Books

VIOLENT CONJUNCTURES IN DEMOCRATIC INDIA by Amrita Basu. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2015. (First South Asian Edition, New Delhi, 2016).

THE study of Hindu-Muslim communal violence cannot be separated from the study of how, why and when Hindu communal forces – most notably those associated with the Sangh Parivar or influenced by its ideology – have assaulted Muslims. This is because from whatever government statistics that have been released, it is clear that well over 80% of all victims in such cases have been Muslims even though they constitute a mere 14% of the general population. Riots instigated against Hindus by Muslim organizations have been much rarer. Although this is a well covered subject, Amrita Basu’s latest work breaks new ground in two respects. It departs from the existing literature in identifying and explaining the structural factors behind such violence in India and, at the same time, suggests that social science literature on social movements in American and western academia can learn much in this regard from the specifically Indian experience.

The more general literature usually moves from a focus on the study of the internal resources, organizational patterns and networking arrangements of movements to how they erupted as a result of changes in the political environment to the organization of their ideological-cultural appeals to rectify presumed injustices and whether or not they succeeded in achieving their demands. Basu’s point is that these approaches by their nature miss out on registering the longer-term changes in the ‘cultural common sense’ that the forces of Hindutva, for example, have wrought in the Indian context. In Chapter 3, therefore, she presents a general typology outlining the distinctive characteristics of parties and movements that separate the two and then perceptively explains how the boundaries between them – especially in the case of the BJP and its ‘movement-structures’ (VHP, RSS, Bajrang Dal, etc.) – are also necessarily blurred. Central to her critique of this broader literature on social movements is her explanation of Hindutva sponsored anti-minority violence which constitutes the basic thrust of the book.

To explain why the frequency and intensity of such localized and periodic eruptions varies even between states ruled by the BJP, Basu identifies five fundamental variables and then tests the efficacy of her arguments in relation to these key factors, both spatially and temporally. She focuses on the time periods 1990-92 and 2000-2002 when she carried out a detailed empirical study to compare the record of four states that have been ruled for at least two terms by the BJP, namely Gujarat, UP, HP and Rajasthan. This is then woven into a broader narrative of the rise of the BJP/Sangh from the late 1980s till the achievement of majority rule at the Centre in 2014.

This work is truly original and takes forward previous studies of communal violence, significant as those undoubtedly were. The late Asghar Ali Engineer was the first major chronicler/theorizer of such violence, providing an urban social geography whereby such anti-Muslim outbursts took place in towns where percentage-wise the Muslim population was not so small as to reduce the potential political benefits of organized Sangh violence, nor too large to make it potentially counterproductive. Two scholars not of Indian origin – Paul Brass and Steven Wilkinson – have added their own insights, with the first highlighting the mechanics and justification for such riots involving ‘fire-tenders’, ‘conversion-specialists’ and ‘blame-displacers’; and the second arguing that in states where there were many parties and, therefore, considerable party competition for the vote of sizeable Muslim communities, violence would be much less likely. Ashutosh Varshney has argued that this would also be the case where there are civic associations like trade unions, festival groups, clubs, NGOs, professional associations, and so on which, in their membership and practice, cut across religious divides. Pradeep Chibber has emphasized the dangers posed by the presence of sharp social cleavages that themselves are reflected in distinct party affiliations.

In response, Basu makes the powerful point that it is not just negative factors, i.e. institutional weaknesses of various kinds that must be taken into account, but often the very strength of organizations/institutions that promotes such violent eruptions. She causally links her ‘independent variable’ of anti-minority violence to five key dependent variables and to their interactions – (i) internal party unity or factionalism; (ii) the nature of the relationship between party (BJP) and its cohort movement-structures; (iii) whether the BJP is in power (as part of a coalition or on its own) at the state level; (iv) in power at the Centre (in a coalition or on its own); and (v) the range, character and caste composition of opposing parties and movements. This book is structured accordingly.

Chapter 1 (after the Introduction which presents her principal hypotheses) gives an overview of the ‘dialectic between states, parties and movements’ in five historical phases – (1947-67) the period of Congress dominance; (1966-89) Congress weakening and shift to authoritarianism and pale saffron politics with the JP movement legitimizing the RSS, as well as the rise of social movements of the poor and displaced; (1989-99) Mandal and Mandir, the regeneration of Hindutva appeal and politics; (1999-2004) Hindutva reinforcement with the NDA at the Centre; (2004-14) Congress rule for two terms at the Centre does not prevent (and even abets) Hindutva advances especially in BJP ruled states in the fields of education, cow slaughter bans, restrictions on religious conversions to Islam or Christianity while promoting conversions towards a Brahminized Hinduism.

