South Asian History and Culture

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Disgust and untouchability: towards an affective

theory of caste

Joel Lee

To cite this article: Joel Lee (2021) Disgust and untouchability: towards an affective theory of
caste, South Asian History and Culture, 12:2-3, 310-327, DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2021.1878784

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2021.1878784

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SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE
2021, VOL. 12, NOS. 2–3, 310–327
https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2021.1878784

Disgust and untouchability: towards an affective theory of caste

Joel Lee
Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Williams College, Willliamstown, MA, USA

ABSTRACT Keywords
The caste order – like all social hierarchies – structures emotions in disgust; ghṛṇā; affect;
particular ways, and in turn depends on emotions, thus structured, for emotion; caste;
its reproduction over time. In North Indian vernaculars, to ask who feels untouchability; sanitation
ghṛṇā (disgust) towards whom is often to trace the boundaries of the labour; Arya Samaj; oral
traditions
touchable body politic. Ghṛṇā karnā – doing disgust – describes a set of
practices often identical to those known in a political register as ‘practices
of untouchability.’ Thus, ve ham se ghṛṇā karte hain (‘they are disgusted by
us,’ or, better, ‘they practice disgust on us’) is among the more common
ways that Dalits describe their treatment at the hands of privileged castes.
This article tracks usages of ghṛṇā in two vernacular North Indian sources
from the early twentieth century in order to throw critical light on the
inculcation of disgust as advantaged and disadvantaged caste observers
have described it. In Hindi tracts composed by members of the Hindu
reformist organization the Arya Samaj, ghṛṇā appears as an impediment
to the majoritarian project of Hindu encompassment of its erstwhile
‘untouchable’ other; Arya Samajist polemicists seek to expose Hindu
disgust towards Dalits and to redirect it towards new targets. In oral
traditions that circulated among Dalit castes engaged in sanitation labour
in the late colonial period, parables of encounter between ‘touchable’ and
‘untouchable’ give utterance to a critique of ghṛṇā as antithetical to moral
action and as opposed to life. Grounded in historical and ethnographic
evidence, the article develops preliminary ideas towards an affective
theory of caste and untouchability.

What might caste have to do with emotion?

In a recent essay, Dipesh Chakrabarty recalls circumstances from his childhood that troubled
him.1 On the one hand, his mother embraced egalitarian social values and taught him ‘with much
sincerity and fervour the injustice of untouchability and how its every precept violated all funda-
mental principles of human equality and justice.’ On the other hand, when the Dalit man who did
sanitation work in their neighbourhood ‘came into our house as a sweeper wielding a large, wet, and
dripping jhadu (broomstick) with which he cleaned our lavatory, my mother would scramble to
ensure that nothing – no draperies or pieces of furniture – was touched by him or the jhadu,
producing in the process quite a panicky commotion in the household.’ Chakrabarty initially sensed
in all of this a kind of ‘hypocrisy.’ Gradually, though, he came to see his mother’s actions as
operating on two distinct registers. Her ideological commitments were sincere, but operated in the
domain of ‘formal knowledge,’ whereas an unreflective and embodied ‘prejudice’ following from
socialization in a particular milieu animated her defensive manoeuvres. ‘[M]y mother’s deeply
Brahmanical sense of her own body was perhaps revolted by the thought that Lakshman and his

CONTACT Joel Lee jl20@williams.edu

© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 311

jhadu dripping with water that may [have] been used to clear faecal matter – an extended
untouchable body, really – might come into contact with anything in our household.’2
In the essay in which this anecdote appears, Chakrabarty makes an argument in which ‘the
untouchable body,’ as an abstraction of a human body wholly interconnected with the organic,
models a particular possibility for life in the Anthropocene. My interest in the anecdote is different.
The scene that Chakrabarty portrays is one in which egalitarian ideology and hierarchical affect are
copresent in the same person. More specifically, it is the deeply corporeal affect of disgust or
revulsion – the ‘sense of her own body was perhaps revolted’ – that Chakrabarty identifies as
running athwart his mother’s democratic commitments. Disgust motivates observable behaviours –
recoiling, physical withdrawal, ‘panicky commotion’ – that communicate a sense of hierarchical
difference that contradicts explicit avowals of equality.
These recollections of Chakrabarty focus our attention on the affective life of hierarchy: The ways
in which social structure differentially shapes the cultivation of emotion, encouraging particular
classes to develop particular emotional repertoires, and the way these repertoires, thus cultivated,
assist in the reproduction of hierarchy. Chakrabarty points in particular to the significance of
disgust in anchoring hierarchical sensibilities in the body, and the centrality of the sensory in this
process. By pointing out that his protagonist was known for her progressive credentials, our author
also indicates the pitfalls, in theorizing caste and class hierarchy, of relying for data only on what is
avowed, explicit, and transparent to the self.
Caste, we have long been told, is a state of mind. Two influential and opposed schools of thought
put this forward: For Louis Dumont and many others,3 the caste state of mind is a civilizational
episteme, a Brahminical Weltanschauung articulated in normative literature (dharmaśāstra) and
expressed in social practices. For postcolonial critics, by contrast, it is imperial epistemology that is
largely responsible for the representation of social relations in South Asia. Caste, for this school, is
as much a European state of mind as it is an Indic one – but a state of mind, nonetheless.4 In tension
with both of these approaches are accounts that identify caste primarily as a mode of political
economy: A ‘division of labourers,’5 a system of land tenure and labour control, the ideological
justifications of which have always been secondary to the compulsions of power.6
Let me make bold to say that all of these accounts are fundamentally correct. There is no
gainsaying the degree to which caste functions as a cognitive scheme capable of generating or
describing order in a host of contexts social and otherwise, a mental representation with distinct but
intertwined histories of deployment in South Asia, Europe, and the Americas (let us not forget the
lively career of the concept in New Spain). Caste is, assuredly, a highly historically consequential
state of mind. That caste describes a style of political economy in which rights to land and
compulsions to labour inhere differentially in different endogamous units is equally indubitable.
The often bitter disagreements of several decades of scholarly debate notwithstanding, we clearly
need the insights of each of these approaches in order to tackle the monstrously complex problem of
caste.
But our existing theories do not take us far in explaining the ‘panicky commotion’ that erupts
when the sweeper arrives at the door of the progressive privileged caste household. A theory in
which caste behaviours flow in a straight channel from consciously held beliefs cannot suffice, as the
person recoiling in Chakrabarty’s account is one who has sincerely repudiated Brahminical
ideology; she is a critic, not an advocate or simple instantiation, of homo hierarchicus. Nor does
the examination of British reifications and amplifications of caste in the colonial period give us
purchase on the affective charge that Chakrabarty describes when Lakshman appears with his
broom. Accounts of caste that stress political economy do explain essential structural features of the
situation – why Lakshman’s profession and economic status are so distant from those of
Chakrabarty’s parents – but shed little light on the scrambling, avoidance, and panic.
Explicit avowals of caste ideology have by no means disappeared from the public sphere in
India,7 but they are far less common than a century ago or even in Dumont’s day. Meanwhile
decades of nationalist education, Dalit assertion, progressive legislation, and the universal franchise
312 J. LEE

