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Abstract

How can socially privileged researchers engage with as well as analyse marginalising discourses without co-opting the experiences and knowledges of marginalised communities? This inquiry forms the focus of the present article. I discuss the lack of accountability for ‘upper’ caste academics and the resulting impunity for us as ‘knowledge’ producers. I explain how I acknowledge(ed) my complicity in maintaining and reproducing the caste-system and worked towards evolving ethical research practices. A form of inquiry called ‘self-problematisation’ is invoked herein as a ‘practice of the self’, in which researchers must ask ourselves what we come to problematise and what is left unproblematic in our work? This analysis has relevance for questions of ethics and the politics of knowledge production. I appeal to the researchers pondering on questions of positionality and privilege to ask – what can we ‘speak’ about when we speak of (caste) privilege and how must we confront the assumptions of ‘superiority’ in the ‘knowledge’ produced through us?

Keywords

Caste epistemic impunity ethics knowledge production self-problematisation

Introduction

‘Why Brahmins started worshipping the cow and gave up eating beef’¹ (Ambedkar, 1948) – was a topic of the Ambedkar reading group that existed on the margins of the institution where I was studying for a PhD. Dr B.R. Ambedkar was an academic, intellectual, activist and the architect of the Indian constitution. Popular discourses – with an ‘upper’ caste ‘common sense’ of imagined persecution – primarily associate him with affirmative action policies that guaranteed reservations for ‘lower’ caste persons in state-run organisations. These policies are collectively called ‘reservations’ and are the thorn in the sight of the Savarna people (what in English is loosely referred to as ‘upper’ caste people). My training as a Savarna person entailed regarding ‘lower’ caste people with suspicion for their presumed ‘misuse’ of reservation policies and remembering how ‘disadvantaged’ my Brahmin family had become due to these reservations.

With suspicion becoming my default response, I was never presented with an opportunity, nor did I try to seek one on my own effort, to confront and contest it. This suspicion was not by accident but by design – continuous, sustained, and nearly perpetual effort (Teltumbde, 2018) is required to foster violent stereotypes, crush dissent and ensure that these patterns transform into material benefit for Savarnas and material loss for ‘lower’ caste people (Bakshi, 2022) who are also referred as Dalit Bahujan and Adivasi (DBA) and Other Backward Castes (OBC) – persons.²

Caste-based violence in India includes not only punishing those who flout the hierarchisation of socio-economic and political ‘norms’ (Chrispal et al., 2021; Kumar et al., 2022) but also reproducing an ‘informal’ network of laws and policies, controlled historically and in the present, by an elite ‘upper’ caste ideology (Ambedkar, 1935). The proclamation that ‘caste is law’ (Aloysius, 2018) indicates the institutional functioning of the state as per ‘caste-law’. In institutions of higher education, caste-law translates into segregation along caste lines – of opportunities to network, access jobs and education (Bapuji et al., 2023), and integrate and engage socially (Pathania and Tierney, 2018; Vijay and Nair, 2022). As I will argue, epistemic impunity is produced through casteist practices of knowledge production where the researcher is in isolation from subjects (Jangam, 2017) and ‘knowledge’ itself is assumed to be ‘neutral’ (Foucault, 1982). The caste order systematically creates a ‘canyon of echoes’ (Tomlinson, 2018) – an institutional mechanism where only similarly socially positioned academics (‘upper’ caste persons) speak to and validate each other’s claims with no possibilities of interjection (Gauthaman and Baskaran, 2021) by other social positions (‘lower’ castes).

This paper describes the effects of such privileged access to and production of knowledge – on ‘upper’ caste subjects such as myself and the academic and societal milieu in our situated contexts. Through reflections from the ‘production’ of my doctoral thesis – I emphasise the role that ‘upper’ caste scholars play in omitting, misrepresenting and self-proclaiming the objectivity of presumptuous ‘knowledge’ produced through us. I contend that an absence or silence of certain discourses from the researcher’s lived experiences produces a concurrent absence or disregard of those discourses in the research generated through them. This idea of concurrent absences is what I term epistemic impunity – impunity with which privileged scholars are allowed to make ‘knowledge’ claims that neglect the history and agency of marginalised subjects. I further contend that institutional mechanisms that lack accountability checks – particularly concerning constitutive and entrenched systems of power such as caste (Ambedkar, 1935) – reproduce and strengthen such impunity while promoting the caste-based and imperialist view of ‘knowledge’ as the presumable ‘inheritance’ of a narrow elite – largely Brahmin or other ‘upper’ caste persons (Sukumar, 2022). ‘Knowledge’ as a singular objective entity is therefore problematised and its taken-for-grantedness questioned in this paper, using scare quotes (Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016).

In my doctoral dissertation on anti-sexual harassment at workplace (anti-SHW) policies in India, I encountered various forms of epistemic impunity. An explicit policy on SHW is relatively recent in India (Ministry of Law and Justice, 2013 – hitherto referred to as the POSH Act, 2013). Various organisational redressal practices with respect to SHW disregard the caste-based co-constitution of SHW (Geetha, 2017; Vandana, 2020) despite a disproportionately high number of SHW cases being perpetrated by ‘upper’ caste men onto ‘lower’ caste women.³ ‘Upper’ caste society’s self-sanctioned norms of ‘purity versus pollution’ produce ‘lower’ caste women as ‘impure’ and ‘vulgar’ (Gupta, 2015; Paik, 2017) and therefore justify their sexual exploitation and assault by ‘upper’ caste men and its condoning and acceptance by ‘upper’ caste people, particularly women (Paik, 2009).

