Shailaja Paik

I am the Charles Phelps Taft Distinguished Research Professor of History and an Affiliate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Sociology, and Asian Studies. I am a 2024 MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellow. My research, writing, and teaching interests lie at the intersection of several fields: modern South Asia, Dalit studies, women's, gender, and sexuality studies, social and political movements, oral history, and human rights and humanitarianism.

As a historian, I specialize in the social, intellectual, and cultural history of modern India. My first book Dalit Women's Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (Routledge, 2014 ) examines the nexus between caste, class, gender, and state pedagogical practices among Dalit ("Untouchable") women in urban India. My second book, The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (Stanford University Press, 2022) analyzes the politics of caste, class, gender, sexuality, and popular culture in modern Maharashtra. The book won the American Historical Association's John F. Richards Prize for "the most distinguished work of scholarship on South Asia" (https://www.historians.org/award-grant/john-f-richards-prize/) and the Association of Asian Studies Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize (https://www.asianstudies.org/aas-2024-prizes/).

My research is funded by the MacArthur Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Stanford Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Institute of Indian Studies, Yale University, Emory University, the Ford Foundation, and the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center, among others.

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Shailaja Paik has been awarded the 2024 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowhip

Research

This book offers the first social and intellectual history of Dalit performance of Tamasha—a popular form of public, secular, traveling theater in Maharashtra—and places Dalit Tamasha women who represented the desire and disgust of the patriarchal society at the heart of modernization in twentieth century India. Drawing on ethnographies, films, and untapped archival materials, Shailaja Paik illuminates how Tamasha was produced and shaped through conflicts over caste, gender, sexuality, and culture. Dalit performers, activists, and leaders negotiated the violence and stigma in Tamasha as they struggled to claim manuski (human dignity) and transform themselves from ashlil (vulgar) to assli (authentic) and manus (human beings).

Inspired by egalitarian doctrines, the Dalit communities in India have been fighting for basic human and civic rights since the middle of the nineteenth century. In this book, Shailaja Paik focuses on the struggle of Dalit women in one arena - the realm of formal education – and examines a range of interconnected social, cultural and political questions. What did education mean to women? How did changes in women’s education affect their views of themselves and their domestic work, public employment, marriage, sexuality, and childbearing and rearing? What does the dissonance between the rhetoric and practice of secular education tell us about the deeper historical entanglement with modernity as experienced by Dalit communities?