have given the repudiation of caste hierarchy positive political value; Chakrabarty’s mother’s
egalitarian principles, then quite rare, are increasingly mainstream. Yet, as the mention in mixed
company of caste-based compensatory discrimination or ‘reservations’ will swiftly reveal, caste
continues to excite passions to a degree matched by little else in Indian social life. Rage and
resentment and, on the other side, humiliation, guilt, and terror, are among the affects set in
motion in such contexts.8 In an age in which the disavowal of hierarchy commands general
admiration, what accounts for these passions? How do we explain the emotional force caste exerts
in everyday life?
This article is an initial step towards developing a theoretical account of caste as an order of
affect, a social form that nurtures sentiments differentially according to status, and that depends on
these differentially distributed sentiments for its reproduction. William Miller suggests that an
‘account of class, rank, or social hierarchy must be thin indeed unless accompanied by an account of
the passions and sentiments that sustain it.’9 I agree. But paying heed to passions stands to do more
than thicken our descriptions; it may help us explain the resilience of a social form whose death has
been foretold for the better part of two centuries, whose ideological premises are less openly
espoused than in the past, and whose political economic foundations have been considerably
weakened. Attending to affect may also help us account for the vitality of hierarchy in places
where it is less expected, and among people who often understand themselves to have moved
beyond caste.
The affective life of caste has long been a central focus of Dalit literature and the debates over
Dalit aesthetics that have sprung up around it.10 Outside of the literary, this line of enquiry was
opened up by Gopal Guru and his colleagues in Humiliation: Claims and Context, a set of
meditations on the traffic between untouchability practices and shame, indignity, and humiliation.
Guru and his colleagues analyse this cluster of affects as an important component of the structural
violence that untouchability enacts on those whose birth is stigmatized11; the analysis thus centres
on the emotional lives of Dalits. The affect we are considering here – ghṛṇā or ghin, a cousin of
disgust – inverts the analytical gaze. By focusing on ghṛṇā, we turn our attention from the victims of
untouchability to its perpetrators, and thus to the emotional dispositions cultivated among the
privileged castes. This is a subject rarely touched upon, though there are precedents in, for example,
Owen Lynch’s study of the ideal of mastī (intoxication and joy) among Chaube Brahmins of
Mathura,12 and Ajantha Subramanian’s analysis of the social enactment of ‘merit’ among Tamil
Brahmin graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology.13 Enquiries of both kinds – into the
emotional repertoires cultivated in advantaged caste milieus as well as in disadvantaged caste
contexts – are needed; a robust account of caste as an affective order demands both.
In what follows I furnish two sets of vernacular North Indian materials that speak to the
centrality of disgust in the maintenance of the caste order. The first is writing by members of the
Arya Samaj in the first three decades of the twentieth century, when the Hindu reformist organiza-
tion was seeking to attract the Depressed Classes – as ‘untouchables’ were then known – to the
Hindu fold. In Patitoddhār (‘The Upliftment of the Fallen’) and other Hindi tracts of the period,
ghṛṇā appears as an obstacle in bringing about a rapprochement between Hindus and the Depressed
Classes; the tract’s privileged caste author charts a path for overcoming or redirecting the former’s
disgust for the latter in the interest of a majoritarian project of inclusive encompassment.
The second set of materials is oral traditions that circulated among the sanitation labour castes –
those Dalit castes, known by such titles as ‘Bhangi,’ ‘Mehtar,’ ‘Halalkhor,’ and ‘Sweepers,’ that
provided the vast majority of India’s sanitation workers – in the late colonial period, as documented
by missionaries, ethnographer-administrators, and Muslim intellectuals writing in Urdu. These oral
traditions plot disgust into parables of encounter between ‘touchable’ and ‘untouchable’ in a way
that critiques ghṛṇā as antithetical to moral action and as opposed to life.
Before turning to our two bodies of evidence, though, we must provide a more substantial
introduction to our key concept, and to the implications it holds for theories of affect and emotion.
I should signal that I am among those who, unpersuaded of the analytical value of a hard distinction
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 313

between affect and emotion, use the two terms more or less interchangeably. As a concept I prefer
the former on account of the transitivity it implies – affects affect, intersubjectively – whereas with
the latter, the insights of historical and anthropological studies are constantly at war with the
assumptions (of internality, biological naturalness, and so on) of folk theories that show no signs of
loosening their grip on the concept of emotion, even in much of the academy. But I also rely on the
emotion literature, and see value in thinking through ghṛṇā in the language of both affect and
emotion. To the point, then: what is ghṛṇā?

Ghṛṇā: social theory from the North Indian vernacular

Ve ham se ghṛṇā karte haiṅ.
They are disgusted by us. The first time I heard this statement, it was said to me by a Dalit
beautician, Priya,14 as she sought to explain why members of the advantaged castes did not
patronize the modest salon she owned and operated in a mixed-caste, working-class neighbour-
hood of Chandigarh, the capital of Punjab and Haryana. Her clientele, she said, was entirely
Dalit; non-Dalits stayed away due to disgust. I was struck by the intensity of the affective
sensibility Priya presumed her privileged caste neighbours to have towards her. Shortly after
this, I noticed that ghṛṇā used in this way figured in the speech of many of my Dalit inter-
locutors in North India; I heard it used similarly in places both rural and urban, not only in
Haryana and Delhi but also in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Ve ham se ghṛṇā karte haiṅ seemed to
do similar work to ‘They practice untouchability with us’ in English; examples that followed
such statements were often precisely those social practices that are usually glossed as practices of
untouchability – touch avoidance, refusal of commensality, the segregation of drinking vessels at
chai stalls or in homes, and so on. Nor was the deployment of ghṛṇā as an index of a particular
social relation restricted to the everyday speech of Dalits; ‘high’ caste interlocutors, too, told me
of the ghṛṇā they felt towards the diet and lifestyle habits that they ascribed to particular Dalit
communities.
Before delving into this specific set of social entailments, let us consider more broadly what work
this affect does. What are the conventional provocations of ghṛṇā? Much like disgust in English,
ghṛṇā has as one of its primary class of elicitors secretions of bodily matter. That is, one hears ghṛṇā
deployed in everyday speech as an affective response, usually presented as normal, to encounters
with discharged mucous, saliva, menstrual blood, bile, or pus, or to bodies from which such
substances are leaking. The vernacular denotes as ghṛṇā that which one feels at the sight, smell,
and touch of human excrement. Ratan Lal, a former manual scavenger, told me this of his labours
transporting ‘night soil’ by mule from the dry latrines of Lucknow to the agrarian hinterland: ‘When
I would load it onto the animals, sometimes I felt ghṛṇā (ghṛṇā lagtī thī), sometimes I would vomit.’
As many manual scavengers have told me, ghṛṇā pervades their experience of work, making it
difficult for them to eat. This kind of testimony points to the nearness of ghṛṇā to nausea, as well as
to its elicitation by the body’s expulsions.
A related set of conventional material elicitors of ghṛṇā are open wounds, bones protruding from
flesh, and severed body parts – what researchers of disgust have elsewhere called ‘violations of the
body envelope.’15 Bodily secretions like blood and excrement, alongside violations of the body
envelope, together constitute a category that we might, adapting the well-known insight of Mary
Douglas, call corporeal matter out of place. When the body’s contents are exuded, when the inside
reveals itself to the outside, ghṛṇā springs into action. Saliva that was innocuous enough in the
mouth becomes revolting when expectorated; digested food of which one is scarcely aware becomes,
upon emergence outside the body, the most scandalous of human products. Ghṛṇā, then, patrols the
perimeter of the self. It warns against contact with matter that, despite its intimate connection with
the self, has, in the act of issuing forth, become categorically polluting. The exteriorizing movement
of this matter across the boundary of the body – its abjection or casting out – seems to be central to
its capacity to provoke ghṛṇā.
314 J. LEE

