Humanities Forum — Nishant Upadhyay: Indians on Indian Lands: Intersections of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity

Humanities Forum Lecture with Nishant Upadhyay
Indians on Indian Lands: Intersections of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity
This lecture is part of the Fall 2026 Humanities Forum

Indians on Indian Lands unravels Indian diasporic complicity in its ongoing colonial relationship with Indigenous peoples, lands, and nations in Canada. Upadhyay examines the interwoven and simultaneous areas of dominant Indian caste complicity in processes of settler colonialism, antiblackness, capitalism, brahminical supremacy, Hindu nationalism, and heteropatriarchy. Resource extraction in British Columbia in the 1970s through the 1990s and in present-day Alberta offers examples of spaces that illuminate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and simultaneously reveals how race, gender, and caste affect labor formations. Upadhyay juxtaposes these extraction sites with examples of anticolonial activism and solidarities from Tkaronto (Toronto). Analyzing silence on settler colonialism and brahminical caste supremacy, Upadhyay upends the idea of dominant caste Indian diasporas as racially victimized and shows that claiming victimhood denies a very real complicity in enforcing other power structures. Exploring stories of quotidian proximity and intimacy between Indigenous and South Asian communities, Upadhyay offers meditations on anticolonial and anti-casteist ways of knowledge production, ethical relationalities, and solidarities. Groundbreaking and ambitious, Indians on Indian Lands presents the case for holding Indian diasporas accountable for acts of violence within a colonial settler nation.