The Pariah Problem, by Rupa Viswanath

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The “Pariah Problem”: A History of Evasion from Colony to Postcolony The “Pariah Problem,” as it was initially called, irrupted into administrative consciousness and public debate in the Madras Presidency of the early 1890s. What was to be done about the plight of those we today call Dalits, members of the so-called untouchable castes and descendants of unfree agricultural laborers? Among the very first public statements of the problem was an editorial published in the presidency’s leading daily, The Hindu, in June 1891, which proclaimed that the condition of these castes is truly miserable. The Hindus do not recognize them as part of their community and nothing can be more humiliating and intolerable than the treatment that the Pariahs . . . receive from the Hindus of higher castes. The Hindu religion has done nothing for them except to prescribe a most abject slavery as the lot for which they alone are fit.1

Later that year, an editorial in the same paper entitled “The Disabilities of the Pariah,” summed up the crux of the problem thus:

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That they are the poorest, the most neglected, the most ill-treated class, there can be no doubt whatever. Some Hindus may think that the Pariah has no right to a better condition than he is now in; but that this condition is the most miserable imaginable even the most bigoted Hindu will admit. . . . [Yet] they are too ignorant, too poor and too degraded to be able to help themselves.2

The first government report on the Pariah Problem, written by the Collector of Chingelput, J. H. A. Tremenheere in 1891 (and published later, in 1892), argued that the Pariah was specifically the state’s problem. The Pariah Problem, then, marks the recognition, in public debate and in the halls of government, not only of that subpopulation as particularly abject, but also of Pariahs as a group whose improvement was the responsibility of others. For their very condition, to cite The Hindu again, “must be a blot on any civilized society.”3 Since being raised, the Pariah Problem has never ceased to be a matter of public and official concern in India. Although the phrase the “Pariah Problem” has long since dropped out of usage, the moral, economic, and political condition of the subpopulation to which it refers has remained a central fixture of public and administrative discourse and political contest; over time, the very recalcitrance of the problem has been the subject of anxious commentary. In a moment of remarkable candor, for instance, current Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh observed that “even after sixty years of constitutional and legal support [provided by the postcolonial Indian state], there is still . . . discrimination against Dalits. . . . The only parallel . . . [is] apartheid.”4 Indeed, if anything, the problem has acquired renewed salience in the past two decades with the unanticipated rise of Dalit-led political parties in the 1990s—a revolution nevertheless coterminous with instances of brutal anti-Dalit violence across the subcontinent.5 This book argues that the peculiar recalcitrance of the Pariah Problem can be better understood by studying the first thirty years following the fateful emergence of the problem. It is in this period that key features of current public debate and the languages of nationwide state policy were conceived. These include (1) the idea that caste itself, and caste discrimination, are religious phenomena; (2) the prioritization of the “social” as the realm in which change is to be sought via gradualist reform, rather than through the state’s enforcement of fundamental 2 i n t r o d u c t i o n

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rights of equality and access; and (3) the narrow focus on “reservations” (India’s affirmative-action policies) in education and government employment as a substitute for (and not merely a supplement to) structural change. Specifically, the book shows how during the thirty years from roughly 1890 to 1920 these ways of thinking emerged through the concerted efforts of a “caste–state nexus”—a de facto alliance between British and Indian officials and native high-caste employers of Pariah labor—to first elide, and when that was no longer possible, to downplay and avoid, the problem that the Pariah posed. As a consequence of concerted strategies of evasion, the Pariah Problem was only posed and never solved, then as now.

The Trope of Gentle Slavery Much of this book will be devoted to examining why and how the Pariah Problem emerged when it did, and what happened subsequently. But here we must first ask a related but distinct question: Namely, why did it not emerge sooner? No one imagined in the 1890s that the conditions they were describing were anything new. Why had they failed to excite concern earlier? A critical piece of the answer is the colonial state’s complicated relationship with agrarian slavery—as well as with agrarian slave owners.

When the British first established themselves in what would become the Madras Presidency, much of the land, especially in the incredibly fertile rice-growing regions, was worked by hereditarily unfree men and women who labored under conditions foreign visitors had no hesitation in describing as slavery. These laborers were also described as slaves (Tamil, aṭimaiyāṭkāḷ) in native discourse. In Madras, as in other parts of India, they belonged to castes considered lower than all others, castes we today call Dalit. The very names of these castes (in the Tamilspeaking regions of Madras, these were Paraiyar, Pallar, and Chakkiliyar) were used by Indians interchangeably with words meaning slave.6 By the 1890s, the caste name Paraiyar was anglicized to Pariah (whence the English term “pariah”) and was used as an inclusive term by officials to refer to all Dalit castes, not just Paraiyars. Pariahs in Madras, throughout the nineteenth century, were kept in miserable conditions, subject to violent physical discipline, often tied to particular plots of land, and i n t r o d u c t i o n 3

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actively prevented from absconding or obtaining land of their own, as chapters 1–4 will describe. And their condition was permanent. They were also ideologically construed as outsiders to native society; symbolically degraded; and portrayed as immoral, lacking intelligence, and unfit for anything but manual labor. They were forced to live apart from all others, and even their touch was considered polluting.7 That the British were not so concerned about this in the earlier part of the nineteenth century is hardly surprising. They were heavily involved in the slave trade, and slave-based production played an important role in the American colonies; prior to the rise of the abolition movement in the early 1830s, to call something slavery did not necessarily constitute a moral critique. After the American colonies had rebelled, however, and calls for abolition were becoming a real force across the British world, the demand that slavery in the colonies be abolished began to resound loudly in policy circles. Surely now the Pariah Problem would rush to center stage, especially given how eager the colonial state was to represent India as benighted?

