Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses how Indian police accept or refuse to file complaints by Dalit ("untouchable") survivors of caste violence based on survivors' ability to perform a mode of masculinity that combines aggression with the embodiment of economic mobility and literacy.

Paper long abstract:

Criminological scholarship on postcolonial nation states has highlighted the historic link between legal recognition, and the performances of violent, male authority (Parmar, Earle, and Phillips 2022, 2023). Meanwhile, anthropologists have shown that a person’s perceived credibility as a narrator of authentic legal narratives tends to depend on the complex web of social aesthetics (Cabot 2013) that makes up an individual’s habitus. In this paper I explore how Indian police officers engage with the narratives of Dalits (former untouchables) who attempt to file complaints against upper-caste aggressors under India’s only hate crime law: the 1989 Prevention of Atrocities Act. The paper adopts the concept of rhetoric masculinity to analyse how police constables accept or refuse to file complaints of caste-based aggression brought forward by Dalit survivors of caste violence. I propose that for Dalits a convincing performance at the police station, which results in a successful complaint registration, hinges not merely the correct forms of documentary evidence, but on the projection of a particular mode of masculinity. This mode of masculinity, which must either be displayed by the survivors himself, or by accompanying male relatives, combines aggression (Sinha 1995) with the authoritative embodiment of economic upward mobility (Jauregui 2016), and markers of literacy (Cody 2013). When survivors fail to perform these markers, police officers declare them and their stories “untrustworthy”. This suggests that for legal actors trust in complainants narratives may often be based intangible webs of cultural and historical semiotics that escapes legal documentation, and generate moments of institutional discretion.