Ananya Vajpeyi: Who were the Shudras? Posing Ambedkar's Question in the Epic Forest
Talk featuring Indian academic and award-winning author Ananya Vajpeyi
Friday, April 21, 2017
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
352 HAINES, UCLA
This talk considers a number of Shudra characters in the Epic and Upanisadic literature, including Satyakama, Ekalavya, Sambuka, Janasruti, Sabari and others. It offers a close reading of the episodes in which they make an appearance, attentive especially to questions of selfhood, identity, otherness and encounter, as well as to subtle and implied indices of status hierarchy, social differences and moral positioning. How do these primordial protagonists and their brief but poignant stories unsettle normative modes of thinking about power and privilege? How do these ancient accounts travel down to us across the literature, from medieval Sanskrit Dharmasastra treatises on shudradharma, through to colonial and modern texts by Phule and Ambedkar? How are the possibilities of resistance to rigid caste structure embedded in the ambiguity of these characters? What is the emancipatory potential present in the radical uncertainty about who they are and what their stories mean?
Ananya Vajpeyi works at the intersection of intellectual history, political theory and critical philology. She is currently writing two books: one, a history of caste categories in India from pre-colonial to modern times, and the other, her long-term project, a life of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956).
Her first book Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India was named book of the year 2012 by the Guardian and the New Republic. It received the 41st Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard University Press, the Tata First Book Award for Non-Fiction (2013), and the Crossword Award for Non-Fiction (2013).
Vajpeyi was educated at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (MA), the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar (MPhil), and the University of Chicago (PhD).
She has taught at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, in the history department at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. Most recently she was a Visiting Professor in South Asian and North African Studies at the University of Venice, Ca' Foscari (Spring 2014).