Not yet. The colonial state’s foremost commitment was to maximizing tax revenue. Historians are familiar with persistent tensions between the state and landowners on this score. What is often overlooked is that the landowners on whom the state depended for tax revenue were themselves highly dependent on Pariah labor, and so, therefore, was the colonial state. Anything that threatened their control of Pariah laborers was a threat to the entire system of production, the surpluses of which filled colonial coffers, and this control rested on the enforced landlessness and hereditary unfreedom of Pariah families. East India Company officials in India, knowing the foundational role of native labor regimes to their own revenue, far from bringing Pariah servitude to wider attention, sought instead to have India exempted from the empire-wide abolition of slavery that was passed in 1833.

To justify this exemption they pioneered an argument that would soon become an article of faith among Company hands, and whose basic form would continue to be echoed in the following decades, down to some present-day writing: the trope of “gentle slavery.”8 According to Company officials, traditional forms of Pariah servitude in India were incomparable with slavery elsewhere in the world and were based on mutualistic and even familial relations between master and servant. In a classic statement of the benevolence of Indian slavery, C. S. Crole, Collector of Chingleput 4 i n t r o d u c t i o n

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District in northern Madras, expressed a view that would become utterly conventional by the 1870s: [Madras’s slavery is] slavery under its mildest and most benignant aspect. An institution from which the mind revolts, owing to the horrors and degradation incidental to it in other and modern countries, is here presented so as to contrast favourably with the state of conquered peoples, even when nominally free, elsewhere.9

Crole first foregrounds his own sympathies with abolitionism: slavery is “an institution from which the mind revolts.” But he does this only to insist that the term “slavery” was in truth not applicable to labor in Madras’s countryside; indeed, Madras’s slavery was superior to freedom elsewhere. Other officials would echo this sentiment: so benign were Madras’s masters that bondage was in fact preferable to free labor (see chapters 7 and 8). According to this logic, the poor servant would at least be sheltered during times of hardship such as famine, rather than subject to the cruel tides of supply and demand that could drown the modern laborer. India’s existence in a timeless traditional realm outside history meant that slavery there was not about gain and accumulation but merely the reproduction of accustomed rules in which the inequality between master and slave was mitigated by personal ties.

Although company officers managed to delay abolition in the subcontinent by only ten years, until 1843, this portrait of the relations between Pariahs and those for whom they labored proved a lasting success.

After that, officers who inadvertently used the term “slave” in official writings could be reprimanded; Indrani Chatterjee has aptly described this, in the context of her work on gender and slavery, as “abolition by denial.”10 The actual conditions of Pariah servitude, however, remained largely unchanged. While ceasing to legally recognize slavery within its territories, the British did nothing to challenge the condition of agrarian unfreedom. In the rare instances when antislavery legislation was actually enforced, it was directed not at the pervasive forms of agrarian slavery but at the relatively small-scale practices of the export and import of slaves in ports and cities.11 In any event, the existence of bondage had never depended on the legislation of the foreign ruler but was based instead on complex forms of local power and state authority that deprived the Pariah of any alternative livelihood. It was held in place, in i n t r o d u c t i o n 5

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the last instance, by brute physical force and well-established practices of individual and collective punishment in cases of insubordination.

The evidence this book provides thus throws cold water on credulous accounts of a tradition of “mutual obligation” in which Dalit laborers (whether called slaves or, after 1843, “agrestic laborers”) too had “rights.” As I show, using a wide variety of unexamined archival sources, conflict and violence were the norm (see especially chapters 3, 5, and 8).

When Pariahs discerned an opportunity to escape from the “protection” of their landed caste masters, they responded with unhesitating swiftness. Nevertheless, as we will see throughout this book, elites and officials would never cease to insist that the relationship between Pariahs and their masters was mutually beneficial, at least as long as the Pariah was kept safe from “outside influences” such as missionaries or, by the early twentieth century, Dalit activists. In 1885, the Collector of Tanjore, J. B. Pennington, had the following frank opinion on the condition of Dalit laborers in his district and even forgot to hold back the word slave: “It seems not unlikely that slaves who are fairly well-treated by their masters and are paid in kind are really happier (so long as there is no actual failure of crop) than free men struggling for a bare existence in a state of competition.”12 This, nota bene, was some forty years after the legal abolition of slavery.

The Problem Spiritualized, Then Socialized This book tells the story of what happened when Dalits’ efforts to better their condition finally forced the issue of their bondage and inhuman living conditions—the Pariah Problem itself—upon the reluctant attention of the colonial state. Dalits did not do this directly, at least not at first, but via a small group of Protestant missionaries who were brought into direct contact with them through rural preaching tours. Missionaries would remain the primary advocates and spokesmen of the Pariah for only a few decades. But their theological interpretation of the Pariah’s plight—namely, as essentially a matter of spiritual degradation—as well as the arguments landed castes would make to the state to prevent missionary interference in rural practices of caste domination, which they portrayed as a violation of Queen Victoria’s promise of religious neutrality, would shape thereafter the way Dalitness would be understood 6 i n t r o d u c t i o n

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(chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5). Such a “spiritualization” of caste, and particularly of the condition of Dalits, would prove to have far-reaching implications, setting the terms for M. K. Gandhi’s famous “Harijan uplift” campaign in the 1930s and forming the basis of the postcolonial state’s caste policies.

