Caste, Reading-habits and the Incomplete Project of Indian Democracy: Bluestone Rising Scholar Honorable Mention 2021

Emphasizing on the functioning of caste as embodiment, this paper attempts to show how the internalization of dominant caste-based framework(s) shapes our habits of thinking which include epistemological and pedagogical orientations as well. The paper briefly traces how such frameworks have settled through historical shifts and shaped dominant imagination of the nation’ that has appropriated caste-system as its essence. To show such making of a dominant framework of caste and Hindu-nation, the paper briefly turns towards nineteenth century Bengal, both as a reminder of the many forms of dwelling within vernacular communities and how such multiplicities came to be reduced within a hegemonic framework of majoritarian Hindu- nation. Such making, the paper submits, shapes a doubleness of the decolonial project of nation-making which finds its paradoxical settlement within the postcolonial democratic framework through the embodiment of the majoritarian (casteist) framework of Hindu-nation. The paper, therefore, examines how such problems of embodiment become an infrastructural problem that haunt one’s everyday imagination, and therefore calls for creation of infrastructures that can enable a training of imagination to unlearn such embodied frameworks of segregation. As one such small onto- epistemological possibility, the paper examines the role of aesthetic education and its suspending potentials.