Description:

This presentation will argue for a new framework in the study of Indian Buddhism, a methodological approach I call comparative subalternities. This approach is central to my project challenging the presumption, implicit in much of early Buddhist material, as well as in much of modern scholarship, that Indian Buddhism is primarily an upper-caste affair. In other words, the field effectively operates as though outcaste Buddhist communities lacked the agential capacity to shape the institutional and soteriological landscape of South Asian Buddhism. Articulating the contours of subaltern influence (or even just their presence) can prove difficult, as the Brahmanical orientation in much of early Buddhist literature tends to obscure the contributions of outcaste figures. For this reason, I compare the very fragmentary discourses of subalternity that appear in Indian Buddhist traditions with more detailed archives of subalternity elsewhere. In this talk, I will compare conceptions of subalternity in the Brahmanical labor hierarchies taken for granted in Indian Buddhist discourse with those of the fugitive slave of the modern plantation. I will focus on a particular Vinaya case about a monastic monster—a sexually deviant figure—in order to illustrate the comparative subaltern methodological approach to reading for outcaste monastics. As postcolonial studies of colonial literature have argued, the discourse of sexual deviancy is often code for subaltern fugitivity—in this case, fugitivity from the socio-economic fetters of caste. This presentation will argue that we may read cases of sexual deviancy among monastics in Indian Buddhist texts as a discursive index of upper-caste anxiety about the presence of outcaste communities in the monastery.

Nicholas Witkowski received his PhD in 2015 in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University. His dissertation is a social history of subaltern ascetic practices in the Buddhist monastic institutions of first millennium South Asia. Before joining the University of San Diego in August of 2022 as Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies and South Asian religions, Dr. Witkowski was Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Nanyang Technological University of Singapore (2018-2022). Dr. Witkowski was also a JSPS Postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at Tokyo University (IAS), where he completed a two year project studying the representations of subaltern communities within South Asian legal traditions (2015–2017).