Abstract
Examining caste, the most coercive and asymmetrical feature of Indian society, from a Dalit lens has offered us some of the most nuanced and dense studies in the recent past. In the history of modern India, what Bengal has signified for gender, Maharashtra has meant for caste, each providing much of the theoretical constructs, and one needs to ask if a Rammohan Roy there and a Bhimrao Ambedkar here played a critical role in this. Rao’s incredible text too relies on moments, events and individuals in the history of Maharashtra between the 1880s and the 1990s, intricately weaving history and anthropology to highlight how we can ‘rethink India’s political modernity from the perspective of the Dalits’ (p. xii). Temptingly, The Caste Question challenges the association of subalterns, here specifically Dalits, with non-modernity, tradition, ‘pasts’ and community. Instead, it places them squarely within the paradigm of India’s democracy and secular modernity, with anti-caste radicals constantly negotiating with the state, and in the process, transforming conceptions of nation, citizenship and political rights (p. 11). Going a step further, breaking from any ‘provincialisation’ of caste, Rao not only sees radical anti-caste thought as offering a critique of colonial and nationalist frames, but also locates it within a global history of political thought.
The recent upsurge of works on Dalit life testimonies and autobiographies stress how narratives of pain and suffering are often their cultural capital. However, for Rao, it is not so much experiences of pain that undergird resistance, but rather those of quotidian and routine caste violence, through which stigma is carried in, on and through the Dalit body, and becomes a constant source of humiliation. The book is methodologically divided between the historical and the ethnographic, with social and intellectual history in Part 1, and legal case studies and analysis of violence in the second. Through fragmented histories, it maps attempts at becoming Dalits, whereby a ‘negative description’ was converted into a ‘confrontational identity’ (p. 1) and a ‘positive political value’ (p. 2). The three chapters in the first section, aptly called ‘Emancipation’, focus much more on the colonial moment, and tell us how Dalits offered public-political critiques of their stigmatised existence and launched struggles for rights and social recognition from the late nineteenth century to the period of constitutional law making between 1947 and 1950.
In line with the landmark works of Eleanor Zelliot, Rosalind O’Hanlon and Gail Omvedt, the first chapter focuses on Satyashodhak Samaj and the writings of Jotiba Phule (1827–90), Gopal Bana Valangkar (?–1900) and Shivram Janbe Kamble (1875–1942). Rao shows how the dynamic growth of print facilitated and nurtured the rise of a distinctive Marathi non-Brahmin and Dalit political counter cultural and public sphere. Broadening other works, Rao argues that Phule’s writings against Brahmanism utilised forms of speech and rhetorical styles associated with the rustic language of peasants, but infused them with demands for human rights and social equality that bore the influence of non-conformist Christianity, thus endowing elements of popular culture with a unique discourse of caste radicalism (p. 39). I think that this is the most powerful chapter of the book as it goes on to underscore the contradictory effects of social reform of gender by caste radicals. Rao documents how Satyashodhak activists evolved a new gendered language to contest their marginalisation. On the one hand, they ridiculed the upper castes for the treatment meted out to widows, and on the other, Satyashodhak marriages eliminated the need for a Brahmin priest and emphasised self-respect and equality within marriage. But, argues Rao, though caste radicals were preoccupied with challenging caste ideology by rethinking marriage, they were by no means immune to the extension of novel patriarchal practices into their own households. Thus, they also tried to modify Dalit intimate relationships and enhance the authority of male Dalit reformers by regulating sexuality. This illuminates the complex and contingent processes by which a powerful critique of the association of gender, caste and Hindu religion could co-exist with a commitment to ‘gender reform’ which, Rao notes, essentially set the stage for a Dalit public sphere rendered male (p. 54).
Rao moves in the next chapter to Dalit claims to the Chavdar water tank as public property and to the temple door, where there was a simultaneous politicisation and privatisation of spaces. Water and temple entry satyagrahas exposed contradictions between nationalist and Dalit conceptions of rights. Dalit demands for social inclusion, couched in terms of civic rights and natural justice, were recast by courts as claims upon private property. Rao argues that the moral hegemony of nationalism not only rendered invisible the structural violence of the caste system, but also often delegitimised even symbolic forms of resistance by the Dalits. No book on Dalits would be complete without underlining the remarkable theoretical contributions and the practical political actions of B.R. Ambedkar. Rao shows in the next chapter how Ambedkar played absolutely the central role in imagining the Indian citizen as a political subject (p. 122), and how that helped in shaping and articulating a new and distinct Dalit identity, organised around rights claims. Ambedkar especially sought to convert the structural negativity of the Dalit into positive political value, a process that Rao terms vernacularisation of political universals.
The second half of the book opens up the paradox of being a Dalit, where emancipation and empowerment has incongruously also left them more vulnerable. It offers an engaging assessment of new forms of violence by bringing out the organisational shape of Dalit politics and changing structures of Dalit life in Maharashtra over the last 40 years. Rao argues that the postcolonial Indian state faced the challenge of transforming Dalits from ‘stigmatised subjects’ into ‘citizens’. This entailed a redefinition of ‘untouchability’ from a form of social–religious experience to a form of vulnerability that necessitated the formation of special laws to protect Dalits against violence from non-Dalits. She begins, therefore, with a theoretical inquiry into the connections between caste, social recognition, law and protected minorities. Rao then moves on to the new directions of Dalit life and cultural politics in Maharashtra in the 1970s. The new configurations between anti-Dalit political violence and Dalit countercultural forms, for example, in the 1974 Bombay riots between Dalit Panthers and Shiv Sena, codified political and sectarian differences. The chapter has a fascinating section on a symbolically charged struggle to rename (namantar) Marathwada University after Ambedkar in 1977, which signified real and virtual control over space.
The last two chapters of this phenomenal book centre on the connections between violence, intimacy, sociality and politics. Chapter 6 on the sexual politics of caste reads like a thriller of ‘violent’ proportions, interspersed with the daily diary of the narrator, legal records, testimonies and press reportage. As an investigating anthropologist, Rao explores the intersections of local, caste and family relations with the legal apparatus through the well-known 1963 case, in which four Dalit women were dragged out of their home, stripped and paraded naked by the village residents of Sirasgoan, in Aurangabad district. Leaving one deeply disturbed, it chillingly marks how caste power is gendered. Continuing this trajectory, the last one is on the policing, legal action and publicity surrounding the 1991 killing of Ambadas Sawane, a Dalit kotwal (village level police officer) on the steps of a Hanuman temple in Parbhani district, Maharashtra, which again vividly brings out the relationship between Dalit bodies, violence and politics.
The Caste Question represents a political history that weaves in the intimate. In the process, the book appears to often stress collective rights and emancipation rather than individual autonomy and freedom, at times marginalising the efforts that have been made, particularly by the Dalit woman, at personal-private assertion, which may at times challenge collective identities. While very dense, the one troubling question that I have about this book is its language. Do we evolve a particular language in which we articulate Dalit political rights? What are its links to terminologies and aesthetics of Dalit writings? At places the book appears to be cultivating a new language, which nonetheless is at times obscure and impenetrable.
It is in the theorisation of violence, not just as ethnic conflict, terrorism or communalism, but as anti-Dalit structural violence, and its links to local and national public spaces, and through it to the state, that the book derives its sharpest edge. Violence, according to Rao, became the hinge that articulated the spheres of production and reproduction of the Dalit body (p. 216). The use of visuals in the book is engaging. All in all, this is a far-reaching work, which will be constantly referred to by scholars of various hues for a very long time to come.