ROCKPORT — The West has talked about India’s caste system because the days or the British Raj, however it stays principally a thriller outdoors of India. What is caste? Is it based mostly on occupation, shade, faith, race – or all these elements? And are there caste methods in America?

Colby College professor Sonja Thomas will unpack the misunderstandings, myths and realities of a system lengthy abhorred however nonetheless practiced in at the moment’s India regardless of years of activism aimed toward ending it, in a Camden Conference Community Event on Wednesday, Dec. 13, on the Rockport Public Library. The program will begin at 6 p.m., and is free and open to all.

Sonja Thomas is Associate Professor of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Colby. Her analysis examines the intersections of caste, race, gender, class, and faith in postcolonial India and race, Catholic settler colonialism, and the South Asian diaspora.

She is the writer of Privileged Minorities: Syrian Christianity, Gender, and Minority Rights in Postcolonial India (UWA Press, 2018). She is at the moment writing a manuscript entitled Indians and Cowboys: Race, Caste, and Indian Missionary Priests in Rural America on Catholic missionary monks from India serving in rural Montana and North Dakota. She has additionally written articles on faucet dance.

Professor Thomas’s discuss shall be in anticipation of the thirty seventh Annual Camden Conference, INDIA: Rising Ambitions, Challenges at Home, going down reside from the Camden Opera House February 16-18, 2024.