The Neighbor

Prema chechi in K colony was a lively Dalit (Kanakan Cherumar) woman in her sixties. She took us to meet Janaki Amma, a nonagenarian, female Ezhava landlord who she had previously worked for. In K colony, agricultural laborers and their former landlords lived next to each other. Laborers were from both the Dalit communities and the locally dominant Ezhava community, while most of the local landlords belonged to a single Ezhava family.

Prema chechi was uncharacteristically subdued when she took us to meet Janaki Amma. Though older than Janaki Amma's son Sashi, she addressed him as ettan (older brother), while he did not use chechi (older sister). Sashi and his wife Laksmi waved her to come and sit inside. As she sat uncomfortably in a chair in the corner, they chided her and told her to eat. A few weeks later, when we told another local Dalit man of this meeting, he smiled at us half-reproachfully; “Oh, that family,” he said, “that man, Janaki Amma's husband, he treated his workers like slaves, he would go and drag Prema chechi’s husband from their house by his hair if he thought that he was late for work.” Reflecting on this visit with Janaki Amma forcefully reminded me of the long histories of subordination, both still explicit and pushed out of view, even as the occasion was presented as an act of neighborly chitchat. Large-scale social transformations in Kerala have turned former workplaces into neighborhoods where former landlords and laborers are neighbors. I use the category “neighbor” here to understand what happens when people of different castes, here Dalits and Eezhava, recognize their proximity as co-residents. Under such conditions, how does one live, and imagine, a life with others in which one's worth is meaningfully acknowledged?

During my fieldwork, I rarely heard people describe people in other castes through the Malayalam term ayaalkarar, which can be translated as “neighbor” and conveys various forms of responsibility and obligation. For those I work with, neighborliness is built upon ever-present caste differences and inequalities, yet despite this, Dalits continue to want other people to treat them as “human beings”—as equals. My analysis of this builds upon Das’ discussion of the complex ways in which a person lives entangled with the Other (in her case, Hindus and Muslims) (Reference Das and Lambek2010). In presenting my account of neighborliness, I will argue that we must give serious thought to how political struggles over recognition, inclusion, visibility, and discrimination have given rise to a widespread notion that everyday relationships between people have the potential to become ethical ones. The category of “neighbor,” to be meaningful, must combine the existential, the sociological, and the geographical.

Positing “the neighbor” as a potentially ethical figure is well established within moral philosophical, sociological, and anthropological thinking about coexistence and ethical relations, often while contemplating the aftermath of violence against others. In the Western philosophical canon, the neighbor has been frequently used to designate a proximate figure who is not kin, but to whom one may owe obligation or responsibility—a different ethical act from loving one's partner or family. The neighbor indicates relationships of dense social interaction and imaginations of responsibility and care for non-kin. For example, analyses of ethnic violence and riots often ask how neighbors come to turn on each other (e.g., Gross Reference Gross2001).

One of the most profound reflections on the neighbor, particularly on the ethics of responsibility to others, comes from Emmanuel Levinas (reflecting continually, if implicitly, on the Holocaust) (Spargo Reference Spargo2006). In his Totality and Infinity (1979) and Otherwise than Being (1998) Levinas marshals the neighbor as that proximate Other or stranger who interrupts, and demands from us a fundamental responsibility. The Other as a pre-given alterity demands that we be “for-the-Other” before we can be “for-the-I,” independent of any response from the Other. For Levinas ethics is, firstly, the acceptance of responsibility for the demand that the Other places upon us, an asymmetric demand that leaves us vulnerable and exposed. Secondly, ethics for him is the injunction that we maintain the Other as fundamentally alter, as mysterious and ungraspable (Reference Levinas and Lingis1979: 194–204; Reference Levinas and Lingis1998: 56–59, 81–94).

Levinas’ emphasis on responsibility and the intersubjective encounter positions us, however abstractly, to confront coexistence and difference. The codification and institutionalization of difference in India is a longstanding feature of everyday sociality (Bailey Reference Bailey1996). Political transformations and demands, including violence in response to Dalit assertions, have turned this heterogeneity, which incorporated deep subordination, into a place of intense political and ethical debate and collective (rather than only individual) violence. Here, as Dr. Ambedkar famously pointed out, the intersubjective space of human interaction continues to maintain the differential worth of Dalit lives, despite formal equality under the law (Rodrigues Reference Rodrigues2017). This means that when we think through neighborliness here in any concrete sense we must move beyond Levinas’ insistence on the neighbor being a mysterious ethical figure. For Levinas, ethics in relation to the Other is the foundational existential domain. Inequality and social asymmetries are moved to a secondary domain of politics, a realm of calculation, distribution, and comparability (Reference Levinas and Lingis1979: 212–19). This surprising separation of the ethical and the political/redistributive is also sometimes found in contemporary writings within the anthropology of ethics (see below for a discussion), but is untenable in an Indian context, and perhaps most contexts, where everyday life is hyper-politicized.

Instead, following Bernasconi (Reference Bernasconi, Katz and Trout2005), I propose that to meaningfully absorb the power of the questions that Levinas forces us to ask into concrete contexts, our analyses must incorporate politics and prefigurations of asymmetry (ibid.: 17–27).Footnote ⁷ The Other is not simply proximate, but rather is understood and constructed as alter prior to actual encounters. As Ricoeur argues in his essay on the parable of the good Samaritan, when the neighbor in philosophical thought becomes translated into “the personal way in which I encounter another over and above all social mediation” (Reference Ricoeur1965: 101), then one misses the relationship of the immediate to the institutional, mediated, larger collective sets of abstract sociological and political relations that he calls the “socius.” There are always larger theological, political, and social imperatives that lead us to give meaning to specific encounters: “My neighbor is concrete in the plural and abstract in the singular” (ibid.: 105).

In other words, my basic question is inspired by Levinas, while the thrust of my analysis draws on a critique of his withdrawal from the realm of politics. These insights allow me to, first, emphasize the relationship of the political to the ethical, and second, develop an ethnographic and historical understanding of how, and under what conditions, individuals and communities begin to view each other as neighbors “in the plural,” as proximate others engaged in limited but, in principle, non-hierarchical quotidian relationships.

