Enclosing Caste with Rupa Viswanath and Joel Lee

The Caste Pod

The episode explores the historical transformation of caste from a system rooted in land and labor into a religious identity within Hinduism

Key takeaways

• Rupa Viswanath explains how colonial land regimes linked untouchability to agrarian bondage and the 'gentle slavery' trope.
• Joel Lee details the Lalbegi tradition, a community that historically identified as neither Hindu nor Muslim.

Main topics

• Caste and agrarian labor
• Colonialism and caste-state nexus

Notable quotes

The pariah could not have become a problem... without the careful promulgation of his condition by missionaries.

Conclusion

The episode provides a profound historical lens on how political and r

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) For many of us, going further isn't a choice. It's a feeling we can't ignore. Because ambition has a way of outgrowing where it began. Turning dreams into direction. Every journey brings us closer to the life we imagine. So, where will your journey take you? Etihad. Beyond Borders. Speaker 1 (0:39) Welcome to the Cast Pod, where we assemble scholars, activists, community organizers, artists, and others to make sense of what cast is, how it works, how it's experienced, and how it has traveled and taken root both inside and outside of South Asia. What have people done to perpetuate, transform, and even attempt to abolish cast? I'm your host, Ajanta Subramanian, a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York. And joining me today are Rupa Vishwanath and Joel Lee. Rupa is professor at the Center for Modern Indian Studies at the University of Göttingen and a fellow of Lucy Cavendish College at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include histories of slavery in South Asia and the politics of its historiography, the political economy of caste, and comparative racialization. Joel is associate professor of anthropology at Williams College. His research focuses on caste and its entanglement with religion, labor, environment, secrecy, and the sensorium in South Asia. And you can find their full bios in the show notes for this episode. So welcome to the podcast, Rupa and Joel. Thank you very much. Speaker 3 (1:51) It's really great to be here. Speaker 1 (1:53) All right. We've got a lot of ground to cover, so I'm going to jump right in. So I want to frame our conversation by sort of... pointing to two prevailing conceptions of caste that your work addresses. The first is of caste as a religious phenomenon that is internal to Hinduism. And so this is an assumption that prevails despite ample evidence of caste practices among Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, et cetera, and despite caste thriving in putatively secular spaces, whether this is the IT company or the political party or the government office, right? The second prevailing conception is of untouchable castes, that is, those groups who now self-identify as Dalits, as being part of the Hindu fold. So even when it comes to Dalits who have converted to other religions, we hear this sort of commonplace assumption that they were once Hindus, who converted from Hinduism. And both of you track a set of profound transformations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as a result of which these assumptions about caste as religious and untouchable caste as Hindus took hold. And this is an incredibly complicated story. It's a story about changing material conditions, changing practices of governance, shifts in discourse, and also shifts in Dalit self-conceptions and maneuvers. So let's just, let's piece this together bit by bit. So what I'd like to do is start with material conditions. Speaker 1 (3:33) And, you know, these are the material conditions that have allowed untouchability as a social practice to thrive. And both of you in your work highlight the relationship between untouchability and particular forms of labor. Right. So, Rupa, in your book, The Paria Problem, you look at the agrarian economy in what is now the state of Tamil Nadu. Speaker 1 (4:02) Maybe we can start with you saying something about why you chose to focus on land and labor as your point of entry into the problem of untouchability. This is not where everyone starts, right? Some people start with the scripture. You don't start there. You start with land and labor. So why start there? Speaker 4 (4:23) I think I got really interested, as many students of history do, in the very complicated new regimes of land control created by the colonial state. And I was suddenly, you know, struck by the fact that there's so much work on land tenure, but actually what is decisive for the productivity of the land is whether or not labor is attached to the land, especially when you have conditions of land surplus. Speaker 4 (5:01) So what actually becomes more decisive is how you get your labor on the land. Speaker 1 (5:06) And Speaker 4 (5:07) that's when I kind of, you know, it's not that no one had worked on these things before. People had done it, but it wasn't central to the way Indian history was taught at the time that I was taught it, which is that I would say India is a slave society, Speaker 2 (5:23) right? Speaker 4 (5:24) It's not usually conceived of that way, but... the most important forms of agrarian production required, you know, depended on slavery. And that's when, you know, I came to discover that so much of the transfer of land, the saleability of land was linked to having Balut people attached to that land and sold along with it. Speaker 4 (5:53) So even if it wasn't exactly, you know, and