Introduction to the special issue: Rethinking difference in India through racialization

Abstract

The contributions in this issue forward a nuanced exposition of how the production of racial difference in India buttresses and is reproduced through Hindu nationalist, casteist, and colonial projects that generate tacit or explicit consent for continued violence against racialized others. At the same time, the articles look transnationally, examining how regional forms of racial difference marked by caste and tribe, for instance, have long articulated with historical forms of global racial capitalism. Ultimately, this special issue attends to the narratives and experiences of those living at the margins, who strategically deploy racial concepts to build international solidarity movements beyond the narrow confines of the nation-state. In so doing, it hopes to derive insights on the necessity of transnational translations, even as it directs renewed attention to the specificity of regional hierarchies that shape everyday life and death in India.