I situate my reflections within an emerging “anthropology of ethics” (Zigon Reference Zigon2014). Anthropologists embracing the “ethical turn” have engaged closely with philosophical arguments and questions and contend that the study of ethical and moral experiences is fundamental to any anthropological inquiry (e.g., Lambek Reference Lambek and Lambek2010a; Reference Lambek2010b; Laidlaw Reference Laidlaw2013). As Laidlaw puts it, “The claim on which the anthropology of ethics rests is not an evaluative claim that people are good: it is a descriptive claim that they are evaluative” (Reference Laidlaw2013: 3). He and others (e.g., Pandian and Ali Reference Pandian and Ali2010) have drawn from divergent South Asian traditions, texts, and practices to assert that there are multiple histories of ethical thought regarding conduct, collective life, and habituated practices.

A number of works that are part of the ethical turn try to distinguish ethics from what is characterized as an obsession in anthropology with politics and power (e.g., Laidlaw Reference Laidlaw2013; Lambek Reference Lambek2010b). Lambek (Reference Lambek and Lambek2010a) urges us to focus on the ordinariness and thus for him “tacit” nature of ethics, suggesting that we focus more on everyday comportment and understanding as opposed to contested and new horizons which signal “explicit” forms of ethics. By this he proposes that we move away from studies that overly focus on “rules, power, interest, and desire as forces or motivations for action.” However, Lambek also says that the Malagasy speakers he knows try to act according to what they understand to be right or good. He argues that such understandings depend upon “a sense of their own dignity; [that] they have refused positions or attributions of indignity, and they have treated, or understood that they ought to treat, others as bearing dignity of their own” (ibid.: 20). This statement, alongside Lambek's acknowledgment that the attempt to “do right or good is often distorted by … denying the humanity of others” (ibid.: 2ff) does not point to a separation of ethics and politics. Instead, the very sense of one's own dignity might depend at least partly on understanding global as well as local histories of persons through questions of inequality, aristocracy, enslavement, religiously embedded understandings of equality, as well as differential authority. In short, it may be influenced by factors of power, interest, and desire.

Indeed, in practice it is difficult to make clear-cut distinctions between politics and ethics (Thiranagama, Kelly, and Forment Reference Thiranagama, Kelly and Forment2018; Zigon Reference Zigon2014). Protests against political and economic inequality have launched new political and ethical projects globally and locally for decades, especially in communist Kerala and among Dalits in India.Footnote ⁸ Dalits have historically mobilized languages of dignity, freedom, autonomy, and respect to inform their judgements, languages often designated as only belonging to a putative West even though they have an embedded vernacular life in South Asia. In India, these questions of dignity and worth, brought up within ordinary contexts of living together, can only be understood by grasping how caste differentially structures respect.

Respect and Dignity in India: The Humanity of Dalits

Respect and disrespect in India are important in two ways. First, differentiated forms of respect are central to the operation and experiences of caste differentiation and are inherent to caste stratification as it is lived. From Dalit perspectives, caste revolves around performing and allocating respect and deference from lower to higher, articulated around the norm that respect should only be paid to those within one's own caste category or above, never to those below (Channa and Mencher Reference Channa and Mencher2013).Footnote ⁹ Visible respect toward upper castes and systemic humiliation of untouchables are the motors of the system (Guru Reference Guru and Gopal2009b) across castes. Second, Dalit scholarship has itself stressed historical and contemporary struggles for equality as centered on human dignity and respect (Rawat Reference Rawat2013; Rawat and Satyanarayana Reference Rawat and Satyanarayana2016). Dalit understandings of respect and dignity are inherently different from how upper-castes talk about respect and caste stratification.

Let me return to the story that I began with, the Dalit women's calm comments on the incivility of Ezhavas who refused to eat with them: “They do not know how to treat people as human beings.” “A human is a human” was often uttered as a clincher after telling a story of caste discrimination, indicating that humanity and respect were anchored not only within a specific story about how individuals treated each other, but also broader relationships of how individuals treated each other as members of caste categories. Dignity as a political concept of self-respect is different for Dalits than for other castes. For the Dalits that I worked with, “a human being is a human being” was never stated to indicate that upper-castes and local Ezhavas needed to be treated as if they were human. It was assumed that Dalits were doing that already. What these statements referenced was a history of caste discrimination against Dalits in India. The accusation is pointed: one's capacity for civilized behavior is not measured by how one treats others of one's own or higher castes, but rather how one treats Dalit others.

Nathaniel Roberts describes the importance of ideas of humanity in his insightful study of Dalit colonies in urban Chennai, Tamil Nadu. He observes that “to be human was also to be, oneself, worthy of being cared for by others[.] Caste, by contrast, was understood by slum dwellers as the denial of common humanity, a denial they believed was unique to India” (Reference Roberts2016: 6). Roberts suggests that urban Dalits thus, in embracing humanity, were reluctant to talk about caste since in urban areas such effacement is desired if not always possible. However, in K colony and in all the rural settings I worked in, the creation of mixed-caste neighborhoods within former rural workplaces means that there are constant interactions, and thus commentary, and individuals and communities share cross-caste histories. In urban Chennai, your former landlord is not your neighbor, but in rural areas caste forms of labor are ever-present. For people I worked with, the individual, the human, cannot fully lose its caste-ness. People think that while one's caste can be effaced it will never disappear. This produces a particular rather than free-floating notion of humanity.

Thus, in India, as in Western Europe, the meaning of “respect” has been transformed; it no longer indicates hierarchical position, but is now an expression of egalitarianism. While those who belong to upper castes lament that they no longer get respect (e.g., mariyathai in Tamil Nadu) from people of lower castes, Dalits and OBC members assert that respect toward them is fundamental to bringing about equality and reversing caste humiliation. Respect, dignity, humanity, and equality have become inextricably linked. How did this entanglement come about?