Despite this relationality of caste and gender, the body of policies and policy materials analysed during my dissertation⁴ barely included mentions of caste. At the institution where I completed my PhD, there was, at best, a moral do-gooding attitude and, at worst, a complete discouragement of analyses that critiqued or invoked the caste system. The Ambedkar reading group that I describe at the beginning of this article was a group at the margins of the institution – with meetings attended by few who would often be the subject of judgement, silencing and condescension by ‘upper’ caste others. Caste is thus erased from the ‘knowledge-producing apparatus’ of institutions and people around us, producing absences – of knowledges and of checks and balances.

To foster an exploration of caste within and through my research a form of inquiry termed as ‘self-problematisation’ by Carol Bacchi is invoked herein as a way of investigating our subjecthood and of asking ‘how we become the people we are’ (Bacchi, 2015: 9). Self-problematisation is a practice of subjecting one’s research – epistemology, proposals, questions, methods and recommendations – to an inquiry of what we regard as ‘knowledge’ and how our experiences shape us as (researching) subjects. Arguably different from reflexivity⁵ (Brewis and Wray-Bliss, 2008; Voronov, 2008), self-problematisation urges the researcher to take the list of questions they have asked during their scrutiny of a policy ‘problem’ and its assumptions and apply it to their own policy proposals. Such an analysis asks – how did I identify these particular proposals as ‘problems’ and not others? What was left unproblematised by me in scrutinising policy ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’? This analysis creates the very practices of research as a matter of scrutiny and produces awareness about the ‘becoming’ of things and subjects as opposed to their ‘being’ (Bacchi, 2018). Self-problematisation involves an engagement with the ‘knowing’ self and its constituents (assumptions and interactions) as well as one’s sites of ‘being and doing’ with respect to ‘knowledge’ production (institutions, fieldwork, home and elsewhere). The narrative of this article is a mix of these constituent elements, often changing from the first person to the third or from active voice to passive, based on the construction of the argument and the need of the narrative. Such a narrative provides an intimacy with the style of self-problematisation – at times, a stream of consciousness and, at times, a cathartic abstraction.

Contributions of this article include the positing of self-problematisation as a valuable method for critical praxis, offering an account of caste privilege during the production of ‘knowledge’ through a doctoral dissertation, and situating epistemic impunity as an exigent concern for research ethics and rigour (Contu, 2018; Wray-Bliss, 2003). The paper has implications for scholarship on erasures in academia (Nkomo, 2021) emanating from different axes of privilege/marginality, such as race, gender and ethnicity, among others (Muzanenhamo and Chowdhury, 2023). I further build on the arguments of critical management studies (CMS) scholars’ claims about tokenistic forms of reflexivity (Gilmore and Kenny, 2015; Mikkelsen and Clegg, 2019) to propose self-problematisation as a viable alternative for producing ethical and socially engaged knowledges, in the process offering the researcher the opportunity to transform in substantive ways.

This article proceeds by first describing the theoretical concepts invoked for my analysis, namely – epistemic impunity, speakability and self-problematisation. Through illustrations and reflections from the fieldwork done for my dissertation, I then present an analysis of how caste privilege expands the ‘speakability’ for a privileged subject position, thereby making it possible for ‘upper’ castes to make claims about caste-oppressed subjectivities with impunity. I proceed to how ‘knowledge’ produced through privileged caste researchers, such as myself, must be subject to the scrutiny of self-problematisation. Here I offer further illustrations to produce an account of coming to terms with my complicity (Chrispal et al., 2021) in the neglect and violence produced through caste-based exclusion, particularly in academic institutional spaces.

Theoretical overview

Epistemic impunity

That ‘knowledge’ is not a fixed truism has been articulated and illustrated within the traditions of poststructuralist (Foucault, 1990) as well as postcolonial (Spivak, 2015) and decolonial scholarships (Quijano, 2007). What counts as ‘knowledge’ is constantly renegotiated, as is the position of the ‘knower’ (Medina, 2017). Production of ‘knowledge’ and the award of a ‘truth’ status consists of a panoply of discursive processes (Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016) – institutional mechanisms, authoritative regimes, localised practices, technologies, lives lived every day, things said or written about this ‘true’ knowledge and things omitted or excluded.

The position of the knower and the co-constitution of the ‘knower-knowledge’ dyad are explored in depth in the discussions on epistemic injustice. Fricker (2017) writes that if a speaker/knower is perceived as an epistemically ‘lesser’ knower, this will have negative effects on their non-epistemic being. Epistemic injustice is important due to the interwovenness of power and knowledge that produce us as beings and that further create the conditions for our survival (Butler, 1997). An implication of the concept of epistemic injustice is – who we are is produced through what we know about – ourselves, those we consider on ‘our epistemic level’, and those we consider beneath this level (Pohlhaus, 2017). Knowing and being, in this sense, are entirely intertwined (Pitts, 2017). Initiating an investigation of ‘knowledge’ that we invoke and produce can lead ‘upper’ caste researchers to a nuanced account of ourselves and our place in the socio-epistemic (societal systems and meaning-making or knowledge-producing systems) milieu. Caste-based systems of privilege inherently divide ‘knowers’ and their statuses through oppressively enforced norms and categories in consistent efforts to retain the ‘superiority’ of the privileged (‘upper’ caste) and ensure the suppression and omission of the lives and knowledges of the ‘lower’ caste ‘other’ (Dar et al., 2021).