of course, historians have many disagreements about exactly what counts as slavery, but we can certainly say that these people were on free labor tied to the land in particular ways. And then what's the interesting thing about India is that these people are. Speaker 4 (6:13) In addition, defined as untouchable. Right. So this is Dharma Kumar, you know, quite a sort of liberal economic historian. But this was her point that the names for the Dalit castes were interchangeable with words for slave in many of these pre-colonial documents. So that's kind of... What sparked my interest and as you yourself said, it was not how I had come to understand caste from the way it's usually taught. Speaker 1 (6:52) So why do you think it is that. Speaker 1 (6:57) these forms of bondage, agrarian bondage, were not conceptualized as slavery. I mean, this was a real Speaker 4 (7:07) shocker to me as a young student of history. It seems so obvious empirically that we're talking about the same thing, but everyone who had a voice in those days, elite Indians, and of course colonial officials, rushed to isolate Indian slavery from all other kinds of slavery. So I talk about this thing, you know, the trope of gentle slavery, that Indian slavery was really more like kinship. It was, you know, a form of protection and patronage, which for listeners who are in North America would be very familiar from, you know, southern plantation owners. This was exactly the language of paternalism. And the same kind of language was used in India. And so when England actually, when the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833, they actually exempted India from this rule for 10 years. And even after that, when they finally did target slavery, it was only the most sort of visible kinds of... of slavery, of selling of slaves from Africa and other places in urban India, as opposed to agrarian slavery, which was, of course, the most common type. So they just excluded by sort of definitional fiat the vast majority of slaves in India from abolition. And Speaker 1 (8:37) you have this very sort of trenchant phrase, the caste-state nexus, you know, which sort of you used to characterize this sort of overlap of interests, right, between landholders on the one hand and state officials on the other. Do you want to say more about why that's so important? Speaker 4 (8:59) Yeah, I mean, again, this goes back to sort of my own intellectual formation where I had kind of always imagined the most important antagonism to be between colonizers and Indians. But what I came to see was really that there was a very tight connection between Indian landowners and colonial state officials, and that they shared many common interests in terms of extraction of the produce from the agrarian surplus. And that was really such a strong shared interest that the proverbial anthropologist from Mars would come down and not see the real antagonism in political and social power to be between Indians and colonizers, but between Speaker 4 (10:03) Indian landowners, the colonial state, and the people who labored for them. I guess something which in anthropology, as you would know, Ajanta, became a big issue in the 80s, this whole idea of the anthropology of the state and its blurred boundaries. But really, here it was very clear that the state was not just a group of colonizers, that state control, political power, and economic extraction were dividing. the society in a different way than... What a political scientist would see as Speaker 1 (10:37) state personnel. Okay, Joel, your work also focuses on a set of social groups who are quite spatially dispersed, but who share a designation as sanitation labor casts. Right. So in your analysis as well, labor is a really important basis for organizing caste difference. Speaker 1 (11:03) So why was it important for you to look at this particular form of labor, sanitation labor, to get at the operations of CAST? Speaker 3 (11:11) Yeah, thanks. Speaker 3 (11:16) There's a certain amount of just chance. The community with which I had the deepest relations at the time of taking up field work happened to be the Bamiki community in Lucknow in UP. And so the kinds of questions that I was interested in pursuing about Dalit religion and so on, it made sense to sort of pursue them with people I was already learning from and living with. The question of labor and sanitation, labor in particular, was impossible to avoid, even though I didn't come in with questions of labor at the forefront, but it so profoundly impinges on people's lives, insofar as it remains the major employer. Of course, people are in all kinds of other industries, but... a large majority of people are either in or have close relatives who are in sanitation labor. So whereas for other castes and other sections of society, the tight correlation from the past of caste and occupation has totally unraveled. But for this community, it's arguably had the reverse since the 19th century. especially when certain other occupations, quote-unquote traditional occupations, like weaving baskets and ritual musicianship have become less available. So there's actually a concentration in sanitation labor that wasn't there in the past. So it was partly just sort of inescapable because it shapes people's lives in such profound ways, but also in terms of kind of representations of... the entire question of untouchability, the way that, you know, Speaker 3 (13:13) Gandhi and others, Mulgharajan and a whole set of kind of representational practices in the mid-20th century made the quote-unquote sweeper, kind of the synecdoche for all Dalit