Languages of Respect and Dignity

Debates around ideas of dignity, respect, and recognition became major questions for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western European theorists as they sought new ethical principles amidst the reconfiguration of European society and the undermining of existing aristocratic hierarchies (Guru Reference Guru and Gopal2009a: 2–4). Political and moral philosophies were deeply influenced by the formulations offered by Immanuel Kant, whose writings on dignity were a critique of the hierarchical world he lived in and a sharp dismissal of aristocratic values of prestige and honor. In Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant linked respect of persons to three precepts: First, humans cannot be understood in terms of price and value because they possess an intrinsic value, dignity, something ungraspable by shifting market valuations of pricing (Kant Reference Kant and McGregor1996 [1785]: 84–86). Second, humans are to be understood as ends in themselves, never as means (ibid.: 79–85, 87). Third, humanity as an end in itself is connected to our capacity for moral judgement and duty, which binds us beyond our personal inclinations and has to hold true for all—the categorical imperative (ibid.: 52–73, 78–79, 85–87). Kant proposed that the modern self and capacity for ethical moral action, and acts of autonomy and thus of freedom (which must be generated internally rather than externally by God or others) are fashioned around respect for persons and the duty to treat others as ends in themselves (Reference Kant and McGregor1996 [1785]: 83–84, 87–89).

However, dignity and respect did not enter public discourse through Kantianism per se, but instead as an aspect of moral critiques developed primarily through abolitionism and global abolitionist movements. Rebecca Scott has described how, “In post-slavery Louisiana, dignity had taken its place in public debate as a term carrying descriptive weight and meaning, capable of linking features of lived experience with a definite, diagnostic, normative concept” (Reference Scott and McCrudden2013: 71). Scott shows this through other global examples. A hundred years later, former slave populations in Brazil used dignity as a benchmark to show the immorality of continuing, post-emancipation affronts to human dignity. Experiences of exploitation and humiliation explicitly invoked questions of dignity to refer to the past as well as the present and these became “a vital part of how people saw the harms and the hopes of their lives” (ibid.: 77). Today, ideas and languages of dignity and respect have fully penetrated everyday attitudes and conceptions of the self and relations with others. For example, human dignity is central to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Enlightenment theories of enfranchisement, freedom, and dignity were not intended to apply to colonial subjects; Kant, for example, considered those in “tutelage” to others to be ineligible for consideration as persons and held deeply racist views of non-western others. Nonetheless, such theories and categories of dignity and autonomy did circulate in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India through Christian missionaries, abolitionists, local intellectuals, and caste reformers of both lower and untouchable castes who engaged directly with European and American writers (Mosse Reference Mosse2012). Texts and ideas that contain radical moral interpretations can, and often do, circulate meanings beyond the intentions of those who introduce them or the authors’ understandings of who these ideas and rights apply to. Sanal Mohan (Reference Sanal Mohan2015) traces the profound impact of missionaries introducing discourses of slavery in their meetings with and conversions of Dalit Pulayas and Parayas in colonial Travancore. Though missionaries did not always live up to the Enlightenment's ideals of equality and liberty that they preached, Sanal Mohan argues that in Southern Kerala, among Dalit Pulayas, assertions of self-worth and dignity were the critical lens through which all forms of structural inequality were viewed by Dalit leaders pressing for political-legal rights, such as Ayyankali, as well as by the millenarian Dalit Christian movement of Poykayil Yohannan (ibid.: 122, 116–213).Footnote ¹⁰ The prominent intellectual Jotirao Phule, who along with Savitribai Phule was central to the nineteenth-century non-Brahmin movement in Maharashtra, was deeply inspired by Thomas Paine's 1791 Rights of Man (O'Hanlon Reference O'Hanlon1985). Another example is the non-Brahmin South Indian Swayam Mariyathai, the Self-Respect Movement spearheaded by the arch-rationalist atheist Periyar (E. V. Ramaswami). It critiqued Brahmanical hierarchies and humiliations through the application of new political and rationalist principles and sought the abolishment of elaborate caste-bound ritual (Geetha and Rajadurai Reference Geetha and Rajadurai1998).

The emphasis of and engagement with global theories of equality were greatly reinforced by the modernist Dalit intellectual and leader Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (Rodrigues Reference Rodrigues2017), and the later flourishing of Ambedkarite movements. Thus, since the late nineteenth century, Dalit activist struggles have appropriated globally circulating languages of dignity, equality, respect, and emancipation to criticize upper-caste presentations of a unified Indian culture by positing Dalit struggles as a universalist quest for emancipation and dignified self-making (Guru Reference Guru and Gopal2009b; Sanal Mohan Reference Sanal Mohan2015; Rawat Reference Rawat2013; Rawat and Satyanarayana Reference Rawat and Satyanarayana2016; Geetha and Rajadurai Reference Geetha and Rajadurai1998). Aside from Ambedkar, this long history of Dalit writings and public actions has until recently been ignored by mainstream scholarship on India (Jangam Reference Jangam2017).

Two things are important to note here. First, while discourses of emancipation and dignity within the Western canon stressed individual as well as collective emancipation, in India caste was central to most visions of emancipation. Multiple reform movements articulated themselves through modernist languages of reform, progress, and transformation, but instead of individual human dignity, as such, they focused on caste-based and community upliftment and formation (Kaviraj Reference Kaviraj and Taylor2002: 116–20). Kaviraj remarks that such movements “placed caste groups at the center of emancipation and made them, rather than the individual, the protagonist of individual change” (ibid.: 117). Self-respect, dignity, and the respect of individuals has been intimately linked to the respect for and dignity of communities at large, sometimes religious ones but most often caste communities. The second important thing to recognize is that, while languages of respect and self-respect became increasingly important, these had differential effects on different communities as they were adopted by reform movements of both Dalit/Untouchable and Shudra/lower castes (communities now known as OBC).

The rise and increased mobility of these middle-caste and OBC lower-caste groups, along with their challenges to upper-caste privilege, has been one of the most important transformations of India's social landscape in the twentieth century (Jaffrelot Reference Jaffrelot2003). The literature on modern Kerala has centered on the history and impacts of the large OBC Ezhava communities and the nineteenth-century Sree Narayana Guru reform movement (SNDP), and their struggles against upper-caste privilege (e.g., Aiyappan Reference Aiyappan1944; Osella and Osella Reference Osella and Osella2000). In Kerala, as Desai (Reference Desai2006) shows, the Communist Party presented itself using languages of transformation of the “poor,” including the mobilization and transformation of lower castes. Desai discusses Ezhava mobilization as a proxy for caste mobilization more broadly, and overlooks the struggles of Dalits, including the figure of Ayyankali in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dalits are rarely mentioned in (non-Dalit authored) scholarly accounts of caste mobility in Kerala (see also Heller Reference Heller1999).