For a historical and ongoing regime of oppression such as caste, ‘knowledge’ and its ‘creators’ are not just any elites – they are a supposedly divinely sanctioned caste – that of Brahmins (I belong to this caste) (Ambedkar, 1935). Challenges to what is ‘knowledge’ have either been avoided altogether by the exclusion, or conditional inclusion, of (some) other castes (Gauthaman and Baskaran, 2021; Joshi and Malghan, 2018). Another key aspect of controlling what is sanctioned as ‘true’ is the setting up of the seemingly impenetrable discourses of ‘castelessness’ – which maintains the illusion that the caste system does not exist any longer (Ilaiah, 2006) or is elsewhere (Pandian, 2002) and in its place is a merit-based system of evaluation (Mosse, 2020) – of ‘knowers’, ‘knowledge’ and accordingly of ‘deservingness’.

This misattribution and deliberate exclusion of caste from the organised discourse is and produces epistemic injustices. As testimonial injustice, castelessness discredits speakers/knowers of ‘lower’ castes who claim that caste-based oppression is real and has caused them material harm – through prejudiced judgements by privileged ‘upper’ caste ‘knowers’ that assess ‘lower’ caste knowers’ statuses as ‘less than’ those of their ‘upper’ caste counterparts (Fricker, 2017; Mosse, 2020). As hermeneutic injustice, castelessness produces, for ‘upper’ caste people, an ‘unfair advantage when it comes to making sense of their social experience’ (Fricker, 2007 as cited in Medina, 2017: 41). For instance, within academia – we operate in a caste-privileged world, with access to information, contacts, networks and meaning-making apparatuses that help us navigate institutional life comfortably, while depriving ‘lower’ caste people of the same information and resources – and doubling down on this injustice by denying that caste-based privilege exists pervasively (Subramanian, 2019) and advantages us immensely (Vijay and Nair, 2022).

I propose epistemic impunity to name a phenomenon that might be easy to miss as ‘upper’ caste researchers entrenched in the practices of castelessness – that silence begets silence and lack of accountability further reproduces evasion of accountability. This form of impunity is perilous because it operates through the systems of power-knowledge that are deeply ingrained in society by reshaping our meaning-making and giving us a false sense of pride as ‘superior’ knowers. It blocks our capacities to question ourselves – whether with regard to casteism, racism, ableism, trans or homophobia and other implicit prejudices that our institutions and selves might be neglecting. Epistemic impunity becomes even more pronounced when it comes to caste because the politics of ‘knowledge’ production and of assigning and validating ‘knowership’ status is controlled according to caste hierarchy. Being able to ‘know’ and recognise caste-based oppression as an ‘upper’ caste researcher is, therefore, a crucial step towards epistemic justice in the context of research and academia.

Epistemic impunity includes an implicit exemption from accountability – towards academic institutions, peers, scholarly journals, academic forums and disciplinary cohorts. It is not explicitly granted but directly assumed by the scholar, immediately recognised by the largely ‘upper’ caste academic apparatus, and rewarded in the form of ‘neutral, casteless’ research published in ‘scientific’⁶ journals. The kinds of academic practices that are awarded such impunity may broadly lie under the following: (a) Failure to incorporate accounts of marginalised communities (specifically ‘lower’ caste) people and to indicate the salience of the caste system as formative of oppression, violence and lack of resources in the lives of ‘lower’ caste persons (Yengde, 2019). (b) Failure to indicate how socio-economic analysis is done in India needs to acknowledge that most inequalities are attributable, in some form, to the caste system (Ambedkar, 1935) and (c) To claim to ‘represent’ or ‘know’ marginalised persons and to make claims on their behalf (Alcoff, 1991) and not have to explain ourselves or ask questions of ourselves (Spivak, 2015). (d) Failure to admit and acknowledge that most education institutions are exclusionary of ‘lower’ caste persons, and when selected, they (students and academics) have to face systematic discrimination (Subramanian, 2019; Thomas, 2020).

Thus regarding epistemic justice and impunity, I ask – How is ‘knowledge’ differently treated based on the subject position of the researcher who articulates it? Can ‘upper’ caste persons produce ethical and unappropriated claims when ‘speaking’ of caste-based oppression? The section on speakability explores these concerns.

Speakability

In addition to governing the knowledge-power nexus, epistemic impunity has implications for issues of speakability – what is possible to be said and who is ‘allowed’ to say it (Raman, 2020). Impunity for privileged ‘knowledge’ producers creates an entitlement on speakability – where the speaker (writer or articulator) believes that they are an authority about subjects – even if there is a lack of experience of particular kinds of embodied living – for instance of living through caste or religion-based oppression (Decoloniality Europe, 2013). This can lead not only to self-sanctioned misrepresentation or outright deception but also to omission.

