Perspective
Writing Ordinary Lives
M S S Pandian
Using the “discourse of
participation”, and drawing from
a narrative that speaks about
ordinary lives, two dalit texts
throw light on various practices
that are the subject of interest of
the social sciences. This is
contrasted to mainstream
epistemology that is constrained
by mere objectivity, reducing, for
example, the study of caste to
variants rather than of the
phenomenon itself.
An initial version of the paper was presented at
a conference on ‘Subaltern and Citizen’
organised at the University of Emory, Atlanta,
in December 2007. I thank S Anandhi, Vijay
Bhaskar, Rajan Krishna, Gyan Pandey, Simona
Sawhney, Sudipto Sen, Ajay Skaria, Ravi
Sriramachandran and Milind Wakankar for
their comments which have helped me revise
the paper.
M S S Pandian (mathiaspandian@gmail.com)
is visiting fellow, Sarai programme, Centre for
Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
34
My acknowledgement of the other is not
something that I can do once and then be
done with. The suspicion of the ordinary
seems to be rooted in the fact that relations
require a repeated attention to the most
ordinary of objects and events, but our theo-
retical impulse is often to think of agency in
terms of escaping the ordinary rather than a
descent into it.
– Veena Das [Das 2007: 6-7].
Life is essentially itself.
– Talal Asad [Asad 1993: 290].
I
n an impassioned essay, ‘How Egalitarian
Are the Social Sciences in I­ndia?’,
Gopal Guru, one of the leading dalit
intellectuals, writes, “It is frustrating, if
not tragic, for dalits to languish in raw
empiricism” [Guru 2002]. According to
him, “…Indian social science represents a
pernicious divide between theoretical
brahmins and empirical shudras” (ibid:
5003). Elaborating on this point,
he continues,
Social science discourse in India is being
closely disciplined by self-appointed juries
who sit in the apex court and decide what is
the correct practice according to the canons.
These juries decide what is theory and what
is trash. It is a different matter that these
canons lack authenticity as they are bor-
rowed from the west unreservedly. The apex
court in social sciences with its full bench in
Delhi keeps ruling out subaltern objections
as absurd and idiosyncratic at worst and
emotional, descriptive-empirical and pole­
mical at best (ibid: 5004).
Based on these observations, Guru
makes a plea that the dalit intellectuals
should do theory that is morally and polit-
ically enabling and not motivated by
i­mmediate temporal gains such as instan-
taneous recognition in the academia.
While Guru’s specific concern is about
the location of knowledge and of dalits
in social science practices, it equally
a­pplies to other subaltern groups. Writing
about how women’s way of knowing
the world gets conceptualised in western
“philosophical and religious discourses”,
Sidonie Smith, for instance, notes, “Her
September 20, 2008  EPW   Economic & Political Weekly
way of knowing and interpreting is less
abstract, less integrative, less transcendent,
less impartial, and less self-conscious
than the interpretive mode of universal
subject. I­nhabiting domesticating space,…
she e­x hibits the less authoritative “femi-
nine” mode of engagement with the
world, one characterised as intuitive, ir-
rational, parti­­cularistic, and practical
[Smith 1993: 14].
The issues which Gopal Guru and other
intellectuals inhabiting subaltern subject
positions raise such as the question of the
arrogating power of theory over empirical
in social sciences and the consequent
problem of hierarchies of knowledge
within social science practices, are indeed
i­mportant and need to be engaged with.
As Sankaran Krishna, drawing his insights
from Michael Focault and Martin
Heidegger, notes: “Abstraction is an ines-
capable analytical device that makes
knowledge practices possible in the first
place; without strategies of abstraction,
the infinity of reality would overwhelm
us. Yet abstraction is never innocent of
power – the precise strategies and methods
of abstraction in each instance decide what
aspects of a limitless reality are brought
into sharp focus and what is left literally
out of the picture” [Krishna 2006: 90].
However, it is time to recognise that the
domain of theory-making or the wider
field of social sciences is constrained by its
own ground rules which often come in the
way of producing morally and politically
enabling knowledge(s) about dalits and
other subaltern groups. Instead, those
narrative forms which Gopal Guru char-
acterises as “raw empiricism” or what the
gate-keepers of social science theory des­
cribe as “emotional, descriptive-empirical
and polemical”, can in most instances
e­nable such knowledge. As I shall try to
show, certain kinds of “radical empiri-
cism” can transcend the divide between
theory and fact and open up spaces for
a­lternative politics for subaltern groups.
