This article was downloaded by: [RMIT University]On: 08 March 2013, At: 05:36Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

India ReviewPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/find20

Who Needs Identity? Dalit Studies andthe Politics of RecognitionJuned Shaikh aa Xavier University, USAVersion of record first published: 10 Aug 2012.

To cite this article: Juned Shaikh (2012): Who Needs Identity? Dalit Studies and the Politics ofRecognition, India Review, 11:3, 200-208

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14736489.2012.705636

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representationthat the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of anyinstructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primarysources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings,demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

India Review, vol. 11, no. 3, 2012, pp. 200–208Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN 1473-6489 print/1557-3036 onlineDOI: 10.1080/14736489.2012.705636

REVIEW ESSAY

Who Needs Identity? Dalit Studies and the Politicsof Recognition

JUNED SHAIKH

The Dalit Movement in India: Local Practices, Global Connections. By Eva-MariaHardtmann. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009. xiv and 263 Pages. Paperback,$29.95.

The Making of the Dalit Public in North India: Uttar Pradesh, 1950–Present. By BadriNarayan. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011. xxxviii and 168 Pages. Hardcover,$52.50.

Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalit History in North India.By Ramnarayan Rawat. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011. xi and272 Pages. Paperback, $28.95.

It is a testament to the burgeoning field of Dalit Studies that historians, anthropologists,economists, sociologists, political scientists, political theorists, and scholars of genderstudies, literature, and religious studies are redirecting their energies to engage with thecaste question in general and the dalit question in particular.1 The term Dalit literallymeans ground down, broken, and oppressed; it has been in circulation in the regions ofpresent-day Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh since the 1920s but came in vogue in thelate 1960s and early 1970s when radical Dalit activists and writers claimed it as a polit-ical standpoint and identity to refer to the former untouchable castes.2 Dalit Studies isan emerging field that engages with this standpoint but shies away from naming itself.Despite the restraint, it is comprehensible as a promising field of intellectual inquiryby scholars of South Asia. Moreover, publishing houses, committees that distributegrants for research, and hiring committees for academic jobs acknowledge that researchon Dalits fills a lacuna in the scholarship on South Asia. Not surprisingly though, themonographs that fill this purported gap are classified under recognizable disciplinarycategories such as History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies. Scholars working inDalit Studies, then, frequently present standpoints with eloquent critiques of powerrelationships—particularly within the Hindu caste system. Dalit Studies is charac-terized by a radical perspective that seeks to construct a theory of knowledge. Theemergence of Dalit Studies has raised the possibility of interrogating omissions, mostnotably the consideration of the experience and cultural politics of Dalit subalterns, and

Juned Shaikh is an Assistant Professor of history at Xavier University, USA.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

RM

IT U

nive

rsity

] at

05:

36 0

8 M

arch

201

3

Dalit Studies and the Politics of Recognition 201

the deepening of our understanding of the processes that constitute India’s modernity,such as democracy, the public sphere, nationalism, and state-formation.

The renewed attention to the Dalit question was enabled by socio-political transfor-mations in India. Its lineage can be grasped through processes that have been bracketedby Christophe Jaffrelot under a tepid phrase, “India’s Silent Revolution.”3 The socialupheaval and cacophony that attended the so-called silent revolution led to the elec-tion of Mayawati as the first female Dalit chief minister of the northern Indian Stateof Uttar Pradesh in 1993.4 The spectacle of a Dalit woman controlling the levers ofstate power, forming opportunistic alliances, and asserting Dalit identity in the socialspace of India’s most populous state through the erection of statues and parks memori-alizing Dalit icons, invited renewed attention to the Dalit question in the new century.Similarly, the 2001 World Conference Against Racisms in South Africa, where manyDalit groups advocated the recognition of caste discrimination as a variant of systemicracism, and the Indian government’s successful efforts to keep caste out of the con-ference’s ambit, brought scrutiny to the dalit question with renewed vigor. The bitterdebates on the reality of discrimination and the specificity of caste as a feature of socialhierarchy in India provoked scholars to capture and theorize the experiences of Dalits.These efforts by scholars and activists coupled with funding by organizations like theFord Foundation to explore the creation of a new field, Dalit Studies, has enrichedscholarship on Dalits in India.5

