#title No Gods, No Masters, No Brahmins
#subtitle An anarchist enquiry on caste, race, and indigeneity in India
#author Maia Ramnath
#date 1 July 2015
#source Retrieved from No Gods, No Masters, No Peripheries: Global Anarchisms
#lang en
#pubdate 2026-01-06T19:08:05
#topics india, caste, Brahmanism, decolonisation, anti-colonialism
#language English



Somewhere that is nowhere, is Begumpura: the city without sorrow. There is
no class or caste there, no taxation, no oppression. It is a place without
masters or peripheries, built upon natural reason, equality, and joy. An
anarchist’s utopia? Perhaps. This one was described by the fifteenth-century
bhakti poet Ravidas, considered a forerunner of contemporary anti-caste
poetics and politics. How then might an anarchist understand the struggle
against caste? This is a question imperative to ponder.

In previous work, I’ve suggested that a spectrum of anti-colonialist
discourses in the global south shares a certain deep logic structure with the
anarchist tradition in the global north, demonstrating a comparable range of
responses to conditions produced by modernization.[1]
(In the colonial context, however, this process was
experienced through a violent disruption by external forces and thus
freighted with an extra burden of racialized alienation.)[2] Correspondingly, I
suggested that if decolonization could be defined as the most comprehensive
possible degree of emancipation and autotrans-formation on all levels, from
the largest socioeconomic structures to the most intimate dynamics of
gender and psychology, this could also be compared to an anarchist ideal of
collective liberation encompassing all axes of domination, oppression, and
exploitation. In the South Asian context, caste lies at the intersection of all
these axes; confronting it is by definition a battle against the purest social hierarchy. Decolonization in anarchist terms, then, is incomplete without
dismantling caste.

Yet ironically, caste can all too easily slip from sharp focus via the same
analytical lenses I had been using with precisely the intent to counteract the
premises that South Asia by default refers to India, that Indian society is
fundamentally Hindu, and that the culture known as Hinduism is essentially
defined by a totalizing hierarchy. Meanwhile, anti-caste interventions
historically have most often called upon, not opposed, modern state
mechanisms. In stark contrast to Gandhi, who opposed the modern state
while advocating a nation framed in a Hindu cultural language in which all
were theoretically included but on an unequal footing, B.R. Ambedkar, the
exemplary figure of caste abolitionism, held Hinduism to be fundamentally
inegalitarian, and looked to the modern liberal state as universal guarantor
of freedom, equality, and rights. Of course, such a solution to injustice is
precisely the kind that anarchist thought avoids—indeed, cannot even see.
Moreover, to the logic of an internationalist inquiry oriented toward to nonor anti-state movements, such interventions are less obviously legible. But,
as with race in the United States, the denial of a principle’s validity does not
eliminate the material realities, entrenched practices, and pervasive
structures of feeling based upon it.

So, then, to repeat the question: what is a useful anarchist approach to
caste?

Although previously I flagged the (patriarchal, militaristic, xenophobic,
homogenizing) dangers of the nation, even while acknowledging its
historical uses by colonized populations, in indicting nationalism I was
primarily blaming the state for tautologically legitimizing a community as a
nation by equipping it with governmental, disciplinary, violencemonopolizing, and revenue-collecting mechanisms, which its minorities and
discontents experience as irredeemably repressive. Now I needed to
continue problematizing the nation, not in the abstract but specifically *as it
was produced* in India: notably in the dominant Hindu version countered by
radical anti-caste discourse, among other modes of subjugated knowledge.

But subjugated on what basis? Does caste function as an ideological shroud
for class relations,[3] or as a mode of oppression that precedes and exceeds
class? Was it a way of formalizing relations with an earlier colonized
population? Does it name an internal or external relationship? Two modes of
decolonial consciousness that weave through radical anti-caste discourse,
sometimes in tandem and sometimes in tension, are indigeneity and race.
Might we answer the question of how anarchism could relate to caste by
examining how anarchism could relate to either indigenous or anti-racist
struggles? If so, grappling with caste requires the anarchist anti-colonialist
to sharpen her understanding of both race and indigeneity, as they intersect
with unique historical and cultural formations, since other elements of
radical anti-caste discourse reinterpret elements of liberalism, Marxism, and
most innovatively, Buddhism,[4] as a rational ethical philosophy and
indigenous challenger to Brahmanism.

Furthermore, an anti-caste intellectual history makes it clear that the story
of colonization and decolonization in South Asia is not a simple binary clash
of the British Raj versus the national liberation struggle, but rather a
palimpsest.[5] Multiple waves of migration, settlement, synthesis,
subjugation, dispossession, and incorporation have created interference
patterns over thousands of years. To see oneself as anti-colonial in India
then has not in all times and circumstances been to see oneself as antiBritish: radical Dalit rhetoric locates the moment of foreign subjugation not
by the East India Company in the eighteenth century CE, but by Vedic
Aryans in the second millennium BCE.

Since the 1990s, however, several of these colonial timelines seem to be
converging so that the once-distinct forces of Hindutva, neoliberal
capitalism and the Indian state are now working synergistically with each
other in relation to the prevailing structure of global empire. Accordingly, it
may be that the dynamics of each wave form, including the counterforces
they unleash, now have unprecedented possibilities to augment each other
rather than cancel each other out. This may in turn create new opportunities
for those borne upon any of those waves to learn from and act in concert
with each other. These are the conjunctures to be explored here.

*** Opening Check-In

But first, in the spirit of “relentless self-interrogation”[6] required for
accountable scholarship, it seems worthwhile to note a few things about
methodological and locational biases. (Those impatient with such matters
can skip ahead to the next section.)

As a logical extension of my initial questions about the practice of antisystemic solidarities, I had originally explored historical connections
between Western anarchists and Indian anti-colonialists from the
transnational standpoint, from which what comes most into focus is
imperialism as a world system, the continuity of classical colonialism and
neocolonialism in the form of expanding global capitalism, and the insatiable
incorporation of land, labor, and resources into that system. It is perhaps
harder to see other aspects of struggle that are urgent for activist agendas
and research questions embedded in the Indian local context. Of course,
world systems and localized oppressions are connected; but according to
positioning, angles and priorities may change. So, in privileging global
systemic analysis over nationalist narrative, “South Asia” over Indo-centrism,
intersection with the Islamic world over Hindu cultural hegemony, history
over ethnography, English, Hindi, and Urdu materials over those in
languages such as Tamil or Marathi, what might a diasporic anarchist
scholar pursuing interests springing from her location be inadvertently
neglecting?

Moving from self-criticism to criticism: for anyone taking up the subject of
caste—or neglecting to take it up—the likelihood of attack is approximately
99.99 percent. Some probable firing lines can be predicted: Indian Marxists
may call me a right-wing reactionary for airing critiques of instrumental
rationalism and industrial development. Hindu nationalists may accuse me
of anti-Hindu hate speech, surely a symptom of either pathological guilt or
cultural contamination. These I would refute, and the refutations are central
to the alternatives I’m trying to highlight.

Radical Dalit activists and intellectuals may say that I should not presume to
speak, due to lack of organic connection to Dalit movements and a middleclass/upper-caste background; or that I am taking up space better left to
others. Native American activists and intellectuals may chide me for not
sufficiently foregrounding and problematizing the location of my writing, on
Lenni Lenape land. Lacking immediate solutions, I can only acknowledge
these contradictions, while striving for what Taiaiake Alfred calls a clear
head and a good heart to guide awareness during an endless process.[7] My
overriding conviction is that if any headway is ever to be made toward the
goals of dismantling oppression and exploitation while building freedom and
equality, then avoiding talking about it is far worse than trying to talk about
it, attempting to open dialogue (not to represent!), whoever and wherever
we are, in however flawed a way.[8]

Finally, North American anarchists may feel (and have implied) that this
topic is irrelevant, inaccessible, and less exciting than what they were
expecting to hear: where are the itinerant revolutionists on whom to project
their fantasies, meeting in clandestine, cosmopolitan locations? Where are
the South Asian syndicalists and guerrillas they had anticipated adding to a
rainbow coalition of familiar types? What such anarchists must realize is
that the failure to think about caste in the past has doomed the
revolutionary aspirations of those with whom they sensed affinity. So then
let’s think about it.

*** A Very Brief and Partial Account of Dalitbahujan Thought

“Dalit” is the preferred term for those previously marked as “untouchable,”
designating a transformation from a condition of subjugation and
dehumanization to one of resistance and emancipatory struggle.[9] “Bahujan”
is the term for the literal numeric majority, the vast base supporting the
social pyramid. The term “Dalit” sometimes refers to the bahujan samaj of
Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes, all
categories assigned by the 1935 Government of India act for the allotment
of representation to socioeconomically marginalized communities, and later
incorporated into the 1950 Indian Constitution. Other times it refers
specifically to those designated avarna, outside caste society’s four grades
(as opposed to either savarna—within the four—or tribal).[10]

If dominant “Indic” civilization has been constructed as synonymous with
Brahmanism—defined as Vedic/Aryan, northern, Hindi-speaking, patriarchal
and hierarchical—then its submerged counter-discourses may correspond to
non-Brahmin, Dravidian (southern), Tamilian, feminist, or Dalit locations.
This multivalence opens up the possibility of principled alliances (or
unstable situational coalitions) among critics of any facet of the dominant
project. Dalitbahujan thought provides an alternate Indian intellectual
tradition based on egalitarianism along the axes of both caste and gender.[11]

The accepted genealogy of modern anti-caste radicalism starts with Jotiba
Phule (1826–1890), introducer of its central themes: the importance of
dignity and self-respect; valorizing productive labor as ennobling, not
defiling; the overdetermination of cultural/ideological and material/economic
structures of domination; and a consistent linkage between caste oppression
and the oppression of women. These issues defined the confrontation with
Brahmanism, understood as an all-pervading ideology fundamentally based
on inequality.

Phule was born in Maharashtra in a relatively affluent family categorized as
Shudra by the reigning social taxonomy.[12] His message was aimed not just
at those condemned to untouchability but to all non-Brahmins: the bahujan
samaj. Phule described caste as equivalent to slavery (gulamgiri), comparing
the particular oppression of Dalits in India to that of blacks and Native
Americans in the United States. His logical framework for this lay in the two
races or Aryan invasion theory, according to which the (dark) Dravidian
original inhabitants of the subcontinent were overrun by (light) Indo-European invaders. The newer Vedic culture was said to have destroyed the
glories of the ancient Indus Valley civilization and enslaved its creators,
leaving upper and lower castes as two distinct racial strata.

In 1873 Phule founded the Satyashodhak Samaj (Self-Respect Society).
Political theorist Valerian Rodrigues writes, “If self-respect is the
fundamental striving of this [Dalit] constituency, then Brahminism is its
principal opponent… militating against self-respect by its tendency of
ranking, which makes some inferior and others superior, irrespective of their
merit and effort; for not relating desert[s] to effort; … [and] breed[ing]
dependence and subservience.”[13] Phule later launched the Sarvajanik Satya
Dharma as a “religious alternative” to Brahminical Hinduism: a
“nobleminded, equalitarian theism, which also projects a strong male-female
equality.”[14] His rejection of Hinduism was total, with no hope of
reinterpretation or recuperation; other intellectual traditions native to the
subcontinent might allow for more egalitarian, emancipatory social views.
He favored knowledge, education, and science as tools of freedom, equality,
and economic progress, while identifying patriarchy as a primary form of
social oppression and promoting women’s equality and education.

