Pranav Jeevan P
Manusmriti ordains production and transmission of knowledge as the prerogative of savarnas or brahmins. This has created a structural gatekeeping of educational spaces from Dalit Bahujan Adivasis (DBA) for millennia. It had also imposed severe restriction on them to access information. The status of education and information distribution is no different even now. All the higher education spaces are exclusively dominated by savarna faculty and students by violating reservation norms, and DBA students are systematically excluded from these spaces. This is a means to create a monopoly in the knowledge creation and transmission process. We see the same happening in other fields like media, journalism etc. where the leadership positions are monopolized by savarnas. Even the knowledge of savarna oppression of DBA is only legitimate if studied, curated, and communicated by savarnas. This maintains the hegemony over knowledge and keeps the power to decide whether something should be considered knowledge or nor exclusively in the hands of savarnas.
When knowledge becomes an exclusive product under savarna domination, it creates an unjust system of power hierarchy where knowledge produced and communicated by DBA communities are either discarded or delegitimized without a second thought. The injustice done to a person in their capacity as a knower (producer and communicator of knowledge) is called Epistemic Injustice.Epistemic injustice is a concept in social epistemology that refers to the unfair distribution of knowledge, credibility, or intellectual resources when someone is denied access to knowledge or is not believed, despite having relevant knowledge or expertise, because of their social identity, such as their race, caste, gender, class, or disability. The term was coined by a British philosopher, Miranda Fricker [1]. This is different from distributive unfairness by gatekeeping where DBA are denied entry to spaces of knowledge production like educational institution and media.
Within the caste system, epistemic injustice occurs when people from lower castes are denied access to knowledge, education, and resources due to their social identity, and when their knowledge and experiences are not recognized or valued by others. Another way in which epistemic injustice operates in the caste system is through the denial of cultural recognition and representation. People from DBA have often been excluded from cultural and literary traditions, and their experiences and knowledge have been ignored or marginalized. This has contributed to a situation where dominant cultural narratives are often based on the experiences and perspectives of savarnas, while the experiences and perspectives of DBA are often ignored or erased.
According to Fricker [1], there are two kinds of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice is a form of epistemic injustice that occurs when someone’s testimony is not given the credibility or respect it deserves due to biases or stereotypes associated with their identity. It is the distrust by others in the knowledge produced by an individual. An injustice of this kind occurs when someone is ignored, or their statement is discarded, because of their identity. This occurs because of the prejudice about the identity of the person and others doubt their capacity as a giver of knowledge. The moment when a DBA candidate steps into an educational space, the additional scrutiny they go through and the doubts casted on their ‘merit’ by savarnas is a case of testimonial injustice. The recent surveys from IIT Bombay SC/ST cell shows that DBA students are excluded from participating in group discussions, and their views are discarded by savarna peers. The blatant disrespect to one’s ideas and opinions by others can affect the self-respect of an individual and harm their mental peace. DBA students are subjected to this epistemic violence by savarna students and faculties to destroy their confidence. Testimonial injustice happens in interviews, where savarna faculties does not believe that DBA candidates can produce quality research.
Savarnas often ask ‘would you go for treatment from a doctor who got medical seat using reservation?’ The whole narrative rests on testimonial injustice where the expertise of a DBA individual is discarded, despite having the degree and experience. Interestingly this argument will never be used for doctors who used EWS reservation or even paid management seats. The use of ‘Merit’ against reservation to undermine the intellect and capabilities of DBA community is the most popular example of epistemic injustice done on the community.
Before the MeToo movement started in India, the LoSHA movement was severely attacked by savarna feminists as not a legitimate method of calling out sexual harassment in academia. The belief that “anything that is conceived or initiated by DBA are inherently flawed” is so inherent to the savarnas that they could not accept it even though it was a watershed moment in Indian feminism. We see a similar event in IIT Kanpur where the appointment of Subrahmanyam Saderla, a dalit Professor, irked the savarna faculty so much that they started questioning the legitimacy of his thesis and called the appointment of DBA faculty a ‘curse’. They cannot digest the fact that a DBA person could ever produce research and create knowledge.
