REVIEW

Caste, class, and the politics of personhood

in neo-liberal India

Anupama Rao

Craig Jeffrey. Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2010. vii + 221 pages.

Manuela Ciotti. Retro-Modern: Forging the Low-Caste Self. London, New York, and New Delhi: Rout-
ledge, 2010. xvii + 292 pages.

The two books under review address caste’s
continued salience as a political-symbolic force
in Indian social life through dense, localized
ethnography. Focused on the north Indian state
of Uttar Pradesh, each is shaped by the new pol-
itics of caste enabled by the rise of the Bahujan
Samaj Party (BSP; Party of the Majority) and
defined by that party’s tactical success in har-
nessing both ideological shifts in Hindutva ac-
tivism, and neo-liberal economic policy in the
interest of a new politics of recognition and re-
distribution.1 What Christophe Jaffrelot (2002)
has called a “silent revolution” has been enabled
by “reservations,” the affirmative action policies
of the state—a process accelerated by the 1989
decision of the V. P Singh government to imple-
ment the recommendations of the Mandal
Commission (1980), constituted by the Janata
Party government in 1979 to explore the advis-
ability of extending reservations to the Other
Backward Classes (OBCs)—to be sure. More
significant, democratization through caste re-
flects “a form of politics that forefronts collec-
tive rights and group emancipation rather than
individual autonomy,” and challenges received
accounts of democratization that “assume lib-
eral individualism as the goal of enfranchise-
ment even when political action centers on
demands for group recognition and the protec-
tion of minorities” (Rao 2009: xii).
Studies of caste, democracy, and personhood
have tended to focus on southern and western
India. These are states with long histories of
anti-caste struggle, demands by non-Brahmin
castes for proportional representation, and the
successful exclusion of Brahmins from political
power (even when their symbolic salience
looms large in the social imaginary). However
the spectacular successes of the BSP have also
led scholars to turn back to earlier studies of
caste and community formation in north India
during the colonial period, and explore the as-
sociational forms and political strategies that
have enabled the BSP’s spectacular rise to power

Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 62 (2012): 122–128

doi:10.3167/fcl.2012.620110
 Caste, class, and the politics of personhood in neo-liberal India | 123
(Chandra 2004; Pai 2002). Ciotti and Jeffrey’s
efforts to understand the rearticulation of caste
self-hood under conditions of Indian globaliza-
tion are welcome for extending this field of con-
cern by taking into account the effects of
consumption, massified education, Dalit poli-
tics of self-respect and dignity, and emergent
linkages between country and city on two im-
portant communities in north India, Jats, and
Chamars.
Jeffrey focuses on the relatively prosperous
region of northwestern Uttar Pradesh to explore
the lives of lower-middle class Jat youth, whose
identity as members of the dominant agrarian
caste has been fissured by cleavages of class, to
produce something like an educated Jat under-
class that is betwixt and between: they are ben-
eficiaries of the extensive educational invest-
ments in their future by their families, but they
are “waiting” in what is perhaps a permanent
limbo, to make the transition to salaried work
in urban areas.
How did this come about? The second chap-
ter of the book explores the long process of Jat
diversification. This was initially consonant with
government policies regarding land reform
(and the limitation of family holdings), on the
one hand, and the considerable success of cash
crop agriculture, on the other hand, and en-
abled the remaking of Jat masculinity, “wherein
male power was communicated through control
over social networks and cultural capital rather
than primarily via prowess in the fields” (44).
Timepass focuses on the second phase of this
urbanizing process, which is occurring in tan-
dem with an enhanced marketization of the In-
dian economy, and where the possibility of Jat
mobility has dried up with the shrinking of jobs
in the bureaucracy, together with the rise of
Dalit and lower-caste claims on state entitle-
ments. This has furthered a process of localiza-
tion through Jats’ efforts to control the farmers’
movement, local governing bodies, or panchay-
ats, deriving status via marriage networks, and
through informal political networking within
local educational institutions that have been
fertile ground for the rise of youth netas, or
leaders, who also function as small-time fixers.
Thus if urban elites across India have embarked
on a process of disembedding themselves from
forms of cultural particularism, now under-
stood as a “drag” on corporate efficiency and
global competitiveness, Jat youth are actively
engaged in using local status “to extract money,
protection and favors” (70).
