Digitally Tracing the Archived Body: Materiality and Practices of Caste in South India, c. 1870-1940

How did the social reality of caste respond to - and transform during - the colonisation of the Indian subcontinent?

My project will answer this question by reading caste as embodied through everyday social and material lives and pursuing this reading via a largescale analysis of historical collections in the colonial Indian archive. The archives have often been read as imposing rigidity on the fluid phenomenon of caste.

My project proposes a new digital method that weaves recent, innovative readings of caste, in particular, caste as constructing sensory landscapes through embodied practice, into the archive of the imperial 'ethnographic state'.