524508

research-article2014
CSI0010.1177/0011392114524508Current SociologyBanerjee-Dube

Article CS

Current Sociology Monograph

Caste, race and difference:

2014, Vol. 62(4) 512­–530
© The Author(s) 2014
Reprints and permissions:
The limits of knowledge and sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0011392114524508
resistance csi.sagepub.com

Ishita Banerjee-Dube
El Colegio de México, Mexico

Abstract
This article reconsiders the past and the present of Dalit and lower-caste struggle in
India, including recent efforts to link caste and race in order to make a common platform
against discrimination at international fora. It explores the burden of colonial concepts
and statist imaginaries in the shaping of objectified identities by Dalits, especially as they
seize upon and crucially rework such categories. Critically engaging with the notion of
coloniality, ‘the other side of modernity’, the article reveals the limits of categorical
perspectives and intellectual theory in the articulation of social worlds. Instead, it points
towards a global sociology that acknowledges and affirms ambivalence and contradiction
as crucial attributes of thinking, writing and practice.

Keywords
Caste, coloniality, Dalits, race

… where Derrida breaks new ground is in the extent‘differ’ shades into ‘defer’.
(Hall, 1997 [1991]: 50)

[If] postcoloniality is to be reminded of its origin in colonial oppression, it must also be

theoretically urged to recollect the compelling seductions of colonial power.
(L Gandhi, 1998: 4)

Corresponding author:
Ishita Banerjee-Dube, Centre for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de México, Camino al Ajusco, No.
20, C.P, Mexico 10740, Mexico.
Email: ibanerje@colmex.mx
Banerjee-Dube 513

This article attempts an experimental deployment of these forceful exhortations in an

examination of the past and the present of Dalit (ground down/suppressed/broken, ex-
untouchable) and lower-caste struggle against discrimination in India. Through a critical
examination of the ways identities are forged and reclaimed and action taken on the basis
of such identities by radical, marginal groups in their effort to combat exclusion, I hope
to enrich the discussions underway in sociology and social sciences to make disciplines
more inclusive and representative. A moot point is the recognition of the epistemological
value and agency of the ‘world beyond the west’. Of equal significance is an effort to
complement the ‘politics of knowledge’ with an exploration of the ‘politics of action’
(Bhambra, 2013).
Sociologists, we are aware, have proffered different models by means of which soci-
ology can become ‘global’ in the real sense of the term. In a recent critical engagement
with these models – of multiple modernities (as opposed to linear and singular moderni-
zation), of multicultural sociology that acknowledges the work of scholars from the rest
of the world, and of a sociology that transcends its ‘methodological nationalism’ –
Bhambra argues that none of these models adequately deals with earlier ‘omissions’ that
had made sociology Eurocentric and uneven (Bhambra, 2013).
Bhambra insists on the need of making the ‘colonial global’ an integral and impor-
tant part of sociology in order to make it truly ‘global’. This article takes the cue from
Bhambra’s pertinent argument, made also by the theorists of coloniality/modernity
(e.g. Mignolo, 2005; Quijano, 2000), that it is vital to recognize the historical role of
colonialism and slavery in the making of the modern world and examine the construc-
tion of the global in the light of such understanding. The global, seen through the lens
of colonialism and slavery, would reveal the racialized hierarchies that inhere in cur-
rent institutions of the global and in concepts and categories employed in sociology
(Bhambra, 2013).
The perspective of coloniality, i.e. a perspective in which the centre of observation ‘is
grounded in colonial history’ (Mignolo, 2005: xi), would enable an excavation of the
‘geopolitics of knowledge’ allowing in turn a more comprehensive and less lop-sided
view of the global. Coloniality, ‘the untold and unrecognized part of modernity’, lays
bare the asymmetrical relations of power that went into the making of knowledge and
social relations from a Eurocentric perspective. And since ethno-racial, hierarchical rela-
tions of power (that emerged from the ‘Discovery of America’) still constitute social
relations and forms of knowledge (Quijano, 2000), coloniality persists even if the histori-
cal process of colonialism has come to an end.
In an effort to bring colonialism centrally into an understanding of processes through
which knowledge of the current world has been constructed, this article tracks the gene-
alogy of the institution of caste in India during colonial rule and highlights how caste
became the ‘sociological key’ to the understanding of Indian society. Following upon
this, it explores the myriad perceptions, approaches and understandings of caste by non-
Brahman and Dalit groups in colonial and contemporary India. Such an exploration
throws into relief the discrete ways colonial understandings of caste have come to inflect
and inform caste-based movements and anti-caste struggles. My purpose is not just to lay
bare the impress of colonial knowledge on anti-caste struggles and on dominant socio-
logical analyses of caste. Rather, I wish to understand why and how colonial knowledge
514 Current Sociology Monograph 2 62(4)

is drawn upon by disadvantaged groups in their effort to fight injustice and social dis-
crimination, and what such deployments tell us about dissent and resistance.
The article can possibly be seen as one rooted in the perspective of ‘coloniality’, in
that it gives central place to the ‘other’ of modernity. At the same time, my examination
of the reified constructions of identity on the part of Dalit and lower-caste groups probes
the extent of the efficacy of coloniality as an enabling perspective that serves to dislodge
Eurocentrism. An unravelling of the intricate and muddled articulation of colonial
knowledge and collective experience and action would serve to destabilize notions that
an acknowledgement and avowal of the ‘colonial modern’ can redress the lacunae in
global sociology by making it complete and comprehensive.
In other words, I wish to excavate the ‘troubled and troubling relationship’ of ‘recip-
rocal antagonism and desire’ between the colonizer and the colonized and track the
‘complicity’ inherent in contestation (Gandhi, 1998: 4). I also wish to understand why
subaltern groups reclaim reified identities and probe whether action based on the experi-
ence of ‘atrocity’ can challenge academic sociology to rethink its basic premises
(Visvanathan, 2001: 3124). A study that combines the politics of knowledge with that of
action would, perhaps, offer better insights into the problems that confront endeavours to
globalize disciplines and indicate their possibilities.

