U. student earns dissertation grant to conduct research on India's caste system

Sahithya Venkatesan, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography, was recently awarded a Dissertation Research Grant by the Wenner Gren Foundation to propel her efforts in analyzing the implications of India's caste system, according to a press release.

In her multiphase project titled "Caste, Place and Nature: Dalit Place-making and the Politics of Climate Adaptation in the tail-end of the Cauvery Delta," she examines how people's marginalization toward Dalit caste groups results in segregation, both spatially and socially, she said. 

"These groups of people were considered untouchable," Venkatesan said. "(People's understanding of the caste system) has obviously mutated, undergone different sorts of transformations, from the colonial period to the present period, and there's also a lot of variation across different regions in India."

While her upbringing in Tiruchirappalli, India, was not impacted profoundly by the caste system, she noticed its presence take greater hold once she sought higher education, housing and employment opportunities, she said.

Additionally, despite her broad experience in research covering issues related to agrarianism, the structuring of urban workers and public health, Venkatesan said she realized that an individual's caste was usually an overlooked but underlying factor. 

"I have gone through this range of positions where I tried to hide my caste and, in an insecure way, not be open about my caste location," she said. "Something I always struggled with is (that) I could never bring that observation that I had in my field … because there's virtually no space in that policy space to think about caste as a factor of social difference."

In fact, she said beyond gender, researchers often failed to acknowledge a multitude of factors that intersect with the study of social issues.

She said when beginning her journey toward obtaining her Ph.D. degree approximately five years ago, the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement inspired her to approach these issues with a broader outlook.

"It was a very radical time," Venkatesan said. "It opened up this huge way in which you could think about access of social difference, not just as an identity of difference, but more centrally in an analytical way about how it matters for … transforming society in a more just way."

As an international student, Venkatesan said, it is difficult to find organizations that are interested in funding research, but the newly acquired grant will give her the opportunity to continue making strides in her project over the next eight months.

Specifically, she plans on interviewing people from an assortment of villages to hear their lived experiences. Venkatesan said her vision is to balance people's stories in how they navigate life in these desolate areas alongside a map to show their geographical displacement.

"Why this oral history really matters is that most often in (these) spatial mapping processes … these maps … reduce people to pixels," she said.

As a result, she said policies that are determined from solely looking at these maps are not an accurate reflection of the communities in which they are affecting.

Ultimately, Venkatesan said she hopes her research will enlighten people on the pervasive nature of the caste system and help humanize those in Dalit caste groups who are disproportionately facing the system's consequences. In doing so, she thinks others will have a shift in their perception of these so-called wastelands, too.

"There is a certain … devaluation of other people's or a certain group's way of living … and most of that devaluation comes from a complete ignorance of what that history is," Venkatesan said. "What you think of places as empty or wasted or marginalized in some way has always had some people living there and building their life out of it."