Who holds epistemic authority to study whom, and what unspoken imperatives—social, institutional, or cultural—shape our research choices? This paper interrogates the challenges of research in a caste-stratified society, where caste functions not just as an analytical focus but as a structural force configuring access, legitimacy, and researcher-participant dynamics. Drawing on eight months of fieldwork (October 2022–May 2023) as a Dalit woman from a beedi-working family in Telangana, India, it examines how caste disrupts conventional epistemic hierarchies, notably those shaped by gender and socio-economic status. Focusing on a heterogeneous group of beedi workers—spanning dominant and oppressed castes—this study reveals how caste privilege persists amid economic precarity, with dominant-caste respondents asserting authority through everyday practices. My Dalit identity shaped access and interactions, exposing the uneven terrain of fieldwork within structural inequities. Engaging Nader’s (1972) call to “study up” and Priyadarshini’s (2003) critique of fixed identities in studying up, I advocate a reflexive, caste-conscious methodology. Centring the epistemic and structural barriers confronting marginalised-caste scholars, this paper draws on Guru (2002) to highlight their exclusion from knowledge production and Rege (2006) to advocate standpoint epistemologies rooted in lived oppression, pressing for institutional and methodological transformation. Without these, fieldwork risks entrenching the inequities it seeks to critique, leaving caste an unreflexive blind spot in knowledge production. While caste and class intersect in shaping inequality, this paper treats caste as a historically and affectively distinct structure that fundamentally reconfigures fieldwork relations in the South Asian context.
Madhuri Kamtam (Wed,) studied this question.