POSITIONALITY: Asking about Caste as a Oppressed Caste Woman with American Privlage

Importance of Positionality in Interviews on Sensitive Topics

When conducting interviews around sensitive topics such as caste in India, especially with marginalized groups like Dalits and women, the positionality of both the interviewer and the translators plays a crucial role. Here are several reasons why this is important:

1. Trust and Rapport

The positionality of the interviewer can significantly affect the level of trust and rapport established with interviewees. Marginalized groups may be wary of outsiders, particularly those who belong to more privileged backgrounds. Understanding and acknowledging one’s own social identity can help in building trust.

2. Understanding Context

Translators and interviewers must be aware of their own biases and social locations. This understanding allows them to navigate the complexities of caste and gender dynamics more effectively. It ensures that they can interpret responses accurately and sensitively.

3. Sensitivity to Cultural Nuances

Cultural nuances are critical when discussing sensitive topics. Interviewers and translators who share similar backgrounds or have a deep understanding of the cultural context can facilitate more meaningful conversations and reduce the likelihood of misinterpretation.

4. Ethical Considerations

Positionality raises ethical considerations regarding power dynamics in interviews. Interviewers must be conscious of how their identity might influence the interview process, ensuring that they do not perpetuate existing inequalities.

5. Representation and Voice

Interviewing marginalized groups requires a commitment to amplifying their voices rather than speaking over them. The positionality of the interviewer and translator can influence how these voices are represented in the final analysis or publication.

6. Navigating Trauma

Sensitive topics often involve discussing trauma. Interviewers and translators must be equipped to handle such discussions with empathy and care. Their positionality can impact their ability to respond appropriately to emotional cues during interviews.

7. Reflexivity

Being reflexive about one's positionality encourages continuous self-examination throughout the research process. This reflexivity can lead to more ethical and responsible research practices, especially in sensitive contexts.

In summary, the positionality of both the interviewer and the translators is vital when engaging with sensitive topics involving marginalized groups. It affects the dynamics of trust, understanding, ethical considerations, and the overall quality of data collected. Acknowledging and addressing these factors can lead to more respectful and insightful interviews.

My Positionality

Dr. Saswathi Natta sitting with North Indian Rural women covering their heads, holding a child on her lap.

Aspects of my identity and position certainly impacted how different respondents approached me. Further, the gender and caste identity of my “local” translators, who were local only relative to me but often came from nearby cities and not the rural areas, also impacted the fluidity of interviews to a great extent. The impact of the translators’ gender presentation resulted in my switching both Hindi and Telugu translators from men to women for round two of my field work.

For my own identity factors, some aspects, such as being a woman and a dalit (Opressed caste, a.k.a scheduled caste), served to gain more intimate access into certain spaces, such as a room full of only women, or more trust from a dalit family in sharing their struggles and aspirations with me if they suspected that I was also dalit. Being american, with a US accent, or showing clear class-privilege by the clothes I wore and the air-conditioned car I arrived in, allowed me to be given enough benefit of the doubt as to be treated as someone of importance and presumably dominant caste unless otherwise proven. That is to say, I was read as an upper class, dominant caste woman when I did not specify, and it afforded me the privilege of moving about and being treated as a dominant caste person. This dominant caste assumption stemmed from the stereotypes that wealthy or official looking people tended to be dominant caste and caste identity questions were not directly asked because in the local context, if I was indeed dominant caste, people feared that I may take extreme offence to being asked if I was dalit. This unspoken assumption of dominant caste identity produced a complex set of interactions with different people in the village. As someone who looks class privileged, clearly coming from the city with a translator introducing me, village leaders allowed for certain doors to open such as being invited into homes and village offices. The same class-privilege also sometimes prevented some respondents from fully empathizing or connecting with me as an interviewer because I was immediately identified as an outsider looking in on their lives. Caste passing as dominant caste, or atleast caste ambiguous, sometimes served to allow me access into the world of dominant caste villagers, but at the same time, dalit families sometimes regarded me as dominant caste which served to make them hold me at arms length until I earned their trust, usually by breaking the touch barrier by playing with a child or hinting in some way that I was not a dominant caste person. 

Passing as dominant caste made me feel a bit like an imposter, because I am usually open about my dalit identity in the South Asian Diaspora community in the US, where dalit identity usually does not pose a serious threat of discrimination. Nevertheless, caste passing as dominant caste also felt empowering in a way because it allowed me to see the stark difference in treatment if I was dominant caste vs if I had self identified myself as dalit in rural India. The experience also gave me methodological insight into the interviewer effect, and I constantly considered how I might be treated if my dalit identity was known, because I would then be a person of the minority or oppressed identity interacting with respondents of dominant identities. These interviewer effects are key, especially for qualitative interviews where building rapport with respondents is so essential, so I avoided revealing my caste identity,as much as possible. 

Beyond the methodological insight, I was keenly aware of the dangers of being a dalit person who was invited into a dominant caste home in a village. I carefully avoided revealing my caste identity to dominant caste people, for the fear of caste related violence that is so often meted out to dalit people who dare to break caste practices. I was warned both by dalit advisors and by dominant caste advisors in academia, to approach fieldwork as an Indian American and present a foreign identity juxtaposed with the identity of a researcher and avoid the topic of my own caste identity or family origins even if respondents probed. I attempted to follow this advice to the best of my ability in all my interviews, though I was also keenly aware of how people read my position and identity when I did not specify explicitly. 

Caste Cues & Hinduism

The cautionary advice around caste was so important because of how the practice of caste, mainly within brahminical hinduism is a religious belief around the supposed purity of dominant caste people and the supposed pollution of oppressed caste people. This belief then serves to create a hierarchy of caste that upholds the structure of financial and socio-political power held by dominant castes such as brahmins, land-owning warrior castes, and merchant castes. 