Her conclusions are that (a) BJP ruled states will to a greater or lesser extent push the Hindutva agenda; (b) Hindutva inspired movements last longer and remain stronger than other movements; (c) unlike other parties, BJP retains close ties to VHP and other Sangh cohorts coordinated by the RSS; and (d) BJP ruled states more strongly discriminate against Muslims and are further supported in this when the BJP is in power at the Centre.

Chapter 2 on the party-movement nexus highlights what Basu takes as the four major ‘game-changing’ movements since independence, namely the JP movement, Mandal that propelled the rise of ex-socialist JD-type backward caste parties to prominence, Naxalites, and Hindutva movements, especially Ayodhya. Of particular value here is Basu’s portrayal of how the BJP/Sangh has been exceptional in the scale and depth of its ‘activist orientation, ideological commitments and organizational cohesion.’ Chapter 3 provides a detailed narrative of the Ramjanmabhoomi campaign and its much greater success as compared to the anti-globalization efforts of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, mainly because the party was committed to the first but not the second. Chapter 4 looks at the two UP towns of Khurja and Bijnor that suffered anti-Muslim violence in the early 1990s. This account serves as an empirical testing ground for her earlier stipulated hypotheses and the lesson to be drawn here is that even the provincial state must be disaggregated to understand how local and municipal level bodies (and the police) promote and carry out communal activity and condone violence. As the BSP rose, and class and caste mobilizational politics emerged, Sangh influence receded.

Chapter 5 is simply one of the best and most comprehensive summaries available anywhere on the prelude, course and aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom – a ‘perfect storm’ and an extremely ‘effective mobilization of hatred’ carried out via the remarkable collusion of party, movements, state and central governments. Gujarat is where Hindutva politics is most safely and strongly ensconced, because this is (i) where low caste and leftist movements have historically been weak; (ii) there exists a relatively strong coalition of upper and middle castes; (iii) BJP is more internally unified; (iv) a pale saffron Congress is the only party challenger; and (v) Sanskritization of lower and backward castes, e.g. Patidars (once Shudras), has been more successful in preventing separate lower caste identity assertion as in UP. In Chapters 6, 7 and 8, Basu applies her basic conceptual framework to understand Hindutva’s ups and downs in UP, HP and Rajasthan while the final Chapter 9 summarizes her main findings.

Among Basu’s conclusions are the following: The BJP in UP/HP/Gujarat is most militant when most unified, except in Rajasthan when it was more factionalized (2003-08). But in HP, the Sangh is least militant with occasional violence directed more at Christians than Muslims. The VHP is most powerful and sustains its militancy in Gujarat where the Sangh operates a dense network of welfare agencies catering across castes/classes and has strong diasporic support. It is less effective in UP because of separate OBC and SC based movements and parties and because Muslims are more collectively organized and politically aware. The Sangh fares better in Rajasthan because it has mobilized tribals (Meenas) and Gujjars around their demands. When the BJP is in power at state and/or Centre, it is more militant and vicious. As for countervailing parties, movements and castes, UP stands out for its multiplicity of such factors.

But a caveat must be entered here. In the 2014 general elections, the BJP swept the state, and this has to be explained by factors other than the variables identified by Basu. But the real test of how well her argument stands up will come in the 2017 assembly elections, which in all likelihood will be preceded by calculated efforts at communal polarization through instigation of local but widespread violence between Hindus and Muslims in the expectation that this will pay off for the BJP electorally.

All in all, this is an empirically grounded work of genuine scholarship, persuasively argued and lucidly written, that will not only be a standard reference for some time to come but also sets a new benchmark for conducting future studies of communal violence. My one major note of dissent is that the work comes across as more sanguine than this reviewer would be about the state and health of Indian democracy. Basu registers, without in any way criticizing, the view that there has been a ‘second democratic upsurge’, while Jaffrelot, also cited here, has called it the ‘silent revolution’. Is this an accurate rendering or incautious hyperbole?

