 welcome everyone online and everyone who's joining us in person. It is a very great pleasure to introduce Anno Pomorao. So, I think in many ways means no introduction, but is being introduced today ready in a conference just around the corner. I'll get a second introduction now, so I'm honoured, we're so pleased to have you, Anno Pomorao. Adno Pom diaw pa meiehowa is Professor of History Rhailun Llywodraeth i'r Prif Weinidol oedd y ddweud Pan, A'r oedd y Deyrnas rhywbeth yn Gwylliannol, a'r oedd y ddoch chi'n oed yn lleiw oedd yn ei bod yn lleiw oedd, wedi bodad oedd eu cefnodau ar hollfoddol'r Ysgol i'r ysgol i'w sgol, ond llywedd y serialio ac amdalen yn ei ddweud, ac yn llywedd y ddweud yn direinio eraill, oedd yn dod, wedi bodam yn ei unigol, oedd ysgol i'r I тутaf, y Llywodraeth Fyierr, a dewis iawn i reall ni i ysgol i'r o gweithio i niwgol, ac oedd yn ddweud o'r ffordd yn ddegwyd, a'r ddegwyd yn ddegwyd yn ddegwyd. Yn y Pomerarau rysun i fynd o'r bêl ar gyfer y Dynum Hymde i'r Chyfargo a'r Llywodraeth Llywodraeth i'r Prifysgol yn Argyrgynigol, mae'n gweithio'r lleolion ac yn Llanetarynydd, ymddydd, ymddydd, ymddydd, ymddydd, ymddydd, ymddydd, ac yn gweithio'r hefyd o'r gydag, ymddydd, Mae'r lluniau 2009 gan amser y Cymru, cymrydiau'r Unedig Ymysgol Cymru, yn ystod o'r fawr cystafol, o'r cyd-fawr cystafol, i'r ffocws cyllid ymwybod ar gyfer anty-fawr cystafol ac y bwysig o gweld geitig ymddechrau. Mae'r cyfrifau o'r lluniau am ddechrau a'r cyd-fawr cystafol a'r cyfrifwyr ar hyn ystod oedd. Mae'r cyfrifwyr ar gyfer yng Nghymru yw'r bobl yn ymeraf ymgyrchio ar gyfer y cyflawni, a yn ymgyrchio ar gyfer y Gloniol a Pwysigol. Mae'r cyfrifod yw ym Mbedchur yn ymbyrcau? Ddweud i'r cyfrifod, roi'n fwy o bryd. Elinor, rydyn ni'n gweithio'n gwybod i chi'n gwybod i'r mwy o'r hyn arfer eu ffóir, ac roi'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gwybod i chi'n gwybod, ac roi'n gweithio'n gweithio, roi'n gweithio'n gweithio ar gyfer y gwaith. Rydyn ni'n gwneud meddwl y tîm hwn i'r pêr am Bécur ac America, ac yn cael eu gwneud o parson, ac yn cael ei bwysig yn yma'r oedd y gweithio ar y tîm hwn. Yn y ystod, hefyd, cyflwyno'r unrhyw ym Mbécur cyflwyno cyflwyno cyflwyno ymysgwrth. Mae'n ystod o bwysig o'r ffawr cyflwyno cyflwyno cyflwyno cyflwyno cwrs and under explored. Now the second thesis puts pressure on the term America and suggests that this place at that time played an important enabling role in creating the conditions of possibility for new forms of thinking and new frames of analysis. And finally this apparently simple effort to situate Ambedkar poses some attendant questions and problems of the archive about practices of reading and ultimately issues of knowledge formation and concept history. So I think if my presentation today is opening up some of these issues for exploration by way of providing an example of a situated materialist reading. Work on the politics of the archive, longstanding, important significant and the possibilities that it offers us of reading against the grain as I said is certainly significant but I think insufficient too. And this has to do with the question of critical thought of tracing its origins and something that the new global intellectual history doesn't quite confront which I think has to do with the possibilities, the conditions of possibility for something that we might call subaltern intellectual history and or subaltern political thought that is a thought, the political thought of subalterns. So what does it mean? First I think we can think through ideas of far reading. Sir Jacques Ronsier has made an important set of arguments about mass intellectuality but as well about delinking the kind of sociology of sort of challenging the question of periodisation and the sociology of thinking through knowledge formations by suggesting that we need to delink that from the question of the conditions of possibility for thought and as you know in some of his work such as proletarian nights and so forth the focus really there is on the capacity, the imaginative possibility and the potential for subalterns, for workers, for artisans to really engage with the universal in ways that seem to go against and challenge the ways in which standard intellectual histories or attention to social history and context might suggest that situations of mass deprivation of exploitation, expropriation does not produce or provide the conditions of possibility for the emergence of new forms of intellectual or insurgent thinking. The second I guess is to think about situated reading itself as a critical practice and here I'm thinking about scholars like Isabel Huffmeier who really provides a mode of critical reading but also I think in many ways situated materialist reading that goes into questions of annotation editing and in a sense how we might think about experimental possibilities for reading thought thinkers and their archive in quite marvelous and experimental ways but I'm also thinking about heterodox engagements with Marx. I'm thinking about arguments that suggest that we need to engage in practices of kind of slow reading thinking through the emergence of new kinds of concepts or concepts that might be revivified or repurposed in the context of new frames of analysis and new modes of critique. Then there is a question or the issue of democratic education and the university itself as a social form and what it might mean to think from within and without the university. Specifically how might one begin to think of this kind of complicated intellectual surround everything from thought to spaces or the spaces where thought lives, the inhabitation of thought. How might one begin to think of this complex intellectual surround or addressing or engaging with the early Ambedkar. And it's interesting of course to think of his being located elsewhere outside India writing about caste. I will end by speaking and doing of course reading of some aspects of his 1916 text castes in India. And so this is kind of the broad frame for what I'd like to do and share with you today. So although and this section is called figure in context also there although there is a long history of engagement with the history and politics of anti casteism in the local languages. We had Ambedkar's thought has only recently begun to receive recognition in our public culture and among scholars of political theory and intellectual history working in global metropolitan contexts and or operating in English. Ambedkar's presence in the body politic poses a peculiar problem. Namely there's an inverse relationship between the scholarly neglect of one of the 20th century's most significant thinkers on the one hand and Ambedkar signal relevance to the story of Indian democracy and to modern caste emancipated selfhood on the other. Why has one of the 20th century's most significant thinkers been neglected for so long by scholars of political theory and intellectual history. The reasons are not hard to find. Ambedkar refused the colonial anti colonial binary that structures much South Asia scholarship. It was challenged for criticizing the Indian National Congress and portrayed as a colonial stooge for his willingness to transact with the British government over the rights and recognition. However, Ambedkar's astute analysis of caste power has proved powerful and difficult to refute. Today the limitations of Indian anti colonialism's address to the social question seems incontrovertible. While the demise of the Congress party is the bearer of anti colonialism's historical unfolding stands in striking contrast to the inherent globality and the durability of Ambedkar's thought. Ambedkar I suggest articulates a theoretical practical reading of the relationship between caste and Indian democracy and foregrounds the conundrum of ongoing existential suffering despite legislative redress. His investment in the exceptional subject, the Dalith, as also the universal subject of rights, the political citizen, is a single contribution to political thought. It animates the tension, the recurrent tension between the quest for radical equality and its persistent failure set in place by constitutional commitments to redress. By investing law and constitution with the capacity to reveal and eventually replace the state's historic reliance upon caste power, Ambedkar's interventions affected an extraordinary transformation of the ground of politics itself. Ambedkar's prominence in today's public culture that stands, as I've said, an inverse relationship to habits of historical forgetting and invites us to reconsider India's 20th century history in the light of a more capaciously conceived archive of Ambedkar's thoughts, actions, and intellectual life world. The Ambedkar archive in India is dispersed across state and community repositories and characterized by disparate modes of preservation, documentation, and publicity. The coherence of that archive and its legibility are organized around a figure who is both complex and enigmatic. An archival unevenness in both form and content has shaped the scholarly reception of Ambedkar. I'd like to start by speaking to how the Ambedkar archive at Columbia University, which is part of our ongoing project at the Ambedkar initiative, enables us to view him instead as a hinge uniting the scope of his earlier years, influenced by the global connections already present in anti-caste thought, and carrying that over into participation during a time of global, interwar, intellectual, and political developments across the United States, Britain, and the subcontinent. In that sense, Ambedkar himself prefigures the future archive of his reception as one that moves beyond current designations of archives as official or non-professional, or not biased or disinterested of global or merely local interest. The initiative created almost a century after Ambedkar left Columbia University, brings the world's oldest and the world's largest democracies into a shared field of engagement with the university as a mediating link, as Eleanor mentioned. The initiative envisions Ambedkar's fortuitous presence at Columbia during a period of disciplinary definition, as well as intense intellectual and political ferment within and beyond the university gate. The initiative thus combines public humanities with critical pedagogy, and aspires to make present and palpable connections between the intellectual history of the American interwar and colonial India. This is a two-way process, and this is also a collaborative process, I should say, always a work in progress, and not something that anyone, two or three people can in any sense hope to complete. So this is a two-way process rendering the history of the United States more worldly through inquiry into the transnational engagements of Americans more typically viewed in their domestic context, while at the same time deep provincializing legacies of anti-cast thinking and action. An annual seminar anchors collaborative learning and research around a digital finding aid for material associated with Ambedkar's time at Columbia University between 1913 and 1916, with a practical focus on archival storytelling grounded in the materiality of history. Students create and tabulate archival metadata and experiment with new ways to share information from podcasts and spatial maps to online exhibits. The