In the history of the Pariah Problem, then, from 1890 to the present day, religion played a pivotal role in the rationales underlying administrative policy and practice. The initial definition of the Pariah Problem as religious, furthermore, only proved critical because religion itself had simultaneously been construed as a sui generis realm of human existence beyond legitimate state control.13 While there is a global history, now well known, about the gradual seclusion of “the religious” from other realms of human practice, in India a defining moment was 1858, following a large-scale rebellion by Indian troops.14 Convinced that “hurt religious sentiments” were the cause of the unrest, Queen Victoria announced that she would avoid interfering in the religion of her subjects thenceforth, thereby inaugurating the principle of religious neutrality, which would play a decisive role in attempts to contend with the Pariah Problem.15 And the very strategy of confining the problem to a realm cordoned off from state interference would then be replicated in a new form at a second historical juncture, which is where this book ends. In the 1910s, representative governance was introduced to India, and Dalits themselves served as representatives of their own communities for the first time, which massively altered the political landscape. Henceforth, it was no longer religion alone that would house the Pariah Problem, but a new realm that I call the “national social” (chapter 9). Here the argument proffered by elites and officials was not that the condition of the Dalit was, in principle, beyond the legitimate reach of state intervention. On the contrary, the post-Independence state would make the uplift of Dalits a central feature of its mandate through the official “abolition” of ritual untouchability and a series of progressive measures and special protections for Dalits that were enshrined in the Indian Constitution itself. Nevertheless, the idea was firmly established in the 1920s that there was only so much that could be accomplished through state intervention and that the true solution to Dalits’ problems would have to come from the gradual and voluntary transformation of society itself—now understood as an organic totality wholly distinct from the state that governed it. Thus, we see at once the rise of a new figure on the Indian scene, the elite reformer i n t r o d u c t i o n 7

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who is valorized for his relative distance from formal politics and who vows to bring about the salvation of the Dalit. Again, Gandhi is the foremost example of a widespread phenomenon. This style of reformism goes hand in hand with a general climate of complacency on the part of the state to actively enforce the fundamental political rights and equal access granted to Dalits as a matter of law.

The Pariah Problem and the Historiography on Caste To say that the colonial state sought to deny and then minimize the problem of the Pariah will strike many readers as a counterintuitive claim.

Caste, as is now widely acknowledged, had by the end of the nineteenth century been firmly established in colonial state governance as a key organizational feature of native society; the colonial state itself systematized and gave administrative priority to what we now think of as caste.16 It has been demonstrated, furthermore, that in some cases, before the development of modern enumerative technologies, caste was a more fluid category than it would later become and was merely one of many determinants of social action.17 In light of these important historiographic developments, the Pariah’s emergence as a problem in the 1890s might seem simply another instance of the reification of caste.

But to extrapolate what became of the Pariah specifically from the important historical research on how caste in general was both transformed and fixed at the intersection of Orientalist assumptions and modern enumerative technologies is to rely on an ideological premise that emerged in this very period, namely the view that caste is a system.18 It is only on the basis of such an erroneous assumption that the differences among various castes would be assumed to be of the same basic nature, distinct merely in magnitude. On the contrary, the difference between Dalits and all others—a massive social hiatus rooted fundamentally in the political economy of agrarian production—ought to be called the caste difference and distinguished from other differences between castes. A racialized subpopulation and the descendants of agrarian slaves, Dalits are and were marked linguistically, sociospatially, and ritually as fundamentally outside society proper, a society comprising all other castes.19 The history of their entry into political modernity and the state’s paternal embrace would markedly diverge from a more generalizable account of 8 i n t r o d u c t i o n

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the “modernization” or “governmentalization” of caste. Caste in general— understood as an India-wide system of exclusive endogamous groups that determined social interaction—was thrust to the center of administrative practice through well-known mechanisms such as the census.

Yet, at the very same time, the qualitatively distinct nature of Dalit difference, which is irreducible to merely an extreme position on a continuum, was tenaciously denied. In the words of one exasperated official who sought to refuse pleas that Pariahs’ improvement be taken up by the state, “The Government has no reason to believe Pariahs . . . are at any disadvantage . . . or that . . . Pariahs qua Pariahs [are] treated . . . with any special disregard.”20

Tracking Evasion: The Implications of Method Unnamed Actors, Cast in Shadow With its goal of illuminating patterns of evasion, Pariahs “themselves” emerge most often only indirectly in this history. The argument presented here cannot and does not attempt to recover the voice of the Pariah as such.21 It would be possible, to be sure, to highlight primarily the achievements of extraordinary Dalit politicians and intellectuals whose actions changed the course of political and social life in south India. A number of recent and soon-to-be published writings will go a long way in making such persons’ works and lives accessible to a wider audience.22 My own commitment, however, is less to illustrating the achievements of extraordinary Dalit agents than to tracking the relentlessness of attempts by officials and others to redirect, redefine, channel, and divert the aims and projects of ordinary Dalit men and women. It is my conviction that this is as necessary to a history of India’s political present as is the recognition of positive gains and remarkable feats of courage.