To observe that Hindi-Urdu ghṛṇā and English disgust (and analogous emotion-concepts else-
where) have overlapping sets of elicitors is not to suggest that the configuration of these affects is
‘natural,’ in the sense that it is unconditioned by history or culture. Abhorrence of one’s own or
others’ bodily secretions, far from being an innate or unlearned human feeling, must be taught, and
taught with great difficulty, as anyone can attest who has trained a child to use a toilet or not to eat
its snot. Like other kinds of matter out of place, corporeal matter out of place becomes disgusting
only upon initiation, through an intensive and sustained discipline, into a categorical order.
Moreover, even if all cultures do seem to inculcate something like disgust towards bodily expul-
sions, there are vast differences in the details, differences that caution against explanations
grounded in biological universalism.
At the same time that it monitors the body envelope, ghṛṇā also conventionally guards the
frontier of acceptable social relations. Proximity to certain categories of person excites ghṛṇā.
Consider the reflections of Maulana Daud Faruqi, head librarian of a venerable Islamic institute
in Azamgarh and scion of a high-status ashraf family. Speaking with me about his encounters with
the ‘Bhangis’ who lived across the road from his childhood home near Lucknow, the librarian said,
‘when those people came to the mosque, if I’m to be honest here, we felt aversion (karāhat) to them.
It wasn’t hatred (nafrat). Rather it was aversion (karāhat) and disgust (ghin).’ By means of ghṛṇā’s
colloquial variant ghin as well as karāhat, a word for ‘aversion, dislike, disgust, abhorrence’ derived
from the Arabic verb ‘to abhor,’16 Faruqi specified the sentiment he was socialized to feel towards
Dalits.17 He spoke ruefully of being forbidden to play with or befriend the Dalit children in his
neighbourhood, the people towards whom he learned to feel karāhat and ghin when they sought to
participate in Muslim community life. It is significant that Faruqi sets this sentiment apart from
nafrat, or hatred. The latter is what one normatively feels towards rivals or enemies who are,
broadly speaking, social equals; in the context of communal antagonism in North India, it is what
Hindu militants are often taught to feel towards Muslims and Muslim militants towards Hindus.
But if nafrat, broadly speaking, maps communal relations (when at their worst), ghṛṇā, by contrast,
seems to be activated by the nearness of social ‘inferiors’ whose inferiority threatens to be
contagious.18 It is telling in this regard that Faruqi’s narration of remembered disgust is hooked
temporally to times ‘when those people came to the mosque.’ By drawing close, by presuming to be
proximate to or even part of the brotherhood of believers, local Dalits threatened to infect Faruqi’s
high-status Muslim community with their lowness. In this way ghṛṇā seems distinguishable from
other negative social emotions as well; as Miller observes when contrasting disgust from
contempt,19 the latter is generally felt from a position of distant superiority vis-à-vis the object,
whereas the former seems always to entail a kind of vulnerability to contamination. One sneers with
contempt, securely, but recoils with disgust, fearfully.
The librarian’s ghin at the approach of ‘Bhangi’ neighbours may be seen as a confirmation of
Priya’s ‘they are disgusted by us,’ the obverse side of the same coin. In everyday conversation ghṛṇā
often – though by no means exclusively – turns out to be diagnostic of relations along this particular
social structural fissure. To ask who feels ghṛṇā for whom is frequently to be guided along the path
of the touchability line, the boundary separating touchable from untouchable. Ghṛṇā and its
variants appear in the quotidian speech of a broad spectrum of North Indian society – in the
discourse of Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Dalits – as a description of what ‘high’ caste people
are understood and expected normatively to feel towards Dalits, especially when proximity or
contact is imminent. Ghṛṇā, then, patrols the perimeter of the collective self. For the ‘touchable’
body politic, it militates against contact with the socially and morally abject, categories of person
whose ascribed ignobility threatens contagion.
That ghṛṇā does similar boundary-regulating work on two distinct planes – the material-
corporeal and the social-moral – confirms an observation, made by a number of scholars, that
disgust facilitates conceptual traffic between these domains of experience.20 It has been noted, for
example, that disgust in the social-moral domain borrows its vocabulary from objects of material
revulsion. In English, morally abhorrent categories of people are described as snakes, vultures,
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 315

leeches, worms, vermin, and scum, and their behaviour as unctuous, slimy, greasy, shitty, creepy,
reptilian, and so on. Conversely, material elicitors of disgust are often charged with moral con-
notations, from the serpent in Genesis to the smell of bodily putrefaction as a sign of moral
corruption.21 It might be objected that these are mere metaphors, conventional symbolic associa-
tions that have no greater capacity to anchor social-moral relations in the body than, say, compar-
isons of the beloved to such physical objects as a rose or a gazelle. Indeed, the moral force of
characterizations like ‘oily politician’ does seem to rest on what, in the semiotic theory of Charles
Sanders Peirce,22 is called a symbol, that is, a sign whose relation to the object it signifies derives
from social convention. Because social convention is relatively arbitrary – oiliness symbolizes
hypocrisy in this instance, but in other cultural and historical contexts it signifies royalty, or
sacrality – symbols are signs that are comparatively amenable to deconstruction.
Other signs that simultaneously elicit corporeal-material and social-moral disgust, however,
operate in less manifestly arbitrary ways. Unlike symbols, indexes signify the objects they represent
by virtue of actual physical contiguity, forging associations that seem more grounded in experience
and in the natural order of things, associations which are thus more difficult to deconstruct or
unlearn. The political economy of caste, insofar as it is a self-replicating ‘division of labourers,’23
specializes in forging enduring indexical bonds between categories of person and the material
substances with which they work: The sanitation labour castes, by virtue of their daily and
intergenerational contact with corporeal matter out of place, become indexically tied to that matter
in the experiential knowledge of the inhabitants of caste society. Moreover, environmental caste-
ism – the ensemble of spatial practices by which toxic and sensorially violent matter is dispropor-
tionately directed at Dalit communities – reinforces these indexical bonds by, among other things,
the dumping of rubbish and locating of public toilets in or alongside Dalit neighbourhoods.24
Operations like these enforce the contiguity of abjected matter – bodily waste, municipal garbage,
and other material refuse – and abjected categories of person, that is, people outside the collective
‘touchable’ self. Corporeal-material provocations to ghṛṇā are thus soldered to social-moral pro-
vocations to ghṛṇā, not by means of metaphors but by indexical bonds forged and remembered in
the sensing, experiencing, knowing bodies of the advantaged castes. Onto the ghṛṇā that most
everyone learns to cultivate vis-à-vis bodily expulsions is grafted the social ghṛṇā that makes the
sanitation labour castes its object; the daily observation of ‘those people’ sweeping roads, mopping
floors, unclogging toilets, and emerging from bastīs located adjacent to rubbish depots disguises the
graft, gradually covering it beneath the tissue of lived experience, giving it the grain and feel of
natural wood. Because all ‘untouchables’ tend to be conflated in the prevailing privileged caste social
imagination – a tendency reinforced by the jocular and hostile circulation of such terms of abuse as
‘Chuhra-Chamar,’ which treat altogether distinct Dalit caste clusters as somehow identical or
interchangeable – socialization in that milieu tends to extend the ghṛṇā attached to the sanitation
labour castes in particular to Dalits more broadly.
A ‘boy in my neighborhood used to call me and my sister “shit lilies,”’ writes Sujatha Gidla,25
testifying to the indexical bonds formed in the minds of youth in her childhood in Andhra Pradesh,
and to the tendency for the advantaged castes to assimilate all Dalits, even those not engaged in such
work, to these ‘sticky’ bundles of sign association.26 Similarly, privileged caste children in an Uttar
Pradesh village invented a rhyme that they would sing when a Dalit woman walked by and in which
they called her ‘woman-of-shit.’27 Such windows into the forging in childhood of indexical chains,
and the learning of disgust of which they are part, are not uncommon.28
In its heavy reliance on indexicality to achieve its defensive ends, the ghṛṇā that maps social
relations in North India may depart from disgust as represented in Euro-American contexts in the
literature on emotion, though I suspect otherwise (theorists of disgust have tended to note the
linkage between the material-corporeal and social-moral domains without elaborating on how the
links are formed and reproduced, but if George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier [1937] is any
indication, British class disgust depends on infrastructurally achieved indexical associations in
much the same manner as I am suggesting caste-based ghṛṇā does). In either case, there is another
316 J. LEE

