“Humiliation is a struggle concept”: Gopal Guru's Humiliation: Claims and Context

Humiliation: Claims and Context sets out to make humiliation a subject of Indian political theory. Gopal Guru, its editor, argues that “Humiliation is a struggle concept” (p. 4). It is not only a bad feeling. It is a claim made by people who have come to expect respect, and a charge against those who deny it.

The book’s twelve essays come from eleven scholars. They were first given at a conference at Ranikhet in 2002 (p. vii). They do not agree on everything, and the disagreements are part of what makes the book useful. But they share one starting point, which Guru states in the first paragraph: “in the West it is the attitude of race that is at the base of humiliation. In the East, it is the notion of untouchability” (p. 1).

What the book argued

Humiliation is a claim, and claims need self-respect. In his introduction Guru argues that “a person who lacks self-respect, and does not aspire to attain it, cannot be humiliated” (p. 10). So humiliation, as he uses the word, is a modern thing. It sharpens when the people kept down come to expect equal treatment and begin to name what is done to them. “Since humiliation does not get defined unless it is claimed, it naturally involves the capacity to protest” (p. 18). Words matter here too. He gives the example of “schaddu”, a slur that upper-caste medical students in a Delhi college made out of “scheduled caste” to use against their Dalit classmates (p. 18).

Caste is humiliation built into a society. Bhikhu Parekh defines humiliation as “an assault on the self-respect of those involved” (p. 25). He separates it from cruelty, insult and degradation. “Societies based on slavery, racial segregation, hierarchical status, untouchability and the caste system are all examples of institutionalized humiliation” (p. 32). Such a society, he writes, “does not generally need to resort to blatant acts of humiliation except as periodic reminders” (p. 32). It rests on four supports: an ideology that makes the order seem natural, poverty, informal policing by members of the dominant group, and the state’s force in the background (pp. 32–34).

Does the victim have to feel it? Here the book divides. Ashis Nandy argues that humiliation “can never be a one-way exchange. Unless the humiliated collaborate, by feeling humiliated, you cannot humiliate them” (p. 42). He also writes that “The humiliation of Dalits accomplishes what in other situations is achieved through mass murder” (p. 53). Parekh, by contrast, holds that humiliation is “most effective when it is so deep and pervasive that it is no longer recognized for what it is” (pp. 25–26). On his view, people can be humiliated by a social order even when they have been taught not to feel it. Guru takes a third line: people must come to see their humiliation before they can claim it, and those who humiliate them work to stop them seeing it (pp. 10, 215–217).

The law outlaws some humiliation and produces some of its own. Upendra Baxi reads Article 17, which abolishes untouchability, as outlawing the oldest form of humiliation (p. 65). But he argues that the way affirmative action and the protective laws are run can humiliate in its own right. On scavenging communities, and especially the women in them, he writes: “Sixty plus years of Indian constitutionalism have not notably affected their working or social conditions” (p. 65). He counts the poor enforcement of the Atrocities Act and related laws as a form of humiliation (p. 66).

Humiliation lives in the body and in dirt. V. Geetha takes from Cornel West the idea of an “ontological wounding”, a hurt to a person’s very sense of being (p. 95). She calls untouchability “an evil that is stunning in its banality” (p. 97). Valerian Rodrigues asks why India’s public spaces stay unclean, and answers that it is because untouchability ties dirt to whole communities: “The unclean public domain has remained with us primarily because there has been an inadequate response to the issue of untouchability” (p. 119).

A crematorium in Goa. Peter Ronald deSouza studies a village in Bardez, Goa, in 2001. When a Mahar man was cremated in the new village crematorium, a purification ritual was performed afterwards and a separate shed was agreed for Mahars (p. 125). He calls the ritual “a deliberate act of humiliating the Mahars” at “their moment of greatest vulnerability” (p. 136). Local campaigners pushed back, and the village sarpanch read the Preamble of the Constitution inside the crematorium (p. 133).

Public equality, private exclusion. Neera Chandhoke supports reservations, but argues they are “today being defended for the wrong reasons” and have become “a soft option” that stands in for land reform (p. 158). She cites a 1999 study of about 200 Dalits in Aurangabad in which 66 per cent still felt humiliated and discriminated against (pp. 144–145). Her conclusion: reservation “in the public arena is completely compatible with continued caste discrimination in the private arena” (p. 158). She proposes a social minimum for all disadvantaged people and ending reservation benefits for a family after three generations (p. 158). The proposal is hers alone; other contributors, Guru among them, put the weight elsewhere.

Gandhi and Ambedkar. Thomas Pantham reviews the long argument between the two over untouchability, from the Poona Pact of 1932 to Ambedkar’s conversion. He argues that their approaches were, in the end, “complementary/compatible” (p. 181). This is the most Gandhi-friendly chapter in the book. It quotes Ambedkar’s sharpest criticisms in full, including “Under Gandhism the Untouchables are to be eternal scavengers” (p. 201), but its conclusion is contested, not least by Baxi earlier in the book (p. 204).

Rejecting rejection. Guru’s closing essay separates “reduction”, treating a person as an animal or a thing, from “rejection”, treating the very idea of a person as repulsive (p. 210). He argues that caste goes further than Western racism here: “the upper castes treat cows as more important than the Dalits” (p. 212). His central example is a Dalit teacher summoned to his head of department’s house at 6 a.m. before a university election, who runs there without stopping to put on his shoes. “Dragging foot is the subaltern method of restoring self-respect” (p. 215). He credits Ambedkar with turning the image of “walking carrion” into a “walking storm” (p. 221), and closes on the constitution’s unkept promise: “What is promised in the political realm is summarily denied in the social” (p. 223).

Why it matters

The book gave Dalit studies a vocabulary for something that survey numbers on income or schooling do not catch: being made to feel less than human, and the work of refusing it. Guru’s case that humiliation is a claim, not a private hurt, puts the person humiliated at the centre. It also explains why caste conflict can sharpen as Dalits gain education and rights, not fade.

It is also a rare meeting of very different thinkers on one Dalit question. Read together, Parekh and Nandy set out a debate that still matters in courts and newsrooms: whether harm depends on what the victim feels, or on what the act does. The book’s examples, from purification rituals to manual scavenging, still appear in the news.

What the book does not show

• How common humiliation is. It is mainly argument. Apart from two case studies, its figures come from other people’s surveys.
• Change since 2009. Its numbers on manual scavenging and untouchability practice date from 1998 to 2006, and it predates later debates on caste on campuses and online.
• One answer. The contributors disagree, most sharply on whether humiliation needs the victim to feel it, and on Gandhi. The book sets out these debates without settling them.
• Dalit women’s own accounts. Several chapters discuss sexual violence and the Devadasi system, but no chapter is centred on Dalit women’s own writing or testimony.
• An easy read. Several essays lean on Hegel, Kant and Fanon. Readers new to the subject may want to start with Guru’s introduction and his closing chapter.

Talking points

• Guru says a person who does not aspire to self-respect cannot be humiliated. Does that make humiliation a sign of progress, or does it risk ignoring people too crushed to protest?
• Nandy says humiliation needs the victim’s “collaboration”. Parekh says it works best when no one notices it. Which view should guide how laws on caste abuse are written and judged?
• Chandhoke argues that reservations can sit alongside private discrimination, and proposes a three-generation limit. A counter-view: limits like this would weaken the one policy that has built a Dalit middle class. Who has the better case?

The work

Gopal Guru (ed.), Humiliation: Claims and Context. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-19-806030-7. Paperback ISBN 978-0-19-807492-2.