Some cues and stereotypes associated with caste include the consumption of meat being associated with caste impurity, while being a vegetarian and specifically not eating beef is associated with caste purity. In recent times, the consumption of meat, specifically beef, has been turned into a politicized act against hinduism in national indian media(Bruckert 2019), even though the practice of eating beef varies widely across different indian states and the most oppressed, dalit people, within the hindu fold have historically eaten beef and worked with leather. It is almost as if this politicization of beef further relegates dalit people to the low status of being impure. In many regions of India, untouchable caste people do leather work and produce shoes, and the occupation related to hauling away dead cattle is given to untouchable people as their livelihood, which also deems them to be ritually impure. Therefore, another cue indicating oppressed caste status is occupation related to any leather work, work with shoes, work as a cleaner or with the sewage system and as a laborer. Work as a scholar, a pundit/priest in a temple, a land-owner, a wealthy business person, a leader or spokesperson with positions of power tend to be associated with higher caste status. These occupational associations mean that my position as a researcher and as someone who is class privileged, will indicate to many villagers that I am most likely from a dominant caste and my behaviors of not deferring to dominant caste people will not appear as a threat to the existing caste hierarchy in the village. 

Another key way that the caste system is imposed is through the strict enforcement of rules forbidding sharing food and utensils with other castes and forbidding physical contact with other castes. The brahminical hindu caste practices in different regions also prescribe a different code of behavior for people in different castes of that region, so as someone who is caste ambiguous, seemingly coming from abroad or an urban area, that code of behavior is relaxed for an outsider like me. It would be dangerous to then reveal knowledge of my own dalit identity after having broken the code of behavior because that would indicate that I may have knowingly broken the practices of ritual purity and introduced pollution into the dominant caste person’s household by touching eating utensils or sitting on a chair. These behaviors of mine may be taken with great offence against the dominant caste and retaliation against me or other dalits in their village may ensue, just to ensure that ritual caste practices are not broken by other dalits and so that the dominant caste groups re-enforces the caste rules and caste dominance within their village. Caste behaviors differ across regions of India, and I also did not grow up in India, thought I am of Indian origin, so I honestly did not know many of the expected caste behaviors in all of my fieldwork sites until I conducted a few interviews. 

For example, in one of my UP fieldwork sites, near the city of varanasi, I learned a few minutes into an interview that the prescribed caste behavior of a dalit woman is to sit on the floor in the presence of a dominant caste woman, and to stand up and cover her face with the edge of her sari if a dominant caste man walked by. Dalit people there are also not allowed to drink or eat with the same utensils as dominant caste people in this region and many other regions of India. When I entered, as a caste ambiguous outsider, who clearly looks class privileged, I am most likely read as dominant caste, because the standing assumption is that only dominant caste people can look, stand, speak and behave the way I do. I attempted to speak with dalit women as my first resopndents, but the dalit women immediately took me to see a brahmin woman who habitually represented their village at village meetings as a spokes person. The dominant caste woman then offered me a seat next to her on her bed, and offered me water and snacks from the plates and glasses that she used in her home. The dalit women who escorted me to the brahmin household sat on the ground next to the bed as my translator and I were making our introductions. A few minutes into my interview with the brahmin woman, a clearly upper caste man walked by and all the dalit women stood up and covered their faces, and the brahmin women sitting next to me nodded her greeting to the man without standing up. I too did not stand up because I did not know at the time that this was the caste related practice of the region. If, after all this had happened, I then revealed that I was a scheduled caste person, someone who was from an untouchable caste and listed so in the schedule of castes in the indian constitution, even if I was not from the region of my fieldwork, this would indicate my kinship to the scheduled caste people, or dalit people, of that village more than to the dominant caste people. I feared that my dominant caste hosts would take great offence to how I had behaved and see my presence in their home, eating from their plate, as a knowing act of caste defiance. Though I might have been forgiven for my ignorance, my actions may inspire other dalit people of the area to break caste behaviors and that may slowly tear down the structure of power and dominance that the brahmins and land owning castes held. This existing caste structure of behaviors directly put me in danger if I revealed my caste origins, even if I came from a different state than the state of the respondent, so I protected my caste identity carefully. 

In this particular village, I was asked about my caste identity multiple times by different respondents and I avoided the question by saying that as a researcher I was not allowed to reveal my caste so as not to bias the interview. Perhaps this invited suspicion, but the villagers respected the word of the researcher, at least for the duration of the interview. It was clear that the topic was not forgotten because toward the end of the day, a dominant caste man came to visit an interview I was conducting with a group a dalit women. He was swiftly offered a chair while all the other women and I had been sitting on the ground of their front porch. He listened to the end of the interview and then proceeded to ask me about my caste, in a semi-joking way, saying it was because I was asking all these questions about people’s memories of caste, so I owed it to them to speak about my caste identity. I laughed along and said that I would reveal the name of my caste, which I did, but I knew that as someone from andhra, my caste name would not mean anything to these villagers in Uttar Pradesh (UP) as long as they did not tie the caste name to the category of a scheduled caste or dalit person. The villagers were confused but satisfied with my answer as someone from a different state and I left the village without much trouble.

Conclusion

In conclusion, stating my positionality was crucial in this blog post as it provided context for my insights and experiences gained from conducting focus groups. By openly acknowledging my background and perspective, I aimed to foster transparency and encourage readers to critically assess how their own positionalities may influence their understanding of research and participant interactions. This self-awareness not only enriches the dialogue around data collection but also promotes a more inclusive and empathetic approach to engaging with diverse voices. As we move forward, recognizing our positions will be essential in ensuring that we create spaces where all participants feel valued and heard.