The central problematic

My starting point is the effort underway for over a decade now, of Black Panther and
Dalit activists, to link caste and race in order to make a common platform against dis-
crimination at international fora. Caste and race, they argue, are ‘comparable systems of
oppression’ in that people at the receiving end of caste and race are similarly disenfran-
chised, despite huge cultural differences (Reddy, 2005: 545). It is not surprising that
Dalit Panthers, an organization primarily of radical poets and artists of the caste of
Mahars in Maharashtra, who drew inspiration directly from the Black Panthers of the
US, would see an affinity between caste and race. At the same time, in pushing for the
similarity and comparability between race and caste, these Dalit activists are going com-
pletely against the view of their formidable leader Dr BR Ambedkar (endearingly called
Babasaheb Ambedkar), whom we will discuss at greater length in a later section.
‘European students of Caste have unduly emphasised the role of colour in the Caste
system’, Ambedkar had stated in his first essay on caste written in 1916, for the
Anthropology Seminar at Columbia University. In this relatively unexplored essay (pub-
lished the following year in Indian Antiquary), Ambedkar engaged with what he believed
were the most important analyses of caste to date in order to indicate his points of con-
currence and dissonance and formulate his own view of the genesis and mechanism of
caste. The essay is remarkable for its candour and also for the arguments advanced. An
illustration is the force with which Ambedkar dismissed the association of caste with
race. The idea that colour was the ‘chief factor’ in the ‘Caste problem’, he stated, derived
from the fact that European students were ‘impregnated by colour prejudices’. Nothing
can be ‘farther from the truth’ (Ambedkar, 2002 [1917]: 261).
Arguably, this was Ambedkar’s first major essay on caste, written at a time when he
was still in his youth and had not become an important political leader. It is highly
Banerjee-Dube 515

probable that his first-hand experience of the ‘pernicious effects of racial division’ in
New York made Ambedkar see the similarities in the position of Blacks in America and
that of the untouchables in India. In a letter addressed to the African American scholar
WEB Du Bois three decades later in 1946, Ambedkar expressed his interest in the peti-
tion filed by the Blacks to the UN and stated that the untouchables of India were thinking
of ‘following suit’ (Ambedkar, cited in Zelliot, 2010).
Ambedkar, however, did not see race as the basis for the forced degradation of
untouchables. His detailed and sensitive work, The Untouchables: Who Were They and
Why They Became Untouchables (1948), written a few years prior to his and his follow-
ers’ conversion to Buddhism, established the untouchables as Buddhists who had been
brought under the subjection and domination of Hinduism in the 4th century ce by the
imperial Guptas. This forced imposition of Hinduism on members of a different faith was
what accounted for the current plight of untouchables. Similarly, Ambedkar’s later writ-
ings (published posthumously) that compare the status of untouchables as the most
deprived people in India with that of American slaves and the Jewish ghetto, do not see
race as the basis of discrimination (Ambedkar, 2002 [1917]).
What has changed between the time when Ambedkar advanced his argument empha-
sizing the difference between caste and race, and now when Dalits compare the two as
similar systems of oppression? What were the ways in which Ambedkar and his follow-
ers related to Dalit identity and how do Dalit activists of contemporary India construe the
same identity?
Identities, affirms Satya Mohanty, are ‘theoretical constructions’ that enable the sub-
jects to read the world in particular ways (Mohanty, 1995). Claims about identity, there-
fore, are in reality explanations of the social world. For Stuart Hall, identity is always in
a process of formation; it connotes the process of identification in which the structure of
identification is constructed through ambivalence (Hall, 1997 [1991]: 47). Ambivalence
resides in the fact that while group identity is about drawing boundaries to delineate who
is and is not part of a group, most people ‘simultaneously consider themselves part of
several groups’. In addition, they appropriate ideas and practices borrowed from another
group by linking them to distinct cultural values (Sidbury, 1997: 4–5).
We track the distinct pathways of Dalit and lower-caste identities over a century and
a quarter in order to understand how these peoples have marked frontiers, appropriated
cultural markers of dominant groups, and belonged to several groups simultaneously,
and probe what the perspective from coloniality has to offer. What happens if this per-
spective is suffused with the paradigms of modernity?

Basic premises
At the risk of repeating widely known facts, let me chalk out the key elements that consti-
tute and sustain caste. Caste relates to two distinct conceptions, those of varna (literally
colour but used to signify ‘idealized human callings’) and jati (birth groups or species).
Varna is taken to be a pan-Indian schema or classification that divides society into four
groups – of Brahmans (priests and teachers), Kshatriyas (kings and warriors), Vaishyas
(merchants and traders) and Sudras (working classes) on the basis of occupation. This divi-
sion is taken to be inherently hierarchical by most, although there have been arguments on
516 Current Sociology Monograph 2 62(4)

the part of political thinkers such as Mahatma Gandhi that varna represents an organic
division of society where interdependent groups together make up the whole, and where
the work of each is as important and indispensible as that of the other. In other words, the
classification according to occupation does not involve discriminatory gradation.
The inclusion of a fifth group of Antaja or Avarna or Panchama (untouchables, peo-
ple exterior to varna, or a fifth group beyond the four varnas) is believed to have hap-
pened at a later stage. The untouchables do not form a part of the system on account of
their impurity; they, however, hold up the entire structure of varna. In Gandhi’s percep-
tion, untouchability came to pass as a result of the degradation of varnashrama, a great
‘blot’ of the system that had to be removed at any cost. Moreover, upper castes had to
atone for the ‘sin’ of untouchability by taking to sweeping and cleaning of toilets, and
other unclean jobs traditionally performed by the untouchables. Gandhi’s efforts and
arguments apart, the ‘untouchables’, who reconstituted themselves as Dalits from the
1930s, have severely contested the varna classification and their low ritual status.
The interface of varna and jati is intricate and multifaceted. It is widely accepted that
varna functions as a ‘fundamental template’, a reference category for conceptualizing
social ranks across India, it does not determine caste. The actual reality of caste is repre-
sented by jatis, believed to have been local institutions rooted in ecology, local traditions,
language and culture. Caste is taken to be a fusion of two systems from two different
cultures: jati of pre-Aryan culture with the Aryan hierarchical scheme of varna. Varna
and jati are polyvalent terms and there are considerable regional variations in the func-
tioning of jatis. Caste, therefore, is a complex, elusive and changing phenomenon, which
often defies categorization.
The principal distinctive features of caste are its ascriptive character, and its endog-
amy often upheld by the principle of ritual purity and pollution. People are born into
castes, i.e. castes are ascribed to them, even though mobility of castes has been a constant
feature of the ‘system’. The crystallization of caste as a bounded and close group, in
Ambedkar’s analysis, reveals the success of Brahmans in superimposing endogamy over
exogamy, of closing doors to others that resulted in the parcelling into bits of a larger
cultural unity. Endogamy, the key element, was ‘the only characteristic that is peculiar
to caste’ (Ambedkar, 2002 [1917]: 245), an element that also explains how classes devel-
oped into castes in India by means of exclusion.
The principle of purity and pollution – which would get primacy of place as the fun-
damental factor that sustained and upheld the caste system – in the French sociologist
Louis Dumont’s elegant explication of caste in 1970, had been dismissed by Ambedkar
in 1916 as something commonly associated with the priestly class. Priest and purity are
old associates, he had stated, and the idea of pollution had any meaning for caste only
insofar as caste had a ‘religious fervour’.
Even more remarkable was the way in which Ambedkar rejected Risley’s confident
pronouncements on caste. Sir Risley, he affirmed, had made ‘no new point deserving of
special attention’ (Ambedkar, 2002 [1917]: 244). The association of caste with race, a
product of Risley’s scientific ethnography, was faulty and rooted in the prejudices of
white observers in Ambedkar’s reckoning. It was not worthy of discussion.
Academics who organized a workshop on race in South Asia in the early 1990s took
the concept of ‘race’ to include ‘any essentialising of groups of people’ which held them
Banerjee-Dube 517

