Dalits and the Politics of Religion in India Joel
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Recognition and its Shadows: Dalits and the Politics of Religion in India Joel Lee Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 ©2015 Joel Lee All rights reserved ABSTRACT Recognition and its Shadows: Dalits and the Politics of Religion in India Joel Lee In its Constitution, postcolonial India acknowledges the caste-based practice of “untouchability” as a social and historical wrong, and seeks to redress the effects of this wrong through compensatory discrimination. Dalits are recognized by the state as having suffered the effects of untouchability, and thus as eligible for statutory protections and remedial measures, on the condition that they profess no religion “different from the Hindu religion” (a condition later expanded to include Sikhism and Buddhism as well). The present work charts the career of the idea underlying this condition of recognition – the idea that the “untouchable,” insofar as she has not converted to Islam, Christianity, or another “world religion,” must be Hindu – and its consequences, from the late nineteenth century to the present. Historically and ethnographically grounded in the community life of the sanitation labor castes – those Dalits castes that perform the vast majority of South Asia’s sanitation work – in the north Indian city of Lucknow, the study tracks the idea from its ruptive colonial beginnings to its propagation by Hindu nationalists, induction into mainstream nationalism and installation in the edifice of postcolonial law. This is also an account of the everyday effects of postcolonial India’s regime of recognition in the present: what it confers, what it transforms, what hides in its shadows. Table of Contents Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………………………………….ii Note on Orthography ……………………………………………………………………………………iv Part 1 Chapter I. Introduction: The Politics of Pahchān …………………………………………………………….2 Chapter II. The Smell of Caste ………………………………………………………………………………………..42 Part 2 Chapter III. Autonomy and Alterity: the Cult of Lal Beg in Colonial India, c. 1880-1920 ………………………………………….81 Chapter IV. Making “Untouchables” Hindu: Congress, the Arya Samaj, and the Harijan Sevak Sangh, 1917-1950 …………….122 Chapter V. Hinduization and its Discontents: Lucknow, 1947-2011 ……………………………………………………………………………………184 Part 3 Chapter VI. Valmiki on Parade ……………………………………………………………………………………….242 Chapter VII. At the Shrine of Lal Beg ……………………………………………………………………………...266 Conclusion: Deceiving Power ……………………………………………………………………...288 References ………………………………………………………………………………………………….296 i Acknowledgements Let me invert the usual order of things here. To Joanna Slater I am enormously grateful for her good humor, patience, support, thoughtful interlocution, and ruthless editorial eye. Our children Leo and Boaz have been the perfect antidote to dissertation writing, and a strong stimulant to complete it swiftly. I thank Sakun, who is no longer with us, and her son Ganesh and daughter-in-law Snehlata, and every member of their family, for their warm hospitality, their support of this project, and everything they have taught me. Likewise Shanti and Sohan Lal, Pushpalata and Jagdish Atal, Mehphul and her sisters, Sant Kumar and Ali Husein, all of whom welcomed me like a son. I thank Sanjeed, Lallan, Rajan, Dilkash Warsi, Anup Kalyani, Shyam Lal Inspector, Shyam Lal son of Bhaggan, Change Lal, and all of their families. The students of Fast Computer Training Centre are a tremendous source of inspiration; I thank them and their families. The people whose stories fill the pages ahead have made everything possible. Govind Prasad (1926-2013), Master Lalta Prasad (1923-2014), and Achhe Lal Balmiki, MP (1932- 2014) – the reformist triumvirate (Chapter V) – generously shared their extensive knowledge and personal experience of the history of the community in Lucknow, without which this thesis could not have been written. My reconstruction of the history of the community in Lucknow also relies on the writings and correspondence of the first generation of Balmiki MLAs and MPs; for this I warmly thank Sarojini, Prithviraj Chauhan, and Ashok Kumar, children and grandchildren of Kanhaiya Lal Balmiki, MLA, and Narain Din, MP, for sharing their personal collections. I am grateful to Nina Sharma, Superintendent of Census Operations for Uttar Pradesh, for kindly granting me permission to observe first-hand the decennial census of 2011 (Chapter I). Also in Lucknow I thank Shura Darapuri, S.R. Darapuri, Masood Alam Falahi, C.M. Naim, Ram Advani, Sara Khan, Nadeem Hasnain, Nicolas Jaoul, Saumyata Pande, Ahtesham Khan, and Pushpa Balmiki, Ramesh Balmiki and their children. In Delhi, Amritsar, Benares and elsewhere I thank Annie