An eight-year-old girl stood frozen at the community well, her hands gripping an empty bucket. Just ahead, water glinted in the depths, close enough to touch. Her aunt’s grip on her shoulder was firm, “Wait. Let them fill their pots first.”
On the other side, women from a dominant caste household that owned the well approached, their glance menacing. The distance between the two groups of women — just a few feet, enforced by centuries — remained etched in the child’s memory, a spatial grammar of bias and humiliation she would go on to spend her life decoding.
Today, Shailaja Paik, is a certified genius. But the groundbreaking historian sometimes thinks she should draw that scene from her childhood. The two lines of women walking toward the same well from opposite sides. The invisible boundary her cousins and aunt knew only too well to not cross. “The distance had to be maintained,” she said.
That childhood moment in her ancestral village in Maharashtra’s Ahmadnagar district (now known as Ahilyanagar) crystallised what would become her life’s work: excavating the histories of Dalit women, documenting the intricate machinery of caste discrimination, and challenging narratives of history that erased her community’s struggles and resistance.
The Charles Phelps Taft Distinguished Research Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati, Paik was named last year as one of the recipients of the 2024 MacArthur Fellowship, a no-strings-attached $800,000 “genius grant” widely considered one of the toughest and most prestigious awards in academia. Over the course of a day, HT caught up with the 52-year-old academic to explore her landmark work on caste, gender, and sexuality through the lives of Dalit women, her views on contemporary debates in education and caste politics, and her hope for the future of the republic.
Emancipation through education
Summers in the Paik household meant making the 200km trek into the hinterlands of Maharashtra – from a tin box in Pune’s Yerwada slum to her father’s ancestral village in Ahilyanagar’s Pohegaon village. Her father Devram Paik migrated to Pune in the mid-1960s, part of a steady Dalit movement away from agrarian servitude toward the fragile promise of urban emancipation. Her elder sisters were born soon after the move, but the village never disappeared from her life. For the first 13 or 14 years, every summer meant three months back in Pohegaon.
It is during these summers that Paik spent time with her grandmother, Tanubai. In Marathi, the older woman spoke about labouring in the fields as a farmhand, walking the streets of the village with an iron pot balanced on her head, one hand steadying it, the other waving frantically at the sky. Inside the pot was her share of meat from an animal’s carcass. Birds often circled overhead, diving for the only food she would have that day. Years later, when Paik began her PhD research on Dalit women’s education and started interviewing women, she asked her grandmother about this life. The response was searing: “Why do you want to know about that life? I don’t want to remember it. It was bad.”
“They remember the stigma and ostracisation,” Paik reflected later. That refusal to remember, born from pain, drove Paik to recover what survival demanded be forgotten.
Life in the city wasn’t rosy either – a single one-room home in Siddharth Nagar, its blue corrugated roof held up by wooden poles, nestled amidst the narrow lanes and tin shacks of the sprawling slum. There was no regular water supply, there was no private toilet, and the stink and sights of garbage and dirt were constant companions.
But education made an early impression.“I had three sisters and our father was determined to give us an education. My mother, who had studied till Class 6, introduced me to the English alphabet,” she said.
Her father, educated in Marathi medium, and her mother, made a decisive choice: All four daughters would attend English-medium schools. “They have to learn English,” they insisted. “It’s the language of mobility.”
Devram himself attended night school and worked during the day, waiting tables and cleaning at restaurants, before securing a bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Sciences, the first Dalit man from his village to do so. He worked for the state agricultural department’s irrigation office. Her mother, Sarita, worked hard in the house and outside, especially after Devram passed away in 1996.
“I remember everything was broken in the slum. I still get nightmares sometimes about going to the filthy public toilet,” said Paik.
Questions of identity
Paik’s trips back to India have become a blur of academic and public engagements since the Macarthur announcement – an average of two talks a day was her norm during her recent Delhi visit. When HT met her on a sunny January afternoon, it was at a brief moment of respite at a Mizo restaurant for lunch. Walking through the narrow lanes of Humayunpur in south Delhi and then through the meadows of Deer Park, Paik reflected on her school life – and the dissonance experienced by many Dalit people committed to academic excellence who find themselves battling pernicious bias.
