"We Don’t Need ‘Caste,’ We Have Religion:” Siddis, Claims-Making, and their Potential Refractions in Contemporary Hyderabad, India
**This event is open to those of the Stanford community ONLY**
❗️There will also be lunch with the speaker on Tuesday, May 19th @12:30pm in room 51A❗️
“We don’t need caste, we have religion.” This was a statement by one of the siddis in contemporary Hyderabad, India – third and fourth-generation descendants of East African slaves, migrants, and soldiers recruited by the local ruler or Nizam in the 1860s, to form the African Cavalry Guard in his army. The talk explores this siddi statement and the complex braiding of categories of social difference in India – caste, religion, tribe, and race – implicit in the ways in which siddis hail the state and make claims for recognition and affirmative action. Drawing on fieldwork conducted over the course of the last decade among siddis in Hyderabad, ambivalently situated as Indian citizens who are racialized as Black in an Indian and global order that denigrates Blackness, are proscribed from identifying as Scheduled Caste because they are not Hindu, Sikh, or Buddhist, do not identify as a Scheduled Tribe like their fellow-siddis in other parts of the country to access state resources, and are marked by their religious identification as Muslim in a virulently Hindu nation, this talk unpacks these contexts and explores how siddis in Hyderabad appear to negotiate their belonging. It unearths the ways in which blackness and Muslimness are constituted as intersecting social and political categories, caught in the dialectics of alienation and intimacy, belonging and otherness, with enduring effects on the lives and cosmologies of siddis in Hyderabad, and on the contemporary politics of race, tribe, gender, and religion in India.