Here I take my cue from Guru’s obser-
vation that “dalits try to compensate for
theoretical deficiency by doing brilliant
poetry” [Guru 2002: 5007]. It is my
submis­sion that brilliant poetry (and other
representational forms such as fiction,

a­utobiography and testimony) need not
be a compensation for the theoretical
deficiency of dalits but could very well be
a compensation for the deficiencies of
dominant modes of theory-making in
s­ocial sciences. Not bound by the evidentiary
rules of social science, the privileged
n­otion of teleological time, and claims to
objectivity and authorial neutrality, these
narrative forms can produce enabling re-
descriptions of life-worlds and facilitate
the re-imagination of the political. In the
rest of the paper, I tentatively unpack this
claim by engaging with two dalit texts
published in Tamil – Karukku by Bama
[Bama 1992] and Vadu by K A Guna­
sekharan [Gunasekharan 1995].
1  Dalit Texts
Bama’s Karukku was published in 1992. In
Karukku, Bama describes her village, her
childhood, her world of labour, education
in different institutions, untouchability
and caste discrimination encountered in
them, her Christian upbringing, joining
the Catholic order as a nun, and her sub­
sequent disenchantment and parting of
ways with the church. While such a syn-
opsis of Bama’s text would impoverish it to
resemble a regular autobiography, her’s is
autobiographical in only one of its orienta-
tions. As mentioned in the foreword to the
book by Mark, a Jesuit priest, “At the first
sight it reads like a history of a village.
From another angle, it reads like an auto-
biography. From yet another angle, it
reads like a brilliant novel.” In other
words, Karukku crosses over genre bound-
aries. It is neither history, nor autobiogra-
phy, or fiction; yet it is all of them at the
same time.
Gunasekharan’s Vadu published in 2005
is no different. While it strings together a
number of events from his life such as his
struggle for education, rich Muslims pay-
ing his school fees, caste-based humilia-
tion in classrooms and elsewhere, life in
the dalit hostel, his budding career as a
professional singer and so on (which are self-
consciously designated as “experiences”),
it violates the canons of autobiography
by not being a heroic and progressive
journey of self-realisation or personal
achievement. After all, to be an untoucha-
ble (i e, to be treated as less than human)
is to lack the agentive autonomy that is
Economic & Political Weekly  EPW   September 20, 2008
central to autobiography as a genre. In his
foreword to Vadu, Ravikumar, a well-
known dalit intellectual from the Tamil
region, writes “[Autobiography] is con-
structed by means of the language of
heroism by centralising a single person.
Contrarily, a work of art remains an ex-
traordinary feat of l­anguage” (ibid: 19).
Thus, he alludes to non-autobiographical
orientation of Vadu and invites the readers
to judge this claim for themselves.
Now let me turn to the salient features
of Karukku and Vadu as texts of “non-­
exemplary” lives.
First and foremost, what is extra­
ordinary about Karukku and Vadu is their
ordinariness. For one thing, both the texts,
contrary to the normal practice of publish-
ing, do not employ the formal, grammati-
cally-bound Tamil. Instead, they use the
colloquial Tamil with its regional and
caste inflections. While the upper caste
readers could enter this language only
with a degree of effort and with a sense of
unfamiliarity, these texts distance them-
selves from the formal and establish the
ordinary as their chosen domain.
In keeping with such a choice of
l­anguage, the events which populate these
texts are ordinary and belong to the every­
day. Bama’s description of her childhood
and the world of dalit labour, which occu-
pies a substantial part of Karukku, is a
case in point. Bama’s childhood comes to
life in a series of cameos – childhood
games the children played and left behind
at different stages of their lives, the festi-
vals of the Christian calendar – Easter,
Christmas and New Year – in which they
partook year after year with much excite-
ment, sharing of game meat brought to
the village by men who habitually forayed
into the adjacent hills accompanied by
hunting dogs, and so on. In the same vein,
Bama’s account of the world of dalit labour
journeys through a impersonal but detailed
description of arduous, underpaid and
unpaid work that dalit men and women
perform – ploughing, manuring, sowing,
weeding, harvesting, digging wells, collec­
ting firewood, baking bricks, etc. In this
thick description, which interweaves
righteous indignation at the downgrading
of exacting physical labour and simultane-
ous pride in the skill involved in it, Bama’s
own presence is merely anecdotal.
perspective
Likewise, Gunasekharan’s text too
recounts the ordinary and everyday. This
includes events such as confronting at the
midnight the village fortune-teller who is
believed to be accompanied by fearsome
ghosts, his father taking him to watch
plays staged during festivals, his free
a­ccess to the local cinema hall since his
mother worked at the ticket counter, fail-
ing in mathematics at the high school ex-
amination, saving a child who had fallen
into the local well, narrating film stories
to the neighbourhood Muslim women who
were prohibited from watching films, etc.
