Dalit history has seen something of a scholarly resurgence in the last few years, and Rupa Viswanath's book makes an important contribution to it. Literally “ground down” or “broken,” “Dalit” is a term of political self-identification by ex-untouchable castes. “Pariah,” though it is the name for a specific South Indian untouchable caste, is also a term that signals Dalitness avant la lettre. Hannah Arendt uses the term to describe figures of abjection and social exclusion, such as the Jew, for instance.Footnote 11 The Pariah Problem addresses the period between the 1890s and the 1920s, when the “problem” of untouchability acquired new visibility due to colonial intervention, missionary activism, and Dalit self-representation. However, dominant frames of disclosure and deniability succeeded in presenting South Indian untouchability as a problem of religious repugnance, rather than coerced labor and material deprivation. The Pariah Problem is concerned with how untouchability was redefined and its enormous economic injustice obscured, thereby precluding a structural critique of caste as an enabling force for capital accumulation, and the social logic justifying lack of agrarian freedom.
The book's focus is the Tamil country, an area that has produced important scholarship on the modern politics of caste.Footnote 12 Like Maharashtra, its western neighbor, Tamil Nadu has a long tradition of struggles for radical equality and social enfranchisement, and extensive scholarship on regional studies of caste is a consequence. Unlike western India, where an autonomous Dalit movement led by political thinker and constitutional lawyer B. R. Ambedkar took shape in the interwar period, Tamil Nadu saw the rise of upper-caste conservatism, combined with an equally strong tradition of egalitarian non-Brahminism in the same period. Hegemonic political parties such as the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) representing middle and lower castes have perpetuated the legacy of non-Brahminism, but elided the specificity of Dalit struggle and protest. And while economic historian Dharma Kumar's study of untouchability and agrarian slavery is a notable predecessor to the current study, that text is now fifty years old, and addressed Dalit agrarian labor as an economic issue.Footnote 13
The Pariah Problem joins a rich scholarly tradition on South Indian caste, although it is one simultaneously structured by analytic foreclosures. Viswanath skillfully navigates the impasse to show how social relations of labor structured the dichotomy of purity/pollution, even though the latter has functioned as the dominant explanation for caste hierarchy. In the process, and by implicating dominant landed castes (as well as Brahmins) in caste exploitation, the book subjects the heroic narratives of political non-Brahmanism to critical scrutiny.
Dalit conversion inaugurates the process: as Protestant missionaries tried to convert Dalits, landed castes responded that their right to subordinate Dalits was derived from custom, and that the colonial policy of religious noninterference reiterated the right. Meanwhile, British demand for cheap labor led them to reinterpret bonded servitude as a function of “freedom to contract,” while ignoring the social stigma that rendered outcaste labor amenable to exploitation in the first place. The first five chapters of the book address the double bind of Christian conversion versus “free” wage labor that structured Pariah lifeworlds, as did narratives exhorting the virtues of hard work and the benefits of marketized social relations. Viswanath notes the resemblance to post-emancipation discourses in the Atlantic world that joined religious cultivation with acquisitive individualism. Closer to home, Saurabh Dube has shown how converted Chamar outcastes in middle India were delinked from their peasant pasts and (newly) associated with degraded labor and leatherwork in the nineteenth century.Footnote 14 Recent work on Chamars in north India by Ramnarayan Rawat suggests a similar set of processes at work in that region, too.Footnote 15 What these studies share is the focus on how the failure to tackle the issue of labor exploitation produced a narrow, moralistic conception of the social reform of untouchability.
Viswanath makes a strong case for missionary records as an overlooked archive of labor control and regulation, and argues that they played a key role in redefining untouchability as a problem of religious exclusion. The book's important fourth chapter discusses Collector J. H. A. Tremenheere's 1892 report, Notes on the Pariahs of Chingleput, and the focus on Dalit disenfranchisement that ensued: a century-long story of Pariah Dalits’ “improvement” as the uneven narrative of missionary intervention, state welfarism, and upper castes’ questionable commitment to social uplift and outright resistance to Dalits’ economic enfranchisement. Chapters 6 through 8 address the importance of property for Dalit livelihood and respectability, and its concerted denial: as the new welfarism of the Madras government committed it to improvements on behalf of Pariah labor, including housing, the government's provision of house sites became a major source of conflict between upper castes and the government. (To this day, homes and other symbols of upward mobility, such as steel utensils, electronic devices, and motorized vehicles, are targets of anti-Dalit violence.) The book's ninth and final chapter explores the continued social resistance to Dalit enfranchisement at a time of expansion of representative and nominated government with the institution of dyarchy in 1918.
Like other Dalit histories, The Pariah Problem indicts the caste-state nexus (and the combined force of colonial government and cultural nationalism) as a modern, if particularly pernicious, site where Dalit deprivation was produced and justified.
Unlike scholars’ focus on associational practice and Dalit protest, The Pariah Problem is concerned with historicizing labor exploitation at the complex and contradictory nexus of mission activism, colonial administration, and Hindu prejudice: ultimately, even Dalit self-representation proves incapable of tacking outcastes’ impoverishment as a project of state and market. The Pariah Problem is an important reminder of the centrality of land, labor, and livelihood to Dalit enfranchisement. By reminding scholars of the need to revisit the political economy of caste, Viswanath also provides a map for where Dalit studies might go.