Yes, lower caste mobilizations have been a welcome democratic advance, just as the anti-racist civil rights movement and second-wave feminism were in the US in the 1960s and ’70s. But capitalist democracy not only sets limits to how far democracy can advance, it also works to reverse progress on the democratic front. Any commitment to progressively strengthen the substantive dimensions of democracy (i.e., a popular empowerment going beyond the political and proceduralist domain) will always be in tension with the changing dynamic of accumulation imperatives. The worldwide shift to a more right wing neoliberal form of capitalist globalization necessarily requires for its stabilization – given the nation state system – a right wing shift in politics and ideology that is invariably nationally specific in its character. Western and Indian democracy are thereby weakened and thinned despite anti-racist, feminist and lower caste mobilizations, unless these in themselves show the promise of taking a serious anti-capitalist direction, which they have not so far done.

The end result is that there emerges, as a result of these struggles, a considerably greater social diversity of the upper and middle classes which, of course, is only to be welcomed. But this also provides even greater stability to elite and class rule overall; not to mention that in the Indian case it has been accompanied by the growing cultural-political influence of Hindutva and the already unmatched, but still expanding network in civil society of Sangh controlled associations of all kinds. Basu defines the BJP as a ‘rightist Hindu nationalist cadre party’ when in fact it is a far right party and an organic part of a much larger far right force with obvious fascist characteristics. The Congress for a long time now has been a straightforwardly right wing party, not a centrist one.

Perhaps the ruthless performance of the BJP under Modi – its determination to take over educational institutions, change the terms of public discourse, generate fear and self-censorship, and thereby restrict freedom of speech and association – while providing much greater leeway for Sangh foot soldiers to carry out moral policing, physical intimidation and violence against presumed opponents – may persuade a reassessment of her characterization of the BJP. One needs to be more skeptical of the kind of admiring liberal discourse on India that mistakes the longevity and durability of certain macro-structures of Indian democracy – coexisting with the institutionalization of highly undemocratic, and indeed routinely violent, realities of life at the meso- and micro-levels – as evidence of a ‘democratic deepening’!

Achin Vanaik

former Professor, University of Delhi

 

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SERVITUDE: Political Economy of Tea Plantations in Colonial Assam by Rana P. Behal. Tulika Books, Delhi, 2014.

THE Indian subcontinent established itself as the largest exporter of tea on the international market between 1890 and 1947. The rise and growth of tea plantations in the Brahmaputra Valley of Assam since the late-1830s was the mainstay of this history. It was the biggest agro-industrial venture and, equally, the largest employer. The book under discussion presents an exposition of the plantations under ‘capitalism of its colonial variant’, its labour-management relationship, the way the young European planter graduated to the ‘coolie driver’, and labour resistance.

Behal suggests, qua Walter Rodney,1 that the plantations developed as capitalist economy in the colonial context. Labour servitude, the dependency relationship and ‘the appallingly low’ standard of living of workers characterized the labour regime. Behal modifies the thesis that the indenture labour was ‘a new system of slavery’.2 He highlights the elaborate ways which the planters devised in the midst of indenture legislation to create a culture of servitude in workers. They improvized newer methods of control for perpetuating the dependency relationship in the post-indenture era as well.

The plantations adopted a labour-intensive method of production. Workers were subject to legal cum extra-legal and non-market cum market methods of coercion and restriction with a view to securing maximum labour during the era of penal contract (indenture) labour system (1863-1919). The Workmen’s Breach of Contract Act (1859-1926), additionally gave support to labour servitude. Both time-expired and other local workers were contracted under the concerned act. Here, planters treated the bonus of Rs 12 paid to workers as an advance and, practically, adjusted it with workers’ wages. In the era of so-called free labour since 1927, planters increased employment of the faltu/basti labourers (ex-garden workers settled on government and private lands) at lower wages that helped depress wages in general. They continued to deploy the benefits of service tenancy, easy advances, credits and subsidized rice for creating a dependent, attached workforce. They also devised newer ways, such as wage agreements among themselves, in order to keep wages uncompetitive from as early as 1929.

The above mentioned labour relations were responsible both for a crisis of reproduction of humankind and an extremely unequal, roughshod social milieu. Planters continuously recruited migrant labour for offsetting the high rates of mortality of the recruits, both in the course of transportation and in the tea gardens, as well as due to desertion. A low birth rate, high abortion and morbidity rates, and absenteeism to the tune of 25 per cent further compounded the difficulty. Behal’s exposition debunks the dominant revisionist historiography. The latter underplays the lack of freedom involved in indenture and gives primacy to the economic rationality of a system, which supposedly benefited employers and labourers alike.3 However, during 1840-61, that is the period before the indenture system became institutionalized and when labour servitude was not a defining moment, the Katcharis workers went on strike in 1848 for higher wages and fair treatment; others too did the same in 1859. This calls for a historical imagining that may not dovetail well with the ‘hundred years of servitude’ narrative.

