Paper short abstract:

This paper will address how caste-class perspectives challenged ideas of liberal democracy in late colonial and postcolonial Bombay.

Paper long abstract:

My contribution to this panel draws in particular on the autobiography of Dalit Communist, R. B. More (1903-1972), and more generally on the cultural and political culture of late colonial and and early post-Independence Bombay, when Dalit communities found themselves addressed by two distinctive, if overlapping ideologies of emancipation, that of caste and class, each of which shaped their political subjectivities in important ways. By exploring the manner in which Bombay's distinctive urbanity shaped and enabled distinctive reworkings of caste and class, and by asking how these were experienced as politically salient forms of identity, the paper explores how subaltern neighborhoods (and the political geography of the city more broadly) shaped political subject-formation. In this way, the paper addresses the manner in which alternative political imaginaries of an emancipated collectivity challenged liberal notions of the politics and the political subject.