conceptual distinction, subtle but significant, to be drawn between ghṛṇā and disgust. Recall Priya,
the Dalit beautician in Chandigarh whose salon had no ‘upper-caste’ clients. My initial rendering of
Priya’s remark, ‘They are disgusted by us,’ is in fact a poor translation. As a noun ghṛṇā does indeed
approximate the emotion concepts of disgust, revulsion, or abhorrence. But whereas in English
disgust must be reactive – you are disgusted by something or someone – ghṛṇā combines with
Hindi-Urdu verbs to form not only passive but also active, transitive compounds. With the verb
lagnā (to stick, be attached), disgust sticks to you, attaches itself to you; as with English, disgust is
induced from without. But in combination with karnā (to do), ghṛṇā becomes transitive. You do
disgust, intersubjectively; you practice disgust. Here it is less a matter of those people triggering an
involuntary disgust reaction in you, and more a matter of you enacting disgust behaviours upon
them. A better translation of Priya’s remark, then, would be, ‘They practice disgust on us.’
The cultural logic of doing disgust – of the transitive compound verb ghṛṇā karnā – has an
affinity with that school of social theory that considers emotion to be a kind of social practice.
Attentive to the cultural regulation of emotional expression, and to the pedagogical methods
whereby children are taught how to feel, this school relates emotion to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept
of the habitus, the internalization of social location in the form of a ‘durably installed generative
principle of regulated improvisations,’ a principle that tends to produce in any given class or group
a similar repertoire of practices, that is, more or less volitional strategies for contending with the
world.29 Emotions, according to this way of thinking, are not best conceived of as evolutionarily
determined nervous system responses to external stimuli, or as states of arousal in a body uncondi-
tioned by history or culture. Rather, they are practices that we learn both mimetically from our
elders and from those patterns of praise and punishment by which social groups inculcate in their
members appropriate social action.30
The caste order – like all social hierarchies – structures emotions in particular ways, and in turn
depends on emotions, thus structured, for its reproduction over time. What I am arguing here is
that caste, alongside its ideological and political economic foundations, rests upon and requires
ghṛṇā. Ghṛṇā karnā – doing disgust – describes a set of practices through which social structure
sinks roots in the viscera, anchoring and ‘durably install[ing]’ itself in the sensing self, erecting an
embodied bulwark against forms of inter-caste contact. Ghṛṇā, an essential element of caste habitus,
makes a disposition to practice untouchability less a matter of giving cognitive assent to proposi-
tions about the order of things and more a matter of acting on unstated, embodied knowledge –
however inhuman the conditions that produce that ‘knowledge.’ In Chakrabarty’s account, it seems
to be just such inexplicit, embodied knowledge that animates his mother’s practice of ghṛṇā when
Lakshman appears with his jhadu. As Chakrabarty puts it, the ‘prejudice against [the Dalit] body
was and is part of the habitus of upper-caste embodied selves.’31
If ‘[d]isgust and indignation unite the world of impartial spectators into a moral community, as
cosharers of the same sentiments,’32 then ghṛṇā unites an otherwise segmented and fissiparous caste
society behind the line of touchability. Because of its viscerality, its ability to masquerade as
a natural reaction to contiguities of matter and person observable in the world, ghṛṇā poses
a formidable barrier to social change.

Rerouting disgust: affective experiments in the Arya Samaj

An examination of Patitoddhār (‘Upliftment of the Fallen’), an influential Arya Samaj manifesto on
untouchable uplift, may help illustrate some of these claims. The text is particularly valuable as
a window into early twentieth-century privileged caste reformist thought. While the cultivation of
ghṛṇā, like the inculcation of the caste habitus more broadly, is often difficult to discern in the
archive, Patitoddhār throws it into relief by making it an object of critical self-reflection. The
explicitness of the text is helpful for establishing the historical significance of affect – an uphill battle
in an intellectual world still swift to subordinate emotion as epiphenomenon. On the other hand, it
tethers us, in a way, to the analysis of the discursive representation of ghṛṇā, perhaps drawing us
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 317

away from more inexplicit sources on how the affect is inculcated in practice. But one must begin
somewhere.
Though neither author nor publication date are attributed, the 192-page Hindi text appears to
have been written in 1918 by one Shri Ram Sharma, most likely in Uttar Pradesh (UP). Patitoddhār,
along with several similar tracts composed by other Arya Samaj authors in the 1910s and 1920s, was
part of the Samaj’s campaign to achieve sangathan, or consolidation, of the Hindu community by
_
persuading the Depressed Classes to identify themselves as Hindus while entreating savarṇ (‘high’
caste) Hindus to reconceive of the heretofore despised Depressed Classes as esteemed co-
religionists.33 Arya Samaj polemicists emphasized the urgency of the ‘uplift of the untouchables
and their assimilation in the Hindu polity’ as a means of stemming the tide of Dalit conversions to
Islam and Christianity and thus precluding the possibility of a Muslim majority India, while also
enervating Depressed Class support for British government.34 Towards this end, Arya Samaj
authors advanced the claim that Dalits and other stigmatized castes had previously been ‘twice-
born’ or ‘high caste’ Kshatriyas who centuries ago resisted Muslim rule and were, on account of this
resistance, subjugated and forced into degrading occupations by Muslim rulers. The author of
Patitoddhār explains ‘Bhangis’ and their traditional occupation of latrine cleaning in this fashion, as
a consequence of Muslim retribution for proud Hindu recalcitrance, followed by forgetfulness.

The unjustly fallen twice-born people became a separate caste (jāti) as the fellow-feeling (sahānubhūti) and
support of their co-religionists (sahdharmī) was gradually, over great lengths of time, extinguished. Over
hundreds of generations they wholly forgot their ancient glory. But happily, due to some good fortune in
history, there remains in these Bhangis that old Kshatriya hauteur (atake) . . . If somehow, despite enduring
_
this oppression, they had had the opportunity to fully nurture their lost twice-born dharm or Shudra dharm,
then the condition of those who remove excrement would not be looked upon with such disgust (ghṛṇā).35

Here we begin to glimpse the affective project of the text, made possible by the myth of the Muslim
invention of untouchability. The Hindu reader, relieved of historical responsibility for the Bhangi’s
condition, is invited to suspend his disgust at this figure – a disgust represented as natural – and to
entertain, instead, the possibility of feeling sahānubhūti, empathy or fellow-feeling, towards this
long-lost brother.
But developing new affective habits is not easy. Acknowledging the depth and embodiedness of
his readers’ objections to fraternizing with untouchables, the author engages with these objections
on their own terrain. Chief among these objections, he says, is the sense among his fellow Hindus
that ‘these people [untouchables] live filthily.’ The author addresses this concern at length.

As dirtily and filthily as these people live (jitne gande maile kucaile yeh rahte hain), there are people of other
castes that live in an equally filthy manner, and they are not considered untouchable. Ask truly, and what is the
main cause of the spread of so much disease these days? It is due [not to untouchables but] to Halwais [sweet
makers], Rasois [cooks], Dhobis [launderers], and Hajams [barbers]. When the eye observes the Halwai’s
soiled clothes and his hands, moist with the saliva from the chillum he’s been smoking, shaping the sweets,
who isn’t exceedingly disgusted at the idea of eating (khāne se kise atyant ghṛṇā nahīn hotī)?36

The passage then describes how, at night, men urinate along the edges of the streets in the bazaar. At
dawn of the next day, at the very time that the Halwai is arranging his sweets for display, ‘the
Bhangi, applying his broom, scatters the dried, urine-saturated dust not only over the Halwai’s
sweets but all over the neighbourhood. Does anyone ever consider this filth?’37
With the mention of the Bhangi, the author seems momentarily to forget that his object is to
arouse the reader’s disgust at the actions of touchable castes. This quickly passes as he turns to
vivid portrayals of the sweat of the Rasoi dripping into the wheat of the roti he bakes and the
squalid heaps of unwashed laundry at the Dhobi’s home. ‘The good barber,’ he continues, ‘for his
part, is the very living definition of filth.’ Having catalogued the bodily exuviae of the ‘disease-
afflicted’ customers of the barber to be found on his shop floor, the author finally sums up the
passage thus: ‘Is a bathed and cleaned, pious Chamar filthier than the above-mentioned forms of
filth?’38
318 J. LEE