As in the case of Karukku, Vadu also gives
detailed descriptions of Gunasekharan’s
struggle against hunger and material dep-
rivation: collecting fish and snails from
the local ponds, gathering grass from the
village commons to be sold to Muslim
cattle-keepers, carrying death messages
of upper castes to neighbouring villages
and getting paid for it, and hunting field
rats and hares. In short, it is the unexcep-
tional which animates these two texts.
Three Strategies
One finds at least three strategies in these
texts that accentuate and underscore the
self-conscious ordinariness of the lives
narrated. First, these texts bring into focus
those lives that will be treated, by the evi-
dentiary practices of social sciences, as
unworthy and trivial. They do not signify,
so to speak, anything more than their
o­rdinariness. Before I move on to offer
i­nstances from Karukku and Vadu to illus-
trate this textual strategy, it is important
to remember that the act of naming and
writing out things, events and lives as
trivial is an act of power in the practice
of social sciences. As Michel-Rolph
Troullot rightly notes, “The triviality
clause…forbids describing what happened
from the point of view of some of the
people who saw it happen or to whom it
happened… with the exercise of that
power, “facts” become clear, sanitised”
[Trouillot 1995: 115-16].
In Karukku, we encounter Ponthan, the
consummate village thief who could
dodge even ayyankatchi padai (the march-
ing battalion of demons, big and small,
who will deliver sure death to anyone who
encounters them), Kaaman, the village
i­diot whose skill in cooking gruel is as
35
perspective
good as that of any woman in the dalit
settlement, Oodan, a habitual wife-beater
who could tease his flute into brilliant
m­usic, etc. Similarly, Gunasekharan recol-
lects and brings to life a number of people
whose lives are marked by nothing extra­
ordinary: Joseph and Daniel, who ferry
pigs to the village on their bicycles from
the nearby towns to be slaughtered during
festivals such as Deepavali and Christmas,
Davamani, who enters an upper caste
k­onar house using the ruse of being pos-
sessed, and Farook who travels ticketless
to Villupuram town in a Madras-
bound train and returns with a stolen
cash of 2,000 rupees. The “repeatability”
and the “non-exemplary” modes of life
lived by these characters slow down
the historicity of time and recover time
as though it is immutable. In other
words, these texts capture the eternity
of certain kinds of past as persisting in
the present.
The second textual strategy which gives
Karukku and Vadu a further depth of ordi-
nariness is erasing specificities of places
and events and masking them with a veil
of anonymity. The village in Karukku goes
unnamed; the upper caste Saliyars who
36
attacked the dalits during Bama’s child-
hood are not specified; the dalit headman
who hid himself in her house to escape the
raiding policemen remains unnamed; the
Catholic priest of the village, an upper
caste partisan, goes unnamed; the schools
and the college where Bama experienced
caste discrimination remains unnamed;
the nunnery and its residents, once again
steadfast believers in caste, go unnamed.
In Vadu, we do not know the name of the
dalit hostel warden who cheats the stu-
dents of their government-given ration, of
the village headmen who extracts work
from dalit students who seek his signature
on the scholarship form, and of the man
who temporarily loses his son during a
temple festival. Such a shroud of anony­
mity frees events, persons, and places of
their claim to distinctiveness and renders
them commonplace. They can be any-
where and anytime. Once again, time gets
marked here as if it is unchanging.
