This talk explores the role of caste in perceptions of reality in British India. It brings together three different modes of representing reality: social, scientific, and literary. Colonial ethnography attempted to understand caste as a distinct form of Indian civil society and painstakingly theorized caste-as-race. Colonial nutrition, drawing on ethnographic understandings of caste, hierarchized the very innards of Indians by mapping the racial basis of caste along the lines of contemporary dietary debates about protein. All the while, colonial novelists used ethnographic and dietary understandings of caste to envision their version of a realistic world in a fictional form. The incipient form of the realist novel in India thus deployed caste as the perfect marriage of exteriority and interiority to represent a legible Indian reality in a newly imported form. In connecting these seemingly disparate modes of reality perception, Sapui argues that in late nineteenth and early twentieth century India, caste epistemologies, understood as observable physical differences and knowable communal characteristics, were key to understanding what is construed as Indian reality. In this regard, seeing to know—the cornerstone of all empirical knowledge—as this talk will show, assumes political, pedagogical, and insidiously persistent charge.

Meghna Sapui is a postdoctoral fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows and an assistant professor of English language and literature at the University of Michigan. Her work has appeared in ELH, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Review, and Global Food History. She is working on her book, Edible Empire: Tasting & Writing India, which looks at gastro narratives in the literature of British India.

Made possible with the generous support of the Title VI grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

Free and open to the public