S. Shankar: Writing about Poverty and Caste as a Novelist and Cultural Critic
These palm trees are in Thirunelveli far in the south of Tamil India. It is where my family is originally from, in that we trace our roots back there. I have visited often and have written about it, including in my most recent book, the novel Ghost in the Tamarind. It is a place of great beauty, soaked with the history of many kinds of inequality, including caste and poverty, but also of resistance to such inequality.
S. Shankar is a novelist, cultural critic and translator. Born in India, Shankar is Professor of English at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa, where he teaches contemporary literatures of the world, translation, postcolonial theory, and creative writing. Shankar is the author of three novels, two volumes of criticism, and a collection of poems. He is currently working on a book on cultural representations of the poor in a global context.
Key Questions on Global Inequality is an interview series in which we ask public intellectuals from all over the world five key questions about global inequality. We ask them about their personal background, the places they have worked and lived, and how these have shaped their views on global inequality. We also ask them some of the big questions of our age: what is global inequality, what causes it, and how to deal with it?
The people interviewed for this series are chosen on the basis of specific criteria concerning diversity and prior engagement with inequality. The research project An Intellectual History of Global Inequality is devoted to understanding the historical relationships between peoples’ location in and movement around the world and how they have thought about global inequality. By asking intellectuals from all over the world the same five questions, Key Questions on Global Inequality aims at transcending the traditional boundaries between research and research dissemination, between our interest in the past and our interest in the present. These interviews are first and foremost fascinating in themselves. But they also invite the reader into our research lab, inquiring into the relationships between peoples’ experiences, the places they have been, and their views upon global inequality.
⬤ What is your background and how did you become interested in global inequality?
I am from India from a salaried middle class family, though I lived in different parts of the world growing up, including Germany (in the 1960s) and Nigeria (in the 1970s). In a sense, I have always been interested in global inequality because of the variety of societies I have experienced. Coming from a salaried middle class family meant that our sense of security was very much connected to my father’s job (as a diplomat for newly-independent India) rather than the vicissitudes of the market or the inheritance of accumulated wealth. We were petty-bourgeois in the language of classical Marxism. I remember distinctly a sense of somewhat reduced circumstances when my father retired, which happened to coincide roughly with when I entered college in 1981. It was clear to me that economic security in the future was not something to be taken for granted. It was something to be worked for, possibly by landing a salaried job like my father’s. That in some ways I chose not to follow that path—choosing rather to be a writer and a scholar—is another story. And in the end I became not that different from my father in many ways, supporting myself via a salaried position at an American university. The more things change the more they remain the same?
At the same time, my family is upper caste and that is a different experience of inequality, since the relationship of caste to class is a real but not neat one. If my class privilege was significant but not entirely secure, my caste privilege was considerable. As a young man exposed to radical thought, I was very much aware of this privilege but it was not until much later—in graduate school in the US in the late 1980s and early 1990s—that I acquired the terminology of “cultural capital” via which to understand this caste privilege. To put the matter succinctly: regardless of my class status, my life has been marked from the beginning by the cultural capital (the privileged social networks, perceptions, and identifications) that accrues to upper-caste status. This cultural capital has surely played a very significant role in my ability to navigate an unequal world.
My background is crucial to my interest in global inequality. Ironically, the privilege of travel has taught me to think comparatively about a global lack of privilege. As a writer I began composing short stories and poems about the poor. Later, poverty and inequality came to be thematized directly in two of my three novels (A Map of Where I Live and Ghost in the Tamarind, the latter of which sets out to tell the story of caste inequality in South India); and became in a more indirect way the subject of my scholarship in postcolonial studies (I am now writing a scholarly book on representations of the poor in literature and film).
⬤ What is global inequality?
