Professor
Priyadarshini Vijaisri is a cultural historian whose interests include histories of caste, tribe and folk traditions. Her doctoral research at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi was on the multiple patterns of sacred prostitution in colonial South India. One of the persisting themes in her work has been ethno-historical exploration of the cognitive systems and cultural practices that signify the exceptional being of the outcast.
Vijaisri’s book Dangerous Marginality: Rethinking Impurity and Power (2015) offered an alternative way of writing history to that of the history of pathos by focusing on folk ritual traditions, dualistic order consisting of right and left hand castes and the boundaries in caste society. Her recent book titled Essays on violence: Pollution, Sacrifice and Madness (2024) dwells on the culture of violence as inseparable from diverse conceptions of sacred, self and the other and their varied inter-connectedness with belief systems or ideas of evil, pollution and morality. The Looking Glass: Reflections on the Supreme Court Judgment on Sub-classification of Scheduled Castes, (co-edited with Yagati Chinna Rao) (2025) is a collection of commentaries by scholars on the Supreme Court judgment on sub-classification, 2024.
Her current research study, funded by the ICSSR, titled “Offsprings of Jatis: Entitlements and trans-structural model of kinship” is a historical exploration of interrelated themes; firstly, documentation and analysis of caste genealogies (kula puranas) the institutionalized mechanisms, discourse and materiality of the tradition as transmitted through the bearers, which is tied to larger issues concerning the form of folk histories among the peasant, pastoral and artisanal communities; secondly, analysis of the deeds of entitlements to genealogists(danapatras/dharma sasanam or hakku patras), in relation to the historical practices of contract or customary rights and modes of authentication. The study also is re-examining the structural dimensions of kinship by centering on a cluster of bardic communties known as ‘children of the caste’ in states of Andhra and Telangana.
Email: vijaisri(at)csds.in
Select Publications (Click to Read)
The Place and Value of Non-Modern History: Some Reflections on Cultural History
‘Hyderabad, Deccan's Qaide-e-Pastaquam: Intimations of the Maverick (Shyam Sunder)’, in Yagati Chinna Rao and Raj Sekhar Basu (eds.) Dalit Intellectuals: Ideas, Struggles and the Vision, Primus Books, 2022
The Turn of Postscript Narratives
Invoking the Erotic Mother: The Outcaste Priestess and the Heroic Men
In Pursuit of the Virgin Whore: Writing Caste/Outcaste Histories
Documentary (Click to Watch)