The two projects are not analytically entirely separable of course, but perhaps a signal difference will be that this book’s “makers of history,” insofar as there are any, are less often Dalit leaders who voiced opposition and defiance (although these will emerge at various points) than the many mostly unnamed Dalit men and women who were often willing to risk everything in an ongoing effort to transform the conditions of their i n t r o d u c t i o n 9

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existence, much to the displeasure of officials and caste folk. There are no records of these persons “speaking in their own voices,” no forms of unadulterated self-representation. To the contrary, the very search for the “authentic Pariah” is a subject of this book and emerged precisely when Pariahs’ behavior confounded the expectations of elites, whose efforts to sideline Dalit projects often entailed questioning the authenticity of Dalit desires and motives.23 Dalit men and women emerge most often in this book as the intended targets of actions that were taken by caste elites, state officials, missionaries, and, finally, from the late 1910s onward, by Dalit political representatives. These men and women are at once ordinary and remarkable, insofar as they incrementally forced the hand of agents and agencies far more powerful than themselves, startling their opponents, disconcerting those with designs on them, and undeniably altering the dynamics of their social field, with consequences still felt today in Indian society—but, given the sheer scale of the forces ranged against them, without unmitigated and spectacular successes. This book seeks to map and analyze their actions, thereby charting an etiology of bitter conflict and broken promises.

States and Subjects Through the Evangelical Lens This book relies heavily on a large corpus of missionary writings that provide a rich depiction of laboring life in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury south India. These writings come, of course, with characteristic distortions. To cite just one example here, conflicts between landlords and Christian Dalit laborers were often styled by missionaries as examples of “religious persecution,” a trope by which missionaries emplotted themselves and their new converts in an ongoing biblical epic. Yet missionaries’ very meticulousness often provides evidence that tells against their own narratives. In this case, missionary records show clearly that the often violent struggles between Dalits and landed castes involved Christians and non-Christian Dalits alike, thus powerfully undermining missionaries’ own ideological reading of these conflicts as instances of religious violence. And this is just one example of the way in which the detailed quotidian records missionaries kept can be used to extract a story that both exceeds and corrects the one missionaries themselves told.

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The incredibly minute record of Pariahs’ lives, of the details of agrarian production, and of Pariahs’ relations with landed castes make the mission archive a unique and heretofore unexamined source for the study of rural caste relations, and one that routinely confutes the view of the colonial state.24 Unlike colonial officials, who spent relatively short periods of time in the countryside (tours of duty at the collectorate level typically ranged from three to five years), missionaries often spent several decades in villages. Where British officers rarely attained more than the most rudimentary knowledge of any native language and had to rely entirely on interpreters, missionaries routinely achieved a level of fluency that would put any modern anthropologist to shame. Officials usually toured native villages on horseback and—like most caste people—would rarely have so much as set foot in a Pariah settlement. As one official admitted when called upon to comment on the rural poor, “It is of course very difficult for Europeans to form any idea as to the condition of the poorer classes of natives.”25 In those matters, officials usually relied on village elites as intermediaries. Missionaries, by contrast, spent the bulk of their time in Pariahs’ cēris, segregated ghettoes set apart from the main village, the ūr. Many missionaries, moreover, took an ethnographic interest in native patterns of livelihood, painstakingly recording information on such topics as cropping techniques, yield, labor regimes, land tenure, irrigation, and food scarcity; these data are therefore an important source against which to read the records of the state on these matters.26 It is only from the letters of Wesleyan Methodist Rev. William Goudie, early and ardent champion of the Pariah and resident of Chingleput District for forty-odd years, that we know, for instance, that in times of severe scarcity, Pariah families would sometimes be forced to subsist entirely on a form of cactus that was normally fed only to cattle. Goudie knew this because the bright red seeds of the cactus remained undigested and were visible in the shit that Goudie painstakingly inspected in order to assess the extent of his congregation’s distress.27 Despite the richness of mission archives and the important contrapuntal role they can play with respect to other kinds of source material, including official records, south Asianist historians whose concern is servitude and agrarian labor in south India (and elsewhere on the subcontinent) have largely overlooked the writings of these most patient documentary observers of nineteenth-century laboring lives.28 Meanwhile,

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historians of religion have thus far asked of them a rather limited number of questions.29 Their uses of mission materials remain closely linked to the conscious preoccupations of missionaries themselves: conversion and the production of religious identity are the most favored themes of recent writings on Christian mission activity in colonial south Asia.30 While this has produced ever more sophisticated research on the history of religion in south Asia, and on forms of translation across religions, it confines missions and their activity to the purview of the religious in a manner that ironically accords very much with prevailing currents of nineteenthcentury missiology itself. One of the most important conceptual divisions missionaries helped to evolve and popularize in colonial India was that between the realm of religion and all others, including the “civil” and the “economic.” To put this slightly differently, missionaries inaugurated a form of thinking that has, ironically, penetrated the very practice of contemporary historiography; state and other archives are consulted by historians of “secular” phenomena, while missionary writings, by and large, are employed to address religious questions. The distinction so critical to the history of the Pariahs—the one between their spiritual degradation and their material condition—which missionaries developed in ways this book will explain, is now thoroughly naturalized in the discourses of both the postcolonial state and academic historiography.