The policy of laissez faire maintained by the colonial state actually meant, Behal argues, that the state assisted European capital. It transformed the migrant labourer into a coerced labourer through a legal framework. It offered huge acreage to capital at throwaway prices, invested in the construction of railways and roads for capital accumulation, financed R&D for improved productivity and a standardized product, and donated funds for the expansion of the export market. It did not bother much, for curbing the planters who rarely paid the statutory wages to workers and forced workers to do more than nine-hour long workday and full Sunday work. Clearly, discriminatory justice was a rule rather than an exception. Behal’s findings strengthen the thesis that ‘the visible hand of the state’ was a crucial factor responsible for economic growth/underdevelopment at all historical phases.4 It also critiques another revisionist argument: the British state adopted sympathetic approaches on both fronts of addressing the grievance of capital against both the shortage and indiscipline of labour, and workers’ complaints of abuse and torture in the ‘coolie trade’.5

The planters ensured handsome dividends for the investors despite falling prices between the 1870s-1900s and fluctuating prices in the subsequent period by deploying various means to intensify labour. Workload roughly increased by 25 to 30 per cent in the 1890s (p. 259). The labour productivity continually rose in the 20th century. New scientific inputs became available from the R&D activity to reduce the number of workers per acre in the 1930s-40s. What was the connection, if any, between those two economic phenomena, on one side, and with workers’ resistance to intensification of labour, on the other? Unfortunately, this is not explored. Behal clubs together ‘extensification of labour’ and appropriation of absolute value with ‘intensified labour’ and appropriation of relative surplus. The reinforced supervisory effort and ticca (additional pay for extra work) benefits helped secure, underlines Behal, a continual intensification of labour. Ian J. Kerr modifies the Marxian understanding from his study of a similar socio-economic phenomenon: mechanization is not a necessary vehicle of intensified labour and relative surplus; appropriation of absolute surplus and relative surplus could be coeval.6

The book integrates the experience of workers and labour resistance with the study of political economy. Workers were not gullible, ignorant and mute victims of labour servitude, highlights Behal. The ex-tea garden labourers displayed a tendency to increasingly settle as tenant cultivators on the government cum private land and/or become service tenants on the plantation land. Behal does not read off whatsoever workers’ resistance to miserable proletarianization and the desire for a modicum of respectable tenant life. The book, unnecessarily, reproduces the planter’s pejorative terms, like ‘jungly’, ‘coolie’ (p. 257). Workers preserved their diverse caste and ethnic identities; yet, they forged solidarity to undertake regular collective protests (pp. 277-8). How did they maintain diverse identities beyond the practice of endogamous marriage? What accounts for the coexistence of diverse identities and collective political actions? Again, there is insufficient elaboration. The book conveys a minimal import of ‘new social history of labour’. The analysis of workers’ notions of indignity, fair income, just reproduction and resentment over all this, surfaced as a synchronic entity of fixed texture that was wrapped in time. The wage struggle is dealt with as a matter of gap between earnings and the cost of living index than that of work efforts and reproduction preferences. The fight against sexual harassment and flogging of women and boys does not come up as a pointer to the social ethics of workers collective.

Women workers were subject to sexual demands of planters; the latter at times forced women to share a polyandrous relation to help secure labour supply stability. Placed in a subhuman existence, women negotiated the reproduction burden through abortion (p. 260). Behal does not take any issue with Samita Sen’s finding that women at times saw an opportunity in sexual liaison with the garden sardar.7 A more focused examination of women’s experiences on the plantations still waits for a researcher.

The workers showed a great deal of awareness of their rights, lodged complaints and increasingly undertook subterranean as well as organised resistance, underscores Behal. They articulated their grievances and demands in a clearer language by the late 1930s; their demand now became economic-in-nature. Their awareness of the rights, notions of objectionable issues and resolutions to the problem did emerge and develop, it could be said, in a sequential manner that unfolded with own historical specificity.

