The afterlife of colonial caste: The Caste Question by Anupama Rao

Focusing on the history and politics of Dalit political formations, and covering the period from the mid-19th century to the present, Anupama Rao's new work powerfully illuminates how "a new political collectivity was constituted by re-signifying the Dalit's negative identity within the caste structure into positive political value." Far from presenting a heroic history, Rao, a professor of Southasian history at Barnard College, suggests instead that the "terms of Dalit enfranchisement and the forms of governmental reparation for stigmatized personhood have produced new forms of vulnerability."

By tracking the history of stigma, and its re-definition via constitutional policy and legislative action, Rao illustrates how this dynamic history of untouchability transformed relations between Dalits, caste Hindus and the state in post-Independence India. Once a form of social experience identified with tradition, religion and stigmatised labour, Dalit identity was successfully redefined through these years as a form of vulnerability that constituted the grounds for political recognition. As Rao stresses throughout the book, this was the paradoxical outcome of minoritarian enfranchisement: the civil-rights regime produced not the emancipated citizen but rather the vulnerable subject, one who was by definition at risk of violence from many directions.

Rao's tremendously important work emerges amidst a widening scholarly interest in caste studies. The centrality of western India, and especially Maharashtra, to caste studies is intriguing, and Rao's own work might have done better to engage the question of why the narrative of caste politicisation has been so regularly located in the state's recent history. Earlier groundbreaking work by such figures as Eleanor Zelliot, Rosalind O'Hanlon and Dhananjay Keer has spawned new appraisals of caste and caste power; more recent works by Anand Teltumbde, Gail Omvedt and Uma Chakravarti have retained the critique of caste formation. Important memoirs published in the past few years have further provided firsthand information on the visible as well as hidden complicities between the Indian state, the symbolic power of gender, and the constant re-invigoration of caste. Building on these important studies, The Caste Question takes the study of caste to a fresh, theoretical understanding of the logic of Indian liberal modernity, exceptionalism and legality.

The text itself is divided into two parts, the first of which tracks 'emancipation' from the late 19th century to the 1950s, the battle over rights and social recognition. The second part discusses the 'paradox' of emancipation, or the contradiction of the continued experience of being marked as vulnerable citizens subjects from the 1950s to the present. Rao starts by detailing the political and activist work by generations of activists from the Mahar Dalit community (the largest Scheduled Caste group in Maharashtra), especially focusing on the Satyashodhak Samaj, the liberation theology established by Jotirao Phule in the late 19th century. In this context, she explores how 19th-century caste radicals argued for a fundamentally secular understanding of the artificial distinctions between the religious and the political, and fore-grounded the failure of religion to encompass the totalising character of caste oppression. From here, Rao moves through discussions of the role of women's status as a means of refashioning the community, the history of the British army in providing employment, the vagaries of British government ethnographies (especially the assurance inherent in the 'martial races' theory) in determining forms of employment for Mahars, and the fact that caste radicals recognised the key role of Hindu marriage as the hinge between intimate and political life. Rao ends this first chapter by building a case for appreciating why and how the Dalit public sphere was rendered so predominantly male; and with that, the centrality of the rhetorical and symbolic memory of stigma to the claim of equality.

Next, Rao turns to the interwar years, documenting Dalit activism over access to water and temple facilities, characterised by claims to public access. Importantly, these claims were "contingent on a conception of the colonial public rather than a colonial conception of community". Even more powerfully, the author scrutinises legal cases to reveal how "Dalit demands for social inclusion were couched in terms of civic rights and natural justice," even as they were "recast by courts as claims upon private property". Indeed, the power of the court in shifting the meaning of claims submerged untouchable political demands under a language of liberal property that could itself legitimise exclusion. Second, by rendering caste into a 'property' of the self, and real property (such as temples) as extensions of persons, "colonial law courts mobilized discourses of private property to strengthen, rather than weaken, the power of caste Hindu claims that segregation was a customary practice dictated by religious custom." Caste Hindus thus read the widening Dalit politicisation as evidence of "transgressive sexual desire" and violence. As the symbolic worlds of Dalit and Gandhian protest collided, they revealed radically different perspectives on violence; Dalits were thus increasingly defined by the colonial-caste consensus that articulated custom with property, and which reduced untouchability to Gandhian paradigms of hygiene and cleanliness. Caste exclusion and segregation were thus legitimised through a language derived from liberal property regimes.