This book focuses neither on the topics traditional to missionary histories nor on issues such as the religious identity of converts and the relations among missionary societies. Instead it discovers in missionary archives—scattered in cities and small towns in south India, in Scotland, England, and New Jersey—the minutiae of laboring life in late nineteenth-century Madras. In the volumes of annual reports and sheaf upon sheaf of letters penned by these scrupulous writers lies a record of how Pariahs, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, incrementally transformed their own relations with local governance, that series of concatenated relations of domination that inextricably linked agrarian labor regimes and the central bureaus of the state proper. By examining the production of new kinds of relations between the lowest strata of society and local state machineries—relations we can trace in great detail in mission archives but hardly at all in those of the colonial state—we may begin to understand how and why the Pariah Problem emerged as it did.

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The Caste–State Nexus and the Official Record The official archive’s numerous inconsistencies, outright contradictions, differences of opinion, misunderstandings, and so on, are impossible to ignore. Careful readers of state archives have never been under the illusion that the state is a unitary phenomenon. And yet, the discrepant and heterogeneous character of the archive is not merely random. Beyond the inevitable randomness of any complex endeavor, it is possible to discern patterns even within inconsistency. By reading the complex and internally discrepant state archive side by side with the picture of rural life derived from mission sources, new sense can be made of the former.

In this way it becomes possible to discern in the records of the colonial state something more than simple instances of inconsistency caused by the bureaucrat’s fabled incompetence, or the sheer magnitude of the state apparatus.

A brief example will suffice to illustrate this point. In 1888, the subcollector of Chingleput District in the Madras Presidency, C. M. Mullaly, came upon the fact that in village after village landlords listed themselves in village registers as the owners of the sites where Pariah laborers lived.

This claim of ownership was flatly illegal; the colonial state had long asserted its own jurisdiction over house sites. Yet control over those sites was prized by landlords, because it allowed labor contumacy to be met by threats of eviction. When Mullaly set about to correct village registers in accordance with official policy, however, he was severely upbraided by his superiors and forced to desist. An attempt to follow the letter of policy, that is to say, was prohibited outright.

No one explained to Mullaly what rule he had breached in attempting to implement policy; we must assume therefore that there were tacit rules of governance that experienced officers followed. But we do know that his actions immediately elicited the bitter protests of landlords.

The moments when tacit rules were unwittingly broken thus provide an opportunity to map the widely divergent kinds of relations official agents had with different subpopulations and, in particular, with landed castes.

Here, we see higher state officials instructing the upstart Mullaly on which rules he ought to follow and which to flout, based on how the implementation of policy impinged on high-caste landlords. Through slippages and disagreements recorded in the archive, as well the overwhelming

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evidence in mission writings of what effects consistent “slips” could have on laborers, we can trace precisely how and where the state’s operation critically differed from the letter of official policy.

Local caste power was continuous with that of the state in the governance of laboring populations. That is to say, for Pariahs, the state appeared, for all practical purposes, unitary. I call this pragmatic unity the caste–state nexus. The series of relations that obtained among such persons as Pariahs’ employers and other village landlords, munsifs, tahsildars, and collectors—although internally complex and often conflictual— were, in relation to Pariahs themselves, united in their effects. As this book will show, what Timothy Mitchell has called the “state effect”—the manner in which the state, although disjointed and heterogeneous, nevertheless takes on the appearance of unity—varies according to the social location of those subjected to its power.31 Thus, although the state and landed taxpayers were, from one perspective, in conflict, from the perspective of the Pariah they were unified.

South Asianist historians such as Robert E. Frykenberg observed long ago that the relations of officials to nonstate agents in colonial India, at the village level, were so interdependent as to make state projects impossible to pursue without the explicit consent and cooperation of local notables.32 While he and others have shown how native elites deployed new state practices and apparatuses to their own advantage, my own focus is on how the operations of the state, whether carried to effect by officials or nonofficials, shaped the lives of the most subordinated elements of native society. Frykenberg’s valuable insight, moreover, was couched in an understanding of the state—one that views it as unified and clearly distinguishable in its functions from the society it governs— that reflects the state’s own ideological self-representation rather than an account of its operation. One of my key arguments is that the very notion of a state–society relation obscures the fact that society is itself crosscut by antagonistic difference and that social elites had particular links to state institutions in ways that systematically worked to control labor.33 In a heated debate over state schemes for Pariah welfare that concerned this very issue of landlord claims over Pariah house sites (and some thirty years after Mullaly had his wrist slapped), one discountenanced landlord, in sheer disbelief that state agents might disagree with his manner of exercising authority over his laborers, exclaimed, “Government and mirasidars [landlords] are co-owners of property.”34 This might 14 i n t r o d u c t i o n

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be a puzzling remark were it not for the kinds of records we have been discussing; in this explicit declaration is a statement of the pervasiveness and durability of the caste–state nexus, whose most profound effects redounded on Pariah laborers. This nexus comes into relief through the juxtaposition of state records with those of missions that trod the same ground; by bridging the division between secular and religious record keeping that has until now largely been preserved, it becomes possible to illuminate how both diverse forms of authority worked in hitherto unremarked, close, if sometimes teeth-gritting harmony, to limit, redirect, and safely channel the Pariah Problem.35