Significant here is the imagination of risk
and a utopian future as what makes “waiting” in
the present palatable (indeed, necessary) for
masses of the educated unemployed. In Jeffrey’s
account, post-secondary education at sub-stan-
dard educational institutions—such as the ones
where he conducted fieldwork, Chaudhry Cha-
ran Singh University, and Meerut College—are
themselves a form of timepass, as protests are
staged to legitimize cheating, and dissertations
are written (and read) by college graduates, and
sometimes by school children. Though educa-
tional qualifications are meant to produce new
opportunities, the space where such qualifica-
tions are garnered, the college, ironically func-
tions as the space of timepass par excellence:
jobless young men chat with friends, go to the
movies, engage in romance, drink, participate
in jugar, or playful and quick-witted speech,
and otherwise “kill time.”2 Though these young
men and women do everything but receive the
education commensurate with the require-
ments of a new economy, they also use their ed-
ucation as a marker of difference from urban
riffraff, on the one hand, and the idle rich, on
the other.
The central third chapter on timepass ad-
dresses how “young men mark their social suf-
fering and begin to negotiate unemployment”
(102), while the two chapters that follow focus
on strategies of resistance—from student pro-
test against corruption on the college campus
that created alliances of students across caste, to
engagement in illicit or informal methods of
fixing, which tended to benefit Jat students. Jef-
frey argues that the critique of corruption, and
the reproduction of caste and communal soli-
darity through brokerage worked as two sides of
the same coin: each was a response to the per-
ception of lost time, and desperation about re-
maining un- or under-employed.
124 | Anupama Rao
If new practices of selfhood are engaged by
the seemingly futile effort to convert symbolic
capital into material success (and urban escape)
in Jeffrey’s account, Ciotti’s “untouchable”
Chamars are engaged in different practices of
translation (and commensuration). Ciotti’s is an
ambitious historical ethnography of the chang-
ing lives of Chamar Dalits3 in the eastern Uttar
Pradesh village of Manupur, near Benares,
which, unlike the forms of rural modernity evi-
dent in northwestern U.P., has continued to be
marked by feudal relations of patronage be-
tween upper castes with large landholdings, and
servile sharecropping labor. Ciotti argues that
Chamars’ entry into post-colonial political
modernity is marked by an investment in dis-
courses of development, educational progress,
and upward mobility, each of which challenges
the tenets of cultural nationalism, with its focus
on a (Hindu) Golden Age and a superior Indian
culture to combat colonial domination. She ar-
gues that exploring the domain of the social,
rather than the merely political, allows her to
“re-establish a balance between ‘Chamar’ as a
‘Dalit’ (a term which was not in common usage
in Manupur), that is, as a political construct and
subject of political participation, and ‘Chamar’
as a socio-cultural subject ‘hijacked’ by and sub-
sumed under the politicization of Dalit identi-
ties in public discourses and imaginaries” (33).
This lack of fit between the socio-cultural and
the political is also what leads Ciotti to craft the
neologism retro-modernity, to mark Dalits’ in-
vestment in two distinctive ways of claiming
mobility (each of which stands the risk of fail-
ure): their insertion into forms of social com-
portment and cultivation of bourgeois interior-
ity, on the one hand, and the more spectacular
and perhaps cruder forms of conspicuous con-
sumption that today signal class and status mo-
bility, on the other.
The former set of attributes is enacted by a
small group of educated Chamars—15 percent
in Manupur—who have sought to improve their
status by exiting agricultural labor and mimick-
ing the bureaucratic middles classes of the
Nehruvian period. However most Chamars
continue—especially in the aftermath of their
exclusion from weaving, an important activity
that allowed them to elide caste Hindu stigma-
tization by working in urban areas with Muslim
entrepreneurs—to perform casualized labor as
rickshaw drivers, and construction workers.
Ciotti explores the divide between the aspira-
tion for modernity through association with
state recognition of caste backwardness, and the
significant cost that status brings, for example
internal fractions within the Chamar commu-
nity, and exclusion from the dignity of artisanal
labor, which was itself a response to Chamar
landlessness, or impoverished landholdings:
state and the market collude to produce Dalit
dependency as the sign of Dalit modernity.