According to poststructuralist scholars (Butler, 1997), we produce our subjectivities as we embody the terms that various discourses make available to us. Unchecked privilege – both within the academy and without – produces us as subjects of unwarranted ‘expertise’. The more we take up the terms of this ‘expertise’ and its related norms, the greater discursive support we find for our capacities as ‘knowers’. Moreover, academic research systems constitute the researcher in the role of an ‘expert’, where a mastery of one’s subject is expected (Decoloniality Europe, 2013). It may thus be difficult to acknowledge for ‘upper’ caste researchers that our ‘expertise’ is questionable because it omits or excludes entire systems of power-knowledge and disregards caste-based oppression. This fear of academic elites being proved ‘un masterful’ or ignorant is, according to Alcoff (1991), what often produces deliberate and systematic silences around the most apparent social marginalisations and blatant forms of oppression – for we may be afraid to be countered or proven wrong or fear our ‘mastery’ being ‘unthroned’ (Alcoff, 1991).

Epistemic impunity plays an important part here. Institutionalised epistemic impunity grants the ‘freedom’ to do research without being held accountable for one’s social position and to ignore important power systems within one’s social milieu. This impunity helps ‘upper’ caste ‘knowers’ speak⁷ or make claims – of the superiority of our caste (Pathania and Tierney, 2018), of ‘knowing’ different forms of the caste system, of ‘knowing’ how caste oppression operates, of our purported ‘castelessness’ (Kothari, 2013), or often even make unsubstantiated admissions of guilt (Dar, 2016). The peril of such unquestioned privilege is the production of subjects who believe that the experience of a privileged (particularly ‘upper’ caste) subjectivity is the only form of ‘knowledge’ and is ‘in the true’ (Thomas, 2020).

The implications of such assumptions of speakability are manifold. First, privileged subjects speak on all accounts and often even ‘on behalf of’ those already made absent from the argumentative space (Spivak, 2015). Second, discursive possibilities are closed off for those subordinated through particular oppressive structures (caste in the case of this paper), thus excluding their claims and lives (Alcoff, 1991). Third, in denouncing any subaltern knowledges as not ‘credible or authentic’ and therefore not ‘knowledge’ – institutions of all kinds, including those of academia (Thomas, 2020), policymaking, law and governance (Rege, 2019) – foreclose possibilities for subaltern subjects to produce themselves as legible or intelligible within such spaces. Lastly and particularly within academia, collective institutional denial of caste-based exclusion, oppression, misrepresentation and co-optation produce boundaries to make caste absent from the lives of those privileged through it (Teltumbde, 2018)

This begets an unquestioning acceptance of ‘upper’ castes as the ‘rightful’ subjects of knowledge and has us continue the unscrutinised production of ‘casteless’ knowledge. Thus, I posit the following relationships – ‘upper’ caste people are produced as specific ‘superior knowers’ and not questioned or held accountable – this epistemic impunity produces unquestioned speakabilities for us – where we have the power to proclaim ‘caste does not exist’ or to misrepresent or appropriate caste-based oppression in our lives, institutional environments and research contexts. This expanded scope of speakability produces further impunity for us, our peers and those researchers who come after us – it carves patterns of impunity in our institutional spaces.

Self-problematisation

We are constituted through power, providing the conditions necessary for our survival and continued existence (Butler, 1997). Not only is caste internalised and accepted in me as a system of power, but my material and epistemic being also depend on the caste system for its survival and perpetuation. Following this logic, while analysing systems of power and politics around us, it becomes crucial to engage with how these systems produce ‘us’ and shape our lives and how ‘we’ in turn reproduce these systems through our being – including the research and knowledge produced through us. To scrutinise policy (and other) proposals the practice of problematisation (Sandberg and Alvesson, 2011) may be invoked. ‘Problems’ are not considered pre-ordained and fixed but are formulated in specific ways that include certain dominant subjects and phenomena and ignore certain (subjugated) others. The ‘What’s a problem represented to be’ (WPR) framework by Bacchi and Goodwin (2016) has the researcher asking six questions from a policy proposal. The seventh step is to take all six questions and apply them to us and our analyses.⁸ Such analysis focuses on how our academic and caste-based (or other) subjectivities coalesce.

The work of self-problematisation (for more on the distinctions between self-problematisation and reflexivity, see endnote 5) is the inquiry of relatively fixed knowledges within the researcher and to ask how these knowledges, over time and through practice, come to acquire this fixed status. Self-problematisation is an inquiry of the self as constituted by uncontested ‘truths’ and the attendant effects this has on the knowledges one produces. One may thus ask – ‘what are the conditions required, within and without, for such articulations to be made possible and acceptable’? As the knowledge-power link is questioned and the (researcher and ‘upper’ caste) self is theorised in relation to ‘knowledge’, self-problematisation becomes ideally suited to confront epistemic impunity, which is generated in the context of ‘knowledge’ producing practices.

Such analysis fosters the admission that research and ‘knowledge’ resulting from a project (or a doctoral thesis) are generated through the filter of a researcher’s subjectivity. Thus, what is absent in researcher experiences is likely to be omitted, misrepresented or undertheorised in our work, regardless of our epistemological leanings. Secondly, through the legitimation of (caste-based) hierarchical practices, omissions and misrepresentations may become institutionalised in the various manifestations of ‘knowledge production’, including disciplinary traditions (Nkomo, 2021), research departments (Liu, 2019), and academic journals (Murphy and Zhu, 2012) among others. Self-problematisation can make the researcher aware of absences and omissions, thereby transforming the significance of ‘knowledge’ and what we understand as ‘valid’ forms of ‘knowing’.

