On September 9, the Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS) launched this year’s lecture series with Meghna Sapui, a U-M postdoctoral fellow and an assistant professor of English, and her talk, “Seeing is Knowing, or is it?: Caste, Protein, and Realism.” 

Sapui opened her talk with an antidote that helped summarize the discussion. She met up with college friends from Kolkata, India, in Chicago a few years back, and during dinner, a conversation about castes came up. 

“The conversation became about how the system of caste-based quotas in Indian education has lowered its quality,” Sapui said. 

“Perhaps I was tired or emboldened by liquid courage, but rather uncharacteristically, I asked if they realized I was from one of these ‘backward’ castes and had to come to college in Kolkata because of that system.

“Their response was, ‘No, you’re not. You would know them if you saw them,’” added Sapui. 

Sapui’s discussion led the standing-room-only crowd through an intricate weave of stories and explorations of old studies and novels to show how she believes, in late nineteenth and early twentieth century India, caste epistemologies, understood as observable physical differences and knowable communal characteristics, were critical to understanding what is construed as Indian reality. 

Meghna Sapui is a postdoctoral fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows and an assistant professor of English language and literature at the University of Michigan. Her work has appeared in ELH, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Review, and Global Food History. She is working on her book, Edible Empire: Tasting & Writing India, which looks at gastro narratives in the literature of British India.