Ciotti’s second and third chapters take up the
question of caste and political economy to trace
the conjoint effects of agrarian immiseration in
the colonial period, together with the rise of
Chamar assertion (and a concomitant shift
away from the performance of stigmatized la-
bor): “their [Chamar] labour, which could not
be deployed in the agrarian economy as a result
of its progressive disintegration in the Banaras
region, already densely populated in the colo-
nial period, was absorbed by weaving” (56).4
Such diversification undid existing relations of
caste labor in rural areas, and brought Chamars
into contact with another artisanal subaltern
community, Muslim weavers, by the 1930s. This
process of learning a (new) trade, also led to the
eventual independence of Chamar weavers,
their investment in new jacquard looms through
government loans, and the production of nylon
and viscose saris for a lower middle-class mar-
ket of consumers. Rather than focusing on po-
litical identity formation, Ciotti links reformed
Chamar identity with shifts in the rurban polit-
ical economy in the Banaras region, thus show-
ing how “the disentanglement of subaltern
communities from their relationship with elites”
enabled new opportunities even as it produced
“a new system of exploitation, in which the pa-
tronage of Muslims replaced that of the landed
castes” (96).
The last four chapters of the book take up
the politics of identity enabled by colonial and
post-colonial shifts in political economy, with
 Caste, class, and the politics of personhood in neo-liberal India | 125
emphasis on the significance of education (and
the production of a sort of caste secularism) in
enabling a distinctive Chamar critique of the
caste Hindu order. Ciotti underlines Dalits’ in-
vestment in education, which is producing new
forms of upward mobility for them compared to
other agrarian castes, especially the Yadavs, who
are classified as OBCs. This has also produced
related practices that are critical to Dalit self-
making, and occur through a set of sacralized
associations with the Ambedkar icon, and in-
creasingly, with the past of Buddhist republi-
canism, and the genealogy of anti-caste thinkers
such as Phule, Periyar, and Shahu. These prac-
tices could have used a clearer analytic frame in
the book—other scholars have used terms such
as a Dalit counterculture, or the Dalit popular to
describe this domain. However Ciotti’s efforts
to link identity politics with political economy,
and to mark two distinctive moments of Chamar
transformation—freedom through weaving,
and insertion into public sector employment—
is a rare and important effort to ground Chamar
political aspirations and imaginations of self in
material circumstance. This broader ambition
of the book may be one of the reasons why Ciotti
chooses to focus on the BSP’s role as a counter-
vailing political force, rather than provide a
detailed ethnography of shifts in BSP party ac-
tivism and organization over time.
Caste and class
Both books explore emergent interfaces between
caste and class, and in so doing enact a shift
away from the narrower focus on consumption
and middle-class formation that has framed
discussions about Indian globalization. (It
should be noted that the two texts also mark a
turn away from: a) the culturalism of an earlier
era of ethnographic research, which was fo-
cused on category-production, the problem of
the archive, and the continued effects of colo-
nial knowledge-production on native lives; and
b) the easy, and ill-serving model of Sanskriti-
zation to specify processes of social mobility
and capital accumulation.) Ciotti’s is the more
standard exploration of Chamars’ social experi-
ence of the “freedom” of waged labor, followed
by their insertion into today’s informal econ-
omy. Because Jat youth are increasingly outside
the domain of value production, however, Jef-
frey explicitly turns to Pierre Bourdieu’s argu-
ment about the transposibility of capital across
domains, to think about capital as a material
and symbolic force in people’s lives. Yet Bour-
dieu’s logic is circular and rests on the assump-
tion of full convertibility: symbolic capital can
be converted to cultural capital, can be con-
verted to educational capital, and so on. (Ciotti
astutely notes the non-convertibility of gender
as capital in Bourdieu’s account [217].) As well,
such transposition rests on the reduction of
what is a complex dialectic between abstract
and the concrete—I would argue that the ab-
straction called “capital” cannot be reduced to
so many examples of “kinds of capital” in the
world—into the dispersion of instrumental rea-
son across fields, so that the strategic gaming of
outcomes, from the marriage market, to gov-
ernment jobs appears to function as the raison
d’etre of social life. Bourdieu’s discussion of
time and reciprocity, of what can transpire in
the lag between receiving and giving, appears to
be the inspiration for Jeffrey’s argument about
“waiting.” However Timepass focuses on a thick
description of the anxiety and desperation
among Jat youth that comes from their desire to
enter a neoliberal order at a moment of height-
ened political activism around caste identity.