This is not to say that India scholars and government officials did not study theformer untouchables in late-colonial and postcolonial India. Many social scientistsmade former untouchables, or Dalits, the category they have adopted, and the socialmovements they created the objects of their analysis in the twentieth century. What issignificant about the new turn, however, is the sheer increase in the volume of schol-arship on Dalits and as well as the changing socio-historical context in which DalitStudies has emerged as a field within South Asian Studies. The new field, bolstered bythe proliferation of scholarship on Dalits in Indian, North American, and Europeanuniversities and borne of intimate dialogue between scholars and Dalit activists posesnew questions about the formation of dalit identities and their cultural politics in var-ious regions. The new corpus has also benefited from the postmodernist interrogationof the certainty of India’s modernity, especially the silences within Indian national-ism, the oversight of secular, liberal, and leftist politics, the stalled possibilities of Dalitemancipation, and the very categories through which Dalits were hitherto understood.It assertively proclaims the existence of an independent Dalit perspective6 and the rel-evance of a Dalit critique of India’s modernity7—a contention that has registered onlylukewarm affirmation thus far. Probably, the reason Dalit Studies shies away from nam-ing itself lies in this conundrum. It is still seeking recognition from its peers and is in theprocess of refining its methods, the objects of its critique, and its political standpoint.Moreover, the promise of interdisciplinary inquiry that Dalit Studies fosters and thepractice of a loose amalgamation of scholars coalescing around a project could unravel ifthe project itself is not capacious enough to recognize the legitimacy of various methodsand differences in perspectives.

The books under review take us significantly further in this direction. One ofthe most important contributions of the authors is the self-reflexive use of different

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

RM

IT U

nive

rsity

] at

05:

36 0

8 M

arch

201

3

202 India Review

methodologies that enables them to articulate a counter-narrative to the extant under-standings of the formation of Dalit identity. For the historian Ramnarayan Rawat, analternate account should destabilize the dominant narrative about Dalits in late-colonialand postcolonial Uttar Pradesh. The mainstream discourse on Dalits, particular thosebelonging to the Chamar caste that comprised 14 percent of the population of theregion, was based on “scientifically” produced colonial stereotypes of criminal castes(p. 25). The representation of Chamar criminality was built on the flawed assumptionabout their occupation, that is, that they were primarily leather workers. The colonialofficials constructed a forceful case for Chamar criminality based on their imaginedcaste occupation. Imagined as leather workers, Chamars were thought to have a crim-inal proclivity for poisoning cattle in order to assert their caste-based claim on thehides of dead cattle, so the case went (p. 25). This argument was buttressed by scientificevidence of arsenic poisoning of cattle, and the possession of arsenic by Chamars puta-tively proved their criminal intent (p. 25). Rawat attributes the power of this stereotypeto colonial knowledge produced in the metropoles––Delhi and London—through themodality of census reports and tribe and caste surveys (p. 19). Rawat privileges localknowledge produced by colonial officials in the form of “settlement reports, tenancyinquiries, and monographs on specific districts” (p. 19) to argue that a majority of theChamars were, in fact, farmers and agricultural laborers. According to the 1911 census,only four percent of the Chamars identified as leatherworkers while 40 percent identi-fied as cultivators and another 40 percent as agricultural laborers (p. 55). By 1961, thenumber of Chamars who identified as cultivators had increased to 50 percent.

Badri Narayan constructs a story of the politicization of Dalits in Uttar Pradeshwith the help of oral histories collected primarily from five villages and supplementsthese with archival sources, political pamphlets, and newspapers. Narayan valorizes theimportance of oral histories in capturing “Dalit experiences of violence and oppression”(p. 39) because these were not well documented in police records and state archivesand were ignored by ethnographies of Uttar Pradesh villages in the post-independenceperiod. Narayan’s work invokes the Marxist social historian E. P. Thompson’s projectin two significant ways. Firstly, the Making of the Dalit Public, like E. P. Thompson’sMaking of the English Working Class, envisions the formation of an identity as a his-torical process in which the culture of subordinated groups is foregrounded. Secondly,like Thompson, Narayan deploys the category of “experience” to reconstruct the poli-tics of marginalized groups. For Narayan, the experiences of marginality are crucial tothe understanding of dalit politicization. For him, the process of politicization beginsin the first half of the twentieth century and reaches its apogee with the election ofMayawati in 1995. His notion of the political and politicization is tied to the inter-linked processes of the formation of Dalit identity and the capturing of political power.Simply put, electoral politics defines the political. To understand the electoral asser-tion of Dalits, Narayan turns to cultural politics and the stories of marginalizationand suffering among Dalits of the Chamar and Pasi castes. According to Narayan, therecognition of marginalization produces a political consciousness, enabled by politicalactors and social movements, which in turn facilitates the coming together of differ-ent castes under the umbrella term dalit. Just as democratic politics enables a politicalconsciousness and facilitates the formation of a unified dalit identity, this process also

