Anti-Caste Movements,Resistance,and Caste: An Introduction

Introduction

In his short story ‘New Custom’ (Naya Kaayda), Ajay Navaria (2013) describes how a tea-seller in a village asks a man, whom he had initially mistaken to be a Thakur, to wash the glass he had just drunk tea in. The protagonist of the story had come to the village to attend a wedding. His tall build and impeccable clothing lead the tea-seller to welcome him and coax him into having tea at his stall. But when he discovers that the person is in the village to attend a wedding in the house of a dalit man—and is by inference, dalit himself—he turns cold and rude and instructs him to wash his glass. The protagonist of the story refuses to do this. He asks ‘why,’ even as he remembers his father saying that class cannot mask caste differences. The tea-seller and many of the people gathered around insist that this is ‘the custom of the village,’ and urge him to wash the glass lest he gets beaten up. In the end, he buys the glass and smashes it to the ground, instead of washing it. Navaria describes how the tea-seller has a smile on his face, but the people gathered around them watch intently. A naked man who had been lying on the ground some distance away, apparently dead, suddenly sits up when the glass is smashed. He seems to register, more dramatically than others present, the impact of this act of resistance—a demand for new customs.

The two-tumbler-system still followed in parts of the country is one of the signs of how caste remains entrenched in everyday life of India even as grand ambitions for the country are pronounced. These practices exist not only in rural areas as depicted in Navaria’s story but also in urban areas. The practice of discrimination, while tenacious, takes different forms, as does the form of resistance. In Y. P. Singh’s essay in this volume, the two tumbler ‘custom’ emerges in a middle-class house in a city in North India. A middle-class dalit man and his friends visit a common friend’s house and after they all drink tea together, he notices his cup being marked out and finds it in the dustbin. He points this out to his friends, thus exposing the blatant discrimination practiced by his host.

Two related aspects emerge from these two incidents—the persistence of caste and equally the questioning of it. Caste practices constantly mutate depending on the context and the processes at play. ¹ If caste practices wear the imprint of the effects of larger processes like colonialism, globalisation, or capitalism, they are also shaped by state policies like the implementation of reservations for Other Backward Classes (OBCs), or the more recent rise of the Hindutva politics. ² Equally, caste is shaped by the resistance to it.

The motivation for this special issue was to look at some of the different forms that anti-caste resistance and movements take and to ask what they tell us about caste in contemporary India. Following Anupama Rao’s (2011) ³ argument that it is productive to ask ‘What is anti-caste?’ rather than ask ‘What is caste?,’ we look at some of the forms that anti-caste movements take to make them anti-caste.

Looking at caste through the lens of anti-caste movements is one way of placing caste squarely in the context of power. This is contrary to both the jajmani description of caste which stressed interdependence, and Dumont’s focus on caste structured by the opposition between purity and pollution which also assumed consensus (Dumont, 1972). Of course, looking at caste through anti-caste movements also takes us away from the static view of caste, that has haunted its study, ⁴ not only because anti-caste movements come in all kinds of shapes, but because they also shape caste. Scholars have for some time focused on the formative ways in which anti-caste practices and movements have reinforced or reshaped caste practices, rather than eradicate or annihilate them (see for e.g., Omvedt, 1994).

In recent years, news of lynching of dalit men and the rape and murder of dalit women have flooded our newspapers––some cases led to protests and drew public attention, such as in the Hathras case (UP), while many more did not. In all these cases, including scores of cases of killings following an inter-caste marriage or elopement, what was evident was that a challenge to old hierarchies had been met with brutal lynching and in case of women, with sexual violence (see for e.g., Chowdhry, 2009; Kannabiran & Kannabiran, 2002; Teltumbde, 2010). Manoj Mitta’s recent book (2023) (reviewed in this issue) on the case law on caste atrocities informs us not only of the huge and gruesome history of caste atrocities but also of the long history of challenge to this violence. While there is a rich and growing body of literature on anti-caste movements (Geetha & Rajadurai, 1998; Gorringe, 2017; Jaffrelot, 2003; Jaoul, 2006, 2013; Juergensmeyer, 2010; Mohan, 2015; Moon & Pawar, 2004; Mosse, 1994, to name just a few), it would be instructive to bring these together in order to understand the multiple forms that anti-caste movements and resistance take.