I want to say: difficult to answer precisely. I will say: the differentially dis-/empowering experience of the world within a community of human beings spread out across the globe. As an ethical and intellectual challenge, the question is meaningful only when understood in a socially significant way, as a question linked to the interrogation of the capacity for self-actualization (however you understand this term) of human beings within communities. Historically, not all societies have understood in the same way what it means to self-actualize, that is, what it means for a person to live to the fullest. Does self-actualization mean to experience without limits? Or, rather, does it mean to live a life of solicitude for others? And what is the role of society in enabling such self-actualization? Viewed in the context of such questions, global inequality is meaningful only when the word inequality has a globally generalizable signification in relation to (social) power structures and self-actualization. To illustrate: the inequality of height may signify if you are a professional basketball player but it does not signify in a globally generalizable way.
So far, so good (maybe). The difficulties arise when we move beyond this highly abstracted level of definition and begin an inquiry into causes, effects, histories, varieties, and more. And then there are the difficulties to do with the very posing of the question. If there are culturally variant notions of inequality, then what does it mean to inquire into global inequality? To pose the question differently: whose inequality are we placing at the center—treating as a category capable of universalization—when we ask after global inequality? In some ways, a globalizing world—a world in which a pandemic like COVID-19 originates in one place and then rages across the world affecting the global community of human beings in dis-/empowering ways—itself provides an answer to the question. Inequality that has the most widespread resonance is the most global. On the other hand, there is no need that we should accept the answer the world imposes on us. The world routinely propagates—imposes on us—modes of thinking that perpetuate the status quo. Might new light on inequality be shed by willfully utopian, perhaps anti-global, perspectives? The merits of counterfactual thinking should not be discounted. Whose global inequality, indeed.
⬤ How have the places you have lived and worked influenced your view on global inequality?
As I have said, I grew up in Germany and Nigeria as well as India. If I learned caste in India, I learned (I realize now) race in Germany and Nigeria, and that too in different ways—as a brown child in white and black countries respectively. I was older when I was in Nigeria—in a way, I came of age there. From my life in Nigeria, I have carried an abiding interest in race and in Africa, to which I have returned as an adult and about whose literature I have written extensively. It was difficult to be a young person with intellectual interests coming of age in Nigeria and India in the Seventies without being attuned to the language of development through which these countries were understood (now it is all about emerging markets). It was difficult to walk or drive past slums with my background of living in different countries and not grow interested in the “wealth of nations.”
I moved to the United States when I was twenty-five to go to graduate school, and now I have lived more than half my life in that country, albeit with extended stretches back “home” in India. That has also been an “influence.” To experience the American empire from within the belly of the beast is instructive. At its most immediate, I am taught every time I travel between the United States and India about the vast differences in consumption and also the ways in which this consumption is to a large extent beyond the voluntaristic—that is, it is structural. You can make enlightened personal choices with regard to consumption in the Unites States and still end up participating in a highly resource-intensive lifestyle. The flip side of this observation is also true. You have a significant minority of people in countries like India who personally consume on a scale comparable to the majority of people in countries like the United States but whose carbon footprint would be lower because of the structural differences between the countries. In this way, I have come to think more and more of how consumption—very broadly construed—is a hinge concept linking economic inequality with climate change and planetary degradation.
Of course, economic inequality is not the only form of inequality. Racialized—and also racist—forms of thought are as significant in the United States as caste is in India. More recently, I have grown interested in thinking comparatively regarding forms of inequality—economic or racial or caste-based—as a way of trying to understand something more foundational about inequality as such. Some of this interest has found expression in my recent work on caste (such as in my co-edited book Caste and Life Narratives).
⬤ What are the main historical causes of global inequality?
Understanding global as a rough synonym for the planetary, we might say the main causes, to put the matter at its broadest, are colonialism and capitalism. Colonialism was and is, among other things, a system of resource extraction and redistribution for the benefit of one part of the globe and to the detriment of another by way of a deployment of difference based on race, ethnicity, and cultural alterity. Capitalism is colonialism’s twin—both cause and effect of it. It is different from colonialism in being the name for an alternative set of processes and mechanisms centered on the subjection of everything—or as much as possible at any given moment—to the rule of the commodity. As I argued in my first critical book Textual Traffic: Colonialism, Modernity, and the Economy of the Text, at an existential level it is not possible to ascribe priority to one over the other (that is, to colonialism over capitalism or vice versa). Colonialism and capitalism are best thought of as coeval in their emergence.
