Time to deliver on promise of equality

HT catches up with Shailaja Paik, recipient of the 2024 MacArthur Fellowship, to explore her views on education, caste politics and her hope for the future of the republic

- Dhrubo Jyoti

n eight-year-old girl stood frozen at the community ‘well, her hands gripping an empty bucket. Just ahead, water glinted in the depths, close enough to touch. Her aunt's grip on her shoulder was firm, “Wait. Let them fill their pots first.”

On the other side, women from adominant caste household that owned the well approached, their glance menacing. The distance between the two groups of women — just a few feet, enforced by centuries — remained etched in the child’s memory, a spatial grammar of bias and humiliation she would go on to spend her life decoding.

Today, Shailaja Paik, isa certified genius. But the groundbreaking historian sometimes thinks she should draw that scene from her childhood. The two lines of women walking toward the same well from opposite sides. The invisible boundary her cousins and aunt knew only too well to not cross. “The distance had to be maintained,” she said.

That childhood moment in her ancestral village in Maharashtra’s Anmadnagar district (now knownas Ahilyanagar) crystallised what would become her life's work: excavating the histories of Dalit women, documenting the intricate machinery of caste discrimination, and challenging narratives of history that erased her community's struggles and resistance.

The Charles Phelps Taft Distinguished Research Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati, Paik was named last year as one of the recipients of the 2024 MacArthur Fellowship, a no-strings-attached $800,000 “genius grant” widely considered one of the toughest and most prestigious awards in academia. Over the course of a day, HT caught up with the 52-year-old academic to explore her landmark work on caste, gender, and sexuality through the lives of Dalit women, her views on contemporary debates in education and caste politics, and her hope for the future of the republic,