During his lifetime, Phule was little known beyond his own western region.
There were other, more broadly influential movements in the south, where
Iyothee Thass (1845–1914), drawing upon a vision of subcontinent-wide, pre-Aryan Dravidian civilization, pioneered a mode of Dalit Buddhism that was
an important entry point for caste activists the early twentieth century. From
this matrix, Periyar E.V. Ramaswamy (1879–1973) forged a new mass
movement in the 1920s. Periyar cited three things that needed to be
destroyed in order to attain freedom: the Indian National Congress,
Hinduism, and Brahmin domination. (Note that British rule is not on this
list.) Through his Self-Respect League, founded in 1926, he called for both
caste abolition and women’s liberation; the following year he contested
Gandhi’s defense of varnashramadharma.[15] Unlike Phule, Periyar favored
atheism over religion—making him a proponent of, in essence, a world with
no gods, no masters, and no Brahmins.

Thass’s Dravidan/Dalit reading of Buddhism also initiated the intellectual
path of Chettiar Singaravelu (1860–1946). Part of India’s first Marxist
generation, Singaravelu contributed articles on socialism and historical
materialism to Periyar’s journal *Kudi Arasu*, and in 1932 Periyar and
Singaravelu proposed a new program for the Self-Respect League: a form of
socialism they called samadharma. But this sundered the more conservative
non- or anti-Brahmins from the leftists, whose ranks otherwise tended to
skew toward upper castes. In 1935 the anti-Brahmin faction formed the
Justice Party while the leftists were absorbed into the Congress Socialist
Party. This had the unfortunate effect of splitting a radical left movement
that was now upper-caste by default and association, from a more
conservative emergent regional/linguistic nationalism. As Periyar’s antiBrahmanism flowed into this channel, the Justice Party begat both the
Dravidar Kazhagam, which still promoted his ideals of self-respect, antiBrahmanism, and women’s rights, and the less progressive regionalist
Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. Thus Ramaswamy’s more expansive vision—
not territorially bound, and capable of encompassing a plurality of identities
—gave way to a more restrictive nationalistic logic.[16]

Nevertheless the 1920s and 1930s were a high point of Dalit mobilization
linking caste radicalism to broader movements for national and class
liberation through mass strikes, tax boycotts, worker and peasant
formations, as well as more caste-specific agitations for access to public
spaces such as temples and water tanks, from which they were excluded.
The recurrent (and recurrently fractured) dream of linking caste and class
politics has remained one of the most potent hopes of profound social
transformation. Yet the failures of communist organizers to adequately
acknowledge caste issues, or to accord them primary importance, inflicted
lasting damage on the growth of intersectional movements.

If Phule had introduced the main themes of Dalitbahujan thought, Bhimrao
Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) brought them to fullest articulation.[17] Also
Maharashtrian, Ambedkar came from a family of the Mahar caste. Defying
the discrimination barring untouchables from education, he proved a
brilliant scholar who went abroad to earn multiple doctorates in law and
economics at Columbia University and the London School of Economics,
taking the bar at Gray’s Inn. After returning to India he rose to political
prominence in the late 1920s. In 1932 he clashed with Gandhi on the place
of Dalits in electoral politics. Gandhi wanted Dalits to be included within an
undifferentiated Hindu constituency, whereas Ambedkar wanted a separate
electorate in which Dalits would vote for their own slate of representatives.
In the face of a Gandhian fast, he had little choice but reluctantly to accede
to the mahatma’s wishes, yielding the Pune Pact compromise in which
Dalits, though remaining part of the Hindu electorate, would be allotted a
certain number of reserved seats.

Ambedkar then founded the Independent Labour Party in 1936, as a
Maharashtra-based leftist worker-peasant party linking anti-capitalist and
anti-landlord agitations with resistance to caste oppression. At this period he
identified a “dual-systems theory”[18] of capitalism and Brahmanism as the
greatest enemies of the working class, criticizing the Left for recognizing
only capitalism’s but not Brahmanism’s role as “negation” of his highest
ideal, “the spirit of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.”[19] During the 1920s
and ’30s Ambedkar was influenced by Marxism, and considered the
“destruction of caste … a prerequisite to economic equality (socialism),”
though his thinking evolved toward a more instrumental developmental
state socialism, and later an emphasis on cultural issues and electoral
politics.[20] The ILP morphed into the All-India Scheduled Castes Federation
in 1942, and after his death into the Republican Party, named for the
(American) party of Lincoln as emancipator of slaves.

Ambedkar played influential roles in government: labour minister under the
British regime, law minister under Nehru. Above all he is remembered as
the chief drafter of the Indian constitution. For Ambedkar at this stage, a
crucial tool of social transformation was the modern state, as “the agency
par excellence for safeguarding rights, when values deeply inimical to rights
rule the roost in the domain of civil society.”[21] Rule of law, and equality
before the law, were paramount, even though existing inequities would first
need to be adjusted through reservations in political, educational, and
professional spheres. ²² Civic republicanism was the ideal, based in
organized deliberative bodies undergirding a “self-governing political
community in which citizens participate as equals to realize the good of both
the individual [and] the collective.”[23] Indeed, there could be “no meaning to
self-rule without representation and participation,”[24] which is why issues of
formal democracy, as at Pune, became so controversial. In *What Congress
and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables* (1946), Ambedkar laid out his
definition of Brahmanism: “graded inequality between the different classes”
was its “official doctrine,” entailing systematic disempowerment of Shudras
and Untouchables—including the systematic denial of access to education,
property rights, and officeholding—plus the “complete subjugation and
suppression of women.”[25] In a sense, the insistence on separate
representation called liberalism’s bluff on its claim to be blind to difference.

Unlike other Dalitbahujan thinkers, he put no stock in the two races theory.[26] Rejecting both class and race as the bases of social division, he turned to
culture and ideology, sketching a historical narrative for caste wherein he
framed Brahmanism and Buddhism as the poles of primary contradiction
within Indian civilization.[27] In Ambedkar’s historiography, the Buddhist
“revolutionary” period (circa 500 BCE-300 CE) was a golden age suppressed
by a Brahmanist “counterrevolution” that imposed patriarchy, parasitic
priesthoods, and social stratification, while appropriating from Buddhism
whatever beneficent ideas and practices were later associated with
Hinduism.

Though a thorough modernist, Ambedkar embraced those (non-Brahmanist)
elements of tradition that could be deemed reasonable and salutary, thus
effectively giving an ancient indigenous genealogy to principles generally
considered modern and Western. Ambedkar presents “the Buddha’s
teachings and practices… as the very embodiment of reason, to which he
found the Brahminical tradition of hierarchy, ritualism, superstitions, priestcraft, deceit and cunning to be in opposition.” Significantly, though, this
approach to reason is not, stresses Rodrigues, the utilitarian cost-benefit
analysis of an atomized and context-free Descartean individual, but rather
something “embodied in lived ways” that “locate … intersubjectively and in
the communitarian context… the capacity to discern what is good and right,
together with others.”[28]

Ultimately Ambedkar’s proposed redress for caste was twofold: politically,
the legislative and juridical mechanisms of the liberal democratic-republican
state, and culturally, a line of flight from Hinduism back to a South Asianorigin philosophy of rationalism, egalitarianism, atheism, and restorative
morality: an autochthonous Enlightenment heritage in all senses of the term.
This interpretation took the form of a liberation philosophy identifying
*dukkha* with oppression and *dhamma* with social and economic justice.[29]
Ambedkarite Buddhism thus made Dalits the agents of “opening the road to
a society of equality and liberation” and the “carriers of… the liberatory
message of Indian tradition.”[30] Near the end of his life, he led a mass
conversion of five hundred thousand to this form of Buddhism.[31] This was a
“quest for collective emancipation” above “individual salvation”; a call to
“increase political participation so as to bring social transformation leading
to an egalitarian social order.”[32] In Omvedt’s assessment, “[Ambedkar] had
fought for a correlated but different freedom struggle,” alongside Indian
nationalism, “one for the liberation of the most oppressed sections of Indian
society. This was a liberation movement wider and deeper than that of
fighting colonialism, focusing on the kind of new nation that was to be built.”[33]

While Ambedkar rejected racial categories, the Dalit Panthers, roaring onto
the scene in 1972 from the slums of Bombay, explicitly linked caste to race
and race to colonization as part of an international third world revolutionary
movement. Representing an urban demographic with newly widening access
to education, they fell within the ambit of a global wave of New Left
militance. As their name indicates, they took inspiration from the Black
Panthers in the United States, whose commitment to community selfdefense, self-respect, and anti-capitalism they shared. Another stimulus was
disillusionment with the bureaucratic cooptation of Ambedkar’s Republican
Party, and indeed with all political party and governmental solutions, amid a
general atmosphere of corruption and a foundering economy. Like their
Dalitbahujan predecessors, the Panthers were notable for their emphasis on
the cultural dimensions of oppression, and harkening back to Ravidas and
Tukaram, produced a literary flowering of radical poetry, memoir, and
polemic.[34] They were also known for their political theater, offering
“entertainment in the service of… mass education.”[35]

In a compilation of Dalit literature put out by the Minority Human Rights
Group on Untouchables, editor Barbara Joshi emphasizes the importance of
culture and psychology as aspects of Dalit liberation: “underlying [a wide
range of activist] tactics is the conviction that the most important struggles
are those within the minds of both the oppressed and their oppressors….
The result is direct and immediate Dalit confrontation with the world of the
mind and the institutions that feed the mind.” Therefore, “concurrent with
efforts to mobilize against overt oppression and exploitation there have been
efforts to repossess culture and self,”[36] equally important when one’s
humanity has been systematically denied.

In a famous essay of 1983, Marathi scholar and Dalit intellectual Gangadhar
Pantawane spoke of redefining the word:

<quote>

What is Dalit? To me, Dalit is not a caste. Dalit is a symbol of change and
revolution … Dalitness is essentially a means towards achieving a sense of
cultural identity…. Now Dalitness is a source of confrontation. This change
has its essence in the desire for justice for all mankind. In this sense,
Dalitness is a matter of appreciating the potential of one’s total being.[37]

</quote>

The Panthers’ founding Manifesto had used a similar definition to draw
battle lines:

<quote>

**Who is a Dalit?** Members of scheduled castes and tribes, neo-Buddhists, the
working people, the landless and poor peasants, women and all those who
are being exploited politically, economically and in the name of religion.

**Who are our friends?**[38] Revolutionary parties set to break down the caste
system and class rule. Left parties that are left in a true sense. All other
sections of society that are suffering due to economic and political
oppression.