Upwardly-mobile middle- and lower-caste groups have only ambiguously extended rights to Dalit communities (Rawat Reference Rawat2011; Nagaraj Reference Nagaraj2010). In Kerala, languages of self-respect, dignity, struggles against upper castes, and respect for laboring poor have been sedimented publicly through the OBC Ezhava community and Communist Party mobilization, and have spoken only indirectly to recognition for Dalits (Devika Reference Devika2010). Indeed, across South India most of the violence against Dalits over the last two decades has been perpetrated by people from OBC and MBC (Most Backward Class) communities (Vincentnathan Reference Vincentnathan1996; Rawat Reference Rawat2011).Footnote ¹¹

This long vernacular history of caste movements that placed respect and self-respect at their heart is important in understanding why contemporary critiques within European and American scholarship of dignity as morally empty and legally vague (McCrudden Reference McCrudden and McCrudden2013) seem out of place in modern India. In India, respect is anchored in a caste vocabulary and the language of dignity is a political language long incubated in and deeply associated with Dalit and lower-caste activism. Respect and dignity are never neutral, competing claims. They are always understood to be inherently linked to the category of person one is.

How, then, are such issues manifest in Palakkad, a district where there is no active Dalit movement, but which has inherited the effects of a century of mobilization, as well as a Communist Party language of equality and social transformation? Throughout my fieldwork these questions came up most in discussions of everyday neighborliness. Therefore, I now turn to the histories of neighborhoods and to discussions among their inhabitants of what a meaningful, convivial life with others would look like. How are ideas of dignity expressed as desires within everyday interactions?

Becoming a Neighborhood: Transformations in Work, Space, and Caste

Velumany chettan, a soft-spoken Dalit man, was a longstanding member of the local Communist Party—Marxist (CPM) in K colony. He had become an agricultural laborer at fourteen, having left school after his father died to help support his mother and siblings. As soon as possible, he switched to construction work, the preferred male route out of agricultural labor. He was eventually able to purchase housing land that had belonged to a son of Bharathan, the Ezhava landlord. The son had refused to sell it to him because Velumany chettan was Dalit and had worked for his family, and instead sold it to a non-local. Velumany chettan then bought it from that outsider for a higher price. There was no interaction between his family and Bharathan's grandson, who lived next door in a more elaborate house. Velumany chettan said something we heard countless times, that the time when workers were bound in multiple nets of obligation, service, and debt to the landlords was now over. That he was proximate to yet lacked interaction with his next-door neighbor was a case in point. There had been profound changes across his lifetime.

The residential neighborhoods in which I worked were like all rural Dalit areas in Palakkad in that while they were places people had lived in for over three generations, they were not conceived of as distinctly residential areas until the 1970s. They had always been centers of agricultural work with deep histories of caste segregation. Here I will briefly outline the socioeconomic shifts that made possible the existence of these places as neighborhoods, and homes to the kinds of sociality that I will describe later as neighborly.

Palakkad district was part of colonial British Malabar, where the agricultural economy was more rigidly caste-based and dominated by large landowners than were the princely states of Travancore and Cochin. This economy was grounded in caste relationships to land and to agricultural labor. In Malabar, every inch of land was owned, right down to the riverbed, by large corporate family estates of Namboodiri Brahmins and Nairs, private individuals mostly from dominant castes, and corporate temple residential bodies—dewaswoms—made up predominantly of Tamil Brahmins (Menon Reference Menon1994).Footnote ¹² Namboodiris and Nairs had large houses and estates called illams and tharawads, respectively, which included joint family complexes, livestock, and ritual shrines, They sometimes also owned land distant from their houses. Land ownership ritually and physically shaped local areas around these estates. Historically, laborers owned no land and always resided on someone else's.Footnote ¹³

All labor relations were structured through caste. Namboodiri and Tamil Brahmins were forbidden from engaging in any manual labor; all upper-castes deemed labor demeaning. Agricultural land was leased to tenants, mostly from dominant castes such as poor Nairs, Chettiars, Guptas, and (lower-caste/OBC) Ezhavas or Mappila Muslims. They would work the land with landless laborers or lease the land to other tenants, Ezhava and Muslims. The bulk of agricultural labor has always come from the formerly untouchable Dalit communities, most often the Cherumar (e.g., Kanakan, Pulaya) and Paraya castes (Kumar Reference Kumar1962). Palakkad district has the highest concentration of Dalits in Kerala.

Across South India, segregation marked caste differentiation and untouchable communities were barred from living near upper castes (Rawat Reference Rawat2011). This ban on proximity was taken to exceptional heights in the areas that now make up modern Kerala and resulted in both rigid segregation of residences and disputes over various public spaces, including roads or paths in agricultural areas (Sanal Mohan Reference Sanal Mohan2015). Different caste residential areas were laid out adjacent to fields according to upper-caste households’ needs for services and agricultural labor. These spatial patterns informed the kind of residences that Dalits lived in. They lived on land granted by landlords, worked for them, and had to negotiate water and other services through them, while always being kept in highly segregated settings. O (Paraya) and P (Pulaya) colonies were small—under one hundred houses each—and separated from each other. Muslims and Ezhavas lived in a nearby residential area off the main road, with Nairs further up the road. K colony was a much larger Ezhava and Dalit Kanakan mixed colony bordering Palakkad town.

Kerala's signature land reforms in the 1960s and 1970s capped agricultural land ownership at 15 acres, redistributed excess land, and transferred land from upper-caste jenmi landowners to their tenants, who were predominantly from the dominant OBC communities, Ezhavas and Muslims (Herring Reference Herring1983). However, critical evaluation of Kerala's land reforms has found that they benefitted Dalits less than other groups (Krishnaji Reference Krishnaji2007; Sivanandan Reference Sivanandan1976). Few laborers had met the distant jenmi landlord. The tenant leaseholder, with whom laborers always had a landlording relationship, became their official landlords. What laborers received were kudikidappu rights—the opportunity to purchase at nominal rates the land on which they already lived (Krishnaji Reference Krishnaji1979). This established the possibility of localities becoming neighborhoods, since laborers could now transmit their property to their children.