finding aid is thus a work in progress, as I said, it's an example of the classroom as a site for making and doing, where student researchers engage with the materiality of the archive through questions and issues of categorization, metadata, annotation, strategies of reading for context, influence and concept history, and curation via open access formats for instance using hypothesis, omega or night lab, all of which are digital technologies for digital humanities work. But this allows students to present archival documents digitally even as it interpolates them, that is, the students themselves into different narrative frames. The first question, of course, is empirical. Is there an Ambedkar archive in the United States? If so, where is it located? What are the terms of its constitution and its limits? Unlike intact personal papers and correspondence and so forth which we possess certainly at the university for faculty who taught at Columbia. Ambedkar was a student at Columbia and therefore the university certainly has the responsibility, you might say, to maintain an account of his doings other than the fact that he was there. And we know he was there, we've got the transcript and so on and so forth. But what I'd like to suggest is that we could go a little bit further as I've said to think through this question of the intellectual surround. And here we predicate the creation of our finding aid on iterative learning through making and doing a process driven by an open-ended conception of what belongs in this Ambedkar archive. You'll get already the question is not so much about the politics and the ethics of existing archives, but as well how one might work through practices of what my colleague, Sidia Hartman, has called critical fabulation, both to imagine and to document and provide evidence of a set of really existing social relationships. So at its centre are private papers for this finding aid, correspondence, university and alumni records, photographs and other archival materials scattered throughout Columbia's rare book and manuscript library. Collaborative student research traces Ambedkar's engagement with important figures of the interwar period. Some of those who trained him and played an important role in the formation of the social science disciplines at Columbia, such as Franz Boas, John Dewey, Frank Giddings, Henry Seeger, Edwin Seligman and James Shotwell. A second layer for exploration is comprised of repositories at Barnard Teachers College and the Union Theological Seminary, where papers of the American Marathi Mission open up yet another dimension of Ambedkar's experiential world. And then there are resources of affinity, such as Columbia emeritus Professor Francis Pritchett's important and still evolving timeline of Ambedkar's life and writing, which was among the first to take advantage of digital affordances for public access and equity. Likewise, the open access SADA archives the South Asian American digital archive, documenting the rich life worlds of the South Asian diaspora, not only expands the field of inquiry but also serves as a model for the kind of work, initiative and visions, linking archive with sophisticated commentary and historical analysis. Now, the creation of a finding aid relies on reading across archival repositories, each governed by its own internal rules of order and organization, in order to knit together fugitive networks and to discover global connections we might have missed earlier. The RBML holdings, the rare books and manuscripts library holdings are organized around proper names of individual figures. Finding aids are both incomplete and lack lateral connectivity across the archives, the private papers and correspondence that's held in the RBML. Instead, the finding aid, our finding aid aims to cross reference documents so that they reflect institutional connections across disciplines and discrete individuals, as well as key sites of socio-political tension and transformation within and outside university. Approaching the finding aid as a mobile technological template enables us to follow out emergent points of contact and to curate existing material in ways that emphasize the unexpected connections and lines of force and in that sense to construct a new multi-dimensional archive from existing documents. This next section is called Inside and Outside the University. One relevant force field is Columbia University itself. Ambedkar appears to have experienced personal and intellectual freedom unlike any he had known earlier since during his time at Columbia when he arrived in New York in the third week of July 1913. His English biographer, Danon J. Kier, notes in America in company with other students and colleagues Ambedkar could move freely, he could write, he could walk, he could bathe and he could rest with a sense and he could rest with a status of equality. To him, life at Columbia University was a revelation, it was a new world, it enlarged his mental horizon. His Marathi biographer, C. B. Kier, Moray writes that Ambedkar was drawn to the pleasures of the city initially and that he appreciated the ease of student interaction across lines of social difference, especially gender. However, he was soon to undergo a self-correction and spent most of his time thereafter in Columbia's library, browsing second-hand bookstalls and either taking or auditing more than 50 courses at Columbia including economics, political science, statistics, history, anthropology and philosophy. And he formed a lifelong friendship with his Barse Hebrew mate, Nabil Batena during his time at Columbia. Now Ambedkar was in the city in a fertile time. The modern social science disciplines were just beginning to take on clear definition. University repositories invite consideration of how the idea of historical comparison, the analysis of social systems, the force of social democracy and the significance of the culture concept were each shaped by interdisciplinary methods and aided by institutional traffic between social science, social work and progressive anti-racist, anti-war activism in the school and the city. Ambedkar's time at Columbia overlapped with that of the long tenured president of the university Nicholas Murray Butler who spearheaded many changes and initiatives by 1915 turning Columbia into the largest university in the United States by any measure. From when Butler assumed the presidency of Columbia in 1901 until Ambedkar's arrival in 1913, Columbia's enrollment had expanded faster than Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth put together. The graduate faculties constituted the largest graduate school in the country and together with summer school and the extension program, Columbia was enrolling approximately 12,000 students by 1915. The university was also being reshaped from within by the growing presence of international students, women and students of colour. Attention to associational dynamics on the university campus reveals key connections between public activism and diversifying student body and the politics of the classroom. For example, Setlow established summer sessions in 1900 opened it to men and women on equal terms on the payment of $25. This was a liberal progressive move by Low to make university education more accessible. Summer sessions were often seen as a trial run by the university administration for minority and minoritized students, especially black, women, native and Jewish students. Students often met prominent faculty and established connections to Columbia that outlasted summer sessions and summer sessions were always pitched or suggested by faculty and the administration for students who were deemed un or underprepared for studies. And the growth of summer session was seen as one of the expanding areas that would constitute the complete transformation of Columbia from a college into a university. Transboas could not teach at summer session of 1900 bowing to logistical problems. But it is likely that he taught every summer session after 1900. Frank Giddings appears to have taken a similar route. The Columbia Spectator archives, the newspaper, the college newspaper showed just how diverse the summer sessions were. There was conflict between students of different ethnicities, races and nationalities, but summer sessions also allowed a particular kind of politics of coexistence and recognition to take root. The university archives also allowed us to challenge received orthodoxy. Seligman begins to look like a particularly dynamic figure in Ambedkar's sphere. He was also his advisor surpassing his singular focus on John Dewey. Seligman's discussion of progressive taxation and public finance and international politics anticipated important elements of Keynesian economics of Oololettre. While the training he and his colleagues at the London School of Economics imparted was evident in Ambedkar's book The Problem of the Rupy, 1923, clearly a response to Keynes' Indian currency and finance of 1913, which would establish Ambedkar as a leading authority on Indian currency and banking. Seligman was also a founding member of the NAACP, as was John Dewey. He was chairman of the Greenwich House Committee of Social Investigations and worked along with Franz Boaz and Frank Giddings on issues of social hygiene, housing and the economic status of African American families who lived in the Ninth Ward. Meanwhile, John Dewey shared a committee on social education in the Seligman House and Barnard College graduate Mary Kingsbury Simcovich headed Greenwich Settlement House, so there's a whole series of connections within and without the university. She was married to Seligman's Columbia colleague Vladimir Simcovich who taught a course called Marxism and Socialism. Seligman was a close friend and mentor to La La La Jpatrai, introduced Rai to the NAACP and Rai Ovington and to Booker T. Washington and to Hampton and Tuskegee. Seligman also played a crucial role in shaping the careers of his numerous international students who would go on to do absolutely critical work in establishing systems of taxation and so forth in newly decolonizing countries. Urban transformation of the period proved equally significant given the university's proximity to Harlem. The streets, churches, salons, speakeasies and political associations offered a direct challenge to institutional elitism and models of economies. Competing processes of social enclosure and social emancipation were thus both at work. By 1915, 80% of New York's African American population lived in Harlem. Many had fled from race riots and violence downtown. Meanwhile, Columbia was actively involved in creating a buffer a frontier zone between the university and Harlem. New gates were installed at Broadway and 119th Street. Iron barriers measuring 46 feet in width and 23 feet in height. By 1917, student volunteers were quote, aiding the police in quelling riots, mobs and otherwise defending lives and property and emergencies. A letter to President Butler from Professor John J. Cross contained a detailed map of the black population of Harlem from 1913 to 1926, noting that quote, the possibility of still further spread is an increasing reason why we should control all the property opposite the university holdings on 116th and Amsterdam Avenue. Enclaveing was a response to the threat of enhanced