**Who are our enemies?** Power, wealth, price. Landlords, capitalists,
moneylenders and their lackeys. Those parties who indulge in religious or
casteist politics and the government which depends on them.[39]

</quote>

Panther franchises formed in other regions too, and the Dalit Voice, a
biweekly published in English and Tamil, achieved a nationwide reach by the
early 1980s. Sharad Patil, originally a CPI (Marxist) organizer, formulated a
“Marx-Phule-Ambedkar” ideology, by which to fuse resistance against classbased exploitation to abolition of religiously sanctioned caste oppression.
Founder of the Satyashodhak Communist Party in 1978, Patil wanted to
“universalize Dalit identity as proletarian exploitation.”[40] But tensions
developed between the Buddhist and Marxist tendencies, represented
respectively by Raja Dhale and activist poet Namdev Dhasal, both of whom
were prominent among the organization’s founders. By the 1980s the
movement had fragmented, though mobilizations framed in terms of DalitMarxism, along with the radical practice of poetry, music, and theater
activism, remain strong today.[41]

In the 1980s, Dalitbahujan mobilization ballooned in the form of electoral
party politics,[42] but the 1990s produced some innovative articulations of
Dalit political theory. Kancha Ilaiah (b. 1950) is a Dalit intellectual and
activist, author of several books including the instant classic (and lightning
rod for controversy) *Why I Am Not a Hindu* (1996). Like Pantawane, Ilaiah
presents Dalitization as a qualitative, holistic transformation of Indian
society, emphasizing that Dalitbahujan culture—beliefs, practices, kinship
relations, economic relations, value systems, lifeways—is wholly distinct
from Hinduism; and that in stark contrast to Hinduism, it is explicitly
egalitarian and nonpatriarchal, and implicitly ecological. Based in
valorization of labor and productivity, it organizes material and social life
collectively, not individualistically.[43] It roots knowledge production in
material practice, orality, intersubjectivity, nature, and experience, as
opposed to textual abstraction. It is rich in technical ingenuity and practical
expertise, and makes no split between mental and physical labor.[44] Nor is
there a notional split between the public and private spheres.[45] Law comes
from the community through participatory consultation, not from an
authority outside and above. Thus the whole Brahminical value system is
overturned: those once stigmatized for their work-function are from this
perspective ennobled by it. That which had been proof of impurity is now the
essence of productivity, hence value, while that which had been guarded as
purity is now revealed as parasitism.[46]

As portrayed by Ilaiah, then, the Dalitization of all society (in contrast to the
historical trend of sanskritization) would usher in a more egalitarian order.[47] Actual (indigenous) alternatives to the Brahmanist dominant order were to
be found in Buddhism, in tribal society, and in a possible future vision of
“collective living and collective consciousness,” in which the sharer would
be “not only a collective being but also a secular social being… human
relationships operate in a mode that has been sensitized to human needs….
Their social context is productive and distributive. Equality is its innate
strength…. The material basis of the society is rooted not in wealth but in
labor power.”[48]

Dalitization, while reframing relations of production, went deeper than
material class; it would require change in the whole culture, society,
religion, philosophy, identity. Nevertheless, the caste-based producer/
parasite relationship easily mapped onto capitalism, with upper castes
proving all too amenable to its globalized form.[49] “In every industry the
working masses are Dalitbahujans … whereas, the entrepreneurs and
managers … are Brahmin, Baniya or Neo-Kshatriya,” Ilaiah points out. “As a
result, there is a total cultural divide between the managerial class and the
working class.”[50] Given this overlay, Ilaiah too postulates a truly casteconscious Left as the great lost opportunity for true liberation.

But the nation constructed in the course of the liberation movement was
botched. “While conducting the anti-colonial struggle, brahminical leaders
and ideologues did not attempt to build an anti-caste egalitarian ideology,”[51]
he says, lamenting not only that landowning aristocrats and urban
bourgeoisie had been ensconced as the drivers of the national movement,
but that Dalits had ceded even Marxism to the caste elites. “If only colonial
rule in India had produced anti-Brahmin, organic, Dalitbahujan intellectuals
who would have been the recipients of the revolutionary theory of Marxism,
by now perhaps India would have undergone a Dalitbahujan socialist
revolution.”[52] But unfortunately, “the most revolutionary theory… fell into
the hands of the most reactionary social forces.”[53] This, in effect, destroyed
Marxism’s emancipatory potential. Ilaiah concludes, “It is only a conscious
Dalitbahujan movement which can, step by step, decasteize society, socialize
the means of production, and finally create humanitarian socialism in India.”[54]

Perhaps one such alternative vision could be that expressed by the
Pondicherry Group of Tamil Dalit intellectuals, exemplified by the writings of
Raj Gowthaman.[55] He proposes an alternative to Dravidian nationalism
which, rather than replacing a northern/Hindi with a southern/Tamil
placeholder within the same logic structure, calls for a rejection of
nationalist logic, statist historiography, and all forms of power. By refusing
to organize on the basis of nationality, an “oppositional culture” of Dalit
liberation could “travel beyond any bounded territoriality and mobilize…
Blacks and … women in general… as well as tribals everywhere as the
source of their new politics.”[56]

As relayed by scholar M.S.S. Pandian, Gowthaman “identifies ‘state, caste,
religion, god, morals, justice, norms, regulated man-women relationship,
ideology of family, literature’—all institutions that mark civilizational
achievements—as institutions of discipline and power to be resisted.”[57]
Gowthaman knows, says Pandian, that caste elites will characterize “this
cultural politics … as that of anarchists and barbarians,”[58] and that Dalits
themselves might downplay this counterculture lest they be stigmatized as
“uncivilized.” For Gowthaman, though, refusing that civilizational teleology
marks the necessary “beginning of Dalit politics.”[59] Summing up this critical
intervention, Pandian asks, “Can there be a nation without history and
power (read state)? Indeed, it cannot be. Perhaps it is fifty years of freedom
within the nation which has taught the Pondicherry Group that freedom lies
outside the construct of the nation.”[60]

*** Dalit Politics as Anti-colonial Thought: Indigeneity and Race

Let’s return to the colonial palimpsest. Ambedkar names Hinduism “a form
of imperialism.”[61] Anand Teltumbde flags the “Dalit aboriginal identity” of
“a highly civilized and peaceful people that was once dominant in the
country but later subjugated and enslaved through Aryan conquest.”[62]
Movements based in the cluster of oppositional identities that define
themselves through the prefix *adi*, designating original inhabitants (e.g.,
adivasi, adi-Dalit, ati-shudra, ad-dharm, adi-Dravida), claim allegiance to “a
non- or even pre-Aryan Indian equalitarian tradition.”[63] There is a double
accusation here: the foundational violence of initial conquest, and the
structural violence of a functioning system.[64]

There is also a double plaintiff in the categories of caste and tribe,
frequently linked together by ethnography, law, and rhetoric. Yet it’s
necessary to distinguish between them as two historical locations and two
modes of decolonizing thought. As J. Kehaulani Kauanui and Dean Saranillio
remind us,[65] the two concepts of race and indigeneity, though related, do
not function in the same way either structurally or analytically. In other
words, each bears a different sort of relationship to, and names a different
subjective experience of, colonialism/capitalism/imperialism; each tows
behind it a different freight of symbolism.

A politics of indigeneity (Aryan invasion): The word “indigenous,” in its
neutral sense, denotes originally native to a place, as defined against newer
arrivals. In many contexts “aboriginal” further implies not only native but
“primitive,” tribal, or nonmodern, as defined against urban/civic/modern
populations. (Here is the line drawn between the anthropological and the
sociological, or the colonizers and the colonized.)

According to one theory, the groups who were defeated and incorporated
into Vedic society evolved into subordinate castes, whereas those who fled
into hills and forests survived as autonomous tribes. Caste groups might
then be assimilated along an incremental “civilizing” pathway of
sanskritization, adopting the characteristics of Brahminical society. But
several contributors to Dev Nathan’s volume *From Tribe to Caste* challenge
the notion that such a process was an improvement, asserting that it instead
marked a devolution from an egalitarian, collective-property based condition
to a more patriarchal, authoritarian, individual-property based one.[66] (What
doesn’t seem fully articulated in accounts of such a shift is a distinction
between hierarchy among distinct groups, and hierarchy within a particular
group.)

Nevertheless, whether or not tribes and castes shared an ancient origin,
they have since experienced different timelines of conflict.[67] Always on the
front lines of encroachment, tribals launched frequent uprisings throughout
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, chafing against incursions by
both British and South Asian interlopers on forest lands.[68] In contrast,
castes as such were not historically associated with militant rebellion, which
might be interpreted as a difference between primary resistance and
postsubjugation subversive behavior (though Teltumbde characterized Dalits
as being more thoroughly beaten down). In other words, a tribal narrative is
about being outside, on the frontier (vertical separation); a caste narrative is
about being inside, down below (horizontal separation).

British colonial ethnographic practices worked to further fix and formalize
these identity categories, ratifying them through decennial censuses from
1871 to 1931. The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 linked the extraction of
surplus, by means of establishing individualized, taxable land holdings, to a
social engineering project by which tribal communities would be
sedentarized as productive workers confined to heavily surveilled and
disciplined villages, having been removed from traditional livelihoods
centered upon more mobile shared land uses such as hunting, shifting
cultivation, or harvesting of various forest plants and flowers. Criminality,
tribal affiliation, landlessness, mobility, and “wild” places would now be
conflated.[69] In this way the history of adivasi communities more closely
resembles notions (and histories) of indigeneity familiar in the context of the
Americas.[70]

Dispossession and violent conquest, of course, are to be categorically
condemned. Still, we should be wary of the implications of legitimating
rights claims only through invoking prior habitation. For one thing, the
language of nativity, spiritually linking a land and its people, its blood and its
soil, is easily appropriated by racialist ethnonationalism, including the
Hindutva which is the antithesis of Dalit politics. Similarly, are newness,
alienness, and oppressiveness being presented as synonymous? This too can
be risky, depending who is using it. Is it possible to find arguments and
logics that are usable only for emancipatory projects?

Kauanui emphatically distinguishes indigenism from a nativism that might
shade into exclusionary ethnonationalism or fascistic populism. Beyond
denoting native or aboriginal, a contemporary critical politics of indigeneity
also implies a particular way of being in relation to place and its (human and
nonhuman) inhabitants, in which land and resources cannot possibly be
commodified, and social relations are by definition nonstatist and
noncapitalist.[71] An indigenist concept of sovereignty then would recognize a
region of interdependent, nonanthropocentric cohabitation, as opposed to a
nationalist sovereignty defined as ownership, control, and exclusive claim to
development of the extractable wealth of a mapped territory.[72]

As this description suggests, in many ways a nuanced indigenist critique not
only of capitalist modernity but of the dominant modes of institutionalized
twentieth-century socialism is echoed by many anarchist critiques.[73] These
include skepticism of an uncritical embrace of industrialization; resistance
at the point of primary onset, as opposed to a struggle for seizure of the
means of production once industrialization is complete (or, as some would
put it, rejection of a whole mode of production as opposed to a more
superficial change in relations of production and more equitable distribution
within that mode); rejection of a unilinear teleological formula for progress
and development, with capitalism and socialism representing the right and
left expressions of post-Hegelian thought, sharing an assumption of limitless
growth in productivity, as opposed to a more steady-state sustainable and
renewable model prioritizing use-values and nonreified relationships.

But is a consciously indigenous perspective *by definition* an ecologically
harmonious preindustrial worldview? Dalitbahujan thought has laid claim to
an *anti-colonial indigeneity* that is *modern, rational and state-based*.[74] At
the same time it legitimates this alternate Indian modernity as the
culmination of an alternate Indian tradition, later subjugated by its upstart
rival.[75] Does this mean that we need to rethink the meaning of indigeneity
for this context, or does it mean that we require a different logic-lens?

A politics of race (Aryan and Dravidian): A century-long history links black
freedom struggle in the United States with both Indian anti-colonialism and
caste emancipation.[76] Indians arriving in North America and African
American observers of India alike recognized the social functioning of caste
as comparable to race as a mode of internal subjugation. Anthropologist
Kamala Visweswaran notes that B.R. Ambedkar and W.E.B. Du Bois were Ivy
League contemporaries, and that even prior to communicating with each
other, Ambedkar was using race to think caste while Du Bois was using
caste to think race.[77] This “translation” of race and caste proved an
effective way for people in either context to make sense of the other (and
enhance their insights about their own) while also opening opportunities for
solidarity.[78] In a sense, then, the linkage of caste abolition and racial justice
posed a simultaneous challenge to the self-definition of both (American and
Indian) national projects, exposing their blind spots and demanding not just
inclusion in but expansion of their concepts of freedom and justice.

Still, Dalitness is differently constructed than blackness in the United States,
although the differences soften if we open the field to include the whole
history of New World slavery.[79] For example, the religiously explained
purity/contamination (curse of Ham) model that preceded the
pseudoscientific biological or eugenic model for race in Europe sounds not
unlike the concept of ritual purity as basis for caste. And the caste system’s
graded hierarchy is more like the intricately stratified Latin American
spectrum than the North American black/white binary. In any case the
function of caste in a Brahmin-supremacist society is very similar to that of
race in a white-supremacist society.

