My Books
Other Scholars on CCS
“savarna scholars ... the far more difficult task of understanding their role in maintaining global caste and white supremacy. This truth might make it easy to 'be frozen in guilt' because being a caste traitor is a much more difficult and nerve-racking task, a never-ending process of recognizing the new ways that one traffics in the same old forms of neocolonial savarna capital.”
“…the critique of the white anthropologist is also kind of short-circuiting that has allowed too many like me to hide our complicity… This study, as I have noted, is about a brown, transnational, savarna class of Indians who emerge as the brown savior—a class of Indians who are very much like myself. The academy in India and the academy in the United States are also both dominated by folks like me and the brown saviors in my study, brahmins and other savarnas whose dominant caste position translates into economic and social capital in both contexts. We even have an entire wing of postcolonial studies that might be understood, at least in one sense, as the project of the brahmin intellectual elite romantically excavating the history of their feelings of loss vis-à-vis the white colonizer.”
“As a brahmin Indian hindu, I am an uninvited settler on Indian lands across Turtle Island, and my journey is embedded within colonial, racial, and casted entanglements.”
“Positing themselves as anti-colonial and anti-imperial scholars par excellence, brahmin and dominant caste Indian scholars and writers—like Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri C. Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Vijay Prashad, Vandana Shiva, and others—have over the last many decades established themselves as the embodiment of the authentic global south critique. In the process, they obliterate their own transnational privileges across varying temporal-spatial contexts. Further, they often systematically sideline and invisibilize Kashmiri, Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi, Tribal, Indigenous, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, working-class, and other South Asian critiques of the Indian state and its imperialism. This canon has also co-opted the works of Black, Indigenous, other racialized, and global south scholars to often position itself as one of the most legible bodies of scholarship on colonialism and imperialism.”