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, Assistant Professor of English and Director of
Undergraduate Studies in South Asian Studies and featuring Kiran Kumbhar, Dr. Malathy Singh
Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer, and Bhoomika Joshi, PhD candidate in Anthropology. The
colloquium was attended by nearly 40 participants in-person and virtually.

 

Paik’s talk was based around The Vulgarity of Caste, her recently published second book. Paik’s
first book, Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India, was written while Paik held the Dr.
Malathy Singh Visiting Fellowship at SASC during the 2011–2012 academic year. SASC was
delighted to welcome Paik back to Yale as a speaker.

Paik began her colloquium with a discussion of Tamasha and its position within a tangled
interconnection of sex, gender, and caste politics. Reading excerpts from her book, Paik
explained that through its use of repeated performance norms, Tamasha became a nexus and
discourse of power. Performing Tamasha counterintuitively defended and obscured feudal,
patriarchal caste violence through the promotion of masti—masculine bonding among its
audiences—and creation of an illusion of normalcy around conventions of caste, sex, and gender.
Paik said that Tamasha encapsulated dichotomies such as sheel-ashlil (virtuous-vulgar) and
manus-untouchable (human-untouchable), and became associated over time with discourses
about honor, respectability, racial identity, and the governance of presumably “indecent” Dalit
communities. Concerns about vulgarity were used to encode, sharpen, and entrench caste
structures.

Having laid out the meaning, nature, and use of Tamasha, Paik outlined three movements that,
over the course of the 20th century, fundamentally challenged the practice. The first was Indian
intellectual and independence activist B.R. Ambedkar’s movement for Dalit manuski (humanity),
which sought to end the exploitation of Tamasha performers and to free them from the stigma of
vulgarity. At the same time, Ambedkar’s movement worked to erase Tamasha itself. The second
was the post-colonial Marathi nationalist movement, which sought to sanitize Tamasha and
defined it as an authentically Maharashtrian art form without dealing with either the Dalit body
or the humanity of Dalits. Finally, the women performing Tamasha engaged in a variety of actions,

sexuality (though not sex) to men of all castes and succeeded when it makes them feel
appreciated, perpetuating the sex-gender-caste economy.

The first panelist to respond to Paik’s expansive introduction was Kumbhar, who said he
approached The Vulgarity of Caste from the perspective of the history of medicine. Kumbhar
noted that a major aspect of the book is its focus on the “vernacular as a method,” and the extent
to which it goes beyond conventional archives of South Asia. He praised the experience of
reading Paik’s book as being “like watching a very well-made, luxuriant, period film,” noting
briefly the ways it moves from the past to the present through Paik’s ethnographic method.
Kumbhar added that Paik’s use of archives from subaltern communities points to the need for
new perspectives on what constitutes legitimate sources of history. Kumbhar also commented on
the concept of the “stickiness” of pollution or inferiority, which is the adherence of stigmas to
minority communities for much longer than for dominant communities. Kumbhar connected the
stickiness of inferiority in Paik’s work to narratives of Indian medicine and healthcare that
privilege Brahminical traditions as modern or worthy of study. He cited examples like attributing
the invention of plastic surgery to Brahminical ayurveda instead of lower-caste potters’ cosmetic
procedures.

Kumbhar’s comments were joined by Joshi’s, who noted that as someone who studies
“stickiness” in modern India, Paik’s book spoke to her on multiple levels. Joshi said it was “a
sheer honor, delight, pleasure, and responsibility to have read this book and be invited to
comment on it.” She applauded Paik’s exposition of the contradictions of intersectionality in the
Indian context, redefinition of humanity and sexuality away from liberalism, and expert
rendering of the Marathi Tamasha archive. Joshi offered three strains of commentary. Citing the
work of Brahma Prakash, Joshi described the question of aesthetics as fundamentally being a
question of labor. Joshi focused on examples of Tamasha women learning Kathak, a classical
Hindustani dance form, to highlight their asli (legitimate) status in the 1970s and 1980s, to ask
how Tamasha artists now perceive their engagement with classical arts and aesthetics. Joshi’s
second strain of questioning asked how Paik arrived at the interwar period as a crucial period for
Dalit manuski, while her final question asked how we understand which sensations, emotions,
and affectations stick to the body and which do not.

Paik responded to Kumbhar and Joshi’s questions about archives, the classical, the interwar
period, and stickiness in turn. An essential element of her responses was the extent to which Paik
was identified by the families of the Tamasha performers she worked with as one of their own.
Paik described eating the same food as members of the troupe of Mangaltai, a Tamasha
performer, and visiting relatives of Bhimsen Gaikwad, a Dalit singer. She connected those
experiences to the experience of piecing together archives and ethnography to understand

 

English-language materials.

The next SASC Colloquium will be “Writing the Anthropocene from the Indian Himalaya,”
presented by Nayanika Mathur, Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at the
University of Oxford.

Byline: Daevan Mangalmurti