At the UN-sponsored World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001, a
Programme of Action was proposed in which caste was included as a form of
racism. This proved controversial on both political and theoretical grounds.
Politically, the Indian government was displeased, while other regimes too
feared setting the precedent. Theoretically, sociologist of caste André
Beteille argued that since race was a biological issue and caste a cultural
one, there could be no equivalency.[80]

Yet segments of the Dalit movement had argued precisely that caste, too,
was based in biological race.[81] And one can argue just as easily that race is
a social/cultural construct, as that caste is not a biological fact. In other
words the issue has more to do with whether race itself, as a social
construct for organizing hierarchical difference, is to be defined as
biological or cultural, than whether or not caste is analogous to race. In
Visweswaran’s reading—in the context of her framing question: what work
does culture do, and when, where and how does it do the work of race?—the
Durban debates implied “the reverse of asking whether caste is race. This
question then asks when and how it has been productive to understand that
race is caste—or more precisely, when the experience of casteism is seen to
be the most compelling illustration of the experience of racism.”[82]

Such a chain of logic, however, may leave intact the Aryan and Dravidian
racial categories, long discredited by most historians as a slippage from the
linguistic (cultural) to the biological register. Nevertheless that racial logic
persists in underwriting both justifications for and indictments of the
modern caste system; both racists and anti-racists can be racialist.[83]

Regarding this persistence, Omvedt writes:

<quote>

The crude version of… Dalit anti-Aryanism, as scholars are quick to point
out, is fallacious as well as a form of inverted racism…. Yet the imagery
survives and for good reasons. The continual privileging of an Aryan identity
and a Vedic-Upanishadic-Sanskritic core by almost all upper-caste definers
of Indian tradition, the pride in being “white” in opposition to “black,” the
continual assumptions of northern superiority, the continual if always veiled
forms of upper-caste arrogance: all of these make it almost inevitable that
the angry Dalit-shudra masses will throw back the weapon of racial and
ethnic identity and ask again, “Who was the first invader? Who was the first
outsider?”[84]

</quote>

Putting it together: Historian Gyan Pandey, in his recent work comparing the
structures of oppression facing African Americans and Dalits,[85]
characterizes both as “internally colonized” groups. But he also notes that
neither, dispersed throughout the social body and integral to its functioning,
could be easily identified as a foreign entity to be allotted a separate
sovereign territory, as sought by Native Americans or South Asian Muslims
(or Tamilians, Sikhs, Manipuris, Assamese, Mizo, Naga, etc.). But it seems to
me that in groping to define some sort of special subcategory of the
racialized as colonized, Pandey too may not be fully acknowledging the
distinction between two historically specific types of subordination.

Kauanui and Saranillio remind us that just as neither race nor nation is
synonymous with indigeneity, imperialism is not synonymous with settler
colonialism. Settlement is a precise phenomenon, which imperialism *may*
include among its goals or instruments.[86] It may be helpful here to utilize
George Fredrickson’s typology of administrative, plantation, mixed
settlement, or pure settlement colonies. In the Indian case, the Vedic-Aryan
arrival could be characterized as mixed settlement (in which indigenous
populations are not exterminated but are incorporated into the complex
racial and class stratifications of dominant settler culture, often including
modes of exploitation through land or labor); and the British arrival as
administrative (in which the goal is military and economic control of a
region for politically strategic benefit, with foreign in-migration on a limited
scale). By contrast, the mode most formative of the United States was a
combination of plantation (with settlers relatively few in number but laying
claim to massive land acreage, and importing enslaved or indentured
laboring populations to produce monoculture crops) and pure settlement (in
which the native population faces extermination, or removal and
concentration).[87]

Andrea Smith’s “Three Pillars of Heteropatriarchy” are also relevant here.
Smith articulates three distinct modes of white supremacist racial logic
applicable in the U.S. case, operative respectively toward Native Americans
(the conquered, the savage), African Americans (the enslaved), and Asians/
Arabs/Muslims (the eternal other, the enemy).[88] In the Indian case, from the
perspective of Brahmanist Aryan supremacy we could place adivasis, Dalits,
and Muslims in these three positions.

Despite the occasional blurring of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes,
then, we might still distinguish adivasi and Dalit political projects, each
facing distinct modes of internal colonization, although both may overlap
and coexist. In the adivasi paradigm—if I may be schematically simplistic—
oppression is visited upon those subhumanized as primitive, and exploitation
is leveraged at the point of land and resources; key issues intersect around
land rights, sovereignty, ecology, development, and militarized security. In
the Dalit paradigm, oppression is visited upon those subhumanized as
polluted, and exploitation is leveraged at the point of labor; key issues
intersect around civil rights, poverty, discrimination, and sexual and social
violence.

If indeed the most serviceable analogy for caste as a structure of oppression
is a mode of race, then it still remains to identify the relationship between
racism and colonialism—and an appropriate anarchist attitude to both.
Perhaps we can formulate a three-sided comparison. Anarchist scholar
Andrew Cornell has traced the intellectual genealogies of both the pacifist
and militant traditions within contemporary American anarchism to pacifist
and militant strands within American anti-racist movements, identifying
anarchist heirs to both the King-Gandhian tradition, and the Malcolm XPanther tradition.[89] Anti-caste movements also link to both these traditions.
We have noted the circuit of inspiration from Black to Dalit Panthers in the
1970s, in the context of postwar decolonization, while the influence of
Ambedkar’s great antagonist, Gandhi, on King and the Congress on Racial
Equality is well-documented. What this suggests is that at any point within
these three historical spectrums of activist discourse, there are points of
correspondence with the other two. So only one leg of a double triangle is
left to be imagined: a link between anarchism and anti-casteism, as there is
for anarchism/anti-racism, and anti-racism/anti-casteism.

*** Interference Patterns: Decolonizing Today?

Earlier I suggested that colonization in South Asia is an incompletely erased
palimpsest, a field in which subsequent wave-forms have set up interference
patterns with each other. I also hinted that some of these factors may now
be converging, whereas in earlier periods they were arrayed at conflicting
angles to imperial formations and to each other. For example, whereas Dalits
perceived British and Mughal rule as mitigating the effects of Brahmanism,
it now appears that postcolonial capitalism has reinforced the control of
upper castes over Indian society and production,[90] in contrast to the earlier
portrayal of British-introduced social and economic changes as providing
opportunities for modern mobility. Indeed, the destruction of “Dalitbahujan
productive structures, culture, economy and … positive political
institutions,” in Ilaiah’s words, has proliferated in post-independence India.[91]

Yet was the earlier period really so good—for Dalits, if not for adivasis? The
British Raj utterly reconfigured the *conditions in which* all narratives of
conquest and conflict were deployed, even if *textually external* to accounts
of Dravidian versus Aryan, or Hindu versus Muslim. Economically, British
intervention drove South Asian incorporation into the circuits of global
capitalism (liberalization since the 1990s has driven a second round).
Politically, British control introduced the notion of paramountcy, a unified
governmental jurisdiction replacing more decentralized forms of segmented
power relations. This consolidation removed many matters from adjudication
by the “village-level caste bodies” (panchayats) which had previously
“functioned as local governments.”[92] In this way, contemporary anti-caste
thinkers argue that the modern state and capitalism mitigated the
traditional oppression of Dalits.[93] According to Teltumbde, British
colonialism, “in addition to creating an enabling environment through its
institutional regime … made two direct contributions to the emerging
anticaste ethos”: by opening up opportunities to untouchables for education
and economic betterment, including employment with the military or
infrastructure projects, all of which, along with the concomitant growth of
urban areas, resulted in greater social mobility.[94]

Yet Dalitbahujan writings also concede that British colonialism reinforced
Brahminical hegemony.[95] Rodrigues weighs the duality: “On the one hand
[British rule] introduce[d] newer and more intense forms of exploitation; on
the other it create[d] the conditions and resources to undermine not merely
colonial exploitation but also other forms of oppression.”[96] According to the
familiar subalternist reading, the subordinated were caught between two
mirrored elite narratives: the colonial and the nationalist, both equally guilty
of erasing their agency and colluding in the task of Orientalist knowledge
production. What became the dominant national paradigm was largely a cocreation of eighteenth-century European Indologist scholars and (Brahmin)
clerical elites who were able to position themselves self-servingly as
“expert” native informants, establishing the textually authoritative version of
a misleadingly monolithic Indian tradition.[97] Precolonial Brahminical
patriarchy was therefore reinforced, though not invented, by the colonial
regime.[98]

Recalling this historiography modifies the sense in which opposition to the
Aryan invasion is an anti-colonial stance: instead of taking sides within the
narrative (of conquerors vs. indigenes, whichever side one chooses to
designate as savage or civil), it’s possible to object to the creation of the
narrative itself. That is to say, opposing not just the Aryan invasion but “the
Aryan invasion theory” shifts the anti-colonial emphasis from an anti-Hindu
to an anti-British resistance, and from a mythic to a historical episteme,
without acquitting Hindutva ideologues of their violent and discriminatory
uses of the Aryan/Dravidian binary. In this way opposition to British
colonialism and to Brahmanism could be connected.

Here is the interference pattern at work.

The development of mainstream nationalism empowered an elite who
identified it with themselves and their own interests. This was also a
nationalism more acceptable to the colonial regime, which saw therein “a
possibility of manipulation of institutions, parties and organizations” in
order to shape the character of post-independence India in accordance with
its own mentality and class interests, foreclosing its revolutionary
possibilities. “Therefore they helped these [elite] forces to play the double
role of articulating the national interest, and opposing colonialism in a
limited form” conducive to preservation of the social status quo. This meant,
in effect, favoring upper castes, landowners, industrialists, and the right
over lower castes, peasants, workers, and the Left. “If the colonial authority
had wanted to create a strong, anti-brahminical social base,” Ilaiah declares,
“it could have done so very easily,” yielding quite a different sort of
postcolonial society.[99] Nevertheless radical caste activists sometimes
appealed to the British at the height of the anti-colonial struggle, when new
political arrangements and proportional representation mechanisms were
being hammered out, as being more likely to safeguard their interests than
the dominant Hindus.

From 1950, when Ambedkar’s constitution was instituted, to the 1980s,
Dalits placed emancipatory hopes in the ideal of the post-colonial
democratic republic. Even now, after much disenchantment with the
emancipatory potential of the Indian state, given its failure to deliver on the
promise of egalitarian redistribution, challenges are most often aimed not at
the law’s core principles, but at abuses or inconsistencies of
implementation. Nevertheless the 1990s reversal of principles, as
commitment to the market superseded commitment to welfare as the state’s
guiding ethos, meant that it could be challenged on the basis of its successes
and not just on its failings.[100]

What now is the condition of “caste in a globalizing India”?[101]
Neoliberalism, Teltumbde notes, is merciless to the poor and disadvantaged,
caste aside. It brings indebtedness to rural areas, job loss to small scale
industries, and the withdrawal of state subsidies and protections. Thus
neocolonialism in the form of globalization has had the effect of
strengthening caste inequities.[102] It also appears that the rise of capitalism
has reinforced the class-like aspect of caste. According to Teltumbde, as
Dalits engaged collectively in class struggle only to face brutal collective
punishment, anti-communist reprisals have manifested as caste-based
atrocities and vice versa.[103]

Another new twist within conditions of late capitalism is that due to
economic competition, the rising OBCs, with rising anxieties matching rising
ambitions, are perhaps even more hostile to Dalit aspirations in many
localities than higher caste groups.[104] This has led to a shocking increase in
incidents of caste-based violence, often with the tacit or open complicity of
police and legal systems.[105] “It is commonplace Dalit experience that state/
police intervention does not help them combat the perpetrators of caste
violence; on the contrary, the state emboldens nonDalits” by both its
omissions and commissions. Beyond the biased application of justice (with
leniency fostering the general perception of tolerance of atrocities, thus
encouraging more boldness in their perpetration), the police have even been
known to join in the mayhem. Thus the “state machinery” has played an
active role in caste atrocities.[106]

Under the 1989 Prevention of Atrocities Act, the state is supposed to
guarantee the protection of Scheduled Castes and Tribes, and punish
perpetrators of hate crimes, but it seldom works that way in practice. Here
too it is suggested that implementation is the real problem, not the law
itself, because the interface of the population with the law—that is, of
society with the state—primarily occurs at the local level, where caste
prejudices prevail.[107] But is this really such a new phenomenon? Those
prejudices are very old. Teltumbde links the rise of atrocities since the
1980s to a combination of factors: the weakening of the anti-caste
movement, the new impacts of capitalism, and the resultant shifts in the
economic fortunes of different groups. The combination of old prejudice and
late capitalist precarity makes a toxic mix.