mobility and the fear of contamination and contact. And of course, I think as many of you know, this becomes the kind of history in many ways of all of the Ivy League institutions that are located in urban areas that are seen to be blighted where you create one way streets etc to control movement into these campuses and so on. And Daverian Baldwin is one of the people who's written about the relationship between the university and its political economy and sort of urban transformations and indeed of speculation and finance and the deep relationship between the university and many of these processes across this period. And I think there are many many connections of course to what's happening here in London around narratives of social uplift, of social reform and the ways in which a certain kind of the practice of urban sociology, urban ethnography and new modes of description around the neighborhood, around space and so on are really coming into the fore in this period too. So just some things to keep at the back of our mind. So on-clining was a response to the threat of enhanced mobility and the fear of contamination and contact. Meanwhile, South Asian community is going to be found at restaurants such as the Salon India restaurant the Taj Mahal Hindu restaurant or the Hotel des Aftiste where they met under the ages of the Indian Home and the League of America or the League of Oppressed People. So these social spaces I'm suggesting were crucial for connecting elite students with subaltern workers and with anti-colonial revolutionaries. There's no direct evidence as we know and we keep trying to find it of Ambedgar's presence in these spaces. However, increased traffic between the world inside and outside the university gates did leave a mark on his thought in ways both direct and indirect I suggest. The further iterations of this course which accompanies the building of the finding gate will add to the finding gate we hope by among other things asking about the impact of multiple social forces on Ambedgar starting with his own writing which suggests a scholarly young Ambedgar relishing his freedom from the daily experiences of cost humiliation. Attention to the associational dynamics within and without the university campus thus reveals key connections between public activism a diversifying student body in the politics of the classroom as I've said. Now this informs the conception of the finding gate. The Ambedgar finding gate is an open-ended iterative archive curated not found but curated actively by student researchers working collaboratively to study varying aspects of the social life of the university. A finding gate draws on resources such as the Columbia spectator, the university registrar's files as well as students can cross-reference their findings by drawing on the outstanding as I've said open access that SATA has as well as digging into some of the other students who happened to be in Columbia and or in the vicinity at the time or they might consult the collections of the Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture digital items at the LSE and a range of other digital and physical repositories. So pursuing that related line of force, we seek simultaneously to mobilize personal correspondence private papers, the administrative lives of the university personnel to shed light on the complex relationship between the university and its outside. Harlem, New York, the US, India during the interwar period. Finding gate with us helped to clarify that Ambedgar's education at Columbia occurred at a decisive moment in the formation of the social sciences when the social question came to predominate academic thinking and the progressive thought of the turn of the century was enriching academic life even as it was becoming establishmentarian too. I will come to the essay and the reading just a moment to think a little bit about archival ethics. The archival unevenness that's a defining feature of the Ambedgar archive whether in India or in the United States and I have a whole section on the archive in India but I think this might not be the time or the place to get into that because that's a rather long section but it indexes a broader crisis of ethics, politics and interpretation. As I've noted earlier the governing conditions of archival absence and efforts to animate this Ambedgar finding gate as a form of counter memory is specific to each location and their histories not to mention their histories of collection, curation and so forth and the relationship between state and popular archives. How likely embed questions about the politics of exclusion and the ethics of access into the very act of curating the finding gate. We continue to puzzle because this is a very very difficult question. We continue to puzzle over the relationship between bringing Ambedgar into public awareness here I'm thinking the US and redressing inequities there. We ask whether and how the finding gate can benefit scholars especially the lit scholars and researchers in particular by enabling access to the university as a matter of right of historical redress and I think as we all know sitting in various institutions this is the hardest thing to do and in many context proves near impossible. Such ethical issues are persistent and often difficult to resolve due to the material constraints that I very briefly wanted to discuss and which ought to I think accompany any discussion of archival ethics. The first the enclosure of South Asia materials and archives and research libraries in the North Atlantic. The high costs of international travel stringent visa restrictions mean that the very people involved in creating and maintaining the Ambedgar archive in India only some of whom are professional academics are unlikely to have the chance to visit these archives. Second questions about copyright the sequestering of material behind prohibitive pay walls and the bundling of journals that monetize academic labour hours, yes, organizes the international academy they function as key impediments to the utopian promise of open access and full inclusion. That's what should remain agnostic about the benefits it seems to me of digitization and challenge its equation with so-called open access. The digital image is itself ephemeral and unstable plus it's never merely a copy of a paper original but it enables new contexts of visual encounter and engagement which alter the logics of order and sense attached to the paper archive sometimes in revealing and exciting ways. The efforts to digitize endangered archives and protect archives at risk have surely played an important role in stabilizing the challenging ecologies, dust, humidity, moisture, insects, poor paper quality that govern the materiality of those archives while welcoming them into domains of virtual publicity and open access that bypass the condescension of the state archive. However digital unevenness and inequity poor bandwidth, power outage the inability to store large quantities of data, continued costs of technical expertise, technological obsolescence can also circumvent these efforts and instead reproduce data darkness and social exclusion. Finally efforts to publicize lesser known archives might themselves come to be viewed as acts of upper caste and class appropriation and new practices of costist accumulation. Meanwhile publicity might subject those who maintain such repositories to enormous personal risk and we know this and we know very well the moment in which we live now during challenging political times. So the finding aid then is continuously animated by questions about access, equity as an extension of ongoing pedagogy enacted through practices of symptomatic reading and attention to the material context of scholarly production the space of the city the architecture of the classroom the practice of working with and interrupting forms of archival regularity and recursivity all of which opens the door to understanding Ambedkar is a globally significant figure whose words and worlds were shaped by his time whether by the formation of the social sciences or his engagement with the paradox of racial democracy in the United States in the moment of Jim Crow. We take inspiration from recent scholarship on the complicity between American universities and the histories of enslavement racialization and ongoing corporatisation in the United States which approach the archive as central to practices of institutional accountability. The ethical entailments of such a project line its invitation to turn the university inside out in order to cultivate a more responsible relationship to it. To date racialising processes have been the focus but the Ambedkar finding aid would offer a rich resource for visiting issues of caste and race as problems for historical comparison that took on renewed pertinence in the interwar. The transnational archive that tracks Ambedkar across America, Britain and India can reveal vital links between global intellectual currents like for example disciplinary concerns with a social question as well as Ambedkar's own distinctive address to the historical presence of caste and untouchability. However as I've said before the two halves of this archive do not cohere. While the Ambedkar archive in India elaborates the complex multifaceted public life of one of India's most important social theorists and political thinkers of the last century Ambedkar's relative absence from the university archive at Columbia provides an opportunity to curate an open ended archive or a finding aid that reflects his innate worthiness. Taking Ambedkar outside India thus becomes a necessary and defining moment in reframing the context of reception for this audacious and insurgent thinker. So now I will enter a slightly different zone of kind of reading and engagement and this is called race caste comparison. The essay cast in India their mechanism genesis and development was written in 1916 by Ambedkar then age 25 for Alexander Goldenweiser seminar on primitive and modern societies. It was published in the Indian antiquary the following year. The Indian antiquary was founded by Jay Burgess in 1872 and it was later taken over by Richard Temple and kept up its publication until 1933. The journal was an important precursor to epigraphica indica and epigraphia indica excuse me and casts in India featured in volume 46 where it was noted that quote in the half century intervening 1872 to 1922 they Indian scholars that is have become so numerous as to be able to with great credit to themselves fill nearly the whole journal. The journal's focus on the ancient Indian past is evident in Ambedkar's own essay which approaches andology is a form of sociology yet offers a radically different interpretation of casts origins. Now Goldenweiser was a student of France Boaz and both were known to reject ideas of racial hierarchy rooted in biological assumptions that are not raised. The text casts in India is evidence of how his education at Columbia might have allowed Ambedkar to understand a cast comparatively and historically. Cast had never been theorized before by an outcast student to experience democracy in adult life however flawed for the first time while undergoing higher education and it should be no surprise that the two levels of experience phenomenological and intellectual shaped