Retro-modern India

Forging the Low-caste Self

Manuela Ciotti

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136704413
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Firmly situated within the analytics of the political economy of a north Indian province, this book explores self-fashioning in pursuit of the modern amongst low-caste Chamars. Challenging existing accounts of national modernity in the non-West, the book argues that subaltern classes shape their own ideas about modernity by taking and rejecting from models of other classes within the same national context. While displacing the West — in its colonial and non-colonial manifestations — as the immanent comparative focus, the book puts forward a unique framework for the analysis of subaltern modernity. This builds on the entanglements between two main trajectories, both of which are viewed as the outcome of the generative impetus of modernisation in India: the first consists of the Chamar appropriation of socio-cultural distinctions forged by 19th-century Indian middle classes in their encounter with colonial modernity; the second features the Chamar subversion of high-caste ideals and practices as a result of low-caste politics initiated during the 20th century. The author contends that these conflicting trends give rise to a temporal antinomy within the Chamar politics of self-making, caught up between compulsions of a past modern and of a contemporary one. The eclectic outcome is termed as 'retro-modernity'. While the book signals a politics of becoming whose dynamics had previously been overlooked by scholars, it simultaneously opens up novel avenues for the understanding of non-elite modern life-forms in postcolonial settings.

The book will interest scholars of anthropology, South Asian studies, development studies, gender studies, political science and postcolonial studies.

Chapter 1

Chamar Modernity: Progressing into the Past

Manav manav ek saman

(All human beings are equal)

I. Introduction: Issues of Water and Not-so-fluid Substances

An unspecified year during the 1970s: a group of Untouchable Chamar men¹ were returning to their native village called Manupur,² after having taken part in a procession for the Chamar saint Ravidas’s jayanti (birthday). The event had been celebrated in the village of Seer Govardhanpur, near Banaras Hindu University (BHU), believed to be Ravidas’s birthplace. This site hosts a large temple dedicated to the saint, a prominent figure of the devotional Bhakti medieval tradition, a leatherworker who ascended to the purity of sainthood and an emblem of the low castes’ struggle for equality. The journey had made the group of Chamars thirsty and they had stopped at a tea shop run by an Ahir (Yadav, a cowherd caste), in a village very close to their own. The Ahir denied the Chamars the use of the lotah, the metal vessel used for drinking water. After arguing with him, the Chamars, no doubt infused with the egalitarian spirit of the celebration they had just attended, headed to the kutcheri (court area), where they knew a local leader was staging a protest. They joined the protest and made public the episode of discrimination. However, this resulted in one of the Chamars, who was part of the group which had become a victim of the Ahir’s ‘contamination anxiety’, being jailed for a few days. The discrimination episode subsequently ended up in the hands of an Untouchable police inspector who began a legal case against the Ahir. Ultimately, the latter was prosecuted. The Chamars say of him: ‘these days he is a much better person’. (Field notes 1998)

Water is a tricky business when it comes to social relations: denying the lotah to ‘status-questionable’ clientele in what was possibly a roadside chai shop (tea shop) or a dhaba (food stall) has quite a genealogy. One ‘moment’ of this genealogy was crystallised in Burn (1902). Burn placed the Chamar caste in ‘Group XII’ classification, which included

the lowest castes who eat beef and vermin and are considered filthy. Of these the Chamar is considered most respectable, and in fact one committee has pointed out that the touch of grooms who are chiefly Chamars does not defile and these men should be placed in the tenth group (castes from whose lotah the twice-born cannot take water). They are principally tanners, and the skins of the animals that die are their perquisite; consequently they are chiefly responsible for the cattle-poisoning that goes on in the eastern districts […]. As there seems some likelihood of a rise in status, however, the panchayats on one district have announced that any Chamar suspected in future of cattle-poisoning will be outcasted. (Ibid.: 232)

