Shailaja Paik among 22 recipients of prestigious MacArthur “Genius” award

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The MacArthur Foundation announced on October 1, its 2024 awardees selected from science and humanities, among them one of Indian origin, for its highly sought after annual Fellowship grant.

Shailaja Paik, a historian, is one of only 22 MacArthur Fellows this year. The award carries a no-questions-asked grant of $800,000 to give recipients the freedom to pursue their interests. It is popularly called the “Genius” grant, “for individuals who have shown exceptional creativity in their work and the promise to do more.”

As a historian of modern India, Paik explores the intersection of caste, gender, and sexuality through the lives of Dalit women. She is currently affiliated with the University of Cincinnati, as the Charles Phelps Taft Distinguished Research Professor of History and affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Asian Studies.

“Paik provides new insight into the history of caste domination and traces the ways in which gender and sexuality are used to deny Dalit women dignity and personhood,” her biography on the MacArthur Foundation website says. In addition to English, Marathi, and Hindi-language source materials, she is creating a new archive comprised of her interviews and fieldwork with contemporary Dalit women.

“To be a Dalit woman is to be doubly oppressed,” Paik says on a video on the MacArthur Foundation site. She is also quoted saying, “Centering the most oppressed Dalit women provides a more comprehensive understanding of oppression, dehumanization, and injustice and revitalizes anti-caste, anti-patriarchal, and anti-race work. I contribute to new global histories of our collective humanity, by illuminating the ways Dalit women resist and display resilience and agency—they stand up again and again; they continue to get up and out from the under.”

Her first book, Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (2014), details Dalit women’s struggles for education and agency in colonial and contemporary urban Maharashtra. It draws on Paik’s oral interviews with three generations of women.

In her most recent book , The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (2022), Paik expands upon the tensions between the state, anti-caste reformers, and Dalit women and their own agency. She does so by focusing on the lives of women performers of Tamasha, a popular form of bawdy folk theater that has been practiced predominantly by Dalits in Maharashtra for centuries.

Paik also critiques the narrative of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the twentieth century’s most influential caste abolitionist.

“I combine archival and ethnographic fieldwork evidence to analyze the mechanism of caste social inequality in perpetuating discrimination, stigmatization, and exploitation. ”

“Centering the most oppressed Dalit (“Untouchable”) women provides a more comprehensive understanding of oppression, dehumanization, and injustice and revitalizes anti-caste, anti-patriarchal, and anti-race work. I contribute to new global histories of our collective humanity, by illuminating the ways Dalit women resist and display resilience and agency—they stand up again and again; they continue to get up and out from the under.”

“Through her focus on the multifaceted experiences of Dalit women, Paik elucidates the enduring nature of caste discrimination and the forces that perpetuate untouchability,” notes the biography.

Paik earned her BA (1994) and MA (1996) from the University of Pune and a PhD (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).  She has published articles in the Journal of South Asian Studies, Gender and History, Journal of Women’s History, and Indian Journal of Gender Studies, among others.