Abstract:
Over the past three decades there has been an increasing academic interest in the field of popular culture and cultural studies. However, in the Indian context there is little study about the popular practices of caste-based cultural forms and sexual labor. In this essay, I deploy the oral history and life narrative of a Dalit Tamasgir woman, Mangalatai Bansode, to examine the hitherto unexplored potentials and problems of intimate and interlocking technologies of “deviant” sexuality, labor, and struggle for survival; the community’s social, cultural, and political battles; private and public patriarchy; and Maharashtra state’s politics  regarding “folk culture.”

Bio-note:
Shailaja Paik, an associate professor of history at the University of Cincinnati, is the author of Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (Routledge, 2014) and several articles that focus on the forging of a new Dalit womanhood in colonial Western India, the education of Dalit women, patriarchy within Dalit communities, the history and politics of naming Dalits, and building solidarity between Dalit and African American women. Her work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, Yale University, Emory University, the Indian Council for Social Science Research, and the Charles Phelps Taft Center, among others. She is currently on the National Endowment for the Humanities funded American Institute of Indian Studies Long-term Senior Fellowship conducting research on her second book, which examines the politics of caste, gender, sexuality, art and aesthetics, and community and nation in popular culture in modern Maharashtra.