Paik says she documents the voices of people through interviews and extended time spent in the field. | Photo Credit: macfound.org/

Maharashtra has had a long history of anti-caste thinking and organising, from Jotirao Phule in the 19th century through Ambedkar, the Dalit Panthers, and the culture of jalsa and public performances that carried these ideas of anti-caste into people’s lives. What do you think made Maharashtra the place where so much anti-caste thinking took root?

Maharashtra’s long history of social, cultural, political, educational, and ideological churning generated sustained protest against caste from the 19th century onward. People facing caste discrimination challenged traditional systems of thought, questioned their exploitation and dehumanisation, found new opportunities in education and employment, and established libraries, hostels, started newspapers and magazines, and taught those excluded from knowledge and learning—these multi-pronged efforts helped build public consciousness and a language of rights, equality, and freedom that strengthened anti-caste movements across both rural and urban areas.

This radical tradition, wherein particular social groups sought the good of the community as a whole, explains Maharashtra’s emergence as a key site of anti-caste work. Similar movements arose elsewhere in India, but Maharashtra’s particular conditions during certain political periods made it an important site.

You studied in Pune and then went to Warwick for your PhD, and have settled in the United States since then. What made you choose academia?

During my undergraduate years in Pune, I was very influenced by my history teacher. I was deeply interested in understanding past historical actors, their ideas, and actions: how they lived, what they thought, and what they did and most importantly, why. I was also influenced by the way she taught. She didn’t just introduce students to standard textbooks; she went beyond that to provide primary sources, which we historians call evidence from the past.

For example, if we were discussing the Peshwa rulers in Pune in the 17th and 18th centuries, she wanted us to look at documents or essays from that period. That was very rare, and this is how I became more interested in studying history. After my BA and MA in History, I pursued research and my PhD and eventually became a historian—I chose academics because it provided me the space to critique the politics of caste, gender, and sexuality and shape the future generation of students.

You work with Marathi, Hindi, and English sources—old newspapers, photographs, films, and long conversations with women whose stories were never written down by anyone else. You’re also building a new archive from your own fieldwork. What’s it like to piece together a history that was never meant to be preserved? What do the gaps and silences in the record tell you?

The archives are biased against certain communities, such as women and Dalits. I bring together different so-called ‘un-archived’, that is, marginalised, ignored, or ‘nonhistorical’, even ‘trivial’ pieces such as memoirs, a few lines from essays, poems, novels, CDs, and documentaries. Along with them, I work on recording social memory and oral histories. I document the voices of people through interviews and extended time spent in the field.

That is where it becomes a layered, textured story, reflecting the various perspectives, different ways people expressed their thoughts and actions. And most importantly, many of the oppressed could not write or read. So how could they record anything? One woman, for example, was listening to someone else read a newspaper aloud and said, “I was there at that time,” or recalled a political contest from the early nineteenth century.

After such deep digging and working with multiple archives, I write intricately textured and multi-layered histories. It is important to me as a scholar to get to those nitty-gritties and find those minute details. I value them deeply, which is why I spend a long time building trust with people and write their stories with moral and social responsibility.

Your first book, Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination, looked at how education freed Dalit women and disciplined them at the same time. You spoke to three generations of Dalit women in Maharashtra and found that the same state that opened school doors also imposed its own rules about how women should behave.

The book is a foundational history of Dalit women’s access to education, tracking three generations of women. I interviewed about 180 women from different Dalit castes. You will not find these stories in the official archives. The oldest woman was about 85. She described discrimination in a hostel during the pangat, when students sat in a line for their meals. Because of her untouchable background, she was told to sit separately, barred from joining the same line as the high-caste young girls. A retired headmistress recalled being made to sit outside the classroom in the 1930s. Another woman described a moment when her skirt accidentally touched a high-caste girl, who recoiled in disgust. The Dalit girl’s touch, and everything she touched, was considered polluting. In the eyes of the touchables, she was untouchable.

Beyond the numbers in historical documents, what mattered was understanding how the British, the Dalit, and the high-caste reformers actually acted in the realm of education. Did they truly open doors to Dalits, or create barriers? These answers had to be excavated from records that are not easily accessible.

Readers have admired the book’s recovery of these women’s voices alongside its historical documentation. I’m very happy to have written it.

Cover of The Vulgarity of Caste

The Vulgarity of Caste opens with Pavalabai Bhalerao Hivargaonkar, a Dalit Tamasha performer whose songs were taken by her Brahmin lover, Patthe Bapurao. It’s a story about talent, theft, desire, and caste all tangled together. I remember you saying there was virtually no documentation of the lives of Dalit women performers.

There has been a lot of writing on Tamasha about the skits, the songs, the performers, but almost no attention paid to the politics of caste, gender, and sexuality, and especially to the Dalit women who are absolutely fundamental to this popular theatre.

Everyone in Maharashtra who knows Tamasha knows Patthe Bapurao, the great Brahmin Lavani composer. And they mention, almost as an aside, “his lover Pavalabai”. While the larger society upheld Bapurao, it denigrated Pavalabai. For example, nobody knows even her full name—Pavalabai Bhalerao Hivargaonkar. Nobody knew her family, her history, or whether she ever spoke or expressed any ideas. There is an absolute vacuum. While Patthe Bapurao is elevated into a godlike figure, almost supernatural, Paurabai is consistently degraded. In every historical account, she is depicted as a cheater, a woman with no mind of her own, loose, corrupt, jealous. Never credited with anything good.

