Abstract
Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalit History in North India sets a new context for discussing problems of contemporary South Asian historiography. It asks certain fundamental questions regarding the practice of history writing in South Asia and not just Dalit History. As a distinct variety of radical historiography that created a new genre of historical practice, Subaltern Studies became the benchmark for history writing in South Asia. Nonetheless, it is a fact that any new historiography of South Asia has to have a creative dialogue with Subaltern Studies in order to move beyond. Reconsidering Untouchability asks questions left out in the radical historiographies of South Asia such as the Subaltern Studies. Rawat is not trying to add on to the left out histories of Dalits in order to fill in a gap in the edifice of historiography. On the contrary, he offers a critique of the historiographies of South Asia that denied histories to Dalits, and to challenge the myth that Dalits did not evolve as agents of history.
According to the author, the denial of agency to Dalits was largely due to the occupational stereotypes that were created and circulated about the Dalit communities, in this instance, Chamars, as a caste of leather workers, turning a blind eye to the fact that many were peasants with land holding in the Uttar Pradesh (pp. 12–13). Rawat, for instance, refers to the fact that even Subaltern historian Gyanendra Pandey, who studied the peasant mobilization under the leadership of the Kisan Sabha in Uttar Pradesh from 1919–22, failed to take note of this fact and their stakes in the struggles were not due to their alleged status as landless labourers who were alienated from their traditional occupation of leather work. He also shows how Dalit agendas take a back seat even when the historiographical framework is not a nationalist one, as in the case of Vijay Prashad’s sympathetic account of Balmiki Sweepers’ Union’s labour strike in Subaltern Studies (Volume 10) which falls short of discussing the agendas of the Balmikis. Instead, it is concerned with the anti-imperialist and socialist struggles under the leadership of the Communist Party of India which would support the struggles of the Balmikis. In the dominant historiography of the reformist movements like Arya Samaj, Dalits appear as people available for the social agendas of reformists without a will of their own—that amounts to the denial of the agency of Dalits who were involved in such movements (p. 17). The Arya Samajists as reformists were responding to the Dalit initiatives in their reforms focused on Dalits. He further argues that Dalits’ own agendas do not seem to advance those of the upper caste Hindus, Indian nationalists or even Marxist and therefore, there has not been any recognition of Dalit concerns in such movements. The author argues that the dominant discourses on the elite versus subaltern dichotomy in understanding the nationalist movement—the concept of insurgent peasant, ideas of Hindu reforms and the radical socialist transformation—all played a substantial role in denying Dalits their historical agency.
Dalit History: Another Project?
In a recent article titled ‘After Subaltern Studies’ Partha Chatterjee recalls three decade long experience of the Subaltern Studies and observes that the changing times of today demand radical historians and social scientists to take up rigorous studies of non Brahmin and Dalit movements, which subaltern studies did not attempt. 1 We may emphasize two things, as the discussion here is on the project of Dalit History. This is also done in the backdrop of Chatterjee’s observation that Subaltern Studies’ scholars had to ‘carry on the fight within the academy’. He further elaborates it by saying that it meant that they had to strictly follow the protocols and conventions of history writing. In the academic circles there is a tendency to brush aside Dalit History as inconsequential as the dominant historiography considers it as, at best additive history and at worst some sort of lamentation over an oppressive past. However, in the book reviewed here, we come across a different intellectual engagement with Dalit History which is characterized by complete adherence to the protocols of professional history writing that makes the book Reconsidering Untouchability a desideratum for further research in the area of Dalit History.
