Paper short abstract:

Through an ‘immanent’ analytical approach based on vernacular dalit sources, the paper unpacks narrative orders on religion/secularity by contextualizing them within local processes through which dalits articulate their collective self-conceptions and their strife for social recognition and reform.

Paper long abstract:

Religion and secularism, constructed as normative categories beyond situated histories and sociopolitical agencies, have often been applied to structure and represent the lived realities of subaltern peoples as per given frames of caste/community/national belongings. Drawing from ethnography and textual analysis of vernacular dalit materials, the investigation reveals discourses and worldviews too often hidden behind segregation and shame. It sheds light on the 'ideological fields of force' which influence the way dalit peoples both engage and are confronted with the symbolic and material embodiments of religion and secularity and which impact on how they come to articulate collective self-conceptions and political subjectivities. The investigation demonstrates how dalit sociality is marked by a history of violated agency, both in its strife for assimilation and its attempts of subversion, which is linked to century-old systems depriving peoples of the means for collective representation, written codification and authoritative guardianships for their own epistemologies and which has led to what arguably still constitutes the dearth of ammunition in a struggle for normative self-determination.

By devising an 'immanent' analytical approach encountering dalits as they perform from and within their communities of reference, the investigation unpacks narrative orders premised on dichotomous oppositions of secularism versus religion, communalism or primordial nativism. It exposes how societal forces and the state, by structuring the living space, public order and socialization, are implicated in such discursive formations; and how they implicate us in terms of the level of socio-cultural translation we pursue in our epistemic production.