IISER MOHALI

Abstract: This talk is based on an article recently accepted for publication in Social & Legal Studies. It brings together constitutional category formation, census practice, and cultural production.

The article develops an enumeration-regime framework to explain the episodic visibility of intersectional subjects, focusing on queer Dalit assertions in contemporary India. It argues that recognition is produced and stabilised conditionally across regimes of enumeration. Enumeration is understood not merely as demographic counting, but as the broader legal, institutional, and cultural processes through which populations become legible to governance, public recognition, and knowledge production.

Drawing on materials spanning colonial and postcolonial classification regimes, constitutional category formation, demographic enumeration of gender variance, juridical recognition, cultural production, and testimonial narratives, the article demonstrates that subjects become publicly legible when multiple enumeration regimes temporarily and conditionally converge. Historical analysis of census practices, caste classification, and gender enumeration shows how counting practices precede and structure political subject formation. Contemporary cultural and testimonial materials are read as forms of enumeration operating alongside or outside state classification, often without institutional stabilisation.

The article argues that episodic assertion reflects structurally misaligned recognition systems. By situating queer Dalit assertions within a broader account of subject formation through enumeration, it explains why recognition fails to endure, how more enduring recognition might be produced, and the wider applicability of this framework to intersectional subject formations across social and legal domains.

Brief Bio: Sumit Baudh (they/he) is Professor and Executive Director of the Centre on Public Law and Jurisprudence at O. P. Jindal Global University (JGU). A former British Chevening Scholar and the inaugural Fulbright-Nehru Visiting Chair in Civil and Human Rights at Emory University, Baudh has held several prestigious fellowships, including the University of California Human Rights Fellowship (Berkeley), the Michael D. Palm Fellowship at the Williams Institute (UCLA School of Law), a fellowship at the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (Columbia Law School), and the Transnational Law Institute Fellowship (King's College London).

Qualified to practise law as an Advocate in India and enrolled as a Solicitor (n.p.) with the Law Society of England and Wales, Baudh has also worked as an independent consultant, advising organisations such as the Arcus Foundation (U.S.), the United Nations Development Programme (India), the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, and LLH (Norway).

Baudh is currently completing a monograph titled Law at the Intersection of Caste, Class, and Sex.