each other. Ambedkar's persistence of inequality was shaped by his and for him unprecedented experience of equality. Ambedkar's rigorous engagement with sociological theory offers students a chance to inquire into the formation of the social science disciplines in the period as I've said even as it allows or asks us to sharpen our skills of close reading annotation and interpretation. The text simultaneously asks about subject formation about what role identity and experience play in the structure of the text. That's awareness of the American context deepens the performative irony of the outcast student detailing the logic of organization of a fundamentally irrational unstable order predicated on the denial of social intercourse. In cast Ambedkar describes himself as quite alive to the complex intricacies of a hori institution like cast and compares the oral presentation of his essay his performance to quote the glib tongue of the guide taking his visitors on a tour of an exhibition of human institutions. Though he never approaches the system of cause from a personal or an anecdotal standpoint Ambedkar nevertheless claims expertise as a student of cast and we should recall that Ambedkar rarely engaged in part of biographical reflection which makes such moments all the more significant. He would for instance speculate of the possibility and the effects of the wiping out of untouchability through his own chosen form of exile which involved moving through the great expanse of human intellectual exploring disciplines at will relishing the pleasure of slow thought in the space of the university and claiming the right to think as the first practice of freedom. There are two issues in cast that I'd like to pick up. First is the question of sex and the social and then relatedly there is the issue of cast's difference from race. Together and separately they speak to cast a social form and as a condensation of social power. Now Ambedkar takes up the mediating role of kinship in the transformation of nature to culture but then introduces endogomy in this text as a distinct innovation in producing the social. It provides a history of cast as a social form we will recollect in this 15 page essay by alerting us to the imposition of cast as enclosed class with class here used in the sociological sense of group membership. So historically Indian society sees the imposition of endogomy. Another name for cast will tell us at various points of this dense essay, an essay that bears the imprint of rather different theoretical and methodological orientations as if cast is too complex to be explored and explained by merely one set of consistent theoretical tools. It could also be that he's 25 and he's a student and he's experimenting with a range of different theories that he's been exposed to. Now the position of endogomy is a sort of Brahminical hat trick he tells us which establishes social mymesis as the basis of society but one that is both impossible to attain and always already insufficient for breaking into that first enclosure a charmed circle that the Brahmins built around themselves. That this mimetic order is predicated on the annihilation of women and this is fundamentally what cast is, that is cast as endogomy and nothing more. And furthermore that endogomy itself is defined by the necropolitical schema that lies beneath the impossible requirement of an absolute parity between men and women as sexual partners for production reproduction and where child marriage, sati and widowhood are all so many tools for addressing the problem of what Ambedgar calls in that spectacular formulation the problem of surplus women really marks the brilliance of this argument. In Kaasen India Ambedgar introduces the concept of surplus women transposing surplus from ideas about economic value to ideas about the status of women as disposable persons and he understands the problem of the surplus women is the consequence of enforced endogomy observing that quote the problem of cast then ultimately resolves itself into one of the pairing of one of repairing the disparity between the marriageable units of the two sexes within it. The ideological commitment to endogomy produces a set of attended dilemmas about how best to satisfy the need for reproductive heteronormativity within each cast. There's the biological mechanism by which to control for reproductive parity so that an equal number of male and female children are either born at any given time or that they're going to be married at any given point in time and there is a problem of one spouse dying before the other. So the logical problem of measure and equivalence recall that this is a political economist first and foremost the logical problem of measure and equivalence thus translates here into the social problem of parity and lack around the couple form which is menaced by the problem by the presence excuse me of surplus woman and surplus man. Now a baker is dry analytical as he describes the resolution of the problem of surplus man and surplus woman while in classical economics the extraction of surplus in the value form are viewed as progressive iterations of the economic process here surplus woman bears the brunt of social discipline and sexual violence because the fact of sexual difference privileges the position of men in relation to women in society and therefore surplus woman poses a double danger she can marry outside caste thus violating the rules of caste and dogamy or she could encroach on the chances of unmarried women in her own caste that is younger women who are up for marriage widow burning sati might be the best guard against the possibility of social infraction a quote here being dead and gone surplus woman creates no problem of remarriage either inside or outside the caste since this is a difficult demand to fulfill compulsory widowhood is superior to burning because more practicable a baker tells us so long as a caste can be sure that the widow is quote on condition in which she is no longer a source of allurement the imposition of social debt on surplus woman means that she's no longer a sexual threat to other women of marriageable age neither does her waywardness risk compromising reality it's clear that endogamy cannot be enforced in practice without resolving the problem of surplus endogamy and surplus regulation and excess together is to be organised on baker's explanation of caste has both inherently unstable and somewhat schizophrenic not merely artificial but also illogical and enforced by intimate violence so if kinship is the hinge between nature and culture between savage sexuality and the regulation of patrilineal descent post-endogamy is a specific form of enactment of the transposition from nature in this case endogamous marriage secures not merely the ideology of patrilineal descent but it also enables hierarchical distinction between groups it's notable that all this is predicated on the regulation of female sexuality itself secured by the threat of gendered violence so after arguing in caste in India that caste in its grammar and exogamy on baker becomes quickly aware that this functionalist position that's intellectually compelling is historically untenable though on baker gives pride of place to enforced endogamy in caste he would later argue that it was but one among a range of socio-sexual forms and rarity and early India and we should really think about on baker's position between whom he takes the argument about endogamy but really refines it and makes it the only kind of structure the structure for understanding caste it seems to me and Gurdje and I'll come to Gurdje in a second by stretching his analysis back in time on baker is forced to reckon with explaining how exactly it was that social exogamy that is the fact that caste could marry with each other outside of each outside of caste how it is that social exogamy the conjugation of caste mixtures gave way to caste endogamy indeed as he digs deeper into intelligical explanations for the origin of castes on baker becomes aware that the neat logic of surplus and parity laid out in castes cannot explain the relatedness and conflict across millennia that is found in the intelligical record which speaks to the constant birthing of new caste through forms of misogynation whether it's Anuloma or Prathiloma unions not just marriages the like as we kept good another influential on baker contemporary in Maharashtra Gurdje trained in endology and shared the University of Bombay Sociology department from 1924 through 1959 identified Brahminism in the caste system as essential features of Indian and Hindu civilization examining traditional knowledge systems religious practices social organization and law as represented in Sanskrit sources in tandem with the discussion of contemporary practices suggesting continuities between the past between the present and the distant past yet Ambedkar's own distinctive strategy was to rely on the intelligical record in order to take down the deficit of caste logically and ideologically rather than to give it a kind of to put it on a respirator as a core which is what you know Gurdje does but what I've done here is to merely flag the precocity of Ambedkar's argument about sex and the social sex as the social and thus also the presentation of caste as social form and a perverse form of sociality predicated on a logic of social function this brings me to grace now we know Ambedkar is interested in the classic sociological problem of group formation how and why it occurs in what form it may take caste furnishes our young student the peculiar yet productive example of the formation of social class we've already noted that Ambedkar challenged Manu's power to lay down the law arguing that the historical Manu had merely engaged in the work of codification by giving existing social customs the status of social rules and he also challenges the idea that the Shastras had brought caste into being he writes, quote there is a strong belief in the mind of orthodox Hindus that the Hindu society was somehow moulded into the framework of the caste system and that it is an organization consciously created by the Shastras end quote caste's historicity contradicted efforts to map textual caste onto caste's social existence and Ambedkar shows caste to be a product of sexual violence and violation as well as the enforced separation of groups these two processes collided overlapped and converged but they also often diverged the heteronomous proliferation of mixed castes who required a place in the Varna hierarchy attested attested to this historicity of caste nobody ever calls this not here so attested to the historicity of caste itself now the logic governing caste a structure however resided in the principle of separation that produced the parceling of an already homogeneous unit and we are thus left with the complexity of caste's origin as Ambedkar saw a stupe and it's worth remembering that he approaches the problem of origins indirectly at least in caste in India via a synchronic study of caste as a assemblage a strange multiplicity comprising primitive and modern elements governed by the mechanism of endogamy in fact Ambedkar addresses origins via its traces through the persistence of exogamy that is visible in the conjugation of castes the persistence of these mixed castes and