All these threads—state repression, global capitalism, accelerated
encroachment on resource-rich forest and agricultural lands—converge
upon a reinvigorated militant left movement that has primarily mobilized
adivasi communities, but in some regions (according to Teltumbde) can also
be significantly characterized as a Dalit phenomenon: Naxalism.[108] The
movement originated in 1967 with a tribal youth, and tribal peasants killed
in an “encounter” over the cultivation of contested land near Naxalbari in
West Bengal. But its branch in Bihar centered on a Dalit teacher named
“Master” Jagdish Mahto, who was first the Ambedkarite publisher of the
Harijanistan newspaper, and then a Marxist after 1968. He and others
established Bhojpur as a Naxalite hub by 1975. The upshot was that
Naxalism in Bihar was, in effect, “caste politics in a different guise.”[109]

This may be even truer in the twenty-first-century form, wherein the
interference patterns are visible yet again, if indeed neoliberal interests and
global ambitions stand behind the Indian state’s policies toward those it
identifies as security threats. In other words, if the U.S.-led imperialist “war
on terror” is a rhetorical cover justifying the annihilation of obstacles to the
expansion of a neoliberal regime, post-Cold War India is its aspiring partner
in that project. Thus, Teltumbde accuses, as the “war on teror” has “justified
demonizing every other Muslim as a potential terrorist, India’s Hinduistic
state has taken the US model even further, invoking the label ‘naxalite’ for
Dalits and adivasis to violently suppress any kind of dissent on their part.
The naxalite rhetoric of ‘armed struggle,’ ‘people’s war,’ ‘guerilla zone,’
‘liberated area’ and so on fits the profile of an ‘enemy’ that the state wishes
to have” in order to justify its militarization.[110]

On the other hand, given the negative impact of neoliberalism on the
disadvantaged, *both* “Dalits and adivasis have been attracted in large
numbers to the naxalite movement, and, by and large, constitute its combat
force.”[111] Because of this demographic, the state’s crackdown on Naxalism
through special laws and paramilitary forces “directly precipitates antidalit
and antiadivasi atrocities.”[112] SCs and OBCs, Dalits, and adivasis are the
most frequent “encounter deaths.”[113] But just because such instances of
state violence fall under the rubric of anti-Naxalism doesn’t mean they
shouldn’t also be viewed as caste atrocity, Teltumbde argues. The use of
anti-Naxalism as cover for cracking down on the protests that followed the
multiple murders of a Dalit family in Khairlanji in 2006 is central to his story.[114]

So it seems the rubric of Naxalism can mask caste relations in both
directions: just as those killed as Naxalites are disproportionally Dalit or
adivasi, people attacked for their caste (or people defending those people)
are liable to be tagged as Naxalites—a blanket excuse to criminalize
activists, rights workers, or gadflies, just as select tribes were interpellated
as criminals in the late nineteenth century.[115] In this way the state, capital,
and caste elites have achieved a new collusion of interests. Can anti-state,
anti-capitalist, and anti-caste radicals do the same?

*** In Lieu of Conclusion: Questions and Observations

Indigenist discourse makes “nation” a possibly recuperable idea,
conceivable within nonstate forms of sovereignty. By contrast, Dalitbahujan
thought asserts the possibility of a recuperable state deployed against a
dangerous nation. Previously, when I suggested (somewhat provocatively, I
admit) the possibility of liberating the nation from the state, I was trying to
hold onto a capacious reference point that could encompass many examples
of anti-colonial struggle; to come to terms with primary resistance to
conquest, and assertions of survival, from the Americas to Africa to Asia to
Australia.

But every context is particular, layering critiques upon a hypothesis in the
process of testing it for relevance. This is fine; the point of such a hypothesis
is not to defend it against challenge and gain ideological points, but to
dialogically carry forward usable, actionable understandings of real
conditions. Anyone listening tends to apply these propositions to their own
specific location, though in reality there is no ideal type against which to
specify qualifications and exceptions. What becomes clear is that it is
inaccurate to draw conclusions in the abstract, outside of a context. The
terms we plug into “let x equal …” change the graph of the function in
historically and politically significant ways.

Attempting to test such terms, I conclude, inconclusively, with questions.

*** Closing Check-in

It is easy to see the struggles of forest-dwelling tribal communities against
land appropriation and enclosure of the commons as direct continuations of
anti-colonial resistance, unbroken across British and Indian regimes.[116] The
ways in which a radical anti-caste political/philosophical framework crosshatches an anarchist/anti-colonialist one are slightly more complicated.

1) Annihilating caste is, in India, the ultimate struggle of equality against
hierarchy. How can anarchism, classical or contemporary, enter into
meaningful dialogue with anti-caste thought and praxis? Here is Malatesta
on the articulation of freedom and equality: “No man can achieve his own
emancipation without at the same time working for the emancipation of all
men around him."[117] This is true if individuals are not atomized monads of
the kind imagined by classical liberal theory, but interdependent
components of society. Emancipation thus must be achieved systemically
and symphonically, through—and here is Bakunin—a “restructuring of
society from below, according to the principle of free association and
federation.”[118] This restructuring occurs both positively, in the development
of social potentialities through education and material well-being for all, and
negatively, in the revolt against “all forms of transcendental authority”
whether human or divine, including both nation and state (Bakunin having
denounced nationalism, long before Benedict Anderson, as a “new form of
political theology”).[119] Crucially though, such revolt opposes not only the
transcendent but the immanent, not only sovereign but governmental
power: namely the “tyranny of the society” that is “exercise[d] through
customs, traditions, sentiments, prejudices, images and habits, on both our
material and intellectual life.”[120]

While Ambedkar repeatedly invoked the revolutionary republican principles
of liberty, equality, and fraternity, he left no ambiguity about equality’s
preeminence. In fact, from the anti-caste perspective, liberation itself could
be defined as the attainment of equality. Similarly, for anarchists, liberty and
equality are reciprocally generated. But whereas for anarchists that
condition requires the elimination of the state, Ambedkar sought to use the
state as tool of emancipation against social tyranny. For Bakunin or
Malatesta such a strategy was inconceivable.

Anti-statist political thought in India is mainly associated with (some would
say tainted by) the Gandhian tradition and the sarvodaya movement, leading
toward various branches of environmentalism that in turn influenced key
adivasi-based mobilizations, including the Chipko movement.[121] These
lineages are for the most part viewed askance by the established left parties,
which extend their suspicion to the notion of decentralized organization and
village-scaled economies. But after the experience of the Emergency in the
1970s (in which Indira Gandhi suspended civil liberties and constitutional
government for two years, brutally crushing dissent with military rule), and
the transition from quasi-socialism to economic liberalization in the 1990s,
many social movements are more likely now than during the first decades
after independence to view the state as a force of repression inimical to
human rights and civil liberties. It has repeatedly claimed internal (usually
Naxalite), external (usually Islamist), and separatist threats (in which case
the internality or externality is the crux of the conflict, as in the Northeast or
Kashmir) as a pretext to intensify its special military and policing powers.[122]

In Debjani Ganguly’s meta-account of caste logic, drawing upon the
formulation introduced by Hegel and embraced by Mill, the state is the
historical embodiment of rationality and freedom in its most advanced/
advancing form. Mill’s liberalism (and therefore canonical social science)
defined Indian society as the opposite of this: India was defined by the
absence of the state, and thus by its negations, hierarchy and despotism.
Much Indian social and political thought internalized that notion, which
outlived the colonial politics that had produced it. But the anarchist’s
definition of the state is the opposite: if the state is by its very structure and
function a producer of hierarchy and despotism, the negation of the state
would promote freedom.

Since both pre- and post-colonial states have been used to institutionalize
and enforce caste through uppercaste domination of symbolic and material
economies, control of resources, and monopoly of coercion, was the colonial
state then an exception, from the perspective of Dalit emancipation?[123] If, in
the current configuration, state-based mechanisms are insufficient (or
inimical) to combat caste, does anarchism have anything to offer to this
struggle?

2) Regardless of one’s own biases, is it possible for people in a given
situation—in this case, Dalits in post-independence India—to conceive of
reform within an existing system as revolutionary, or is reform always
counterrevolutionary? What if the establishment of that system itself was
considered revolutionary, or at least the result of revolutionary intentions?
In other words, when, if ever, do incremental changes that make use of
official channels, even highly problematic ones, move things in a direction
that creates conditions of possibility for revolutionary change, and when do
they shore up the status quo? For example, one might argue that ensuring
the conditions basic for survival and humane living when these have
previously been denied is, in addition to being an ethical imperative, a prerequisite for anyone to have the capacity, time, and energy to organize
toward revolutionary futures. These questions have also been discussed
within Western anarchist discourse: Colin Ward, Murray Bookchin, and
others have proposed pragmatic coexistence with or even strategic
utilization of existing institutions.[124]

On the other hand, caste radicals seeking constitutional redress may need to
consider whether or not top-down changes in state policy are sufficient—
even assuming they are consistently enforced—when in truth what’s needed
is a profound and pervasive change in social attitudes and cultural norms,
which cannot be legislated.[125] As the saying goes, when the mores are
sufficient, the law is unnecessary; when the mores are insufficient, the law is
ineffective. But the same applies from the bottom up. Decentralized
organization, if it is informed by patriarchal Brahmanism in village councils,
for example, is by no means guaranteed to be egalitarian or emancipatory. A
litany of ugly newspaper stories illustrates how khap panchayats have been
primarily a vehicle for punitive caste and gender violence. Form without
content, structural devolution without a shift in values, is not enough.

3) Omvedt has characterized the new social movements since the 1980s as
linking cultural and socio-economic critique—a trait she associates with the
spread of a “Dalit consciousness”[126]—along with their increasing opposition
to centralization.[127] Could these strands (including those focused on the
environment, gender and sexuality, as well as peasant, worker and student
concerns) as be unified into a “total liberatory theory,” as Omvedt hopes?[128]
Pandey too, echoing Ilaiah and Pantawane, suggests that the Dalit liberation
paradigm of egalitarian emancipation offers a future to all people, not just
Dalits. In other words, might a political vision based in radical Dalitbahujan
thought, if enhanced by a stringent critique of political forms, be the
foundation of a movement based on intersectional (anti-oppression, anticapitalist) grassroots (anti-statist, anti-authoritarian) logic? And might it
magnify decolonizing solidarities with anti-authoritarian, intersectionally
minded activists with anarchist affinities elsewhere in the world?

