Abstract
The book is an attempt to map the historical trajectory of the making of dalit identity in contemporary India. Categorised into three main sections, History, Literature and Religion, it is a collection of 14 articles published earlier in the Economic & Political Weekly. In the introduction, narrating the story of the evolution of dalit identity, Swaraj Basu argues that the construction of dalit identity is aimed at creating an alternative past, presupposing that it is a prerequisite for overcoming the burden of caste hierarchy and providing a respectful position to marginalised communities in Indian society. A critical examination of Indian traditions has been undertaken primarily in the fields of history, literature and religion culminating into evolution of dalit identity.
The chapters in the section on history are aimed to denaturalise caste and provide a historicity of dalit identity for which each author adopts a distinct mode of historical analysis. Michael Bergunder argues that use of the ‘Aryan Invasion Theory’ in early dalit movements—Jyotiba Phule’s Anti-Brahmin, Iyothee Thass’s Neo-Buddhism, Periyar’s Dravidinian, Mangu Ram’s Adi Dharm and Swami Achhutanand’s Adi-Hindu—is a common phenomenon where a mythical past is associated with a golden age in which the dalit’s high status is imagined. The next stage of the imagination is a loss of status due to some tragic accident. There are multiple explanations of such tragic incidents including the ‘Aryan Invasion’ in making the history of dalits as a site for ‘contested past’. The rise of Hindu nationalism has not only added more explanations but also has given a communal colour by pouring self-referential texts in India’s public sphere where the invasion of Muslims is held responsible for the decline in the status of dalits.
The Aryan invasion theory is the product of a positivist history which assumes that truth lies in the past; the past is inscribed in a document and the document is in the archive. From this argument, a conclusion is further drawn that communities devoid of a written tradition cannot have their own history. This is how colonial historians have argued that, ‘Third World countries do not have a history’ since they lacked a written tradition. The colonial historiography has been challenged in two ways—the first involves searching for archival materials such as coins, treatises, inscriptions and so on and, to some extent, even the written documents. The second, which is inspired by the hermeneutic tradition of Paul Riceour, asks for using alternative archival material such as myths, narratives, short stories and folk songs for communities which did not have a written tradition.
In his chapter, ‘Making an Identity’, Rajshree Dhali narrates the story of the Meghwals of Rajasthan who have adopted the first way and secured a vertical social mobility by creating written documents, claiming a mythical origin in the Brahmin clan. In the chapter ‘Inventing Caste History’, which is based on the alternative archival material, Badri Narayan demonstrates how the Pasis of Uttar Pradesh invented the mythical figure of Uda Devi in India’s freedom struggle. Narayan argues that initially the Bahujan Samaj Party used such tactics for political mobilisation and countering nationalist political parties but nowadays Hindu nationalists are making great efforts to give a communal colour to all such narratives, short stories and folk songs.
On the pretext of discussing the ‘communal turn’ in Indian politics, the authors, in the history section, seem to suggest that an alternative excavation of history by dalit movements, is always prone to communal interpretation. But while doing this, authors themselves fall in the trap of old binaries of secular–communal and modernity–tradition. This is clearly evident in D.R. Nagaraj’s ‘The Problem of Cultural Memory’ where he strongly crticises B.R. Ambedkar for relying too much on modernity and modernity-based development for erasing cultural memory. In addition to this, Nagaraj further argues that modernity brings capitalism that dispossesses and destroys indigenous technology owned by subaltern castes, making them worse off (p. 162). But Nagaraj fails to mention that if the subaltern castes had such technology then they could have improved their status by using it.
The chapters in the literature section are burdened with analysing dalit autobiographies as if only the autobiographical genre comprises dalit literature. The contributors of this section circle around the peripheral questions of dalit literature: whether non-dalits can write dalit literature or how the subject matter of dalit literature is different from mainstream literature. However, today the core questions pervading dalit literature have moved from subject matter, language and agency of author to the epistemology, ontology and phenomenology of this literature. Only the chapters by Raj Kumar and Rahul Mukharjee raise some of these fundamental questions. Raj Kumar talks about how dalit women have a different understanding of patriarchy, and Rahul Mukharjee deals with the challenges thrown up by dalit literature in front of mainstream Indian literature, whose virtue, value and aesthetics are responsible for reproducing old social hierarchies.
The contributors in the section on religion, such as Sekhar Bandhopadhyay and Ronki Ram, are concerned about how religion has been used instrumentally by low castes for their social mobility during the colonial period. Bandhopadhyay has studied the Chandals of Bengal who turned into the Namashudra community, first by entering the agrarian economy and later by forming the Matua sect. Ram narrates a similar story about the formation of the Adi Dharm in Punjab under the influence of the Gadar movement. But the impact of both, the Matua sect and the Adi Dharm, lessened in the post-colonial period since the former deviated from its core preaching of radical equality, and under the influence of Sanskritisation started following gender inequality. Similarly, the Adi Dharm movement also got fragmented under the influence of the Arya Samaj.
Instead of enlightening the reader about the distinct teachings of these religions/sects, the chapters in the religion section outline the evolution of various religions/sects. This unfortunately allows very little scope in making a distinction between the subject matter of the sections on history and on religion.
As mentioned in the beginning, the book is an attempt to trace the historical trajectory of the making of dalit identity. But for doing this, those published articles have been chosen which deal with different questions that were raised in a different time and space. The result is a lack of coherence between chapters and sections. Each chapter seems to be speaking in a different language, and some chapters—such as the one by Gyanendra Pandey that expands on the meaning of decolonisation has been needlessly placed in the section on religion—could have been classified better in a different section. Most of the chapters are more or less based on the success story of some caste groups, but whether a common narrative emerges out of these stories, is not clear.
Last, but not the least, the book does not incorporate various philosophical interventions made on these articles when they were published for the first time. The inclusion of such responses would have added a new dimension and provided a valuable insight to readers. As of now, the book only remains a collection of articles useful for beginners and novice readers who want to know about the process of formation of an identity and the contradictions in the making of dalit identity. Still, given the heterogeneity of all the essays and the issues they address, the book would be a useful reading for students working on dalit movements in modern India.