SAST Colloquium: Rupa Viswanath

The scholarship on politics in postcolonial Tamil Nadu is overwhelmingly in agreement that the state represents a laudable "exception" in the Indian subcontinent, an example of the electoral supplanting of traditional elite castes by the plebs, genuine democratization and the emergence of an anti-caste, secular public culture. Identifying a series of interrelated methodological limitations and theoretical missteps in this literature, this paper proposes an alternative account of postcolonial political settlement in Tamil Nadu. It depends on a wealth of archival data on the governance of anti-Dalit violence in the state and the implementation of its caste-differentiated welfare regime-sources the earlier literature entirely ignores—as well as a theoretical framework that explains how the postcolonial state's regulation of land and labour sustains that violence.