Santhosh Sadanandan | Undoing Caste-Visuality

The role of modern Indian art in invisibilizing caste-subaltern lifeworlds has not been incidental. On the contrary, it is structurally embedded within the historical formation of modernism itself. Two primary technologies of representation have sustained this process. First, the over-signification of the caste-subaltern and Adivasi subject as the “ethnos” of the nation through tropes of innocence, nature, pastoral authenticity, and purity. Second, and more insidious, is the production of caste-sight—what may be thought alongside Nicholas Mirzoeff’s white-sight—which operates through the aesthetic and intellectual formation of the casteless modern artist. Modern art thus played a crucial role in producing caste-visuality and the upper-caste projection of castelessness as both a subjective dis-position and an aesthetic virtue. 

Although every aspect of Indian life is marked by caste, revealing its visual coordinates in historical and geo-political specificity has remained outside mainstream artistic discourse. Through exclusionary techniques and technologies of making and/as thinking, the material manifestations of caste are easily transcoded as class, region, or culture, thereby evading direct visual inscription. This forfeiture of visualizing caste’s spatial and material coordinates marks the historical failure of Indian modernism to confront its constitutive violence. 

This presentation argues that thinking caste and aesthetics today requires moving beyond the representational question toward a dispositional and performative one: how spatial, social, and material entanglements produce and circulate aesthetic experience. Caste-sight may be seen as a machinic operation that organizes perception and affect rather than a mere representational absence. Contemporary anti-caste practices reclaim these entanglements, striving to unconceal the caste coordinates of visuality and open a counter-aesthetic where seeing itself becomes a site of political and affective struggle. 

About the Speaker

Dr. Santhosh Sadanandan is a cultural theorist based in New Delhi, India. He is one of the founding members and teaches at the School of Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University Delhi. Drawing on his training as an art historian, his work critically examines the structural dynamics of the institutionalisation of culture from a minoritarian perspective. He writes on contemporary cultural politics in India, with an emphasis on deconstructing technologies of visuality and the affective dimensions of the political. 

Note: Dr. Sadanandan will deliver this talk on Zoom for an in-person and online audience.

This event is hosted by the Caste, Culture, and Aesthetics Global Humanities Research Workshop co-sponsored by Stanford Global Studies, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Center For South Asia.