This is a textual strategy which we find
more in Karukku than in Vadu. In compar-
ison to Karukku, Vadu specifies places and
persons more often. Yet it manages to pro-
duce the veil of anonymity. For instance,
the villages which appear in Vadu such
September 20, 2008  EPW   Economic & Political Weekly
as Keeranur, Thoovur, Virathakandan,
Chokkapadappu, Ananthur, Vadathirukai,
etc, are so undifferentiated in the way
they are represented that they carry very
little marks of distinctiveness. In other
words, one can substitute these names, yet
come with, by and large, the same cameos
of events and stories. There are, however,
two exceptions in Vadu. They are the
towns of Illayankudi, where Guna­sekharan
experienced the warmth of friendship
with Muslims, and Madurai, where the
intensity of untouchability was never as
in villages.
The third of the textual strategies which
animates Karukku and Vadu is related to
the way time is yet again manipulated to
invest events of the past with a “now and
here” quality. For one thing, events nar-
rated in them come with no explicit details
of when they took place. Even when time
is marked, it is indecipherably fuzzy. The
allusion to time is made in such phrases as
“When I was studying in school…” or
“During Christmas celebrations…” More
significantly, events do not, for most part,
follow a linear time grid. They unfold as a
montage of fragments going back and
forth in time. In effect, this produces a

depletion of the past-ness of the events
and glosses them with a significant degree
of contemporariness – as if time repeats
itself instead of progressively moving on.
Thus past folds into the present and the
time that matters is the ever-persistent
now. In the passing, let me note here
that the valourised teleological time of
theory cannot achieve this all-pervasive
present-ness.
Let me now turn to how the question of
untouchability and caste-based discrimi-
nation figure in these texts.
2  Writing Untouchability
For both Bama and Gunasekharan, the
s­ocially assigned identity of an untouchable
is a source of intense humiliation. Recall-
ing her schooldays, Bama, for instance,
notes, “time and again, my physical train-
ing teacher and class teacher would come
to the classroom or the school assembly
and ask the dalit children to stand up for
some reason or other… They would record
our names… It is humiliating to stand in
front of about 2,000 children with bowed
heads – as if we have committed some
crime” [Bama 1992: 17]. Gunasekharan’s
experience was similar too:
“How many parayans are there in this class?
Lift your hands. How many are pallans?
Stand up. I will count. As soon as the class
gets over, come over to the office and pick up
the scholarship forms. You should fill up the
forms and return them to the office within a
week”, the class teacher would announce. It
is hard even today to imagine how small I
felt in front of everybody in the class
[G­unasekharan 1995: 29].
It is a language of affect – not reason –
that can give these experiences their
meaning. Despite such public humiliation,
voicing the untouchable identity in the
public is the moral and political option
chosen by these two texts. What I am con-
cerned with here are the specific modes
of this voicing chosen by Bama and
Gunasekharan.
If announcing one’s untouchable identity
in the classroom and undergoing humilia-
tion was a routine that repeats time and
again, the practice of untouchability else-
where too is, according to Karrukku and
Vadu, an everyday routine and not an ex-
ceptional event. The montage of descrip-
tions found in these texts are continually
interspersed with stories of untouchability
Economic & Political Weekly  EPW   September 20, 2008
in its pervasiveness. Let me cite a few
instances from Vadu: Gunasekharan gets
slapped by an upper caste man for coming
too close while walking on the narrow
bund of a paddy field; when he buys unfer-
mented palm juice in the village, it is
served to him in disposable palm leaf cups
and not in any metal vessel; and when he
goes to nearby villages to announce upper
caste deaths, he will be fed on a disposable
palm leaf plate which he himself has
to produce (ibid: 45, 55-56, 71). Alluding
to untouchability’s everydayness, Guna­
sekharan writes, “Whichever village you
enter, the first question that is asked is
“what [caste] do you [belong to]?’’ (ibid:
45); and “In our country, village is caste,
caste is village”. With a sense of irony, he
adds, “Gandhi loved villages a lot” (ibid: 91).
Routine
Bama’s tone of narration is similar. The
practice of untouchability plays itself out
as a routine: an upper caste woman refus-
es to sit next to her in a bus; dalit children
have to do all the physical work in the
school such as watering plants and sweep-
ing the compound; Bama being falsely
a­ccused of plucking coconuts from the
school and being told that she has shown
her “parayar mentality”; and the parayar
community’s decision not to allow women
to go for films since they get harassed by
upper caste men [Bama 1992: 14-15, 47].
Both the texts talk extensively of how spa-
tial practices in the village regulate and
reproduce caste on a day-to-day basis.
There are separate streets for different
castes, separate bathing areas in the vil-
lage pond for upper castes and dalits, and
separate cemeteries and churches for
u­pper castes and dalits.