Where the denial of the lotah would still have allowed the possibility of ‘upgrading’ the Chamars to a less-defiling group, decades later Cohn remarked on the impossibility of food and water transactions between this caste and those of higher status as follows: ‘in North India this is a not a literal untouchability, but rather a situation where high-caste men will not take water or cooked food from the Chamars’ (1987: 284). The discrimination episode described at the beginning of the book is an iconic incident of untouchability, as the Chamars with whom I carried out fieldwork would undoubtedly recount, should I search their collective memory for events (or people) which had offended their personas and dignity. Rather than remaining buried in the succession of untouchability practices which members of certain castes have to confront sooner or later in life, the Chamars could join a public protest to voice their grievances and were lucky enough to find a sympathetic State official who shared their social origins, and therefore understood their plight and dealt with the case. What is more, the case of discrimination had taken place in a public space, and this had heightened the gravity of the Ahir’s gesture. In the end, according to the Chamars, the Ahir in question redeemed himself from his previous offensive behaviour and bias. Without forgetting the symbolic and psychological violence caused by this episode, this happy-ending story is more of an exception than the norm — Uttar Pradesh (UP) has the tragic record of the highest number of cases of atrocities against Dalits in 2006.³

Caste relations have never been idyllic in the village of Manupur (and its surroundings in eastern UP), the locality from which the stories I tell in this book originate. Fortunately, though, the village has only presented cases of minor gravity. I do not have information on the Ahir’s redemption path towards ‘becoming a better person’, which surely included renouncing, at least publicly, his beliefs. On the other hand, in many of the stories I collected amongst Manupur Chamars, a rather different project of ‘becoming better persons’ recurred — one which shared a semantic field of internalised ideology with the Ahir, but which had been triggered by compulsions about reform and civilisation. Together with concerns of dignity and equality, this project exuded a powerful discourse of identity and shaped the trajectory of social reproduction that the Chamars had embarked on, and inflected the material and symbolic resources mobilised to this end. This book is an empirical investigation of the configurations of modernity born out of this trajectory, and enacted and imagined by a historically marginalised community, inhabiting one of the many thousands of villages scattered throughout north India. These configurations tell of new entanglements between pasts and presents and of human agencies which defied, in many different ways, the dichotomy between tradition and modernity, while showing alternative ways to conceive the nexus between Indian modernity and its entanglements with powers, discourses and images which converged into the idea of ‘Europe’⁴ and the ‘West’ in India.

The Chamar caste has a population of many millions fragmented into a vast number of subdivisions spanning across the states of central and north India.⁵ Burdened by a history of ‘impure’ activities, such as the removing of dead animals, leatherwork and midwifery — these implying defilement, immorality, and lowliness — the derogatory identity core associated with this caste has been crystallised, moulded and mobilised by a number of intertwined factors. Amongst these, the inheritance of authority contained within Hindu sacred scriptures, the transformation of the economy through colonial domination and the passage from rural to urban economy (S. Bayly 1999; Gooptu 2001), the process of social objectification by colonial administrators’ accounts (Charsley 1996; Cohn 1987; Dirks 2001), the State’s juridical action (Galanter 1984), low-caste identity politics, and the everyday practices of untouchability have all intervened in shaping the Chamars as a social category. Nonetheless, sections of this caste have been at the crux of development processes aided by the State policy of positive discrimination for communities such as theirs, and have been the protagonists of political-mobilisation movements for self-respect. Compared to other Untouchable castes in north India, the Chamars have been at the vanguard of reaping the benefits of these processes. While ‘polluting’ activities connoted only a minority of this large caste, they are, more significantly, generally suggestive of the profound class divisions of UP. Historical centres of industrial employment like Agra and Kanpur aside, in this state, and especially in the eastern region — historically the theatre for upper-caste landlords’ domination — the Chamars have constituted a vast, landless agricultural labour force. As Brass has remarked, the ‘bottom of the economic hierarchy in rural UP corresponds strongly with the status hierarchy in the sense that most of the landless come from the lowest caste groups’ (1997: 205).

In this book, I intend to illustrate how the Chamar production of distinctions in pursuit of the modern has been powerfully shaped and mediated by modernisation discourses, and the belief in progress, science and development, which have informed society, the economy and the politics of post-independence India. ‘“There is only one-way traffic in Time.” India had to march with it, discarding the old religious and social orthodoxies and hierarchies, and adopting science and the principle of equality, along with an economy system to match them’ (Prakash 1999: 211). The first sentence within the quote is from Nehru’s The Discovery of India. His message would have been met with enthusiasm by low castes such as the Chamars, for the promise of emancipation it contained. It valorised education, secularism, and economic and industrial development — a vision whose contradictory unfolding has been espoused by Khilnani (1998). This ‘idea of India’ saw its main actor in the State, which for communities such as the Chamars was the guarantee for implementing ad-hoc measures to uplift their condition and ‘fix’ the historical injustices perpetrated against them. State mythologies around development through education, employment and democratisation practices flourished amongst its most disadvantaged citizens. The Chamars were particularly attracted by the State’s vision of change, mediated by the ideals of equality put forward by Dalit historical leaders and movements. The Manupur Chamar community’s narratives resonated with echoes of modernisation, of education as a civilising tool, of a history of labour as a movement towards freedom and the depersonalisation of labour relations, of Western beliefs in progress and scientific rationality.