For a while in Paik’s teens, school offered anonymity. She attended an English-medium institution founded by a Parsi woman, where she was briefly just another A+ student who gobbled up trivia and excelled at quizzes.
But that anonymity would not last. Students from scheduled caste and scheduled tribe backgrounds received fee concessions, and the office needed information. A staff member would enter classrooms, sometimes in the middle of lessons, and call out, “All SC students, stand up.”
“I felt the shame,” Paik recalled. “There was no need to do this openly, to call us out openly. All SC students stood up. I was uncomfortable standing up. My pen would fall down — I’d try to hide myself.” The students on the concession list were already marked in official registers; the public identification served no administrative purpose.
There was no overt cruelty from teachers. But exclusion worked through culture too. During Ganesh festival celebrations, a Brahmin student would lead the aarti. Paik wanted to participate, to be included. But she didn’t know the prayers. Others did; they had grown up with them.
By the time Paik reached college, she had learned discretion. During the Mandal movement, when the country burned and debates raged across India over extending quotas in education for other backward classes, her campus was relatively calm. No classroom discussions. Among friends, reservation was spoken of casually, but resentfully. “Look at them,” some of her peers would say. “They’re getting seats. They’re not meritorious. We’ve worked so hard.”
They didn’t know her identity. In Maharashtra, the surname Paik did not immediately mark one as Dalit – the way it does in eastern India. Paik disagreed, but she did not argue. “I didn’t agree with them but I didn’t want to enter the argument. I was the only one in the room.”
Years later, when her daughter was in kindergarten, Paik encountered the same bias. Despite paying full fees, her child’s name appeared on an SC/ST list posted on the classroom door. “I was doing my PhD then,” she says. “People still said there was no discrimination.”
Not a homogenous identity
The winter sun now burning brightly overhead, Paik pulled her feet up on a bench, the hedges throwing their shadow over her diminutive form, and remembered the one person who understood her intellectual hunger – her uncle, who passed away in the pandemic. He grew up in their village before attending a missionary school where he lived in a hostel with other young men. “That is where he was exposed to different things,” Paik said. He pursued UPSC training and reached the interview stage, though he never made it to the civil services. “He was the only one I could talk to. I could have some conversation about what to read, thinking about things.”
Paik herself found reading voraciously during her master’s degree but her career was almost derailed by the demands of the household after the death of her father. She needed to find work and sent handwritten applications for jobs in Mumbai. When she received no responses, a friend asked, “Don’t you have to type it out?”
She cleared competitive exams for bank, postal services, the Life Insurance Corporation of India and the Railways – all safe options for a lower-middle class household looking for a lifeboat. Eventually, she found a job at Kirti College in Mumbai before moving into doctoral work. “She was always clever and completed her SSC with 98% from Roshni School, Tadiwala Road. This was the first time that the school was featured in a news article,” said her mother Sarita. One of her sisters, Rohini, works as a senior officer in the public works department in Pune and another sister, Kirti, is a doctor in London.
At the time, her home had a small TV where she watched tennis. Steffi Graf was her idol and they shared a birthday. “One old iron chair in front of the TV was our haunt. Tennis had women in there. Cricket was all men,” she said. Bollywood was a family tradition for years – Paik cycling to the theatre when Maine Pyar Kiya released in 1989 for tickets, and then back home to travel with the family for the evening show.
When Paik began her PhD on Dalit women’s education, she discovered something startling in the archives – silence. The records had erased Dalit women’s experiences, their organising or resistance. She turned to oral history, interviewing women from slums and middle-class backgrounds, reconstructing what archival silence had buried.
“There is a deep history of Dalit women organising, even in pre-Independence India,” she said. “Women who started libraries, teaching in the Nagpur area in the early 20th century.” These women had their own conferences. When Dr. BR Ambedkar started organising, “women started working on different lines to take Dalit women forward—making speeches, participating in demonstrations, going house to house to distribute pamphlets” through mahila mandals (women’s organisations), explaining why knowledge was important for their community.