to ‘display inherent, heritable, persistent or predicative characteristics’ involving a bio-

logical or quasi-biological basis (Robb, 1995: 1). This was a working definition that took
into account different kinds of race theory, which in turn reflected distinct understand-
ings of biology, history or societies. Despite wide variations, racism implied a ranking
according to biological origins and features (Robb, 1995: 2).
Ranking or grading of groups according to origins and qualities that are given and not
achieved also form the principal criterion in the division of society according to castes.
Indeed, scholars and activists who regard caste and race as being similar, emphasize the
element of discrimination inherent in both. The ascriptive nature of caste, it bears point-
ing out, has occasioned severe critiques of caste, not just by members of lower-caste and
Dalit groups, but also by modern political leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, the first
prime minister of independent India. ‘Caste’, ‘the symbol and embodiment of exclusive-
ness among the Hindus’ in Nehru’s terms, had ‘no place left’ in the ‘social organization
of today’. Caste would lose its distinguishing feature and ‘in fact, end’, if opportunity
was throw open to everybody on the basis of merit (Nehru, 1997 [1946]: 520).
What has happened over time, however, is a reinforcing of caste and race identities
both by groups who are graded, and the ones who share the prejudices of such grading.
The following sections examine such contradictory articulations in order to understand
why subordinate peoples draw upon objectified identities and vindicate what they ‘know,
feel and believe’ in order to resist conditions of their ‘incarceration’ (Reddy, 2005: 546).

Race and caste

The 19th century, we are aware, witnessed the widest circulation and prevalence of racist
theories, a time when such theories became commonplace, ‘almost unwitting’ as a mode
of explanation (Robb, 1995: 2). Even though assessment of observable phenomena was
governed by the belief that qualities were given and not achieved and that perfectability
resulted only from linear evolution, race theories claimed to be scientific in that their
effort to explain the observable rested on social analysis and empirical physical assess-
ment. Social Darwinism of the Victorian era joined hands with eugenics to give sub-
stance and polish to stereotypical Western views on non-Western societies. Racist
conceptions, moreover, did not remain confined to the domain of anthropology; they
came to pervade perception and policy in colonized societies generating in turn a variety
of responses from the colonized.
The second half of the 19th century marks a critical period in Indian history. The Revolt
of 1857 and the direct takeover of India by the British Crown in the aftermath of the
Revolt set in motion processes that had far-reaching implications for understandings of
Indian society. Queen’s government promised institutional reforms to eventually prepare
Indians for self-rule and took bold steps to know and classify Indian society in order to
govern better. Anthropology replaced history as the principal instrument of knowledge
and rule (Dirks, 2001), and caste replaced the village community as the primary object of
social classification and understanding. The notional ‘Indian individual’ was stripped of
his/her place in the ‘village community’ and clothed in ‘caste’ (Smith, 1985: 173).
British administrators turned ethnographers drew heavily upon the existing works of
Orientalist scholars, colonial officials and missionaries that had marked out religion and
518 Current Sociology Monograph 2 62(4)

caste as the key elements of ‘traditional’ Indian society. Such ideas were consequent
upon the belief that Indian society was composed of communities and not of individuals
and those communities accepted and followed the dictates of religion and caste without
demur. A search for the primordial religious communities began almost from the time of
the inception of the East India Company’s rule in the late 18th century. And once the
population was neatly divided into Gentoos (Hindus) and Mahommedans (Muslims),
caste figured prominently as the distinguishing feature of Hindu society. While it is true
that liberal administrators, Orientalist scholars and Protestant missionaries differed
widely in their approaches to caste and their evaluation of the effects of caste on Hindu
society, they all agreed that caste differentiated ‘traditional’ India from ‘modern’ West.
By the second half of the 19th century caste and religion had come to constitute ‘natu-
ral’ categories, the ‘sociological keys to the understanding of Indian people’ (Cohn,
1987: 242). The decennial census, carried out on a country-wide basis from 1871,
together with photographic surveys of the peoples of India and ethnographic surveys on
caste, perpetrated the discourse of differentiation. This knowledge, now produced ‘under
the Enlightenment rubric of objective science’, transformed Orientalism into an objecti-
fied ‘set of factualized statements about a reality that existed and could be known inde-
pendent of any subjective, colonizing will’ (Ludden, 1994: 252). The needs, policies and
politics of the ethnographic state, therefore, fomented and stabilized identities around
new orientations (Dirks, 2004).
The census takers were given ‘special keys’ for converting unsuitable responses into
officially formulated census categories. Indian informants often failed to give clear
answers about their caste or religious affiliation; an indication of the blurred nature of
such categories or the relative insignificance of them in the everyday lives of people till
then. For colonial administrators, of course, it was yet another sign of the ‘ignorance’ of
Indian people.
The immense information produced by the surveys emboldened Herbert Hope Risley,
nominated director of the Ethnographic Survey of Bengal in 1885 and the Census
Commissioner in 1899, to try out the science of anthropometry in classifying the peoples
of India. The application of anthropometry to the examination of castes would prompt
Risley to assert that the classification of castes on the varna model was firmly rooted in
facts.
And what were the facts? There were two important ones. First, that the varna scheme
of classification was the valid one for caste and second, that the caste-based population
of India could be classified in terms of race into Aryan and aboriginal (Risley, 1908:
20–21).
Risley’s affirmation came in the wake of uncertainty among the earlier census com-
missioners on whether to rank castes in accordance with the classical four-fold division
of varna, which did not correspond to the existing relationships between castes, or to
classify castes on the basis of occupation, an idea that derived from the notion of castes
as social guilds that descended from tribes. In 1901 Risley established – on grounds of
very few cranial measurements he had taken of different tribes and castes – that castes
were really races (Banerjee-Dube, 2008: xxxix; Bates, 1995: 21). The ‘pseudo-scientific’
method of anthropometry enabled Risley to prove something that the Orientalist scholar
William Jones had suggested in the early 1830s but had failed to establish – that there
Banerjee-Dube 519

was a racial difference between northern and southern Indians and between high castes
and low castes (Bates, 1995: 14).
The understanding of caste in terms of race derived from the prevalence of anachro-
nistic thought, closely linked to ‘evolutionist beliefs and theory’, current among British
colonial officials (Skaria, 1997: 728). Taking an Aryan invasion into India from Central
Asia in the remote past as the basic premise, officials ranked castes in accordance with
the degree of Aryan and Dravidian blood present in groups, with those believed to have
more Aryan blood regarded as superior (Bates, 1995; Skaria, 1997). The term arya (pure)
used in Vedic texts for the first three varnas, who were also qualified to be twice-born
castes, now came to stand for race, and a racial distinction was made between the native-
born Indians and an ‘European-related group of invaders’ (Zelliot, 2010). Modern schol-
arship, it bears pointing out, regards arya as an Indo-European language group with no
connection to race.