The range of movements we are witnessing, whether in music with dalit–bahujan hip hop singers, or Gini Mahi singing to packed audiences in Punjab or DS4 (discussed by K. Kalyani in this issue), or in the field of literature, including autobiographies, name the caste discrimination and claim a creative space, and in so doing, talk back to caste power. Equally, processions demanding entry to a temple, or temple tank, the demand for reservations, or a fair wage paid on time, or the end to sexualised violence, are just a few of the multiple forms that anti-caste movements and resistance take today. These movements challenge the web of rules in caste society and the boundaries and enclosures that circumscribe what is possible and what is not for those without caste privilege. They fight for dignity and equality, demand rights and substantive equality in relation to the state, lay claim to spaces and goods that had been denied, and express pride in their identity irrespective of caste. These movements have enabled a questioning within other movements (see Kumar & Datta, this issue). ⁵

The six articles in this special issue cover a spectrum of assertive claims and a range of movements that expose and challenge caste discrimination, everyday resistance, including claims on material and immaterial goods of value. The articles address the claims to Hindu philosophy itself, as in the Sree Narayana Guru movement in what is Kerala today (K. V. Cybil), the demand for reservations made by Vanniyar caste associations and political parties in Tamil Nadu (TN) (R. S. Raja), issues of labour, religion, and caste in an anti-caste movement whose activists are the focus of a recent film (D. Janarthanan), the experience of caste by dalits in a city in North India and everyday forms of resistance (Y. P. Singh), the creation of an anti-caste counter public through music (K. Kalyani), and the caste question in transgender communities and movements (P. Kumar & S. Datta).

In moving then between different sites and strategies, the articles in this special issue speak not only of the multiple forms that resistance takes but also of the changing form of caste, and how it is experienced. These articles, which speak to anti-caste movements from the margins, force us to engage with the forms that they take, the debates within, and the quality of the ‘anti-caste’ expression. While they are in no way representative of all movements or even address all the central issues of our times, we see this as an opportunity to understand anti-caste movements from different vantage points, and what they can tell us about how caste changes.

This introduction reflects the sets of issues that brought each of us to an interest in anti-caste movements. In the first section, we look at the category of anti-caste and point to the range of movements in which caste was challenged by laying claim to resources that had been denied. In the second section, we look at symbols of dignity and the production of anti-caste creative arts—particularly music and film. In the last section we briefly introduce the papers in this special issue.

A Claim to Resources, a Claim to Dignity

The twentieth century provided us with an array of anti-caste movements, although many were not named as such. Whether they were addressing a single caste or not, until fairly recently the anti-caste nature of these movements that addressed the dis-privileges of caste during colonial rule were often masked by the overarching label of ‘social reform.’ Consider, for instance, the Satyashodhak Samaj, which was established in 1873. It is well-recognised for laying stress on education of dalit and other lower-caste students and thereby enhancing the social rights and political access of these groups. Several anti-caste movements and leaders have stressed on education as the resource which would provide young people with the ability to escape caste-based, prescriptive livelihood or employment opportunities, which often came with caste-based forms of bondage or patronage. Jyotiba Phule critiqued Brahminism by stressing social rights and rational thinking and rejecting the intermediation of priests. A look at the Satyashodhak movement also illustrates how education opened not only the possibility of new occupations but also the creative expression of a caste critique. Muktabai, the 14-year-old Mang (a dalit caste in western India) girl’s essay published in a journal called Dhyanodaya starts with what are now iconic lines––‘O learned Pandits, wind up the selfish prattle of your hollow wisdom and listen to what I say’ (Tharu & Lalitha, 1997, pp. 215–216).

Anti-caste movements at the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century then staked claims to resources such as education and occupations that were seen as enabling and were an escape from traditional occupations, stigma, oppression, and exploitation. Simultaneously, they fought for the right to worship in all temples, for access to water and resources that carried value, and the removal of caste disabilities. At the same time, religious practices have themselves changed considerably. Charismatic religious leaders who critiqued caste and created alternate spaces for worship were often reduced to being leaders of new religious sects within Hinduism itself. In Karnataka, the movement pioneered by Basava, the twelfth-century poet, philosopher, and social reformer, led to the creation of the Lingayats as another Hindu caste. In Punjab, the Ravidassia movement around Guru Ravidas, a fifteenth-century mystic poet saint led to the creation of several Deras. In Kerala, Sree Narayana guru, a mystic born into the Ezhava caste, became the centre of a movement led initially by some Ezhavas in South Kerala.

