ABSTRACT
The vestiges of European imperialism continue to manifest in South Asian postcolonial societies, including India. This means that the projects of decolonization will continue to have their relevance for the foreseeable future. Nonetheless, the colonial racial dispossession combined with and vitiated the precolonial Indian race-caste problems that have existed for a couple of millennia. Thus, premodern race-caste-based forms of colonization and exploitation in India were re-legitimated by Western racial imperialism to establish the colonialist–casteist continuum, i.e., manipulation by both Indian and Western racism and casteism. Colonial and postcolonial subjugation of Indigenous Indians, as untouchables and lower castes, by self-privileging-caste groups, such as brahmins, and their resistance against brahminism/casteism point to the dispossession of their water, land, food, labor, sexuality, resources, homesteads and environments, and displacement. Therefore, their much-delayed compensatory reparations involve two components: North–South and intra-South, in the context of India. Not surprisingly, the race-caste-oppressed Indians, their resistance, memory, and history against race-caste-based durable inequality of brahminism/casteism and European imperialism led to their call for reparative structural transformation. By engaging archival, ethnographic, and philosophical approaches and sources of Critical Caste Studies, this chapter analyzes the multidimensional reparative possibilities in postcolonial India.