Caste and caste identity

Risley’s faith in the ‘immutability of caste ideology’ and his confidence in his own
knowledge about the subject population found eloquent expression in his decision to
rank castes in the social hierarchy along with their enumeration in the Census of 1901
(Banerjee-Dube, 2008: xxxix). This generated hectic activity on the part of the colonized
peoples, who saw this as a move to freeze a changing hierarchy.
Voluntary caste associations emerged as a new phenomenon in Indian public life;
associations that engaged in census-based caste movements, and made petitions to
census commissioners in support of their claims for higher ritual ranks in the official
classification scheme. Social hierarchy, it is important to remember, was not just
about social prestige; colonial recruitment directly drew upon such classification
(Carroll, 1978).
Scholars generally agree that colonial rule created conditions for the growth of a ‘non-
Brahman’ ideology and contributed to the emergence of lower-caste movements. This
was because, on the one hand, there was a direct attack on the institution of caste by
Protestant missionaries and, on the other, classification of caste according to numbers in
the censuses made visible the discrepancy between numerical strength and social privi-
lege of various castes.
Different groups, made aware of their numerical strength in the population, began to
claim a certain degree of equality in public employment – the limited opportunities open
to Indians in the Administrative Service, in medical and legal professions, and in the
Army. Soon, there would be demands for representation in the local legislative councils,
which started to include ‘native’ members from the 1880s.
Powerful non-Brahman movements emerged in west and south India, regions where
the predominance of Brahmans had no correspondence with their numbers, and regions
that had witnessed regimes that were consciously Brahman. In Maharashtra in western
India, the movement was headed by Jotirao Phule, a member of the caste of Mali (gar-
dener) whose family had taken to agriculture. Phule was greatly influenced by Protestant
missionary critiques of the caste system and outraged by the oppression it represented.
By the time he set up his Satyashodhak Samaj (Truth-Seekers Society) in 1873, Phule
520 Current Sociology Monograph 2 62(4)

had become convinced that Brahman monopoly was solely responsible for the predica-
ment of lower castes and untouchables (Sudras and Ati-Sudras).
Phule’s attempt to bring together the huge conglomerate of non-Brahman peasant
castes (kunbis) and the untouchables within a single fold rested on an ingenious inver-
sion of the Orientalist theory of Aryanization (O’Hanlon, 1985: 142–151; 2008: 172–
180), and a reconstruction of history as one of caste conflict. He portrayed the Brahmans
as the descendants of the Aryan invaders who had conquered the indigenous peoples of
India and forcibly imposed their religion as an instrument of social control. This religion
allowed the Brahmans not only to deprive the original inhabitants of their power and
property but also to perpetrate their domination. Phule reclaimed a non-Aryan Kshatriya
past for the lower-caste groups of Maharashtra by imaginatively linking the word
Kshatriya to the Sanskrit kshetra (field), and combining agricultural and military service,
which gave the humble peasant-cultivator a resplendent past of military prowess.
The untouchable castes of Mahar and Mang, the original inhabitants of Maharashtra,
were also given a glorious past where they offered the strongest resistance to Aryan
invaders. The term Mahar, argued Phule, derived from Maha-ari (the great enemy), the
Dravidian Kshatriyas. Unsurprisingly therefore, with the ascendancy of the Aryans, the
Mahars were banished from society, condemned to poverty, made to feed on dead carcass
and wear a black thread as a symbol of servitude (Phule, cited in Rao, 2009: 45). By
means of this central polemical argument, Phule denied the legitimacy of Brahmanic
religious authority, asserted the hidden Kshatriya identity of all lower castes, and reinter-
preted ‘the most important stories, figures, and symbols in popular Hinduism from a new
and radical perspective’ (O’Hanlon, 1985: 141).
Phule’s efforts resulted in the crystallization of a powerful non-Brahman movement.
Within a few decades, however, the non-Brahman Marathas sought to align themselves
with Kshatriyas in the pan-Indian schema of varna. This alienated the Dalits, who parted
ways in the 1930s, demonstrating thereby the instability of a collective non-Brahman and
untouchable identity.
Gopal Baba Valangkar (1840–1900), a close associate of Phule and a Mahar ex-army
man, complemented Phule’s work by trying to make members of the Mahar and
Chambhar castes conscious of their oppression and exclusion by Hindu scripture and
society. Influenced by Christian missionary writings on bhakti, Valangkar ‘reformulated
and radicalized’ compositions of 14th-15th-century saints Tukaram and Chokhamela and
laid the basis for a radical Dalit identity (Constable, 1997: 326). He also made an ingen-
ious use of the idea of Aryan invasion by asserting that the untouchables were almost the
only original inhabitants of India with the Brahmans and upper castes of the south and
the west being descendants of ‘Australian-Semitic-Non-Aryans’ and African negroes,
‘Barbary Jews’ and the Turks respectively (Zelliot, 2010).
The non-Brahman movement in the south drew upon missionary and Orientalist theo-
ries of Aryan invasion to proclaim that the caste system was not indigenous to the south.
It was an imposition by the Brahmans from the north who tried to colonize Tamil-
Dravidian culture. The conflation of non-Brahman and Dravidian identity gave a power-
ful edge to the movement: the Tamil language played a key role in the differentiation of
the Dravidian south from the Aryan north. Opposition to Brahmans and, by extension,
their association with Sanskrit and Sanskrit culture, was undergirded by devotion to the
Banerjee-Dube 521