The history of workers’ awareness and resistance should have been interwoven with the earlier discussion, where the planters looked like despotic rulers and workers as coerced and unreflexive. Such a split, as it is, in the narrative structure conveys an impression that workers’ resistance had little impact over the planters’ behaviour pattern, although the former influenced changes in the labour laws. Therefore, a slippage like this occurs: ‘The planters enjoyed unquestioned control over the labour force’ (p. 134). An analytical framework, where social struggle is a participant in development, is needed.

An informed reader may find certain improvisation of methods here vis a vis Behal’s published articles. Behal collects a couple of private papers, diaries, recollections and photographs of some planters. He uses this archive to analyze the graduation of the European planters to the ‘coolie driver’. The planters considered workers as ‘jungley’, inferior humankind, subhuman species, persons of low intellect and indolent animals. They regarded the provision of penal contract, below-subsistence wages and ostentatious flogging as necessary tools to deal with such Indian labour. Jan Breman8 and Michel Taussig9 have studied the effect of ‘estrangement’ shared by planters on their brutal attitude towards workers. Dipesh Chakrabarty10 has underlined the coexistence of modern/capitalist arrangement of production, on one side, and pre capitalist/premodern form of power, on the other. The latter explains, argues Chakrabarty, the scenario that managers organized public violent punishment to discipline and control labourers. Behal shuns such distinction; instead, his findings reveal the cultural locus of ‘mode of power’, which planters wielded.

Rana Behal suggests that the language of sources distorts our view. His narrative in itself undertakes a judicious assessment of divergent viewpoints and roles of different actors available in the archives; it juxtaposes various types of sources, and underscores the fudging of figures, critical when writing the history of wage and well-being. It discovers substantial under-reporting of those cases of workers’ attempts at desertion that were discovered and received punishment. Many such cases were not reported to the police and labour inspectors (p. 231). The imperfect official statistics of desertion cum prosecution, as it were, led T. Roy to conclude that neither wages nor the quality of life were actually worse on the plantations; that most historians have exaggerated reports of the involuntary nature of migration.11 Behal’s narrative applies ‘a close reading of conventional sources’, including the jhumar (folksong of the tea garden) to record the notion and perception shared by workers and their self-activity.

Dhiraj Kumar Nite

Ambedkar University, Delhi

 

Footnotes:

1. Walter Rodney, ’Plantation Society in Guyana’, Review IV(4), Spring 1981, pp. 643-66, Fernand Braudel Centre, Binghamton, New York.

2. Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery. Oxford University Press, London, 1974.

3. David W. Galenson, ‘The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis’, The Journal of Economic History 44(1), 1984, pp. 1-26; C. Emmer (ed.), Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labour Before and After Slavery. M Nijhoff Publisher, Dordrecht, 1986.

4. Deepak Nayyar, Catch Up: Developing Countries in the World Economy. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2013, pp. 119-121; Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011, pp. 259.

5. Tirthankar Roy, ‘Sardars, Jobbers, Kanganies: The Labour, Contractor, and Indian Economic History’, Modern Asian Studies 42(5), 2008, pp. 971-998; Peter Rob, Peasants, Political Economy and Law. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2007.

6. Ian J. Kerr, Building the Railways of the Raj 1850-1900. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1997.

7. Samita Sen, ‘Informalising Labour Recruitment: The Garden Sardar in Assam Tea Plantations’. Paper presented at International Conference on ‘Towards Global Labour History: New Comparisons’, V.V. Giri Labour Institute (Noida), 10-12 November 2005.

8. Jan Breman, Taming the Coolie Beast: Plantation and the Colonial Order in Southeast Asia. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1989.

9. Michael T. Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terra and Healing. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987.

10. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1989.

11. Tirthankar Roy, 2008, p. 988, op. cit., fn. 5.

 

THE BALLAD OF BANT SINGH: A Qissa of Courage by Nirupama Dutt. Speaking Tiger Publishing, New Delhi, 2016.

DALITS have always had a rich repertoire of diverse cultures and memories. They have their stories and music, their indigenous systems of knowledge and technological skills, their gods and goddesses, their ghosts and shamans. Their knowledge traditions comprise of an alternative set of analytical categories. Their collective memories include a record of their suffering and humiliation, their construction of the past, which Nagaraj calls the ‘algorithms’ of their resistance.1

The Ballad of Bant Singh presents an account of the life and times of a landless Dalit folk singer of Punjab. The book enables the reader to understand Punjab’s reality solely from the perspective of its oral traditions, local continuities and folklore, which emerges in complete contrast to the mainstream.