through the reproduction of caste by imitation of the Brahman as a historically specific form of social power and the reason also that I am drawing some attention to caste in India is that this is a text that he keeps coming back to and argues that he holds firm in some sense to the analytics and the social analysis that he had put in place in this text even though as we know the rest of his ever would kind of you know quite you know quite significantly elaborate on many of these arguments that he is making here now Ambedkar would make three arguments that form the backdrop to the question of caste's origins here in this text. First is that India is a cultural unity. Second that a provisional answer to the question of caste's origin is provided by the mechanism of endogamy he is not able to actually ever get to the question of the origin of caste that is it's an enforced social rule which relies on the exercise of gendered violence both within and across caste third and most important that caste is a partitioning of the social whole and that it thus presents us with the sociological puzzle of understanding the relationship of part to whole. This is unlike race he argues which poses the problem of finding a unifying mechanism for territorially differentiated and culturally distinct groups. So here the logical operations of complementarity opposition, separation repulsion and encompassment are each at play all very very important emergent sociological concepts to our conceptions. So in the way that Ambedkar presents caste as a relation of relations however beginning as Ambedkar does with India as a cultural unity and caste is a form of artificial and imposed separation it's clear that unlike race difference social differences he argues in India are of a different kind from those in the United States and in Europe and therefore in caste Ambedkar analyzes the violence of caste also without any reference to untouchability which is quite interesting even independent of untouchability then caste is already constituted by sexual violation within and between castes. Golden visors teacher Boaz demonstrates hierarchy and evolutionism by positing the cultural concept as an alternative with cultures viewed as bounded and separate thus de-emphasizing internal division and prioritizing shared values governing a cultural whole. Instead Ambedkar argues that caste does not operate like race writing that caste endogamy is different from endogamy amongst the cultures and the whites and the various tribal groups that go by the name of American Indians in the United States who and I continue to quote who are culturally different making the remote and localities more or less removed and having little to do with each other caste however is a partitioning of the whole following the logic of parceling of self-duplication which was caused by and was a consequence of that first primordial Brahmin enclosure. But how had this internal division this principle of separation come about? In cast Ambedkar struggles to explain a structure governed by a peculiar force of separation vision and division of the social whole and the problem he lays out in cast he will dramatically modify 20 years later in the annihilation of caste where he will prioritize a relationship between untouchability and Hindu religion as a point of contradiction that can bring caste to crisis. Later he will talk about the untouchables as a part a part and argue that quote Hindu society as such does not exist it is only a collection of cast and he will go on to suggest that the division between touchable and untouchable and the principle of untouchability itself is what effects the separation between society from itself and he will articulate a revolutionary project that seeks the destruction of this edifus. Ambedkar's challenge to those advocating the reform of caste is clearly stated in AOC in the annihilation of caste. Criticize a reform of the social limited to the yxorial rules described in cast rather than a total critique of caste itself repeated and well known statement early on in that text he points to those reformers and I quote felt quite naturally a greater urge to remove such evils as enforced widowhood child marriage etc evils which prevailed among them and which was personally felt by them. They did not stand up for the reform of Hindu society. The battle that was fought centered around the question of the reform of the family. They did not relate to social reform in the sense of the breakup of the caste system which actually is the destruction of the reigning order of the family and the form of the couple. And as we know in the annihilation of caste Ambedkar calls for the death of Hindu religion for caste annihilation in the interest of social revolution. This is not yet apparent when we read castes but there are intimations in caste in India the student of sociology discovers the mechanism that makes caste cohere. He has yet to spell out the political, the ethical and the existential implications of caste separation. He has only just begun to think about the outcast, the boycotted and those defined as untouchable and unseeable. In fact the term untouchability as I said does not appear in that 1916 paper. But in 1916 his growing awareness of the internal division of the whole intimates a revolution in thought. Unlike his predecessors from Maharashtra like Fule or Gopalbaba Balankar or Vittal Ramji Shinde Ambedkar thinks sociologically according to the rules of that emergent discipline and arrives at its limits. So when he'll also think the limits of the equality principle in order to effect social revolution to bring caste to crisis as I said and to engage in the project of cost annihilation. But one thing is certain Ambedkar's ways of thinking about the social question is charged because of the way he is already articulating the internal division the partitioning of the social whole that is the non-relation of part to whole as one of the defining features of caste. Us in India thus queues us that the question of caste is a question of the constitution of the social and that caste's negative sociality is a product of the peculiarity of the internal division the partitioning of the whole. The social whole is internally divided because caste is is separous. The whole is so internally divided that it's neither the sum of its parts nor can it represent them. Parts are actually agonistically related to each other through violence separation but they're also pulled together by the force of imitation and I think this focus on the psychic life of caste on the mimetic force of caste and caste imitation is extremely critical in this early text. So in caste in India Ambedkar's efforts to divide the manifestations of social caste into origins functioning or mechanism and ideology or power its development we might say keep returning him to the question of mechanism what makes the machine take folded into the problem of mechanism is the iterative dimension of caste's a self duplicating and vociferous once the principle of endogomy is established as a social rule relatedly the ideological power of Brahminism and the high status of the sociological Brahmin is a consequence of their having perfected the rule of caste endogomy which others seek to replicate by imitation. What this does is to give to caste an unstable organising centre. Interestingly Ambedkar refers to the principle of excommunication as mechanistic as he observes that it articulates the first cleavage between Brahmin and non-Brahmin and I quote while making themselves into a caste the Brahmin's by virtue of this created a non-Brahmin caste or to express it in my own way by closing themselves in by closing themselves in they closed others out I end quote so the penalty for the offensive breaking established caste rules he goes on to note is excommunication and the result of that is a new caste. So the dual logic of excommunication and imitation both together and separately describe the social physics of caste it explains the social reproduction of caste as a complex totality. At one point Ambedkar mourns the frailty of those who merely followed along he notes this completes the story of those who are weak enough to close their doors he tells us and later work Ambedkar's focus will be on those who didn't follow along and whose ideas challenged the very ideology of caste but here in caste in India the Columbia student has discovered the logic of social reproduction but has yet to elaborate his own demands for social revolution. So I might then use this as a way to return to the point I began with regarding the ways in which this kind of brief kind of journey through a situated materialist reading that I've tried to offer here might put pressure on standard methods of both thinking about questions around thought but also the methods of doing intellectual history by really forcing us to think through maybe the text context relationship in a slightly different way. So I'll stop there. Reposed in the chat I think there is that option yes it does look good questions here too and there are also questions from the floor here also and please raise your hand and jump in if you would like to hear. Thank you Anu that was amazing and I feel there's lots of questions I have about the kind of what you're doing the project you're doing in Columbia as well as your reading here of Ambedca's sort too. I feel like my thinking in one sense is on that course this is something that you haven't run yet but you're developing is that correct so yeah with the tool. So I mean I think one of the things that's really interesting here is being able to engage these questions through a person engage the institution through a person rather than sort of starting with the institution which I think gives you you pass that out very nicely these different kinds of spaces and the inner and the outer I guess one of the questions I had was about how I mean you framed how the university works for Ambedca very clearly here but I'm wondering a bit about how students will engage with that from their own experiences of being with their own reading of it here now and thinking about the teleologies that can play out here and ideas of translatability of different forms of exclusions and inclusions and how you've encountered those questions so far and how you're anticipating those and what that means to this space there is a history of the university that is peripherally in this project but which points are everyday existence Absolutely yeah No that's this is an ongoing question right in each classroom in a sense produces a different set of both problems and questions but also responses now in terms of you know I've taught the course twice I should say right or no I've taught it once and I'm going to teach it the second time but in the meantime there's been a kind of collaborative ongoing project thinking through a set of these modes of near and far reading so I think yeah I mean you know the question of set of translation that you know the history of the university then and the history of the university now the question of responsibility and complicity which many of the students are coming I think into the classroom with and more broadly yet perhaps the moment that we're in the political and the intellectual moment that we're in where many of these questions