The politics of invisibilising caste-based oppression is inextricably linked with epistemic practice (Ramdas and Bedide, 2016). Dalit scholars write that the scholarship produced by ‘upper’ caste people is reappropriated Dalit knowledge, reproduced by the ‘upper’ castes from an apologist perspective – one that either justifies the caste system and discredits the substantial resistance movements against it (Shakyamuni, 2016) or that delivers universal generalisations about a very diverse group of people – through the usage of umbrella terms such as ‘undercaste women’ (Ramdas and Bedide, 2016).

In line with Huber’s (2022) emphasis on autoethnography as a crucial mode of reflection, I contend that self-problematisation can be a transformative tool for involving theories of power together with a researcher’s observations and experiences. Applying our theoretical and analytical lenses to our lived experiences and the ‘knowledge’ generated through us can help with the important work of ‘doing critical (management) studies’ in an epistemically just manner.

Illustrations of epistemic impunity

This section traces the journey outlined in the introduction – my doctoral research and the patterns of epistemic impunity within institutions, research contexts, fieldwork engagements and academic texts. I wish to illustrate the systematic silence around caste and its attendant effects on creating the atmosphere of epistemic impunity. For this purpose, I present evidence from various contexts – my dissertation fieldwork and data, institutional processes during my doctoral research and scholarly literature within management studies.

Epistemic impunity in dissertation and fieldwork scope

In my dissertation, I investigate the POSH Act and a set of court verdicts in cases of SHW, in state High Courts and the Indian Supreme Court, to identify how workplace sexual harassment is invoked and produced as a ‘problem’. In the context of SHW, there are policy silences around its co-constitution as a caste and gender-based violence (Irudayam et al., 2011). Despite the historically prevalent (Gopal, 2012) and continuously increasing sexual violence against SCs and STs (National Crime Records Bureau, 2019, 2021), none of the verdicts, the policy texts or the experts I was speaking with⁹ included any mentions of caste as a co-producer of sexual subjugation in the workplace (Sharma, 2018; Vandana, 2020).

The policy that addresses SHW – the POSH Act of 2013 – bears no mention of caste-based workplace harassment and invokes ‘women’ as a universal category that supposedly spans ‘all castes’. Further, the Act makes separate arbitration provisions for ‘formal’ versus ‘informal’ workplaces. It is evidenced that most formal workplaces include largely ‘upper’ caste women (Sarkar, 2016; Sarpotdar, 2020), whereas ‘informal’ workplaces with exploitative working conditions are the main sources of employment for ‘lower’ caste women (Wadekar, 2019). The consultants and agencies I could reach during my fieldwork catered to ‘formal’ arbitration mechanisms. For ‘informal’ mechanisms – the details of the arbitration bodies are not made public, and in many districts, these are not yet formed (The Hindu, 2018), thus reiterating caste-based exclusion. When formed, the arbitration bodies for these informal committees run up against operational issues such as the inability to protect witnesses, obtain evidence and problems with other disciplinary authorities (Sarpotdar, 2020).

The existing laws, precedents, policy provisions and qualified statements made by counsels did not discuss caste as an underlying basis for sexual assault, a claim that has been asserted widely and rigorously within DBA feminist scholarship (Geetha, 2017; Gopal, 2012; Wadekar, 2019). The mention of caste¹⁰ in matters of workplace sexual violence appeared only in three instances – to acquit ‘upper’ caste men of the gang rape of a ‘lower’ caste frontline healthcare worker¹¹; to acquit a man for hurling casteist abuses to the public, on the grounds that they were not uttered against an individual and that the assaulter had no knowledge of the caste status of the public¹²; and to question the validity of the testimony of a ‘lower’ caste minor girl.¹³ To be clear, I did not encounter a case where a ‘lower’ caste woman as an aggrieved approached a court, through the provisions of the POSH Act, as a declared matter of caste-based assault.

Rege (2019) argues that caste and gender are co-constitutive of sexual harassment; however, violence against marginalised (particularly DBA) women is legitimised through a separation between caste and gender at the policy level. This argument is reiterated by Wadekar (2019), pointing out the systemic nature of the vulnerablisation of DBA women through gender, caste and informality/contractualisation. In the organised sector, I came across corporate trainers and consultants for SHW prevention that explicitly made clear that caste ‘was not a problem in urban areas and formal workplaces’ (quoted from my interview with a corporate consultant, dated 11th March, 2020).

An oft-repeated ‘formal versus informal’ or ‘urban versus rural’ binary stuck out during my research and fieldwork as a policy ‘solution’ offered not just with the objective of administrative convenience but also a category that induced divisionary logics. Just as policies can be gendering practices and strengthen gendered logics through assumptions they make (Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016), so can they be class-ing or caste-ing practices. The widespread and wrongful (Siddique, 2011; Vithayathil and Singh, 2012) assumption within ‘white-collar’ anti-SHW policy apparatus was that urban and white-collar work is ‘casteless’ and rural and informal work that happened in ‘backward hinterlands’ – was ‘casted’. I encountered these binaries within the policy (the POSH Act) and in its allied literature (such as the Handbook for the prevention of sexual harassment act, 2015) and tutorials by consulting firms.