In 1903, the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam [lit. the organisation to propagate the teachings of Sree Narayana guru, henceforth SNDP Yogam] was formed with Narayana guru as its first president. Narayana guru challenged the upper-caste’s exclusive access to Hinduism and Hindu gods and started temples as a way of critiquing the denial of temple entry. He argued that rather than undergo the humiliation of standing outside a temple they were denied entry into, and having the offering thrown into their hands from afar, people should worship in the new temples. He laid claim to Hindu philosophy, the right of non-brahmins to be priests, and established new temples with gods and rituals that had not been accessible to Ezhavas and Thiyyas. Sree Narayana guru also brought about reforms in wedding rituals and stressed the need for education, urging people to take up occupations other than the traditional occupation of toddy tapping. Narayana guru’s influence spread to the north of what is now Kerala to include Thiyyas, and the Billavas of southern Karnataka.

One of the ways in which Narayana guru and the movement have been described is through M. N. Srinivas’s category of sanskritisation. While sanskritisation is a complex process discussed by Srinivas in writing done over many years, it is popularly understood as the imitation of Sanskritic rituals for gaining mobility (see, e.g., Srinivas, 1995 [1966], 2002). This was an important concept that described caste mobility, as opposed to the fixed, unchanging view. The Vanniyar movement (discussed by R. S. Raja in this issue) is known to have sanskritised their rituals and customs. There are scores of other examples. For instance, the Namasudras in Bengal introduced the wearing of the sacred thread, and other elements of upper-caste custom and ritual (Bandyopadhyay, 2008). Sanskritisation is normally seen as a process that did not challenge caste, and only challenged the ranking of the caste. The question then is: Can caste associations sanskritising their customs and rituals be considered anti-caste movements? Were they anti-caste?

We would like to answer the question by arguing that the process of sanskritisation was a critique of caste and must be understood as the political appropriation of what was denied under caste society (see Abraham, 2023). At a time when caste ideologies and hierarchies suffused every capillary of society, sanskritisation provided the possibility of claiming what was not accessible, what was not allowed. These were goods and ideas that carried value. Seen this way as an adoption of valued goods, or as an appropriation of goods that were forbidden, what is described as sanskritisation emerges as a deeply political act.

This is clear when we look at the kinds of resistance that sanskritisation met with from those with caste privilege. ⁶ In fact, Sree Narayana guru faced opposition when he established the first of a series of temples. In other instances, we see that the refusal to carry out degrading and stigmatised work seen as a ‘traditional occupation’ was (and still is) often met with violence (see for e.g., Mendelsohn & Vicziany, 1998). In Nicolas Jaoul’s film Sangarsh (2018), dalit villagers speak about how they are beaten up when they refuse to comply to dominant caste attempts to reinforce unpaid, forced labour. It is not uncommon to read about dalits being punished for daring to ride a horse to their wedding, or wearing a turban, or claiming other material and symbolic goods that had been denied including new occupations (see Y. P. Singh, this issue).

Thus, if we see ‘sanskritisation’ as a political act of appropriation, a subversive act that sought to break caste exclusivity and denial, then these movements are anti-caste movements. What a study of social movements such as the Sree Narayana Guru movement shows us is that strategies employed in movements and valued goods appropriated are often eclectic. ⁷ In the temples he established, Sree Narayana guru installed different deities, drew from different kinds of architecture in upper-caste temples, and introduced an eclectic set of rituals practiced in such temples and in wedding rituals. He set up a gurukulam, a training centre for priests irrespective of caste, and laid a claim to the study of the Vedas that had been prohibited for non-brahmins (discussed by Cybil in this issue). These appropriations, or claiming of democratic access, go far beyond the idea of sanskritisation as ‘imitation’ or ‘emulation.’ Moreover, what we see is that both religious and secular goods that carry value were appropriated. This may include a claim to reservation in education and jobs. If we think of each of these as democratising claims to resources, and we consider that appropriating sanskritic customs and rituals was a means of gaining dignity and not just a new caste status, then there is little contradiction between sanskritisation and claiming reservation ⁸ ––both are valued goods with a promise of relief from humiliation, exploitation, and violence.

