Talk:Anupama Rao

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By Sachi Anjunkar


Anupama Rao is a Professor of History at Barnard College. She is Senior Editor of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; Associate Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society; and organizer of the Ambedkar Initiative[1] as of October 2022. According to her university profile, her research interests intersect with gender and sexuality studies, caste and race, historical anthropology, social theory, comparative urbanism, and colonial genealogies of human rights and humanitarianism.

As per her bio, she has published no books, papers or research pertaining to the rights of Hindus, the impact or relationship between Islam and Hinduism / Hindutva, India or the Indian Government in the context of BJP Government.

In 2021, she along with Hibatullah Akhundzada, the supreme leader of the Taliban, co-signed a letter supporting "Dismantling Global Hindutva" Conference, as an academic and scholar and made the allegation

"the current government of India [in 2021] has instituted discriminatory policies including beef bans, restrictions on religious conversion and interfaith weddings, and the introduction of religious discrimination into India’s citizenship laws. The result has been a horrifying rise in religious and caste-based violence, including hate crimes, lynchings, and rapes directed against Muslims, non-conforming Dalits, Sikhs, Christians, adivasis and other dissident Hindus. Women of these communities are especially targeted. Meanwhile, the government has used every tool of harassment and intimidation to muzzle dissent. Dozens of student activists and human rights defenders are currently languishing in jail indefinitely without due process under repressive anti-terrorism laws."[2]

On November 5, 2017, she signed the letter submitted by the South Asia Faculty Group (SAFG) to the California State Board of Education[3] where she:

  • She misrepresented scholarship stating "Mythological terms substitute for historical ones for example the 'Indus Valley Civilization' (a fact-based geographic term) appears to be replaced with a religiously-motivated and ideologically charged term 'Indus-Saraswati/Sarasvati Civilization'. The Saraswati is a mythical river"[4][5][6]
  • Implied that Christians and Muslims existed in Ancient India, prior to the founding of these religions ​

Publications related to India[edit]

Book[edit]

  1. Rao, Anupama. The Caste Question: Dalits and Politics in Modern India. University of California Press, 2009. Also published by Permanent Black, 2009.

Edited Volumes[edit]

  1. Rao, Anupama, editor. Caste, Gender, and the Imagination of Equality. Women Unlimited, 2018.
  2. Rao, Anupama, and Saurabh Dube, editors. Crime Through Time. Oxford University Press, 2013.
  3. Rao, Anupama, and Steven Pierce, editors. Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism. Duke University Press, 2006.
  4. Rao, Anupama, editor. Gender and Caste: Contemporary Issues in Indian Feminism. Kali for Women, 2003. Paperback edition, 2005. Co-published internationally by Zed Books, 2005.

Journal Articles[edit]

  1. Rao, Anupama. “Violence and Humanity: Or, Vulnerability as Political Subjectivity.” Social Research, vol. 78, no. 2, 2011, pp. 607–32. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23347192.
    In this article, author, Anupama Rao argues that Dalit women face violence and sexual assault because they identify as Dalit. Anupama Rao, further gives false information about Dalits and Hinduism, she subscribes to the opinion that "Dalit" is a governmental term for “untouchable” castes. She makes the following statements:
    Colonial officials did not “invent” caste so much as they transformed caste into an anthropological category, which was thought to adequately describe a unique and unchanging form of social stratification legitimized by Hindu tradition.
    Upper-caste reformers and nationalists also understood caste to be religiously derived. But so far as they were concerned, caste was not an issue for colonial policy, but for Hindu reform. Rather then focusing on the victims of caste discrimination, untouchable reform focused on the upper-castes guilty of prolonging the practice, and became a sort of test case for the possibility of reforming Hinduism by reforming upper-caste Hindu practices, to achieve an authentically Indian self.
  2. Rao, Anupama. "Anticaste Thought and Conceptual De-Provincialization: A Genealogy of Ambedkar’s Dalit." In Postcolonial Horizons, edited by Gary Wilder and Jini Kim Watson, Fordham University Press, 2018.
  3. Rao, Anupama. "Word and the World: Dalit Aesthetics as a Critique of Everyday Life." Journal of Postcolonial Literature, vol. 53, nos. 1-2, 2017, pp. 147-161.
  4. Rao, Anupama. "State Effect and Indian Affirmative Action." In The State, edited by Gregory Anderson, John Brooke, and Julia Strauss, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 331-344.
  5. Rao, Anupama. “Dalit Subjectivities and the Politics of Emancipation.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 31, no. 2, 2011, pp. 227-241.
  6. Rao, Anupama. “Caste, Colonialism, and the Reform of Gender: Perspectives from Western India.” Social Scientist, vol. 24, no. 4/6, 1996, pp. 3-30.
  7. Rao, Anupama. “Death of a Kotwal: Injury and the Politics of Recognition.” Subaltern Studies XI: Community, Gender and Violence, edited by Partha Chatterjee and Pradeep Jeganathan, Permanent Black, 2000, pp. 226-259.
  8. Rao, Anupama. "Personal Laws and Equality: The Case of India." University of Chicago Law School, 2009. [1](https://www.law.uchicago.edu).
  9. Rao, Anupama. "Hindu Nationalism and the Politics of Memory." Hinduism Reconsidered, edited by Günther-Dietz Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke, Manohar Publishers, 1997, pp. 259-274.
  10. Rao, Anupama. "The Problem of Caste and the Subaltern." The Oxford India Companion to Sociology and Social Anthropology, edited by Veena Das, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 311-329.

References[edit]

  1. ↑ Anupama Rao page on Barnard College accessed October 1, 2022
  2. ↑ "Letter of Support", Dismantling Global Hindutva Conference website, accessed August 7, 2022
  3. ↑ 2017 South Asia Faculty Group (SAFG) Letter to the California State Board of Education
  4. ↑ Chakrabarti, Dilip, and Sukhdev Saini. The Problem of the Sarasvati River and Notes on the Archaeological Geography of Haryana and Indian Punjab. Aryan Books International, 2009.
  5. ↑ Danino, Michel. The Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati. Penguin Books, 2010.
  6. ↑ McIntosh, Jane R. A Peaceful Realm: The Rise and Fall of the Indus Civilization. Westview Press, 2002, p. 24. ​where she stated "Suddenly it became apparent that the “Indus” Civilization was a misnomer—although the Indus had played a major role in the development of the civilization, the “lost Saraswati” River, judging by the density of settlement along its banks, had contributed an equal or greater part to its prosperity. Many people today refer to this early state as the “Indus-Saraswati Civilization” and continuing references to the “Indus Civilization” should be an abbreviation in which the “Saraswati” is implied. There are some fifty sites known along the Indus whereas the Saraswati has almost 1,000. This is misleading figure because erosion and alluviation has between them destroyed or deeply buried the greater part of settlements in the Indus Valley itself, but there can be no doubt that the Saraswati system did yield a high proportion of the Indus people’s agricultural produce"
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