Rawat’s book in fact sets a new benchmark for such a critique of history in South Asia. With regard to the practice of history the author felt it necessary to probe the local archives and vernacular literature where another story line was preserved which contradicted the meta-narratives that were constructed by reading the materials in the metropolitan archives in Delhi or London. While the metropolitan archives helped produce a powerful myth of Chamars as leather workers, the local repositories provided materials that provided a different story—a story of Chamars as peasants and owners of cultivable land. Alongside the archival research that led to the mining of the unconventional local histories and narratives in print and manuscript, the author had also conducted a multi-sited ethnographic research of the Chamar community spread over several towns, cities and villages of Uttar Pradesh to trace their history. This enabled the author to reconsider the narratives of Chamars that articulated their own agendas which were not analyzed by historians and other social scientists. Most of the Chamars contested the dominant interpretations of their occupation narratives and explicitly showed their opposition to the upper caste domination rather than an opposition to British colonialism. Rawat’s departure from other radical historiographies is explicit in his desire to move away from the autonomy and resistance mode of analysis of the Chamar history to bring into active conversation the Chamar agendas with main stream Indian historiography.
Another important theoretical move of Reconsidering Untouchability is the conscious attempt not to be caught up in the narrow confines of ‘identity or ethnicity politics’ and understand Dalit struggles offering a ‘resounding critique of social and cultural practices that have defined and shared the frameworks of colonialism and nationalism’. Problems of hierarchy and discrimination that have historically prevailed in India and that continue to hold sway even today could be better analyzed by bringing in the insights provided by the Dalit critiques. One may observe here the Dalit movement’s interrogation of hierarchical practices of Hinduism and nationalism and the circulation of occupational stereotypes of Chamars and other Dalit communities. Rawat contends that the alternative visions that the Dalit perspective puts forward solidifies into a resource for a critique of the Indian historiography that opens up new debates about Indian history. The ideas articulated by the Dalit theorists in the early twentieth century regarding caste inequality and hierarchy continue to be relevant even today.
Caste, Untouchability and the Chamar Social World
In the first chapter, ‘Making Chamars Criminal: The Crime of Cattle Poisoning’, Rawat critically analyzes the widely held colonial notion of the late nineteenth century that Chamars were responsible for the large-scale cattle deaths. This was connected in certain ways with the colonial notion of ‘criminal tribes’ that was epitomized in the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. The false association of Chamars with the killing of cattle was embedded in the colonial and Hindu notion that they were predominantly engaged in leather work. The genealogy of such a prejudice is analyzed in this chapter to show the assumptions behind it. Through an analysis of the empirical details of several cases of alleged poisoning of cattle by Chamars, Rawat shows how they were falsely implicated in such cases. In fact in the village society, Chamars performed rituals along with the traditional medicines to prevent cattle and human diseases. Nevertheless, the Hindu middle and lower castes thought Chamars to be a threat especially in the context of the Cow Protection Movement of 1880s and 1890s.
The stereotype of the Chamar as the leather worker is investigated in the second chapter of the book. Working through the rich colonial archive, the author has shown that the Chamars were engaged in a variety of occupations and chiefly in agricultural peasant production. In spite of the large presence of the Chamars as agricultural peasants (nearly 90 per cent), there were structural barriers that prevented them from acquiring land. Yet, by the turn of the twentieth century, in several parts of Uttar Pradesh, the Chamars had owned land under various tenures such as maurusi and ghair-maurusi (pp. 61–65). In spite of this, their ownership of land was disproportionate to their total population making the colonial commentators to interpret their social position as that of agricultural labourers and leather workers. This interpretation was possible largely because of the fact that Chamars were forced to perform unpaid labour (begari) for the landlords. This became a powerful means for the upper caste landlords to perpetuate their hegemonic control over Dalits as untouchables even as the latter possessed land and some means of livelihood. Rawat extends this detailed analysis in the third chapter to demonstrate that the colonial context enabled the Chamars to carve out a role in the leather trade. He further points out that ‘it was not because of any traditional role, but because they took advantage of the opportunities available to them that the Chamars became important in the Kanpur Leather industry’. This enables the author to provide an alternative interpretation to the colonial, nationalist and revisionist economic history of India, all of which tried to construct a natural association between the Chamars and the Leather Industry. It is in this context that the author understands the early twentieth century protest of Chamar ideologues against the association of leather-work with their identity.
