Paper short abstract:

Dalit assertion, infrastructural interventions, religious minorities, borderlands

Paper long abstract:

While considerable amount of research has occurred in India on the causes and effects of what is called the Dalit resurgence, almost nothing has been written on Pakistan. Gazdar (2007) has argued that this silencing of caste is born out of "embarrassment" within the Pakistani elites of the continuity of "traditional" social forms in the face of modernist aspirations of the Islamist and cosmopolitan types respectively. My field area is the district of Tharparkar, a region with a Hindu majority, where over 200 kilometres of roads are being constructed to facilitate access to a coalfield being developed to provide power to an electricity starved country. Tharparkar is changing, and one of the surprising outcomes of these infrastructural interventions is the growth of an assertive Dalit movement, the Dalit Sujhag Tehrik (DST). The changes are allowing for the formation of a new class of economically independent Dalits, largely employed by non-governmental organizations, thereby ending the dependence on Muslim landlords. The DST functions within an increasingly narrow space provided by the Pakistani state by framing their struggle as against upper caste Hindus, arguing the Dalits are natural allies of Pakistan. On the other hand, the DST has attempted to stop some of the more abusive and exploitative practices by the landed classes against Dalits, such as the widespread use of beggar or forced labour. I will argue despite the restrictions and difficulties, the DST is attempting to change the discourse and provide self-esteem to one of the most marginalized community in Pakistan.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the futures that Japanese Buraku and South Asian Dalit are building together.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2003, a small group of Japanese sanitation workers has travelled annually from Tokyo to Chennai, India to meet with a group they understand as comrades - the Dalit. Every year, over the course of a week, the Japanese visitors tour Dalit places of work, their homes, and share with them stories of pain and discrimination - the difficulties of marginalization alongside the triumphs of resistance. Using this type of solidarity trip as my ethnographic crucible, my talk examines how Buraku and Dalit activists work to create better futures for themselves, together. I argue that we can understand politics here as the labor of creating together venues in which subjects practice being the selves they want to become.

At the center of my analysis is an examination of how and when the viability of political solidarity hangs on the cultivation of a "fellow feeling," a formative process of learning to feel alongside another. At times this cultivation is successful, at other times it not simply fails but renders the entire endeavor ethically suspect. Following the path of the sanitation workers, I examine the rules that permit and constrain that sympathetic traffic, as well as the moments that lead to its blockage. How is it that these efforts at establishing and affirming connection might allow imaginaries of a future without discrimination?

Paper short abstract:

Western imperialist and Indian majoritarian politics inspire aspirations for ethical reform among marginalised Bengali Muslims. I reflect on how these aspirations manifest in the idiom and practice of Islamic reformism and the consequences of this imagined alternative for liberal models of change.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the complex combination of local and modern, political and religious elements in the ethical imagination of Muslims in rural West Bengal. Drawing on two years ethnographic fieldwork I stress that for this stigmatized group, Indian liberal modernity does not offer the equally distributed increase in wellbeing that was promised, but rather has materialized in exploitative capitalism and continued marginalization. My interlocutors link the sense of moral degradation to the influence of Western liberalism, which drives unbridled individualism, leading to social fragmentation and a decline of dharma, the local ethics of justice and order.

In this context, the Islamic movement Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) is stepping into the sense of moral failure and exclusion experienced by Bengali Muslims, drawing on the idiom of all-encompassing dharma to incorporate local sociality, rationalized religious conviction, and modern civility. Disenfranchised from political voice, reformist Muslims aim for individual reform rather than collective mobilization, through techniques of the self (both religious practice and modern education) that promises liberation from the 'backward' past and modern personhood. Islamic Mission School are a hallmark of this imagined future.

TJ rejects Western imperialist liberalism but fosters an 'alternative modernity' - an ethics of equality, solidarity, and humility that counters radical individualism and consumerism. I reflect on the ways in which such alternative modernities offer critique or support for universal liberal paradigms such as human rights and the capability approach.

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Paper short abstract:

In Nepal, the future is often imagined as 'casteless', yet caste-based discrimination persists. This paper suggests that psychological essentialism, a bias which is well-known in cognitive science but often overlooked in anthropology, can help explain this situation.

Paper long abstract:

In the hills of East Nepal, an 'ethics of castelessness' has emerged. This ethics is best captured by the statement, frequently repeated in the area, that 'there are only two "castes": men and women'. This statement, regardless of its implications for gender, is invariably made in order to deny the existence of caste and the notion that there are multiple 'kinds' of humans.

