The Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences was awarded to Dana Kornberg for The Garbage Economy: Caste Capitalism and the Persistence of Informal Recycling in Delhi
The Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities was awarded to Satya Shikha Chakraborty for Colonial Caregivers: Ayahs and the Gendered History of Race and Caste in British India
Dana Kornberg
The Garbage Economy: Caste Capitalism and the Persistence of Informal Recycling in Delhi tells a story of persistence. When public-private partnerships (PPPs) introduced incinerators and garbage collection trucks in Delhi, they encountered an existing system of waste collection operated by hundreds of thousands of Dalit and Muslim informal workers who rely on customary rights to glean plastics, papers, and metals for sale into recycling markets. Despite widespread fears of informal waste workers’ dispossession, they managed to endure—sustaining the city’s only recycling system. The book takes this empirical puzzle as an entry point to examine Delhi’s waste economy as an institutionally plural site of caste capitalism, in which caste formation processes structure class-based patterns of exploitation and wealth accumulation in conjunction with other forms of domination. The environmental politics of garbage are not merely about waste, but connections between caste formation, global capitalism, and legacies of colonialism. Drawing on 20 months of ethnographic research, including 101 interviews with informal waste collectors, policymakers, and recycling business operators, The Garbage Economy asks why capital-intensive, centralized waste management schemes so often fail to win over citizens—and how informal waste workers and recyclers persist without formal organizational platforms. The book’s chapters trace the caste-based valuation processes that create forms of labor, promote spatial segregation, and underpin the valuation of workers and materials alike. These processes enable upper-caste managers and engineers to engage with the stigmatized material of garbage, generate pathways for rural-to-urban labor migration, and legitimate the servile labor expected by upper-caste residents—while also fostering new forms of identity, provision, and solidarity. Throughout, caste is conceptualized as a dynamic, comparative, and deeply political formation. The Garbage Economy demonstrates that Delhi’s informal waste landscape is neither exceptional nor uniquely postcolonial, but rather a set of instituted processes that promote economic exploitation and configure possibilities for accumulation. The Garbage Economy is under contract with Oxford University Press, with the expected publication date of 2026. The AIIS book prize committee noted that The Garbage Economy is “based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with recycling workers as well as community residents and it makes major interventions in the fields of sociology, environmental studies, labor studies and critical caste studies.”
Dana Kornberg is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara who uses ethnographic and qualitative methods to examine environmental infrastructures and local economies in Indian and U.S. cities. Her research identifies how political-economic and symbolic valuation processes harness racial and caste inequities to produce unjust outcomes, while also attending to existing and potential pathways of transformation. Her projects to date include the politics of informal waste collection and recycling in Delhi, the governance of water utilities in Michigan cities, and Black-owned businesses in Detroit. Her research has been published in leading journals such as Social Forces, Economic & Political Weekly, and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Professor Kornberg holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan and an MA in Asian Cultures & Languages from the University of Texas at Austin. She is an alumna of the AIIS summer Hindi language program. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and other institutions. Whether working in Delhi, Detroit, or beyond, her research is fundamentally comparative, examining places through relational and historical perspectives. As a writer, teacher, and organizer, she strives to bridge diverse knowledge producers within and beyond the academy.
Satya Shikha Chakraborty
Colonial Caregivers: Ayahs and the Gendered History of Race and Caste in British India provides a social and cultural history of South Asian ayahs, who provided care-labor to British imperial families, between the mid-1700s and the mid-1900s. Colonial Caregivers argues that the Indian ayah not only provided domestic labor, but also important moral labor to the British Empire. In the late-1700s world of the declining Mughal Empire, the desexualized figure of the ayah emerged as a cover-up for British men to hide the shameful prevalence of inter-racial concubinage, mixed-race children, and domestic slavery from their imperial biographies. Throughout the 1800s, particularly during the turbulence of Indian rebellions and anti-colonial violence, sentimentalization of the ayah’s fidelity provided emotional comfort to imperial Britons. In the early-1900s, elite South Asian families started employing ayahs. Mimicking British racialization of the ayah, “upper” caste Hindu, Muslim, and Parsi employers deployed Aryan race theories and romanticized their “dark”-skinned “low” caste and “tribal” maids. The intimate labor of the ayah was crucial for the production and reproduction of British imperial racial purity and white femininity on the one hand, and South Asian “upper” caste femininity and domestic modernity on the other hand. While arguing that the idealized ayah archetype morally legitimized British colonialism, Colonial Caregivers foregrounds the voices and experiences of real-life ayahs, and the attempts of colonial servant-women to live up to patriarchal dictates of morality. Although colonial archives desexualized the ayah, many ayahs continued to provide unpaid sexual and reproductive labor to British men. Ayahs expressed fears of caste-loss for touching “impure” untouchable white British bodies and for crossing the ocean (kalapani) to take care of British families on the long ship-voyages across the empire. Legal archives reveal cases of ayahs who were physically abused, denied wages, and abandoned in Britain without return passages to India. Medical archives expose the degrading racism-casteism that ayahs experienced in the British imperial home, despite colonial scientific naturalization of the care-labor of “hardy” brown women for “fragile” white women in the tropical empire. Colonial Caregivers argues that the pervasive cultural valorization of the ayah rendered invisible the vulnerabilities of ayahs in real-life. Using vernacular archives, letters and petitions written by ayahs, fairy tales told by ayahs to British children, the book retells the history of British colonialism from the perspective of marginalized maidservants. Drawing theoretical and methodological insights from postcolonial subaltern studies and black feminist intersectionality, the book decolonizes the history of the British Empire, and centers care-labor in South Asian history. Colonial Caregivers will be published by Cambridge University Press in September 2025, as part of the Critical Perspectives on Empire book series.
Satya Shikha Chakraborty is a historian of South Asia and the British Empire, with broader interest in histories of gender and sexuality, colonialism, and visual culture. She is an assistant professor in the Department of History at The College of New Jersey. She teaches courses such as “Modern South Asia: Mughals to Modi,” “World History from the Margins,” “Beyond Ars Erotica: Gender & Sexuality in South Asia,” and “Medicine, Science, and Colonialism.” She received a PhD in History from Rutgers University in 2019. Her article on Indian ayahs in Britain received the Best Article Prize from the Journal of Women’s History Editorial Board (2023) and an Honorable Mention from the North American Conference on British Studies (2021). Her article on the contrapuntal history of European nurses and governesses in Indian princely households in the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History was awarded the Berkshire Best Article Prize in the History of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Chakraborty has also published on the history of mistress-maid homoeroticism using Mughal courtly paintings. In an interdisciplinary faculty-student collaboration with a computer science team, she is currently curating a digital humanities exhibition titled “Race, Gender, and the Visual Culture of Domestic Labor, Tradecards and Postcards, 1870s to 1940s”. This project showcases how mundane ephemeral objects upheld hierarchies of racialized gendered domestic labor across colonial empires in the age of New Imperialism, Jim Crow anti-black racism, and anti-Asian xenophobia.