Cultures of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. xviii, 396 pp. (Maps.) US$60.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-231-16306-4.
Rupa Viswanath’s The Pariah Problem is a study of Dalits in the Madras Presidency, south India, between the 1890s and 1920s. It is an outstanding work of historical scholarship, based on innovative, assiduous archival research and a through reading of relevant literature, which carefully examines the data and relevant theoretical problems, and advances original conclusions about the position of Dalits in India today, as well as in the past.
Dalits in south India have been known by various terms, but their miserable condition was first publicly identified as a problem that afflicted “Pariahs,” an anglicization of “Paraiyar,” the name of the largest Dalit caste in Tamil Nadu (formerly part of Madras). The Pariahs’ condition, Viswanath insists, was a function of both class and caste, because they were unfree landless labourers or slaves, and also degraded because they were excluded from society proper, as constituted by the higher castes. In the late nineteenth century, an alliance developed between Pariahs and Protestant missionaries, mainly because Pariahs actively sought out missionaries, rather than the other way around. The alliance gave Pariahs new resources to combat local, village oppressors and the missionaries’ interventions eventually forced British officials to recognize the reality of the Pariah problem, an event Viswanath dates to a government report in 1892.
Officials, however, were reluctant to tackle the Pariah problem vigorously, because they did not want to alienate the landed elite groups whose support was vital for imperial rule, and they feared that interfering with traditional customs would be dangerously provocative, especially if the customs were religious ones. The missionaries viewed the Pariahs’ degraded, untouchable status as essentially linked to the Hindu religion, and their understanding became part of how the colonial government and rural elites conceptualized the problem. Hence any attempt to truly ameliorate the Pariahs’ condition could be deemed offensive to the rights and sentiments of all other Hindus. Moreover, the notion that relations between high-caste masters and untouchable servants were mutually harmonious, rather than exploitative, was pervasive in government circles, among both British officials and their numerous Indian colleagues and subordinates.
In the early twentieth century, the government, partly influenced by new liberal ideas of social welfare in England, cooperated with missionaries in granting new house sites to Panchamas (as Pariahs came to be called). Such initiatives provoked serious opposition from higher-caste landlords, however, and officials were unwilling to confront them. Starting in 1918, the government nominated several Dalits to the reformed Madras Legislative Council and some became vocal members of it, demanding equal rights of access to public space and facilities. But high-caste council members and British officials responded by insisting that because the untouchables’ problems were social, not political, peoples’ minds had to change before reform could be effective. Hence even progressive nationalists evaded the reality of the Pariah problem by defining political and legal problems as social problems, primarily within Hindu society. That definition and the outlook it entails, Viswanath argues, remain “deeply embedded in political, scholarly, and legislative responses to the plight of Dalits in the present day” (241).
Viswanath writes well and presents her arguments clearly in the main text of 258 pages. The 84 pages of endnotes, however, are burdensome. Unfortunately, too, bibliographic references in them are sometimes inadequate; for instance, citations never indicate whether the voluminous proceedings of the Madras Board of Revenue were consulted in the Tamil Nadu State Archives or British Library, although the two sets are not identical. Furthermore, the endnotes contain too much digressive material, probably surviving from her PhD thesis. A lot of this content deserves to be in the main text and checking this is tedious, especially because no footers cross-referencing page numbers are printed in the endnotes.
One significant issue mentioned only briefly is the difference between Paraiyars, Pallars and Chakkiliyars (3). The first two “specific caste terms” were practically synonymous with terms for agrestic servants or “slaves,” and “to be a Pariah was to be a laboring servant” (28), but an endnote confirms this does not mean that “all laborers were Pariahs, although virtually all Pariahs were laborers” (n. 19, 273). If I understand Viswanath correctly, “Pariah” primarily denoted someone belonging both to the servile labouring class and an untouchable caste. The populous Paraiyars gave their name to the whole untouchable category; nonetheless, the less numerous Pallars were and are a different caste group, often said to rank above Paraiyars, and the Chakkiliyars are a third, still smaller caste group normally ranked lowest. Even in modern Dalit political organizations, the three groups are not always united, and their social divisions persist in many localities (Robert Deliège, The Untouchables of India, Berg, 1999, 58–62; Hugo Gorringe, Untouchable Citizens, Sage, 2005, 55–64). Viswanath says hardly anything about these divisions during the period she discusses and sometimes I was unclear whether her book’s “Pariahs” belonged to all untouchable castes or were Paraiyars only.
The book’s virtues greatly outweigh its flaws, however. One important research innovation is Viswanath’s combined use of the separate missionary and government records, which has contributed to her original finding that Pariahs actively sought out missionaries, rather than passively waiting for them to proselytize. She also shows that Dalits—not just Brahmans and non-Brahmans—mattered in south Indian colonial history and that, too, is a major step forward. Other historians and anthropologists have previously argued that servitude or slavery, as well as ritual pollution and status inferiority, define untouchability, but none has done so more effectively than Viswanath. Her explanation of how the Pariah problem in Madras became social-cum-religious, instead of political and legal, is consistent with modern ethnographic evidence, although her claim that “hurt Hindu sentiments,” rather than undermined privileges, “became central to the discussion of the Pariah” (131) sounds anachronistically contemporary. Finally, though not everyone will agree with her extrapolations to the current state of Dalit affairs in India, Viswanath makes a persuasive case and her book deserves a wide readership.
C. J. Fuller
London School of Economics and Political Science, London, United Kingdom
pp. 948-950