Sree Narayana guru’s anti-caste philosophy was strongly expressed in his maxim ‘one caste, one religion and one god for man’––part of a famous poem he wrote called ‘Jati Mimamsa’ [A critique of caste]. In the poem, he argued that there was a common human body, indicating that all human beings belonged to one caste (or one race), the human race or caste, and that caste, was a ‘principle of false differentiation’ (Kumar, 2009, p. 59). This movement launched several strands, one of which was led by his disciple Nataraja guru (discussed by Cybil in this issue), which focussed on Advaita philosophy and spirituality. C. Krishnan led one strand of the movement that argued that caste was central to Hinduism and urged people to convert to Buddhism. And, the third led by K. Ayyappan stressed that in order to fight untouchability, Ezhavas had to identify themselves with castes ‘lower’ than themselves and would only be able to fight for equality with ‘high’ castes once this was achieved.

These strands of the movement did not seem to inform the SNDP Yogam, which seemed to focus on the narrow interests of the Ezhavas and Thiyyas, and over time Guru is believed to have gotten disillusioned and stepped down from being its president. This kind of shift between the critique of caste on the one hand and the entrenchment of caste boundaries, on the other, was common to other movements such as the Virasaiva movement of the Lingayats in Karnataka (Ramanujan, 2004 [1973]), and the movement of Satnamis in Central India (see Dube, 1998), or the Matua sect formed by Harichand which brought together the Namasudras in Bengal (Bandyopadhyay, 2008). This move between a caste critique and the working of a caste association is important in engaging the question of what anti-caste is. What it also indicates to us is the importance of a temporal understanding of anti-caste movements.

Again, in the Sree Narayana Guru movement, the SNDP Yogam increasingly modelled itself as a caste association squarely placed within Hinduism. Thus, even though Guru had stressed a common humanity across caste, race, and religious belief, the practices around Sree Narayana guru’s statues indicate a firm placing of Sree Narayana guru within Hinduism. In the 1990s an enclosed canopy was built around his statue in the Jagannatha Temple complex in Thalassery, in North Kerala. The pentagonal enclosure has glass on each side with large embossed Sanskritised Hindu gods or goddesses on each––Shiva, Parvathi, Saraswati, Durga, and Lakshmi. On special occasions––Sree Narayana guru’s birth and death anniversaries––the statue is treated like a Hindu idol in any temple––it is washed, sometimes in milk, sandalwood paste is applied on it, and the statue is dressed. This form of worship, especially in neighbourhoods in the region, foreclosed the possibility of Narayana guru becoming a symbol of anti-caste and inter-faith solidarity. With Narayana guru framed squarely within Hinduism, another kind of change took place––the perceived ‘other’ shifted from the ‘upper caste Hindu’ to the ‘non-Hindu’ and especially, Muslims. During her fieldwork in the 1990s, many people informed Janaki of a board that was put up sometime in the 1950s at the entrance to the temple in Thalassery, which prohibited Muslims from entering. ⁹ In the 1970s, a new president of the temple took over and removed the board ‘without any discussion as it was so against the teachings of Sree Narayana guru,’ as he said in an interview in 1997. The shift in the idea of the ‘other’ has resonances today with dalit groups joining Hindutva politics (see, e.g., Lee, 2023) and once again reminds us of the need for a temporal understanding of anti-caste movements.

Thus, the political significance of movements needs to be read in their context. For, as we have tried to show through the case of the Sree Narayana Guru movement, what was once an anti-caste movement focussed on appropriating what had been denied, breaking caste exclusivity, and providing democratic access, may take on a form that looks more like a caste association promoting the interests of the castes that come under its wing, or may in fact lose its caste critique to embrace a pan-Hindu identity.

In more recent times, we see that appropriations of what was denied can also run along with a rejection of brahmanical culture, Vedic traditions, sanskritic gods, and so on. These multiple appropriations sometimes express themselves as conflicts within or between movements and groups (see for e.g., Janarthanan, this issue). Such differences also exist with respect to dietary practices––the denial of the consumption of beef by one group is matched by the pride in it by other groups—or with dalit art forms—if some groups move away from parai drumming due to its signification as stigmatised caste-specific work, other groups may engage with a resignification process that transforms this into an art to be valued, into a sign of pride and resistance (see, e.g., Mosse, 2012, pp. 277–278).

The focus on the Sree Narayana Guru movement in this section has been to point out how the emulation of brahmanical customs was in fact anti-caste, and hence caste associations seeking dignity and self-respect via practices of sanskritisation, seen as the appropriation of what was denied, must be considered as anti-caste movements. We are aware, of course, that religion’s inhabiting of the field of anti-caste has been studied through other analytical frameworks. Rather than reconceptualise Srinivas’ concept of sanskritisation, others (for example, Viswanath, 2014) have highlighted the very processes that led up to an administrative and analytical separation of the religious from the social and the political. In her study of temple rituals and political dominance in rural TN, anthropologist Diane Mines (2006, p. 5) argues that ‘the “fierce gods” [of the village…], through their socially disordering powers, allow subordinate groups and persons to publicly turn the tables on domination and assert their own powerful alternatives of village relations.’