If untouchability and caste reproduce
themselves by repetition, its violence
could be disclosed, as evident from
Karukku and Vadu, only by means of em-
phasising its everydayness. As Bama
remarks, “Wherever you go, whatever you
have studied, it seems caste will not leave
us”; and “It is a caste [parayars] born to
labour. However much you labour [you
get] every day [only] the same gruel, the
same gruel made of broken rice, and the
same dried fish curry” (ibid: 18, 44-45).
Even in situations where caste seems to
disappear, it quickly resurfaces. A small
perspective
but telling episode from Vadu illustrates
this well. Gunasekharan’s cousin, Mayandi,
the first medical graduate from his family,
works as a doctor in Madurai town. Upper
caste men from his village go to this hospi-
tal at times of illness which cannot be
cured locally. A doctor in white coat fol-
lowed by nurses, he gets addressed by
these men as “doctor brother”. The kin-
ship term “brother” is important here. It
frees Mayandi from his untouchable iden-
tity momentarily and he gets notionally
integrated into the upper caste family. Yet,
when they leave for their villages after
getting cured, they return to the old
d­erogatory mode of address when talking
to him [Gunasekharan 1995: 91-92].
The everydayness and the repeatability
of untouchability in these texts places it
outside the time of history.1 That is, un-
touchability and caste emerge here as if
they are immutable in time. As Bama
notes, “Wherever you go, whatever have
you studied, it seems this caste will not
leave you that easily” [Bama 1992: 18]. Or
as Gunasekharan’s grandfather informs
us in Vadu, “As time changes, caste audacity
increases. When are they [the upper
castes] going to change?” [Gunasekharan
1995: 80]. These are indeed statements of
incomprehension. In other words, caste
and untouchability cannot be made sense
of (as in theorisation) but has to be en-
dured in its bewildering practices. While
incomprehension affirms the irrationality
of caste and untouchability, the act of
e­ndurance works here as an ethical and
political move of waiting for the upper
castes to understanding this irrationality.
These texts are indeed aware that the
irrationality of untouchability can touch
the upper castes too. Both Karukku and
Vadu contain several instances of this poli-
tics of hope. For the sake of brevity, let me
draw one instance from each of the texts.
Despite the practice of caste discrimi­
nation in the school where Bama studied,
she has other things too to write. She joy-
ously notes, “I studied well and stood first
in the class. Hence all children spoke to
me nicely… My teachers and the [Catholic]
sisters who taught me praised me. They
treated me with affection. I was thrilled. I
was asked to teach other children who are
not good in their studies. Because of my
teaching they scored good marks. I was
37
perspective
very happy” (ibid: 17). Gunasekharan narrat-
ed a similar story. While he was studying
in college, he participated in a singing
competition. As his name was announced,
upper caste boys shouted at and jeered
him – for he belongs to an untouchable
caste. Yet he began to sing. As the song
proceeded, silence descended on the audi-
torium. As he finished, there were thun-
derous claps. As he turned the pages of his
notebook after the event, he found a mes-
sage written. It read, “Forgive me. I shout-
ed to disrupt your singing. I realised later
the melodiousness of your voice. I judged
you wrongly on the basis of your caste and
without realising your talent” (ibid: 96-97).
Both are statements where the upper
castes experience astonishment and
incomprehension about caste which they
have been treating as natural. Possibility
of such upper caste astonishment about
their own practice of caste is the source of
hope in these texts of the ordinary lives. In
other words, these statements celebrate
the “fugitive abundance of life over iden-
tity” [Connolly 1995: 232] as a source of
freedom from caste; and they at once
invite the upper castes to acknowledge
this ethical and political possibility. What
is more, these texts know that the coher-
ence of the subject claimed by the upper
castes is fiction. As Michelamma, a char-
acter in Karukku, reasons thus about the
non-availability of beef for the dalits:
“Now all caste fellows eat beef in secret. It
is difficult for us to get meat. Everybody
eats. Yet they call us, lower caste” [Bama
1992: 52]. Such incoherence of the subject
can p­recisely be the source of upper caste
a­stonishment about caste.
As much as these are statements of
incomprehension, they are also of affect:
“If you are born in a lower caste, you have
to live struggling every moment. The
moment they know one is of lower caste,
they turn their face in disgust. One cannot
des­cribe how much it pains… With pain,
a­nger too will surface. What our anger
can do to them! One has to swallow the
anger and live in degradation” (ibid: 22).
