Ketaki Jaywant

Ketaki's headshot

Assistant Professor, Department of South Asia Studies

809 Williams Hall, 36th and Spruce Streets, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Ketaki Jaywant is an Assistant Professor in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a historian of Modern South Asia. She received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Minnesota, and an M.Phil. in Political Studies from JNU. She is interested in studying the history of caste and social reform, the politics of knowledge production, the Marathi-language print world, the history of liberal ideas in South Asia, the global circulation of categories of race and caste, and the history of intellectual trends and critical thought in South Asia. Before moving to the University of Pennsylvania, she taught history at Washington and Jefferson College. Her doctoral research received the 2021 Sardar Patel Award for writing the best dissertation in a US university on any aspect of modern South Asia.

Her current book project Secularizing Caste: Mapping Nineteenth-Century Anti-caste Politics in Western India, examines how nineteenth-century debates in the public realm transformed caste from a conservative authoritarian order to an identity around which popular politics coalesced. By narrating a textually layered story of the vernacular anti-caste discourse in nineteenth-century western India, the book explores how the caste question was systematically reframed as a primarily political phenomenon by ‘lower-caste’ reformers and writers in western India. By thinking with and through the writings and ideas of nineteenth-century anti-caste radicals, the project seeks to understand how historical actors from the margins plunged into agitations, arguments, and violent situations to change the world that they lived in, and envisioned a future without caste tyranny, a future where caste subalterns were free to engage in unbridled creative activity.

Education

Ph.D. University of Minnesota.

M.Phil.,Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Research Interests

Critical readings in Caste Studies; Comparative History of Race and Caste; Intellectual History of Modern South Asia; Hindu Religion and Reform in South Asia; From Rebellion to Liberalization: History of Modern South Asia, The British Empire and Inter-Asian Connections among others

Selected Publications

Jaywant, Ketaki. “Reshaping the Figure of the Shudra: Tukaram Padwal’s Jatibhed Viveksar (Reflections on the Institution of Caste).” Modern Asian Studies 57, no. 2 (2023): 380–408. doi:10.1017/S0026749X21000767.