Following reforms and throughout the 1970s laborers across the Palakkad district staged strikes for better working conditions and higher wages. In 1807, Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, a Scottish physician surveying the Madras Presidency, found wages in Malabar to be 2 and 1/2 edangazhi (1 edangazhi = about 800 grams) of rice for women and men, or sometimes 3 for men. A hundred and sixty years later, this was still the wage.Footnote ¹⁴ Strikes in eastern Palakkad demanded raises to 4 to 5 edangazhi for men and 3 for women. In O and P colonies the strikes lasted for three years, and in K colony for a few months. Older laborers, such as Ponni Veliyamma, Vasantha chechi, and Prema chechi in K colony and Balan chettan in P colony recalled to me that Ezhava landlords tried to convince Ezhava laborers to stand with them, on the basis of caste, rather than with Dalit laborers. Although Ezhava laborers had always toiled under the same working conditions, they had been allowed to enter and work in Ezhava tenant landlords’ houses and participate in social functions.

Balan chettan, from the Pulaya community, an agricultural laborer turned night watchman and a continuously loyal member of the CPM, had been a leader in the three-year strikes. He had been one of the Palakkad delegates to state-wide meetings of agricultural unions in the 1970s. That was when he realized that the three taluks Alathur, Chittoor, and Palakkad of Palakkad district were the most “backward” in the state—wages in Palakkad districts were still paid in rice, not cash. Chettan said the switch to money occurred in 1975.Footnote ¹⁵

Neighborhoods were transformed as rising incomes and access to municipal schemes helped laborers make their homes into more permanent houses and “improve” them. In the 1970s, Balan chettan and other Dalit leaders had collected a comprehensive list of Dalit localities and taken it to the panchayat. This list rendered these places as localities and eligible for panchayat recognition through various schemes (made possible by Kerala's effective welfare state)—activists wanted water, electricity, and roads. Municipal schemes provided for public roads in many colonies to replace internal paths, though like many single-caste Dalit colonies, O and P (Paraya and Pulaya) to this day lack roads, regular running water within houses, or consistent electricity. I date the emergence of spatial neighborhoods, distinct from previous settlements, to this period.

However, by the 1980s there was considerable male flight out of agriculture and, despite raises, wages remained low (Jose Reference Jose1988). School attendance rose in the 1990s and many young men and women avoided agricultural labor, which they saw as a demeaning caste occupation. For Ezhava laborers, laboring was a sign that their economic status had been degraded to the level of Dalits. Agricultural labor became the province of older and middle-aged women, with little to no renewal of the workforce from younger generations. At the same time, increasing mechanization and streamlining of agricultural practices in the 1980s and 1990s reduced the number of jobs available to even the older and middle-aged women. Now women were primarily employed through NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) schemes that guaranteed a hundred days of work in panchayat schemes such as clearing ponds or roads.

Today, neighborhood colonies are filled during the day with middle-aged women waiting for their next NREGA work days. They live and socialize largely within the (caste) world of the colony. The most common trips women make outside the colony are to the clinic or bank, political rallies, temple festivals, weddings or homecomings, and other kin and social functions. Some young women have a daytime life outside of the colony at a school or university or a job, but they spend all their evenings in the neighborhood. Their major context for sociality is everyday “hanging out” in the front of particular houses in the neighborhood. There is also a series of social functions that are based primarily in the neighborhoods: weddings, marriage-related parties, funerals, homecomings, baby ceremonies, and going to bring women home from their natal families after a new baby is a few months old. At social functions people might see or meet prospects for future marriage. These activities and practices define the neighborhood through a set of regular interactions. In this new world of leisure and waiting, with no clear structure of work or obligation, might new structures of neighborliness emerge?

When we asked Balan chettan about relations with landlords prior to the 1970s, he replied, laughing, “There were friendly relations because you had no choice. You had to go to them for everything. You had to please the landlord!” While people had pithy stories about their former landlords, and evaluations of which of them was the most casteist, they told me that they felt they had to outwardly maintain non-antagonistic relations with them since they depended on them for work, loans, land, and arbitration. The intimacy and necessity of transactions across power gradients means these relationships were always grounded in friendly, dense relations, with deeply hidden transcripts (Scott Reference Scott1990), and continue to do so today even as direct economic dependencies have fallen away. Such relationships between landlords and laborers fold caste and class into each other. The question remains as to how people who are in the same class but of different castes relate to each other. Many scholars, such as Patrick Heller, approvingly measure Kerala's progressive transformation by its “horizontal” forms of association produced by social movements, unions, and other actors that mobilize based on class rather than caste, unlike elsewhere in India (Reference Heller2000: 499). This raises the question of whether, landlords aside, Dalits can engage in neighborly relations with Ezhavas in the colony who are their fellow laborers and members of their same class.

Visiting in the Private-Public

Throughout fieldwork, Vinu and I would return to Ponni veliyamma’s house and family in K colony. They had adopted us within the colony. We would take part in the evening ritual of tea and chatting that most women were able to engage in before it got dark and the evening meal had to be prepared. Female sociality was intense and warm in all the colonies that we worked in, and it was very much centered around houses.

Everyday life in the colonies is filled with visiting, hanging out, chatting, and exchanges of food, tea, and coffee. Karen Hansen, in discussing nineteenth-century American antebellum working-class communities, draws attention to the importance of “visiting practices” with neighbors and extended kin who made up networks that people drew upon for emotional and financial support, gossip, or political conversations, and worked together within seemingly private households (Reference Hansen and Weintraub1997: 275). Similarly, in rural Palakkad, people socialize with different households, often of the same larger family group, and with neighbors within the space of the rural neighborhood. While that neighborhood space cannot be characterized as private, it is not the same as the formal public spaces of the municipality, organized spaces created by political party events and actions, or male public spaces outside of the locality.