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

RM

IT U

nive

rsity

] at

05:

36 0

8 M

arch

201

3

Dalit Studies and the Politics of Recognition 203

exacerbates divisions within various Dalit castes. For instance, Dalit castes such as Pasi,Dhobi, Kori, Valmiki, and Nai often object to the political domination of ChamarDalits within the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party (p. 151).

Eva-Maria Hardtmann’s translational ethnography of Dalit activists in the 1990sand 2000s broadens the spatial scale of Dalit Studies. Since Dalit activists traverse the“local and the global,” Hardtmann self-reflexively invokes an analytic that is unencum-bered by the limits of the region and the nation. She finds purchase in the sociologistManuel Castells’ notion of network.8 But, unlike Castells who studied the social andeconomic processes of a new society in the information age, Hardtmann uses the notionof networks to study the practices of dalit activists and the meanings they produce atvarious levels within the Dalit social movement. The notion of network gives her thefluidity to traverse these levels and highlight the interconnections between them. Whatconnects the various nodes in the scale she delineates—Buddhist viharas in India andBritain, Dalit theology, party politics, discussion boards on the internet, Dalit NGOs,and transnational arenas like the World Social Forum and the reports of United Nationsub-committees, such as the sub-committee on human rights—is the discourse on castediscrimination. The discourse of discrimination enabled Dalits to create a counter-public in which they articulated a critique of the post-independence Indian state. In the1990s and 2000s, Dalit activists extended the critique and refashioned their messageto form a transnational counter-public that lobbied the United Nations and WorldSocial Forum to consider their claims for recognition. In the process of refiguring thecounter-public, Dalit activists appropriated the discourse of human rights and framedcaste discrimination as a question of human rights and a form of “racism and relatedintolerance” (p. 207). According to Hardtmann, the discourse of Dalit activists “waspermeated by a surprisingly similar message” (p. 231) and the different nodes in thescale were part of the “same common counter-public sphere” (p. 232). In conjuringup an essentialized image of a common counter-public marked by the circulation ofan analogous discourse of discrimination, Hardtmann imagines a space outside thedominant public sphere. In her view, an alternate space is crucial to the creation ofa Dalit identity. One of the important implications of her argument is that discoursebecomes an important site for the construction of identity. Another suggestion that canbe drawn from her argument is that the Dalit identity created in the counter-public/s issingular because the message that is circulated across the various levels within the dalitmovement is similar. Thus, in her analysis, publics may be plural but identity is singular.

The turn to the investigation of how marginalized groups construct identities,inhabit subjectivities, and articulate their worldviews is a tendency shared by all thebooks. Another important contribution of the authors is the close attention to cul-tural politics in Uttar Pradesh, the state where Mayawati became the first Dalit womanto be elected to the office of chief minister. The focus on the formation of identities,an important theme of research on South Asia from the 1980s onwards, attests to theshared notion among the authors of a paucity of research in understanding the mak-ing of Dalit identities. As Rawat points out, the question of identity is the fulcrumof Dalit political struggle; the political stakes of the classification and representationof Dalits are immense (p. 121). An attendant question that these scholars ask is aboutthe insidiousness of caste, especially its practices of untouchability, outlawed by the

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

RM

IT U

nive

rsity

] at

05:

36 0

8 M

arch

201

3

204 India Review

Indian constitution in 1950, but a feature of the everyday life of urban and rural Dalitsin various parts of India. These works prod us to refocus our attention to the ques-tion of ideology, consciousness, and the culture of marginalized groups. Moreover, theyencourage us to interrogate the assumptions underlying the dominant representationsof Dalits by the government and other important actors like social scientists, opinionmakers, and policy makers. The study of the cultural politics of Dalits in all three worksthus involves a two-fold process: a deconstruction of the dominant representation ofDalits and an understanding of the processes that produce Dalit subjectivity.

