Paper short abstract:

The paper examines a significant disjuncture between radical Dalit politics and local conflicts (around land or water or matrimony), and the work of local political actors who diffuse caste or religious disputes while reproducing a public discourse of communalised politics.

Paper long abstract:

In 2004 I returned to a village in which I had undertaken fieldwork more than 20 years earlier (1982-84) to try to find out about the social meaning of what I understood to be an increasingly radicalised politics around religious and caste identity in Tamil Nadu. In particular, new articulations of Christian and dalit identity in the shadow of Hindutva appeared to bring unprecedented social conflict, along with new activism, emerging dalit social movements and political parties, and innovative expressions of dalit theology and militant cultural protest. How would such religious and political processes look when placed within the social relations of a village that I knew? This paper attempts an answer as it reviews key socio-economic changes over 20 years and offers a view on local social and religious change, the meaning of a local eruption of caste associations, dalit militancy, Hindu activist and Christian social fronts, violent Hindu-Christian conflicts, and the appearance of fissiparous Pentecostalism ― in short a social world apparently transformed by new modes of agency, collective action and public contest. I try to make sense of new intricacies in the experience of caste among Christians ― the simultaneous erasure of caste as a discourse of inequality and privilege and its public appearance as a discourse of exclusion and injustice ― and to document distinctive shifts in the symbolic resources through which caste finds political expression (e.g., from religious shrines to schools and technical colleges). But perhaps most importantly, what I try to show is the existence of a significant disjuncture between a public discourse of radical 'communalised' religious and caste identity that sets Hindus and Christians, Dalits and non-Dalits against each other, and the pragmatic interests (around land or water or matrimony) that constantly erode these bounded identities. Specifically the paper offers detailed cases of the inter-translation of local conflicts and the categories of Tamil identity politics, and of the work of local political actors that diffuse religious or caste disputes while reproducing a public discourse of religious and caste communalism.