This dense household-to-household sociality within the locality, I propose, is neither private nor public, but instead a “private-public.” I take the term from Habermas (Reference Habermas1991), who locates the beginnings of the public sphere in the growth of private publics within bourgeois homes, where in the salon within the home, family, acquaintances, and friends within socially restricted circles gathered. This was a private sphere that was imbued with sentiments of the intimacy and sociality of the conjugal family but was simultaneously oriented outward (ibid.: 43–51). Here, rather than placing the private-public prior to the public sphere, I understand them as simultaneous forms. Private-public here denotes the everyday life of the locality in which outwardly oriented, heavily gendered, and unequal but sentimentalized households maintain networks of conviviality, affiliation, loyalty, and often inequality. Gorringe suggests something similar, arguing that the Dalit cheri (domicile/colony) can also be understood as a realm of security, “a semi-public space between the private lives of individuals and the public life of the street” (Reference Gorringe2005: 180). In the following sections, I focus on how such private-publics are structured by caste and gender.

Visiting practices take place largely within caste networks of support and help. In all colonies and across the Kanakan, Pulaya, and Paraya communities, families are commonly centered around a group of brothers, their in-marrying wives, and their children. Different branches of the family related to each other through an originary elder brother-younger brother relationship, what people call an annan-thambi or chettan-aniyan relationship. While men officially constitute the family structure, women provide most of the sociality. In the past, joint households where all the sons and wives lived together were common, but after families gained rights in land, they were able to partition, transmit, and buy plots, which led to families spreading across different houses.

Each male, married member belongs to a locality-based caste organization, called a desam in Eastern Palakkad.Footnote ¹⁶ In the past, a desam could be based on common service to either a small local shrine or an ancestral temple for which people performed caste service. The contemporary desam mixes caste, ritual, family, and locality relations. The same caste across a panchayat and region will be in different local desams, which roughly corresponded to family clusters. Families in desams constitute a community of death pollution (that is, they will observe death rituals together), help out at each other's weddings, and are ready to be called upon if help is needed by others in the desam. Elder men of the desam perform rituals at weddings and funerals and arbitrate and censure inter-caste marriages. In ever-expanding K colony, the desams are well-established, with each family contributing Rs. 50 monthly. Every local caste, Ezhava, Kanakan, Pulaya, and Paraiyar, has its own desam. If one's family falls out with others in one's desam, in K colony, people then will switch to another desam even though it might be from a different ritual group or family cluster. Family and desams show how intra-caste sociality is the fundamental affective infrastructure of the neighborhood.

Visiting rarely, however, crosses castes. O and P colonies are intensely caste-segregated. Muslim, Nair, and Ezhava communities live in completely different localities separated by roads and fields from Dalits. Our Dalit friends would lower their voices going past the two Ezhava houses in P colony, who conducted no exchanges with next-door Pulaya and Kanakan houses. In K colony, it is rare to find Ezhava women visiting Dalit women at home. This even though Dalit and Ezhava women work in work groups together, relationships that, according to Heller (Reference Heller2000), should be informed by class solidarity rather than caste discrimination.

Within a few months of starting fieldwork in K colony, Vinu and I, too, soon felt the bite of caste-based visiting, and hit a wall. While we continued to be welcomed into both Dalit homes and the Ezhava landlording family homes whose status needed no defending, most of the Ezhava laborers refused to let us visit. Some Ezhava older women cautioned us that their families had told them not to talk to us at home. Selvi, who had first discussed with us her life, laboring, and relationships to others in the colony, refused to greet us on an attempted second visit. By eating in Dalit homes, meeting frequently with Dalit laborers, and being adopted into a Dalit family, we were now on the other side of a line that was being drawn all the time. Our Dalit friends in K colony who had told us in the first few months that there was no problem with caste in K colony now relaxed and became more open. They started telling us about the numerous caste-inflected aggressions and slights that made up their everyday life in the colony. These stories came out particularly in discussions of inter-caste commensality, which has historically marked both caste segregation and ranking, and continues to be a potent sign of hospitality and community. The sharing of food, or refusal to do so, is a perfect proxy for the travails of inter-caste neighborliness.

Commensality and Inter-Caste Relations

In Palakkad, agricultural work is commonly organized through a work group. A standard work group in K colony consists of some seven or eight women, mostly Dalit but with two to three Ezhava women, and two or three men who are husbands to some of the women. You inherit a work-slot from your mother-in-law and will work with her and your sisters-in-law. It is also while working that women make friends across families and castes, negotiating forms of friendship and caste discrimination simultaneously. Our Dalit friends introduced us to Ezhava women they knew through work groups they had previously been in together. Work thus also introduces inter-class (landlord, families) as well as new intra-class but highly tense inter-caste relations among Dalit and Ezhava laborers, all of whom are neighbors in K colony.

Rather than political or class solidarity, caste is very much at the forefront of these relations between laborers. Some older practices have lapsed. For example, older Ezhava women laborers told us of how their mothers-in-law would bathe as soon as they got home from work to rid themselves of the pollution from working with SCs, a practice they said they themselves had abandoned. However, SC/Dalit friends kept reminding us that while caste had changed, “it has not gone away.”

Ponni veliyamma, her daughter-in-law Radhika, and other neighbors including Prema chechi, told us of how Soundhari chechi in the work group had accidentally eaten something from another woman's food. Finding out that it was from an SC woman, she had made herself vomit. We regularly heard Dalit women's stories of workdays where Ezhava laborers would refuse to try the food that Dalit laborers had cooked. Dalit women endure this routine casteist behavior from co-workers, yet they do not tolerate it in silence. They discuss and remind each other of these moments. It was not that women are not genuine friends in the work groups. They have worked together for years, shared lives and employers, told each other stories and jokes, discussed sex with their husbands, and helped each other through difficult times. Yet friendship does not mean that caste considerations do not apply. Everyone knows who practices caste discrimination and who does not. Their caste-sharpened eyes see minute movements within the texture of everyday life, things hard to put one's finger on precisely, but ever-present and constitutive of how one thinks about others.

