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How do ideologies of ascriptive difference structure

capitalist economies? How do subjects of such ideologies

experience and interpret their own ascribed differences?

What forms of collective politics do they articulate?

How do their political projects reconstitute the terms of

ascription?

These are the broad conceptual questions that knit

together two of my projects. The first, older project, which

resulted in the book The Caste of Merit: Engineering

Education in India, examines the social and political lives

of alumni of the Indian Institutes of Technology. Some of

these alumni were part of the post-1965 wave of

professional migration to the United States. A subset of

this group—Tamil Brahmins—is the population that I’ll be

focusing on in this paper.

The second, new project, explores the social and political

lives of Tamil Dalits who worked as the underground labor

force in the Kolar Gold Fields, a gold mining company

town in South India. At first glance, these histories may

seem wholly divergent, but there is considerable overlap.

Both Tamil Brahmins and Tamil Dalits were conscripted

into capitalist labor regimes that naturalized caste

difference. This conscription catalyzed mobility across

political borders and into new spaces of social

stratification. These spaces of labor and life produced

novel articulations of caste and class, hinging in part on a

sense of relational geographies. 

They also animated new forms of collective self-

representation and claims to post-caste futures.

In this paper, I consider these histories together to

examine what the comparison reveals about the dialectics

of caste ascription and future-making.

Co-Sponsored by Kofi Annan Institute for

Global Citizenship, Interdisciplinary

Center for the Study of Global Change

(UMN), Macalester Departments of

Religious Studies, Philosophy, History,

Political Science, Asian Studies, and

Anthropology