Social Movements and the Question of Identity
By the end of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century, Dalit communities began to be thought of differently in the emergent public discourses. Colonialism and the politics of colonial knowledge provided the context for such interpretations. In chapter four, Rawat analyzes the efforts of the Chamar organic intellectuals to write the history of Chamars that challenged the Hindu and the British interpretations of their history as well as their status in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They sought to reclaim the dignity of the community by questioning dominant Brahmanical theories of their origins. This, according to the author, was central to the Chamar histories ‘but of little or no importance in the histories written by caste Hindus’ (p. 121). One fundamental question posed here is the possibility of writing about the experience of untouchability and humiliation associated with it in India. It will be instructive in this context to refer to the notion of historical wounds as there is a historiography that problematizes such terrible experiences in other parts of the world. Dipesh Chakraborty refers to the case of Dalits in India as an example of a social group that experienced historical wounds in the context of the politics of recognition. 2 However, historians are yet to analyze the experiential dimension of untouchability and humiliation. Rawat’s book in fact begins an enquiry of historical wounds inflicted by untouchability in the North Indian context. Thus, Rawat refers to the mode of history writing resorted to by the Dalit intellectuals that articulate their notions of a Dalit past which leads them to the claim of Kshatriya status for Chamar Dalits. Texts such as Chanvar Purana sought to provide such a history by rejecting the Hindu and colonial versions of history. Rather than looking at the truth of such histories, the author emphasizes the power of history as it is claimed by a group which could not have written history or who understood that they do not possess knowledge of the past.
The fifth chapter theorized the claim of Dalit identity as ‘untouched’ instead of untouchable by analyzing its complex construction through discursive and non discursive practices. The adi-Hindu movement from 1922–33 articulated the new identity of Chamars as original inhabitants or rulers of India. This leads the author to investigate in a detailed manner the achhut agendas as they unfolded. The ‘achhut identity ‘was not merely political but also social and cultural, a way of thinking not just about Dalit society but also about Hindu society’ (p. 179). According to Rawat, the formation of the Republican Party after Ambedkar created the space for building up political alliances without losing the focus and power of a united achhut identity. The formation of the republican party also meant that the Dalits were coming to terms with new regimes of citizenship, adult suffrage, affirmative action and elections (p. 181). It has been argued that the achhut identity remained very powerful since 1920, quite often competing with other notions of Dalit identity, such as, Jatavas, Raidassis and Kureels, to mention a few. The trajectory of the identity formation which is shown here from Chamars to Dalits show the tortuous course that the Dalit community of Chamars followed in negotiating with modernity. Right from the early twentieth century, through a range of organizations, the Chamars tried to transform their lives and contested the upper caste constructions of their lives as ‘untouchable’ by emphasizing the ‘purity’ of their lives. The proposed achhut identity was a category that included all Dalits. Claiming to be ‘untouched’ (achhut), and now Dalit, Rawat observes that this identity became a foundational political category.
Conclusion
The Dalit history raises a range of issues that remained outside the concerns of most historiographies of South Asia and Reconsidering Untouchability brings them to the centre of the historical analysis. One significant point raised in the present study is the caste embeddedness of peasant communities that have not been fully analyzed, even in alternative histories of peasants. Rawat’s study shows how the peasant consciousness was steeped in the culture of caste. The unqualified usage of the term subaltern, as it is applied to the peasantry, obliterates the world of the large mass of Dalits in the agrarian societies who were themselves subalterns and were subjected to the exploitation of other upper caste peasants who could also pass off as subalterns. In the discourses of the subaltern studies, the peasant appears unmarked. It becomes clear that the idea of ‘peasant citizens occupying spaces of modernity’ becomes highly contested in the wake of the discussions imitated by Reconsidering Untouchability. Methodologically outstanding and sophisticatedly argued, Reconsidering Untouchability will remain a classic in the field of Dalit history and social sciences.