These stories of marked commensality and the humiliations surrounding negotiations of food are regular features of conversations about caste in the colony. The maintenance of caste lines within what are roughly similar class relations within work is proof to many Dalits that caste continually impacts their everyday lives. As Chella from P colony remarked caustically, “Until you go home, you are all working together,” yet “they won't come to the home,” entering homes was only done within “their community/samuyam.” Radhamani in O colony told us, “Even now there is no habit of dining together. It is not like ‘untouchability’ (aitham), but you cannot forget that the caste spirit is still there.”

Rejection of ordinary forms of food sharing is linked to larger neighborly ceremonies that also enshrine commensality, such as wedding feasts. Functions, especially those related to marriage, are highly significant in the colonies. All involve food. Marriages are within caste but take place within a larger inter-caste universe in which status is established and maintained by giving food to others, taking part in formal rituals, and displaying the bride's gold jewelry, among other such prestigious displays. Formal visits of the groom's family and friends prior to weddings are major hosting celebrations; the bride's family provides food for a large crowd, there are brief ceremonies, and photographs are taken. This celebration involves a definition of the social largely internal to the caste community, since everyone is associated with the familial lineages or desams. Today young people have friends of different castes from school, so the group of young people brought by the bride and groom can be mixed caste, as they were in “visiting the bride” event that we participated in as members of the groom's party for the family we were closest to.

The wedding itself demands a larger conception of the social as involving the whole neighborhood. Every nearby family is expected to be invited to a wedding and should send at least one representative to it. If you are Dalit, such weddings can be a humiliating experience. In the past, Dalits were served last and seated separately from other castes. For any given wedding it is difficult to anticipate whether this will happen or not, and this is a source of uncertainty and discussion. Velayudhan, one of our regular interlocutors and friends, when asked about his experiences of caste discrimination, immediately recalled a local Ezhava wedding that he had attended as a young man with school friends who were Ezhava. He was served last and separately from his friends. He recalled this as a terribly humiliating experience that made him swear to never again attend such an event.

The reverse was also difficult, as Radhika, Beena, Ponni veliyamma, and Prema chechi, explained to us in one leisurely evening conversation. In local Kanakan ceremonies, you are supposed to host a dinner in your home the night before and invite your neighbors. However, the Ezhava landlord and laborer families would not eat food cooked by Dalits. Dalit families had to provide bought snacks and fruit such as bananas or send them around to Ezhava family homes. This was not only expensive but also, as the four women expressed, they found the behavior and expectations repellent. When I asked about the difference between purchased snacks and food served at the dinner and why they had to be provided, Beena laughed ruefully and replied with a strong note of disapproval, “They don't want anything that could have been cooked or touched by us.”

Over the last decade, all weddings in K colony have taken place in marriage halls. Families, both Dalit and Ezhava, can on occasion get Namboodiri Brahmins to consecrate marriages. All members of the colony from all castes are invited to the marriage halls and attend to eat food provided by caterers of unidentified castes hired by the halls. These wedding halls highlight the many changes in caste relations in Kerala. The performance of a marriage by the Namboodiri Brahmin shows the continuing importance of specific upper-caste practices as constituting consecration, but a service being extended to lower-caste communities was inconceivable a few decades ago. Wedding halls, and their anonymous caterers, solved the problem of caste commensality and satisfied neighborhood conviviality, but they managed to transform conviviality only by dodging confrontation. That is, they did not really transform caste commensality, they simply reorganized it.

Commensality has always been a significant marker of caste boundaries and orthopraxy. Marriott, in a classic essay on caste, found that exchanges and withholding of food expressed basic ideas of ranking between castes: “givers are higher, receivers are lower” (Reference Marriott, Singer and Cohn1968). “Equalizing ranks” was possible through eating each other's food, thus allowing one to manipulate pollution to express domination, equality, or other subtleties (ibid.: 143). Cooked food can be divided into both superior pakka cooked food served to deities at festivals and feasts, and kacca ordinary cooked food, which is inferior. “To accept inferior food is to accept one's lack of honor, one's more intimate, routine dependence upon the food provider” (ibid.: 144). This emphasis on transactions of food and substance as constituting the person as well as ranking one's relation to other castes has been well-discussed (e.g., Daniel Reference Daniel1984).

During my fieldwork it was common for people to discuss caste and caste ranking in the past through food exchanges. When we asked Chella in P colony about past differences between Parayas and Pulayas, she replied, “We don't take or give daughters [in marriage]; even now we don't eat amongst each other.” Radhakrishnan, a Gupta landlord, explained it to us in classic Marriott-like terms: “We cannot eat food cooked by them … people of similar castes, Gupta, Nair will eat in each other's houses.” When we asked people of different Dalit castes about internal rankings within those castes, Kanakans would rank themselves in relation to Pulayas and Parayas by saying, “We eat with them though in the past we didn't eat with them; we still don't eat with them [Parayas, for example].” Prejudice against the Paraya community, remains particularly pronounced, not only among Ezhavas, but also other Dalits. However, I found that, in practice, despite past rankings and separation, contemporary restrictions on eating between different Dalit communities were not always strictly observed and were rather flexible (DeLiege Reference Deliege1992), and Dalits I knew rarely refused food from other Dalits. I found that, unlike endogamous marriages, which are still understood as naturalistically necessary, not eating together has changed from a marker of caste ranking to an explicit statement of caste ranking.

The restricted commensality that we observed within everyday neighborly contexts of work and visiting was no longer based in a relationship of substances in which a comprehensively ranked system was understood to operate. Instead, commensality took place within a context in which caste mobilization has seen castes engage in direct competition as distinct substantial groups. When Ezhavas and Dalits understand each other as such, and discuss commensality, they do not talk about the play of substance as among individuals, but rather about relationships of corporate political and social actors. As Fuller remarks, this is an “alteration in the normative basis of caste—from purity as an index of hierarchical rank to difference as a marker of separation” (Reference Fuller and Fuller1996: 12). The Dalit women I worked with discussed avoidance of commensality as caste discrimination, and this perspective is a result of the profound political transformations within India that I discussed earlier.