Chapter Outline: Containing the Problem The book’s first chapter begins in northern Madras in the late 1890s, with an account of those quotidian forms of subjugation and tacit understandings that defined agrarian labor relations for Madras’s Pariahs. In so doing, it seeks to foreground two features of unfreedom and landlessness in colonial India. In conditions of relative land surplus and frequent labor shortage, control of servile labor was the critical determinant of productive capacity until at least the end of the nineteenth century. The entire system of land tenure and the property regimes of the landed castes was built around the permanent subordination of the landless and, in many cases, the permanent attachment of laboring families to particular parcels of land. Second, I show that being a landless laborer and being a Pariah were essentially, and not accidentally, linked. “Ritual” forms of degradation, the fixing of grain payments, casual slurs, and corporal punishment all functioned together in tense synchronicity, producing and reproducing the labor regime. Likewise, to be a mirasidar, a landed elite, was also to be of high caste. The chapter then shows how new forms of governmental regulation in the latter half of the nineteenth century, intended to curb the rights of mirasidars, were offset by other forms of regulation that indirectly entrenched aspects of the unfree labor regime that silently prevailed in the Tamil countryside, despite the legal abolition of slavery.

In the second chapter, I turn to Protestant missionaries and their role in shaping how Pariahs would be received by the colonial state. Beginning in the 1870s, Madras’s Pariahs took Protestant missions by storm, not simply asking but indeed demanding to be converted. The missionary i n t r o d u c t i o n 15

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world exploded with discourse on the Pariah, which took place against a wider attempt by missionaries to contend theoretically and practically with caste difference in the church. Scholarly writings are virtually unanimous in depicting caste and Christianity as antithetical and missionaries themselves as staunch opponents of caste and as promoters of an egalitarian ideology, with the most significant exception being the recent work of anthropologist David Mosse.36 I argue that this standard picture of Protestant missionary opposition to caste is largely overdrawn and, moreover, simply mistaken in treating opposition to caste as tantamount to a wholesale plea for social equality.37 Missionaries in fact only wished to oppose what they perceived as the genuinely pernicious face of caste, its “religious” aspect, comprising meaningless ritual, irrational fears of contagion, and the cruelty those beliefs elicited. Opposition to those features of caste was perfectly compatible, however, with a firm commitment on their part to what they viewed as caste’s legitimate “civil” aspect, namely social differentiation, and they encouraged the maintenance of “natural hierarchies” between landed castes and laborers.38 Missionaries’ profound conceptual innovation then was to redefine caste as essentially a matter of religion and in principle, distinct from labor and political economy.39 The third chapter analyzes the concrete effects of Pariahs’ alliances with missionaries in the countryside and thereby reveals key features of the labor relations that would shape the future of the Pariah Problem.

Mission records disclose that—quite at odds with the state’s representation of “gentle” relations between Pariahs and their employers—Pariahs’ lives were characterized by unremitting conflict and harassment, a fact to which later Dalit writers would attest. Pariahs were able, in spite of missionaries’ social conservatism, to transform critical aspects of contests with village elites; they could, for instance, make the fullest use of the fact that missionaries ensured Pariahs were treated fairly at the local levels of the state’s administrative structure. In alliance with missionaries, then, Pariahs wrought the transformation of their villages from theaters of oppression to sites of struggle. Finally, the missionary presence would eventually force inconvenient facts about rural bondage to the reluctant attention of British officials.

The moment that marks the definitive emergence of the Pariah as a problem for the state is surely the release in 1892 of Collector J. H. A. Tremenheere’s “Note on the Pariahs of Chingleput.” The fourth chapter charts the series of administrative accidents that led to that document 16 i n t r o d u c t i o n

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and the ways in which missionaries intervened at key moments to channel the state in particular directions. Most importantly, this chapter illustrates a repertoire of evasion that would be rehearsed again and again. Tremenheere’s findings were derided as “sensational,” and the specificity of Dalit subordination was altogether denied. In so doing, officials laid the groundwork for a whole series of equivocations that would, as with missionary discourse, make caste a matter of religion alone, inaugurating the long project of dividing religion and political economy. Meanwhile, tacit codes of state practice—often proceeding directly against state policy, which I discern by reading slippages in the official archive—worked in concert with mirasidars and other landed elites to ensure labor control. These tacit forms of cooperation and institutional practice represent the caste–state nexus.

Missionaries pioneered the view that Pariahness and religion were essentially linked. In the fifth chapter I train my sights on how this conceptual twinning entered the language of administration with far-reaching consequences in the late 1890s. The efforts of a few missionaries to help Pariahs were dashed on the shoals of religious neutrality, the promise to avoid interference in native religious sensibilities promulgated by Queen Victoria in 1858 in the wake of the 1857 rebellion. In a series of village-level conflicts between Pariahs and their caste masters, in some of which missionaries too were implicated, the meaning and practical implications of neutrality itself were transformed. It was at this time that native elites began to portray a whole range of caste prerogatives, including traditional techniques for perpetuating Pariahs in their servitude, as matters of inalienable religious right. The missionary consensus on the condition of the Pariah—namely, its construal as essentially a religious matter—entered the vocabulary and practices of colonial administration, as well as the language of rural caste elites. Although notionally Pariahs’ protectors, missionaries themselves would thus provide landlords with the conceptual vocabulary to effectively oppose missionary efforts to help the Pariah. At the same time, for practical purposes, officials allowed elites to understand the public spaces and public resources allotted to the village as the preserve of caste people alone.