Many of these Dalit women directly challenged upper-caste leaders such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak. They were invited to women’s conferences, but sometimes at lunch were made to sit separately because “they belonged to depressed classes.” Rather than accept this segregation silently, “they challenged savarna (upper-caste) women about this. These were moments of resistance and protest and challenging.”
She held up examples such as the 1942 Depressed Classes Women’s conference in Nagpur, where around 25,000 women delegates from marginalised communities came together to fight for their dignity. She excavated figures such as Pavalabai Bhalerao, the early 20th century singer and dancer celebrated for beauty and fair complexion, yet stripped of intellectual credit. Her husband Baburao’s songs were published in three volumes, yet her labour vanished from history.
“Because Bapurao was a Brahman, he was always already knowledgeable, meritocratic, wise, scholarly, and therefore assli. And the untouchable Pavalabai was already ashlil (obscene), dull-witted, dumb, and inferior…The partnership between Pavalabai, a Mahar Murali (a woman dedicated and given to local deities in fulfilment of vows), and Bapurao, a Brahman, and the transgression it represented was a threat to the caste hierarchy,” she wrote in her second book, the Vulgarity of Caste.
This historical excavation became Paik’s calling. “I want people to read in depth, not just repeat half-baked stories about history based on little evidence. I found that the Indian woman is not a monolith. There are different Indian women. When we talk about liberation, we have to ask which Indian women — what class, what caste, what background. We need to really understand location and subjectivity.”
Her critique extends to both mainstream Indian historians and feminist scholars who have failed to account for caste in their analyses. “They write about the history of India conveniently, without taking into account those who made it a modern nation,” she argued. “Dalit women’s demands and fights — as women they may have some commonalities – but face additional hurdles because of caste and class. We have to pay attention to that. We can’t paint everyone with a broad brush.”
Archive of oral histories
Paik received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Pune in 1994 and 1996 respectively, and a PhD in 2007 from the University of Warwick. She served as a visiting assistant professor of history at Union College (2008–2010) and a postdoctoral associate and visiting assistant professor of South Asian history at Yale University (2012–2013). Since 2010, Paik has been affiliated with the University of Cincinnati.
Her first book, Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination, came out in 2014 and chronicled the struggle of Dalit women in Maharashtra; her second, The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India, spoke about Maharashtra’s Tamasha artists, many of whom are Dalit women.
“To write and understand the stories of the marginalised, you need a different method. Their stories are not archived or documented. So I created my own archive of oral histories of dalits who never had an opportunity to be able to speak to anyone about their ideas and their lives,” she said.
Speaking on the eve of the republic turning 77, Paik’s attention turned to four aspects of contemporary Indian politics.
The first is the question at the heart of caste – that of humanity – and the place of Dalit women. “How the privileged who have enjoyed power and rights have protected their humanity without thinking about those who have never been seen as human defines the structure of caste,” she said.
“This has allowed certain people to be in power and enjoy privilege, to be human, at all times, already. Everything is for them.” Meanwhile, it has “relegated others to become animal-like, non-human. That’s the caste game—human, non-human dissonance. This is how the vulgar functioning of caste hasn’t allowed Dalits to enjoy the status of being human.”
It is here that her work on the Ambedkarite ideal of Manuski – or universal personhood and dignity – began to take ground.
“Ambedkar deployed manuski to enable a far wider conception and politics of the good, self-mastery, and recognition — embracing practical reason and a broad range of emotions. To Ambedkar, “to be manus is to not be (or behave like) a slave.” Most importantly, he declared, “Ours is a fight to achieve manuski.” Manuski brought together moral and material claims about fundamental equality,” she wrote in Vulgarity of Caste.
Paik rejected simplistic narratives about caste, including those that blame British colonialism for rigidifying caste structures. While acknowledging that “caste census, enumerating and writing down details” did solidify categories and that “some Indians used it to jump up the order of caste, tweaking information to put them higher,” she insisted the story was more complex. “Caste existed before the British. How do we deal with that? It’s in the social fabric of the country that we cannot deny.”