The value of problematisation as a policy analysis tool became apparent through these patterns of ‘skirting around caste’ and assumptions of ‘castelessness’ prevalent in most urban corporate and private firm offices. Caste was assumed to be entirely’ irrelevant’ in the prominent spaces of anti-SHW redressal (formal workplaces). Vandana (2020) observes that ‘studies on sexual harassment have focused on gender [..] studies on caste have focused on discrimination’ (p. 36). This separation demarcates the boundaries not only within the law but also in public life.

Epistemic impunity in academic and institutional arrangements/establishments

A senior self-proclaimed feminist academic, during a public seminar on anti-SHW laws, remarked, ‘Most of these assault cases by DBA women are false anyway, so including caste in the anti-SHW Act would be a waste of space’. I do not seek to bring out the matter of intentions of individuals – but to demonstrate how I am composed through ‘upper’ caste elitism and was not only party to such violent acts of suspicion but also never contradicted them, despite possessing evidence (Human Rights Watch, 2020) to the contrary. Similar instances of impunity happened each time a research seminar/faculty recruitment seminar, or a proposal/defence seminar included discussions of gender, feminism, sex-based discrimination, gender identity and fluidity etc. The ‘common sense’ around ‘social strata’ and forms of power such as age, ability, caste, gender and class was that – we must study it to control for it in our experiments or find an interesting × factor for our job market papers.

The discursive boundaries within policies were the same ones drawn around my subject position as an ‘upper’ caste person. My hesitation in writing about caste came from a lack of institutionalised neglect and the internalisation of my ‘role’ as an ‘upper’ caste person. I was directed to believe in my ‘superior’ status as a knowledge producer. Hence, not knowing enough about something or not being ‘good enough’ at it, being contradicted by another person or being proved wrong were insecurities fuelled by this ‘upper’ caste arrogance. These insecurities were exacerbated by a largely ‘upper’ caste academic institutional milieu which believes in ‘caste’ based supremacy and objectivity of ‘knowledge’.

It is essential to highlight that epistemic impunity is not limited to caste privilege but rather to a host of intersecting marginalities. A quick review of literature within management studies reveals knowledge produced with varying degrees of impunity, in various contexts (Alcoff, 1991). Bristow et al. (2017) analyse academic insecurity without problematising how intersections of caste (Pathania et al., 2023), race (Azhar and McCutcheon, 2021), ableism (Dolmage, 2017) and gender (Powell, 2018) all produce experiences of precarity and insecurity for academics. A similar absence of discussions on race, ethnicity and precarity is found in Sullivan’s (2014) work on massage therapists, in a research setting on gender, desire and pleasure, for which intersections of race and coloniality play historically important parts (Flubacher, 2020).

A different form of impunity presents itself in Grosser and Tyler’s (2022) work, which includes mentions of race or coloniality within the context of sexual harassment and corporate social responsibility (CSR). In their discussion on radical feminist approaches to sexual harassment, the authors mention race and coloniality and cite critical legal studies scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw but do not substantively engage with the crucial insight that Crenshaw offers in terms of how the uniqueness of intersectional experience requires that laws and policies situate themselves in the position to recognise intersectional subjects and make them legible (Crenshaw, 1991). Here, epistemic impunity is embedded within academic practices of citation where one need only signal ‘expertise’ by citing the ‘right’ scholars without engaging with their arguments (Crenshaw, for instance) – a process of knowledge production that can ‘shoehorn’ (Willmott, 2011: 429) (management) research into the reproduction of elitist knowledge.

By contrast, Murphy and Zhu (2012) illustrate neocolonialism in the academy through data and theorisation, situating academic practices in the wider colonial context, and discussions on Chinese, Indian and South African cases within management and sociology. Abdelnour and Abu Moghli (2021) call for a form of political reflexivity that may work along a decoloniality continuum which can make researchers attentive towards their complicity while also working towards reparations. To bring the discussion back to caste, Bakshi (2022) argues going beyond a self-reflexivity that might obscure relations of oppression through a disembodied politics. These are examples of contextual situatedness and calls to accountability within critical thought and research – beyond simplistic modes of ‘privilege recognition’ and into engagement that reflects on historicities of subjects, oppressions and power relations. In line with these scholars, I argue for a form of self-problematisation that is necessarily epistemically just – through accountability towards self and through institutional practices. In the next section, I provide an account of what transpired when influenced by Bacchi (2018), I began to practice self-problematisation.

Scrutinising caste privilege and epistemic impunity through self-problematisation

Speakability and its relation to sources of ‘knowledge’

The first steps towards a critical practice of self-problematisation I undertook were provoked by a Dalit scholar and lawyer I interviewed during fieldwork (name anonymised upon request). She asked me (paraphrased) – are you admitting your privilege and complicity through illustrations from your lived experiences, or are you writing and making claims about those who are oppressed through caste? Primarily engaged with the latter kind of writing on caste, this intervention helped me reflect on speakability – and its relation to impunity. In the kind of nearly purely ‘upper’ caste institutional environment around me – I could say anything about DBA persons as long as it fit the stereotypes that already existed about them – suspicion, dislike, allegations of nepotism, vulnerable DBA women who suffered abuse and violence and had to be rescued from DBA men and the supposedly sexual gaze of DBA men from which ‘upper’ caste women must be rescued and ‘lower’ caste men who are harassers or assaulters of ‘upper’ caste women’s modesty.

