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Historian Shailaja Paik, who broke caste ceiling, awarded ‘genius grant’

ByVicky Pathare, Pune/new Delhi
Oct 03, 2024 09:35 AM IST

Shailaja Paik, a Dalit historian from Pune's slum, wins the 2024 MacArthur Fellowship for her groundbreaking work on caste, gender, and sexuality

Growing up with her parents and three sisters in a tin box in Pune’s Yerwada slum, groundbreaking historian Shailaja Paik battled pernicious caste bias. From the village in Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar district where her family had migrated in 1990, Dalit people were regularly forced to stand at a distance at public tube wells and taps so as to not touch the utensils of the caste-elites. Once, when visiting an “upper caste” family, her grandmother and her were given designated teacups and made to sit on the mud floor while the upper caste woman sat on a chair.

Shailaja Paik has been named one of the 22 MacArthur fellows for 2024. (John D and Catherine MacArthur Foundation Program)
Shailaja Paik has been named one of the 22 MacArthur fellows for 2024. (John D and Catherine MacArthur Foundation Program)

Paik, now a professor of history at the University of Cincinnati, was named one of the 22 MacArthur fellows for 2024 on Tuesday. “I wasn’t sure I was hearing correctly, but I tried to keep my cool…I was ecstatic,” she told the university website.

Popularly known as the genius grant, the MacArthur Fellowship is a “no-strings-attached” award in support of people, not projects. Each fellowship comes with an award of $800,000 to the recipient, paid out in equal quarterly instalments over five years. Widely considered one of the toughest and most prestigious awards in academia, the fellowship recognised Paik’s landmark work exploring the intersection of caste, gender, and sexuality through the lives of Dalit women.

“By studying the inequalities and the dehumanisation of people, we can provide new ways to think about universal humanity and universal emancipation,” Paik told the fellowship.

In Pune, her family was overjoyed.

“I never dreamt that my daughter would reach these heights in her career but it’s all her hard work and determination that helped her achieve what she has. This is God’s will, seeing her consistency and hard work,” said her mother Sarita Paik.

Paik received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Pune in 1994 and 1996 respectively, and a PhD in 2007 from the University of Warwick. She served as a visiting assistant professor of history at Union College (2008–2010) and a postdoctoral associate and visiting assistant professor of South Asian history at Yale University (2012–2013). Since 2010, Paik has been affiliated with the University of Cincinnati, where she is currently the Charles Phelps Taft Distinguished Research Professor of History.

“India has outlawed caste discrimination. However, caste continues to be entrenched in the social, economic, political and religious fabric of people’s everyday lives,” said Paik, 50.

Her first book, Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination, came out in 2014 and chronicled the struggle of Dalit women in Maharashtra; her second, The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India, spoke about Maharashtra’s Tamasha artists, many of whom are Dalit women.

“To write and understand the stories of the marginalised, you need a different method. Their stories are not archived or documented. So I created my own archive of oral histories of dalits who never had an opportunity to be able to speak to anyone about their ideas and their lives,” she told the fellowship.

Since 1981, only 1,131 people have been named MacArthur Fellows.

In interviews, Paik often attributed her achievements to her parents Sarita and Devram, who brought her up in the slums of Siddharth Nagar in Yerawada, where they lived in a rented tin shanty.

Her family said it was Devram’s dream that all his daughters should study well. But he died in 1996, forcing Paik to abandon her initial dream – of becoming a bureaucrat. “She had even cleared her preliminary and mains exam. When Dad passed away it was time for her interview for the UPSC, but she could not give the interview. She gave up on her dream and took up the family’s responsibility,” said Rohini Paik, her sister.

The eldest of three sisters, Paik took up a job as a lecturer at Kirti College in Dadar, Mumbai. “She was always clever and completed her SSC with 98% from Roshni School, Tadiwala Road. This was the first time that the school was featured in a news article,” said Sarita. Rohini works as a senior officer in the public works department in Pune and another sister, Kirti, is a doctor in London.

Neighbours and friends said the family had stood with Paik during the initial days of penury. “My father and Devram were good friends. Shailaja was popular as a bright student. Her mother also supported her in her studies and stood like a pillar supporting all daughters after her father,” said Avinash Salve, a family friend.

Bhushan Korgaonkar, a writer and theatre director who was featured in Paik’s second book, hailed her contribution to Indian academia. “She never gathered information just from books but believed in meeting people to understand issues,” he said.

“She always sat and observed the entire tamasha play and later interviewed the artists. This was how she did her research,” he added.

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