‘A celebration of Dalit women’s ideas’: Shailaja Paik, first Dalit winner of a MacArthur Fellowship
‘The sexual and gendered arrangements of the caste system to oppress Dalit Tamasha women remained unexamined,’ said Paik who has written a book on the subject.
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Historian Shailaja Paik has become the first Dalit person to be awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. Known as the “genius grant”, the fellowship comes with a “no-strings-attached” award of $800,000 – a little over Rs 6.5 crore. To put the achievement and the term “genius” in perspective, since its inception in 1981, the fellowship has been given to only 1153 people. Among its recipients are literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr, Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, poets AK Ramanujan, Adrienne Rich, John Ashberry and Claudia Rankine, novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, jazz violinist Regina Carter, and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. It is a list of the best minds at work in the United States.
From growing up in a one-room tenement in Pune, Paik won major academic accolades and is now a professor of history and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Cincinnati, US. She works at the intersections of caste, gender and sexuality, building on the existing groundwork of Dalit feminism to broaden the scope of the questions that can be asked and finding new sources that can lead us to fresh answers.
Paik’s first book Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination, is the story of the struggles Dalit women underwent to secure educational...
