“How untouchables became Dalits”: Anupama Rao's The Caste Question

The Caste Question sets out to tell “the story of how untouchables became Dalits” (p. xi). Anupama Rao follows the Mahar community of western India from the 1880s to the 1990s. She asks how a stigma, being “untouchable”, was turned into a political identity, and what that identity cost.

Her answer is that it happened in stages. Dalits were first defined as people outside Hinduism, then as a political minority, and finally, under the constitution, as vulnerable citizens the state must protect. Each stage won something real. Each also left Dalits defined by the injury done to them.

The book’s larger claim is that this is not a side story. “Dalit history is the history of India’s political modernity” (p. xiv). In her view that is why “caste has grown rather than diminished in significance as democracy has taken root” (p. xii).

What Rao argued

Dalit politics began as a fight over public space. Chapter 1 starts with Jotirao Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj, founded in 1873, and with Mahar army veterans such as Gopalbaba Valangkar, whose petition of 1888 questioned the religious case for caste and untouchability (pp. 39–80). In the 1890s and 1900s the fights were over schools, wells, roads and temples. Rao notes that in this early politics the Dalit subject “was imagined as male” (p. 54). The story ends with Ambedkar’s march to the Chavdar tank at Mahad in March 1927 and the burning of the Manusmriti that December (pp. 79–80).

The courts turned caste into property. In chapter 2 Rao reads the court cases over the Mahad tank and over temple entry at Parvati and Nasik. Colonial judges did not defend untouchability as custom. They defended it as a right of property, so that a caste could hold a temple or tank as its own. In her words, this “rendered caste into a property of the self” (p. 116). Gandhi opposed forcing entry: “Satyagraha in reference to such temples would be pure violence” (p. 94).

Ambedkar tried to make Dalits a political minority, and lost. Chapter 3 follows his argument that untouchables were a minority apart from Hindus, who needed their own electorate. Rao quotes him: “A political majority is not a fixed or a permanent majority. It is a majority which is always made, unmade and remade” (p. 136). The Communal Award of 1932 gave separate electorates. Gandhi’s fast against it, in September 1932, forced the Poona Pact, which replaced them with 148 seats reserved for the Depressed Classes and chosen by a joint electorate (p. 138). Rao reads the conversion to Buddhism in 1956, with almost half a million people, as the other half of the same claim: that Dalits were not Hindus at all (p. 118).

The constitution recognised Dalits as vulnerable. In chapter 4 Rao traces the laws from Article 17, which abolished untouchability, to the Untouchability (Offences) Act of 1955, later renamed the Protection of Civil Rights Act, and the Prevention of Atrocities Act of 1989 (pp. 163–181). They were real gains. But, she argues, “the civil rights regime produced not the emancipated citizen but the vulnerable subject” (p. 24). The law saw Dalits most clearly when they were attacked.

Assertion met violence. Chapter 5 covers the Dalit Panthers of 1972 and the namantar movement to rename Marathwada University after Ambedkar. The state’s decision to rename it in July 1978 set off attacks on Dalits. Rao reports, from a contemporary account, that violence reached 1,200 of Marathwada’s 9,000 villages (p. 210). The university was renamed only in 1994. Soon after, the Maharashtra government began to withdraw more than eleven hundred cases under the Atrocities Act, “even though it is illegal to do so” (p. 212).

Sexual violence is caste violence, but the law struggles to see it. Chapter 6 reads the court records of a 1963 case in Sirasgaon, Aurangabad district, where four Dalit women of one family were stripped and paraded through the village (p. 221). The judges condemned the crime but treated its sexual side as something that could not be said in court. Rao argues that “sexual violence is particularly indecipherable as caste violence because it is normalized as upper-caste privilege” (p. 222). She closes the chapter with the Khairlanji massacre of 2006, in which none of the accused were prosecuted under the Atrocities Act (p. 238).

A first atrocity case, and no murder conviction. Chapter 7 follows the killing of Ambadas Sawane, a Dalit kotwal (a village police servant), on the steps of a Hanuman temple in Parbhani district in August 1991. It was the first case in Maharashtra judged under the Atrocities Act (p. 241). Police wireless records show local officers playing down the caste motive until officials in Bombay and Delhi pushed back. The court found five men guilty but held that intent to murder was not proved, because the fatal blow “could not [be] attributed to a particular accused person” (p. 255).

Why it matters

Rao’s book gives a history to a pattern that Dalit activists and lawyers describe today: laws that name caste violence but rarely punish it. She does not argue that the protective laws were a mistake. She argues that they framed Dalits as victims to be protected, and tried caste crimes as individual acts, while the violence they were meant to stop was collective. The result, she argues, is that “efforts to legislate Dalit vulnerability out of existence have instead helped to establish violence as a public mode of recognition between upper castes and Dalits” (p. 263).

The book is also a close study of Ambedkar’s politics as politics, not only as ideas. It shows how his claims about minority status, separate electorates and conversion were fought over in courts, councils and villages, and how they shaped the constitution. Its last pages place the story in the wider history of “how equality was redefined as caste equality” (p. 271).

What the book does not show

• Beyond the Mahars. It is the history of one Dalit community in one region. It says little about other Dalit castes in Maharashtra, or about the rest of India.
• The recent law. It was written before the Atrocities Act was amended in 2015 and 2018, and before the court rulings that followed.
• How typical its cases are. Part 2 rests on a few famous cases. They show how the law works when a case gets public attention, not how often cases go unreported.
• Women’s own politics. Rao says early Dalit politics imagined its subject as male, and she discusses Dalit feminist critique, but women’s own organising is not the book’s main subject.
• A plain account. The theory is dense, and readers looking for a narrative history of the Ambedkar movement may find other books easier to start with.

Talking points

• Rao argues the Atrocities Act sees Dalits mainly as victims. Is that a flaw in the law, in how it is used, or a cost worth paying for protection?
• The courts of the 1920s and 1930s defended caste as a property right. Where do property and privacy still shield caste today, in housing, temples or marriage?
• A counter-view: some scholars argue that the reserved seats and the protective laws, whatever their limits, are what built Dalit political power. Does Rao’s account leave enough room for that?

The work

Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-520-25559-3 (hardback), 978-0-520-25761-0 (paperback). The book online (DOI)