Anti-caste pedagogy as a personal and political statement

“Amrita DasGupta speaks with Srilata Sircar to understand how we need to be politically inclined to create and adopt an anti-caste curriculum and pedagogy; anything less is not enough. This interview appears in a special issue of Postgraduate Pedagogies titled Conversations on teaching in the contemporary university: Perspectives from within and across disciplines The excerpt below features two passages from the interview – why Amrita chose to interview Srilata, and a lightning round series of questions and answers where Amrita quizzes her about teaching, dream courses, and invaluable resources. This post is part of a special issue, Conversations on teaching in the contemporary university In January 2016, the death of Rohith Vemula, a Dalit PhD scholar at the University of Hyderabad in India, shocked the nation and led to student protests against caste discrimination. It was then, as an MPhil student in one of India’s most politically active universities, that the relationship between caste and classrooms entered my pedagogic consciousness. In the wake of these events, frameworks to tackle caste discrimination in higher education in India were revisited and recommendations were proposed. However, in India, these efforts were tokenistic due to interference from the university and the state. Outside India, caste was discussed in terms of its fit within the framework of race. It was clear that the creation of an anti-caste classroom could not be achieved only by encouraging caste-marginalised students to express their lived experiences or by including caste-marginalised authors and empirical and historical accounts of caste discrimination in the curriculum. What struck me about Srilata Sircar was not just her research, but that she enacts anti-caste pedagogy in the classroom. In interrogating decolonisation from an anti-caste perspective, she distinguishes race from caste at an epistemic level, thereby furthering the creation of non-Eurocentric currencies for caste. In the interview, Srilata explains how a caste-conscious pedagogy is born out of the anti-caste philosophy an educator subscribes to and is intrinsically tied to one’s personal and political identity. This is realised in the classroom by initiating radical anti-caste dialogue with the students, which is what makes anti-caste pedagogy well suited to a teaching and learning context. Lightning round Amrita: What is one idea every student on your course should come away knowing? Srilata: Brahmanical patriarchy. Amrita: Name one concept covered in this course that most students struggle with? Srilata: Brahminism – the social belief system of upper-caste Hindus, i.e. the Brahmans. Amrita: Name one topic on this course that you really enjoy teaching. Srilata: Discussion of caste through cinema. Amrita: What is one development that has contributed to this area of study? Srilata: Studying DNA has informed the ontology of caste. Amrita: Recommend a podcast that a novice to this field should read and will understand. Srilata: Confronting Caste podcast . Amrita: What would be your dream course to teach? Srilata: Critical caste studies. Amrita: As a teacher, what do you find the hardest? Srilata: Reaching out to every person in the cohort. Amrita: Recommend an invaluable resource to your fellow teachers in this field. Srilata: The special issue in Ethnic and Racial Studies by Jesús Cháirez-Garza et al. Amrita: Whose teaching or pedagogy in this area inspires you? Srilata: The people in my Critical Caste Studies Collective. Amrita: What is your magic tip when it comes to giving feedback on an assignment? Srilata: Start with the assumption that the student genuinely wants to do better and how can you help them do that. Read the interview in full in Postgraduate Pedagogies who have kindly permitted us to re-publish this excerpt. This post is opinion-based and does not reflect the views of the London School of Economics and Political Science or any of its constituent departments and divisions. Main image: Film poster of Sadgati (Deliverance) The post Anti-caste pedagogy as a personal and political statement first appeared on LSE Higher Education .

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