On the Moral Theory of Harm: Caste and the Critique of Charity in Travancore

Scholars of colonial South Asia have shown that charity has a function of power: it constructs its own subject, i.e., rightful recipients, and regulates indigenous forms of giving, such as dana, into a language legible to colonial political economy. However, this account has not been sufficiently brought into contact with the historiography of caste-based dispossession. This talk argues that anti-Brahmin writers in the nineteenth-century South Indian princely state of Travancore, addressing ‘charitable’ giving to Brahmins, elaborated charity’s implications for caste-based dispossession through a concept of harm. In this elaboration, the concept of harm enacts a morally consequential relationship between charity and dispossession. Gathering the vernacular anti-Brahmin writings as an archive of the concept of harm, the talk demonstrates how this concept gave the critique of charity its coherence. 

Muhammed Shah Shajahan holds a PhD from the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought (ASPECT), an interdisciplinary doctoral program at Virginia Tech. He has taught courses in ethics, religion, and political economy in Virginia Tech’s Department of Religion and Culture. His research engages colonial South Asia, examining how moral and theological arguments shaped economic and legal categories such as labor, property, and charity.