For instance, Rawat helps us understand the socio-economic and cultural processesthat produced a Dalit identity. Rawat delineates the factors that produce oppressionand illustrates the specifically political mobilizations between the 1920s and 1950s thatled to the making of an acchut (untouchable, literally untouched by other castes) iden-tity in which Chamars played an important role. According to Rawat, what oppressesDalits is the violence of classification, the practices of untouchability, and the socio-economic processes that dispossess them of land, demand unpaid labor (begari) fromthem, and limit their possibilities on the labor market. Rawat lays immense stress on theviolence of categorization. State officials, social reformers, social scientists, and nation-alist leaders are implicated in equating Chamars with leatherwork, an occupation thatis deemed polluting according to the Hindu caste system. As mentioned earlier, Rawatsystematically deconstructs the coupling of Chamars with leatherwork by demonstrat-ing how a majority of the Chamars were in fact tenants on agricultural lands and werealso agrarian laborers. He also points out that Chamars were weavers and workers inthe jute and cotton textile industries of Calcutta and Kanpur. He buttresses his claim bypointing out that Chamars were active participants in the farmers’ agitation of the 1920sbecause their “livelihood and dignity” were threatened by the landlords’ (zamindars)policies of evicting tenants. Similarly, he contests the easy association of Chamars withleatherwork by pointing out that the leather industry in Uttar Pradesh was dominatedby Muslims in the nineteenth century. The increase in the number of Chamars in theleather industry (64 percent of the workers in the industry by the 1940s were Chamars)was “not because of any tradition but because this was one of the few employmentopportunities available to them” (p. 115). Rawat thus contradicts the easy associationof Chamars with leatherwork by highlighting the myriad forms of labor they engagedin the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and by asserting that the “chamariza-tion” of the leather industry was a myth enabled by the politics of categorization andthe processes of dispossession of Chamars from land.

Rawat’s reading of the history of Chamars in north India provokes us to rethinkthe agrarian and labor history of the region. It highlights the possibilities of DalitStudies and its potential to complicate, nuance, and challenge entrenched shibbolethsof historical change in South Asia. Unlike Rawat, Narayan does not disturb the asso-ciation of Chamars with leatherwork: the caste-based profession of Chamar men “wasskinning and tanning dead animals, especially cattle,” while Chamar women cut theumbilical cords of newborn babies and cleaned the “pollutants of mother and child”(p. 7). Narayan is not invested in deconstructing social categories. In fact, categories areinvested with explanatory powers—stories collected from his respondents make senseonly by situating “each respondent in the social strata to which he or she belonged”

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

RM

IT U

nive

rsity

] at

05:

36 0

8 M

arch

201

3

Dalit Studies and the Politics of Recognition 205

(p. xxxii). But, more importantly, he does not disturb caste categories because the Dalitleader Kanshi Ram, who was the founder of the Bahujan Samaj Party and Mayawati’smentor, believed that Dalits could strategically use caste for their emancipation (p. 103).In Narayan’s structural view of Dalits, the worldview of respondents belonging to theChamar and Pasi castes was shaped by their location in the social strata. The physi-cal manifestation of different social locations took the form of separate localities forvarious Dalit communities in the villages of Uttar Pradesh. In Narayan’s view, caste isthe most important feature of everyday life and differences in social location of castesresults in different experiences, identities, and histories (p. 16). The Chamars of UttarPradesh countered the stigma associated with polluting work by starting a social move-ment to shed polluting caste-based occupations in the 1950s. In Narayan’s view, theNara (umbilical cord) Maveshi (cattle) Movement helped the Chamars of Uttar Pradeshappropriate processes of modernity, like secular education, print capitalism, migrationto cities, and the adoption of new occupations like “brick-making, house constructionand rickshaw pulling” (p. 52). The appropriation of modernity produced a new con-sciousness that developed and thrived in the Dalit public sphere. Narayan, like Rawatand Hardtmann, envisions the Dalit public sphere as an alternate space where stories ofhistorical oppression, stigma, and humiliation are circulated and a sense of “dignity andself-respect” inculcated among the Dalit public. The stories of oppression, the recount-ing of heroic deeds of Dalit icons like Ambedkar, Phule, Jhakaribai, and Udadevi (p. 68),and the imagination of self-respect and dignity led to the politicization of Dalits thatenabled the ascent of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in the 1980s. Narayan draws acausal link between the creation of a Dalit public, where a Dalit identity is articulatedand reconstructed, and the acquisition of political power. The attainment of politicalpower manifested itself in the usurpation of public space. The social space of Dalits,hitherto restricted to segregated pockets in villages and cities, was transformed with therise of the Bahujan Samaj Party. The attainment of power facilitated the symbolic pol-itics of redesigning public space through the erection of statues of dalit icons like B.RAmbedkar, Mayawati, Eklavya, Ravidas, Gautam Buddha, Jhalkaribai, and Udadevi.