about inclusion within the university as a kind of social form and a real space but as well the kind of knowledge that has been produced in the university and being held accountable to them are just so you know there's so profoundly sort of salient and present and with us and one of the things that you know I would like to try to do is to harness much of that kind of critical reflection sometimes and very often at an elite institution with students coming from elite backgrounds not all by any means but certainly many is I think to maybe harness questions around sort of guilt complicity etc to harness that to words some notion of kind of intellectual and institutional responsibility so it seems to me that to actually get students to think about the space that they are in to think about questions of the curriculum to think about practices of reading as themselves having you know both the kind of long history but it's a very complicated history right because the university is not just a mode of exclusion it's also a space of absolute kind of fascination and a desire for inclusion within the university you see this with Ambedgar you see this with many others and so I think it's that relationship between both kind of you know social emancipation or kind of mass intellectuality democratic education on the one hand and then the very real social and sociological circumstances of exclusion that I don't know one would like to at least push students I think to think about this through some model of kind of historical responsibility and accountability right hence I mentioned the university and slavery model that many institutions have now adopted now again to your point you know Ambedgar doesn't translate well in that context right most students who might see a race cast in the university course are called they come you know either one has students coming from a South Asia context where they've got some sense of what you know cast is and then they have been introduced to the new cast studies and to kind of anti-cast thought and so on but may not have any sense of the American university in the interwar or you have students coming in who have really a kind of keen sense and many of them have come from that university course who have a sense of what it means to do archival work on the university and work in the university archives but what do you do with this kind of weird figure who actually doesn't exist in our university archive right so that imaginative leap so I think there is both the kind of imaginative leap that both sets of students have to make very often and I'm quite comfortable doing this but this is as a teacher in the classroom I think it's good for students to be a little and maybe even more radically kind of de-familiarized and destabilized and just throw them a text and say what would you do with this and it's kind of remarkable what students are actually able to do with a text who don't bring to it a particular optics of reading so they start noticing well what is this weird you know why does he keep using this term enclosure this is really weird that you read enclosure right and then suddenly it's like oh so for some of them it's like oh British history and you know is this what he's talking about or you know when he talks about things like you know caste is a kind of virus and this model of self duplication or sociological thinking what does it mean to engage in sociological thinking at a moment when the discipline of sociology and anthropology don't exist as two distinct disciplines they're actually also thinking about this through political economy where economics as a discipline has not made its you know kind of shift away from more historicist ways of thinking economy right so I think for students maybe to to encounter that almost as a set of forms or things that they kind of pick up on but they're not quite sure what's going on it can produce some interesting things but I think the question of sort of translation across two very different sort of play books are reading lists that is always really hard which is why I think the focus on text annotation close reading begins to produce and provide a kind of shared definitional universe for students and then you can start kind of you know getting them to think about well who's well as who's getting is here's a fact that both of them really are um itching in a sense the new science through female students if we think about people like and see those Parsons and you know who are the people who are actually carrying the message of the new science at this time and these are all these are women and that I think is very interesting where there's you know Benedict or Meade or any of the others and so on and all of you know these are all folks who are at this institution and Baker is there at this time and I think that very complex world of the university and Harlem is one that I just want students to think about because you can walk you know you can actually walk you can see the gates you can move within and outside the institution and begin to actually get some sense of what this means to be in a space that has a radical insurgent popular you might say a kind of street university history if you think about Harlem is that and indeed it is that because you know you have Ymian Garvey and there you know the conflicts and the debates between that's a Du Bois and Garvey a lot of this is happening on the streets right and so on it's happening in spaces that are that are not formal educational institutions so then I think to just start asking and posing this question of intellectual labour and what it means to be educated which is so significant for someone like Ambedgar for all of the anti-cast theorists this is the first you know this is the first enclosure that has to be broken right so I think just to you know begin to think about that I think produces may be a more rich sense of responsibility one that's hopefully not paralyzing and which is not just too easy you know in terms of saying oh well you know really critical well okay sit down into your time in the archive you know the archives really really where you have to be honest to the archive and all of you know this right that really sitting and you know being in the archive creates a kind of honesty to that empirical material and then you really have to think through you know the easy critique in a slightly more difficult and complicated way also that sort of spatialisation of audience and influences also helps to break up the institution yes yes very interesting way absolutely and you know opening up things that you know one hasn't known right because you can approach this in many different ways you could actually approach this by saying what's you know how do we get to political economy you know what else is going on at this time I mean there's a huge conversation around things like eminent domain the railways I mean all of this is really really critical in terms of the organisation of political economic knowledge at this time you can say you know what's happening in terms of political economy what's happening through this racecast comparison how does he come to so there's many different cuts right do you want to engage in a Boazian reading do you want to focus on Dewey do you want to think Seligman just in the title those of you joining us online please do add your questions to the new thing and I will read those out but please are we working with 1619 right yeah yeah yeah okay there's three questions there and I'll maybe respond to I think the two main ones I think this question of sort of archive and absence is very very important and it's a little bit different from the other question that you asked and the question of origins because as I said you know in the later work indeed he both stretches the subcontinental history much much much further back into the into the past and also discovers the kind of you know an agent an agent in terms of a kind of structuring antagonism between what Ambedkar will call Buddhism and Brahminism has actually both the motor of history but also the kind of agonistic framework with thinking about the history of caste in the long term but there are places you know and he does some of this work in the late 40s but there are places again to the point of kind of autobiography and the interesting ways to read for that there are places where you know he will argue that the untouchable is missing in the historical record right and that what one needs to engage in I think I talked about critical fabulation that one actually needs to engage in a kind of imaginative act that allows you to suture between point A and point B right that to make that jump you actually need to be able to rethink the historical record in the way that you write a kind of literary aesthetic work now I see that not as him engaging in fabulation I E not real not true but that this question of origins is incredibly aids complicated be the question of origins is a kind of prehistory to what he really wants to be doing it seems to me right so the origin is not ever it seems to me the the question for anyone it's an animating fiction to get a system going right it's the fiction of the social contract well you know or the hubesian you know idea of of society is you know in a sense living in a state of civil war so that animating fiction you know origins are that kind of an animating fiction they have to in a sense allow you to then get the motor going and allow you to tell the story that you want to tell and so this I think as you know so this is of excuse me a very very interesting question about archive and absence it also has a lot to do with the umbedker archive in India and the question of what did umbedker read and how which is also I think you know to your question about marks and his engagement more broadly with the traditions of kind of British socialism which I think again he sees as being much much much more elaborate expansive and capacious and merely thinking through marks right and so so that archive is is an interesting engaged and complicated archive both of material that he has to read in translation because he doesn't he can't access the Sanskrit texts but then as well his own understanding of kind of universal history and that I think is you know if you I don't know how you want to think about marks but you know this is a problem for all moderns right that some kind of an investment in universal history doesn't matter what you think cost is that is that animating motor or you think value or labor and so on so that question I think is is really interesting now your second question about using cost to think race and are people wrong again I think they're using cast here as a concept metaphor I mean you might be thinking about Isabelle Wilkerson but that's only the latest of a long range of works I mean there's a cost in motions you know which you know had many other people in the mix and actually just because to the tradition which is a kind of Chicago school tradition as well. You know you know much further back if you know engagements with slave abolition and mission Christianity and the ways in which American cast I think has a very long history going way back into the early 19 of the before the 18th century but onwards. So I think there, when folks are using since ... to think about race