This episode features a conversation with historian Rupa Viswanath and anthropologist Joel Lee. We covered the remarkable transformations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that resulted in widely shared assumptions that caste is primarily a religious phenomenon and that Dalits are essentially Hindus. We discussed how Protestant missionaries enclosed caste within religion by framing untouchability as a form of religious persecution, in the process allowing the extraction of untouchable caste labor to continue unchecked. With the rise of both social reform and electoral politics in the 20th century, this missionary framing of caste and untouchability dovetailed with Gandhi’s own paternalistic embrace of Dalits and movements to build a Hindu majority. In addition to discussing these projects targeting Dalits, we delved into the many ways that Dalits have engaged in their own forms of collective self-definition and action, including both overt legislative and political claims-making and covert expressions of religious alterity. We ended with a brief overview of the contemporary legacies of these historical processes.

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Guests

Rupa Viswanath: Professor, Center for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen

Joel Lee: Associate Professor of Anthropology, Williams College

References

Rupa Viswanath, The Pariah Problem (2014).

Rupa Viswanath, "Spiritual Slavery, Material Malaise” (2010).

Rupa Viswanath, "Rethinking Caste and Class” (2014).

Joel Lee, Deceptive Majority (2021).

Joel Lee, “Odor and Order” (2017).

Dharma Kumar: Indian economic historian noted for her work on the agrarian history of India.

Bhagwan Das: Indian Theosophist who he served in the Central Legislative Assembly of British India

Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1901).

William Goudie: member of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society who served in colonial Madras Presidency from 1882 to 1906.

Arya Samaj: Hindu reform movement launched in the late 19th century by Swami Dayananda Sarasvati, who advocated a return to what he believed to be the monotheism of the Vedas.

Harijan Sevak Sangh: an organisation founded by M.K. Gandhi in 1932 aimed at the uplift of Dalits.

Poona Pact: a 1932 agreement that replaced separate electorates for Dalits with reserved seats in joint electorates.

Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers (2006).

M. K. Gandhi, “The Ideal Bhangi” (1936).

M. C. Rajah: Tamil politician, educationist, social and political activist who was the first member of the Dalit community to be elected to the Madras Legislative Council

Panchayati Raj: system of local self-government in rural India.

Iyothee Thass: Tamil anti-caste thinker and writer who converted to Buddhism and called upon members of his own Pariah caste to do the same.

Tamizhan: or Oru Paisa Tamizhan was an anti-caste weekly started by Iyothee Thass.

Rettamalai Srinivasan: a Dalit activist and politician from colonial Madras Presidency who founded the Adi Dravida Mahajana Sabha in 1893.

Kumbh Mela: major Hindu pilgrimage held every 12 years.

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This episode featured a conversation with Ramnarayan Rawat, K. Satyanarayana, and Sanal Mohan, three scholars in the burgeoning field of Dalit Studies. We began with the significance of the 1990s as a point of departure for new work in this field and segued to the interventions made by their two edited volumes published in 2016 and 2025. We discussed the paths opened up by earlier radical historiographical paradigms, such as Subaltern Studies, which nonetheless failed to address the caste question. The guests noted three key emphases of contemporary Dalit Studies: one, centering Dalit historical agency and intellectual production; two, decentering the binary of colonialism and nationalism, and illuminating the colonial period as a complex terrain of maneuver; and three, foregrounding the importance of “the Dalit social” as a field of variegated power irreducible to the state. We ended with a discussion of the heterogeneity of Dalit sociopolitical formations, what makes “Dalit” cohere as a category, and future directions for the field of Dalit Studies.

Read the transcript here

References

Ramnarayan Rawat and K. Satyanarayana eds. Dalit Studies (Duke University Press, 2016)

Ramnarayan Rawat, K. Satyanarayana, and Sanal Mohan eds. Dalit Journeys for Dignity: Religion, Freedom, and Caste (SUNY Press, 2025)

Rajni Kothari, “Rise of the Dalits and the Renewed Debate on Caste.” In State and

Politics in India, edited by Partha Chatterjee, 439–58 (New Delhi: Oxford University

Press, 1998).

Gopal Guru, “The Language of Dalit-Bahujan Political Discourse.” In Dalit Identity and

Politics, edited by Ghanshyam Shah, 96–107 (New Delhi: Sage, 2001).

Baburao Bagul, Dalit Sahitya ajache Kranti Vidynana (Nagpur: Buddhist Publishing

House, 1978).

Belcchi: village in Patna district of Bihar where eight Dalits and three Backward Caste men were killed by members of the landowning Kurmi caste in 1977.

Keezhvenmani: hamlet in Nagapattinam district of Tamil Nadu where upper caste landlords burnt alive 44 Dalit agricultural laborers in 1968.

Karamchedu: village in Bapatla district of Andhra Pradesh where members of the Kamma landholding caste murdered six Dalit men, raped three Dalit women, and displaced hundreds of Dalit families in 1985.

Vempenta: village in Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh where, in response to the killing of a village official by the People’s War Group, landholders killed more than thirty Dalits and burned more than 100 of their houses in 1998.

Chundur: village in Bapatla district of Andhra Pradesh where members of the Reddy landholding caste killed eight Dalit men in 1991.

Mandal Commission:

Divya Cherian, Merchants of Virtue

B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste

Phule: Jyotirao Phule was an anti-caste social reformer and writer from Maharashtra.

NTR: Indian actor and politician who served as the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh for four terms between 1983 and 1995.

Mahad Satyagraha: mass mobilization by B.R. Ambedkar to claim Dalit access to a public water tank in Mahad, Maharashtra.

Ayyankali: Indian social reformer and lawmaker who worked for the advancemetnt of Dalits in the princely state of Travancore.

Ad Dharm: an anticaste movement in the 1920s that claimed a distinct identity for Dalits separate from Hinduism and Sikhism.

Adi Hindu Mahasabha: sociopolitical organization founded in 1923 by Dalit leader Swami Achhutanand in Uttar Pradesh that claimed for Dalits the identity of originary Hindus.

IITs: the Indian Institutes of Technology

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