Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow, September - November 2023
Home institution: Ashoka University
Vivek V. Narayan is a scholar, performance-maker, and writer working on caste and anti-caste politics in south India. He is Assistant Professor of English, Theatre, and Performance Studies at Ashoka University and an alumnus of Stanford University, Royal Holloway, University of London, and St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. His book project, Stolen Fire: Caste Scripts and Anti-Caste Politics in South India, 1806-1941, views the long history of anti-caste struggle in colonial-era Travancore through the lens of performance. His writing appears in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures, Theatre Survey, J-CASTE, Modern Drama, The Georgia Review, Black Warrior Review, Muse India, The Caravan, AZURE, The Bombay Review, and The Hindu, among others, while his plays have been performed at various venues in India, the UK, and the USA.
Project title: Stolen Fire: Caste Scripts and Anti-Caste Politics in South India, 1806-1941
This project explores three questions: first, how is caste socially constructed? Second, how have people resisted caste? And finally, where have they found ideas and inspiration for their anti-caste politics? This project views the social phenomenon of caste through the lens of performance. My usage of performance here, and throughout, goes beyond aesthetic forms to include all forms of social behavior. Stolen Fire: Caste Scripts and Anti-Caste Politics in South India, 1806-1941 develops a performance framework of caste which allows us to analyze: first, how caste inflects everyday forms of behaviour and informs our notions of personhood; second, how actions reaffirm or resist caste in quotidian life; and third, how the affective force of embodied ideas inspires action. Locating the everyday as the proper milieu for the dynamic flows of social and political life allows this project to trace transnational routes of humanistic and radical ideas such as egalitarianism—stolen fires—that disrupt the caste order and empower anti-caste resistance in the repertoires of embodiment. Stolen Fire reads literary and philosophical texts, historical archives, and missionary ethnographies to trace these three themes—encasted personhood, political action, and embodied ideas—for over a century during the colonial period in Travancore, Kerala.
Stolen Fire makes the case for a performance framework of caste through three theoretical concepts: caste scripts, political action, and intellectual histories in the repertoire. Caste scripts analyze particular definitions of the human by paying attention to the interactions between caste codes, materiality, and social behaviour. Anti-caste political action articulates a practice-based approach by focussing upon the momentum of enactment, the weight of universal claims, and ultimately, the transformation of human relations in everyday life. Finally, intellectual histories in the repertoire trace the affective lives of ideas and their embodied transmissions during the long and ongoing histories of struggles against caste by exploring how particular conceptual frameworks and discursive modes are transmitted, transformed, and embodied by people for whom these ideas are, quite literally, a matter of life and death. Together, caste scripts, political action, and intellectual histories in the repertoire make up the caste as performance framework.