The sarcasm with which this passage is laced should not be confounded with farce; the author
of Patitoddhār is in earnest here, and his concern with ghṛṇā is both serious and at the heart of his
project. If the talk of fraternity with the Depressed Classes is to have any traction, the text
suggests, we Hindus must contend with ghṛṇā. Pointing out the double standards of untouch-
ability by drawing attention to ghṛṇā-eliciting behaviours of some of the artisanal and service
castes that hover slightly above the line of touchability is the author’s initial tactic. Soon, though,
it is clear that he is only warming up to his topic, and the Halwai and the Hajam are secondary
targets.
What of those eaters of cow-flesh that we call Yavanas [Muslims]? Shall we accept with relish sugar cubes and
molasses cakes made by their hands, and shall we slurp up with pleasure milk from the vessels of Muslim
Gaddis [dairy farmers] and such castes, and yet not even touch the cow-worshipping, Hindu Chamar? . . . Is it
a sin to even touch the hand of a Chamar and such castes, but we should cling daily to the hands of Yavanas?
It’s as though the chillum licked by Muslims is the household deity of the proud Hindu.39

The everyday exchanges – even intimacy – between Hindus and Muslims in North India’s
integrated, religiously pluralistic society are here presented as a problem: There is something
wrong with a Hindu’s accepting food and milk from or sharing the pipe or holding hands with
a Muslim. Such quotidian contact, moreover, is figured as a perverse inversion of the Hindu’s non-
contact with the untouchable. Gesturing to the common practice of Hindus consulting and
accepting the healing remedies of Muslim religious specialists, the author remarks: ‘The Hindu
who becomes polluted (bhrast ) by touching Chamars, does he become pure by consuming the ashes
__
spit on by the Mulla and the sweet cakes distributed by the [Sufi] Pir?’40
The one happens at the expense of the other. It is as though intimacy and disgust were fixed
quantities, subject to the law of conservation of matter, in a closed affective economy. From the
material domain of sweat and saliva, the author then moves to the moral register of ghṛṇā.
When a Qasai [Muslim butcher], who day and night lets loose rivers of blood by murdering harmless goats
and other beneficent animals that were only waiting for human affection, is touchable, then for what sin, even
of criticizing some aspect of Hindu dharma, is the cow-worshipping Chamar untouchable?41

Time and again, the reader of Patitoddhār is presented with sensuously descriptive juxtapositions of
the untouchable and the Muslim. If the former is ‘bathed and cleaned,’ the latter are ‘eaters of cow
flesh’ who ‘spit on’ ashes, ‘lick’ chillums, and let ‘loose rivers of blood.’ If the Hindu reader is being
tasked with the formidable challenge of confronting the ghṛṇā he has been socialized to feel towards
the untouchable, the burden is eased, in a way, by the provision of a new object of disgust. Rather
than eradicating this most visceral and corporeally rooted of emotions, he is encouraged to redirect
it at the Muslim.
At the centre of Patitoddhār, then, is a project of emotion work, an effort to restructure the
pattern of affective bonds that organize North Indian social life, and to do so from within. The
Hindu is asked not only to reimagine his relations with Muslims and the Depressed Classes, but to
cultivate the emotional habits that would work this newly imagined community into the flesh, into
embodied knowledge. A new repertoire of emotion practices is to be developed in relation to the
untouchable, a repertoire that includes fellow-feeling (sahānubhūti) and even love (prem).
Meanwhile the practice of ghṛṇā is not to be abandoned but rechanneled: ‘If we kept them [the
untouchables] far from us only on account of their filth, then we should show the same disgust (yahī
ghṛṇā dikhlāte) towards all of these above-mentioned filthy people and filthy behaviours.’42
In three careful recent studies, anthropologists have observed and analysed the discourse of
disgust in the mobilization and normalization of anti-Muslim sentiment among urban Hindus in
Gujarat and Maharashtra.43 It remains to track the historical development of this discourse before
the present, but Patitoddhār and similar early twentieth-century texts point to a clear precedent. It
may be that the disgust studied by these anthropologists measures the slow fruition of the Arya
Samaj’s project to cultivate Hindu ghṛṇā, previously channelled primarily at the untouchable,
towards the Muslim.
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 319

There is introspection in Patitoddhār, even a degree of critical reflection on the contradictions in

the practice of ghṛṇā in the imagined Hindu reader’s everyday life. But in this and other Arya Samaj
literature that acknowledges ghṛṇā as a problem, the shallowness of the diagnosis and the social
violence of the proposed solution are heavily determined by the communal and majoritarian
commitments of their authors. When we turn from sources in which savarṇ Hindus imagine the
possibility of fraternity with the Depressed Classes to sources in which the latter conceive of possible
relations with the former, ghṛṇā again appears, but in a different light, and subject to a different kind
of critique.

The swineherd and the protector of food: critiques of disgust with life
Between the 1880s and the 1920s a significant number of songs, genealogies, legends, and other oral
traditions that circulated among the sanitation labour castes in North India were documented by
missionaries, Urdu and English writers, and colonial administrators (foreign and native) with an
interest in folklore. These materials, part of the vast corpus of ethnographic writing produced in the
late colonial period, provide some insight into Dalit thought in the period preceding the rise of
organized religio-political Dalit formations like the Ad Dharm in Punjab and Ambedkar’s move-
ment in western India. Whereas within such Depressed Class communities as Chamars, Paraiyars,
and Mahars, a small educated stratum had begun producing its own writing by this time, published
writing by members of the sanitation labour castes appears to have been delayed by their even
further stigmatized and structurally disadvantaged position, with the striking exception of Heera
Dom’s poem ‘Achhūt kī Shikāyat’ (‘An Untouchable’s Grievance’) in 1914.44 Thus, though inevi-
tably inflected by the priorities and translation practices of those non-Dalits who committed them
to paper, oral traditions remain our chief source of evidence for how the sanitation labour castes
viewed the world in this period.
With varying degrees of explicitness, ghṛṇā features in a striking number of these oral traditions.
Here let us take two, each of which appears in several versions in the corpus of sanitation labour
caste lore. The first we will consider belongs to a cycle of stories regarding the miraculous birth of
Lal Beg, the prophet of the sanitation labour castes, facilitated by one Balnik or Balmik, a magician
of Ghazni.45 The key character in the story that interests us here, though, is neither Lal Beg nor
Balmik but Balmik’s daughter, sometimes called Jastri and sometimes Pundri, who herds swine on
the outskirts of Ghazni. In one version of the story, narrated by sanitation labour caste informants
to British military officer Richard Temple in Punjab in the early 1880s, Pundri is approached by
a pious Sheikh of Multan who seeks a cure for his childlessness.
Shekh Sarna had no child, and some one referred him to Balnik, then residing at Ghazni. Whereupon the
Shekh set out for Ghazni, taking his wife with him. As he approached the place he came across a girl, named
Pundri, feeding swine, and enquired of her as to the whereabouts of Balnik, whereon she said that she was his
daughter. On this the Shekh offered to watch her swine if she would take his wife to her father, to which she
agreed. When she returned she saw that two young pigs had been born during her absence, and asked Shekh
Sarna to carry them home for her, which he did. Meanwhile his wife had so won over Balnik by her devotion
that he asked her what she wanted, and she said, ‘a son.’ So Balnik promised her a son, whom she was to call
Lal Beg. After nine months she gave birth to a son, and dutifully called him Lal Beg.46

The story emphasizes Pundri’s membership in the sanitation labour castes by figuring her as
a swineherd, a traditional occupation of the Chuhra or ‘Bhangi’ caste. Another traditional occupa-
tion for these castes, midwifery, is hinted at in the structural role Pundri plays in facilitating Lal
Beg’s birth, and in the narrative doubling of the trope of birth with the delivery of Pundri’s piglets.
Meanwhile the centrepiece of the narrative is a scandal. A pious Muslim of high birth not only offers
to tend swine – that most objectionable of creatures in Islamic society, both nāpāk (impure) and
harām (forbidden) – but is then compelled to carry the sow’s freshly born offspring, presumably
dripping with the fluids of birth, to the swineherd’s home. Only after this humbling, polluting,
highly transgressive act does the Muslim gentleman find the path to fertility – to life – open.
320 J. LEE

In other versions of the tale, Pundri is named Jastri, and her encounter is with a leprous Brahmin
on his way to the Kumbh Mela in hopes of a cure. Here is an abridgement of a song the Scottish
missionary John Youngson heard and transcribed from the Chuhras among whom he lived and
worked near Sialkot; I have modified Youngson’s translation slightly for clarity.