Yet in practice, castelessness remains unrealised. While the discrimination which Dalits face in the area has diminished and changed over the past decades, shifting away from the public sphere and becoming confined to a more secretive, domestic sphere, it nonetheless proves remarkably tenacious. A number of macroscopic social projects have attempted to rid the country of caste-based discrimination, including changes in the Nepali law, modernist projects of 'development', anti-casteist activities by Maoist insurgents, etc. Yet despite all of these projects, the perception that Dalits are inherently 'dirty' and 'lowly' remains common.

Castelessness, therefore, remains an incomplete project, a future which is imagined but remarkably hard to bring about. This paper asks why this is the case. Acknowledging the many, well-documented sociological reasons for which discrimination against Dalits persists, the paper suggests that an overlooked part of the explanation may lie in psychological factors. In particular, a bias known as 'psychological essentialism', well studied in cognitive science but less so in anthropology, affords important insights into the issue.

Paper short abstract:

Sociology defines caste as unchangeable status which bestow by birth.becoming Dalit to non-Dalit is almost impossible in Hindu caste system but this paper delves into how power elite can change from Dalit to non-Dalit caste with the case study of inter-caste married couples of Madhesi community.

Paper long abstract:

Mainzan system, particularly the one practiced amongst the caste groups from Madheshi community is a custom of selecting head of community by respective caste members. The nominated head takes role in solving the problems which may arise from time to time in the community. One of the roles performed by the head relates to deciding the fate of couples that have eloped after inter-caste marriage. When any community member elopes with a Dalit girl the Mainzan decided the fate of couple; he either rejects the couple from his community or accepts the Dalit bride with some conditions. To accept the Dalit bride Mainzan must uplift her caste status. After the bride becomes non-Dalit, her relationship with her maternal family also changes and needs to treat differently. This paper delves into such incidences through case study of inter-caste married couples of Madhesi community in Nepal. It focuses on the Dalit and non-Dalit's familial relationship, the conditions such couples need to fulfill after accepting marriage, and the problems they face. On the one hand, non-Dalit cannot imagine the marital relationship with Dalit, and on the other hand, when such a situation takes place they cannot boycott them from their family. The paper juxtaposes the outcomes of agency versus structure and the relationship between Dalit and non-Dalit.

Keywords: Mainzan, Dalit and non-Dalit, marriage, couple, family and society.

Paper short abstract:

Nepali Dalits are divided by caste, language, and geography; they lack any single outstanding leader. There are four basic options available for imagining a future different from the present and past and, as will be illustrated ethnographically, all four have their adherents.

Paper long abstract:

The status of Dalits in Nepal has undergone considerable changes in recent decades. Nepali Dalits are not short of political or activist leaders offering them liberation or at least government support. But Dalits themselves are deeply divided over what the best way forward is and could be.

In the case of Nepal's Dalits, at least four characteristic and (theoretically, if not practically) mutually incompatible ways of avoiding the stigma of the past and embodying an egalitarian future can be identified: (1) a desire to assimilate and entirely get rid of a stigmatizing past, a position characteristic of upwardly mobile and non-activist households; (2) the revolutionary option, most obviously represented by the CPN-Maoist party in its heyday and today (for Dalits) by the figure of the poet Comrade Ahuti; (3) identity politics that work to build a single Nepali identity labelled 'Dalit', focused on suffering and subordination under the caste system (across all the divisions of Hill and Plains, and different castes), in order to achieve reparations and reservations; (4) assertion of a positive identity that focuses not on victimhood but on the artisan skills that were associated with their former status as castes providing services to the rest of society. This latter position also involves a firm rejection of the term 'Dalit'. All four positions will be explored using material from interviews with urban activists and rural Dalits.

Paper short abstract:

Pardhis, a denotified tribal group live in the slums of Bhopal as ragpickers and engage with Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed, through an organisation called Muskaan. The potential of education as transformation against the government policy of assimilation in the name of integration is examined.