Like Rawat, Narayan also posits that the formation of a Dalit identity is a histori-cal process enabled by the political mobilization of former untouchables. In this sense,both Rawat and Narayan share with E. P. Thompson the belief that the formation ofidentity is enabled and shaped by political action.9 Like Rawat, Narayan also imagines“Dalit” as an umbrella term that includes various Dalit castes that align with the BSP atvarious historical moments; their affiliation is not “natural” but historically contingent.In Narayan’s rendering, Dalit identity is not homogenous or stable. The formation ofa Dalit public in some parts of north India is a narrative of the dominance of Chamarswithin the Dalit movement; other Dalit castes were unhappy with the Chamar domi-nance of the BSP (p. 151). The reason these communities identified with the categoryof Dalit and aligned with the BSP was because of their aspiration for self-esteem anddevelopment (p. 148). He states: “Dalits would be attracted to whichever political partythat panders to their self-esteem (and) assures them of an end to their socio-politicalmarginalization (p. 148).”

Narayan’s book raises many important questions and clarifies some of them. Apartfrom emphasizing the importance of processes of modern life in the formation of Dalit

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

RM

IT U

nive

rsity

] at

05:

36 0

8 M

arch

201

3

206 India Review

identities he sheds light on another important aspect: “identification.” When, how, andwhy do Chamars, Pasis, Dhobis, and other Dalit communities identify with a Dalitidentity? Why do they adopt this identity? How is it constructed? By describing thediscontent of the non-Chamar Dalit castes with the hegemony of Chamars within theBahujan Samaj Party, Narayan helps us understand that identities are contingent; Pasisand Dhobi take up the Dalit identity because the narrative of suffering and emancipa-tion links them to the stories. Similarly, they support the BSP because it helps themimagine a life of dignity. These stories circulate and help create a Dalit public. By focus-ing on the Dalit public as the site for the formation of identity, Narayan suggests thatidentity is formed through a three-pronged process. It is primarily discursive, but isenabled by face-to-face interactions and dependent on the awareness of psychosocialmarginalization. Narayan imagines the Dalit public as an alternate space where his-torical experiences of humiliations and aspirations for dignity circulate in the form ofstories and enable the formation of a Dalit identity. The identity that is formed in analternate space helps the Bahujan Samaj Party re-signify public space by installing stat-ues after they captured political power. The alternate space, where identity is producedand refined, facilitates the inscription of public space with symbolic artifacts of Dalitidentity.

As we have already seen, Hardtmann also uses the lens of an alternate public tostudy the Dalit movement. Her important contribution, however, is her focus on Dalitactivism. She tracks the practices of Dalit activists in the Dalit counter-public fromthe 1990s and suggests that their practices offer insights into the formation of iden-tity (p. 13). Hardtmann focuses mostly on discursive practices of activists and arguesthat even though they may be separated by physical distance or ideological differencesthey have “common points of references” and tacit knowledge of the “other” withinand outside Dalit communities (p. 226). The common mental maps of activists are animportant feature of Dalit identity. They help them agree on common points in thewake of bitter debates and disagreements. According to Hardtmann, Dalit activistsemphasize their distinction from “the Hindus” (p. xii). She argues that a Dalit iden-tity is formed not only in contradistinction to a Hindu identity, but also throughdebates among Dalits in the counter-public on various religious and political issues.The counter-public, then, is the space for the formation of identity by marginalizedgroups.10