Before we move on to looking at symbols of movements and the anti-caste creative engagement in the arts, of which there is a growing and vibrant public presence, we would like to reiterate a few arguments. One, that a movement for change most often meets with resistance because it challenges the claim to exclusivity critical to caste society and the reproduction of caste hierarchies. Thus, even caste associations appropriating what had been denied in caste society shifts caste and disturbs power dynamics. Two, anti-caste movements may be eclectic in the resources they seek to claim. These may be religious resources and/or ‘secular’ resources. In some cases, anti-caste movements reject rituals and customs associated with Brahminism. Furthermore, as we saw with sanskritisation that this appropriation may happen over generations––and this length of time should inform the way we conceptualise movements. Three, movements need to be located in their context, and especially in time as what is anti-caste is not fixed in time or place.

Symbols, Art, and Aesthetics in Anti-Caste Movements

The stellar presence of B. R. Ambedkar today in numerous art forms and in rural and urban landscapes is perhaps the clearest indication of the traffic between politics, emotions, symbols, and aesthetics in anti-caste struggles. In this section we turn our attention to these symbols and creative expressions which form anti-caste movements.

Ambedkar appears with such regularity in anti-caste literature, theatre, music, calendar art, and statuary that the phenomenon has given several scholars the pause to recall, and interpret, the Aristotelian adage that ‘to praise a man is in one respect akin to urging a course of action’ (Aristotle, n.d.). This is best captured by the Ambedkar statues populating rural and urban landscapes across several regions in India. The significance of these for anti-caste struggles and dalit groups has been examined, for instance, by Nicolas Jaoul (2006) in the case of Uttar Pradesh (UP), and by Gary Tartakov (2012) in the case of Maharashtra. The sheer material variation to the now-ubiquitous Ambedkar statue—its manifestation in concrete, plaster of Paris, bronze, or clay—and the commemorative practices attending the statue are measures of both Ambedkar’s significance to anti-caste struggles and of Ambedkar’s appropriation by diverse actors.

Ambedkar statues have been important to dalit assertions regarding access to public space, land, and other resources. ¹⁰ These statues have figured, for instance, in struggles to reclaim Panchama or depressed class land allocated to dalits in the late colonial period in Madras Presidency (see Viswanath, 2014) but usurped by landed castes (Moses, 1995), and in inter-caste conflict over public spaces such as parks in UP (Jaoul, 2006; see also Y. P. Singh, this issue).

Anti-caste formations and dalit political groups have also erected statues and other commemorative structures to lesser-known mythic and historical figures. ¹¹ Such commemorative structures as well as the sites in which they are located are configured in an Ambedkarite calendar (or more broadly, an anti-caste calendar) that periodically visibilises dalit claims to space as well as time. They play an important part in a protracted war of position in Gramscian terms, which is ‘made up of many small, “molecular” aggressions and assertions, dispersed over multiple spaces and times,’ as suggested by Thomas Crowley (2020, p. 37) in the context of the Mahad satyagraha and related dalit mobilisation in the 1920s in Maharashtra.

In addition to commemorative structures, group consolidations, and contestations play out through a plethora of other types of material objects which urge courses of action that extend, even exceed, the iconicity of the person or entity being commemorated. R. S. Raja (this issue) alludes to just such a strategic use of flags in the 1980s by the Vanniyar Sangam, a caste association of the Tamil caste group of Vanniyars (categorised as MBC or Most Backward Caste). He writes of the number of occasions when the Sangam hoisted its flag in rural and urban localities as a mobilisation strategy, to energise and mobilise caste members towards a demand for separate reservations for the Vanniyars. Others working in TN (e.g., Gorringe, 2017) have documented dalit groups and political parties using flags and graffiti as territorial markers and symbols of pride and resistance. Like caste-iconic statues, these material objects shape the terrain of contentious politics and transform the everyday experience of caste.

If the statues are a symbol of dalit pride, they have also become a site of attack (see Jaoul, 2006). Y. P. Singh (this issue) describes how in a middle-class neighbourhood in Meerut, a rumour that dalits in the neighbourhood were planning to install a statue of Ambedkar led to the park being divided into half––one for dalits and the other for non-dalits, with each part maintained by a different gardener.

