Anti-Caste STS

In late 2020, Foundation Chamar started a three-year research project looking into the state of pollution in Mumbai. After struggling to reconcile the overlapping pollution logics that shape life in South Asia, the Foundation Chamar compiled a report that considers how we might re-make pollution and waste sciences in India today, inviting us to embrace all the open-ended possibilities for matter.

The project provided the foundation for us to start building the field of anti-caste Science and Technology Studies (STS). Foundation Chamar is proposing to build a Sustainable Materials School that is dedicated to supporting artisans, artists and designers working imaginatively with un/touch/able materials.

Reworking History, Redefining Materials

Sudheer Rajbhar touring the colonial-era chemical laboratories of the Government Leatherworking School in Dharavi, India, reimagining waste and pollution through an anti-caste lens.

Our Research Objectives

  • We are committed to studying and championing the rich history of anti-caste technoscientific knowledge production. This begins with further exploring the chymical philosophies of Guru Ravidas, a fifteenth-century Bhakti tanner-saint, connecting them with contemporary issues like industrial pollution, caste apartheid, and colonialism in modern India.

  • We are committed to creating new educational and infrastructural initiatives. This has included our proposal to transform the Government Leatherworking School in Dharavi into a Sustainable Materials School, aimed at rethinking waste and pollution through an anti-caste perspective.

  • Destiny is a powerful logic in South Asia that naturalizes oppression. We emphatically reject the natrualization of caste through the rhetoric of destiny. Technoscientific practices reveal the profound malleability of our natural and social worlds.

  • The shift from using chrome-tanned leather to reclaiming rubber waste championed by Chamar Studios is linked to a commitment to reinterpret chemical materiality through the teachings of Guru Ravidas. This perspective redefines molecules as māyā—illusory, affectively-charged substances that must be transcended to engage with the transmutational real.

  • Ravidas tells us that chemicals act as catalysts for social transformation, providing a vision for dismantling caste society.