The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

The casteist structure of Brahminical society works powerfully through the production and circulation of the outcaste.  The outcaste, as the outside of the caste structure, is the subject of myriad forms of hate, mistreatment, and abuse in savarna society.  The normative structure of caste society makes these forms of violence normal, producing them as the necessary instruments of disciplining to retain social order. The social order is one that serves the power and control of Brahmin men within the structure of the community. A wide range of communicative strategies from social boycotting, to threats of boycotting, to stopping access to community resources are deployed as strategies of maintaining caste power and control.  Powerful examples of these forms of violence are visible in community norms around issues of common resources such as drinking water. Outcaste households are denied access to community water in one example of caste violence.  There are serious con...

Whiteness, the hegemonic structure that imposes the values of white culture on diverse communities across the globe, is the key organizing instrument of colonization. It works through the creation, reproduction, and circulation of binaries. The creation of binaries is an essential element of the colonizing project, forming the infrastructure of the divide and rule policy that makes up the administrative apparatus of colonialism.  British colonial rule drew on this fundamental logic of whiteness to seed division and circulate hate, reproducing hate to serve the hegemony of colonial rule.  The whiteness of colonialism in British India drew on and catalyzed Brahminical forms of power and control and Islamic fundamentalism to seed hate. The 1905 partition of Bengal epitomized this infrastructure of hate, imposing the geographic division of Bengal along colonial lines with the goal of quelling the anticolonial resistance. Both the political formation of Hindutva as ethno-nationalis...