A Brahmin’s body became leprous (brahme dī dehī nūṅ kushthī dhāyā)

_

He had to go to bathe [in the sacred Ganga] at the Kumbh festival.

On his way Jastri fed a herd of swine

The Brahmin asked the way

‘Why have you come, Brahmin?

What brought you?’

‘My body is leprous,

I have come for a bath at the Kumbh.’

‘The third hour is the proper time for your bath.

How will you reach the Ganga in time?’

‘The third hour is the proper time for my bath.

Can any man get me there in time?’

‘I will show you a pond,

You can bathe there if you like.’

Jastri then showed him the pond,

The pond where her swine wallowed (kenāṅ dī bhannī hoī chappaṛī)

The Brahmin dived once.

He brought up a handful of sand.

The Brahmin dived twice.

He brought up a handful of shells.

The Brahmin dived thrice.

He brought up a handful of rubies.

When the Brahmin found the stones

He gained Harji’s darshan (Har jī kā darshan pāe)

The sins of his body were swept clean (oh dī kāyā de pāp jhāṛe de)

Said Jastri: ‘Come out, Brahmin, your bath is finished!’

Further in the song, the Brahmin asks Jastri her name and asks her to take him to her father; when
she leads him to Balmik, the Brahmin asks him to give his daughter in marriage. Balmik interrogates
the would-be husband, asking ‘why do you forget your caste?’ and then probing whether the
Brahmin plans to eat with Jastri or separately, and whether he will ultimately abandon her. After
the latter gives assurances that he will eat food cooked by Jastri and will not abandon her, Balmik
agrees, the two are married, and the children to whom Jastri gives birth inaugurate illustrious
lineages.
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 321

The structural parallels between this and the previous version are unmistakable. In place of the
childless sheikh we have the diseased Brahmin, another man of high status suffering a physical
defect or lack. Again, the young woman directs him away from sources of power sanctioned by licit
religious authority – the sheikh’s Sufi master, the Brahmin’s Kumbh Mela – and towards an
alternative wellspring of force. Access to this alternative source again requires intimate contact
with substances – the newborn piglets, the pond in which the swine bathe – that constitute, from
both the orthodox Muslim and Brahminical points of view, radical pollution, and that are linked to
everyday forms of Dalit labour. Though the word ghṛṇā does not appear here, the swine-touching
and immersion in her pigs’ pond that Pundri/Jastri invites her interlocutors to take up are decidedly
ghṛṇā-inducing acts in Islamic and Brahminical social milieus. In both versions of the story, the
men ultimately overcome the ghṛṇā that listeners would expect them to feel. The result of their
willingness to take the plunge, so to speak, is the reversal of their life trajectories from disease and
barrenness to healing, fertility, and the auspicious condition of marriage.
The second oral tradition we will consider belongs to a cluster of stories that explain solar and
lunar eclipses as the consequence of a primordial conflict between deities such as the sun and moon
that are aligned with the savarṇ castes, on the one hand, and anti-gods associated with ‘untouch-
ables,’ on the other – a myth cycle discerningly analysed by Ranajit Guha.47 As with the Pundri/
Jastri legend, the eclipse stories are sometimes set in an Islamicate narrative universe and at other
times in a milieu more marked by Hindu social and religious concerns. The version of the story
given here comes from an Urdu collection of oral traditions of the sanitation labour castes
published in 1923 by the journalist, Sufi, and proponent of tabligh Khwaja Hasan Nizami. As
I have discussed elsewhere, Nizami’s collection begins as an effort to refute Arya Samaj claims of the
timeless Hindu-ness of the sanitation labour castes by pointing to the Islamic content of many of
their legends, but the polemic thrust of the text is abandoned shortly after the introduction, yielding
instead to the accumulative imperative of the genre of folklore anthologies and ultimately providing
more evidence of the religious autonomy of the sanitation labour castes than ‘proof’ of their being
either Muslim or Hindu.48 Nizami’s version of the tale shares some features with those considered
by Briggs and Guha49; it is also remarkably similar to the tale as an anthropologist recently heard it
from Dalit interlocutors in Rajasthan.50 While we do not have access to Nizami’s source and thus
cannot know whether or how Nizami editorialized the text, the overall correspondence of his
version with other accounts, and indeed with the mood and character of other stories in the oral
traditions, suggests that interventions, if any, were limited to minor embellishments or rhetorical
flourishes.
A brief note on the semantic play and colloquial tone of the story is in order. What I am
translating as the ‘Angel of Daily Bread’ is rizq kā farishta; a farishta is an angel in the Islamicate
universe, but this particular farishta seems to be a uniquely sanitation labour caste contribution to
that universe. In other versions of the story this figure is either simply grain or food, with no divine
title, or is called Ann Dev, a Sanskrit-derived title meaning ‘God of Grain.’51 Rizq denotes ‘means of
subsistence or support, subsistence, food, daily bread,’ it resonates with its close cousin razzāq, ‘the
giver of daily bread,’ an epithet of Allah.52 Rizq kā farishta thus suggests something that is quotidian
and banal – food, daily bread – yet simultaneously exalted and intimate with God. The divine, for its
part, appears in the story as ‘Allah Miyan,’ a colloquialism that has something of the flavour of
‘Mister God.’
The Halalkhors [i.e., the sanitation labor castes] have a legend that there were many flies buzzing around the
Angel of Daily Bread, because flies [always] come to things that can be eaten and drunk. The prophets and
sages saw the face of the Angel of Daily Bread, and they felt great disgust (unko bahut ghin āyī), so they went
before Allah Miyan and said, ‘Please send this one away, somewhere far from us.’ Allah Miyan acquiesced to
the request of the prophets and sages and said to the Angel of Daily Bread, ‘Depart, brother! Go hide yourself
with Bhadli the Halalkhori.’

The Angel of Daily Bread came to Bhadli the Halalkhori and said, ‘The prophets and sages have become my
enemies (dushman), and Allah Miyan sent me to you. Kindly give me quarter here with you.’ Bhadli said, ‘If
322 J. LEE

you need to conceal yourself from the prophets and sages, go hide in my grain bin.’ The Angel of Food did just
that and hid in Bhadli the Halalkhori’s grain bin.

As soon as the Angel hid, the prophets and sages began to feel hungry, and they started to search for food
(rizq). But they did not find food anywhere, because the Angel of Daily Bread was in hiding. Who would
distribute food among the people?

When the prophets and sages were much distressed, they assembled together and came before Allah Miyan
and said, ‘We are hungry, call the Angel of Daily Bread and feed us!’ Allah Miyan replied, ‘But I gave the Angel
of Daily Bread over to the jurisdiction (ikhtiyār) of Bhadli the Halalkhori! You go and ask her.’

The prophets and sages came before Bhadli the Halalkhori and demanded from her the Angel of Daily Bread.
Bhadli replied, ‘You were disgusted by an Angel of God (tum ne khudā ke farishte se ghin khāyī). I will not give
him to you.’

