Indian American Historian Shailaja Paik Named MacArthur Fellow For Research on Dalit Women

Indian American historian and University of Cincinnati professor Shailaja Paik is part of a new class of 22 MacArthur Fellows, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced this week. Also called the “Genius Grant,” the annual prize is awarded to “extraordinarily creative individuals with a track record of excellence in a field of scholarship or area of practice, who demonstrate the ability to impact society in significant and beneficial ways through their pioneering work or the rigor of their contributions,” the announcement said. She will receive a grant of $800,000, paid in quarterly installments over five years to each of the Fellows.

Paik is a Charles Phelps Taft Distinguished Research Professor of History and affiliate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Asian Studies and sociology in UC’s College of Arts and Sciences. As a historian of modern India, she explores the intersection of caste, gender, and sexuality through the lives of Dalit women. 

A Dalit herself, the community has been the center of her research and writing for 25 years, according to her MacArthur Foundation profile. She “provides new insight into the history of caste domination and traces the ways in which gender and sexuality are used to deny Dalit women dignity and personhood,” the profile says. In addition to English, Marathi, and Hindi-language source materials, she is creating a new archive comprised of her interviews and fieldwork with contemporary Dalit women.

Paik’s first book, “Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination” (2014), details Dalit women’s struggles for education and agency in colonial and contemporary urban Maharashtra. She expands upon the tensions between the state, anti-caste reformers, and Dalit women and their own agency in her most recent book, “The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India” (2022). In this project, she focuses on the lives of women performers of Tamasha, a popular form of bawdy folk theater that has been practiced predominantly by Dalits in Maharashtra for centuries. She also critiques the narrative of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the twentieth century’s most influential caste abolitionist, who “places responsibility on Dalit women to uplift themselves through the rejection of sexualized performance, even if doing so causes great hardship,” her McArthur Foundation profile says. 

“Caste is a complex system made up of many distinctions of ranked groups that marry within the limits of a certain community,” Paik told UC News. “It is a division of society based on differences of inherited social rank or privilege, profession and occupation, and it continues to exist in India’s society, politics and economy.” She continued: “To be a Dalit, is to be born Dalit, is to be born into a caste system that sanctions Dalits as impure, polluted, and hence, ‘Untouchable.” 

Dalits “comprise about 17% of India’s population,” she told UC News, and “historically they have not been allowed access to education in any form, access to common public goods, in terms of public tanks, water wells or even some of the most basic things like wearing footwear or new, clean clothes, even if they can afford them.” But, “to be a Dalit woman is to be doubly oppressed, that is both by the politics of caste as well as gender. To be a Dalit woman is to be the ‘Dalit of the Dalit, slave of the slave,’” she said. 

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Paik grew up in Pune with her three sisters in a 20-by-20-foot room. They lived in a tenement in the Yerawada slums. “We did not have a regular water supply or a private toilet and, yes, I grew up with garbage and dirt around me, and pigs roaming the alleys. I am still traumatized by the memories of the public toilets,” she told UC News. Recalling “carrying large vessels of water for cleaning and cooking on her head from the city public water tap,” she noted how it had a “deep impact” on her — “socially, educationally, emotionally, psychologically.”

Paik’s father, Deoram F. Paik, sought an “English education” for his children, “as a way to help them find their way to a better future,” she told UC News. Her mother, Sarita Paik, “also protected her and her sisters, making sure that the dangers of their environment didn’t interfere. Paik was the first Dalit person to attain the highest scores in high school. This set the trajectory for where she is today.  “I just poured myself into academics — education and employment were the magic wands to escape the slum,” she says. 

Paik told UC News that “this fellowship is a celebration of the enormous contributions of Dalits — their ideas, actions, history and fight for human rights.” She said “it is a fantastic reminder of the contributions Dalit studies as well as me, a Dalit woman scholar, have made to the different fields of knowledge,” she added. “After experiencing discrimination in terms of caste, gender and race, I have worked my way up and out from the under with grit, determination and hard work. Dalit women shared their lives with me, and I am indebted to them as well as my advisors, mentors, colleagues and friends who have participated in this journey.” She hopes that the “achievement will strengthen the fight of both Dalits and non-Dalits against caste discrimination in and beyond South Asia.”