Tamil language and Tamil culture in the shaping of a Tamil-Dravidian identity. Here too,
the more radical ‘Self-Respect’ movement, led by EV Ramaswamy Naicker ‘Periyar’,
broke away from the more elitist non-Brahman members, who were interested in enter-
ing the legislative councils and government employment by making use of the special
protection offered by the colonial state to ‘depressed’ classes.
It is significant that both movements took recourse to the colonial archive and colo-
nial categories. Phule’s skilful use of the Orientalist theory of Aryan invasion in his
subversion of the varna scheme ended up reinforcing the varna classification; it tried to
expose the hidden Kshatriya identity of Sudras and Ati-Sudras. The non-Brahman move-
ment of southern India, in turn, drew a wedge between the Aryan north and the Dravidian
south, deploying Orientalist theories of Aryan invasion and freezing a process in time.
The Brahmans, we need to remember, had got singular prominence in the initial phase
of the East India Company’s rule; they were sought out as authorities on Hindu law and
scriptures and played a crucial role in the codification of laws. This produced what has
been termed a ‘Brahmanization’ of Indian (Hindu) culture. Phule’s movement as well as
the Dravidian movement accepted this Brahmanization as given and devoted all efforts
to dislodge the Brahmans from their alleged position of supreme authority.
The institutional reforms of the colonial state that promised ‘representative self-rule’
for Indians in a distant future and the Reforms of 1919 in particular that transferred
certain responsibilities to the provinces where Indians had greater say in local adminis-
tration, provided the untouchables with a ‘spark’ to organize. This was bolstered by the
economic and political upheavals that followed the First World War. All over India, the
depressed classes came forward to assert their identity. In the early 1930s, ‘untoucha-
bles’ reconstructed themselves as Dalits (crushed to pieces/ground down), a self-
description that signalled a new belligerence, ‘self-recognition, and a new process of
identification’ that made possible ‘the emergence into visibility of a new subject’ (Hall,
1997 [1991]: 54).
It is interesting that Dalit was a direct translation of the colonial categorization of the
untouchables as ‘depressed’ (Zelliot, 2010); it was, however, imbued with new signifi-
cance to denote a new ‘historical identity’ marked by a ‘distinctive stigmatized existence’
(Rao, 2009: 40). It also marked ‘an explicit repudiation of all the Hindu cultural norms
of untouchability, the varna structure and karma doctrine’ imposed by caste society on
untouchables (Constable, 1997: 317).
Dalits defined themselves as the original (adi) inhabitants of the land, and claimed
that their own ideology and traditions upheld equality and unity in direct contrast to the
caste system. They refused to perform traditional degrading caste duties and demanded
rights to education and employment, and to the special privileges for the ‘depressed
classes’ offered by the colonial state, even though for them non-Brahmanism was more
a political theory and ideology and less an appeal to the government. For Dalits, the
source of upper-caste predominance was their privilege in education that conferred status
(and power and wealth); Dalits, therefore, had to emulate the privileged classes in order
to compete with and challenge them.
The path of radical autonomy that the Dalit struggle adopted opened up difficult ques-
tions and choices at a time when the nationalist movement for freedom had gathered
tremendous momentum. Dalits had to confront difficult questions with regard to their
522 Current Sociology Monograph 2 62(4)

stand on imperialism and nationalism, and their choice of allies and enemies. At this
crucial juncture, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar emerged as the most important leader of the
movement and would remain so till his death in 1956.

Ambedkar and his legacy

Born on 14 April 1891 in the garrison town of Mhow (Military Headquarters of War) in
Maharashtra, Ambedakar belonged to a Mahar family in service of the army. His father
was a military officer and the head of the Army Normal school, and his mother came
from a family with a distinguished record in military service. A promising student,
Ambedkar graduated with a BA in English and Persian from Elphinstone College,
Bombay in 1912, and continued his studies with the financial aid provided by the
Maharaja of Baroda, a Maratha leader, who was sympathetic to the cause of non-
Brahmans. The Maharaja made the very generous offer of sponsoring Ambedkar’s study
in the United States on condition that he agreed to serve the Baroda state for 10 years
upon his return (Jaffrelot, 2005).
Ambedkar went to Columbia University in New York in 1913, did a Master’s in
Economics in 1915, and went to England in 1916 to continue his studies at the London
School of Economics. Influenced by inspiring professors at Columbia, and possibly
impelled by his earlier experience in India where he had not been allowed to study
Sanskrit on account of his caste status, Ambedkar wrote his first essay on caste in 1916,
which has been discussed above. Ambedkar owed his great faith in the state to Fabianism
and British idealism, which he imbibed in England during his stay in 1916 and subse-
quently in 1920–1921. In addition to an MSc and a DSc in economics from the London
School of Economics, Ambedkar did a PhD at Columbia University and became the first
‘untouchable’ to obtain a doctorate in 1927 (Jaffrelot, 2005).
Ambedkar’s academic excellence, however, could not make up for his low caste and
ritual status in India. In 1917, his low caste status had prevented him from finding suit-
able accommodation in the city of Baroda, and in 1923 it came in the way of his legal
practice at the Bombay bar. These experiences were decisive in turning Ambedkar into a
political fighter. He would put his legal training to great use in arguing forcefully and
persuasively for untouchables in courts, at negotiating tables and in the political arena. It
was ‘not by chance’, therefore, ‘that Ambedkar became the first pan-Indian untouchable
leader’ (Jaffrelot, 2005: 29).
The only untouchable with a graduate degree in the Bombay Presidency in 1919,
Ambedkar was consulted by the committee appointed by the colonial state to look into
the issue of electoral franchise to be included in the constitutional reforms of 1919.
Backed up by his knowledge of sociology, Ambedkar stated before the committee that
the real cleavage in Hindu society was not between the Brahmans and non-Brahmans,
but between the ‘touchables’ and ‘untouchables’, an argument that set him apart from
Phule and proponents of the non-Brahman movement. Ambedkar clearly rejected an alli-
ance with the ‘caste-Hindus’; the Dalit struggle, he felt, had to be directed at the entire
institution of caste.
Ambedkar also emphasized the necessity of separate political representation for the
Depressed Classes, and advanced ‘personal representation’ as the only effective mode to
Banerjee-Dube 523

