Historian Shailaja Paik was awarded a 2024 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for her scholarship on exploring the intersection of caste, gender, and sexuality through the lives of Dalit women in modern India. Through her work, Paik provides new insight into the history of caste domination and traces the ways in which gender and sexuality are used to deny Dalit women dignity and personhood. In addition to English, Marathi, and Hindi-language source materials, she is creating a new archive comprised of her interviews and fieldwork with contemporary Dalit women.

The Fellowship’s aim is to identify extraordinarily creative individuals with a track record of excellence in a field of scholarship or area of practice, who demonstrate the ability to impact society in significant and beneficial ways through their pioneering work or the rigor of their contributions. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or individuals in other fields. Paik will receive $800,000, paid in quarterly instalments over five years.

Paik’s first book, Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (2014), details Dalit women’s struggles for education and agency in colonial and contemporary urban Maharashtra. Drawing on oral interviews with three generations of women, she shows that Dalit women were caught between two opposing forces.

Paik expands upon the tensions between the state, anti-caste reformers, and Dalit women and their own agency in her most recent book, The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (2022). In this project, Paik focuses on the lives of women performers of Tamasha, a popular form of bawdy folk theatre that has been practised predominantly by Dalits in Maharashtra for centuries.

Paik also critiques the narrative of Dr BR Ambedkar who placed responsibility on Dalit women to uplift themselves through the rejection of sexualised performance. Paik’s analysis of hitherto neglected Marathi historical documents and oral histories shows that, in spite of this double bind, Dalit Tamasha women strategically make use of public performance.

Through her focus on the multifaceted experiences of Dalit women, Paik elucidates the enduring nature of caste discrimination and the forces that perpetuate untouchability.

She is currently the Charles Phelps Taft Distinguished Research Professor of History and affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Asian Studies at the University of Cincinnati, America. She has published articles in the Journal of South Asian Studies, Gender and History, Journal of Women’s History, and Indian Journal of Gender Studies, among others.