What is more, the Chamars’ world-views were often shaped by dichotomies between the past and the present, illiteracy and education, as well as between backwardness and civilisation. Such binaries are not just to be found in India. In China, for example, Rofel encountered ‘strong views on “modernization”, “development”, “the West”, “backwardness”, and “progress”’ (1999: xi; emphasis in the original) — a testimony of the pervasiveness of these ideas in the pan-Asian context. Mosse has noticed how

no sooner have we dispensed with the local/global, underdeveloped/ developed, traditional/modern, Indian/Western, etc., as universal ordering categories of knowledge, and redirected our energies to the stories of villagers or policy makers, than the same binaries reappear, now filling our notebooks as idioms through which social experiences are interpreted, social differences marked or aspirations expressed, whether in south Rajasthan or south London. (2003: 333)

My notebooks were similarly filled with the Chamars’ binaries. But what did these point to? Binaries sedimented over and intertwined with the vernacular organising principles which the Chamars used to order their present, past and future. Manupur Chamars were not just a case of ‘Lévi-Straussian subjects’: their binaries returned to the ethnographer those antinomies which had made up modernisation theory, and whose flaws scholars had endeavoured to demonstrate. Illuminating, in this regard, is the case of education which I discuss in Chapter 4: examining the changes education brings about, Chamar narratives and practices proposed almost the same ones which the widely criticised ‘literacy thesis’ had put forward. But why did binaries acquire such an explanatory power? This alerted me to the need for reflection on development’s ideological seeds, the ways they had penetrated the minds of their subjects, informed their world-views, and the inevitability of conceiving one’s life as one of betterment: after all, ‘what else can one strive for if not to develop?’ (Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal 2003: 4). The need for reflection became intriguing in view of the fact that amongst most Manupur Chamars, development has been more discursively powerful than actually leading to significant life-changing consequences. It was the interplay between binaries and Chamar vernacular categories which formed one of the most interesting entry points into their modernity configurations.

II. A Démodé Enchantment? Historicism, Modernisation and a Particular Social Race for Progress

The inescapability of development and its enticing teleology finds its roots in the historicist mode of thinking which the coloniser introduced in India (and elsewhere) in the 19th century, and in its transformation into a tool of intellectual and practical dominion. In the words of Chakrabarty, this mode

tells us that in order to understand the nature of anything in this world we must see it as an historically developing entity, that is, first, as an individual and unique work — as some kind of unity at least in potential — and, second, as something that develops over time. (2007: 23)

This, according to Chakrabarty, allowed the coloniser to place non-European people in the ‘waiting room’ of history — deploying a stagist notion of it — which was both rebelled against by nationalist elites but also used by them vis-á-vis the subaltern classes, and carried forward in independent India. Against this backdrop, the trope of the ‘peasant’,

a shorthand for all the seemingly nonmodern, rural, nonsecular relationships and life practices that constantly leave their imprint on the lives of even the elites in India and on their institutions of government. The peasant stands for all that is not bourgeois (in a European sense) in Indian capitalism and modernity (ibid.: 11),

both endowed with citizenship rights and in need to be educated (ibid.: 9ff.), is a cogent example of the contradictory relationship between the internalisation of historicism and the developmental practices of the Indian State. This trope features in Chakrabarty’s idea of political modernity, and in the course of the book, I will show how the Chamars reshape the ways in which the ‘peasant’ has been envisioned and answer questions on the nature of her/his political performance.

