Paper short abstract:

An examination of discursive practices within 19th century missionary and legal contexts, which laid foundations for the exclusion of Dalit Christians from state affirmative action benefits in India.

Paper long abstract:

Today, Dalits who convert to Christianity are denied "Scheduled Caste" (SC) status and quotas in employment and education that such status ensures. Many trace this policy to the Constitutional Order of 1950, which precluded non-Hindu Dalits from being considered SC. While this is technically correct it misses a deeper history, anchored in liberal imperial ideology of the 19th century, which laid conceptual foundations for the 1950 Order. Ironically, it was in the very efforts to secure the civil rights of converts within the Hindu joint family, and to further the liberal transformation of India that two key principles were established that underlay the 1950 Order, namely, the comparative social mobility of Christian converts, and their official exit from Hindu caste society. Having left Hinduism, Dalits were presumed to gain access to the infrastructure of a 'foreign religion.' No longer can they qualify for benefits aimed at rectifying the historical abuses of Hinduism. Drawing from 19th century Indian case law, missionary reports, and colonial ethnography concerning the status of converts, the paper delineates discursive practices within legal and missionary contexts centered on the social trajectories of converts. It then identifies their structural similarity to current rationales for excluding Dalit Christians from affirmative action benefits. From this, we gain a sense of how the knowledge production of the 19th century shaped identity politics and policies concerning Dalit Christian affirmative action. What is lost in this debate is awareness of both the heterogeneity and the indigenous character of Dalit Christians.