Thus, it is the language of affect – disgust,
pain, anger and degradation – that cap-
tures the intense everyday violence of
caste. Here the language of pain works as
an act of persuasion and appeal. Enduring
pain and suffering is not necessarily signs
38
MANOHAR
of lacking agency and being in a passive
state, but its work of agency often has a
profound ethical dimension [Asad 2003:
chapter 2].
In short, in Karukku and Vadu, the
every­day, the ordinary, a temporality that
is not teleological, and a language of a­ffect
and incomprehension invest caste with
certain presentness and immediacy and
opens up a space for moral and political
appeal to the upper castes. The burden of
caste is thus returned to the upper castes.
3 Theorising Caste
Let me leave behind Karukku and Vadu for
the moment and return to the question of
how caste is written in social science theory.
As a way of illustrating how social science
theory often fails to produce morally and
politically enabling knowledges of and for
dalits and other subaltern groups because
of its own ground rules, let me take up the
concept of Sanskritisation and westernisa-
tion developed to understand the dyna­
mics of caste by M N Srinivas. My choice of
M N Srinivas’ work is informed by two sets
of reasons. First, his work continues
to be treated as offering a disinterested
theory of caste not driven by ideology.
Arguably, the only other work which en-
joys such a status is Louis Dumont’s Homo
H­ierarchicus [Dumont 1970]. Second,
Srinivas’ concept of Sanskritisation has
e­ntered the Indian middle class voca­
bulary in such a way that it enjoys the
s­tatus of self-evident truth. In dealing
with M N Srinivas’ theory of caste, my em-
phasis is on how acts of theorising in the
domain of social sciences are inevitably
acts of multiple distancing.
Stripped down to its basics, M N Srini-
vas’ theory of Sanskritisation and west-
ernisation claims, within a comparative
framework, that the lower castes sanskri-
tise (i e, they adopt upper caste practices
so as to move up in the social/caste hierar-
chy); and the upper castes, instead, west-
ernise [Srinivas 1972]. Taking a cue from
Johannes Fabian’s argument about how
the west constructs its other by “the denial
of coevalness”,2 we can immediately l­ocate
a teleological scheme at work in Srinivas’
comparative analysis. The teleology moves
from lower caste practices to sanskritisa-
tion to westernisation. Setting caste as the
other of the modern, it thus locates the
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time of caste in the past. In other words, it is
a residue or a leftover that will disappear
as time marches on. Let me add that this is
not something unique to the question of
caste. The teleological time of s­ocial sciences
cannot but mark the time of other subaltern
groups such as peasants, indigenous peo-
ple and the un­lettered as that of the past.
Let me compare this temporal distanc-
ing of caste from the present found in
M N Srinivas’ theoretical scheme with the
manner in which Karukku and Vadu deal
with time. By not engaging in teleological
time but using montage as a way of evok-
ing a feeling of “here and now”, Bama and
Gunasekharan, as we have seen, reduce
the pastness of caste and recover it as an
ethical and political question of immediacy.
In contrast, being a residue from the past
in M N Srinivas’ scheme, the question of
caste loses its political and ethical imme-
diacy. Thus, the sense of immutability and
the consequent angst and moral appeal
cannot belong to the teleological time of
social sciences but only to other forms
of temporalities.
Here Dipesh Chakrabarty’s formulation
on the institutionalised discourse of
h­istory as a discipline is the most helpful.
He writes, “So long as one operates within
the discourse of ‘history’ produced at the
institutional site of university, it is not pos-
sible simply to walk out of the deep collu-
sion between ‘history’ and the modernis-
ing narratives of citizenship, bourgeois
public and private, and the nation state.”3
This collusion between modern state and
social science practices is precisely what
vetoes out the everyday and the ordinary
as the candidates for theorisation [Guha
2002]. What Chakrabarthy writes of
h­istory as a discipline is applicable to o­ther
social sciences as well, at least in varying
degrees. The exception can only be, as
T­zvetan Todorov argues, certain kinds of
ethnology [Todorov 1995: chapter 1]. After
all, all of them, in their self-description, are
“modern” disciplines. In other words, be-
ing a professional sociologist, M N Srini­vas
cannot escape the seduction of teleologi-
cal time and its consequences. While social
sciences can theorise non-teleological forms
of temporalities, its own time cannot be
but secular and teleological.
