Paper short abstract:

The paper proposes to examine the role of the state, through the early 1900s till the present, in using technological education to create a sanitized and scientific industrial realm of leatherwork in India away from the messiness of its erstwhile status as a ‘untouchable craft’.

Paper long abstract:

Leather is a curious object, especially within the caste discourses in India, where the production of leather is regarded as an extremely 'polluting' activity. Involving raw hides, animal bodies and filthy work conditions leatherwork is the domain of the 'untouchable' lower castes. Yet finished leather is a highly desirable commodity within political and popular economies in this society. This distance between desire and disgust was largely bridged by the use of technological education to create of a stratum of upper caste technical elites who function as owners, managers and experts creating a 'respectable industry' out of an 'untouchable craft'. The paper proposes to examine the role of the colonial and postcolonial state through the early 1900s till the present, in using technological education to create a sanitized and scientific industrial realm of upper caste experts who 'knew' how to produce leather, as against the 'untouchable' labour which actually touched, smelt and tasted the raw hides to actually 'make' leather. The paper argues that the phenomenological realities of caste are invisibilized in this spilt between knowing and doing. The paper then moves to interrogate the failure of this sanitization by examining the trajectories of some of these upper caste elites, for whom a technological intervention could not still mask the stench of raw hides and which now comes to 'pollute' them as well. The paper thus examines the relationship between the anesthetic category of technology and the highly affective nature of caste in order to bring affect back to the technological.