Namala, Paul Divakar, Bezwada Wilson, Vimal Thorat, Sukhdeo Thorat, J.P. Singh, Murtaza Alam, Ali Husein Ustad, Darshan Ratn Ravan, S. Anand, Suraj Badtiya, Jayshree Mangubhai, S.D.J.M. Prasad, and Aloysius Irudayam for their wisdom, provocation, hospitality, and support of this project. In developing this work I have benefited greatly from discussions with Eleanor Zelliot, Carla Bellamy, Nandini Gooptu, Anand Taneja, Tabinda Khan, Gajendran Ayyathurai, Tyler Williams, Divya Cherian, Joel Bordeaux, Patton Burchett, Harmeet Kaur, and Paul Divakar. Ajeet Singh Matharu (1983- 2010) generously read and perspicaciously reflected on early stages of this work. I thank my fellows in the dissertation workshop at Columbia’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race – Irvin Hunt, Amanda Gilliam, Jessica Lee, our guest Eric Lott, and our guide Karl Jacoby – for very enriching feedback on two chapters. My students, especially Eva Asplund, Evan Hamilton, and Ben Graif, encouraged me and posed questions that made me think and rethink what this was all about. My mentors at Columbia have challenged me and shaped my thinking in countless ways. I am grateful to Frances Pritchett, Sudipta Kaviraj, Nicholas Dirks, Anupama Rao, Brinkley Messick, Brian Larkin, Partha Chatterjee, Katherine Pratt Ewing, Paul Kockelman, and Elizabeth Povinelli. I particularly thank John Stratton Hawley and E. Valentine Daniel, who have been scrupulous, affirming, and exacting readers of every chapter. Finally I wish to thank Bhagwan Das (1927-2010) and Owen Lynch (1931-2013). They showed the way. ii In memory of Sakun (1953-2013) iii Note on Orthography With the non-specialist in mind, I have elected not to burden with diacritics the caste names and occupational titles with which the following text is teeming. In deference to specialists, I do provide the technical rendering of such names and titles once: in a glossary at the end of Chapter I, or, for names not in the glossary, upon their first appearance. Again for ease of comprehension, I use conventional English spellings for Sanskrit, Urdu, Persian and Hindi words that have wide circulation in secondary literature: shudra rather than śudra, pir rather than pīr, and so on. For less common terms – dharmaśāstra, jhāṛū – I use diacritics. The transliteration system that I employ, with slight modifications, is that found in John Platts’ A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi and English (1884). iv Part 1 1 Chapter I Introduction: The Politics of Pahchān Allow me to begin with the census. Not with the census as a reservoir of factual data about the size or development indicators of the population with which this dissertation is concerned, though these things certainly matter. Nor with the census as a technology of colonial governance responsible for the reification or calcification of previously fluid categories of social difference – though this, too, is relevant. I would like to begin with the census as a series of unusual conversations in a Dalit bastī of the north Indian city of Lucknow on a soggy February morning in 2011: a sequence of interactions between two census enumerators and the people they enumerated, a brief irruption of state officiality into the weekday routines of a neighborhood called Lal Colony (Red Colony) by its inhabitants and Sweeper Colony by its more prosperous neighbors. The decennial census, after all, is for most people precisely this – once every ten years, a five minute conversation at the door with a local schoolteacher or government clerk wielding pencil, clipboard, and forms. I would like to begin with what may seem an overly long account of this grey February morning because it exemplifies the central problematic of this study: the politics of knowledge, concealment, recognition and naming on the terrain of Dalit religious subjectivity, and the haunting of the present by the past of these politics. It introduces the protagonists of our story: the sanitation labor castes and the state. The latter, moreover, it introduces both in its remote and proximate guises: as a distant power responsible for determining the categorical schema according to which political goods and services will be distributed, and as local bureaucrat, government school teacher or politician enmeshed in parochial power structures. The February morning also suggests the importance of modes of signification – of communicative practice itself – as a theater in which the politics of Dalit religion are waged. 2 It happened that I arrived in Lucknow, the site at which I was to conduct my doctoral research and the capital of Uttar Pradesh (UP), the most populous state in India, two days into the implementation of the 2011 census. This was a vast undertaking: from the 9th to the 28th of February, for