To be sure, these comments make sense only when contemplating globe as a rough synonym for planet, and when we are trying to map inequality in this planetary sense. From a different perspective, gender and sexual difference, for example, are as much if not more pervasive in being commandeered for the generation of human inequality. Conceptual rigor requires that when we contemplate inequality we keep context and intersecting issues in clear view—unless we are engaged with a broader philosophical discussion of the very conditions of possibility for any equality as such. Since I am not a philosopher, I tend to be more interested in the contextual and intersectional dimensions of global inequality.
⬤ What are the most pressing contemporary challenges concerning global inequality and how do we deal with them?
Is it useful to rephrase the question in the following way: what are the contemporary challenges concerning global equality (rather than inequality)? Equality before the law? Equality of opportunities? Equality of outcomes? Equality is a necessary and unavoidable orienting goal but its semantics are not self-evident, at least to my mind. (It is also worth asking whether equivalence is a more useful term than equality, but that is discussion for another day.) I have been working on a book on cultural representations of the poor in a global context. The scholarship on poverty amply illustrates the (allegedly) vexed relationship between equality and destitution. The (neoliberal) argument that inequality may be the price to be paid by a society for freedom from destitution has often been made. The refutation of this claim is a great contemporary theoretical challenge concerning global inequality.
Another great challenge involves the struggle over inequality in relation to climate change and the planetary environmental crisis, both of which tend to trump every other concern in discussions of the future. Why bother thinking about inequality when there is a planet to save? This kind of apocalyptic thinking has always shoved aside more mundane matters of justice like persistent inequality. However, as I explore in a short story in progress, inequality might very well survive the apocalypse. There is certainly no guarantee that the unfolding costs of climate and environmental crisis will not be selectively displaced—as they already are—onto helpless populations through sustained systems of inequality. One hopes that an acute sense of shared doom will create the conditions to foster yet unimagined ideologies of equality. That outcome, however, will be the result of struggle, not inevitability.
S. Shankar: Writing about Poverty and Caste as a Novelist and Cultural Critic
S. Shankar is a novelist, cultural critic and translator. Born in India, Shankar is Professor of English at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa, where he teaches contemporary literatures of the world, translation, postcolonial theory, and creative writing. Shankar is the author of three novels, two volumes of criticism, and a collection of poems. He is currently working on a book on cultural representations of the poor in a global context.
These palm trees are in Thirunelveli far in the south of Tamil India. It is where my family is originally from, in that we trace our roots back there. I have visited often and have written about it, including in my most recent book, the novel Ghost in the Tamarind. It is a place of great beauty, soaked with the history of many kinds of inequality, including caste and poverty, but also of resistance to such inequality.
Key Questions on Global Inequality is an interview series in which we ask public intellectuals from all over the world five key questions about global inequality. We ask them about their personal background, the places they have worked and lived, and how these have shaped their views on global inequality. We also ask them some of the big questions of our age: what is global inequality, what causes it, and how to deal with it?
The people interviewed for this series are chosen on the basis of specific criteria concerning diversity and prior engagement with inequality. The research project An Intellectual History of Global Inequality is devoted to understanding the historical relationships between peoples’ location in and movement around the world and how they have thought about global inequality. By asking intellectuals from all over the world the same five questions, Key Questions on Global Inequality aims at transcending the traditional boundaries between research and research dissemination, between our interest in the past and our interest in the present. These interviews are first and foremost fascinating in themselves. But they also invite the reader into our research lab, inquiring into the relationships between peoples’ experiences, the places they have been, and their views upon global inequality.
⬤ What is your background and how did you become interested in global inequality?