In the last chapter of the first section, Rao probes the nationalisation of the Dalit question, focusing on legality, regionalism and the competing symbolic rhetoric that shaped the politics of caste reform. Re-centring the achievements of B R Ambedkar, Rao tracks the manner by which he successfully reached beyond regional politics, posing 'the' Dalit identity as one of urgent national interest. Ambedkar prepared the way for significant legal protection, and his distinctive re-signification of Dalit identity made such a Dalit identity integral and unique within Hinduism. The inextricable centrality of Dalit identity to Hinduism was Ambedkar's only victory; even more crucially, he named Dalit identity in ethical terms. The success of Ambedkarite politics lay in rejecting the claim of Hindu ethicality, because as Ambedkar proved repeatedly, Hinduism itself was premised on inequality. While Mohandas K Gandhi depended on exacerbating knowledge of stigmatised identities so as to mobilise to overcome them, Ambedkar's fitting response was that historical, inherited marginalisation made Dalit identity a permanent and embodied reality. Here, Rao's reading of Ambedkar powerfully demonstrates the importance of the stigmatised identity in shaping claims to belonging, rights as well as critique itself. Simultaneously, Rao sheds light on Ambedkar's faith in the power of the state, and his sustained engagement with liberal categories of mobilisation: individual, minority,nation, rights.

Postcolonial critique
The second part of The Caste Question turns to changing the structures of Dalit life in Maharashtra over the last 40 years. Rao discusses the manner by which state efforts to contain caste atrocities produced the knowledge of the 'Dalit' as vulnerable, subject primarily to judicial convention. The state's privileging of the language of equality and access further set in motion a politics of authenticity that continued to invoke violence and vulnerability to realise claims. Discussing the heightened symbolic and public politics of the period between 1960 and 1979, the author proceeds to look at specific political actions under the viduthalai siruthaigal (the Dalit Panthers, the Tamil people's movement and political party), and student struggles to rename Marathwada University after Ambedkar. Powerfully documented here is the mutually reinforcing relationship between Dalit countercultural forms and new formations of anti-Dalit violence, the history of the Shiv Sena, the Republican Party of India's conflict with the Panthers, and ultimately the emergence of a new charismatic though 'masculine' cultural politics around the 'Dalit' identity.

In exploring the intersection of local caste and family relations with the legal apparatus from 1963 to 1991, Rao undertakes a passionate discussion on the uncertain status of sexual violence as caste violence. As she describes, issues of scandal, morality, shame and community conspire to render sexual violence, as well as expressions of caste masculinity, illegible as caste crime. By turning to the embodied realities of caste, and the politics of marriage as a hinge between community and citizenship, Rao maintains her focus on the changing politics of Dalit political and social agency.

The Caste Question ends with a discussion on the paradox by which "Dalit selfhood and the caste body have been historically central to the problematic of Dalit emancipation precisely because the stigma of caste in a birthmark, it is what 'can't be cast off by dying'." In this, the pivotal role of Dalit politics in expanding the domain of politics by making manifest the relationship between violence and politics is powerfully illustrated. There is no question that Rao's work highlights complex historical detail, furnishing important information on the efforts made by marginalised castes to alter existing relations of caste and community, and re-directing the dominant pre-suppositions of caste Hinduism and its related structures of privilege. In this, the author has successfully re-directed our appreciation of the afterlife of colonial categories of caste, the violent contradictions at the heart of Indian democracy, the politics of regionalism, sexuality and the integral nature of caste difference to modern India's public.

The details here are largely specific to western India, and then to its relationship with the modern country. Undeniably, Rao has provided a blue-print for a new generation of students to discuss the salience of liberalism and its requirement of stigma beyond the history of modern India. Doing so will allow us to retain a sensitivity to the growing urgency of caste politics in the nation-building project throughout the Southasian region.

~ Shefali Chandra is an assistant professor of history and area studies at Washington University in St Louis.

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