All the three authors thus emphasize the discursive aspects of the formation of Dalitidentity. One of the key underlying assumptions of all the scholars is that identitiesare fashioned within discourse and therefore it is essential to focus on the discursivepractices of actors and the historical contexts within which a Dalit identity is pro-duced. Similarly, they also emphasize how social identities (as achhuts, chamars, andpasis) and political identities (as Dalits) were braided together in the context of twen-tieth century Uttar Pradesh. Moreover, they work with and extend Jurgen Habermas’idea of a public sphere. Habermas imagined a public sphere in which the bourgeoisare engaged in rational and critical discourse in eighteenth–nineteenth century Europe.What Rawat, Narayan, and Hardtmann do is address the blind spot in Habermas’argument. They study how social movements produce discourse, influence democraticpolitics, and shape identities.11 By opening up the possibility of multiple public spheres,

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

RM

IT U

nive

rsity

] at

05:

36 0

8 M

arch

201

3

Dalit Studies and the Politics of Recognition 207

as evidenced by their notions of an alternate or counter-public, they also move beyondHabermas’ assumption that a State has one public sphere. The standpoint of the Dalitmovement is enunciated in the alternate public sphere. As Rawat argues, by the 1950s“the Dalit of Uttar Pradesh had crafted a well-defined agenda and a way of thinking,”not just about Dalits but also about Hindu society and the dominant Congress party(p. 179).

Narayan, Rawat, and Hardtmann eloquently capture the standpoint of some mem-bers of the Dalit social movement, particularly those of the Chamars of Uttar Pradeshin the twentieth century. In doing so, they elucidate one of the seminal interventions ofDalit Studies in terms of its theory of knowledge. Dalit Studies is not just knowledgeabout Dalits, but it is also sensitive to the perspective of Dalits and able to imagine adialogic relationship with the social and political agendas of Dalit social movementsnot just in Uttar Pradesh but all over India. It exhibits willingness on the part of socialscientists to grasp changing meanings of what it means to be a Dalit in twenty-firstcentury India and what it meant to be a Dalit (or untouchable) in centuries past. Thesenew meanings are produced within the vibrant Dalit public sphere and highlight theaffective aspects of everyday experience, stigma, humiliation, anger, and alienation, andan analysis that links everyday experience to the position of Dalits within the Hinducaste system, and to the practices of State governance.12 In its attempt to apprehend theconsciousness of subordinate groups and reconstruct the mental maps of Dalits, DalitStudies borrows from the programmatic assertions of Subaltern Studies, especially itsingenious methods of reading official documents “against the grain” and its impetus tomove beyond discourses of the nation state.13 It is no surprise, therefore, that Rawatand Narayan acknowledge their intellectual debt to certain projects classified withinthe umbrella of Subaltern Studies. Unlike Subaltern Studies, which is recognized forits trenchant critique of colonial and postcolonial modernity and enlightenment episte-mologies, Dalit Studies highlights how historical actors and movement used processesof modernity strategically for their own ends.

But, the promise of Dalit Studies will materialize only if there is a critical engage-ment with it. The claims of scholars identifying with this label have to be tested and thepolitical stakes of the project have to be quizzed and refined. For instance, what are thepolitical implications of Rawat’s claim that a “united acchut identity and politics” tookshape in 1920s and endured until the 1950s and has refused to bow to the more power-ful identities of nation, nationalism, Hindutva, and class-based formulations (p. 184)?Similarly, what is gained and lost in Hardtmann’s claim that Dalit activists, despitetheir ideological differences have familiar mental maps? One of the causalities of thisline of reasoning is the lack of attention to the contingent nature of identities or tothe socio-historical contexts within which they are made and unmade. What are thestakes of imagining an absolute Dalit identity that is in confrontation with other morepowerful identities? How then do we make sense of Dalits who took part in variouspolitical movements at particular historical moments, including the farmers’ agitationsand the communist movement in twentieth century India?14 Finally, does the focuson discourse as the premier site for the formation of Dalit subjects prevent an ade-quate appreciation of the socio-historical contexts that shape identity? An attention tothe latter may point to a deeper understanding of the relationship between the Dalit

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

RM

IT U

nive

rsity

] at

05:

36 0

8 M

arch

201

3

208 India Review

and other public spheres. The success of Dalit Studies will depend on not only how itexplicates its theory of knowledge and refines its standpoint but also complicates ourunderstanding of categories and processes that produce subordinate groups in modernIndia.

