Focusing on the history and politics of Dalit political formations, and covering the period from the mid-19th century to the present, Anupama Rao's new work powerfully illuminates how "a new political collectivity was constituted by re-signifying the Dalit's negative identity within the caste structure into positive political value." Far from presenting a heroic history, Rao, a professor of Southasian history at Barnard College, suggests instead that the "terms of Dalit enfranchisement and the forms of governmental reparation for stigmatized personhood have produced new forms of vulnerability."
By tracking the history of stigma, and its re-definition via constitutional policy and legislative action, Rao illustrates how this dynamic history of untouchability transformed relations between Dalits, caste Hindus and the state in post-Independence India. Once a form of social experience identified with tradition, religion and stigmatised labour, Dalit identity was successfully redefined through these years as a form of vulnerability that constituted the grounds for political recognition. As Rao stresses throughout the book, this was the paradoxical outcome of minoritarian enfranchisement: the civil-rights regime produced not the emancipated citizen but rather the vulnerable subject, one who was by definition at risk of violence from many directions.
Rao's tremendously important work emerges amidst a widening scholarly interest in caste studies. The centrality of western India, and especially Maharashtra, to caste studies is intriguing, and Rao's own work might have done better to engage the question of why the narrative of caste politicisation has been so regularly located in the state's recent history. Earlier groundbreaking work by such figures as Eleanor Zelliot, Rosalind O'Hanlon and Dhananjay Keer has spawned new appraisals of caste and caste power; more recent works by Anand Teltumbde, Gail Omvedt and Uma Chakravarti have retained the critique of caste formation. Important memoirs published in the past few years have further provided firsthand information on the visible as well as hidden complicities between the Indian state, the symbolic power of gender, and the constant re-invigoration of caste. Building on these important studies, The Caste Question takes the study of caste to a fresh, theoretical understanding of the logic of Indian liberal modernity, exceptionalism and legality.
The text itself is divided into two parts, the first of which tracks 'emancipation' from the late 19th century to the 1950s, the battle over rights and social recognition. The second part discusses the 'paradox' of emancipation, or the contradiction of the continued experience of being marked as vulnerable citizens subjects from the 1950s to the present. Rao starts by detailing the political and activist work by generations of activists from the Mahar Dalit community (the largest Scheduled Caste group in Maharashtra), especially focusing on the Satyashodhak Samaj, the liberation theology established by Jotirao Phule in the late 19th century. In this context, she explores how 19th-century caste radicals argued for a fundamentally secular understanding of the artificial distinctions between the religious and the political, and fore-grounded the failure of religion to encompass the totalising character of caste oppression. From here, Rao moves through discussions of the role of women's status as a means of refashioning the community, the history of the British army in providing employment, the vagaries of British government ethnographies (especially the assurance inherent in the 'martial races' theory) in determining forms of employment for Mahars, and the fact that caste radicals recognised the key role of Hindu marriage as the hinge between intimate and political life. Rao ends this first chapter by building a case for appreciating why and how the Dalit public sphere was rendered so predominantly male; and with that, the centrality of the rhetorical and symbolic memory of stigma to the claim of equality.