Despite loudly proclaimed commitments to challenging epistemic and material hierarchies, feminist classrooms remain insidious, concealed sites of caste violence. This paper examines how caste is (re)produced in the feminist classroom, reflecting expressly on the authors’ diverse roles in perpetuating and resisting this violence. Authored by a collective of scholars writing together across caste, gendered and teaching-learning divides, the article is an experiment in collective writing as an (imperfect) act of anti-caste solidarity, while reflecting on its limitations and dangers. Drawing on our own experiences, we identify four distinct but related mechanisms of caste vioence in the feminist classroom: (i) caste erasure, (ii) caste collapse, (iii) caste capture, and (iv) caste displacement. We then consider a specific, significant, and concerning contemporary turn within feminist classrooms – the selective and cynical embrace of the decolonial imperative in ways that ossify caste hierarchies. We track the discursive and material patterns that constitute the tapestry of a ‘decolonial foil’: active and tacit participation in caste violence carefully veiled under righteous rhetorics of epistemic justice, anti-colonial resistance, and subaltern struggle. Finally, we offer some tentative reflections (and surface tensions) on building and sustaining anti-hierarchical feminist classrooms and futures.
Singh et al. (Wed,) studied this question.