Introduction: The Ethics of Embodied Life

The editors of CSSAAME envision Kitabkhana (lit. repository of books) as a space for scholarly discussion about books whose critical perspectives reshape our understanding of the regions under the journal’s purview.

This inaugural book forum takes up the topic of caste and untouchability through an extended debate on the theory and experience of caste and untouchability between two India-based scholars, the philosopher Sunder Sarukkai and the political scientist Gopal Guru. As is well known, caste has long been a master signifier (together with religion) for Indian society. Whether viewed as inherently connected to Hindu belief and hierarchical ideology, or to the forms of social inequality justified by it, caste has been seen as both potent and parochial, a form of Indian “difference” that resists comparison. Instead, The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory does something different: it connects caste with a broader consideration of ethics, sociality, and the politics of representation.

The concerns of this text are twofold. The first is to challenge Indian social scientists’ impoverished understanding of caste and untouchability. How do we understand a stratification system of unparalleled sophistication, that is also radically undertheorized outside scriptural and colonialist perspectives (and the reactions to these)? Why have powerful perspectives on what caste looks from its outside, or under-side, received little attention within the academy though they have predominated public discussion and activism? A second and related set of issues arises from The Cracked Mirror’s explanation for this conceptual impoverishment. Guru and Sarukkai argue, albeit from different intellectual and political positions, that existing theories of caste cannot do justice to its complex lived reality. Rather, caste is a category marked by a history of failed comparison (and attempted commensuration) with categories of thought denied from European and American experiences of inequality, exclusion, and serial stratification.

In his essay for this book forum, Sudipta Kaviraj argues that it is important to understand caste through the rubric of untouchability (and from the Dalit point of view) because “[this] shows what the caste system is really like by looking at its extreme manifestation.” He further argues that because caste (and untouchability) “has no equivalent in European social history, . . . the theory of a European structure could not explain it.” Kaviraj emphasizes the incommensurability between the experience of caste and the categories we use to make sense of it. Gopal Guru goes further and demands that Dalits develop the “moral stamina” to produce generative theory. Indeed the debates in The Cracked Mirror are organized around a critique of the bifurcated structure of Indian social science knowledge production that pits “theoretical Brahmins” against “empirical Shudras,” with Guru and Sarukkai articulating divergent positions regarding the relationship between identity and universality.

The Cracked Mirror takes neither ideas of purity/pollution nor the notions of hierarchical thinking and ritual encompassment, as articulated in the writings of Louis Dumont, as grounds for theorizing caste. The text also keeps a distance from longstanding concerns with the modernity of caste, itself the result of earlier efforts to address the conceptual entailments of caste, colonialism, and Indian nationalism. Rather, the text is interested in what might be termed the social psychology of caste. Even though Sarukkai and Guru use the language of phenomenology, a careful study of their text reflects a commitment to understanding the psychic life of caste: this is why terms such as repulsion, humiliation, nausea, and touch become salient for our interlocutors. The Cracked Mirror suggests that it is in those places between the purely perceptual and the fully theoretical that a collective rethinking of untouchability must take place.

Each of our contributors recognizes that The Cracked Mirror is predicated on a double demand. The first is to take Indic philosophical traditions as the locus for ideas regarding un-touch-ability. The second is the “modern” insistence, arising out of struggles for rights and recognition, for Dalits to develop the right to produce theory. In this regard, Milind Wakankar’s efforts to chart a prehistory...