In addition to the “temporal distancing”
of caste from the present, there are other
Economic & Political Weekly  EPW   September 20, 2008
forms of “distancing” that one finds in
Srinivas’ formulation which have signifi-
cant implications for dalit and subaltern
politics. I mark here two such distancings
– the first, relating to the language of affect
and the second, to authorial neutrality
and objectivity that is demanded by social
sciences. It was thanks to Edmund Leach
that M N Srinivas, who spoke all the time
about caste in general but never about his
own, spoke of his caste identity. In a re-
view of Srinivas’ Caste in Modern India,
Leach called his sanskritisation model
“brahminocentric” and taunted him
whether his interpretation would have
been different if he were a sudra [Srinivas
1992: 148]. The incitement of Edmund
Leach prompted Srinivas to concede his
own caste identity. He wrote,
…my stressing of the importance of the
Backward Classes Movement, and of the role
of caste in politics and administration, are
very probably the result of my being a South
Indian, and a Brahmin at that. The principle
of caste quotas for appointments to posts in
the administration, and for admissions to
scientific and technological courses, pro-
duced much bitterness among Mysore Brah-
mins. Some of these were my friends and
relatives, and I could not help being sensitive
to their distress (ibid: 152).
Significantly, his caste identity and a
language of affect find articulation here.
While references to “bitterness among
Mysore brahmins”, some of them being his
“friends and relatives”, and his “being sen-
sitive to their distress” makes his state-
ment one of profound honesty and affect,
he also talks of his caste and regional iden-
tity openly. In certain ways this is a state-
ment which shares the language of texts
like Karukku and Vadu. Yet being a social
scientist, he cannot stay with such a state-
ment for one too long as it comes in the
way of authorial neutrality and objectivity.
He has to distance himself from such
l­anguage to claim detachment from what
he theorises.
As soon as M N Srinivas confesses his
caste identity (with the caveat of “very
probably”) and participates in a language
of affect, he hastens to enfeeble them. In
the place of his sensitivity to the distress
of the Mysore brahmins, now he presents
a range of things that has nothing to do
with caste as such. His real concern was
not motivated by his caste identity or the
perspective
distress of his fellow-caste persons but
b­ecause of his concern about
the steady deterioration in efficiency and the
fouling of interpersonal relations in acade­
mic circles and the administration – both
r­esults of a policy of caste quotas. As one
with a strong attachment to Mysore, I could
not but be affected by the manner in which
conflicts between castes prevented concen-
tration on the all-important task of develop-
ing the economic resources of the state for
the benefit of all sections of its population
(ibid: 152-53).
This quick abandonment of his caste
identity and the language of affect signals
two modes of distancing. The first one is
related to the question of what can be the
appropriate language for social science
discourse. Can one talk of one’s distress
and the bitterness of others as the source
of one’s theory? One cannot since it vio-
lates the criteria of neutrality and objec-
tivity. This is precisely why M N Srinivas
had to abandon the language of affect and
foreground a language of “common good”
in terms of efficiency and development. As
Trouillot rightly notes, “A fetishism of the
facts still dominates history and the other
social sciences. It reinforces the view that
any conscious positioning should be
r­ejected as ideological. Thus, historian’s
position is officially unmarked: it is that of
a nonhistorical observer” [Trouillot 1995:
151]. In contrast, being unconstrained by
such claims to objectivity, Karukku and
Vadu could partake in a language of affect
and produce morally and politically
i­nformed appeal to upper castes.
The second mode of distancing which is
evident here is a result of the social science
practice of discerning the so-called real
from appearances. That is, what is being
studied needs to be made sense of and
explained. There is no space for incom­
prehension or astonishment in social
science practices. This is perhaps why in
M N Srinivas’ theorisation, caste has to be
dealt with not on its own terms but re-
duced to other variants such as efficiency
and development.4 Significantly, this is
precisely the moment in his theorisation
wherein the everyday and ordinary are
shown the door. Karukku and Vadu stand
in sharp contrast to these modes of dis-
tancing. In both the texts, the authors are
both actors as well as narrators. Thus
there is no space for detachment. The
39
perspective
truth of caste b­ecomes experiencing it.