The field of anti-caste art, more broadly, is marked by innovative transformations of forms and genres that are otherwise used to service caste consolidation. This is brought to bear, for instance, by Bhimgeet, the musical genre that was popularised by Ambedkarite shahirs (balladeers) in mid-twentieth-century Maharashtra (Rege, 2008, p. 18). On the one hand, the genre is marked by the modernity of its content, for it comprises verses that praise the historical figure of Ambedkar and simultaneously advocate Ambedkarism, the political project of Ambedkar. On the other hand, it is also symptomatic of a redistribution and re-formulation of existing genres. If the term shahir has been used to denote those serving as clients––singing the praise of patrons or rulers, then the term shahiri denotes the associated folk music form (Ajotikar, 2022). The emergence of the Bhimgeet and its presence in anti-caste struggles disturbs the established South Asian genres that reserve eulogy and praise for the divine and the royal.

Such reworked performative forms and traditions also populate other anti-caste fields. K. Kalyani (this issue) evidences the circulation of theatre and music forms (including Bhimgeet) in North India during different time periods. As she points out, the Maharashtra-based Kabir Kala Manch, which is widely known for its deployment of music, theatre, and other performative genres in struggles against caste and myriad other forms of oppression and exploitation, was framed as a Maoist cultural organisation and its activists were incarcerated for allegedly waging a war on the Indian state—a comment maybe on the power of their critique of the status quo, and the simultaneous attempts by the state to paper over caste discrimination. Former members of the group continue to forward anti-caste struggles through a group called Vidrohi Shahiri Jalsa (Ajotikar, 2022, for details).

The Kabir Kala Manch activists and other Maharashtrian shahirs—most notably, the poet-singer Vilas Ghogre—also prominently feature in Anand Patwardhan’s 2011 film, Jai Bhim Comrade. In some senses, this film signals a full circle to the trajectory of recent caste-focussed documentaries. It is a composition that details dalits as much as agents of change—whether directing their energies against mill closures that pauperised several textile workers or against state violence on dalits, workers, and activists of anti-caste or radical left movements—as members of groups whose living and working conditions located them as dehumanised, stigmatised, dispossessed subjects. Taking up the complex trajectories of Maharashtrian dalit Marxism, Rao (2012, p. 24) reads Patwardhan’s film as ‘provid[ing] occasion to extend, rather than to reproduce the long-standing caste-class debate, and to ask what that binarism forecloses.’ This cues us to the relevance of the film itself for caste/class-focussed social movements as well as for scholarly debates on caste/class relations and structures.

Deborah Matzner (2014) highlights the connections between the sonic practices of the dalit musicians, poets, and activists depicted in the film and the ‘everyday sonic ecologies’ that are as central as visual practices are to dalit claims-making and yet stand eclipsed by a visual-centric scholarship. In a sympathetic reading of Patwardhan, Matzner argues that Jai Bhim Comrade voices ‘Dalit rational criticism in a rousing, poetic fashion via the sonic register’ rather than ‘in a dry, purely intellectual mode’ (2014, p. 130).

If Matzner (ibid.) indicates that ‘the rational, critical realism of Dalit protest depicted in the film is a postcolonial hybrid of local and transnational influences,’ and goes on to suggest that this tradition of dalit rational humanism is ‘well allied with Patwardhan’s mode of critical documentary realism,’ D. Janarthanan (this issue) focusses on Nicolas Jaoul’s (2018) Sangharsh: Times of Strife, positioning this film alongside other modes of documentary and ethnographic filmmaking. Her analysis is based on identifying Sangharsh as an important addition to the cinematic trend, in the subfield of caste-related documentaries, that inverts the lens on caste realities by taking activists opposing these realities as the main filmic subjects.

Similar trends are also visible in other cinematic fields, now redefined by the success and popularity of works by dalit filmmakers working in, say, Hindi, Marathi, or Tamil cinema. Commenting on directors Pa Ranjith, Nagraj Manjule, and Mari Selvaraj, Manju Edachira (2020, pp. 50, 52) has suggested that their films instantiate a new aesthetics ‘that contests the oppressive normative’ and act as ‘an invitation to the other—through an affective anti-caste aesthetics [by] bringing into presence a previously absent entity to a sensory reality.’ If Edachira utilises Alain Badiou’s conception of ‘inaesthetics’ and his suturing or knotting of philosophy and art as a mode to reconsider art as ‘a truth procedure, which is irreducible to philosophy’ (Edachira, 2020, p. 49) in her study of recent cinematic interventions, the field of dalit literature is already witness to several debates about politics and aesthetics, the political and the literary, and the categories of truth and fiction or testimony and storytelling (see, e.g., Jaaware, 2018; Limbale, 2004; Satyanarayana & Tharu, 2011, 2013; Tharu & Satyanarayana, 2013).

