The Dalit Search for Dignity

At the heart of Dalit Journeys For Dignity: Religion, Freedom and Caste, this second volume of Dalit Studies – the first published in 2016 – lies the key concept of the “Dalit Social”. Right from the late 19th century inception of India’s Dalit movement, its activists have always understood that institutional politics could only ever offer a very partial challenge to the entrenched forms of social and religious antipathy directed at their communities. Rather, the challenge had to come in the many realms of social life where, as Ambedkar affirmed, the bigotries of caste flourished and sought to crush Dalit claims to the dignity of their common humanity.  

'Dalit Journeys For Dignity: Religion, Freedom and Caste', edited by Ramnarayan S. Rawat, K. Satyanarayana, and P. Sanal Mohan, Permanent Black and Ashoka University, 2025.

In an elegant and thoughtful Introduction to the volume, the editors unpack the enduring significance of “dignity” for Ambedkar himself, culminating in his placing it into the Preamble of the Indian constitution. They trace his hostility to the cultural traditions – both in the West and in Hinduism – in which the quality of dignity is associated either with human reason, or with status and hierarchy, with what Luis Cabrera has called “the haughty face of dignity”. In other traditions, compassion, fraternity and fellow-feeling gave radically different potentialities to the concept.  

In India, Ambedkar saw these latter qualities in the work of the medieval saint-poets and in Marathi vernacular understandings of “manuski”, connoting the inherent worth of every human being. Ultimately, of course, he found them in Buddhism’s concept of “maitri” or friendship. But only through what he described as the “moral stamina” of Dalits willing to wage an unremitting struggle against casteism could these qualities be realised as a universal human value. For Ambedkar, therefore, the Indian concept of dignity emerged, no more and no less, out of the struggles of Dalits.  

Ambedkar, the editors argue, pursued his compelling focus on Dalit dignity essentially in the realm of the social – centrally, in religion, but also in work, leisure, education, community, family, personal and bodily comportment, private life. In the last half-century, of course, Dalit renewal outside the field of institutional politics has found striking new expression in literatures of many kinds – poetry, life writing, drama, socially informed fiction, historical exploration. But the 10 contributors to this volume break quite new and often surprising ground in exploring other fields of action in which Dalits past and present have pursued their search for dignity.  

The first six essays are grouped around the theme of “Religion and the Social”.  The fine-grained studies they contain focus less on religious culture itself, as on the circumstances of individual lives, the social and material practices, the forms of individual agency and the fluid inventiveness which have attended Dalit initiatives. Chakali Chandra Sekhar takes us into the life and legacy of Nanchari, the Mala weaver-trader and community headman of Rayasaleema in southern Andhra Pradesh. He was imprisoned for trying to enter a Hindu temple, converted to Christianity in prison in 1838, and left a legacy of a mass conversion movement amongst local Malas.  

As is so often the case with Dalit activists from this period, we know of Nanchari only through his fugitive presence in different (and competing) missionary records, in later Telugu accounts from within the Dalit convert community, and in later oral narratives. Strikingly, Nanchari does not at all fit the stereotype of Dalit marginality. Unlike many other Malas, he did not earn a living as a field labourer, but as a mobile artisan, who moved around selling his cotton thread. His mobility, the author argues, may well have made him readier to challenge convention by seeking to enter the local temple, and to explore the spiritual alternatives held out to him in prison in his conversations with visiting missionaries.  

In his search for dignity, Nanchari was unambiguous in his rejection of local religious cultures. As local oral tradition records him saying, “I went to Ahobilam temple in search of God, but was imprisoned. Yet this new God, Jesus Christ, came in search of me”.  Nanchari’s repudiation presents a sharp contrast to the ways in which the Chamar-led Sant-Mat community of north India, and the Ravidassia movement amongst Dalit Sikhs, actively sought paths to Dalit dignity in the legacy of the 16th-century poet-saint Ravidas. 

