Shailja Paik, an Indian-American professor who researches and writes about Dalit women, has received an $800,000 “Genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation, which awards the prize each 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 makes clear the enduring nature of caste discrimination and the forces that perpetuate untouchability.”
Ms. Pike is a Distinguished Research Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati, where she is also an adjunct faculty in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Asian Studies.
The foundation said, “Pike offers new insights into the history of caste domination and explores the ways in which gender and sexuality are used to deny the dignity and individuality of Dalit women.”
MacArthur Fellowships, popularly known as “genius” grants, are awarded to people in fields ranging from education and science to art and activism who, according to the foundation, are “exceptionally talented as an investment in their potential.” And is a creative person”.
Selections are made anonymously based on recommendations received and do not allow application or lobbying for the grants, which come with no strings attached and are spread over five years.
The foundation said their recent project “focuses on the lives of women performers of Tamasha, a popular form of bawdy folk theater that has been practiced primarily by Dalits for centuries in Maharashtra”.
It states, “Despite the state’s efforts to re-establish Tamasha as a respectable and quintessential Marathi cultural practice, obscene (marks of obscenity) remains associated with Dalit Tamasha women.”
Based on the project, she published a book, “Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality and Humanity in Modern India”.
It says, Pike also criticizes the narrative of Dr BR Ambedkar, “the most influential caste abolitionist of the twentieth century” and the architect of India’s Constitution.
In an interview with National Public Radio (NPR), a US government-funded broadcaster, she said that she herself was a member of the Dalit community, growing up in a slum in Pune and was inspired by her father’s dedication to education.
After obtaining her master’s degree from Savitribai Phule University in Pune, she went to the University of Warwick in the UK for her PhD.
He served as Visiting Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Yale University.
Fellowships have been awarded to 1,153 people since the program began in 1981.
Previous MacArthur Fellows include writers Ruth Prawar Jhabvala and Ved Mehta, poet AK Ramanujam, economists Raj Chetty and Senthil Mullainathan, mathematician L Mahadevan, computer scientists Subhash Khot and Shwetak Patel, physical biologist Manu Prakash, musician Vijay Gupta, community organizer Raj Jayadev . and lawyer and activist Sujata Baliga.
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