I am from India from a salaried middle class family, though I lived in different parts of the world growing up, including Germany (in the 1960s) and Nigeria (in the 1970s). In a sense, I have always been interested in global inequality because of the variety of societies I have experienced. Coming from a salaried middle class family meant that our sense of security was very much connected to my father’s job (as a diplomat for newly-independent India) rather than the vicissitudes of the market or the inheritance of accumulated wealth. We were petty-bourgeois in the language of classical Marxism. I remember distinctly a sense of somewhat reduced circumstances when my father retired, which happened to coincide roughly with when I entered college in 1981. It was clear to me that economic security in the future was not something to be taken for granted. It was something to be worked for, possibly by landing a salaried job like my father’s. That in some ways I chose not to follow that path—choosing rather to be a writer and a scholar—is another story. And in the end I became not that different from my father in many ways, supporting myself via a salaried position at an American university. The more things change the more they remain the same?
At the same time, my family is upper caste and that is a different experience of inequality, since the relationship of caste to class is a real but not neat one. If my class privilege was significant but not entirely secure, my caste privilege was considerable. As a young man exposed to radical thought, I was very much aware of this privilege but it was not until much later—in graduate school in the US in the late 1980s and early 1990s—that I acquired the terminology of “cultural capital” via which to understand this caste privilege. To put the matter succinctly: regardless of my class status, my life has been marked from the beginning by the cultural capital (the privileged social networks, perceptions, and identifications) that accrues to upper-caste status. This cultural capital has surely played a very significant role in my ability to navigate an unequal world.
My background is crucial to my interest in global inequality. Ironically, the privilege of travel has taught me to think comparatively about a global lack of privilege. As a writer I began composing short stories and poems about the poor. Later, poverty and inequality came to be thematized directly in two of my three novels (A Map of Where I Live and Ghost in the Tamarind, the latter of which sets out to tell the story of caste inequality in South India); and became in a more indirect way the subject of my scholarship in postcolonial studies (I am now writing a scholarly book on representations of the poor in literature and film).
⬤ What is global inequality?
I want to say: difficult to answer precisely. I will say: the differentially dis-/empowering experience of the world within a community of human beings spread out across the globe. As an ethical and intellectual challenge, the question is meaningful only when understood in a socially significant way, as a question linked to the interrogation of the capacity for self-actualization (however you understand this term) of human beings within communities. Historically, not all societies have understood in the same way what it means to self-actualize, that is, what it means for a person to live to the fullest. Does self-actualization mean to experience without limits? Or, rather, does it mean to live a life of solicitude for others? And what is the role of society in enabling such self-actualization? Viewed in the context of such questions, global inequality is meaningful only when the word inequality has a globally generalizable signification in relation to (social) power structures and self-actualization. To illustrate: the inequality of height may signify if you are a professional basketball player but it does not signify in a globally generalizable way.
So far, so good (maybe). The difficulties arise when we move beyond this highly abstracted level of definition and begin an inquiry into causes, effects, histories, varieties, and more. And then there are the difficulties to do with the very posing of the question. If there are culturally variant notions of inequality, then what does it mean to inquire into global inequality? To pose the question differently: whose inequality are we placing at the center—treating as a category capable of universalization—when we ask after global inequality? In some ways, a globalizing world—a world in which a pandemic like COVID-19 originates in one place and then rages across the world affecting the global community of human beings in dis-/empowering ways—itself provides an answer to the question. Inequality that has the most widespread resonance is the most global. On the other hand, there is no need that we should accept the answer the world imposes on us. The world routinely propagates—imposes on us—modes of thinking that perpetuate the status quo. Might new light on inequality be shed by willfully utopian, perhaps anti-global, perspectives? The merits of counterfactual thinking should not be discounted. Whose global inequality, indeed.
⬤ How have the places you have lived and worked influenced your view on global inequality?
As I have said, I grew up in Germany and Nigeria as well as India. If I learned caste in India, I learned (I realize now) race in Germany and Nigeria, and that too in different ways—as a brown child in white and black countries respectively. I was older when I was in Nigeria—in a way, I came of age there. From my life in Nigeria, I have carried an abiding interest in race and in Africa, to which I have returned as an adult and about whose literature I have written extensively. It was difficult to be a young person with intellectual interests coming of age in Nigeria and India in the Seventies without being attuned to the language of development through which these countries were understood (now it is all about emerging markets). It was difficult to walk or drive past slums with my background of living in different countries and not grow interested in the “wealth of nations.”
