How does the utopian democratic ideal of meritocracy reproduce historical inequality? My larger project pursues this question through a historical anthropology of technical education in India. It looks at the operations of caste, the social institution most emblematic of ascriptive hierarchy, within the modern field of engineering education. At the heart of the study are the Indian Institutes of Technology, or IITs, a set of highly coveted engineering colleges that are equally representative of Indian meritocracy and, until recently, of caste exclusivity. In this talk, I hope to show that the politics of meritocracy at the IITs illuminates the social life of caste in contemporary India. Rather than the progressive erasure of ascribed identities in favor of putatively universal ones, what we are witnessing is the rearticulation of caste as an explicit basis for merit and the generation of newly consolidated forms of upper casteness.

Ajantha Subramanian is Professor of Anthropology and of South Asian Studies at Harvard University. Her first book, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India, chronicled the emergence of a politics of rights among Catholic fishers in southwestern India. She is currently working on a second project on caste and meritocracy in Indian engineering education.

Cosponsored by the Department of Anthropology.