The Departments of Religious Studies, Asian and Middle East Studies, History, Anthropology, and International Studies welcome Joel Lee, professor of anthropology at Williams College.
Caste structures the life chances of a fifth of humanity. Notoriously resilient, caste systems have accommodated social and political reform in South Asia while remaining inescapable in practice: you cannot change the caste into which you are born. But is there room for clandestine maneuver? In the colonial archive, Article 419 of the Indian Penal Code — "cheating by personation" — emerges as the legal instrument with which the state dealt with alleged "imposters" in land and inheritance disputes. In a high profile case in 2017, a government scientist invoked IPC 419 to charge her domestic cook with "impersonating a brahmin." This talk follows that case alongside the life story of another domestic worker who, despite the risks, conceals her Dalit ("untouchable") origins and adopts a middle-caste persona in order to gain employment in privileged-caste homes in the north Indian city of Lucknow. Her experiences as an undercover observer — someone who inhabits two locations in the caste system at once — yields insight into "passing," personhood and how caste functions as a form of property in the contemporary city.