The importance of the book lies not only in presenting an account of the inspiring life of Bant Singh but also, in the process, making at least two significant contributions: first, it shows how caste and its material dimensions like birth, space and body are uniquely embedded in the real world life of Punjab. Second, it makes us critically aware of the oral tradition and folklore as an integral part of the everyday life of subaltern communities in contemporary Punjab. The colourful cultural world of Dalits, with its distinct religious underpinnings has, however, remained somewhat neglected.

Landlessness, domination, social segregation and violence are a regular feature of the daily lives of Dalits in Punjab. A major problem of her work is the effort to understand the caste problem solely through a single theoretical perspective. Conflicts over land and schools are two prominent themes that are used to understand the Dalit problem in India. The author places greater emphasis on the former and unfortunately ignores the latter. In her writing both schools seem to be separate and she does not realize the tragic implications of such bifurcation. Simply stated, the concrete and the abstract are kept separate in the work.

The most interesting and moving part of the book is the depiction of the rich and robust oral traditions which continuously survive among the marginal communities of Punjab. Bant Singh loves to recount through his ballads the rich and robust oral tradition of Punjab. Both the courage to resist the dominant forces, and the demand for just and equal socio-economic status for the subaltern, draw upon his past memories which he inherited from his grandfather. This gives him courage and inspiration to live a life better than the one forced upon him in the name of caste. He loves the lovelorn, plaintive notes of his grandfather, the qisaa of Heer-Ranjha, Sassi-Punnu and Mirza-Sahiba, the ill-fated lovers of Punjab who perished while fighting the social taboos that would not allow their union.

The stories that most find favour with him are those which concern the downtrodden, the lower castes or those who labour hard for a living. He draws on tales of valour from Sikh history and icons – heroes like Guru Gobind Singh, Bhagat Singh and Dulla Bhatti. But the songs of Udasi (a Dalit poet and singer) take him to another world, a world without oppression where everyone has enough to eat and live with dignity.

The book, however, falters is in its simplistic description of Valmiki as the patron-saint of the Mazhabi/Balmiki. It provides a rather narrow view of the rich and varied religious culture of the Dalits. Religion in Punjab is diverse, popular and historically formed. Traces of this rich history can still be found in the songs and stories which have been popularized by bards (mirasis).2 It has been argued that a long history of exclusion at the hands of caste Hindus has provided Dalits with a markedly different perspective on Indian history, society and religion.3

Humiliated communities like the Mazhabis/Balmikis still retain memories of an autonomous cultural domain outside the Brahmin dominated cultural universe. This domain survives in the form of the symbolic and religious life of the lower castes in Punjab. Their diverse patterns of worship, belief, legends, traditions and so on, reflect their experience of the world and their ways of dealing with it.4 They visit the tombs of saints and pirs and also join in the village worship of Mata Devi and Gugga Pir. Unfortunately, Nirupama Dutt’s work is unable to comprehend that diverse, dissident and colourful cultural world of the Dalits, which though diminished is still alive and flourishing.5

Reading the ballads of Bant Singh makes us aware that Dalits need to rediscover their community culture. This is critical as there has been a conscious denial of Dalit gods and goddesses, ghosts and demons, parents and grandparents, ancestral lands and customs, knowledge systems and myths which have sustained them through all the violence, expropriation and humiliation that have been perpetrated against them by the dominant castes.

Yogesh Kumar

Department of Political Science, Panjab University

 

Footnotes:

1. D.R. Nagaraj, The Flaming Feet and Other Essays: The Dalit Movement in India. Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2010.

2. Vijay Prashad, Untouchable Freedom: A Social History of a Dalit Community. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2000, p. 70.

3. Ramnarayan S. Rawat, Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalit History in North India. Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2010.

4. J.C.B. Webster, Religion and Dalit Liberation: An Examination of Perspectives. Manohar, New Delhi, 1999, p. 33.

5. D.R. Nagaraj, op. cit., pp. 146-163.

 

THE GENDER OF CASTE: Representing Dalits in Print by Charu Gupta. Permanent Black, Ranikhet, and University of Washington Press, 2016.

