The Centre for Policy Research (CPR) and Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH) invite you to a digital workshop on: Outcaste Bombay and the translation of Marxism
About the Talk
Marxist ideas, literature, and intellectuals trickled into Bombay in the first few years after World War I. The Marxist vision of a political and social revolution, that would end class inequality, needed to be translated in order to capture the imagination of intellectuals and the urban poor in the city. In other words, it needed to shed light on industrial capitalism in the city, the condition of workers within it, and provide a vision for overcoming it. Translation necessitated that Marxists address the question of caste too – how would they bring about a socialist revolution in a social formation riven with class and caste hierarchies? Marxists from S. A. Dange to M.N Roy addressed this question. They laid great store in the power of capital to desiccate caste. Marxists would then organize workers, with shriveling caste affinities, into a working class. The working class in turn would lead an Indian revolution. Therefore, assertions of caste identity by the anti-Brahmin and the Dalit movements invited Marxist opprobrium and allegations of being reactionary, fascists, and petit bourgeois. This talk considers the politics of translating Marx(ism). Translation operates in two different registers, one, as the interpretation of a system of ideas and concepts to shed light on the socio-political situation in late colonial Bombay and the other as the categories used to render Marxist concepts into Marathi. Caste was important to both these translations.
About the Speaker
Juned Shaikh is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Outcaste Bombay: City Making and the Politics of the Poor, published recently by the University of Washington Press and in India by Orient Blackswan. He will be a visiting research fellow of the Shelby Davis Center at Princeton University during the next academic year. His new work will be on the life and times of Gangadhar Adhikari, a Bombay Marxist. He was the recipient of the Dean’s medal for the Social Sciences as a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Find all the available videos of our previous workshops, here