Self-problematisation involved engaging with anti-caste scholars’ writing on the role and (in)ability of Brahmins in anti-caste praxis. Dr Ambedkar writes in ‘Annihilation of caste’ that to expect a Brahmin to give up the caste system seems as impossible as expecting the Pope to give up his papal authority (Ambedkar, 1935). This is true not only because impunity relieves us of the need to be conscious and empathetic as well as to monitor ourselves and give up or share our privileges but also because these discourses wrap us up in tight, neat casteist bundles – such swaddling only reflects to us, what we already are and how we already make meaning – in casteist and supremacist ways. However, Dr Ambedkar also writes in the same text how difficult yet imperative it is for ‘upper’ caste people to break out of casteist slumbers (Ambedkar, 1935), to be strong allies and not stand in the way of institutional change but rather to accelerate it. In light of this argument, I knew I must speak as an anti-caste scholar, but what would I say? Can ‘upper’ caste scholars write about caste-based oppression? What must our focus be, and how should we approach such writing?

Engagement with the above questions included questioning the Brahmin privilege that necessarily positions ‘lower’ caste women as the ‘vulnerable victim’, and reflecting on the innumerable anti-caste resistance movements in which ‘lower’ caste women have historically participated and continue to participate (Kapadia, 2017) substantively. Thus, going to sources that trace anti-caste narratives without ‘upper’ caste presuppositions (Bama and Holstrom, 2000) and acknowledging that academic journals and books are not the only source of narratives on marginalised lives (Kandasamy, 2014), was an important initial step towards self-problematisation. That is, acknowledging and providing equal epistemic credibility to knowledge produced outside of the confines of ‘upper’ caste academic cultures.

Self-problematisation through allyship

Self-problematisation is not confined to individual reflection but also involves building allyship (Yengde, 2019) and inviting scrutiny of one’s research and observations from peers implicated in it (Saul, 2017). I was asked by my thesis advisor, herself a poststructuralist, postcolonial, queer theorist,

Who are the reviewers of your thesis? Are you giving this text to DBA peers to review? This thesis needs scrutiny by its main interlocutors and the ones most marginalised in context of SHW. And if your institution won’t give you that ethical rigour you have to find it yourself.

(Thesis memo dated 15/04/2021)

There was a form of self-imposed accountability in the absence of institutional checks and balances (Collins, 2000). I asked three DBA scholars to review my thesis before it went to the ‘official’ evaluation committee. One of the reviewers commented –

I have read enough texts by Savarna women that talk about the evils of caste. I have not yet read or heard a single one of them write/speak about how they partake in caste oppression. How it constitutes them to the extent that they can’t feel gratitude towards the DBA people who nourish them and would rather regard them as indebted slaves. They do not take responsibility for being casteist themselves rather deflect discussion onto ‘other’ people/contexts. Either onto how vulnerable “lower” caste women are or onto how ‘other’ “upper” caste people are casteist (but not their selves).

(Reviewer anonymised upon request, thesis memo dated 26/06/2021)

Following the need to position ‘lower’ caste women beyond ‘vulnerable victim positioning’ and engaging with anti-caste writing (described in previous section), such feedback pushed me to theorise the constitutive role of ‘upper’ castes in oppressing ‘lower’ caste people. A discussion on responsibility ensued, which involved responsiblising and visiblising Brahmins and other ‘upper’ castes as oppressive, violent and insensitive to our social contexts (Jangam, 2017). This may be accomplished through an urgent self-problematisation and vocalisation of insensitivities and assumptions of ‘upper’ caste persons – from assumptions about ‘castelessness’ (caste does not exist anymore) (Kothari, 2013; Mosse, 2020) to assumptions about ‘purity and pollution’ – viz. what is considered ‘allowable’ to touch (Jaaware and Rao, 2018), eat (Natrajan, 2018), smell (Lee, 2017), who is considered ‘(un)meritorious’ and ‘(un)deserving’ (Subramanian, 2019). It is necessary to provide epistemically just forms of knowledge (Dotson, 2011) by declaring what wrongful assumptions influence critical research and prevent researchers from providing a transparent account of complicity in the caste system. Allyship was not confined to sharing frustrations and struggles about academia anymore – but became about finding allies to learn from, thus changing the casteist myth of ‘self-sufficiency’. Self-problematisation went from so-called ‘formalised knowledge’ practices to substantive discussions and engagements within a peer group and a gradual changing of who is a ‘knower’.

Fighting complacence

Something in my subjecthood fought back (Butler, 1992) when I tried to change my definitions of who was an ‘expert’ (DBA peers) and who needed to learn (me). After a few steps taken towards anti-caste praxis, the Brahminical meaning system within me began complacent self-talk about how not only am I an anti-caste scholar, but I am also making efforts to write about ‘caste’ and ‘bringing awareness’ in other people’s lives. This is the ‘upper’ caste gaze that involved self-congratulatory ideas – I was a righteous saviour. I believed that an act of ‘simple kindness’ on my part or the ‘right’ academic praxis I followed through this peer review from DBA interlocutors – should get me accolades and gratitude from the DBA community.

