Caste, Culture and Community: A Social and Intellectual History of Socialist Politics in India, 1930s-90s.

This presentation will put forward an initial framework for Prateek Pankaj's PhD research, which studies the social and intellectual history of a brand of Indian socialist politics often characterised as “opposition socialism”. The origins of this strand of politics lay in the establishment of the Congress Socialist Party in 1934, as a faction within the Indian National Congress, which, however, split from the latter in 1948 and became the Socialist Party, an important opposition force in early postcolonial India. This research studies opposition socialism – represented by a wide constellation of parties, figures, and movements – during the 1930s-90s through three interrelated angles: its politics of caste-based social justice, its approach to religious politics, and its ambiguous relationship with the ideologically-opposed Hindu Right.