The renewed symbolism of caste via a poli-
tics of number together with new claims on
public visibility is precisely what Ciotti addresses
in her discussion of the contemporary material-
ity of caste. She (like Jeffrey) offers an incipient
critique of Partha Chatterjee’s argument about
the relationship between civil and political so-
ciety. As Ciotti rightly notes, in the case of
Chamar politicization this has to do with ad-
dressing the profound significance of civil soci-
ety—and the institutions and discourses of de-
mocracy, more broadly—for Dalits, rather than
scanting that process of respectability and rec-
ognition by which they have persistently sought
to remove themselves from the domain of infor-
126 | Anupama Rao
mality, of political society. If Dalit political sub-
jectivity has sought to mark the constitutive re-
lationship between caste and an Indian de-
mocracy, the descriptive effort to divide socio-
political life between formal, institutionalized
structures of regulation, on the one hand, and
domains of the illicit and the informal, on the
other, appears to scant the very innovations of
Dalit self-making (Rao 2009). Therefore Ciotti’s
return to questions of the relative autonomy of
(and the connections between) the “social” and
the “political,” though they remain suggestive
points of departure in her ethnographically em-
bedded text, appears to reopen ways of histori-
cizing Chamar politics without dividing those
strategies into the formal-institutional, and the
informal. It would then be important to ask
what this analytic dichotomy enables by way of
new perspectives on Chamar retromodernity, an
awkward term that in my view hides rather than
reveal the complex historical and analytical
project Ciotti undertakes.
Gender and the politics of sexuality
One way to engage this question of the social
might be to end this review with a brief explo-
ration of gendered personhood, a shared con-
cern across the two books. Jeffrey’s focus on
campus culture makes it difficult to “scale up”
his analysis as a reflection of gender transfor-
mations in north India today, especially when
his subject-position did not permit sustained
conversations with college-going women. What
Timepass underlines are the unanticipated ef-
fects of the presence of women on college cam-
puses, not to mention a growing number of
Dalit and Muslim youth, which has made sexu-
ality a key site for staging assertions of caste
masculinity.5 This is evident in the contradic-
tory manner in which young men at Chaudhary
Charan Singh University and Meerut College
engaged in the performative politics of eve-
teasing while swearing allegiance to more “feu-
dal” concerns with protecting the reputation of
their sisters: the novelty of educated women has
itself produced new measures for the success of
Jat men, and thrown up new comparisons with
men of other castes, for instance Dalit men who
can claim state entitlements while (successfully)
seeking employment.
Instead Ciotti’s focus is on the impact of the
homogenization of masculinity on the produc-
tion of difference between Dalit women: as caste
and capital undergo forms of embourgeoise-
ment, women have withdrawn from earlier prac-
tices of Dalit female labor such as midwifery,
grass-cutting, and working as domestic labor
within upper-caste homes, which are stigma-
tized by educated Dalit women. These processes
of internal differentiation among Manupur
Chamars is generational, but it also signals the
manner in which gender ideologies of compan-
ionate marriage, bourgeois respectability, and
the nuclearization of the joint family have ex-
tended beyond upper-caste domains, albeit
with the effect of bringing educated Chamar
women into rural areas (where the number of
educated Dalit men is on the rise). The fact that
Dalit women’s response to caste patriarchy is oc-
curring in the context of the political-economic
shift of market fundamentalization, together
with the politicization of community, means
that gendered modernity is pulled in two differ-
ent directions, as it were: female education (and
withdrawal from manual labor) is valued as a
status marker, even as the explosion of employ-
ment and economic opportunity in quasi-rural
areas such as Manupur has produced a reverse
traffic in women from urban to rural areas, ex-
posing them anew to “traditional” forces (233–
237). Caste transformation in rurban areas im-
plicates transformations of gender and family,
and it has produced new arenas of sexual con-
flict and negotiation that are as deeply impacted
by the new economy, as they are by Victorian-
brahminical patriarchal norms. The premium
on education offers a detour around caste hier-
archy, but it also reproduces internal hierarchies
(of gender and patriarchy). Indeed a discussion
of violence and gendered humiliation, a major
arc of Dalit feminist politicization, could have
shed further light on new configurations of
 Caste, class, and the politics of personhood in neo-liberal India | 127
Chamar gender and sexuality by highlighting
its effects on the politics of intimacy.