Ramnarayan S. Rawat describes how Sant-Mat communities in the 1920s found ways to appropriate Ravidas for their own vision of an anti-caste community of equals. The spiritual leader Swami Achutanand of the Adi Hindu Mahasabha was key to this drive. His particular contribution lay in insisting on the value of knowledge gained though personal experience, over the Vedic rote learning associated with some parts of the Sanskrit knowledge tradition. He also developed a corpus of devotional literature in north Indian vernaculars familiar to Dalits. For Achutanand, it was but a short step from the egalitarianism of the poet-saints to the language of equality and civil rights which progressive activists were then developing in India’s legislative assemblies.  

The legacy of Ravidas also provided a rich resource for the Ravidassia movement amongst Dalit Sikhs in Punjab. Koonal Duggal explores the movement’s emergence out of fissures within Punjab’s Sikh community, between the mainstream emphasis on a unified community of Khalsa Sikhs, and the Dalit Ravidassias’ own wish to promote the independent legacy of Ravidas. Developing particularly strongly amongst Punjab’s Dalit diaspora, the movement reached a turning point with the assassination of the Ravidassia Saint Ramanand while preaching in Vienna in May 2009.  

Sant Ravidas. Photo: Flickr/ravidassia CC BY 2.0

Duggal describes the extraordinary public mourning that followed. Deliberately countering the hyper-masculine visual culture of much popular Punjabi Jat music, the Ravidassias celebrated the spiritual service of Saint Ramanand through DVDs, YouTube channels and community digital networks. Glossy video montages displayed the cosmopolitan role of the saint and his globalised followers as they travelled by air between the world’s cities. In this aspirational community, transnational capital and new digital media had their rightful place in the public memorialising of Saint Ramanand as martyr. Indian sacred space was also a part of this: having declared the Ravidassia movement to be an independent religion in 2010, community leaders pledged to build a temple in the saint’s honour in Banaras, which would be plated in gold and open to all.

Gender and cultural remaking also emerge as important themes in the work of Lucinda Ramberg and Jestin T. Varghese. Ramberg notes some of the compromises that Karnataka Buddhist families have made in recent decades. For all their overt embrace of a caste-free future, they still practice patrilocal endogamy in marriage. Within the inner spaces of the household, women minister to the old family deities, while images of Ambedkar and the Buddha in its outer spaces declare the family’s allegiance to Dalit modernity. Yet, Bamberg suggests, the families are well aware of these contradictions, convinced of their advantages in making it possible to maintain older and newer social networks. The strategy also gives them a sense of independence from conventional social pressures towards “modernisation”.  

Challenges in the lives of Dalit Christians in Kerala form the subject of Varghese’s essay. Some Dalit communities in Kerala came out in favour of the state’s first Communist government in 1958-9, incurring the hostility of the state’s conservative community of Syrian Christians. With the aid of a Jesuit priest, they formed a new Catholic faith community for themselves, in which prayer gatherings offered a salve for Syrian Christians’ wounding taunts about their menial Dalit status. Yet the taunts went both ways. Dalits in this setting actively affirmed their own masculinity, hitting back with the familiar trope that 'upper' caste men were cuckolds, their sexual inadequacies leading their women to look to Dalit men for pleasure.  

Later essays in the book offer a sharp reminder of the barriers to Dalit advancement in the ‘secular’ social world. In studies of caste, we spend much time thinking about the transmission of elite cultural capital, but much less about capital as transmissible property.  Sharika Thiranagama looks at Kerala Dalits’ very limited ability to pass property on to future generations. She points to studies of devastating disadvantage amongst similarly handicapped African-American families in the USA. In vivid detail, she describes the new forms of family aspiration and mobility that followed when land reform and housing assistance schemes during the 1960s and 1970s enabled Dalit families to own land and build houses in their own colonies.  

An important transformation that followed from this state intervention lay in the imagined possibilities for a new life that their homes represented. Homes were spaces where advantageous marriages could flourish, children now with prospects could thrive, and hospitality be shared with neighbours and relations. Dignity in this setting lay in a sense of the expansive possibilities of private life that property could open up for those unused to having it.  