I moved to the United States when I was twenty-five to go to graduate school, and now I have lived more than half my life in that country, albeit with extended stretches back “home” in India. That has also been an “influence.” To experience the American empire from within the belly of the beast is instructive. At its most immediate, I am taught every time I travel between the United States and India about the vast differences in consumption and also the ways in which this consumption is to a large extent beyond the voluntaristic—that is, it is structural. You can make enlightened personal choices with regard to consumption in the Unites States and still end up participating in a highly resource-intensive lifestyle. The flip side of this observation is also true. You have a significant minority of people in countries like India who personally consume on a scale comparable to the majority of people in countries like the United States but whose carbon footprint would be lower because of the structural differences between the countries. In this way, I have come to think more and more of how consumption—very broadly construed—is a hinge concept linking economic inequality with climate change and planetary degradation.
Of course, economic inequality is not the only form of inequality. Racialized—and also racist—forms of thought are as significant in the United States as caste is in India. More recently, I have grown interested in thinking comparatively regarding forms of inequality—economic or racial or caste-based—as a way of trying to understand something more foundational about inequality as such. Some of this interest has found expression in my recent work on caste (such as in my co-edited book Caste and Life Narratives).
⬤ What are the main historical causes of global inequality?
Understanding global as a rough synonym for the planetary, we might say the main causes, to put the matter at its broadest, are colonialism and capitalism. Colonialism was and is, among other things, a system of resource extraction and redistribution for the benefit of one part of the globe and to the detriment of another by way of a deployment of difference based on race, ethnicity, and cultural alterity. Capitalism is colonialism’s twin—both cause and effect of it. It is different from colonialism in being the name for an alternative set of processes and mechanisms centered on the subjection of everything—or as much as possible at any given moment—to the rule of the commodity. As I argued in my first critical book Textual Traffic: Colonialism, Modernity, and the Economy of the Text, at an existential level it is not possible to ascribe priority to one over the other (that is, to colonialism over capitalism or vice versa). Colonialism and capitalism are best thought of as coeval in their emergence.
To be sure, these comments make sense only when contemplating globe as a rough synonym for planet, and when we are trying to map inequality in this planetary sense. From a different perspective, gender and sexual difference, for example, are as much if not more pervasive in being commandeered for the generation of human inequality. Conceptual rigor requires that when we contemplate inequality we keep context and intersecting issues in clear view—unless we are engaged with a broader philosophical discussion of the very conditions of possibility for any equality as such. Since I am not a philosopher, I tend to be more interested in the contextual and intersectional dimensions of global inequality.
⬤ What are the most pressing contemporary challenges concerning global inequality and how do we deal with them?
Is it useful to rephrase the question in the following way: what are the contemporary challenges concerning global equality (rather than inequality)? Equality before the law? Equality of opportunities? Equality of outcomes? Equality is a necessary and unavoidable orienting goal but its semantics are not self-evident, at least to my mind. (It is also worth asking whether equivalence is a more useful term than equality, but that is discussion for another day.) I have been working on a book on cultural representations of the poor in a global context. The scholarship on poverty amply illustrates the (allegedly) vexed relationship between equality and destitution. The (neoliberal) argument that inequality may be the price to be paid by a society for freedom from destitution has often been made. The refutation of this claim is a great contemporary theoretical challenge concerning global inequality.
Another great challenge involves the struggle over inequality in relation to climate change and the planetary environmental crisis, both of which tend to trump every other concern in discussions of the future. Why bother thinking about inequality when there is a planet to save? This kind of apocalyptic thinking has always shoved aside more mundane matters of justice like persistent inequality. However, as I explore in a short story in progress, inequality might very well survive the apocalypse. There is certainly no guarantee that the unfolding costs of climate and environmental crisis will not be selectively displaced—as they already are—onto helpless populations through sustained systems of inequality. One hopes that an acute sense of shared doom will create the conditions to foster yet unimagined ideologies of equality. That outcome, however, will be the result of struggle, not inevitability.