achieve popular government, a mode that ensured representation of the interests and
opinions of the majority and the minority communities. The problem of Depressed
Classes, he felt, could never be solved unless they got political power in their own hands.
Ambedkar and Gandhi diverged widely in their perception of the problem of Dalits.
While Ambedkar stressed the need for political power for the Dalits, Gandhi insisted on
reform and protection from above, since the problem of untouchability was, for him, a
problem of the self, the collective Hindu self (Nagaraj, 1993: 10). He took strong excep-
tion to Ambedkar’s effort to politicize a ‘social problem’, i.e. ‘untouchability’ and stated
angrily that those ‘who speak of political rights of Untouchables do not know their India’
(Gandhi, 1958: 159).
Ambedkar, on the other hand, claimed that ‘Gandhism’ could offer no hope to the
untouchables. It did not represent any radical departure from the very institution of
Hinduism, which is responsible for the oppression of the untouchables. Hinduism, he
declared, was a ‘veritable chamber of horrors’ for the untouchables, and all that
‘Gandhism’ did was to ‘find philosophic justification for Hinduism and its dogmas’
(Ambedkar, 1945: 296).
Let us try and cull out the implications of Ambedkar’s arguments, made first in his
essay in 1916 and later in the decades of the 1930s, 1940s and part of the 1950s, when he
became a prominent leader and one of the chief framers of the Constitution of independ-
ent India. Ambedkar maintained from the beginning that caste was a social issue and not
a racial one; the ritual and religious aspects of caste were secondary to him. Caste
belonged to the domain of the social and the political, was the prime factor in the division
of Indian cultural unity, and the root cause of the socioeconomic backwardness of mem-
bers of untouchable communities. Hence, political power in a representative government
was vital for Dalits.
It is interesting that while Ambedkar dismissed and ridiculed Gandhi’s notion of the
caste system as an organic division of society where each caste was dependent on the
other making the collective crucial, he simultaneously tried to construct a collective
identity for Dalits and give them individual rights. He oscillated between ‘communitar-
ian egalitarianism’ and ‘individualist egalitarianism’ in his effort to forge a relationship
of equal respect among communities (Bhargava, 2008: 20). The collective identity of the
community, however, rested on the colonial categorization of Dalits as members of
‘depressed’ and subsequently ‘scheduled’ castes.
Ambedkar was a modernist and his training in law made him a firm believer in
individual rights. In addition, the philosopher John Dewey, his teacher at Columbia,
had induced in him a strong faith in the power of education. Finally, Fabianism,
acquired during his stay in England, made Ambedkar place great trust in the state.
Together they meant that Ambedkar’s efforts to create an independent political iden-
tity for Dalits in the structures of social, economic and political powers turned on the
state, in particular the state of independent India, and the educational opportunities
offered by it.
And so it is that the framers of the Constitution of independent India, headed by
Ambedkar and aided by Jawaharlal Nehru, coincided on concerns of offering ‘substan-
tive’ sociopolitical equality to all Indian citizens. Consequently, the colonial legacy of
‘reservation’ of seats for scheduled (depressed) castes and members of backward classes
524 Current Sociology Monograph 2 62(4)

in public employment, government institutions and political constituencies was retained

and transformed into an instrument to fight social injustice.
Nehru and Ambedkar shared their vision of liberal democracy posited on individual
rights. They also believed that education and employment would eventually do away
with the sociocultural hierarchy represented by caste. Both believed in the efficacy of a
strong centre for the uniform application of the Constitution and for implementation of
measures of ‘modernization’. At the same time, they differed on the assessment of caste.
For Nehru, caste was a matter internal to Hinduism and had to be kept out of the political
arena; for Ambedkar, caste was political and social, and the solution to the stigma of
untouchability lay in access to political power and education for the Dalits. This was to
pave the way for moral/cultural good (one-man-one-value) as the defining condition of
justice (Guru, 2008: 244).
The Constitution of India, which came into force on 26 January 1950, declared the
practice of ‘untouchability’ to be illegal. It also reserved ‘quotas’ for disadvantaged
groups in educational institutions run by the state, in public employment and in electoral
constituencies. This much debated ‘reservation’ or compensatory discrimination was
adopted as a temporary measure for 10 years. The idea was that special privileges for a
specific period of time would enable ‘backward’ sections of society to be on par with the
others and exercise their rights on an equal basis.
The reverse, however, has happened. More and more groups have come forward to
stake claims on ‘reservation’ on grounds of ‘backwardness’, and the provision of reser-
vation has been extended continually for subsequent periods of 10 years. If the argu-
ments of these groups have turned fond ideas of progress and modernity as well as
anthropological notions of Sanskritization on their head, they have also bolstered con-
cepts of backwardness in diverse ways.
The clause of ‘reservation’ has actually enabled certain sections of Dalits and back-
ward classes to press for greater privileges. On the political front, reservation of constitu-
encies has occasioned a ‘silent revolution’ by giving much greater representation to
Dalits and backward classes in the legislative bodies of the country (Jaffrelot, 2003). On
the other hand, it has allowed members of the privileged upper classes and castes to
emerge as serious critiques of compensatory discrimination. They lament the deteriora-
tion in political standard and insist on the necessity of bourgeois equality and merit for
the proper functioning of democracy (Banerjee-Dube, 2008: xxvii). In their view, posi-
tive discrimination is a negative force that reinforces inequality and caste identity.
Dalits and members of ‘other backward classes’, in turn, have harped on the prejudice
of the ‘forward castes’ (an interesting Indian term that marks out the upper castes and
classes from the ‘backward’ ones) as an obstacle to the successful implementation of
positive discrimination. Drawing a subtle distinction between the moral and the legal
intention and implication of the Constitution with regard to social justice, Gopal Guru,
the Dalit intellectual, has argued that the Constitution has provisions only to ensure the
material and ‘positional’ good of the Dalits and backward classes, but falls far short of
the moral provision that entails a reorganization of society along egalitarian lines, an
objective that was implicit in Ambedkar’s efforts (Guru, 2008).
The point is well taken. At the same time, one wonders if a state or a constitution has
the power or the authority to ensure a proper implementation of the moral provision that
Banerjee-Dube 525