Charu Gupta’s The Gender of Caste brings an unusual focus to the burgeoning historical literature on caste in modern India: it examines early 20th century Hindi print – from newspapers and weeklies to occasional publications – for the myriad ways in which these engaged with the caste question, particularly with issues of hierarchy and difference, identity and social rank. The Hindi sources that Gupta turns to include conservative, reformist, upper caste run print media, resistant Dalit writing, publications by caste associations and literary fiction. She also sifts through colonial ethnographic texts, gazetteers, census records, Home and police department files and reports of various commissions to do with education, health, labour and so on, to frame and annotate Hindi print expressions.

Gupta’s appraisal of the changed discourse on caste during this period – the first three decades of the 20th century – foregrounds two emergent social concerns: the reform of upper caste Hindu womanhood, and the consolidation of a putative Hindu identity that can prove adequate to these modern times. The author makes it clear that she is particularly interested in examining how gender anxieties folded into prolific thought on bodily life to do with food, hygiene and sex, and the consequent reshaping of intimate experiences and lives. Such reshaping, she argues, was driven by both caste and sexual anxiety. Upper caste women were asked both by conservative as well as reformist men to insistently differentiate their behaviour, morality and bodily existence from that of Dalit women; meanwhile, upper caste men were enjoined to beware of the Dalit woman’s seductive prowess.

This was not all. Dalit selves had to be remade as well and this meant two things. On the one hand, she points out, Dalit men and women were claimed for the greater glory of Hinduism, and Hindu reformers were implored to take critical note of how Muslim and Christian publicists were waiting to gather Dalits into their fold. The ‘Hinduness’ in Dalits was sought to be ‘awakened’ through a series of bodily practices to do with strength, hygiene and sexual restraint. On the other hand, Dalits were pitted against Muslims, and seen as ‘ours’ as opposed to the latter. Typically, arguments for temple entry claimed that Hindus did not mind Muslims coming into their places of worship, whereas they kept Dalits, who after all were Hindus, away by force. Some even went so far as to say that untouchability entrenched itself in the wake of Muslim conquest! In the event, Dalit men were hailed as the fighting force of Hindus. Dalit women, meanwhile, were subject to surveillance, since they were viewed as potential converts, and those who could not be expected to know their own minds. In either instance, Dalit bodies were subject to a kind of moral rearmament, which was both condescending and sentimental at the same time.

However, Dalits were neither passive subjects of upper caste representation, nor were they abject victims, whose plight incited upper caste sentiment and extracted from them what Gupta terms, ‘spectatorial pity’. They inhabited the historical moment as coeval beings, trusting their own claims: thus, derided dalit women, whether sanitary workers or dais, insisted on their worth as labourers and claimed better wages, and less onerous conditions of work. They dared to fall in love with men they liked and did not mind converting, should the man in question be Christian or Muslim, even if that made caste Hindus far more anxious about regulating Dalit lives. Dalit men made the most of work, military and intellectual spaces that opened up in colonial India and fashioned their selves in ways that challenged both upper caste disdain as well as benevolence towards Dalits. For one, they rethought their relationship to Hinduism, and for another, discovered a sense of productive worth, and organized as labourers, mindful of their dignity and interests. Some amongst them engaged with the promise of reform and set themselves against Muslims, even as they asserted their ‘Hindu’ness. Others sought to upgrade their status through regulating the lives of women from their communities – the implicit assumption was that since Dalit women were viewed as incapable of respectable behaviour, they had to learn to conform to new norms in order to salvage the worth and honour of their respective communities.

Having thus laid out the coordinates of an emergent discursive field, Gupta goes on to do more. She argues that the historical details that she has set out to unpack are not novel; indeed they have been the subject of recent research. But what is often overlooked is the gender of caste, whether this has to do with caste reform, contra-caste responses or caste violence. That is, it is assumed that ‘in colonial India, most women were upper caste and middle class, while virtually all the lower castes and Dalits were men.’ Her objective, she notes, is to work against this presumption on the part of scholars and offer a reading of the historical record, gleaned from popular sources, that allows us to imagine Dalit women’s lives and responses on their own terms. This is not easy to do, since Dalit writers and publicists were chiefly male whereas women who addressed gender concerns were mostly upper caste. On the other hand, Dalit women appear and disappear in colonial records in matters to do with labour, health, religion, conversion, and crime – and Gupta utilizes these details, along with all that she may glean from Hindi print sources, to sketch in Dalit women’s lives during the early 20th century. She also examines Dalit women’s performance and song traditions, many of which were domesticated during this period for upper caste relish, to sift out ways of being and expression that elude print. In addition, she examines labouring lives, through an appraisal of what Hindi print had to say about female labour, particularly those who were indentured in faraway lands.