4) If colonial encounters in India are a palimpsest, not a simple polarity,
what opportunities for solidarity appear where multiple colonialities
converge?

5) Is it only relative power calculus—a quantitative measure—that
determines whether a newly introduced element is a threat, a vulnerable
guest, or an assimilable additive, as in the Parsi story of sugar sprinkled into
milk? How can we also evaluate the qualitative? After all, one could just as
easily sprinkle the milk with salt, or cyanide. What political work is done by
distinguishing the need to restore what was lost as a benefit to all because
of its intrinsic (e.g., egalitarian or ecologically sustainable) character, from
the condemnation of conquest on principle, regardless of the character of
the conquered society?

6) Finally, some object to mobilizing caste (or race) as a political identity on
the grounds that doing so reinforces and perpetuates the logic on which it is
based. Can you reject the epistemology of caste (or race), and the material
conditions, privations, and power imbalances of caste or race? The former
may be a construct, but the latter are very real. Does denying the former
before the latter is dismantled simply leave the latter intact? Perhaps the
key is to deny its legitimacy, but not its existence. That way, it’s possible to
hold both in one’s head at the same time (koan-like, though that’s a different
branch of Buddhism than Ambedkar’s). This is not quite the same thing as
strategic essentialism—more like a distinction between what does exist and
what should, could, and must exist, while trying to move actively from one to
the other.

7) Can an anarchist navigate a route to Begumpura?

*** Selected Bibliography

<biblio>

Ambedkar, B.R. The Buddha and His Dhamma. Bombay: Siddharth College
Publications, 1957.

The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar. Edited by Valerian Rodrigues.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

The Annihilation of Caste with a Reply to Mahatma Gandhi. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004. (orig. R.R. Kadrekar, 1937.)

Anand, Mulk Raj, and Eleanor Zelliott, eds. An Anthology of Dalit Literature.
Gyan Publishing House, 1992.

Chakravarti, Uma. Gendering Caste Through a Feminist Lens. Calcutta:
Stree, 2003.

Dangle, Arjun. Poisoned Bread. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2009.
Dirks, Nicholas. Castes of Mind. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2001.

Ganguly, Debjany. Caste, Coloniality, and Counter-Modernity. New York:
Routledge, 2009.

Guru, Gopal. The Language of Dlit-Bahujan Political Discourse.” In
Ghanshyam Shah, ed., Dalit Identity and Politics. Vol. 2. New Delhi: Sage
Publications, 2001.

Ilaiah, Kancha. Why I Am Not a Hindu. Calcutta: Arunima Printing Works,
1996 (2012 edition).

“Towards the Dalitization of the Nation.” in Partha Chatterjee, ed., The
Wages of Freedom: Fifty Years of the Indian Nation-State. Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1998.

“Dalitism vs. Brahmanism: The Epistemological Conflict in History.” In
Ghanshyam Shah, ed., Dalit Identity and Politics. Vol. 2. New Delhi: Sage
Publications, 2001.

Joshi, Barbara, ed. Untouchable! Voices of the Dalit Liberation Movement.
London: Zed Books, 1986.

Kannabiran, Kalpana, and Vasanth Kannabiran. “Looking at Ourselves: The
Women’s Movement in Hyderabad.” In M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra
Talpade Mohanty, eds., Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic
Futures. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Mamdani, Mahmood. Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Natarajan, Balmurli. The Culturalization of Caste in India: Identity and
Inequality in Multicultural Age. London: Routledge, 2012.

Nathan, Dev, ed. From Tribe to Caste. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced
Study, 1997.

Omvedt, Gail. Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr. Ambedkar and the
Dalit Movement in Colonial India. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1994.

“Ambedkar and After.” In Ghanshyam Shah, ed. Dalit Identity and Politics. Vol. 2. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001.

Ambedkar: Towards an Enlightened India. New Delhi: Penguin, 2004.

Seeking Begumpura. Navayana Publishers, 2008.

Understanding Caste: From Buddha to Ambedkar and Beyond. New
Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2011.

Pandey, Gyanendra. A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in
India and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Pandian, M.S.S. “Stepping Outside of History? New Writings from Tamil
Nadu.” In Partha Chatterjee, ed., The Wages of Freedom: Fifty Years of the
Indian Nation-State. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Rajshekar, V.T. Dalit: The Black Untouchables of India. Atlanta: Clarity Press,
1987 [orig. Apartheid in India (Bangalore: Dalit Action Committee, 1979)].

Rao. The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2009.

Rao, ed. Gender and Caste. London: Zed Books, 2005.

Rege, Sharmila. Writing Caste, Writing Gender. Zubaan Books, 2013.

Rodrigues, Valerian. “Dalit-Bahujan Discourse in Modern India.” In V.R.
Mehta and Thomas Pantham, eds., Political Ideas in Modern India: Thematic
Explorations. Vol. X Part 7. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2006.

Schwarz, Henry. Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India. Malden,
MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Shah, Ghanshyam, ed. Dalit Identity and Politics. Vol. 2. New Delhi: Sage
Publications, 2001.

Sikand, Yoginder. Islam, Caste, and Dalit-Muslim Relations in India. New
Delhi: Global Media Publications, 2004.

Teltumbde, Anand. The Persistence of Caste. London: Zed Books, 2010.

Thorat, S.K., and K. Newman. “Caste and Economic Discrimination: Causes,
Consequences and Remedies,” Economic and Political Weekly 42, no. 41
(October 13, 2007): 4121–24.

Vajpeyi, Ananya. Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern
India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Visweswaran, Kamala. Un/Common Cultures. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2010.

Zelliott, Eleanor. From Untouchable to Dalit. Delhi: Manohar Press, 1992.

“The Meaning of Ambedkar.” In Ghanshyam Shah, ed. Dalit Identity
and Politics. Vol. 2. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001.

</biblio>

[1] Maia Ramnath, Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History
of India’s Liberation Struggle (Oakland: AK Press, 2012); and Ramnath, “In
Dialogue: Anarchism and Postcolonialism,” in Carl Levy and Saul Newman,
eds., The Anarchist Imagination (London: Routledge, 2015).

[2] The fact that this was never a matter of a dynamic force acting upon
an inert mass, but of complicities between particular external and internal
actors, confronted by a spectrum of subalterns and dissidents, facilitated the
continuities between “classical” and “neo” colonialisms, including
“domestic” varieties proceeding from the independent Indian state’s
takeover of the British governmental apparatus, which it has since utilized
in a precisely colonial fashion against those in economically, socially, or
geographically marginalized but resource-rich areas of the territory it
claims.

[3] On class analysis: see S.K. Thorat and R.S. Deshpande, “Caste System
and Economic Inequality: Economic Theory and Evidence,” in Ghanshyam
Shah, ed., Dalit Identity and Politics (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001),
44–70; K. Balagopal, Ear to the Ground: Writings on Caste and Class (New
Delhi: Navayana Publishing, 2011).

[4] Gary Snyder, Robert Aitken, Hozan Alan Senauke, Joshua Stephens,
and others have linked contemporary, social change-focused “Engaged”
Buddhism to anarchism, while others, such as Peter Marshall in his omnibus
history Demanding the Impossible, locate Buddhism as one of the
philosophical traditions that preceded and prefigured anarchism, counter to
the modern Western dominant paradigm of instrumental rationalism,
hierarchical binarism, and domination. (Of course this pertains only to
certain iterations of anarchism and Buddhism.) For a Buddhist anarchist
attempt to grapple with caste and class, follow thread at [[http://
www.dharmawheel.net/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=12046&hilit=anarchism]]. A
fuller exploration of anarchism in dialogue with a specifically Ambedkarite
Buddhism would be valuable, but well beyond the scope of this paper.

[5] After writing this, I realized with chagrin that the “palimpsest” was
Nehru’s famous formulation of subcontinental history and culture in his
Discovery of India (1946).

[6] I am here recontextualizing a term for which I am indebted to several
conversations with Skanda Kadirgamar.

[7] Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

[8] Wallace Shawn’s 1985 essay “Morality,” Essays (Chicago: Haymarket,
2010) inspires me here; more directly relevant are debates on Arundhati
Roy’s foreward to a new edition of Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste
(Navayana, 2014). For a sampling, see [[http://scroll.in/article/658279/WhyDalit-radicals-don’t-want-Arundhati-Roy-to-write-about-Ambedkar/]] ; [[http://
roundtableindia.co.in/index.php?
option=comcontent&view=article&id=7312:preface-politics-doesannihilation-of-caste-need-anintroduction&catid%20=119:feature&Itemid=132/]] ; and [[http://
roundtableindia.co.in/index.php?
option=comcontent&view=article&id=7283:an-open-letter-to-ms-arundhatiroy&catid=119:feature&Itemid=132]].

[9] In what follows I’m being slightly anachronistic in using the term
“Dalit” throughout. It was introduced in common usage in 1931, and
popularized more broadly in the 1970s. For a history of the terminology see
Gopal Guru, “The Language of Dalit-Bahujan Political Discourse” in Shah,
Dalit Identity and Politics, Vol. 2, 96–107. For a much more comprehensive
introduction to the history and political theory of caste than space here
allows, see, for example, Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India
from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001); Gail Omvedt, Understanding Caste: From Buddha to
Ambedkar and Beyond (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2011), Dalits and the
Democratic Revolution (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1994), and many
others; Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern
India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Valerian Rodrigues,
“Dalit-Bahujan Discourse in Modern India,” in V.R. Mehta and Thomas
Pantham, eds., Political Ideas in Modern India: Thematic Explorations,
Volume X, Part 7 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2006); Eleanor Zelliot,
From Untouchable to Dalit (Manohar Press, 1992); S.M. Michael, ed.,
Untouchable: Dalits in Modern India (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999).

[10] See introduction to Dev Nathan, ed., From Tribe to Caste (Simla:
Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1997), 1–30.

[11] I do not have space to accord Dalit feminism its due here, although
anti-patriarchy is central to radical anti-Brahmanism. Phule’s work was
paralleled by that of his partner, Savitribai Phule, and contemporaries,
Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922) and Tarabai Shinde (1850–1910). Unusual for
the time, both women attained high levels of education while rejecting
Hinduism on the grounds that its practices of caste hierarchy and patriarchy
were not aberrational but intrinsic. Shinde, the daughter of a Satyashodhak
Samaj member, was known for her fierce writings on women’s rights.
Ramabai dedicated herself to the service of (by definition disenfranchised)
widows, and later founded an autonomous community made up of women of
all castes living together. I am barely scratching the surface here but would
rather cede the floor to those better equipped than myself to address it
broadly and deeply, such as Uma Chakravarti, Gendering Caste through a
Feminist Lens (Calcutta: Stree, 2003) and Rewriting History: The Life and
Times of Pandita Ramabai (New Delhi: Zubaan Books, 2014); Sharmila Rege,
Writing Caste, Writing Gender (New Delhi: Zubaan Books, 2013); B.R.
Ambedkar, Against the Madness of Manu (New Delhi: Navayana
Publications, 2013); Anupama Rao, ed., Gender and Caste (London: Zed
Books, 2005). See also the current work of the All India Dalit Mahila Adhikar
Manch, which may be accessed at http://www.ncdhr.org.in/aidmam/ and
http://allindiadalitmahilaadhikarmanch.blogspot.com.

[12] Shudras were low in the hierarchy, but still within the system
(savarna), not excluded from society as untouchables (avarna). Technically
then they would fall within the category of bahujan, but not Dalit.

[13] Rodriques, “Dalit-Bahujan Discourse in Modern India,” 49.

[14] Omvedt, Understanding Caste, 27.

[15] This term refers to the fourfold division of society into the “traditional”
functions of brahmin, kshatriya, vaisya, and shudra (priests, warriors,
merchants, laborers/artisans).