will come out of ‘upper caste compliance with cultural justice’ (Guru, 2008: 237). Can
privileged groups be coerced to give up or share their privileges if they are not commit-
ted to ‘social justice’? The answer lies in the fact that even though constitutional provi-
sions have allowed certain sections of the dis-privileged to gain access to education and
employment, it has also made them vulnerable to ‘forward caste’ opprobrium as ‘quota
candidates’.
In other words, lower-caste assertion and an increased assumption of a politicized
identity by Dalits have gone hand in hand with the strengthening of upper-caste and
upper-class prejudice in distinct ways; one repercussion of which has been the resur-
gence of the Hindu Right. The fight between Brahmans and non-Brahmans, or ‘toucha-
bles’ and ‘untouchables’ has been reconfigured as a struggle between the ‘forward’ and
‘backward’ castes, as well as between the backward classes and Dalits. Through all this,
caste has changed avatars but has remained central in the political agenda of republican
India. It has far from disappeared.
Perhaps this disunity and difficulty over constructing identities with clearly marked
out friends and foe has prompted the Dalit Panthers to try and make common cause with
Black Panther activists; an endeavour that has muddled the situation further even though
it has had some effect on commonsense understandings of caste, untouchability and race.
In 2006, Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister of India, stated at the Dalit Minority
International Conference that the only parallel to the practice of untouchability in India
was apartheid in South Africa.
Participating in the passionate debate that arose in the wake of the decision of Dalit
Panthers and other activists to take the issue of caste to the UN conference on racism
in Durban in 2001, the sociologist Shiv Visvanathan had made a series of provocative
affirmations. A ‘sociology of atrocities’, he had argued, is what marked out the Dalit
discourse at this stage. This discourse, which viewed atrocity as a social fact, made
academic sociology’s statements about mobility and pollution with regard to caste
seem irrelevant and ‘antiseptic’. Moreover, a sociology that paid serious attention to
hate, oppression, despair, humiliation and horror had the potential of rewriting Indian
sociology which valorized ‘the voice of the expert over the voice of the victim’
(Visvanathan, 2001: 3124).
Visvanathan had urged the Dalits, whose decision to go to Durban demonstrated a will
to move beyond quota and reservation, and beyond the ‘benefits’ offered by Indian
democracy, to take the initiative in producing a new sociology poised on the experience
of oppression. The Dalit battle, moreover, had to do much more than react to atrocity and
plead for human rights. What the ‘dalit problem’ demanded was ‘a theory of freedom’,
freedom conceived in both metaphysical and sociological terms (Visvanathan, 2001:
3126).
The decade that has elapsed since 2001 has demonstrated the futility of Visvanathan’s
ambitious expectations. Gopal Guru’s hope for moral justice has also been belied. Indeed,
the effort of Dalit Panthers to make common cause with the Blacks and move beyond the
benefits offered by the Indian state has been superseded by the assertive demands of
many more groups for positive discrimination. The factors for such discrepancy are
many and diverse. There is no unified Dalit movement as there is no homogeneous com-
munity of Dalits; nor is there a single way of being Dalit or experiencing atrocity. Dalits
526 Current Sociology Monograph 2 62(4)

share in and belong to diverse groups and the boundaries they draw are changing and
crisscrossing.
In her nuanced discussion of Dalits and racism, Eleanor Zelliot poses two questions:
Do higher castes consider Dalits to be of an inferior race? Do Dalits think of themselves
as a race (Zelliot, 2010)? The answer to both is a possible ‘no’. Zelliot underscores the
important fact that Indian languages do not have a general word for ‘race’ as it is used in
the West and concludes that although isolation of Dalits and violence against them ‘can
be compared to race prejudice’, they ‘have a different basis and perhaps a different solu-
tion’ (Zelliot, 2010).
We are still left with the problem of why Dalits, the ‘objectified natives’ of colonial
ethnographers, and the objects of intellectual analysis, are increasingly and assertively
using the very concepts (culture, identity and ethnicity) that once purported to analyse
and describe them (Dube, 2011: 216)? Why are they ‘investing in backwardness’ as the
only way forward?
Can we read this investment in backwardness as a ‘fetishization’ of their ‘wound’
caused by experience of injustice and discrimination (Brown, 1995)? Or is this reifica-
tion a necessary condition for fomenting counter-politics (Hall, 1997 [1991]) that will
allow Dalits to claim a better tomorrow (Bhambra and Margree, 2010)? How effective
has the counter-politics been in fighting atrocity by overturning established mainstream
ideas and prejudices? If one element, i.e. exclusion from the caste structure, remains a
constant in an identity that is being ‘continually produced and reproduced by political
projects’ (Bhambra and Margree, 2010: 59), and forms the basis for recrimination, can it
result in a better tomorrow?

Towards a conclusion
I began this article with a question and I come back to it in the end: if fight against social
discrimination and for social justice prompts Dalits and Blacks to unite, why do they
accept and fortify identities that are given and are premised on prejudice, hierarchy and
discrimination?
I have recounted a long and awkward tale of the mutual imbrication of colonial con-
cepts and categories and lower-caste and Dalit struggle where difference shades into
deference and resistance is circumscribed by the seductions of power. This murky tale
confronts us with a difficult question. Do we discount dissent just because it is limited,
or do we stay with the contradictions of dissent and probe its possibilities?
Dissent or resistance, we are aware, is never pure: it is ambivalent and contradictory.
Subordinate groups share in dominant knowledge and cultures and often draw upon their
important symbols only to imbue them with new meanings. The cultural appropriation
that follows has the potential of modifying not just subaltern cultures but also the ones
they apprehend. If the Black slaves of the Richmond-area of Virginia conspired to over-
throw slavery by working within social boundaries defined by their masters and yet
constructed a different cultural world (Sidbury, 1997: 60), a Phule or an Ambedkar
inverted and appropriated Orientalist myths and liberal ideas to deploy them to the cause
of social justice. And yet, they could not completely overturn the existing relations of
power. The cultural resources available to subordinate groups often exert a constraining
Banerjee-Dube 527

effect on dissent. Members of lower castes and Dalits have seriously interrogated the
ideality and universality of dharma (moral order) and the unifying force of the caste
system, but they have not been able to move beyond caste and its overarching parameters
(Chatterjee, 1992).
The endeavour to link caste and race proffers a distinct example of appropriation, one
that transcends academic understandings of caste and the Indian state’s perception of it,
and takes a Dalit ideologue’s call to combat social injustice to new heights. At the same
time, this move to an international forum is intended to exercise greater pressure on the
Indian state to make measures to fight injustice more effective; not dismiss the state and
the privileges it promises to disadvantaged groups. We are yet to gauge the significance
of attempts made periodically by many Dalits to create a fraternity of Buddhists all over
the world, an effort that might turn current perceptions of untouchability upside down.
I have dwelt at length on the possibilities and contradictions of dissent and resistance to
prod ourselves and global sociology to reflect critically on our ways of knowing and of
approaching worlds of existence and action. If sociology has to be truly global, it has to
move beyond binaries where a colonial perspective is countered by a perspective from
coloniality. It has to understand ambivalence and contradiction as crucial features of
thought and action and theorize on the basis of that. An acknowledgement of the murkiness
of social worlds would enable scholarly representations to transgress neat and tidy catego-
ries and be more in tune with commonplace perceptions. This is the work that lies ahead.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

References
Ambedkar BR (2002 [1917]) Castes in India: Their mechanism, genesis and development. In:
Rodrigues V (ed.) The Essential Writings of B. R. Ambedkar. New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, pp. 241–262.
Ambedkar BR (1945) What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables. London:
Thacker and Co.
Ambedkar BR (1948) The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables.
New Delhi: Amrit Book Company.
Banerjee-Dube I (2008) Introduction: Questions of caste. In: Banerjee-Dube I (ed.) Caste in
History. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. xv–lxiv.
Bates C (1995) Race, caste and tribe in central India: The early origins of Indian anthropometry.
Edinburgh Papers in South Asia Studies 3, School of Social and Political Studies, Edinburgh:
University of Edinburgh.
Bhambra G (2013) The possibilities of, and for, global sociology: A postcolonial perspective. In:
Go J (ed.) Postcolonial Sociology (Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 24). Bingley:
Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp. 295–314.
Bhambra G and Margree V (2010) Identity politics and the need for a ‘tomorrow’. Economic and
Political Weekly XLV(15): 59–65.
Bhargava R (2008) Introduction: Outline of a political theory of the Indian constitution. In:
Bhargava R (ed.) Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution. New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, pp. 1–40.
528 Current Sociology Monograph 2 62(4)

