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Paper short abstract

This paper asks what reconfigurations of racial capitalism are necessitated within the historical materialism of caste. I propose “caste capitalism” as a framework for thinking through entanglements of sexuality politics, caste, and capital in contemporary India.

Paper long abstract

This paper takes up the question of what the transnational travels of queer of color critique look like and what kind of reconfigurations of racial capitalism are necessitated and enacted by such travel. I propose “caste capitalism” as a framework for thinking through entanglements of sexuality politics, caste, and capital in contemporary India. I develop this frame through a queer hermeneutic of heritability and endogamy, drawing inspiration from Indian feminist, anti-caste, and Marxist critiques, and from critiques of racial capitalism as they have circulated in American critical race and queer studies. There is an urgency for this argument with respect to the Indian context, where the rise of autocratic Hindu nationalism is being waged in the terms of upper caste Brahminism and extractive capitalism. This project of Hindu nationalism, known as Hindutva, relies on the ruse of “identity” as being distinct from questions of political economy, offering limited forms of legibility on the basis of caste, gender, and sexuality, while attempting to cut off democratic processes that enable access to justice, or even advocacy for social welfare. Binding Hindutva to an autocratic turn, this mode of governance aggressively targets criticisms of the state and political dissent, pitting them against the logic of privatization and the consolidation of wealth, while steadily waging the erasure of the public sector. My argument builds on critiques of “casteification” (the ongoing production and processual iteration of caste categories) and its imbrications within and relations to class and the political economy of land and enclosure.