[16] This observation comes from the Pondicherry Group of Tamil Dalit
intellectuals, described by M.S.S. Pandian in “Stepping Outside History?
New Dalit Writings from Tamil Nadu,” in Partha Chatterjee, ed., Wages of
Freedom: Fifty Years of the Indian Nation-State (Delhi: Oxford, 1998), 294–
98.

[17] Scholars such as Anupama Rao, Debjani Ganguly, and others make a
strong case that Indian modernity cannot be understood without the
category of the Dalit. In Caste, Coloniality, and Counter-Modernity (London:
Routledge, 2009), Ganguly argues that in fact it is not only generated by but
constitutive of Indian modernity, as opposed to a premodern remnant
indicative of incomplete modernization, to disappear once that project is
complete.

[18] However, he didn’t really articulate connections between the two,
according to Omvedt, “Ambedkar and the Dalit Cultural Movement in
Maharashtra,” in Shah, Dalit Identity and Politics, Vol. 2, 146–47.

[19] Gail Omvedt, Ambedkar: Towards an Enlightened India (New Delhi:
Penguin, 2004), 82. For a more extensive elaboration of his definition of
these three principles, see Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936), section
14, [[http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/ambedkar/web/index.html]].

[20] Economically he favored state socialism, though after independence he
moved further right, toward pragmatic developmentalism including strategic
nationalization of land and key industries.

[21] Rodrigues, “Dalit-Bahujan Discourse in Modern India,” 65.

[22] The term “reservations” in this context is roughly equivalent to
affirmative action in the U.S. context. BRA also emphasizes throughout
Annihilation of Caste that neither political nor economic adjustment is
sufficient (if even possible) without a thorough transformation of social
mentality and ideological commitments.

[23] Rodrigues, “Dalit-Bahujan Discourse in Modern India,” 62.

[24] Ibid., 63.

[25] Ibid., 49.

[26] To quote from Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste: “Some have dug a
biological trench in defence of the Caste System. It is said that the object of
Caste was to preserve purity of race and purity of blood. Now ethnologists
are of the opinion that men of pure race exist nowhere and that there has
been a mixture of all races in all parts of the world. Especially is this the
case with the people of India…. The Caste system cannot be said to have
grown as a means of preventing the admixture of races, or as a means of
maintaining purity of blood. As a matter of fact [the] Caste system came into
being long after the different races of India had commingled in blood and
culture. To hold that distinctions of castes are really distinctions of race, and
to treat different castes as though they were so many different races, is a
gross perversion of facts…. [The] Caste system is a social division of people
of the same race. Assuming it, however, to be a case of racial divisions, one
may ask: What harm could there be if a mixture of races and of blood was
permitted to take place in India by intermarriages between different
castes?” See The Annihilation of Caste, section 5, [[http://
ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/ambedkar/web/index.html]].

[27] This is discussed in several of his books including Ambedkar,
Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables (1948),
accessible at [[http://www.ambedkar.org/ambcd/39A.Untouchables%20who%20were%20they_why%20they%20became%20PART%20I.html]]

[28] Rodrigues, “Dalit-Bahujan Discourse in Modern India,” 56

[29] See Ambedkar, The Buddha and His Dhamma (1957), accessible at
[[http://www.ambedkar.org/buddhism/BAHD/ 45A.Buddha%20and%20His%20Dhamma%20PART%20I.htm]]. In Buddhist
terminology dukkha represented the world’s sorrow and suffering, from
which liberation was sought; dhamma was the way of right thought and
action for achieving it.

[30] Omvedt, “Ambedkar and After: The Dalit Movement in India,” in Shah,
Dalit Identity and Politics, Vol. 2., 149.

[31] Conversion to Christianity or Islam was seen as providing a
comparable state of equality, but, it was claimed, at the cost of exile from
one’s own cultural heritage, unlike conversion to Buddhism, an indigenous
philosophy. See Yoginder Sikand, Islam, Caste, and Dalit-Muslim Relations in
India (New Delhi: Global Medial Publications, 2004); Abdul Malik Mujahid,
Conversion to Islam: Untouchables’ Strategy for Protest in India
(Chambersburg, PA: Anima Books, 1989); Gauri Vishwanathan, Outside the
Fold (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

[32] Shah, Dalit Identity and Politics, Vol. 2., 34.

[33] Omvedt, Ambedkar: Towards an Enlightened India, 157.

[34] For an introduction, see Mulk Raj Anand and Eleanor Zelliot, eds., An
Anthology of Dalit Literature (New Delhi: Gyan Pub. House, 1992); Arjun
Dangle, Poisoned Bread (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2009).

[35] Barbara Joshi, ed. Untouchable! Voices of the Dalit Liberation
Movement (London: Zed Books, 1986), 91. See also Omvedt, “Ambedkar and
After” in Shah, Dalit Identity and Politics, Vol. 2., 151–54; Thorat and
Deshpande in Shah, 48–49.

[36] Joshi, Untouchable!, 78.

[37] Ibid., 80. Pantawane was founder of the main Dalit literary journal
Asmitadarsh in 1967, serving as editor until the 1990s.

[38] “Our” here presumably refers to anyone included in the preceding
paragraph.

[39] Joshi, Untouchable!, 145.

[40] Omvedt, Understanding Caste, 77.

[41] For a spectacular recent document of this, see Anand Patwardhan’s
film Jai Bhim Comrade (2012). Anupama Rao’s critical commentary of the
documentary for India Seminar may be viewed at [[http://www.indiaseminar.com/2012/633/633anupamarao.htm]].

[42] See, for example, the Bahujan Samaj Party founded by Kanshi Ram; his
protegée Mayawati made history as a female Dalit chief minister of Uttar
Pradesh four times between 1995 and 2012.

[43] Kancha Ilaiah, Why I Am Not a Hindu (Kolkata: Samya, 1996), 99, 114–
17, 124, 151–52, 155.

[44] Ibid., 120, 127, 150; see also Kancha Ilaiah, “Dalitism vs. Brahmanism”
in Shah, Dalit Identity and Politics, Vol. 2., 108–28; Ilaiah, “Towards the
Dalitization of the Nation,” in Chatterjee, Wages of Freedom, 266–91.

[45] Ilaiah, Why I Am Not a Hindu, 39–40.

[46] I would like to flag a critical concern, on both feminist and ableist
grounds, about the implications of this theory of value, which skirts the risk
of rating people in terms of the quantity of their productivity.

[47] Ilaiah, Why I Am Not a Hindu, 114.

[48] Ibid., 160–61; and in Chatterjee, 289.

[49] Ilaiah Why I Am Not a Hindu, 52.

[50] Ibid., 66.

[51] Ibid., 113.

[52] Ibid., 50.

[53] Ibid.

[54] Ibid., 52. Does this argument not contradict another frequent
assertion, that the introduction of capitalism under the British was beneficial
for Dalits? Perhaps this is what distinguishes Dalit liberalism from a Dalit
Left.

[55] Limited by language, I am reliant here upon the summarization of
M.S.S. Pandian of what sound like remarkable Tamil texts by Gowthaman:
Dalit Paarvayil Tamil Panpadu (Tamil Culture from a Dalit Perspective), 1994
and Dalit Panpadu (Dalit Culture), 1993. Pandian, “Stepping Outside of
History? New Writings from Tamil Nadu,” in Chatterjee, The Wages of
Freedom, 302. See also Pandian, Brahmin and Non-Brahmin: Genealogies of
the Tamil Political (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007).

[56] Pandian, “Stepping Outside of History?,” 305; see also 306–8.

[57] Ibid. quoting Gowthaman, Dalit Panpadu, 1993, 18.

[58] Pandian, “Stepping Outside of History?,” 306.

[59] Ibid., 305.

[60] Ibid., 309.

[61] Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century
to the Modern Age, 261–62.

[62] Teltumbde, The Persistence of Caste, 23.

[63] Ibid.

[64] Conscious of the sharp ironies inherent in using a Hinduistic metaphor
in this context, it strikes me that there are visible here violences of Brahma
the creator, and Vishnu the preserver—in which case there remains only a
violence of Shiva the destroyer. Would that mean genocide? Or could it
suggest resistance, as in the case of the anti-caste dissident Virashaivite
movement?

[65] Both made complementary points as part of a panel presented at the
American Studies Program Annual Conference, “Circuits of Influence: U.S.,
Israel, Palestine,” at New York University, March 7, 2014.

[66] See Nathan, “Introduction”; K.S. Singh, “Tribe into Caste: A Colonial
Paradigm(?)”; B.B. Chaudhuri, “Tribe-Caste Continuum? Some Perspectives
from the Tribal History of Colonial Eastern India”; Shalini Mehta, “The
Legend of Evolution from Homo Equalius to Homo Hierarchicus”; Saguna
Pathy, “From Tribe to Caste: Domination Reaffirmed”; and Baidyanath
Saraswati, “Tribe as Caste”; all in Dev Nathan, ed., From Tribe to Caste
(Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1997). Gowthaman would share
this view: Pandian notes that his reasoning is similar to Ramaswamy’s, but
that he lacks Ramaswamy’s “meta-narrative of progress through reason and
science” vis a vis a Tamil Dalit past of collectivistic, egalitarian “hill
cultivators, hunters, fisherpeople, pastoralists and the like,” 304.

[67] Teltumbde, The Persistence of Caste, 162.

[68] The literature on this is extensive within the Subaltern Studies
volumes of 1982–87, and histories of criminality and insurgency in India. I
would refer readers to the work of Ranajit Guha, Ramachandra Guha, David
Arnold, David Hardiman, Crispin Bates, Anand Yang, John McLane, Swapan
Dasgupta, K.S. Singh. These uprisings included the famous Santhal Hool of
1855; Birsa Munda’s millennarian movement in 1898; and histories of tribal
groups such as the Bhils, Konds, and Doms, as well as the northeastern
Bodos, Nagas, Ahom, Chittagong hill tribes, et al.

[69] On this process see Anand Yang, Crime and Criminality in British India
(Association for Asian Studies, 1985); Sanjay Nigam, “Disciplining and
Policing the ‘Criminals by Birth,’” parts 1 and 2, Economic and Political
Weekly 27, nos. 2 and 3 (1990); Henry Schwarz, Constructing the Criminal
Tribe in Colonial India (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

[70] See Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Expanded Edition
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), Varieties of
Environmentalism (London: Routledge, 1997), Social Ecology (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998); Ajay Skaria, Hybrid Histories (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1999); Amita Baviskar, In the Belly of the River (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1998), Contested Grounds (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2008). This is also very much in the news. See cover story in Frontline
31, no. 3, February 21, 2014. ([[http://www.frontline.in/magazine/?
date=2014-02-18&magid=5656026]]). A cluster of related features on tribal
resistance to forest land acquisition in Chhattisgarh and mining operations
in Orissa (among many other instances) detail how the Indian government
takeover of land for use by multinational corporations leads to local
communities’ loss of livelihood and traditional access to resources.

[71] Note that this does not necessarily require them to be nonhierarchical
or nonpatriarchal, nor always and everywhere the same.

[72] As Raymond Craib pointed out in a personal communication of January
5, 2014, “some might argue that the very notion of indigeneity as inherently
pre-industrial and/or ecologically harmonious is a radically modernist
notion.” This can be seen as characteristic of particular indigenous societies
(or the idealizations or aspirations thereof), rather than part of the universal
definition of indigeneity itself. Again, this represents a discursive ideal type
rather than a empirical sociology of contemporary individuals of indigenous
heritage and their range of evolving relationships to urban, industrial
conditions.