This discrepancy is entirely about caste, gender, and sexuality. She was a Dalit Mahar Tamasha woman; he was a Brahmin man. They lived and travelled together. And yet one is placed on a pedestal while the other is erased. I contacted her family, and I was very fortunate to find a handwritten memoir, and that is how, with these different pieces and with my own historical and moral imagination, I wrote the first history of Pavalabai.

You call this the “sex-gender-caste complex”—the idea that caste doesn’t just operate through rules about who eats with whom or who marries whom, but through the control of women’s bodies and sexuality. Can you walk us through what that means, using Pavalabai’s story?

My theorisation of the sex-gender-caste complex refers to the gendered arrangements of the caste system that specifically oppress Dalit women. Tamasha women are always depicted as ashlil (vulgar), and the question is why. When Babasaheb Ambedkar was building the radical Dalit movement, the British and upper-caste patriarchal structures were already depicting Dalits as effeminate and weak. Dalit men fought back fiercely. But in asserting dignity, the burden of sexual discipline fell on women. Women became the community’s honour.

So Pavalabai was trapped on both sides. For upper castes, a Dalit woman living with a Brahmin man was polluting him. For Dalit radicals, she was transgressing caste boundaries and threatening the community. Through her life, we see exactly how the sex-gender-caste complex operated—limiting her freedom to act, to speak, to have virtue, to be remembered. The 1905 court case is a perfect illustration of it. While Patthe Bapurao and Paurabai were living and performing together, the Brahmin community filed a formal complaint with the British High Court in Thane that Pavalabai, a Mahar woman, was polluting the Brahmin Bapurao. They wanted the British court to punish her for it. Both were summoned.

Pavalabai has been written about by upper-caste writers as weak and with no mind or opinion of her own. She was neither. She was bold, independent, and a daring woman, and she turned the accusation straight back at the judge. She said that if that is your claim that “I polluted the Brahman Bapurao,” ask the man himself whether it is true.

The judge did, and Patthe Bapurao refused to answer in court and instead invited the judge to the Tamasha theatre on a specific date. On the day, Bapurao performed a Lavani declaring his love for Pavalabai and then fed her a pedha on stage. It was a public romantic gesture, but it changed nothing for her in the historical record. She remained the accused, the degraded, the erased. He walked free, his reputation intact, his Brahman caste privilege fully shielding him. He remained the superior, supreme Brahman and she an Untouchable Mahar Tamasha woman.

Something you said in the context of women in Tamasha stoked a bit of controversy, that Ambedkar “created two kinds of women: a moral woman and an immoral woman”. That the Tamasha performer, the woman who used her body in public, was seen as a threat to the Dalit project itself. How do you make that argument without handing ammunition to people who want to tear Ambedkar down for entirely different reasons?

I am critiquing what radicals and Ambedkar did, but readers need to read the other half, which gets into the complex pressures faced by them. Readers, please read the full argument in my book.

High-caste and British patriarchal thinking depicted Dalits as uncivilised, dirty, docile, childlike, and dangerous. Radical Dalit men, and especially Ambedkar, were deeply aware of these negative colonial and Brahminic stereotypes, and were writing and fighting against them. It was very important for them to confront this depiction. That is why Ambedkar invoked manuski, a Marathi word meaning dignified humanity. Ambedkar invokes it as personhood, reason, responsibility, and self-respect. Dalits were denied this dignified humanity, and Dalit men were seen as unmanly, namard. The cultivation of manuskhi was essential to protecting the basic civic and human rights of Dalits.

That is why, when Ambedkar told Dalits to change their dress, or radicals told women to abandon their occupations in Tamasha, this is not a narrow patriarchal move, as some high-caste elite feminist scholars have argued. This is why I have also taken scholars to task because they have not paid attention to the intersections of sexual labour, of gender, caste, and humanity, especially for Dalits. This is not Dalits copying high-caste patriarchy. Manuski and masculinity come together here, within a hierarchical relation where British and high-caste men characterised Dalits as effeminate and dirty. What Ambedkar and Dalits were doing needs to be understood within these complex pressures (and social, political, ideological context) to carve out a dignified humanity.

How does the current political reality of a slide to increasingly right-wing politics, where there is hostility to the kind of work you do, affect scholars working on caste in India and abroad?

We are indeed in difficult times. Let me talk about how I am working through this. After the MacArthur Award, I founded the Institute for Just Futures, a transdisciplinary hub for research, education, and community engagement advancing justice and equity across caste, gender, and social systems. I am collaborating with faculty, students, and partners across the United States, Europe, and South Asia to examine how historical and structural inequalities have shaped opportunity, well-being, and belonging. I am organising a symposium this fall—a deliberate and urgent response to the climate in which academic freedom, civil liberties, and communities’ rights to self-determination are under profound threat in India, the US, and globally. This is the moment to re-examine our work, work on our present and reimagine a robust future.