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  • The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India
  • Thomas R. Metcalf
The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. By Anupama Rao (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2009) 392 pp. $65.00 $24.95

In this probing and thoughtful volume, Rao places the Dalit, or “untouchable,” community squarely at the center of India’s modern history. Not simply a narrative account, the volume encompasses a set of reflections on what it means to be a “political subject” in a context where the downtrodden (in Hindi, dalit) castes have been marginalized both on the ground and in the conventional nationalist historiography. As Rao forthrightly asserts at the outset, her contention is that “by examining how people without rights came to possess them, and how stigmatized subjects were transformed into citizens,” it is possible to learn something about the character and contradictions of India’s political modernity (1).

Of necessity, the growth of Dalit subjectivity had to take place by a process of contestation with Brahmins and other “clean” castes, who did not relish giving up power to despised “untouchables.” Initially, Dalit activists appealed for recognition on the basis of the secular civil rights due to them in a liberal state. They also claimed rights—above all, that of entry to Hindu temples—as a subjugated community of Hindus. This contradiction between the secular and the religious they sought to reconcile, first, by claiming that Hindu temples were public spaces open to everyone, and, then, under the leadership of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, by insisting that Dalits were a non-Hindu minority. Caste, by definition, in this view, involved “structural violence” against the “negated” Dalit subaltern (124, 130). Unable, like Muslims, to make good a claim to a territory of their own, Dalits made their “negative identity,” Rao argues, the basis of their struggle for collective rights (158). Mohandas K. Gandhi had vehemently determined to keep Dalits within the Hindu community as Harijans (“children of God”), but Ambedkar converted to Buddhism, along with many of his followers, and sought state protection for Dalit rights. “Untouchability” was accordingly abolished in the 1950 Constitution, of which Ambedkar was a primary author, and specific discriminatory measures were enacted in favor of “scheduled castes.”

The most powerful and original section of the book is Part Two, “Paradox of Emancipation” (161), in which Rao follows the story of Dalit struggle into the post-independence era. Dalit claims upon equal citizenship, she argues, have continued to operate through a “legal exceptionalism” of acts that define a distinct and separate community (242). Through a series of vivid, and chilling, anecdotes of sexual abuse and murder, she shows how this legislative framework enhanced not only Dalit separateness but also their vulnerability as victims. Efforts “to legislate Dalit vulnerability out of existence,” combined with new forms of Dalit militancy had the cumulative effect of establishing violence as “a public mode of recognition between upper castes and Dalits” (263). In a way not unfamiliar to Americans, the “dual impulse” of simultaneously [End Page 336] recognizing and eradicating caste has produced a “paradox” in which universal values are embraced within a framework of “embodied difference.” The result is what Rao calls a “corporeal politics of caste” (278; author’s italics).

Rao’s argument is occasionally obscure, with vaguely defined terms drawn from different theorists as if their meanings were obvious. Nevertheless, this richly textured, theoretically engaged work is surely destined to stand as a lasting account of the clash of caste and modernity in India. It will find a readership among legal historians and political theorists, as well as historians of India. [End Page 337]

Thomas R. Metcalf
University of California, Berkeley
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