Social activist Ruth Manorama
| Photo Credit: File photo

New York:

An Indian-American professor, Shailaja Paik, conducting research on and writing about Dalit women has received a $800,000 “genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation which gives out awards every year to people with extraordinary achievements or potential.

Announcing her fellowship, the Foundation said, “Through her focus on the multifaceted experiences of Dalit women, Paik elucidates the enduring nature of caste discrimination and the forces that perpetuate untouchability.”

Ms Paik is a distinguished research professor of history at the University of Cincinnati, where she is also an affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Asian Studies.

“Paik provides new insight into the history of caste domination and traces the ways in which gender and sexuality are used to deny Dalit women dignity and personhood,” the Foundation said.

The MacArthur Fellowships, popularly known as “genius” grants, are given to people across a spectrum from academia and science to arts and activism, who according to the Foundation are “extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential”.

The selections are made anonymously based on recommendations received and it does not allow applications or lobbying for the grants, which come without any strings and are spread over five years.

The Foundation said that her recent project focused “on the lives of women performers of Tamasha, a popular form of bawdy folk theatre that has been practised predominantly by Dalits in Maharashtra for centuries”.

“Despite the state’s efforts to reframe Tamasha as an honourable and quintessentially Marathi cultural practice, ashlil (the mark of vulgarity) sticks to Dalit Tamasha women,” it said.

Based on the project, she published a book, “The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India”.

It said, “Paik also critiques the narrative of Dr B.R. Ambedkar, the twentieth century’s most influential caste abolitionist” and the architect of India’s Constitution.

In an interview with National Public Radio (NPR), the US government-subsidised broadcaster, she said that she was herself a member of the Dalit community who grew up in Pune in a slum area and was inspired by her father’s dedication to education.

After getting her masters’ degree from the Savitribai Phule University in Pune, she went to the University of Warwick in the UK for her PhD.

She did a stint as a visiting assistant professor of South Asian history at Yale University.

Since the programme began in 1981, fellowships have been granted to 1,153 people.

Previous MacArthur Fellows include writers Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and Ved Mehta, poet A.K. Ramanujam, economists Raj Chetty and Sendhil Mullainathan, mathematician L Mahadevan, computer scientists Subhash Khot and Shwetak Patel, physical biologist Manu Prakash, musician Vijay Gupta, community organiser Raj Jayadev, and lawyer and activist Sujatha Baliga.

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