The sixth chapter traces the effects of Britain’s “new liberalism” on the Pariah Problem in Madras. New liberalism, a welfarist ideology that emerged in Britain purporting to resolve a growing number of social questions such as poverty, shaped state policy in the first decade of the twentieth century.40 In colonial Madras, for the first time, the state came i n t r o d u c t i o n 17

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to regard the improvement of Panchamas (as Pariahs became known by this time) as not simply a mark of its benevolence but as its own duty, echoing the new liberalism of the metropole.41 Where missionaries and state officials had hitherto come to share only conceptions about Pariahness, now, with the inauguration of welfarism, colonial state officials used missionaries to provide expertise, resources, and pastoral care to test schemes for Panchamas’ improvement. Most important of these was the settlement of Panchamas as tenants on mission-managed farms. While the scale of the scheme was small, it provoked considerable outrage, and an elite discourse protesting the alleged “inauthenticity” of Panchama conversions to Christianity erupted in the public sphere. Prior to this moment no one had been concerned about the religion of Panchamas, let alone what motives guided it. Yet today concerned citizens continue to worry that Dalits are “induced” to convert by wily missionaries’ promises of material betterment.

The next phase in the ongoing story of the evasion of the Pariah Problem concerns the development of a policy to grant Panchamas ownership over their house sites, as I describe in chapter 7. House sites, throughout the history of the Pariah Problem, had been matters of contest. Masters claimed to own these sites and threatened laborers with eviction for any sign of insubordination; this was an utterly routine form of intimidation.

Yet officials, as they had in the days when slavery was still legal, continued to insist that relations between masters and servants were gentle and mutually beneficial. This chapter shows how insistently evidence to the contrary obtruded into the official archive, corroborating mission records. Moreover, the protests against these state measures, coming not only from employers of Panchama labor but from officials both Indian and British as well, reveal the plasticity and continued utility of the trope, pioneered by British India hands seeking to stave off abolition, that Indian servitude was benign and that laborers, unless mischievously influenced by outside agitators, were perfectly content.

Chapter 8 follows the violence that erupted when the house-site scheme, against objections, was implemented in parts of Tanjore District, where a government report had confirmed that masters’ use of house sites to threaten laborers was widespread. Government assured landlords that all they were doing was making laborers more “invested” in their homesteads and therefore (even) less likely to run away. Mirasidars were unconvinced, and state attempts to put the scheme into practice met 18 i n t r o d u c t i o n

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with attacks on Dalits and repeated warnings from mirasidars to government that intervention had best not be too intrusive or social upheaval would result. Dalits themselves, meanwhile, in analyzing the conflicts surrounding the house-site issue, refused the idea that caste was a matter of ritual alone and denied that their own poverty was anything but the direct result of the concerted actions of caste folk. But although officials continued to insist that the economic rationalization of agricultural labor regimes was essential to the “public good,” which was now redefined to include the Panchama, they were unwilling to push too hard against the intransigence of native elites. Reforms were thus limited in practice.

However, contrary to the expectations of both native elites and British officials, who continued to portray Dalits as content with traditional arrangements, Dalits seized on every possibility provided them to escape the yoke of hereditary bondage.

The ninth and final chapter charts how state intervention was transformed as the new system of devolution in governance, dyarchy, was put in place. Beginning in 1918, Dalit representatives entered Madras’s Legislative Council—the first fruits of a governmental design to call upon this subpopulation of Indians to learn to “represent themselves.” Their effort to do so—often by simply insisting that the ameliorative schemes outlined in the previous chapters be properly enacted—was evaded by the invocation of the social. Presented as the salvation of Dalits’ ills by native elites of all political stripes, the idea of a united national social, a realm outside politics and legitimate governmental interference, was now increasingly embraced by British state officialdom as well; social reform was, in the language of the day, a “domestic, not imperial” matter.

Yet the concerted and unanimous resistance with which Dalit political claims were met shows clearly that the social was not an organic whole but was constituted by a fundamental and profoundly antagonistic division. Unique evidence of this division is preserved in the colonial archive itself—principally in Tamil petitions from ordinary Dalits who sought out their representatives from across the Presidency—but was never acknowledged by officers of the state or in the discourse of the (nonDalit) native public sphere. In short, new liberal welfarist ideologies had previously seemed to demand state intervention in Pariah welfare. But by the late 1910s and 1920s, responsibility for the social was devolved onto natives by the colonial state, considered to be a matter for natives to work out among themselves. i n t r o d u c t i o n 19

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Society, moreover, was a temperamental beast: Dalit politicians were told repeatedly that while society could and would improve itself, rushing the process would prove catastrophic.42 The notion of an autonomous social that cannot and should not be pushed too fast into change or reform continues to inform public discourse in India today and implicitly to justify the nonenforcement of laws and protections for Dalits that were enshrined in the Indian Constitution by its principal author, the great civil-rights leader B. R. Ambedkar.43 The concluding chapter summarizes this and other implications of the book for the present day.