The well-studied field of dalit literature highlights the convergences of emotions, affects, life circumstances and life trajectories, and self and subject formations (see, for e.g., Satyanarayana & Tharu 2011, 2013; Tharu & Satyanarayana, 2013). Janarthanan (this issue) foregrounds the full-bodied characterisation of Panther activists in Sangharsh as a cinematic intervention to be valued. Such character complexity also found in recent popular cinema by dalit filmmakers indicates not only the maturity of anti-caste struggles and a move away from the dominant framing of dalits as victims (cf., Jaoul, 2013) but also a break away from the ‘entrapment of traditional ideological forms’ and from cultural or art forms that have served as ‘bearer[s] of ideology’ (Waugh, 2011, p. 6).

Finally, recent engagements with the literary in the broad field of caste studies have also provisioned fresh ways of approaching caste as well as art and aesthetics. We recall Aniket Jaaware’s (2018, p. 6) tropology and rhetoric of touch as a mode of studying caste and his suggestion that ‘any attempt to think anew about “caste” will have to withdraw from most sociological and anthropological understanding. His recommendation stems from the fact that ‘“caste” is understood mainly through sociological and anthropological categories, and “dalit” literature is understood as literature of protest against social injustice,’ and consequently receives more sociological and political attention rather than literary attention’ (Jaaware, 2018, p. 6). The provocative and productive suggestion can animate kindred methods to the study of other art forms. The articles in this issue approach the interconnected queries on art, aesthetics, and social movements in diverse ways: Kalyani nods towards a Rancierian notion of aesthetics as self-education in her study of music as anti-caste counterpublic; Janarthanan broaches a method of deferring the temptation to seek one-to-one correspondence between art and caste relations in her film analysis, while Kumar and Datta in this issue engage with the autobiographical and other accounts by dalit trans persons to point to the way the caste question haunts the queer and trans movements.

The Articles in This Issue

This special issue has six articles which look at different movements and forms of resistance. Below is a brief description of the articles.

K. V. Cybil looks at the Sree Narayana Guru movement in Kerala and its critique of caste. In a context in which Ezhavas suffered considerable caste disability, Sree Narayana guru (1856–1928) challenged the exclusive claim of the brahmins to Hindu philosophy and spirituality. He started new temples and asserted the right of all castes to access asceticism, and towards this, set up a gurukulam for people from all castes. It is this gurukulam movement which his disciple Nataraja guru carried forward in different parts of South India and abroad. Cybil explores the texture of the links between the spiritual and the political through a study of the writings of Nataraja guru, and argues that the engagement of the spiritual was a form of anti-caste politics. In doing this he employs a historicising perspective, drawing from the Foucauldian idea of the past as a process and as events in the making. Cybil argues that although the SNDP tended to follow the interests of the Ezhavas, Nataraja guru followed in Narayana guru’s view that Ezhava did not refer to any particular caste or religion. His discussion then points to not only the multiple trajectories that movements take, but to the very wide cultural influences drawn on to engage the spiritual and the political.

Saravana Raja’s article takes up the mobilisation of Vanniyars, a caste group categorised as an MBC, numerically dominant in the northern districts of TN. He focusses on the 1980s, a decade characterised by important events and processes such as the Mandal issue and the upper-caste backlash against the central government’s decision to implement reservations for OBCs; the Eelam struggle or the Tamil National Liberation Movement in neighbouring Sri Lanka, which impacted politics and political rhetoric in TN; a resounding critique of the Congress party in several regions across India; and the Dravidian movement and parties in TN. It is against this national and regional background that Raja sets the mobilisation tactics of the caste association, Vanniyar Sangam, and the subsequent formation of the political party, Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK). He suggests that the shift in focus from caste-specific issues of separate reservation for the Vanniyars—which gained fruition in 1989, through the reclassification of the Vanniyars as MBC—to issues relating to Tamil identity, the Tamil question as simultaneously a cultural and a linguistic issue, Tamil national liberation struggles in Sri Lanka, and the ‘Tamil masses’ or the labouring poor, indicate the Vanniyar movement’s attempt to articulate and participate in a new rhetorics of contention and reformulations of questions of identity. The Vanniyar mobilisation of this period, as Raja demonstrates, is thus a clear instantiation of both the operations of caste in a relational field comprised of political and non-political actors, as well as of caste groups’ continuous negotiation with institutional and non-institutional forms of politics.