NOTES

I would like to thank Sunila Kale and the editors of India Review for their prescient comments and suggestions.I would also like to thank the South Asia Council at Yale University for providing institutional support, a stim-ulating environment, and most importantly, time for writing this review. Moreover, I would also like to thankMadhavi Murty for being a sounding board. Needless to say, they bear no responsibility for errors of omissionand commission.

1. Apart from the three books under review here, see, for instance, Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalitsand the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Manuela Ciotti, Retro-Modern India: Forging the Low-Caste Self (London: Routledge, 2010); Johannes Beltz, Mahar, Buddhist,and Dalit: Religious Conversion and Socio-Political Emancipation (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2005);Milind Wakankar, Subalternity and Religion: The Prehistory of Dalit Empowerment in South Asia (London:Routledge, 2011); Balmurli Natarajan, The Culturization of Caste in India: Identity and Inequality in aMulticultural Age (London: Routeldge, 2011); M.S.S. Pandian, Brahmin and Non-Brahmin: Genealogies ofthe Tamil Political Present (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007); Sukhadeo Thorat, Dalits in India: Search for aCommon Destiny (New Delhi: Sage, 2009); Gail Omvedt, Understanding Caste: From Buddha to Ambedkar(New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2011); and Gopal Guru, ed., Humiliation: Claims and Context (New Delhi:Oxford University Press, 2009).

2. The term not only conveyed the consciousness among dalits that they were historically oppressed but alsoserved as a useful antidote to contest the dominant representation of dalits as Harijans (God’s children) anduntouchables.

3. Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in India (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2003).

4. The term silent revolution refers to the political ascendance of the middle or peasant castes that are catego-rized as Other Backward Classes by the census reports. The rise of Mulayam Singh Yadav and Laloo PrasadYadav–protégés of the socialist leader Rammanohar Lohia–to political power in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar isemblematic of the silent revolution. The dalits occupy a position that is beneath the middle castes in the Hindusocial hierarchy, but the rise of the Mayawati led Bahujan Samaj Party to political power in Uttar Pradesh in1993, in alliance with Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party, is part of the broader process in which disen-franchised groups became politically ascendant in the 1980s and 1990s. A feature of the emergence of partiesthat mobilized backward castes was the demand for affirmative action in government jobs and educationalinstitutions.

5. See for instance the 2004 article by Savyasaachi, “Dalit Studies: Exploring Criteria for a New Discipline,”Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 39, No 17 (2004), pp. 1658–60.

6. See, for instance, the special issue of Seminar edited by Ramnarayan Rawat in 2006. “Dalit Perspectives: ASymposium on the Changing Contours on Dalit Politics.” Semiar, No. 558 (February 2006), http://india-seminar.com/semframe.html.

7. See, for instance, Aditya Nigam, “Secularism, Modernity, Nation: Epistemology of the Dalit Critique,”Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 35, No. 48 (2000), pp. 4256–68.

8. See Manuel Castells, “Towards a Sociology of the Network Society”, Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 29, No. 5(2000), pp. 693–99.

9. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1963)10. On this point, see also Nancy Fraser and Geoff Eley: Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A con-

tribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy” in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the PublicSphere (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), pp. 109–42; and Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and PoliticalCultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the PublicSphere (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), pp. 289–339.

11. On this point, see Craig Calhoun, “Introduction,” in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), pp. 36–37.

12. I am borrowing here from Raymond Williams’ notion of “structures of feeling.” See Raymond Williams,Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 128–35.

13. For an engaged reading of the Subaltern Studies project see David Ludden, “Introduction: A Brief History ofSubalternity,” in David Ludden, ed., Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical Histories, Contested Meaning, andthe Globalization of South Asia (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), pp. 1–42.

14. Dilip Menon, Caste, Nationalism and Communism in South India: Malabar 1900–1948 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1994); Juned Shaikh, “Translating Marx: Mavali, Dalit, and the Making ofMumbai’s Working Class, 1928–1935,” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XLVI, No. 31 (2011), pp. 65–73.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

RM

IT U

nive

rsity

] at

05:

36 0

8 M

arch

201

3