A few weeks ago, Professor Shailaja Paik, historian and professor at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio received a call that some artists, academics, and creative workers wait a lifetime to answer. On the other side was the McArthur Foundation informing Paik that she had received what is inarguably one of the most prestigious grants in the United States — The McArthur Fellowship “Genius” Grant that comes with an $800,000 no-strings-attached stipend laid out over five years.
Paik, who is 50 and Dalit, has devoted her scholarship and research over 25 years to exploring caste and its impact on Dalit women. Her latest book, The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality and Humanity in Modern India was published in 2022, and offers the first social and intellectual history of the Dalit art form of Tamasha — a provocative, ribald traveling theater in Maharashtra — historically practiced as a caste labor by Dalit women.
Seeing Paik’s name on the list of the grantees, which was made public in early October, unleashed a collective wave of excitement among the Dalit diaspora in the US, and the community back home. Especially following the period of relative quiet since the poorly judged veto of the Caste Bill in the state of California by Governor Gavin Newsom around the same time last year. The selection of Paik as a McArthur “Genius”, among a highly selective group of grantees (22 this year), neither of which are eligible to apply but instead are chosen based on their work, was a resounding signal for the imperishability of caste in the mainstream discourse of United States.
Yet, inevitably and somewhat predictably, a Dalit woman’s success at this level of breathtaking accomplishment could not go unsullied for long. As the news of Paik’s fellowship spread over social media and received coverage in Indian news outlets, the vitriol which is somehow stored in abundance for Dalit women, spilled forth instantly. Risible accusations about Paik being a ‘deep state agent funded to break the unity of India’ to screeching feigned concerns about the sum of the stipend (it converts to somewhere around 6.5 crore in Indian rupees) which could be used to fund the education of ‘other Dalit women’ (always unspecified) started swirling on Indian social media.
Right-wing talking heads with evidently no engagement with research or academia jumped to label Paik a grifter, and her work on Dalit women that has spanned over 25 years, as ‘predictable’. Sleuths assiduously dug up old videos where her name was mentioned alongside other Dalit intellectuals like Anand Teltumbde to ‘prove’ the connection between her grant and a larger anti-India conspiracy (Teltumbde was released from prison in 2022 after being indicted on false charges under the Bhima Koregaon riots against Dalits). Repugnant comments about her personal life and appearance were casually thrown to establish why a Dalit women, who had won one of the most prestigious and among the largest individual grants of the Western world, did not deserve her accomplishment.
Shailaja Paik grew up in what she describes as the tenement slums of Yerawada Pune, with “garbage and dirt around… pigs roaming the alleys” and no access to regular water or a private toilet. After securing a junior research fellowship at the Savitribai Phule University in Pune, she went on to win scholarships from the Ford Foundation, Stanford Humanities Center and the Indian Council of Social Science Research earlier, and is clearly no stranger to the inner workings of structural casteism — To be a Dalit woman is to be the “Dalit of the Dalit, slave of the slave”, Paik told Scroll in an interview last week.
As someone who quite literally defied the barriers stacked against her to become (going by the careers of previous McArthur recipients like Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates), one of the most prominent Indian scholars, and as a Dalit academic who has spent a quarter of a century archiving and investigating the societal exploitation of Dalit women, Paik knows perhaps better than anyone that her wins will be cruelly diminished and prodded until their celebration has been hollowed from the inside out. Dominant caste detractors “mocked her Dalit background. Some would be baffled that she indeed received fellowships for research and consistently ask her how she did it”, reads a 2020 article from the University of Cincinnati website, where Paik is currently a Charles P. Taft Distinguished Professor of History in the College of Arts and Sciences. Yet, the naked hostility and the cruelty of the vitriol flung towards Paik since her win has been nothing short of nauseating. It openly betrays the teeth-grinding resentment of the dominant caste Indians who find it personally insulting that a Dalit woman would be labeled a “genius” and awarded with a sizable grant, shattering the dearly cherished beliefs of their own entitlement and ‘ingrained’ merit.
Even Indian media’s coverage of Prof. Shailaja Paik’s win has been astounding, with wall-to-wall pieces demanding to know “Who is Shailaja Paik?” while broadcasting the $800,000 fellowship stipend in eye-popping headlines. As a clear indication of the rising power of Dalit voices over the last decade, much of this reportage has been laudatory, focusing on her success, yet most articles also struggle to contain their barely concealed shock. No where is the mention that Paik is hardly the first person of Indian origin to have won this award, which has gone to at least 15 other people with Indian heritage since its inception in 1981, including the legendary Hindustani classical musician, Ali Akbar Khan.
Most recently, Manu Prakash and Subhash Khot, both graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), won the fellowship in 2016, and Kartik Chandran, an environmental engineer, won before them in 2015. Prakash and Khot received moderate attention from Indian media, while Chandran was barely mentioned. None was asked “Who are they?” in multiple headlines, and certainly not one of the 15 previous winners of McArthur Fellowship who had Indian heritage, received a fraction of the hate that Paik has received in the last two weeks. Paik is also the only Indian American McArthur recipient so far, who had her credentials questioned by self-styled Twitter pundits, whose sole qualification seems to be their allegiance to a casteist agenda.
After decades of missing Dalit narratives in Indian reporting, the celebratory coverage of Paik’s fellowship is a fresh change that is certainly welcome. But the scrutiny around her win is not. Dominant caste men like Prakash, Khot or Chandran, all of whom won their fellowships in science and engineering are accepted as the norm, their accomplishments greeted without reproach. But a Dalit woman who has spent a lifetime researching and writing about the inequities and exploitation she has experienced first-hand becomes an immediate target of suspicion.
This uniquely hateful response to Paik is more than just the knee-jerk reaction to dismissing the success of a Dalit woman – a response that is without a doubt inseparably smeared into the cultural fabric of Indian social structures. It is also a revelation of many Indians’ collective discomfort with the increasing international attention towards caste. The comments about her funding as a conspiracy to ‘fracture Indian unity’ disclose the denial and irritation around mainstream North American culture becoming aware of the ‘dirty laundry’ of the ongoing discrimination of caste that the Indian establishment has worked over decades – since its Independence in 1947 – to conceal. There is a clear thorough line between labelling Paik’s work as destructive to Indian unity and the Hindu Supremacist organisations banding together to pressure Gavin Newsom to keep caste out of the state policy in California in 2023. It’s about Dalit women like Paik puncturing the carefully constructed narrative of what India and its people should represent globally: Science and tech, always yes. Caste, never.
Despite the negative reaction to her recognition, Paik continues to uphold the hope that “this achievement will strengthen the fight of Dalits and non-Dalits against caste discrimination in and beyond South Asia”, a sentiment she has expressed in almost all recent her interviews.
The Dalit women artists of the Tamasha art form that professor Shailaja Paik has worked with for years, and whose work has been dismissed as unacceptable and whose labor termed indecent, have endured despite of the societal pushback they have received for generations. And the widespread recognition that is about to inevitably follow from this fellowship will ensure that Paik’s work endures for generations too. And for that we are eternally grateful!
This article first appeared on the author’s Substack ‘Featuring Dalits‘ and has been republished with permission.