After the prophets and sages pleaded their case at length, Bhadli said, ‘Alright, I will give you the Angel on
this condition: that you will never practice disgust with any of God’s creations, and never look upon them
with hatred (ki tum phir kabhī khudā kī kissī cīz se ghin na karna, aur us ko nafrat se na dekhnā).’ The
prophets and sages said ‘We will never do it again, and we pledge that we will never be hateful with a thing
created by God.’ Bhadli the Halalkhori said, ‘And what if you people break your pledge – what will be the
remedy in that case?’

The prophets and sages said, ‘Take a security (zamānat) from us.’ Bhadli the Halalkhori said, ‘Good. Give the
moon and the sun in security.’ And the prophets and sages did just that. When they had given the moon and
sun as security, Bhadli opened the grain bin, took out the Angel of Daily Bread, and gave it to the prophets and
sages.

This security that the prophets and sages gave is the reason behind the occurrence of solar and lunar eclipses.
Allah Miyan made a memorial of their pledge. And at the time of an eclipse, the reason that grain is given to
Halalkhors is again precisely this; it is due to the security owed to the Halalkhori that the sun and moon have
to undergo this difficulty. If grain were not be given to the Halalkhors, the moon and sun would not be
released from the eclipse.53

In more hinduānā versions of the tale (i.e., those that feature a more Hindu-sounding social and
theological vocabulary), it is gods and goddesses (devī-devtā) who, disgusted by the flies on his face,
excommunicate the god of grain (Ann Dev), who then takes shelter with Sati Churi (Churi being
a variant of Chuhri, i.e., a Chuhra woman, thus equivalent to Halalkhori, Mehtarani, etc.).54 The
main difference is the absence of Allah Miyan or his Hindu analogue; but his absence in other
versions of the tale throws into relief his superfluity to the story’s central conflict even in Nizami’s
version – where, indeed, Allah Miyan does little more than acquiesce to the decisions of the
prophets and sages. In all versions, the drama centres on a standoff between a high-status collective
(‘gods and goddesses,’ ‘prophets and sages’) and a woman of the sanitation labour castes (Bhadli
Halalkhori, Sati Churi, ‘a sweeper woman’) who is sheltering a kind of incarnation of food (Rizq kā
Farishta, Ann Dev, ‘grain’). I submit, then, that the value of the story is not to be found in what it
suggests about the Islamic or Hindu leanings of its tellers, since the sanitation labour castes were
able to weave this narrative with equal facility into tapestries of apparently ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’
design. More compelling is what it suggests about gender, labour, and the affective structure of
untouchability.
Why does the Angel of Daily Bread seek refuge with a Dalit woman? It is difficult to ignore the
centrality of Dalit women’s labour to agricultural production in North India, past and present. With
this in mind we might interpret the Angel’s hiding place to reflect or refract an indexical relation
deeply etched in agrarian life: In a quite literal sense, Dalit women are, and have long been, the
mediators par excellence between ‘grain’ and those high-status collectives who would eat it. Reading
Bhadli’s story as a parable of the caste and gender structure of agrarian labour relations, we might
ask what it tells us that she bargains hard with the ‘prophets and sages,’ anticipates the likelihood
that they will renege on their promises, and threatens conditions that will shut down agrarian
production if they do so.
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 323

But Bhadli’s story speaks not only to Dalit women’s labour as producers of grain; it also advances
a moral critique of the dominant, which contains elements of an affective theory of untouchability.
The story begins with ghin, that is, ghṛṇā. It is the ghin of the dominant that inaugurates conflict:
Their revulsion for the Angel of Daily Bread leads to enmity (dushman hue), hatred (nafrat), hunger
(bhūk), and distress (taklīf). Untouchability, the critique suggests, thus has its origins not in the
behaviour or ethical practice (karma) of the ‘untouchable,’ but in the socialization of the sensorium
of the dominant. Allah Miyan, and the licit religious authority that he perhaps symbolizes,
capitulates to the prejudice of his followers, leaving Bhadli to confront the prophets and sages
with the impiety and logical contradiction of their practice. She reminds them that to practice
disgust – it is the transitive compound ghin karnā that is in play here – is an offence against God,
since God created all things. In a less moralizing register, the story illustrates how ghin karnā is also
a self-defeating practice, a mode of action essentially directed against life. Here Bhadli points to
a contradiction at the very core of ghṛṇā as a human affect. Like food, which in the natural order of
things attracts flies, a great many of those objects and processes that induce ghṛṇā are precisely the
objects and processes that make human life possible.
What do Pundri/Jastri and Bhadli Halalkhori have in common? Each invites the representatives
of the dominant to dwell for a moment at a threshold of disgust, a position from which the
contradictions of their affective practices are thrown into relief. Pundri tells the sheikh to touch
an animal regarded with loathing by his religion, surely provoking in the Muslim gentleman
a confrontation with his own affective habits. Does it matter that the piglets are newborn? On the
one hand, this may make them more disgusting, because wet or smeared with the fluids of birth; on
the other hand, might the piglets, because vulnerable and somewhat similar to human babies, incite
compassion or parental emotion in the sheikh (desirous of offspring as he is), making more acute
the affective crisis presumably induced in him? Jastri also brings the Brahmin face to face with her
swine and their water; given that pigs are traditionally regarded as abhorrent in the Brahminical
tradition as well, this is again a provocation of sorts for the Brahmin to reflect on what he has been
taught to abominate, and whether this affective orientation may be part of his disease.
What is implicit in the actions of Pundri/Jastri, Bhadli Halalkhori puts into discourse. ‘You were
disgusted by an Angel of God (tum ne khudā ke farishte se ghin khāyī),’ she tells the prophets and
sages. Bhadli compels the prophets and sages to acknowledge the fundamental contradiction in
their practice: They are disgusted by something upon which life depends. Here it is food, that which
nourishes humans but also, in the natural course of things, attracts flies. Disgust for food is
a universal human foible; what is appetizing one minute may make one’s gorge rise just a few
hours later, and what is a delicacy to one group is, famously, revolting to another. But the prevalence
of ‘grain’ – hardly a typical object of food disgust – in Bhadli’s story (in all its versions) hints at
something more particular. Combined with its presence in the grain bin of a Dalit woman – the
paradigmatic agricultural labourer – grain as a provocation to disgust in this story gestures to the
affective disposition towards manual and particularly agricultural labour that the Brahminical
discursive tradition prescribes for Brahmins, summarized by the prohibition on Brahmins touching
the plough. Read this way, Bhadli’s remonstration is a critique of a mode of living in which the
labourers on whom one depends for sustenance are treated with revulsion.

At the bottom of the Brahminical mind

Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai identify untouchability as a disorder anchored in the privileged
caste self.55 Guru cites an observation in Marathi by the anti-caste thinker Vitthal Ramji Shinde:
‘Asprushtechi malmal, manachy talashi dadun basil ahe,’ or ‘[u]ntouchability is a kind of repulsive
feeling, a sort of nausea, that sits deep at the bottom of Brahminical mind.’56
Insight into the affective structure of caste, I have been arguing, can be found in a range of
vernacular sources composed by privileged and disprivileged caste authors. Shinde’s formulation
echoes what Arya Samaj authors discovered in themselves a century ago, in the formative decades of
324 J. LEE