Brown W (1995) States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Carroll L (1978) Colonial perceptions of Indian society and the emergence of caste(s) associations.
The Journal of Asian Studies 37(2): 233–250.
Chatterjee P (1992) Caste and subaltern consciousness. In: Guha R (ed.) Subaltern Studies VI:
Writings on South Asian History and Society. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 169–
209.
Cohn BS (1987) The census, social structure, and objectification in South Asia. In: An Anthropologist
Among the Historians and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 224–252. An
abbreviated version reprinted in Banerjee-Dube I (ed.) (2008) Caste in History. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, pp. 28–40.
Constable P (1997) Early Dalit literature and culture in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century
western India. Modern Asian Studies 31(2): 317–338.
Dirks NB (2001) Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Dirks NB (2004) The ethnographic state. In: Dube S (ed.) Postcolonial Passages: Contemporary
History-writing on India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 70–88.
Dube S (2011) Afterword: Scandals, scholars, subjects. In: Schmalz MN and Gottschalk P (eds)
Engaging South Asian Religions: Boundaries, Appropriations, and Resistances. Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press, pp. 207–225.
Gandhi L (1998) Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Gandhi MK (1958) The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 54. New Delhi: Publication
Division, Government of India.
Guru G (2008) Constitutional justice: Positional and cultural. In: Bhargava R (ed.) Politics and
Ethics of the Indian Constitution. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 230–246.
Hall S (1997 [1991]) Old and new identities, old and new ethnicities. In: King AD (ed.) Culture,
Globalization, and the World System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of
Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 41–68.
Jaffrelot C (2003) India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Low Castes in North Indian Politics.
Delhi: Permanent Black.
Jaffrelot C (2005) Analysing and Fighting Caste: Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability. Delhi:
Permanent Black.
Ludden D (1994) Orientalist empiricism: Transformations of colonial knowledge. In: Breckenridge
CA and Van der Veer P (eds) Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Mignolo WD (2005) The Idea of Latin America. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Mohanty SP (1995) Epilogue: Colonial legacies, multicultural futures: relativism, objectivity, and
the challenge of otherness. PMLA 110(1): 108–118.
Nagaraj DR (1993) The Flaming Feet: A Study of the Dalit Movement. Bangalore: South Forum
Press and Institute for Cultural Research and Action.
Nehru J (1997 [1946]) The Discovery of India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
O’Hanlon R (1985) Caste, Conflict, and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest
in Nineteenth-Century Western India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
O’Hanlon R (2008) Phule and the inversion of Brahman myths. In: Banerjee-Dube I (ed.) Caste in
History. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 172–180.
Quijano A (2000) Colonialidad del poder y clasificación social. Journal of World-Systems
Research, 6 (2, Special issue): 342–386.
Banerjee-Dube 529

Rao A (2009) The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
Reddy DS (2005) The ethnicity of caste. Anthropological Quarterly 78(3): 543–584.
Risley HH (1908) The Peoples of India. London: W Thacker and Co.
Robb P (1995) Introduction: South Asia and the concept of race. In: Robb P (ed.) The Concept of
Race in South Asia. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–76.
Sidbury J (1997) Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia,
1730–1810, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Skaria A (1997) Shades of wildness: Tribe, caste, and gender in western India. The Journal of
Asian Studies 56(3): 726–745.
Smith RS (1985) Rule-by-records and rule-by-reports: Complimentary aspects of the British
Imperial Rule of Law. Contributions to Indian Sociology ns 19(1): 153–176.
Visvanathan S (2001) Durban and Dalit discourse. Economic and Political Weekly 36(33): 3123–
3127.
Zelliot E (2010) India’s Dalits: Racism and contemporary change. Global Dialogue 12(2).

Author biography
Ishita Banerjee-Dube is Professor of History at the Centre for Asian and African Studies, El
Colegio de Mexico, Mexico City, and a member of the National System of Researchers (SNI),
Mexico, where she holds the highest rank. Her authored books include: Divine Affairs (Indian
Institute of Advanced Study, 2001), Religion, Law, and Power (Anthem Press, 2007) and A History
of Modern India (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Among her eight edited volumes are:
Unbecoming Modern (Social Science Press, 2005), Caste in History (Oxford University Press,
2008) and Ancient to Modern (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Résumé
Cet essai réexamine le passé et le présent des Dalits et la lutte des castes inférieures
en Inde, y compris les efforts récemment entrepris pour lier caste et race dans le
but de créer une plateforme commune contre la discrimination lors de forums
internationaux. Il explore le fardeau des concepts coloniaux et des imaginaires étatistes
dans l’élaboration, par les Dalits, d’identités objectivées, notamment dans une ère où ils
se saisissent de ces catégories et les remanient de façon cruciale. En utilisant de manière
éclairée la notion de colonialité, « l’autre versant de la modernité », l’essai révèle les
limites des perspectives catégoriques et de la théorie intellectuelle dans l’articulation
de mondes sociaux. II laisse plutôt entrevoir une sociologie globale qui reconnaît et
soutient l’ambivalence et la contradiction en tant qu’attributs cruciaux des pensées,
écrits et pratiques.

Mots-clés
Caste, colonialité, Dalits, race

Resumen
El presente ensayo reconsidera el pasado y el presente de los Dalit y la lucha de las
castas bajas en India, incluyendo los esfuerzos recientes por vincular la casta y la raza
530 Current Sociology Monograph 2 62(4)

con el propósito de crear una plataforma común contra la discriminación en los foros
internacionales. Explora el peso de los conceptos coloniales e imaginarios estatistas
en la conformación de identidades objetivadas por los Dalit, en especial cuando se
apoderan y re-trabajan dichas categorías en forma crucial. Dialogando críticamente con
la noción de colonialidad, ‘el otro lado de la modernidad’, el ensayo revela los límites
de las perspectivas categóricas y la teoría intelectual en la articulación de los mundos
sociales. En cambio, apunta hacia una sociología global que reconoce y afirma que la
ambivalencia y la contradicción son atributos cruciales del pensamiento, la escritura y
la práctica.

Palabras clave
Casta, colonialidad, Dalits, raza