[73] For such indigenist critiques, see, for example, Glenn Coulthard, Red
Skin, White Masks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014);
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Blood on the Border (Boston: South End Press, 2005)
and An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (Boston: Beacon
Press, 2014); Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous
Manifesto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), Vine Deloria Jr., Custer
Died for Your Sins (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988). Jeff
Corntassel, “Rethinking Self-Determination: Lessons from the IndigenousRights Discourse,” in Jai Sen and Peter Waterman, eds., World Social Forum:
Challenging Empires (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2009). Given the
irrefutable ecological crisis conditions of the twenty-first century, even
Marxist theory has come to incorporate ecology as central its critique of
capitalism: see, for example, the work of John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clarke,
and the index of journals such as Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.

[74] Ambedkar himself distinguished Dalits from adivasis in this way: one of
his many critiques of Hindu society in The Annihilation of Caste is that due
to its fixation on purity it excluded aboriginal tribal communities from the
benefits of inclusion and the civilizing process. Section 8: “Apart from the
question of whether their exclusion from the new Constitution is proper or
improper, the fact still remains that these aborigines have remained in their
primitive uncivilized state in a land which boasts of a civilization thousands
of years old. Not only are they not civilized, but some of them follow pursuits
which have led to their being classified as criminals. Thirteen millions of
people living in the midst of civilization are still in a savage state, and are
leading the life of hereditary criminals!!” (He seems to be taking for granted
the taxonomy put in place by the Criminal Tribes Act.) Ambedkar, The
Annihilation of Caste, section 8, [[http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/
ambedkar/web/index.html]].

[75] In Why I Am Not a Hindu, Ilaiah traces this to pre-Buddhist counterVedanta traditions of the rational/skeptical Lokayatas and Charvakas, 113;
points to tribal republicanism, 116; and associates the dhamma with a social
contract, 118, 119. For more on suppressed counter-traditions and alternate
readings of traditional texts, see note 83. On ancient materialisms and
rationalisms, see Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian (New York: FSG,
2005). As Chakravarti notes (103), it’s important to be able to access the
precolonial critiques of brahminical patriarchy, such as those within the
bhakti and Buddhist traditions, so that feminist and Dalit mobilizations
cannot be discredited [by right-wing nationalists] as foreign imports, alien to
the “true” indigenous Indian culture.

[76] On the connections and cross-fertilizations between Pan-African and
Indian anti-colonial and anti-racist movements, see, for example, Gerald
Horne, The End of Empires (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009);
Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2012); Susan Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of
Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

[77] Kamala Visweswaran, Un/Common Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010), 12. Visweswaran identifies a “caste school of race
relations” associated with the Chicago School of Sociology in the 1920s,
interpreting race in the United States as, in effect, a caste structure. Un/
Common Cultures, 114, 163.

[78] Ibid., 152.

[79] For a magisterial overview see Robin Blackburn, The Making of New
World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso,
2010); The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights
(London: Verso, 2011); and The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848
(London: Verso, 2011).

[80] See, for example, André Beteille, “Race and Caste,” The Hindu, March
10, 2001, accessible at http://www.thehindu.com/2001/03/10/stories/
05102523.htm/ ; Shiv Visvanathan, “Durban and Dalit Discourse,” Economic
and Political Weekly 36, no. 27 (July 2001) and no. 33 (August 2001).

[81] Visweswaran, Un/Common Cultures, 150.

[82] Ibid., 163.

[83] In addition to the two-races theory, Hindu nationalism shares the
premise with much radical anti-caste thought (not to mention the Indologist
scholarship behind the once-conventional modes of history and
anthropology) that brahminical Hinduism, as contained in authoritative
readings of the Manusmriti, Dharmashastras, Ramayana and Mahabharata,
is the essence of Indic civilization. This renders it irredeemable. Narrow
dogma is accepted epistemologically, though it may be accepted or rejected
morally. Other anti-caste and feminist scholars take a revisionist approach to
Indic civilization, in which the spectrum of Hindu culture, philosophy, and
practice may be reclaimed as a polyvalent tradition incorporating composite
elements over millennia. This view holds that to define it solely in terms of
patriarchal Brahmanism is an artificial and drastic restriction of its meaning
that impoverishes its heritage, diminishes its referents, and erases its many
valid variants. See Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternate History (New
York: Penguin Books, 2010) and On Hinduism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2014); Paula Richman, ed., Many Ramayanas (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1991) and Questioning Ramayanas (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001); A.K. Ramanujan, “Three Hundred Ramayanas in The
Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, ed. Vinay Dharwadker, (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1999); Romila Thapar, The Past Before Us (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), Somanatha: The Many Voices of a
History (London: Verso, 2005). The operative point, though, is that
regardless of one’s deep logic, or one’s definition of “true” Indic civilization,
the structures, institutions, practice, prejudices, sanctioned social relations
(and resultant exploitations, exclusions, dehumanizations) of the narrowly
brahminical version do exist now and must be opposed.

[84] Omvedt, Understanding Caste, 99.

[85] Gyanendra Pandey, A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference
in India and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), 62. Equating Dalit liberation with conversion (to Buddhism, or to an
alternative social ethic and political position), he links this choice in turn to
the core of a decolonization process.

[86] Talks given at American Studies Program Annual Conference, New
York University, March 7, 2014. On the native-settler-slave triad see also Eve
Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,”
Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

[87] George M. Fredrickson, The Arrogance of Race: Historical
Perspectives on Slavery, Race and Social Inequity (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 218–20.

[88] INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, The Color of Violence: The
INCITE! Anthology (Boston: South End Press, 2006).

[89] Andrew Cornell, “‘White Skin, Black Masks’: Marxist and Anti-racist
Roots of Contemporary US Anarchism,” in Dave Berry, Ruth Kinna, Saku
Pinta, and Alex Prichard, eds., Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Black and
Red (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

[90] Ilaiah, Why I Am Not a Hindu, 113–14.

[91] Ibid., 113.

[92] Teltumbde, The Persistence of Caste, 20–21. How selective is
Teltumbde being in noting laws which undermined caste? Were there other
laws which reinforced it? One thinks for example of the Criminal Castes and
Tribes Act, and of course the decennial censuses. Perhaps it’s fair to say that
the categories were produced and strengthened, but the material condition
of the people in some of those categories may have improved, or at least
been afforded pathways toward improvement?

[93] See Shah, Dalit Identity and Politics, Vol. 2, 19, 39.

[94] Teltumbde, The Persistence of Caste, 21–22

[95] Ilaiah, Why I Am Not a Hindu, 9; Rodrigues, “Dalit-Bahujan Discourse
in Modern India,” 57.

[96] Rodrigues, “Dalit-Bahujan Discourse in Modern India,” 58.

[97] On this process see Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2001); Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Bernard Cohn, An
Anthropologist Among the Historians (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998).

[98] Another aspect of this reinforcement via the colonial juridical system
can be hypothesized through the designation of certain areas as “personal”
as opposed to civil law, as a zone of colonial non-interference relegated to
the control of Hindu and Muslim authorities, in order to avoid social
destabilization potentially leading to insurgency. Instantiated as they were
through strict endogamy and interdining practices, caste and gender
structures could be cemented under the umbrella of culture and religion
rather than coming into the domain of politics, public space, or civil rights.

[99] Ilaiah, Why I Am Not a Hindu, 49.

[100] Teltumbde, The Persistence of Caste, 62.

[101] Ibid., 31.

[102] Ibid., 154–56.

[103] Ibid., 60–61.

[104] Even so, the Mandal agitations of 1990 too could be seen in part as
reaction to fear by upper caste people of limited economic means at losing
their own precarious access to educational opportunity to reservations.

[105] Teltumbde offers an exhaustive account of this in relation to the
Khairlanji killings of 2006, in which government involvement ranged from
tolerance of the violence (90–112) to actual complicity in caste atrocities
(116–35). A similar dynamic applied to the Gujarat massacres of Muslims in
2002.

[106] Atrocities are defined as “the violent manifestation of social prejudice
against dalits.” Teltumbde, The Persistence of Caste, 154–55.

[107] Ibid., 87. On the good intentions of the law, see 78–79. Note again this
blurring or conflation of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, including
in the UPA government’s Common Minimum Program of 2004.

[108] Ibid., 158.

[109] Ibid., 161, drawing on Mendelsohn and Vicziany, The Untouchables:
Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India (Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 59. Teltumbde, The Persistence of Caste, 204. He identifies
Dalits as central also to the Telangana uprising of 1947, marked as
precursor to Naxalbari, 159.

[110] Teltumbde, The Persistence of Caste, 156.

[111] Ibid.

[112] Ibid.

[113] Ibid., 163.

[114] Ibid., 156.

[115] Ibid., 164–66.

[116] Much of the content of colonial Indian Forest Acts (1865, 1878, 1927)
was incorporated into postcolonial land rights and tribal land use legislation.
For comparative global perspectives, see Alexander Reid Ross, ed.. Grabbing
Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab (Oakland: AK Press, 2014).

[117] Errico Malatesta, “Notes on Anarchist Social Organization,”
referenced on February 19, 2014 at International Institute for Organization
Research, [[http://www.anarchy.no/malat1.html]]. Also quoted in the context of
Chiara Bottici, “Black and Red: The Freedom of Equals,” in Bottici, Jacob
Blumenfeld, and Simon Critchley, eds., The Anarchist Turn (London: Pluto
Press, 2013), 16.

[118] Bakunin, “Stateless Socialism.” [[http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/
Anarchist_Archives/bakunin/stateless.html]].

[119] Bakunin, “God and the State.” [[http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/
AnarchistArchives/bakunin/godandstate/godandstatech1.html]].

[120] Quoted in Bottici, 17.

[121] Chipko was a movement initiated by Himalayan tribal groups in the
1970s, whose activists were famous for using their bodies to protect trees
from being logged after the Forest Department awarded lumber contracts to
a sporting goods company; the tactic was part of a larger mobilization in
defense of local sovereignty, ecological sustainability, and traditional rights
of access to and use of forest resources. See sources cited in note 70.

[122] Here I am not talking about the post-liberalization trope that the state
must retreat before the markets—this is not reality. The state is equally big,
or even bigger, just reoriented to serve markets and the interests of global
capital and the emergent layer of Indians who identify with it, rather than
the interests of redistribution and social welfare. Kanchan Chandra, “The
New Indian State,” lecture, February 16, 2013, Fifth Annual Global South
Asia Conference, New York University; Rupal Oza, The Making of Neoliberal
India: Nationalism, Gender, and the Paradoxes of Globalization (London:
Routledge, 2006).

[123] Precolonial examples include the Maharashtrian peshwai state
described by Chakravarti, 105–13; and the classical Gupta state in which the
Dharmashastras were made normative. The early postcolonial Ambedkarite/
Nehruvian years could also be included within the period of a pro-Dalit state
that I’m suggesting was anomalous.

[124] While this has sparked accusations of halfhearted reformism, it also
obliges us at least to consider the obscured routes by which we might
navigate from the society in which we actually live to that in which we would
like to live I’m not taking a stance here, merely puzzling it out. For a taste of
these discussions, see, for example, Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action (London:
Freedom Press, 1973) and Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction (London:
Oxford University Press, 2004); Howard Ehrlich, ed., Reinventing Anarchy,
Again (San Francisco: AK Press, 1996); and Murray Bookchin, Social
Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (Oakland: AK
Press, 2001).

[125] Even in the 1970s and ’80s, prior to the emergent symbiosis of
Hindutva and neoliberalism, and aside from the state’s active collusion in
caste oppression, a turn to electoral politics itself was seen as a neutralizer
of social movements, sapping energy from more radical transformations and
diluting constituencies for the sake of mass appeal. See Adi Dalit pamphlet.

[126] Omvedt, Understanding Caste, 81.

[127] Ibid., xii.

[128] Ibid., 87–88.