A sharp contrast with this state-led transformation emerges in Sumeet Mhaskar’s long-term study of Dalit employment in the mills and factories of Mumbai. In this private-sector setting, a finely drawn local hierarchy designated more and less desirable work roles. With extraordinary consistency over some century and a half, middle and upper caste workers were able to preserve the cleaner, better paid and less onerous roles for themselves, and to push Dalit workers into the hardest and dirtiest work. Even here, though, Dalit workers found their choices expanded: factory work enabled them to earn cash, and the urban setting provided opportunities to organise.  

In Anupama’s study of Dalit dress in late colonial north India, we return to the theme of the body as the site where Dalits’ experience of dignity denied has perhaps been most painfully felt. Dress and bodily comportment have always been caste flashpoints, where Dalit aspiration to dignity of the body has met with upper caste retribution. Anupama’s study reminds us of the grim historical realities of upper caste insistence that Dalits should wear the marks of stigma, such as wearing clothing taken from the dead, visibly on their bodies.  

Yet the freedom to choose personal styles – even now seen as provocative in some parts of rural India – replaced one quandary with another, albeit less painful. What to wear, in the novel setting of the office, the school, the factory? With his signature suit and tie, Ambedkar himself laid claim to the dress of a modern western professional. For others of his generation, however, such sartorial upgrades often felt unfamiliar and uncomfortable, markers of a new kind of constrained modernity rather than spaces of choice and freedom.   

Running through many of these essays is the story of Dalit negotiation between different kinds of time and space. In his study of the Tamil scholar Iyothee Thassar, Dickens Leonard lays out Thassar’s re-envisaging of Tamil society’s pre-Hindu past, home to a flourishing anti-caste civilisation shaped by Buddhism’s promise of an ethical community life. With the enormous civilisational resources of an independent Tamil culture to draw on, Thassar was able to go much further than his non-Brahman predecessors in Maharashtra in specifying the features of this “India before caste”.  

Leonard’s study draws particular attention to Thassar’s understanding of the power of naming in language. It was through devising new names for places, people and things that Brahman elites had been able to overlay and ultimately erase the Tamil memory of a society before caste. Particularly as practised in Buddhist viharas, castlessness had been an active principle, a shared commitment to participation in a common ethical life. It arose not out of any notion of a sacred space, but, rather like the Sant-Mat spiritual leader Swami Achutanand’s conception, out of a deep sense of the value of personal experience. In Thassar’s formulation, Tamil language had been once, and could be again, an open home for a casteless society based in the values of compassion and mutual respect.  

What these studies of “Dalit journeys to dignity” really reveal is that dignity has taken on many dimensions for those who consciously seek it. Felt social esteem is certainly one of them. But we see other dimensions here too: entitlement to ask questions and have them answered, respect for personal experience, the pursuit of prestige for valued figures and symbols, the right to make spiritual as well as practical choices, freedom to take advantage of opportunity, the autonomy needed to arrive at workable compromises between present and past, space for the development of a private life, the ability to hit back under attack.   

In terms of Isiah Berlin’s classic essay, Two Concepts of Liberty, it is striking that most of these are positive freedoms, freedoms to, rather than simply freedoms from. More recently, of course, Amartya Sen has highlighted the importance of positive freedom in the “capabilities” approach advanced in his discussion of the proper goals of development. The real test of development is the degree to which it expands people’s capabilities, giving them opportunities to make social lives that they themselves value. Underlying this remarkable collection of essays is little less than an exploration of Dalit modes of thinking about capabilities in this sense. As such, the essays mark an important contribution to the conversation that Sen, and ultimately Ambedkar himself opened up, in seeing these Dalit struggles from the margins as a means to realise much wider human values.

Rosalind O’Hanlon is an early modern historian and specialist in the colonial history of India. She is a retired professor in Indian History and Culture at the University of Oxford.

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