they are seeing it as a concept metaphor. It's a form of bearishisation right, it's the shock of saying well you know you thought race was it might be awful but if ... it's nothing if it's not modern and here we and got this archaic traditional you know social structure AND system and practice and we are likening it to that. So I think it's meant to produce This is that kind of... Compared to a kind of, you know, intellectual shock. This is not something that we might understand, why would you say this. But then more complicatedly it seems to me, the caste argument opens up. And I don't think it's class like. I think caste is a very complex form of social inequality that is that is hydro headed. It might be class like at times, but it is also a system that regulates status, it's a Ya, of sexual and reproductive labour is in the legislative order of occupation and ability The other thing that they also want to think through are all of the kind of non material practices, prejudice, discrimination, outcasting, exclusion. I guess that would call a set of microaggressions as well. So the kind of status order, the psychic life of caste, like the psychic life of race, which goes beyond merely kind of material parity, right? And I think that's what maybe that kind of comparison is enabling for people and I think we should respect it. Does that mean that those are scholars of caste? I don't think so. You know, just like I would hesitate to call myself a scholar of race. But I don't think so. Yeah. Questions online. Well, I was going to break them together a little bit. Yes, so there's a series from Charles Queshi, one which is a request to send the link of the recording at the end, which I think we will do. Don't worry about that. There's another kind of point of information, which is a question about whether or not Columbia University maintains an active subscription to Dullet Voice, founded by VP Redshaker in 1981. No, I mean, they might, but I'm not absolutely sure how current. Yeah. I mean, there's a question about do you maintain a subscription, but I mean, that touches on the point you are making earlier about kind of the ethics of this archive and sharing information. And then there's a number of questions that are more around past struggles in the present moment. So, a request to comment on how you see the caste system, has the caste system in India been strengthened by the Modi regime, has the position of Dullet's improved, and a request for your thoughts. If you would like to share them on the recent banning of Dullet activists, then Mozi Sundarajan at Google in North America due to protests by other Hindu employees. Why hasn't the North American environment weakened caste tending? Okay. I'm not a political commentator. So, you know, I'm going to have to make a leap from the paper I gave to the paper that I should have given. But I will try. No, I think the first question, you know, about Dullet Voice, and I think as you're suggesting also Eleanor that, you know, the bigger question behind it is, you know, do you have actually access to the world of kind of ephemeral pamphlet production chapbooks, etc. And again, to that point, you know, Western libraries and universities are kind of vacuuming machines, they're hoover hoovers or whatever. So there is a great deal of interest if those things can be accessed, I think, to actually gather them and to preserve them. And they do do right by the logics and the politics of preservation and the ethics of preservation, I should say excuse me. But Dullet Voice in particular, I'm not absolutely sure if I know that there were some that we used to get. But a lot of this is also very contingent on faculty themselves to your point that, you know, we are here and therefore certain things happen. So, you know, I'm here and therefore I teach a particular course and not something else. And, or I go to the librarian and say, hey, you've got to go and, you know, get all of this material. So I think that there is that kind of patchiness, but, and then the bigger question still might be, who can access, you know, Cleo, which is our search engine for Columbia. So back to this question, I think, again, of access, we are all great about, you know, making a bid for digital humanities and talking about open access and making information available. So we work with incredibly, you know, difficult structures and corporatized structures to make any of those things possible and I think one also has to be quite honest about this. This is not just about, you know, can I, you know, do I feel that this should be done, of course, but can I do it. Most times probably not. So I think we should be honest about it. The Modi regime, the caste system, this I think is a very complicated and a very large question. What we might think about, to my point about the significance of Ambedkar today is that the Modi regime itself also has its own understanding and relationship to the figure of Ambedkar and wants to see him as part of a broader pantheon of other figures. And therefore there is a certain, we could say, a certain kind of both a misreading or a rejection of the insurgent Ambedkar in favour of the constitutional Ambedkar, you know, so, and that's, you know, quite easy. I mean, why not? Yes, he is an extraordinary constitutional thinker. He does, you know, he does chair the drafting committee of the Indian constitution. You can't take that away from him, and it's an extraordinary document. And so the constitutional Ambedkar and the Ambedkar who, you know, an Ambedkar does this all the time, right? He works within the system, and then he's constantly also speaking to the limits of the system. So he'll participate, you know, in the constitution, in the drafting committee of the constitution. But of course we also know that he says that, well, this is a document which, if it can't actually put in place social democracy, not political democracy, then it's, you know, it's worth, it's a document that can be just like, you know, in my heart, I tried to burn Maru, Maru's Darmyshastra, but Maru's Darmyshastra, right? So that, you know, I have no fealty to the document as such, even if I've played a role in it. I will constantly do this as a way to, I think, both mark the necessity of working within an organisational and institutional and a policy framework always, he never says no to that, but always to mark also his own relationship to any of those forms and practices of centralising power, if you will, that is his own kind of marginal position there, his own experience of inhabiting the margins, and always being a kind of insurgent voice that is kind of sniping from the sidelines if you will, right? And he's constantly doing this, and I think that's a very important aspect of his own political thought, if you will, the way that he works it, and there's a constant recursivity in his thought as well. He keeps coming back to questions, asking them in new ways, and so this early late kind of a bit good, you know, with maybe a violation of caste being a kind of dividing line, some of that makes sense, but other bits of that don't quite make sense because of how recursive his thought is. He keeps coming back to questions because he never feels that he's adequately answered them. He hasn't found, you know, that kind of the clinching explanatory logic for any of these things, and so he's kind of haunted by constantly repeating this question, where am I in the Indian historical, you know, what is caste as the social. And that, if one wants to read in a kind of more literary mode, it is, that's the tragic, if you will, a kind of element there in Ambedkar that I think we should also think about. Then there was a question about the Murray and equality labs. Again, the bigger response here might be the ways in which cast has traveled, not necessarily through race and people thinking about race through cast but indeed about the diaspora and the way that cast has traveled. And the ways in which that has been a kind of again an absent presence. And the fact that these things are really being brought to the surface, and these make for not just very difficult conversations but it's producing, I think a certain kind of a legal problem. Because of the modes of multiculturalism that again speaking of the body regime or maybe internationalists who are interested in a very different hegemonic idea of both India but also of Hindu social relations and so on. So producing a real problem because multiculturalism actually allows for an argument about hurt right about community hurt that doesn't address the question of agonism inequality within the community, and in many ways it's reproducing what I think is the differences in the context of something like the Puna pack right. So the idea of actually creating political separation becomes impossible, partly because of Gandhi mentioned Gandhi, but it's also because how do you imagine and figure reorient the structure of agonistic intimacy, which is what cast is, and the outcasts relationship to that structure. Right. And I think it's reproducing that in kind of very interesting ways here you know I mean everything that Walker says there about, well social reform had no place for a radical annihilatory logic of thinking about cast well. You know, South Asian diaspora, especially in the US, where there's already a divide between manual and intellectual neighbor right those who come post 65 knowledge workers. Others were part of the kind of revolutionary and or working class traditions of South Asian migration from the late 19th century onwards there's already that divide. Now you're posing that question about cost in that context, where I think legal safeguards around US multiculturalism are going to produce some very interesting responses. And that's what we see here, these are. This is about sort of competing hurt, as I understand it right so the argument that was made about the disinvitation again is, is that well this would actually create, rather than creating the conditions for dialogue. It was going to create discord. But can you swallow the poison. And, and I think that's the kind of, you know, that's the my response to it. We're working you hard, but I would like to give. Yes, if we take a few questions from the floor, if that's right, collect them. Yes, yes, yes. I mean, you're right. I'm sorry, yes, yes, yes. This is a question about a medical studying in London. His training as a lawyer and questions of secularism is thought. We had other questions. Could you speak up so that people don't like it? Thank you very much. Even again, the university is outside India. It is kind of like less than minimum. I'm sorry. That's about it. So how, you know, I look like a peddler. You have four fours, something. And in that sense, how do we think about it? But then it was from looking at from India and also like looking at from the universities. Thank you. Thank you for that. My question to you is that it's not really like it's not something that you're talking about. So, but what do you, why do you like it? It's not as good as it is. It's even a factual sort of. I think that I would like to just like to find some more of the questions that cast this way. So I think that I just have to understand the question. While in the talk, you try to use how social life is. I think of the system. We go with the logic that whole, not constantly. What is it that? Then also for that. Not going to see that scale in me. How do we mystic in this? And then do we sort of not inquiry the origins of it? Origins of the system. And how does it begin? Because when I went and put it, I said, where does it originate from? By the mechanisms. And then what you have to sort of find. How is it? The system, you understand it. And it is in different forms. So it has a site itself. It has a property. So all of these are explanations that comes later. How do we reconstruct the quality? Maen nhw dwi ddim mynd i chi, dwi ddim yn ychydig yn ysgrifiadau digwydd.