Bluestone Rising Scholar Prize Recipients

August 31, 2019

We are pleased to announce the results of the international competition for the Bluestone Rising Scholar Prize for 2019. The journal received 70 papers by authors in 7 countries. Many entries were of outstanding quality. The jury of leading academics from South Asia and the United States spent several weeks reading the papers and deliberating together.

The jury decided to award two authors Bluestone Rising Scholar Prizes. They are:

Ms. Maya K.S. of Kerala, India for her paper titled As a Dalit woman: My life in a caste-ghetto of Kerala.

and Mr. Vivek V. Narayan, currently of Gujarat, India for his paper titled Mirrors of the Soul: Performative egalitarianisms and genealogies of the human in colonial-era Travancore, 1854-1927

In mid-October, both our winners will participate in the Award Ceremony at Brandeis University near Boston and the Fifth International Conference on the Unfinished Legacy of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar being held at The New School in New York.

In addition, several papers were selected for Honorable Mention. They are:

Sunaina Arya, Dalit or brahmanical patriarchy? Rethinking Indian feminism

Mark Edward Balmforth, In Nāki’s Wake: Slavery and Caste Supremacy in the American Ceylon Mission

Mohan Dharavath, Can the Adivasi Speak? Politics of Representation in India

Subro Saha, Caste, Materiality and Embodiement: Questioning the Idealism/Materialism Debate

Sanober Umar, The Identity of Language and The Language of Erasure: The Indian State’s Construction of the Foreign and Casteless “Backward Musalmaan”

The purposes of the Bluestone Rising Scholar competition were to encourage early career scholars to pursue caste studies and to disseminate excellent contributions to universities around the world. We hope that all authors who entered the competition will continue in the pursuit of scholarship of caste and social exclusion and that they will not hesitate to submit future papers for possible publication in J-CASTE.

The 2^nd Bluestone Rising Scholar competition will be announced in early 2020. Register for J-CASTE to receive notices.

Sincerely,                                                             

Joint Editors-in-Chief

Laurence Simon    Sukhadeo Thorat