What is more, standing outside the lan-
guage of reason, they could simply express
astonishment at caste and invite others
to join them. In other words, making
sense of caste in this context work as
making it, while astonishment becomes a
tool of unmaking.
In short, unlike social science texts, cer-
tain forms of “radical empiricism” as evi-
dent in texts such as Karukku and Vadu,
can bring together experience, affect, and
politics as inseparable.
4 Conclusions
Thus theory as an act of multiple distanc-
ing and the dalit texts as that of the world
of everyday, affect and incomprehension,
differ in their intentions and methods
drastically. They produce different forms
of truth and knowledge. One way of cap-
turing this difference is to take recourse
Stanley Tambiah’s distinction between the
“discourse of causality” and the “discourse
of participation”. As he notes,
While much of the discourse of causality and
positive science is framed in terms of dis-
tancing, neutrality, experimentation, and
the language of analytic reason, much of the
disourse of participation can be framed in
terms of sympathetic immediacy, performa-
tive speech acts, and ritual action. If partici-
pation emphasises sensory and affective
communication and the language of
e­motion, causality stresses the rationality of
the instrumental action and the language of
cognition.5
While social science practices and
t­heory-making belongs to the “discourse
of causality”, the dalit texts belong to the
“discourse of participation”.
This distinction is important. Being a
discourse of causality, theory works with
its own ground rules of “distancing, neu-
trality, experimentation, and the language
of analytic reason”. Given this, it needs to
discard sympathetic immediacy, perfor-
mative speech, affective communication,
language of emotion, etc. This is why
theories of caste have to partake in
secular teleo­logical time and abandon the
language of affect and valorise the lan-
guage of reason. Yet lives as they are lived
– subaltern or otherwise – is suffused with
what theory has to discard to be theory –
multiple temporalities, affect of different
kinds, astonishment and incomprehension.
40
The discourse of participation, by its very
definition, has the space to accommodate
and account for these. Thus, Karukku and
Vadu could bring to life the prosaic and
the everyday, play around with temporality
without being constrained by secular
teleology, indulge in the language of
affect, employ astonishment and bewilder-
ment instead of reason and explanation,
and concede the non-sovereignty of the
self. Through all these, these texts make
an appeal to the upper castes to under-
stand what it is to be a dalit. But for
the “raw empiricism” of describing the
ordinary and everyday, this morally and
politically charged appeal may not be
possible. I­nstead, theory, as evident from
M N Srinivas’ instance, constrained by its
protocols of neutrality and objectivity
could often depoliticise.
It is indeed true that theory, as Gopal
Guru rightly claims, should not remain
the monopoly of any group. Yet if the
“apex court in social sciences with its full
bench in Delhi keeps ruling out subaltern
objections as absurd and idiosyncratic at
worst and emotional, descriptive-empirical
and polemical at best”, it is the apex court’s
own self-limiting protocols which cannot
accommodate the idiosyncratic, emotion-
al and polemical. Writing about “[e]piste-
mology, the social sciences, the science of
texts”, Bruno Latour notes,
In the eyes of our critics the ozone hole above
our heads, the moral law in our hearts, the
autonomous text, may each be of interes, but
only separately. That a delicate shuttle
should have woven together the heavens,
industry, texts, soul and moral law – this
remains uncanny, unthinkable, unseemly
[Latour 1993: 5].
What remains uncanny, unthinkable
and unseemly for theory and social sci-
ences is precisely what is possible for texts
like Karukku and Vadu. They can weave
together “heavens, industry, texts, soul
and moral law” and produce an ethical
and political appeal which theory, as it is
practised, is perhaps constrained not to.
Notes
1 My claim is not that subaltern texts do not par-
take in teleological time. They do. But the point is,
they unlike in social science practices, can choose
different forms of temporalities – mythical, cycli-
cal, teleological, etc.
2 Johannes (1983), Walter Mignolo characterises
the “denial of coevalness” as “the replacement of
September 20, 2008  EPW   Economic & Political Weekly
the ‘other’ in space by the ‘other’ in time... and the
articulation of cultural differences in chronologi-
cal hierarchies” [Mignolo 1995: xi].
3 See Chakrabarti (2000: 41). See also Guha (1997).
4 This act of transcoding caste into something else
such as eugenics, division of labour, and hygiene
has a long tradition [Pandian 2007: 37-40]; see
also Menon (1999).
5 Quoted in Clark (1998: 147).
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