Beyond Containment – Confronting Racial Hierarchies in International Law: Bodies of Knowledge – A Dalit Praxis of Legal Resistance

[Kamya Vishwanath is an international trade lawyer based in India and will be pursuing her LLM at Georgetown University Law Centre this fall]

“If you want to make it as a radical critic these days, slip the word ‘body’ into your title”

Terry Eagleton 

‘Caste’ is a relatively modern concept and a preeminent source of racialized violence in India and the wider South Asian region. Yet, the caste system’s conflation with traditional Hindu society’s fourfold ‘chaturvarna’ system has made it nigh impossible to contest (let alone obliterate). This has guaranteed impunity through the Brahmanical hegemony, colonial governance, and sustained Hindu majoritarian orders across the last few centuries, a confluence of factors that greatly disadvantage Dalits in particular. 

Dalits fall outside the system, subordinate to even the lowest caste. Before it was abolished, the practice of “untouchability” regarded Dalits as polluting others, compelling them to walk with brooms attached to their backs to sweep their footprints off the ground. They were denied access to education (or made to sit separately) and offered only menial labour (with most Dalits even today practising manual scavenging, i.e., cleaning human excreta with bare hands). Killing Dalits on questions of honour continues, and significant sexual violence against Dalit women persists. 

While domestic legal reforms prohibit these atrocities, they continue to go unrecognised in practice. On the cusp of both invisibility and hypervisibility, Dalits’ precarious position on the margins has created a carceral legal identity but corporal social beings incapable of asserting their autonomy. In reality, lower caste groups form the majority of the Indian population (nearly 68%), but continue to bear the brunt of structural discrimination and caste-based brutality. 

Emancipating International Law confronts international law’s wilful blindness and the entrenchment of racialised hierarchies within its processes. My chapter, Bodies of Knowledge: Re-framing Emancipation in International Law through Dalit Praxis (Bodies), argues that anti-caste impetus is vital for racial justice within international law. It builds on arguments that have already been made within international law scholarship. Burra, writing almost a decade ago, began this dialogue most astoundingly not only critiquing mainstream international law but also highlighting the blind spots in TWAIL for failing to account for caste minorities’ voices in critique. Venkatesh, responding to this call, studied the increasing enmeshment of caste in the international legal order beyond India, notably questioning existing conceptions of racial thought within international law as purely Eurocentric and colonial. Memon then revealed how it was the British colonial project in India that entrenched a casteist hegemony there and simultaneously established this racial ordering within international legal thought more generally. Building on this emergent debate, I argue that international law’s limited mechanisms of knowledge production have marginalized Dalits by treating them as passive recipients rather than active producers of legal discourse.

By looking at how the liminal subject has confronted the law’s tenuous “promise”, Bodies studies Dalits’ engagement with the law and their capacity to expand international law’s limited understanding of knowledge. Notwithstanding Eagleton’s cheeky quip, international law will remain in crisis if knowledge-production within the discipline continues to privilege the “rational” and the “objective”, when imagining equitable racial futures would require striking at the very heart of where race (and/or caste) directly disadvantages its subject, viz. most obviously their bodies.

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Dalit praxis comprises three main modes through which they advance anti-caste resistance in ordinary ways. The first is through their resilient engagement with the law despite its efforts to fetter rather than free them. The second is their resourcefulness in expanding their own visions of freedom by drawing inspiration from similarly disadvantaged groups and moving beyond the domestic legal framework and into international law. Drawing inspiration from the Black Panthers Movement, Dalit Panthers and ardent anti-caste champions seek to further Ambedkar’s vision of a “counter-hegemonic legal order based on abolitionist principles”. This would necessitate shifting the axes of power from a Brahmanical hegemony that currently constitutes the normative economic, social, and political ways of being to a caste-conscious order that rights historical and ongoing inequities. The ultimate goal, of course, would be to abolish the system altogether. 

The third form is the turn to alternative registers beyond the law viz. finding self expression for the community through protests and in writing. Dalit narratives are born and bred through their daily existence. Theory, here, is not just an ideal abstraction; it is made and unmade through the body in pain. As I explain:

“Dalit epistemology—shaped by their endless struggles against violence—is produced from their bodies. Yet, international law’s engagement with bodies has traditionally revolved around efforts to control, restrict, or save them, while neglecting the myriad ways in which the law itself perpetuates harm to some bodies.” 

As an object, the Dalit body is rendered hyper-visible through its association with stigma and marginality, while being erased and dehumanized. It is through their muted presence as darker bodies that ‘disembodied whiteness’—or in this context, upper-caste identity—is affirmed. Dipesh Chakrabarty explains how the Dalit body, in the eyes of a Brahmin, is perpetually associated with death and waste matter, effectively linking it to the non-human and non-living:

“For Dalits, the body exists as both a site of resistance and a repository of trauma, experiencing what Adrien Wing describes as a ‘spirit injury’—the ‘slow death of the psyche, the soul, and the personal’ exacerbated by centuries of systemic oppression.”

Bodies tries to demonstrate how international law has deprived itself of Dalit epistemology, including its unique modes of knowledge production and self-definition that must be seen in its own right. Rather than exploring what international law can do to “save” Dalits,  I suggest how Dalits’ positions in the liminal subject-object space can enrich international law.

As a subject, Dalits integrate their experience from being seen as objects into narratives, producing new forms of thinking about these same questions. As Margaret Davies argues:

‘Attention to bodies has also focussed upon the epistemological question of how we know, and who knowing subjects are.’

This dual role grants Dalits a distinct standpoint to critique and subvert the systems that oppress them, offering insights into the intersections of caste, law, and resistance. However, the discourse around international human rights law (IHRL)  tends to neglect this material and embodied aspect of human experience. IHRL’s ‘Savages-Victims-and-Saviors’ metaphor assumes a universal vocabulary for distinct problems without accounting for necessary deviations. Much of Dalit resistance already considers IHRL’s vocabulary of emancipation but seeks to go beyond a rights-based promise alone. 

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The (re)turn to the body within theory is vital not only for praxis, but for the enrichment of what theory even is. Feminist and queer scholarship routinely engaged with ‘affect theory’, exploring ‘how freedom and unfreedom are experienced in everyday life, an aspect often ignored in epistemological critiques’. My provocation in Bodies does not claim the superiority of the body over the mind. Instead, it offers a way of seeing both as agentic, further inviting one to do away with the dichotomy altogether. The foundation for Bodies was not built solely from contemplating the subject of international law as one experiencing the world, but as an object onto which the world unfolded itself. Quite frankly, no body can witness and be witnessed quite like bodies on the margins:

“Bodies are inseparable from law; in legal geography, the flesh-and-blood body and its discursive constructions through language can be studied together.”

What is worth remembering is that racism never loses sight of the body. In my chapter, I go one step further and argue that racism never loses ‘site’ of the body. In that vein, writing about race and/in the law must necessarily involve looking at/from the body. At the very beginning of this project, I was asked whether I’m advancing body theory through Dalits’ experiences, or Dalit epistemology through embodied practice. While the temptation to ground “international” legal theory would compel anybody to argue the former considering its ubiquitousness, I realised how Dalits were already deep into the process of knowledge-production. It was only a matter of time until the world took notice and learned from it.