organized Hindu majoritarianism – an affective disposition they sought not to uproot but rather to
redirect: Away from the ‘untouchables’ whose numbers they needed and towards Muslims whose
numbers they feared. Shinde’s observation also corresponds closely with what Bhadli Halalkhori
diagnoses in the socially and religiously dominant – but her critique reaches deeper, demonstrating
how ghṛṇā, when ranged against the very objects and forms of labour on which life and health
depend, is fundamentally self-defeating. If the oral traditions documented among the sanitation
labour castes in the colonial period reflect the historical longevity that we often expect of such
traditions, then it seems that the insights generated in the recent ‘affective turn’ in the humanities
and social sciences have been anticipated by the sagacious women of Dalit lore for quite some time.
But does all of this amount to a ‘psychologizing’ move? By naming ghṛṇā/ghin as the ground of
practices of untouchability, are Bhadli, Guru, Sarukkai, and Shinde interiorizing the problem,
depoliticizing this mode of dominance by locating it in the individual psyche? This would be an
error of both conception and translation: As this article has sought to demonstrate, ghṛṇā/ghin is
not, as disgust is sometimes imagined to be in Anglophone thought, a ‘natural’ and essentially
reactive emotion, a protective response to dangerous external stimuli ‘hardwired’ in the evolved
human organism and then tailored to individual taste. As Bhadli’s usage makes clear, ghṛṇā/ghin
operates not only as an internal condition of the individual (an emotion, as popularly imagined),
but as a social affect: Bhadli warns the prophets to ghin na karnā, to not practice disgust, a transitive
compound verb that conveys the intersubjective force of a mode of action. Moreover, she identifies
ghin not with individuals but with a collective – the ‘prophets and sages’ – pointing to the affect’s
specificity not in individual idiosyncrasy or personal preference but in group socialization, in the
collective habitus. Finally, Bhadli levels her criticism at the prophets’ and sages’ treatment of ‘grain’
(and, it would seem, those who produce it): Her critique thus relates the ghṛṇā/ghin her inter-
locutors are socialized to feel and practice to the labour regime that it both sustains and is sustained
by. This is an acknowledgement that culturally and historically particular structures of affect are
enmeshed in particular organizations of political economy – that ghṛṇā is political. When Bhadli
puts her finger on the socialization of the sensorium of the dominant – the over-cultivation of
disgust among the privileged castes towards processes and forms of labour essential to life – she
offers a critique of untouchability that is in no way depoliticized.
These initial observations on ghṛṇā suggest, if anything, how much work remains to be done.
Several lines of enquiry immediately present themselves. One would be an etymological study of
ghṛṇā over the longue durée, attentive to the emotion-concept’s curious reversal from its denotation
of ‘compassion’ or ‘pity’ in early Sanskrit literature, a journey apparently taken by way of the
negation nirghṛṇā, ‘pitiless’ (and thus monstrous, ‘disgusting’ in the moral sense), which, signifi-
cantly, is already normatively attached to such antagonists of Brahminical sociology as the Chandal
(the paradigmatic ‘untouchable’) and the Rakshasa in Valmiki’s Ramayana.57 An investigation of
the deep structure of caste affect would necessitate, as well, a systematic tracking of ghṛṇā and its
companion vibhatsa (the ‘macabre’ or ‘disgusting’) in the literature on rasa, or classical aesthetics,
a body of thought that routinely correlates particular affects with particular social groups.58
And what of the present? In Shinde’s remark we see that social theory in Marathi may converge
with what we detect in Hindi-Urdu; but what of the subcontinent’s many other languages – what
emotion-concepts govern practices of untouchability in Tamil, Bengali, Kannada, and Kashmiri?
Safwan Amir’s discussion of puccham (contempt) and arappu (disgust) in discourses on the
stigmatized labour of Muslim barbers of Malabar presents a promising model.59 With ghṛṇā and
its counterparts (if, indeed, they function in this way), what are the micro- and macro-operations by
which the affect is inculcated, and how does this emotion pedagogy differ according to social
location? Ambedkar described Hindu dispositions towards ‘untouchables’ as governed by ‘odium
and avoidance’60; how might a subtle analysis of Ambedkar’s remarks on odium and other emotions
enrich our understanding of caste as an affective order? Are there accounts of the successful
unlearning of ghṛṇā, of the disembedding of disgust? Broadening the frame, what other affects,
aside from ghṛṇā and humiliation, play critical roles in the reproduction of the caste order, and what
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 325

affects disrupt its reproduction? To attend to these and other questions will be a step towards
comprehending the resilience of caste in the present – even in contexts in which caste ideology is
disavowed – and towards gaining critical leverage on the passions that hierarchy excites.

Notes
1. Chakrabarty, “The Dalit Body,” 9–10.
2. Ibid., 10.
3. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus.
4. E.g., Appadurai, “Putting Hierarchy in Its Place”; Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity; and Dirks, Castes of
Mind; Inden, Imagining India.
5. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste.
6. E.g., Berreman, “Stratification, Pluralism and Interaction”; Guha, Beyond Caste; Mencher, “The Caste
System”; and Viswanath, The Pariah Problem.
7. Thorat and Joshi, “The Continuing Practice.”
8. See, e.g., Dutt, Coming out as Dalit.
9. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, 245.
10. See, e.g., Brueck, Writing Resistance; Limbale, Towards an Aesthetic; Valmiki, Dalit Sahitya; and Tharu and
Satyanarayana, No Alphabet in Sight.
11. Guru, Humiliation.
12. Lynch, “The Mastrām.”
13. Subramanian, “Making Merit.”
14. A pseudonym, as with the librarian quoted later in this section.
15. Haidt, McCauley, and Rozin, “Individual Differences in Sensitivity.”
16. Platts, A Dictionary of Urdu, 823.
17. On other deployments of karāhat, see Mhaskar, “Ghettoisation of Economic Choices”; and Tayob, “Disgust as
Embodied Critique.”
18. For an alternative view, to which we will return, see Ghassem-Fachandi, Pogrom in Gujarat.
19. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, 31–33.
20. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion; Kolnai, “The Standard Modes”; Menninghaus, Disgust; and Miller, The
Anatomy of Disgust.
21. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, 60–78.
22. Peirce, Philosophical Writings.
23. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, 233.
24. Lee, “Odor and Order.”
25. Gidla, Ants among Elephants, 8.
26. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion.
27. Irudayam, Mangubhai, and Lee, Dalit Women Speak Out, 108.
28. See, e.g., Rege, Writing Caste/Writing Gender, 222, 43.
29. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory, 78.
30. Frevert, et al., Learning How to Feel; Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling; and Scheer, “Are Emotions.”
31. Chakrabarty, “The Dalit Body,” 14.
32. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust,195.
33. Lee, Deceptive Majority.
34. Swami Shraddhanand quoted in Jordens, Swami Shraddhananda, 163.
35. Sharma, Patitoddhār, 166–167. All translations from this text and Nizami’s in the following section are my
own.
36. Ibid., 14.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 15.
39. Ibid., 21.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.: 25.
42. Ibid., 24.
43. Ghassem-Fachandi, Pogrom in Gujarat; Mhaskar, “Ghettoisation of Economic Choices”; and Tayob, “Disgust
as Embodied Critique.”
44. On which, see Narayan and Misra, Multiple Marginalities.
45. Often assumed to be Rishi Valmiki, composer of the Sanskrit Ramayana, though the oral traditions suggest no
such connection; see Lee, “All the Valmikis.”
326 J. LEE

46. Temple, “A Story of Lal Beg.”

47. Guha, Small Voice of History, 239–265.
48. Lee, Deceptive Majority.
49. Briggs, The Doms, 544–548; Guha, Small Voice of History, 239–265.
50. Snodgrass, Casting Kings, 75–79.
51. Guha, Small Voice of History, 260; Snodgrass, Casting Kings, 75–79; Briggs, The Doms, 545.
52. Platts, A Dictionary of Urdu, 591.
53. Nizami, Halālkhor, 11–12.
_
54. Snodgrass, Casting Kings, 75–79.
55. Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai, The Cracked Mirror.
56. Guru, “Archaeology of Untouchability,” 50.
57. Jha, “Candala and the Origin,” 18.
58. Pollock, A Rasa Reader, 27.
59. Amir, “Contempt and Labour.”
60. Quoted by Fazal, “Scheduled Castes,” 6n4.

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