Privileged, yet victims
The second are mounting demands from erstwhile dominant and upper-caste communities – Jats, Marathas, Gujjars, Patels, some among them – who opposed affirmative action for marginalised communities for decades, only to then demand quotas for themselves over the last decade.
To Paik, this is a disturbing trend where the privileged are claiming oppression. “Without thinking about the power and privilege they’ve enjoyed for centuries. This is obscene.”
This inversion—privileged groups claiming victimhood—represents to her a profound ethical failure and a global one. “The privileged are saying yes, we are oppressed,” she said. “White people saying we need protection. It’s going the other way around.”
“Protecting yourself and thinking of yourself at all times without thinking of humanity and how it’s been deprived of basic rights and human rights. That’s vulgar to me.”
Her response to questions of migration – particularly critical for Dalit people who are often fleeing more rigid caste structures in villages – is more nuanced. Two generations ago, her father’s move to the city carried “the promise that the city would give liberatory space.”
“He would have continued with farm work but the need for higher education and a better life was only realised in the city. For Dalits, the city has much to offer—education, employment and an escape from ritual degrading duties. But discrimination changes colour and shape,” she warned.
To her, caste is forever mutating and the stickiness of the controversy around reservation is only a symbol that discrimination is manifesting in new forms. “People trying to list you as SC/ST” even when you’ve achieved success. No amount of money has broken the stigma,” she said.
The neverending debate around reservation particularly galled her. “People want to hang on to talking points. They have no knowledge of what reservation is. They want to make and rigidify these stories without critically thinking about it.”
English versus vernacular
The third is the thorny question of language and mobility at a time when debates around regional languages and allegations around the imposition of Hindi on southern states in particular have taken centrestage. Paik’s home state of Maharashtra is no stranger to this politics, having been the home of a string of language stirs and then regional ferment.
Moreover, the question of English versus vernacular education runs through Paik’s life and work. In her interviews with Dalit women, Paik found that “they were discriminated against in Marathi medium schools. English was one that would provide a better environment.”
“For me, English opened up a world for me, helped me gain higher education. Things were different because I knew English. I was confident.”
Yet, she recognises the complexity. During her research, she worked mainly with Marathi sources from the 19th and 20th centuries, gaining a window into the Marathi world.
“When we study languages, there has to be balance without any place for jingoism. What is language doing? How are we reading it? These are questions we must ask.”
Even Marathi itself contains hierarchies, she pointed out. When teaching in Mumbai, a Brahmin colleague commented, “You’re in Pune but not Puneri.”
“What he meant was, you’re not a Brahmin. Pune Marathi—the diction and nasal quality associated with some speakers—is a mark of privilege. Those who don’t speak it, they’re looked down upon. Even when we talk about language pride. we have to ask what kind of language is being valorised and who is excluded,” she said.
And the last is her hope for the Republic – one that was built on the radical promise of equality for all, the abolition of untouchability, and the pledge of universal adult franchise.
Paik’s work has assumed urgency at a time when Ambedkar’s legacy looms large over Indian politics and parties with disparate ideologies – some even initially opposed to the constitutionalist’s teachings – scrambling to appropriate his work for their electoral benefits.
Paik is both amused and dismayed by what she calls “the circus” of interest in and appropriation of Ambedkar. “Everyone wants to be on the caste train and the Ambedkar train. But we need more than just symbolic gestures. We have to think about it with criticality. Work on ethics. Are you following his work, his teachings?”
This work, she believes, is core to the promise of the Republic.
“I hope the republic continues to work deeply on the essence of what the Constitution has given, for people who have been excluded from enjoying constitutional rights. We have to work on strengthening the humanity of these communities and respecting them, helping them enjoy their right to life,” she said.
Shadows have started to fall on Deer Park and Paik has to get ready for a busy evening of lectures. Her work continues to recover buried histories, to insist on the complexity of Indian women’s experiences across caste and class lines, to challenge both nationalist historiography and frameworks that erase Dalit women’s resistance.
“These people are also human, deserving a life of dignity and respect,” she underlined, speaking of those relegated to the bottom of the caste hierarchy, “But they have not been really treated like that. It is the job of the republic to change that.”
