Review of Indians on Indian Lands: Intersections of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity by Nishant Upadhyay (University of Illinois Press)

Indians on Indian Lands: Intersections of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity. By Nishant Upadhyay. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2024, 216 pp. (paperback) ISBN 978-0-252-08821-6. US List $28.

Nishant Upadhyay’s Indians on Indian Lands uniquely situates itself at the intersection of settler colonial studies and South Asian diasporic studies, interrogating the multifaceted relationalities of diasporic Indians in the settler-nation state of Canada. Rather than characterizing diasporic Indians solely as settlers on Indigenous lands, the book “foregrounds these messy proximities, intimacies, relationalities, and solidarities between differently racialized and colonized Indians, to investigate what it means for diasporic dominant-caste Indians, like myself, to “settle” on Indian lands” (xii). Employing an interdisciplinary methodology that combines ethnographic fieldwork, literary analysis, archival research, and close readings of cultural texts, the book demonstrates the interconnectedness of colonial projects, their “pernicious continuities” across spatial geographies. For instance, the book demonstrates how the dispossession of Dalit and Adivasi communities in India draws from the settler colonial project in North America, and how, in turn, the continual dispossession of Indigenous communities in North America is reliant on Indian diasporic settlements there.

In the first chapter, titled “Unsettling Brahminism,” Upadhyay centers the role of caste, especially brahminism,¹ in the “making of these transnational settler colonial projects” spanning the geographies of North America, Palestine, and Kashmir (25). They unpack the past and present of brahminism in South Asia and the diaspora, and its entanglements with race, caste, Indigeneity, and religious oppression/hindutva. They achieve this by providing a historical overview of how caste is organized in India and the diaspora, particularly within Sikh communities, as a significant portion of their ethnography later in the book focuses on the Sikh diaspora. Upadhyay examines the relationship between brahminism and knowledge production, predominantly in the western academy, critically reviewing fields such as India-centric postcolonial theory and transnational feminist frameworks. A major critique that they put forward in this chapter is that “brahmin and dominant caste Indian hindu scholars in the settler academy, be it on India or Indian diasporas, have erased brahminism and caste in their [scholarship, in order] to make themselves/ourselves colonized, racialized, de-casted model scholars” (34). Upadhyay notes that most upper-caste scholarships in the fields of India-centric postcolonial theory, transnational feminism, or South Asian studies within the settler academy do not address matters of caste and rather employ a tactic Upadhyay terms “caste maneuver” or “a performance of castelessness” (38). This scholarship simplifies race relations across the white/brown divide, repeatedly appropriating experiences of anti-Blackness (simply as racism) and erasing Indigenous aspirations of nationhood and sovereignty.

Building on the concept of the de-casted model scholar introduced in the first chapter, the second chapter discusses the model labor of high-skilled Indian professionals alongside working-class Sikh and Punjabi immigrant labor in Canada. In the tar sands industry of northern Alberta, most of the Indian professionals are highly educated, highly skilled, upwardly mobile, economically self-sufficient, with urban upbringings, and in heterosexual family set-ups. Upadhyay argues that the model labor of these Indian professionals enables Indian inclusion into settler economies and obscures complicity with Indigenous dispossession. Upadhyay draws upon their fieldwork with these contemporary Indian professionals in the tar sands and contrasts them with retired working-class Punjabi and Sikh workers from the lumber mills and cannery industries in British Columbia between the 1960s and 1990s (20). The characterization of both these sets of Indian workers across class divides as “model” and “steady” produces the “unmodel” Others, that is, the Indigenous peoples on these lands, who are cast as less reliable or “unmodel.” For example, many Punjabi workers in their conversations with Upadhyay self-identified as “steady.” Indians were constructed as better and more reliable workers than their Indigenous counterparts by both these Indian workers themselves as well as their white employers (77). The Indian interlocutors viewed Indigenous peoples, on the other hand, as having drinking problems, not being educated enough, constructing them as unreliable and unmodel Others/workers. This chapter argues that although Indian workers may face marginalization due to race, class, or gender, their model labor still plays a role in upholding and sustaining settler colonial systems on Native lands. Upadhyay ends the chapter by illustrating how the working-class backgrounds of the Punjabi and Sikh workers enabled more intimacies and proximities with the Indigenous communities in British Columbia than the upwardly mobile Indian professionals in Alberta could experience.

In Chapter 3, Upadhyay introduces an anti-caste framework to their analysis of settler colonialism, examining how race, caste, and Indigeneity intersect in shaping Indian diasporic identity. Upadhyay argues that although caste isn’t typically considered central to a settler colonial analysis, ignoring brahminism leaves our understanding of the Indian diaspora incomplete. Drawing on their fieldwork in Fort McMurray and Vancouver with highly skilled Indian professionals, they show how dominant-caste Indian hindus construct Indigenous peoples through both colonial and caste-based logics, seeing them as analogous to caste “Others,” thus reproducing caste-based logics and exclusionary practices in the diaspora. Upadhyay argues that the brahmin and dominant-caste migrant “by recognizing the Indian Other, a.k.a. the Dalit and Adivasi Others, in the Native Other . . . can ascertain their positionality and privilege within the settler society” (101). This is how the structures of brahminism and settler colonialism encounter each other, in turn reinforcing each other.

In the second half of the chapter, Upadhyay shifts gear to highlight how hindutva (hindu nationalism) in the United States is an extension of brahminism, and how various hindu right-wing groups and scholars in the US academy misuse Indigenous frameworks from Turtle Island to legitimize their claims, effectively extending brahminical dominance across borders. For instance, Upadhyay explains how the solidarity of hindu nationalist organizations in the west with the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island is an attempt at appropriating Indigenous struggles, obfuscating the settler/colonial complicities of hindus in South Asia (such as in Kashmir, or on Adivasi lands) as well as on Turtle Island (111–12). By connecting caste and settler colonial structures across Canada, the US, and India, the chapter positions brahminism as a global system aligned with white supremacy, anti-Muslim racism, fascism, and neoliberalism (21).

While the second chapter focuses on the “material intimacies” between the model working-class Indians and the unmodel Others, the fourth and final chapter focuses on sexual and romantic intimacies between Indians and Indigenous peoples that Upadhyay terms “colonial intimacies.” In this chapter, they closely read two literary texts: Cree writer Tomson Highway’s short story “The Love Snake” (2013) and Punjabi writer Sadhu Binning’s short story “Eyes in the Dark” (2014). In the latter story, Binning portrays Punjabi masculinity and gendered violence that he witnessed around himself in the 1970s–1990s. In his story, he focuses on the power dynamics between Punjabi and Indigenous communities, drawing upon solidarity based on similar racialized experiences across the communities. On the other hand, Highway’s story is about two queer lovers from “worlds apart” (129). As Upadhyay analyzes, “For Highway the impulse is not to equate the differing experiences of colonization and racialization into one, but rather the cultural descriptors . . . work to keep differences central to understanding colonial intimacies” (129). Upadhyay argues that colonial intimacies do not disregard agency or desire but instead highlight how interactions between differently colonized and racialized people are influenced—though not entirely determined—by settler colonial structures. These relationships can both reinforce existing power systems or offer moments of resistance, existing on a spectrum between complicity and possibility.

Upadhyay ends their book with anecdotes from radical South Asian activists in the Canadian diaspora, who are imagining alternative praxes of solidarities and other futures on the lands that they/we occupy. Moving beyond the simplistic binary of settlers on colonized lands, Upadhyay presents in their book a meditation on the range of relationalities across race, caste, and Indigeneity that settler colonialism makes possible, offering a critical reflection on our fraught positionalities on stolen lands.