This shift to conceiving of people as corporate actors can be understood through Barnett's insightful though little utilized exposition of (Dumontian) substantialization and the ethnicization of caste in contemporary India. Drawing on a detailed analysis of transformations in different Vellala sub-castes, Barnett argued that caste has shifted from an emphasis on orthopraxic rules (David Schneider's “code for conduct”) toward being substantialized in the body of the person as “heritage”—it has become “blood purity” (Reference Barnett and Stein1975: 151). A Vellala or Brahmin man drinking alcohol or eating with another caste no longer means that they cannot continue to be Vellala or Brahmin. Barnett argues that marriage choices and preserving blood heritage has become more important than strict restrictions on commensality and other aspects of orthopraxis. Caste thus endures as substantialized ethnic-like community substance inside bodies and collectivities. This means, first, that castes can become unmoored from the specific moral and material economies that positioned them in relation to other castes, and still endure (ibid.: 156–59). Secondly, Barnett asserted that along with ethnicization comes a form of upper-caste racism towards Dalits that substantializes Dalits as a distinct race with a different kind of substance from other castes—all groups can be distinct from Dalits—while collapsing boundaries between different segments within upper-caste and OBC communities (ibid.: 159).

During my fieldwork I found that the emphasis on caste endogamy as a natural fact of community within the colonies, and by all castes, was absolute. Marriage was not considered an arena of caste discrimination; all the people I worked with believed that love marriage (most frequently found in inter-caste marriages) had to be policed. One of the prime tasks of caste desams was to police inter-caste marriages, and such “mistakes” were punishable by fines of around INR 5000 paid to one's desam. While Dalits generally accepted couples once the fine was paid, we noticed that the inter-caste families we knew were visited less. Among Ezhavas, inter-caste marriage was more stigmatized and could split a desam, as it did in K colony. Punishment through ostracization highlighted the importance of sharing food. Balan chettan explained this regarding one branch of his family whose members were ostracized over a community shrine dispute: “Weddings, functions … they can't come when the community is around. Within the family, I will share food.” In the past, he explained, “if you were isolated, you were not meant to take or give them anything.”

While Barnett suggests commensality has become less important as a marker of individual caste behavior, I found that it remains strategically significant within ethnicized caste groups. It marks how different groups use and manipulate forms of food sharing to mark caste community boundaries within new caste universes. Ezhava disdain and failure to reciprocate is directed at Dalits as collective actors. The specific ways in which commensality can be manipulated is evident in how it is significantly gendered and linked to new forms of private and public. As Radhamani of P colony told us, now one can hold a marriage in a marriage hall and men will come. She remarked, “[In] the earlier generation, no one came. This generation, men will come and women will not come … women have ego, they think they are better people, they think they are better than this.”

Gendered Commensality

In Kerala, visiting makes clear how much spaces, including the private-publics, are deeply gender-segregated (Devika and Thampi Reference Devika and Thampi2011). While both men and women might engage in visiting and in household-to-household sociality, we found that men propounded in spaces outside the house within both in the locality and the panchayat at large. Men socialized in public thoroughfares, roads, toddy shops, union buildings, CPM meeting houses, and other more “public” places. These public spaces were of a different order from the fronts of the houses in the neighborhoods, where women gathered to talk. The neighborhood was the space for women (Sharma Reference Sharma1980; Gorringe Reference Gorringe2005). At night, going through Palakkad town, few women were to be seen outside. If women did go out at night they only visited other inside spaces such as malls, sari shops, and restaurant/eateries.

While male mingling in the locality continued to be largely, though not entirely caste-based, official public spaces, such as in the mixed eating places outside of the neighborhood, were considered spaces for inter-caste mingling. Cross-caste commensality was not an issue in the local panchayat eating-house where Vinu and I, two class-marked oddities, sat on benches in a crammed half-open room to eat our 40 rupee lunch with a host of men ranging from laborers to the local village officer. When some women we knew set up a closed-door women's co-operative canteen inside the panchayat building with the help of the Communist Party, all kinds of panchayat officials, male and female, ate easily inside with no mention of the fact that all the women in the cooperative were Dalit. In the official public, everyone knew that caste observances and discrimination “officially” were not supposed to happen. Inside the locality, everything was understood to be different. As Adrian Mayer (Reference Mayer and Fuller1996) describes, across India, while caste differentiation has become more publicly illegitimate, this has not reduced by any means caste differentiation in the private realm. Caste, and especially the minute forms of caste differentiation and discrimination that serve to constantly remind Dalits that they are Dalits, was officially abolished from the public sphere in Kerala, but it has come to reside ever more intensely within the realm of the private, the localities and the households, where most sociality actually takes place, especially for women.

This took a double-gendered form in the private-public. As we soon learned, while men would visit social functions for other castes and eat there, it was rare for OBC women to eat in Dalit functions and homes. Ezhava and upper-caste women rarely, if ever, inter-dined. Statements about OBC and upper-caste women not inter-dining were ubiquitous, casual, and factual. Only Radhakrishnan, the upper-caste Gupta, was characteristically explicit: “Caste things are established through women. Women are considered the pride of society. So, [women] going and eating with mixed castes, men don't like it.”

This constant differentiation between whether men and women came to eat in functions and houses recalls a subtle distinction of women as the fundamental keepers of caste status. Men's commensality is seen as part of the official public observation of an end to caste practices, but women's lack of participation is read as evidence of the enduring kernel of caste in everyday life. Inter-dining by men signals the official and public disavowal of caste, while women's continuing refusal to eat in Dalit homes signals the private world of caste (Sarkar Reference Sarkar2001).Footnote ¹⁷

While endogamy, desams, and other caste-oriented community relations are enclosed within the private-public as necessary features of community, this does not mean that inter-caste discrimination in the shape of labor exploitation, restricted commensality, and humiliations within neighborly relations are accepted as constitutive of aspirations toward neighborliness, as was evident in our Dalit friends’ disgust in describing Ezhava observance of restricted commensality. Commensality is an issue that simultaneously evokes caste separation, given that segregated commensality is central to classical definitions of caste, and the celebrated value of hospitality in Indian homes. The very definition of hospitality is the offering of tea, coffee, and food when you visit homes. It is through practices of eating, or not eating, in other people's homes, while at work inside the locality, and at each other's weddings inside the locality that neighborliness in the private-public is both built and frequently disappointed.