communities, right? I mean, how many books have you seen where the caste question is... The book cover has, you know, a picture of a sweeper, someone holding a broom, right? That sort of history of representation also kind of burdens this community with... Speaker 3 (13:55) you know, serving as a symbol of a broader set of questions that arguably nobody asked to be put in that position, but that is kind of the state of affairs that we've inherited. Speaker 1 (14:11) I mean, you also, you have this lovely article, Odor and Order, where you actually talk about You also take up the caste state nexus in some sense, right? You talk about the role of the colonial state in enforcing that connection between caste and occupation, right? By funneling these groups into urban sanitation labor, right? So it's not, so, you know, what one often thinks about. Dalits escaping caste labor by moving from countryside to city. But in that piece, you show that, you know, the labor follows them because of how they get conscripted into the infrastructures of urban governance. Speaker 3 (15:03) Yes, totally. Speaker 3 (15:06) colonial state had a de facto policy of housing sanitation workers next to sanitation infrastructure, which it was constructing at the very same time. And that has profound, you know, sensory and chemical, you know, kind of impacts on people's lives, right? What we call environmental racism in the US. I mean, it's a kind of variant on that, right? Speaker 3 (15:36) that, yeah, that shapes so many things. So, yeah, the colonial state was, of course, as we, I'm sure many people we've talked with have talked about this, but, you know, was very interested in making use of existing traditions of exploiting Dalit labor. Also, the colonial state ran municipalities as a profit-making enterprise. So, which is, you know, quite strange, really. But that means that, right, the, you know, the resources are even scarcer than they are usually for municipalities. And so that entirely depends on the exploitation of valid labor and the sort of municipal authorities in the colonial period were, as Rupert was saying, in the agrarian context. Speaker 3 (16:33) The same words for certain municipal titles, work descriptions of tasks were also caste terms. So, you know, the sweeper colony would be called the dome colony in parts of Bihar, or it would be called the halal whore colony in parts of UP and so on. Speaker 1 (16:55) Joel, you had said that you didn't intend to think about labor. You were, you know, you went in. with questions about religion and you were sort of forced to contend with labor. So I, you know, one of the things that is so remarkable in your book, Deceptive Majority, is this question of religion and what you refer to as the religious alterity of sanitation labor castes. This is a quote, and I'm going to read it out and then ask you to say a little bit more about. this tradition that you sort of delve into. So you say the idea of the transhistorically Hindu untouchable emerged scarcely a century ago, and it ran athwart the collective self-perception of the sanitation labor costs. So drawing on a range of sources from the 1870s to the 1920s, I contend that the sanitation labor costs of North India understood themselves as neither Hindu nor Muslim, but as members of a Qom or Umat. a cohesive, autonomous, socio-religious community centered on Lal Beg, an antinomian prophet who moved in a largely Islamicate narrative world. Hindus and Muslims, moreover, acknowledged the religious alterity of the Lal Begis as they were called. So what was this Lal Begi tradition? And why was it important for you to... Speaker 1 (18:28) to understand sanitation labor caste, not just in terms of labor, but in terms of their sort of religious practices. Speaker 3 (18:42) Bhagwan Das, as I'm sure you know, was a writer and thinker who worked with Ambedkar in Ambedkar's last years. Speaker 3 (18:56) and really was responsible more than perhaps anyone else for bringing Ambedkar's message to sanitation labour castes. First he wrote in Urdu, then he wrote in Hindi, on kind of the history of the community. And before he passed, he was working on a kind of big... Speaker 3 (19:18) social, political, and religious history of what the community is now called the Valmiki or Valmiki community. And it's in some of his essays that I first came across this term, this, you know, Lalbeg and the term Lalbegi, you know, follower of Lalbeg. And Bhagwan Das cited various, you know, colonial sources on the, on a kind of, you know, prophet, from the Mughal period, who, and that was the focus of devotion for the sanitation labor cast. And he wrote about this and followers of Laobig being a community that's neither Hindu nor Muslim. So that very much intrigued me. And then I followed his footnotes into the colonial archive. And there's... enormous amounts of material actually in the 19th century. Loudbake shows up in Rudyard Kipling's Kim, shows up in all kinds of places you might not expect. And so there's a rich archive on this tradition, which includes missionaries and Speaker 3 (20:37) you know, folklorists, you know, local and foreign, like civil administrators in 1880s Benares who are like out there recording folk tales and songs of the community to, you know, be out of curiosity and so on. So... In this, it emerges that there's a whole set of sort of liturgical hymns that talk about, that give a sense of the kind of self-conception, collective self-conception of this community. And these Lalbegi songs and stories and hymns are quite explicit. Sometimes we talk about how the Samaltern traditions, you have