Stolen fire : caste scripts and repurposed universals in South India, 1893-2018
Keywords: Theater and Performance Studies.

Stolen Fire: Caste Scripts and Repurposed Universals in South India, 1893-2018, views caste and anti-caste politics through the lens of performance to access repertoires of everyday behaviour and reveal the potential of performance to reaffirm or resist the caste order. This project coalesces around 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? Performance becomes an object of study, an analytical mode, and a method of investigation through which to understand social phenomena such as caste. Performance, as object, analytic, and method, inflects and reframes my original questions to ask: first, what can performance and caste tell us about each other? Second, what can performance reveal about the practice of anti-caste politics? And finally, what does an intellectual history of anti-caste political practice look like? The caste as performance framework I propose here brings together three tentative answers: namely, caste scripts, political action, and intellectual histories in the repertoire. Stolen Fire is organized in two parts, the first of which investigates caste in colonial Kerala through historiographical methods by reading archival records, missionary ethnographies, and literary texts. Chapter One, "Caste as Performance: The caste scripts of colonial Kerala, " examines the spatial, embodied, and linguistic codes of behaviour in colonial Kerala to theorize caste scripts, which conceptualizes encasted personhood as an entanglement of the human and the non-human by triangulating performative codes of conduct, materiality, and social behaviour. The second chapter, "Equality in Action: Ayyankali's performative claims to political subjecthood, 1893-1941, " analyzes the political actions of anti-caste leader Ayyankali (1863-1941) to argue that resisting caste requires bottom-up claims-making through political action that articulates universal values such as equality with particular contexts, a process I call repurposing universals. Chapters Three and Four—"Genealogies of the Human I: Three routes for the concept of equality in colonial Kerala: Soulful Enlightenment" and "Genealogies of the Human II: Three routes for the concept of equality in colonial Kerala: Repurposed Advaita and Radical Saiva Siddha"—attempt an intellectual history of the concept of equality in the repertoires of embodiment. Together, these two chapters trace three distinct pathways for egalitarian discourses: from Enlightenment values via British Protestant missionaries, through Advaitic concepts of non-dualistic equality in the philosophical works of anti-caste thinker Narayana Guru (1854-1928), and as imaginations of universality and corporeality in the Tamil philosophical and yogic tradition of Shaiva Siddanta. Part II of Stolen Fire shifts to the late 20th century, and employs the methods of performance ethnography in order to access the repertoire of lived experience. The embodied politics of the Dalit Women's Society (DWS)—a political organization dedicated to resisting caste patriarchy—forms the subject of "An Ecosystem of Care: The Dalit Women's Society and the embodied politics of kinship, 1992-2018." This last chapter demonstrates the usefulness of the caste as performance framework in ethnographic work, and reveals the continuities and ruptures of caste in the time of DWS with colonial histories of caste. Through these five chapters, Stolen Fire traces the continuities and ruptures between colonial and contemporary Kerala in the social construction and political contestation of caste. This interdisciplinary project adopts archival, ethnographic, oral, and literary methods, to situate local political struggles within transnational flows of global intellectual history.