Testimonial injustice operates with respect to caste is through the dismissal of the experiences and perspectives of DBA. DBA have firsthand experience with discrimination, oppression, and other forms of injustice, but their testimony is not taken seriously or given the same weight as the testimony of savarna. This can result in a situation where DBA are not believed or their experiences are minimized or dismissed. This was blatantly visible in the interim report published by IIT Bombay on Darshan Solanki’s death where they discarded statements made by Darshan’s sister (dalit) and Darshan’s senior (Adivasi) which pointed to caste discrimination and focused only on statements of savarna students. No credibility is given to testimonies of DBA people, even in cases of their own oppression.
Hermeneutical injustice is a form of epistemic injustice that occurs when a person or group is unable to make sense of their experiences or communicate them effectively due to a lack of available conceptual or linguistic resources. The lack of a language to articulate their experience is due to the erasure of their part from creation of the vocabulary of languages. This puts them at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their own social experiences because they do not even have the means to know or express the injustice they are suffering. It occurs when someone’s experiences are not well understood, both by themselves or by others, because these experiences do not fit any concepts known to them (or others), due to the historic exclusion of these groups of people from activities, such as scholarship and journalism, that shape the language people use to make sense of their experiences. Oppressors have been using language as powerful tool to oppress and control people.
The lack of words in a language to properly define and articulate oppression is not an accident. According to Fricker [1], the absence of a word for Sexual Harrassment, and the difficulty women faced in communicating it was intentional, due to women’s exclusion from participation in the shaping of English language. After the term sexual harassment was introduced, woman who experienced harassment can understand better what happened to them, but it was harder to explain it to someone because the concept of sexual harassment was not yet well known. The absence of familiarity and sensitization is also intentional, due to women’s exclusion from equal participation in journalism, publishing, academia, law, and the other institutions that help people make sense of their lives. Fricker [1] argues that some women’s lives are less intelligible – to themselves, and to others – because women have historically wielded less power to shape the categories through which people understand the world. This is also true for other marginalized groups. The fight by LGBTQ+ communities has led to understanding the current limitations of language in understanding and describing gender. Language has been used to suppress the spectrum of gender and sexuality, and has been instrumental in imposition of strict heteronormative gender binary. The lack of equivalent words of ‘pativrata’ for men in Indian languages shows the patriarchal nature of language where only women are supposed to be devoted to men.
Hermeneutical injustice operates in caste through the lack of available language or conceptual frameworks to describe and articulate the experiences of people from DBA communities. Dominant cultural narratives and discourses does not have adequate means to capture their experiences and this makes it difficult for them to express themselves or be understood by others. Also,most of the scholarship on caste oppression is mostly written by the oppressor castes with a savarna gaze that portrays the oppression in a completely different light. The knowledge and cultural practices of oppressors are always considered classical and the cultural and artistic products of DBA are relegated to the bottom. The discomfort and suffocation that BDA feels when they enter savarna dominated spaces like academia or media is mainly due to the erasure of identity and cultural shock they experience by not being able to connect or articulate in the language or assimilate into the culture of savarnas. The way to battle hermeneutical injustice is by questioning the language, culture and scholarship created by savarnas, and expanding the vocabulary to be able articulate the experiences of DBA by more inclusion of marginalized groups into academia, media, journalism, law etc.
Epistemic injustice is a pervasive problem in most social situations, and it has adverse effects on individuals and communities. Addressing epistemic injustice involves recognizing the ways in which different forms of social identity can impact the distribution of knowledge and resources, and taking steps to ensure that everyone has equal access to knowledge and is treated with equal respect and consideration. It requires challenging the structural inequalities and biases that contribute to these forms of injustice, and working to create more inclusive and equitable systems of education, knowledge production, and cultural representation.
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References
[1] M. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford University Press, 2007.
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Pranav Jeevan P is currently a PhD candidate in Artificial Intelligence at IIT Bombay. He has earlier studied quantum computing in IIT Madras and Robotics at IIT Kanpur.