這en. Mae'r sgwrs darnu ffiydd. Dwi dwi'n ffigures i'w dweud a'r pryd yn byw, a ysgriffaalau, ysgriffaane gyda swydd ddweud. A'r drwng – a yna'r scientists. Ta'w ddweud yr anodigion? Roedd penderfyn oedd yn anodigion? Roedd yn ysgriffaane gyda'r anodigion? Mae'r anodigion? Roedd yna'r anodigion? Mae hi'n rŵr yn ysgriffaan? Yn y cwmhwys i'r llwyddoedd, ydych chi'n gwybod. Gweithio y rheolwyr yng Nghymru yn ymweld i'r Bym Armi ac i'r Shmarprade. Felly, mae'n ddweud i'r cwmhwys i'r cwmhwys i'r cwmhwys i'r pwysig. Felly, mae'r cwmhwys i'r pwysig yw… Felly, mae'n ddweud i'r pwysig i'r Cwmhwys i'r pwysig i'r Cwmhwys i'r Cwmhwys i'r pwysig i'r pwysig i'r pwysig. Felly, mae'n ddweud i'r pwysig i chi'n gwybod… Felly, oherwydd, ydych chi'n gwasanaeth gwneud. Felly, yn y cydweithio, ond rydych chi'n gweithio y ffyrdd yng nghymru, sy'n gweithio'r ffordd yng Nghymru, a'i oed yn dod i'r pwysig. well, you know, I think we always have to be able to read and reread and take down the fathers whoever they may be. Right, so the whole point of critical academic labour is to kill the father. And if that father happens to be unbidgar, then we've got to take him down to all, which is to say that you know there are always reflections and new readings a newydd y ddweud o gweithio cyfnodd wedi eu llwyddiadau. Felly dyna'n gwybod ym Mbedgar, oherwydd eu maen nhw'n gweithio am gant ei ffordd, ond rydyn ni'n gweithio allan o'r ddweud. Felly dyna'n gweithio allan o'r gweithio ar y cyfnodd oedd ymddangos. Felly dyna'n gweithio at yw'r awtdiad o'r gweithio am Bedgar, ond Bedgar efallai ychydig o'i cynnig, fynd y cyflwyno, is a name and you know many things happen in his name that may that may not be their Ambedkarite but they are not what you know a strict fidelity to Ambedkar's thought might involve but this is like saying you know are you an originalist in your interpretation of the constitution well you know we know where that has taken us so you can't be so I think all texts and all human beings have to be historicized in some sense um you know and I'll come to to that other question I'd like to very much this question of rereading reading or reading reading because I think it is reading Ambedkar reading and this is the way that I've thought about it and thank you for that I like that very much but in but but then to briefly respond to your questions yes yes yes and yes and the constitution is also secular but I don't think it is only Ambedkar's constitution there are many many things that are happening between the first sort of constitutional moment which is the colonial constitution the government of India act in 1935 and then the lead up to this uh both with sort of partition and then the constituent assembly and so on and so I think the the idea of kind of Indian secularism which is a very distinctive form which is not about the separation of religion and state but it's actually about the parity of religious communities regardless of their enumerated density if you want to call it that right so the parity of you know religious communities is the model of Indian secularism so to that extent it is a secular constitution but it's a constitution that is extremely active and interventionist in producing its secularism it engages in you know opening up temples it makes sure the temple entry is allowed for everybody it does away with sectarian differences within Hinduism and so on so so far as Hinduism itself is concerned it produces a certain kind of secular Hinduism aggressively and actively through juridical intervention and reform so may not be quite the secularism that you were thinking about I think this question I mean these two questions actually I think are kind of interrelated exclusion now institutional murder and access institutional access on the one hand and then on the other you know writing life right writing personal life narratives and writing life and that question you know why isn't the personal life evident in in Ambedkar I did not mean to suggest that it's not there I think it requires a different kind of reading which is what I suggested that there are bits of it in caste in India the entire sort of a preamble to annihilation of caste is all about an autobiographical argument about who Ambedkar thinks he is and why he is just you know and it's an extraordinary kind of an autobiographical fragment so I think those fragments appear but part of it might also be that you know a it's about conventions of the time you might say I mean Gandhi is a little bit radical in the extent to which he feels that the life requires examination and constant self reflection and so on it's also a kind of motive atonement for him right you could say and we should take that quite seriously whereas I think here the conventions of kind of self writing self narration but also I think you know I think Ambedkar is playing with the immortals which is to say he's playing on the grounds of kind of you know global thinking and the arguments there are actually arguments about logic about analytics and about making a kind of distinctive set of arguments that have systematicity and coheal over time so I think that maybe makes sense but to the question of sort of writing life now and why I mean alith writing the alith sahitya the post-Ambedkarite movements around literary representation as itself ethnographic so autobiography is a certain kind of ethnography we probably need to think about all of those things I should also personally say that I do not believe that narrating personal life stories per se is necessarily an act of kind of either authenticity right so it requires other strategies it seems to me of reading but that very profound question that was asked about you know how do we think about the existing orders of exclusion which also work along I think relations have cost and this was your question what do we do about it um I don't have an easy response to that you know I don't think I mean unless you're going to talk about again the kinds of movements that existed and they still exist of communities really supporting young people training them you know as I think you know you know as exists you know you want to take the IAS exam and so you know there are coaching classes you would meet in buddhist viharas and so on so I think unless you have some of those kinds of projects together with people from within these institutions pushing for it as has been happening with students around cost discrimination and so on it's it's a very difficult thing to do and I can say that in my own institution you know there is a recognition of underrepresented domestic minorities but we don't have a way to recognize international what we call international urns so you don't you can't make an argument around affirmative action in an international frame so just as you know in Indian institutions now you and Indian educational institutions that entire order in many ways isn't kind of tatters because of what's happening to US universities I think here you know it's institution by institution and especially in the US which is structured so much around the presence of public universities where many of these arguments have been able to take root and private institutions where you know we do need blind you know need blind admissions and so on but we don't want to commit to international urns so I think it's a very very complicated terrain but it's an important question quickly to this final question agonistic intimacy I think because Baker's thinks that Romans can't exist without others and untouchables can't exist without others either it is a system of relationality and I don't know what society is except as a relation of relations right so the the emergence of sociology and anthropology is in a sense the is about presenting society as an externalized kind of form back to us so the idea is always that society is a kind of totality that is that exists outside of it and is presented back to us right this is what you see with you know Durkheim and you know most you know so all of the early sociological theorists take your pick are interested in thinking about society in that sense of totality and one that can be presented back to itself right so in that sense I think it is always in a sense assumed to be a relation of relations and so the important innovation that Ambedkar is making is to say well what if the social relationships are profoundly deformed what if they actually preclude social intercourse what if they make it impossible for us to actually have egalitarian relations right in the middle of you know kind of modernity where you know we have a commitment to equitable relations right so here's this really weird order that has managed to persist by bringing together the primitive and the modern right and has this kind of outstanding kind of hold on social reproduction it's able to replicate itself how does it do this this is a huge puzzle for him because I think for him you know that comes together with the idea that this is an order of asociality it's not an order of sociality right so you know what was the city supposed to do what a sociology think you know happens to you know modern human beings yes they're all anomic they're autonomous they're all kind of rooted in some form of melancholia I suppose but what is it that's going to produce the social glue so Durkheim will talk about religion and take that very very seriously right as a certain kind of social glue that brings people together Marx will talk about labour and the relationship between labour and capital as a kind of social glue that is that creates the relations of relations so that I think is kind of also what Ambedkar is playing with because this is you know he is a person of his time so he's not I also don't think he's thinking thoughts yes he's thinking thoughts that are kind of beyond his time but he's also very rooted and he's responding to the the main major sociological debates at the time tokenism religion social glue you know effervescent in social relations and so on so I think he's working through all of that he is you know he's certainly aware of you know Marx and Weber and Durkheim and Gabriel Tard and Boas and so forth I think which means he's aware of the German traditions the British the French the Bergson and so on so I think he's he's very very well aware and and he is he is deeply learned so he knows those traditions it seems to me thank you and thank you to our audience in person and online thank you so we didn't get to cover everything but I think everything in the chat I think we covered pretty much everything else so thank you everyone and again thank you it's always weird to to be to existent in two others one which you didn't even know