Dhivya Janarthanan analyses the cinematic engagement with activists of the Bharatiya Dalit Panthers, an anti-caste formation in UP, in anthropologist Nicolas Jaoul’s 2018 documentary, Sangharsh: Times of Strife. Shot in the turn-of-century in the Kanpur region, Jaoul’s film destabilises the humanitarian mode in which caste has recently reappeared in the international scale. Janarthanan foregrounds Sangharsh’s essaying of questions relating to caste, labour, and religion in filmic terms, focussing on cinematic interventions and enactments, and filmic grammar and argument in this documentary. By attending to questions of form and the form–content dialectic, Janarthanan analyses Sangharsh’s enactment of the caste question for a diverse audience; the anti-caste movement’s modes of addressing the state and of mobilising rural and urban dalits against caste violence and Hindutva violence; and the dalit rationalist critique of subaltern religious practices.

Based on intensive fieldwork in Meerut city, and his own experience of growing up as a Jatav in Meerut city, Yaduvendra Pratap Singh writes about the experience of caste in different neighbourhoods and in the sphere of work in the context in which a dalit movement has manifested in political power in UP. Countering the dominant modernisation narrative of caste withering away through urbanisation, Singh provides a sobering account of the urban as a caste-marked space. Taking inspiration from James Scott’s argument about everyday forms of resistance, Singh also draws out the differences between the experience of caste based on the caste composition of the neighbourhoods, while pointing to the way neighbourhood spaces can get sharply polarised and public spaces separated between dalits and non-dalits. At the same time, the proximity of living brings people of different castes together in neighbourhood religious activities, although marked by masked and not-so-masked forms of untouchability. These, however, are resisted by dalits in a variety of ways. He also chronicles the multiple strategies used by dalits to counter the resistance they face when they move out of traditional occupations.

Drawing from archival material and interviews with musicians, K. Kalyani looks at music as a way through which dalit–bahujan singers ‘talk back’ to caste and casteism, and the way music is an important site of caste critique which constitutes an anti-caste counter public. Arguing that much of the literature on anti-caste counter publics has focused on anti-caste movements centred on important figures like Phule and Ambedkar, Kalyani focuses specifically on the history of dalit–bahujan music in select regions of North India and how it plays out in everyday life. She employs Nancy Frazer’s distinction between ‘strong counterpublics’ and ‘weak counterpublics’ to stress that the latter also created a space for caste critique. She describes distinctive strategies employed by performers to reach out to their audiences by experimenting with genres, adopting popular rhythms, or through audience participation techniques which bring the singers and the audience into a shared space of caste critique and of solidarity. The attempt is to create an alternate space outside of caste society which is democratic and egalitarian. Kalyani argues then that dalit–bahujan music, through the creation of a sonic counterpublic, has become an important symbol of dalit pride and identity.

Pushpesh Kumar and Sayantan Datta chronicle the development of the queer and transgender-rights movements in India and the growing anti-caste consciousness within the movement. Drawing from secondary literature, autobiographies and biographies, they look at the different issues that brought queer and transgender communities together and show how liberalisation in India precipitated the anti-377 campaign through the HIV/AIDS campaign in the 1990s. Amidst discourse on decriminalisation of homosexuality, class emerged as a fault line. The experience of lower class, ‘sartorially assertive trans women in India’ was often marked by humiliation, abjection and poor material conditions. While some of these experiences resonate with the experiences of dalit trans women, Kumar and Datta draw out the multiple strategies used by Hijras to mask their stigmatised caste. While early work on Hijras declared that they were ‘not governed by the logic of caste,’ Kumar and Datta describe the way dalit transgender people have begun to break the silence and speak about their experiences of untouchability as they were growing up, their ‘common suffering,’ including at the hands of the police. An understanding of intersectionality has brought the demand for horizontal reservation from the state, so far only implemented in one state (Karnataka). They argue that the growth of anti-caste movements has no doubt contributed to a greater reflection on the way caste and class are experienced by queer and trans people.

These articles with their diverse methods and focus are a small step towards understanding anti-caste movements and resistance in contemporary India.