Paper long abstract:

Denotified tribes (DNTs) are a diverse collection of peoples, comprising several hundred groups with a population of 110 million, who suffer exceptional levels of discrimination, far beyond the well documented stigma and oppression faced by Dalits and Adivasis. This category came into being through the British-era Criminal Tribes Act of 1871; and discrimination was perpetuated post-Independence with the Habitual Offenders Act (1952), which changed the nomenclature from 'Criminal' to 'Denotified' tribes, but otherwise did little to correct the institutionalised targeting these groups suffer by the police and other groups. In 2003-5 a National Commission for De-Notified, Nomadic and Semi-Nomadic Tribes was set up to ameliorate the situation. Yet the stigma and institutionalised behaviour towards DNTs prove hard to change, and the self-immolation of a DNT woman from the Pardhi community in Bhopal in November 2017, after being targeted by police demanding money from her and threatening her family with jail, drew nation-wide coverage and outrage over the DNT situation. Pardhis were formerly a hunter-gathering tribal community, with their own language. Since they had no tradition of cultivation (unlike most 'Adivasi' groups), they had no land title, became classified as encroachers on government land, and have been displaced in large numbers into urban areas, where they mainly work as 'rag-pickers'. In Bhopal, they live as second generation migrants, and an organisation called Muskaan organizes education using Freire's ideas of conscientization, uses multilingualism and constructivist methods of knowledge building, as well as action in defence of their rights as pathways to transformation.

Paper short abstract:

This paper shows as to how 'political society' in postcolonial cities of the Global South moves beyond the rubric of patronage politics (Piliavsky 2014) and operates as a 'rhizome' (Deleuze and Guattari 1998) of brokerage in shaping the contours of subaltern aspirations.

Paper long abstract:

Attempts to theorize the urban in recent years have seen a sharp divide between the proponents of 'planetary urbanization' (Brenner and Schmid 2015) and that of 'global urbanism' (Robinson and Roy 2016). However, such an argument runs the risk of either reifying 'capital' or fetishizing 'identity'. For instance, in case of the Global South, the rise of a caste-class consociation (Heller and Fernandes 2006) has ruptured the presumed impermeability between capital and culture. Therefore, there has been a tendency to conceptualize the tussles between State-sponsored 'governmentality' and the localized communitarian interventions as one between the 'civil' and 'political' society (Chatterjee 2004). In this paper, I look at such contests through a 'multi-case' ethnography of Resident Welfare Associations (RWA) among the Valmikis (i.e., a lower caste community) in Delhi. It shows (a) as to how has the rise of a RWA mode of governance influenced the clientele predilections of traditional community leaders (viz., the pradhans) and (b) the ways in which such a transition has changed both the tactics and vocabulary of identity politics among Dalits in an urban set up like that of Delhi. In other words, it explores as to how do processes like urban gentrification engender the emergence of urban subcultures among the Dalits. In so doing, the paper shows as to how 'political society' in such contexts moves beyond the rubric of patronage politics (Piliavsky 2014) and operates as a 'rhizome' (Deleuze and Guattari 1998) of brokerage in shaping the contours of subaltern aspirations.

Paper short abstract:

The paper proposes that for Dalit victims of violence in Rajasthan, India legal social protection measures, like the 1989 Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe Prevention of Atrocities Act can come to represent idealised, fixed and potentially accessible horizons of hope in moments of social breakdown.

Paper long abstract:

Clifford Geertz famously argued that law represents 'a distinctive manner of imagining the real' (1983:167). Later generations of anthropologists have shown that individuals and groups frequently consider state and human rights law allies in personal struggles, as potent, yet opaque instruments that have the power to create or restore moral order (Merry, 1990; Conley& O'Barr, 1990). However, authors have, thus far, paid little attention to the circumstances under which legal imaginaries arise as powerful, aspirational horizons for socio-political change.

My paper considers this question, drawing on fieldwork in Rajasthan, India, which focused on Dalit engagement with the 1989 Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA), a legislation aimed to alleviate inter-caste violence against historically discriminated minorities.

I propose that for marginalized communities, like Dalits in India, legal concepts, terminology and practice often emerge as imagined pathways to a better future against the backdrop of violence and social ostracism. Not only can experiences of violence lead to a loss of faith in the grammar of the ordinary (Das 2006) but also, simultaneously, produce a need for new social networks and perspectives of hope. Therefore, legal social protection measures, like the PoA can come to represent idealised, future imaginaries of a stable and fair sociality for victims whose ordinary social setting has lost its meaning and sense of refuge. In moments of violent breakdown state law promises to transform visions of moral community living into 'the hard cash of law' (Habermas, 2010: 345).