media
On food politics
- BBC News article (“The myth of the Indian vegetarian nation”)
- The Wire (“What India Really Eats”)
- Online quiz from EPW Engage (“Who Eats What In India”)
- Times of India Part 1 & Part 2 (Hegemony of Vegetarianism)
- A Deccan Herald article (“New Study Questions Vegetarian Numbers”)
- Interview at EPW Research Radio “Myth of Vegetarianism in India”
- Other media pubs: First Post , Frontline, Asia News, Global Indian Times, The Guardian, Muscat Daily
on caste (and race)
Interview with Balmurli natrajan
An interview with Raghav Kaushik. The interview has two goals. The first is to bring back a sense of caste as a historical material rather than a timeless transhistorical entity, to convey a sense of caste not as a static but as a dynamic system, in flux, being challenged and changing with circumstances, often material circumstances. Given the complex and long history of caste, the interview will briefly outline the course of the caste system from a system of varnas to a system of jatis. Unlike the varna system which bore some similarity to other oppressive systems around the world, the jati system with its 4000 plus caste groups is peculiar to India. Our intention here is to provide a way for anticaste activists to sharpen our tools to dissect and challenge a nimble and protean form of injustice.
Talk given at Ambedkar King Study Circle (AKSC) Annual Conference, August 2022
Talk, “Casteism: Cause and Effect”
Part of the series on Caste Practice in the USA, hosted by Ambedkar King Study Circle, California, USA. July 18, 2020.
View the lecture here
#DalitLivesMatter – The Ongoing Struggle of Dalits
Panel discussion with Martin Macwan (Navsarjan Trust, Gujarat) and Dr. Jebaroja Singh (Dalit Solidarity Forum). November 14, 2020.
Video of event available at Agitate Journal
Final Panel featuring Meena Dhanda K. Satyanarayana, Meena, Kandasamy, and Balmurli Natrajan
on diversity and inclusion
Multiple engagements hosted by Microsoft Inc., as part of their Diversity and Inclusion Journey, 2020 – 2021 (all videos available here)
- Historical View of Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) – 3.06 mins
- Panel discussion on D&I with Dr. Tanya Hernández, Professor of Law at Fordham University. Prof. Kenji Yoshino, Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU, and Dr. Balmurli Natrajan (William Paterson University of New Jersey)
- Race and Ethnicity – the Global conversation, a panel discussion with Dr. Michael Eric Dyson and Dr. Adrienne J. Keene, and Dr. Balmurli Natrajan
on authoritarian populism in india
Suchitra Vijayan of Polis Project speaks to Prof Balmurli Natrajan about the political and cultural history of Hindutva, it’s a relationship to fascism, how caste and violence are deployed by Hindutva and what awaits the country in the aftermath of the elections.
RECALL THIS BOOK – EPISODE with AJANTHA SUBRAMANIAN AND LORI ALLEN
Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allenturn from hosts to interlocutors in an episode that ties a bow on our Violent Majorities conversations about Indian (episode 1) and Israeli (episode 2) ethnonationalism. Along with John they discuss commonalities between Balmurli Natrajan’s charting of the “slippery slope towards a multiculturalism of caste” and Natasha Roth-Rowland‘s description of the “territorial maximalism” that has been central to Zionism. The role of overseas communities loomed large, as did the roots of ethnonationalism in the fascism of the 1920s, which survived, transmuted or merely masked over the subsequent bloody century, as other ideologies (Communism and perhaps cosmopolitan liberalism among them) waxed before waning.