Names and Nomenclators: On “Dalit” and Related Usages Virtually every article or book written on Dalits in the past couple of decades registers their authors’ discomfort with the lack of an entirely suitable term for these populations. As Simon Charsley puts this in his historical account of the term “untouchable,” a writer’s preferred term is interpreted as a sign of his or her “moral and political allegiance. . . .

The opposition of perspectives is such that taking sides is almost unavoidable.”44 Indeed. A requisite first step might therefore be to ask on what basis these opposing perspectives claim authority and how in turn their authority is impugned.

There are at least three kinds of difficulties to which a term identifying a subpopulation may give rise, and the identification of each depends on a distinct justificatory criterion. Consider “Dalit.” Some scholars have observed, quite rightly, that only a minority among these populations self-identify as Dalit.45 Wishing to conform to the usage of their informants, these scholars adduce what I will call the criterion of self-designation. But a problem arises because there is no single term used by all Dalits. To refer to the all-India category, self-designation is of no help. Therefore some have chosen “untouchable;” although it too is very rarely a self-designation, more than one scholar has justified its use by avowing that it captures the existential plight of the persons so described more evocatively than any other.46 Yet Dalit does happen to be the only term chosen by at least some members of these groups to refer to themselves as an India-wide population, and it is now wellestablished in scholarly usage.

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A second difficulty is pointed out by historians, who will note that although it is widely considered by academics and English-language media persons to be most politic today, Dalit is anachronistic when speaking of colonial India; this is the criterion of historical propriety.

Names that correspond to specific jātis are very frequently considered by a section of those to whom they refer to be derogatory (Pariah, for instance). Alternatively, as with the Gandhian moniker Harijan, a name loudly announces its allegiance to a specific politics. But these names are nevertheless used, typically with apologies, in order to preserve historical propriety, and their use is further justified as simply a matter of efficiency: the terms and spellings that are most frequently found in sources are used to avoid confusion.

A third difficulty is often introduced under the rubric of referential rigor, and it has been most recently articulated by Charsley, specifically in order to persuade scholars to desist entirely from the use of any labels purporting to describe a pan-Indian reality, including untouchable (the historical emergence of which concept he traces) and, eo ipso, Dalit.47 Charsley argues that untouchable ought not be used, because it fails to refer to a group that shares any essential characteristics. But this is not true. The essential characteristic that all those within this group share is that of belonging to castes which, in their own local caste order, fill an identical structural role—that of the morally inferior outsider. The members of such castes are part of a recognized pan-Indian category of person referred to by different names in different regions, as well as by various pan-Indian terms (panchama, avarna, chandala), all of which are treated by native speakers as interchangeable.48 Moreover, a century of practices of mobilization and technologies of rule premised on an allIndia category have imbued it with altogether real political force.

The above typology of criteria should suffice to illustrate that the naming of Dalits—in scholarly work as much as in the annals of administration—is embedded in normative expectations about what names should do. These norms are themselves rarely made explicit, let alone debated, and it is variance in these norms that has resulted in the bewildering array of alleged problems to which these names give rise; the problem is less with the names themselves than with competing conceptions of what we use names for. In this book, therefore, I want to make explicit my own expectations at the outset. I use particular names and

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analyze their emergence not in order to reveal the self-consciousness of the groups in question, though that may sometimes come through, nor simply to be as efficient in my reference to my sources as possible. Rather it is a central argument of this book that the contexts in which particular terms emerge, are given content, and take hold are critical to understanding what they authorize administratively, politically, and socially.

Thus, when speaking in my own voice I generally use “Dalit,” whereas when discussing a particular policy or style of thinking, I often use the terminology of those whose practices or ideas are under consideration.

More telling than simple names themselves are the various concepts that are thought to attach to them: whether or not one refers to Dalits as Pariahs, for example, indicates whether their degradation is being theorized as following from their ritual rank within Hinduism (as those who deployed Pariah supposed) or from some more complex configuration of political-economic and cultural forces (as many Dalit activists today would assert). And these conceptual differences have concrete practical entailments, determining the reasons and actions of social actors: It is these conceptual consequences that I wish to capture.

It might be useful to recall the original function of the nomenclator.

A nomenclator is today used generically to refer to someone who names, but in Roman history the nomenclator was a slave who served his master by remembering names, whispering them in his master’s ear when someone approached so that his master might smoothly offer a greeting and perhaps solicit the visitor’s vote in an upcoming election to public office. The name’s purpose was inseparable from the social-political function of the nomenclator: it was not called upon to refer accurately, to be true to historical provenance, nor to divulge the named person’s sense of himself. Its purpose was to facilitate effective (in this case political) action. In like fashion, this book will trace the emergence and transformation of “Pariah,” where the latter and its successors, such as “Panchama,” “depressed classes,” and “Adi-Dravida,” are not treated as names that can be judged for accuracy in isolation. Rather I will describe their force as concepts whose deployment in a political-administrative field would have consequences for the people to whom it referred, for the style of governing it inaugurated, and not least, for the forms of public life— where well-meaning concern for Dalits coexists with rising resentment and violence—modern Indians today take for granted.49

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