I would like to flag three concerns that Gupta’s approach posed for me as a reader. The first has to do with the plethora of material she has assembled, which she treats more or less as a seamless whole, even as she notes that representations of Dalit women and men in print are not consistent and there are at least two registers that are evident – one of derision, and the other of sentiment as far as Dalit women are concerned; and where Dalit men are concerned, a register that refuses Dalit men’s dignity and wilfully constructs them as criminal and effete, and another that enables them to express, through different means and in varied contexts, an insistent and resistant masculinity. Now it is not clear if these two registers exist in the same context, or whether each unfolds in its own time. Going by the source material, it is evident that Gupta draws on texts that range from those published in the 1910s to the 1940s, with a majority of the material being from the mid-1920s to the late 1930s.

These were dynamic decades in which particular years stand out: of heightened political activity to do with the Khilafat and the Arya Samaj’s campaigns against cow slaughter; the Moplah revolt, and the Kohat violence; of social reform debates to do with the Age of Consent Bill, and with Katherine Mayo’s Mother India; of Dalit political assertion, evident in the matter of the Communal Award and the events that followed, including the signing of the Poona Pact and the setting up of the Harijan Sevak Sangh. Many of the responses Gupta indexes have surely to do with either one or the other of these particular events. To be sure, they have to do with distinctive developments in northern India, including the founding of the Arya Samaj and Hindu Mahasabha and the debates around the Hindi language. The point is there were very many contingent moments that called for responses, which as is always the case go beyond the here and now, drawing on set modes of argument, evolved over a longer arc of time, and employing particular tropes and metaphors that had emerged as stock-in-trade in discourses on a range of subjects, in this case, ‘Hinduism’, caste, honour, respectability, women’s status and so on.

Further, since Gupta draws on everyday print media, the question of the contingent cannot be put away, since newspapers and weeklies are concerned with the immediate present. It is puzzling, therefore, as to why Gupta did not see it fit to rigorously contextualize the rich material at her disposal – and while her argument gains a certain dramatic resonance on account of her treating texts as part of a discursive field, we lose out on historical nuance and explanation. Dalit assertion starting from the 1920s, was an all-India phenomenon, and the anxieties this incited played out differently in different parts of the subcontinent – something to which Gupta’s scholarship contributes, but does not do nearly enough to illuminate in a historical sense.

My second problem has to do with her drawing on the present, both to illuminate the past and reckon with contemporary Dalit perspectives on history and the now. In this sense, the chapter on Dalit viranganas, which compiles tales of Dalit women who fought in the 1857 revolt drawn from Dalit writing in the present sticks out, but one is not sure what function it serves. For ultimately, these are male representations, as Gupta points out, and they do not help us imagine Dalit women as historical subjects in a manner coeval with Dalit men. Likewise, Gupta’s drawing on the rhetoric of contemporary ‘masculinity’ studies is deeply problematic for, going by her rich documentation of how Dalit men in the early 20th century remade their lives, it is not evident that there is anything particularly ‘masculine’ about their sense of self. To be sure, they claim denied valour and honour, but their remaking is so varied and textured that the term ‘masculine’ does not really explain the range of responses that the book lists and describes – except that the use of the term helps bracket Dalit responses as ‘male’, in a manner that answers to contemporary rather than historical concerns.

Lastly, given that much has been published on the changed nature of discourses around caste during this period, and in fact Gupta is very familiar with work of this kind, a comparative perspective would have been very useful – even for what Gupta sets out to do. For example, the figuring and refiguring of Dalit women in Hindi print was markedly different from how this unfolded in the Tamil context, and while the anxieties that underlay these figurations were similar, they were expressed differently, indeed the terms of debate were themselves different. In the Tamil context for instance, it is clear that much of the ire reserved for ‘uncontrollable’ lower class and caste women in popular print was actually incited by the defiant feminism of the Tamil self-respecters. Further, Dalit self-making possessed its own temporality in different regions, though it was prompted by fairly similar social and economic developments.

The Gender of Caste is short on history, but rich in the material it serves up – and meanwhile there is much to ponder about the many lives of caste in modern India.

V. Geetha

Historian and Editor, Chennai