In conclusion
To conclude, Timepass and Retro-modern India
are at the broadest level concerned with the phe-
nomenon of rurban modernity, one that is in
formation through transformations of agrarian
capital that has differentially impacted agrarian
landless labor (Chamars), and dominant agrar-
ian castes (Jats). State policies of affirmative ac-
tion have been central, though the state appears
as both highly local and culturalized in each of
these accounts. However the state is also an en-
abling abstraction, and an especially powerful
one due its putative universality. I suggest that it
is this order of state that Chamar subalterns are
able to mobilize against locality in their effort to
override caste hierarchy, and to enter a “scien-
tific” modernity. Meanwhile the practices of
“waiting” and timepass exhibited by Jat youth
appears to presage formations of violent mas-
culinity that has more typically characterized
the major metros—one thinks of the Shiv Sena,
recent Kannada chauvinist agitation, and orga-
nized attacks on sexual freedom that have pro-
duced pushback such as the Pink Chaddi
campaign, and Slutwalk. Each of these texts ex-
hibits an ambition of explanation coupled with
creative narration in linking (caste) self and
subjectivity, with structural transformations of
political economy; that is, in addressing as-yet
incipient tendencies without a name. By nam-
ing them, Ciotti and Jeffrey have also brought
them into the domain of public visibility and
discussion.
Anupama Rao is associate professor of History
at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is
the author of The Caste Question: Dalits and the
Politics of Modern India (2009); co-editor of
Discipline and the Other Body (2006), and Gen-
der and Caste: Issues in Indian feminism (Delhi
2003), in addition to essays and critical writing,
including in Subaltern Studies XII. Her research
interests include: the anthropology of violence,
comparative urbanism, feminist theory and
gender history, and social and political thought.
She is currently working on a project titled Dalit
Bombay, on stigma, precarity, and the social life
of outcaste labor in Bombay/Mumbai.
E-mail: arao@barnard.edu.
Notes
1. For an important account of conjunctural adja-
cencies between a Hindutva techno-modernity,
and the liberalization of India’s economy during
the late 1980s, see Rajagopal (2001). Unlike
studies that have adopted the stated aim of Hin-
dutva politics—to make India “Hindu”—as
scholarly common-sense, Rajagopal argues that
the project of stitching together a Hindu con-
stituency rested, quite centrally, on broader
shifts in India’s political economy that were able
to align the primordial claims of Hindutva with
neo-liberal ideologies of consumer citizenship
and market fundamentalism.
2. For a discussion of timepass in the context of
India’s capitalist modernity and the cultivation
of subjectivity, the earliest theoretical discus-
sion of which appears to be Rajagopal (2001),
see Christopher Fuller at http://aotcpress.com/
articles/timepass-boredom/.
3. Dalit means, “ground down” or “broken.” The
term signals untouchable communities’ efforts
to make a history of exclusion and social stig-
matization into a form of resistant identity.
4. For an account of the colonial association of
Chamars with leatherwork, which scanted their
long history as agriculturalists, see Rawat
(2010). For an account of the large numbers of
Chamar landholders in middle India, and an ar-
gument about Chamar immiseration as the ef-
fect of the colonial categorization of Chamars as
unclean or polluted castes, see Dube (1998).
Both accounts suggest that Chamar stigma was
recently produced, as a result of colonial stereo-
types regarding untouchable communities.
5. For a discussion of the politics of (caste) inti-
macy and new formations of violence at educa-
tional institutions, that historicizes the pheno-
menon within regard to debates about caste,
128 | Anupama Rao
gender, and sexuality across the colonial and
post- colonial periods, see Rao (2011).
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Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2002. India’s silent revolution:
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