If Dalit women's voices are absent or silenced, distorted or subordinated through discursive practices and political agendas, how does a scholar signify the embodied and agentive capacities for Dalit women in the history of Hindi-speaking Uttar Pradesh in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?
For taking up a difficult challenge for historiography where no accessible self-representations by Dalit women are available, Charu Gupta's book deserves serious consideration. Gupta adds to overall Dalit and global feminist scholarship a rich and dense analysis of texts and contexts to unpack the “biopolitics of caste” (p. 268). It is an engaging example of interdisciplinary work focused on close readings of print and popular culture representations from colonial India, including present-day representations, that construct, contest, revise, and influence narratives of gender and caste. Gupta mines discursive sites to interrogate constructed identities of Dalits in general and Dalit women in particular.
The time period under consideration produced a ferment of ideas in the context of modernity due to social changes such as the development of British-influenced cultural consciousness due to educational reforms; religious reformist movements, including the Arya Samaj; various nationalist movements, both conservative and liberal; Dalit social movements, including the Adi Hindu movement; and an explosion and dissemination of print culture among middle-class and/or middle- and upper-caste readership. This larger context forms the background for Gupta's study.
At the outset we learn that the structure of this book is “episodic rather than chronological” (p. 17). The first three chapters focus on the contradictory representations of Dalit women in the print media as vamps who challenge respectability of all women and need to be managed; as victims who need sympathy from enlightened, educated Hindus; or as viranganas who demonstrated extraordinary abilities as women warriors during the 1857 battles and who must be recuperated for the revised, “true” history of the modern Indian nation. These women warriors also offer exceptional models of valor for new generations of young Dalit women making such recuperation by male historians and storytellers a significant political intervention in the time of the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Mayawati.
In later chapters, Gupta considers Dalit masculinities; conversions to Christianity or Islam; goddesses and songs; desire and intimacy, including the politics of khadi and purdah; and, finally, emigration after 1838 to various British colonies as indentured laborers. The range and scope of these interrogations is impressive. Every chapter offers a nuanced and smart use of archival materials from a variety of print and public-culture sources available to her for critical analysis, situating and differentiating her work from existing analyses. Gupta teases out areas where a Dalit woman's capacity to act or speak on her own behalf is possible by reading the gaps left in representations by male writers—whether colonial reports; police practices; policies and laws; or reformist and nationalist literary, visual, oral, and journalistic representations; or Dalit male writers’ representations.
She makes no claim that her readings offer the usual understanding of agency as a matter of free will or resistance. Instead she offers Laura Ahearn's definition of agency as “the socioculturally mediated capacity to act” (pp. 269–70) as a tool for her analysis. Gupta explains that Dalit identity is grounded in “material processes” and in “specific contexts” (p. 270). As such, she suggests that showing the possibilities for agency is just as important as claiming textually documented individual or group resistance.
Gupta acknowledges, that “[w]hile these fragmented acts may not be interpreted as active agentive realignments, as overtly political moves, or as fully legible protests, nonetheless they signaled everyday Dalit agencies embodied in the interstices of these performances. They enabled Dalits to enact their scripts, at times disarm the dominant cultures of caste, gender, religion, and nation” (p. 270). The Gender of Caste leaves the reader with a rich and complex analysis of texts and contexts that helps us see continuities and shifts in discourses around caste in Uttar Pradesh, but with a clear view of the fluid meanings in each discursive space.
As a reader from the field of literary and cultural studies, I would have liked a couple of quick factual notes about the mapping of shifting contours of place in Uttar Pradesh during the period of inquiry (United Provinces, Uttar Pradesh, and now Uttarkhand) and if it affected Gupta's choice of materials. Beyond texts in standard Hindi or khari boli, what Hindi variants were considered here, which were left out, and why? I recall references to Awadhi and Bhojpuri, but perhaps there were others. Was Urdu considered at all? To avoid larger generalizations about Dalits or Dalit women even within a region, it is important to ensure accuracy for all new scholars from any discipline entering this field of study.