Intrinsically linked to the above issues is the creation of an identity and discourse of ‘backwardness’ amongst the Chamars, as a result of colonial and postcolonial processes of caste objectification. This was an additional backwardness to, and a rather different condition from, the one impressed by the coloniser upon their Indian subjects. The Chamars and others like them developed an internalised condition of backwardness as a result of their Untouchable identity vis-á-vis other Indian castes. My findings illustrate how, while showing little desire to resurrect and capitalise on a reconstructed ‘pristine’ or ‘indigenous’ Chamar identity, the attribute of backwardness had become a marker of their past, culture and habits. This consideration is pivotal to the understanding of the enactment of modernity within this community, and to the more general argument I make here on Indian modernity. Where A. Gupta has rightly pointed out how

one of the dimensions in which the experience of modernity in the Third World is significantly different than in the West is that a sense of underdevelopment, of being ‘behind’, of being ‘not like’ powerful Others, is a constitutive feature of social and political life (1998: 103; emphasis in the orginal),

the Chamar experience features other powerful others with whom they compared themselves, and these were to be found within Indian national boundaries. Further, for subaltern subjects such as the Chamars, the historicist approach worked in seemingly circular ways: if on the one hand, it created the ‘backward subject’ who had to be reformed and developed, on the other, narratives of modernisation and progress which were responsible for this approach served to obliterate this very discourse. In other words, this approach forged a ‘problematic subject’ and provided a solution to her/him at some stage in the future. What complicates the workings of historicism, however, is that for communities such as the Chamars, the discourse of backwardness became prominent in the formation of Scheduled Caste (SC) communities and individuals, symbolised by the jati patr or caste certificate, which entitled them to the benefits of the policy of positive discrimination. The importance of backwardness to qualify for special attention within the developmental State resulted in a peculiar condition identified by Parry in ‘The Koli Dilemma’ (1970). This article encapsulates the circumstance by which an SC community — in this case the Koli community in Kangra, north-western India⁶ — is pulled between assertions of superior status with a view to appear socially respectable and claims of their ascriptive status (and therefore of ‘backwardness’) in order to receive special provisions from the State.⁷ More broadly, this phenomenon has resulted in a ‘socially schizophrenic condition’ of progressing through claims of lagging behind amongst Untouchables and other protected categories. ‘Backwardness’ is an incredibly coveted attribute long after the constitution of independent India. If ‘the Mandal Commission listed three categories of backwardness, e.g., social, economic, and educational’ (D. Gupta 2005a: 424), with social backwardness being the most important of all (ibid.), in the post-Mandal era, more communities exercise pressure and protest to be included in the list of privileged categories. The social discrepancies generated by the condition identified by Parry, are also reflected in the realm of the history of Untouchable citizenship. Chatterjee has analysed the life of Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar, the historical leader of the Dalit movement, ‘in order to highlight the contradictions posed for a modern politics by the rival demands of universal citizenship on the one hand and the protection of particularist rights on the other’ (2006: 8). Chatterjee concludes that ‘my burden will be to show that there is no available historical narrative of the nation that can resolve those contradictions’ (ibid). Still, the contradictions between the features of universal citizenship (of the developed subject) and the special provisions for a selected group of citizens (conceived as ‘underdeveloped’ subjects) make up the everyday experience of citizenship amongst communities such as the Chamars.

The seeds of historicism, and subsequently the lure of modernisation, engendered amongst the Chamars an experience of temporality akin to that implicit in their impetus: the idea of history as a forward movement. Where on the one hand Hindus often blame the Kali Yuga (the last of the four ages of the world) for the occurrence of things that do not follow the rules of dharma (moral order) and lead the world towards degeneration, on the other, Chamars’ conversations about their own community and society at large were replete with words like sudhar (improvement, social reform) and vikas (development). This terminology refers to an idea of progress — certainly more soci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Orthography and Transliteration
• Glossary of Selected Terms
• Foreword by Mukulika Banerjee
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1. Chamar Modernity: Progressing into the Past
• Chapter 2. ‘Today We Can Touch Anything’: Reflections on the Crux of Identity and Political Economy
• Chapter 3. Ethnohistories behind Local and Global Bazaars: Chronicle of a Weaving Community and its Disappearance
• Chapter 4. ‘We Used to Live like Animals’: Education as a Self- and Community-engineering Process
• Chapter 5. Nonrational Modernity? Religious Agency, Science and Spirits
• Chapter 6. Beyond the Vote: Politics as Sociality, Imagination and Identity
• Chapter 7. The Bourgeois Woman and the Half-naked one: Gendering Retro-modernity
• Chapter 8. The Politics of Indian Modernity
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Index