Self-problematisation encouraged me to ask – what knowledges am I producing and defending, and what was I excluding? This question meant I had to answer why I exclude ‘upper’ caste people – including family, friends and colleagues from scrutiny. Can I admit to and situate dowry, domestic violence, and sexual abuse in ‘upper’ caste homes? These practices are commonly hidden in ‘upper’ caste meaning systems (Rege, 1996) in an attempt to grant impunity and retain the privileged status of the ‘upper’ caste man, thus maintaining his ‘supremacy’ through the oppression of all other people within the caste order. Do I situate such caste and gender-based violence in the oppressive ‘upper’ caste practices, or do I stay silent about the role of caste and sanction it further through my complicity? And above all, if I attempt to write about DBA lives, what assumptions do I make about my ‘ability to know’? Do I imagine myself as a ‘superior’ (or ‘competent’) knower who is capable of engaging with meaning systems, despite never having lived through them? Wherefrom does this belief in superiority originate, and how is it systematically maintained? Questions of this sort pulled focus away from the complacency of ‘enough is done for an anti-caste praxis’ and into the responsibility of ensuring ethical and balanced ‘knowledge’ production. Herein, self-problematisation acknowledges the union that was always already there – of a person, their researcher ‘self’ and their lifeworld. It accomplishes the role of combining our theoretical ‘knowledge’, and our experiences ‘woven into a body of thick description’ (Huber, 2022: 12). Self-problematisation is not a practice that can ‘solve’ epistemic impunity but rather a set of continuous and contingent processes that change with every situation.

Concluding remarks

This article contributes to unpacking epistemic impunity as the structural, institutional and individual lack of accountability produced in us as privileged subjects and the knowledges generated through us. Problematising such impunity can serve as a valuable endeavour, particularly at the early stages of a doctoral dissertation project, as this is the time we learn what is ‘knowledge’ and how to ‘do’ research (Prasad, 2013). As a ‘practice of the self’ (Foucault, 1982), while self-problematising, we may take criticisms, questions and scrutiny done in our work and apply it to ourselves to ask what do we assume about the ‘knowledge’ generated through us. How do we come to accept our research, analysis and conclusions uncritically? The value of self-problematisation, as a mode of inquiry, lies in being applicable to all kinds of research questions and paradigms, wherever researchers may want to question the taken-for-granted and unproblematised aspects of research propositions or ideas. In illustrating journey(s) of encountering privilege through self-problematisation, I have highlighted the contingencies of critical, poststructuralist research. Unquestioned reflexivity executed ‘at a distance’ (Bacchi, 2018) can separate the researcher’s role and privilege in the knowledge produced through us.

Asking the same questions to ourselves as we do to the ‘problems’ within our research context may lead us to understand that we are not exempt from the scrutiny that we conveniently undertake for ‘others’ – policies, texts and people. This paper also discusses issues of ‘speakability’ regarding what is ‘allowed’ to be said and by whom? Are we ‘speaking’ about the brutality of the Brahminical caste order, or are we controlling what gets to be part of the ‘narrative’ on caste? Do we accentuate our ‘expertise’ and hide our complicity? Further, I ask, what can privileged persons ‘speak’ when we ‘speak’ of caste (and other forms of privilege)? Is our ‘speaking on behalf of the marginalised’ grounded in assumptions of ‘superior knowledge-producing abilities’, privileged exposure to different forms of ‘Western knowledge’ or even notions of ‘higher levels of merit’ than ‘lower’ caste persons? If so, how have we come to sustain these notions and particularly, what is the role of various institutions, including the academy, in consistently maintaining discourses of caste supremacy?

In summary, this article’s primary implications are in the questions we (must) ask of ourselves and our ethics – what claims are we making? How do we come to have institutionally supported confidence in our claims? What or whom do we neglect or violate? What do we leave unproblematised, and what are the consequences of such uncritical ‘knowledge’ production? Above all – how do we engage with the impunity that systems of privilege produce, and what, if at all, do we ‘speak’ in relation to our complicity with these privileged meaning systems?

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Anukriti Dixit

Notes

Author biography

Anukriti Dixit is a postdoctoral scholar at the Interdisciplinary Center for Gender Studies, University of Bern. She has obtained her doctoral degree at the Public Systems Group, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. Her areas of scholarship include poststructural policy analysis, postcoloniality, feminist theory and intersectionality. Presently she is doing a critical analysis of India’s anti-sexual harassment at workplace policies. She is an awardee of the Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship (ESCAS) for the year 2019–2020.

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Caste(d) knowledges: (Self)-problematising epistemic impunity and caste-privilege in academia

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Theoretical overview

Epistemic impunity

Speakability

Self-problematisation

Illustrations of epistemic impunity

Epistemic impunity in dissertation and fieldwork scope

Epistemic impunity in academic and institutional arrangements/establishments

Scrutinising caste privilege and epistemic impunity through self-problematisation

Speakability and its relation to sources of ‘knowledge’

Self-problematisation through allyship

Fighting complacence

Concluding remarks

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author biography

References