South Asia in Motion Series. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022. xix, 400 pp, (Figures, B&W photos.) US$95.00, cloth; US$32.00, paper. ISBN 9781503634084.
Historically, in making caste societies on the Indian subcontinent, gender has been a critical component. In creating caste structure as a plural social process, the female body acts as a site of production of caste community, domination, and relations with other castes regarding marriage and boundaries of touch. Thus, caste society predicated on the subordination of women and control over their sexuality and reproduction also forces women to perform their respective gender roles in endogamous and monogamous marriages following caste prescriptions. Shailaja Paik, taking a cue from B. R. Ambedkar’s seminal diagnosis of endogamy as the foundation of caste, places gender, especially stigmatized Dalit women, at the centre of the social and political history of modern India. In recovering the voices and critical roles of marginalized communities like Dalits in reshaping the idea of India, she places the stigmatized Tamasha and Lavani women as an ethical bar against which both dominant-caste Hindus and the oppressed Dalits defined and refashioned their modern self and identity. Paik traces the erased history of Tamasha women’s precarious existence inside (Dalit) and outside (dominant) caste margins as excess women. She rightly argues Tamasha women are also essential to perpetuating masculine caste patriarchy and its assertion of caste inequality, oppression, and domination. Through the lens of intersectionality, the book explores the visible and invisible operations of caste and gender dynamics predicated on the exploitation of Dalit women, who continue to endure caste- and gender-based oppression and exploitation.
True to its anti-caste spirit, the book is organized as a dialogue around B. R. Ambedkar’s historic anti-caste struggles, with Tamasha women as the central figures informing how the Dalit movement became entangled in the intersectional challenge of gender- and caste-based oppression. The book fascinatingly presents the dilemma of Dalit politics, i.e., protecting Dalits from sexual exploitation and refashioning their self and identity by making Dalit women a symbol of dignity, humanity, and self-respect. In this respect, Paik interrogates the social, political, and cultural processes and contestations against the backdrop of colonial modernity that inaugurated new vistas challenging gender and caste oppression and inequality. Nevertheless, the colonial modernity also reinforced Brahmin patriarchal norms. The book demonstrates how the dominant Brahmani ideology’s alliance with colonialism facilitated the order, subordination, and exploitation of marginalized sections of society. The Dalit Bahujans waged a two-pronged battle to liberate themselves from the stranglehold of the dominant Brahmani ideology and colonial oppression. Paik ingeniously captures the everyday anxieties and battles for humanity, dignity, and self-respect by using Ambedkar’s political and intellectual life as a trope. Using the Marathi public sphere and Marathi national identity movement to illuminate her arguments, Paik reorients modern Western concepts such as human, humanity, authenticity/original, and vulgarity into their vernacular forms as Ashlil, Manuski, and Aasli. These concepts encapsulate the everyday contestations of caste- and gender-based oppression and mediations to assert the right of everyone to be recognized as human beings.
The response by the dominant caste to the colonial critique of Hindu caste society, especially regarding the status of women and the dehumanization of untouchables, was Brahmanization and colonial modernity. They refashioned patriarchy to demonstrate its suitability to the modern nation-state. The refashioning of the national and regional (Marathi manus) identities of Sanskrit Brahmani culture emerged as a defining ideology. In the Brahmanical spectrum, the untouchable is an emblem of the lowest being. Furthermore, untouchable women represented further degradation, as individuals whom dominant-caste men could violate at will to demonstrate their masculine patriarchy, thus using sexual violation to maintain caste inequalities. Throughout the book, Paik profoundly illustrates the concept of the “sex-gender-caste complex” through the lives and experiences of Tamasha and Lavani women. As unmarried and untouchable women (dedicated as Muralis to gods and goddesses), Tamasha women inherited the traditions of Tamasha and Lavani to entertain caste Hindu men with dance and sexual appeal. These performances stigmatized them as promiscuous and sexually available and as a threat to the professed monogamy of the dominant castes. Even though they spent their lives entertaining caste Hindu men, their labour was devalued as unproductive and condemned to the margins by both caste Hindus and Dalits. In this context, the rising nationalist politics and the Hindu reform movement sanitized and appropriated Tamasha and Lavani as part of Marathi’s history and cultural identity. The entry of Brahmin men like Ram Joshi and Patthe Bapurao into the stigmatized Tamasha transformed from a scandalous affair to a quintessential Marathi cultural resource to be claimed, sanitized, and performed not only in state-sponsored public events but also to the global Marathi diaspora in the US. Paik rightly points out that this transition of Tamasha has a caste twist. For centuries Dalit women who performed Tamasha were denied basic dignity and humanity and excluded from the social fabric within Dalit and caste communities as deviant and vulgar.
Nevertheless, the Brahmin Sanskritistic sanitization and appropriation made Tamasha and Lavani palatable to educated urban Savarnas, even a female audience, and to be celebrated as authentic Marathi culture. Paik rightly presents the irony of that transformation, where Dalit Tamasha women continued to be treated with contempt, a taint of vulgarity and promiscuousness attached to them, but not to the Brahmin men engaged in the profession. The lives of Pavalabai, Vithabai, and Mangalatai, three lower-caste women perfomers profiled in the book, demonstrate that despite their popularity and economic gains they were not accepted as equal citizens with full humanity. In this, even Ambedkarite Jalsas sanitized Tamashas to spread the message of social regeneration and endeavoured to discourage Tamasha women from performing.
This book not only makes an original contribution to debates on the intersectionality of caste and gender but also challenges the mainstream privileged position of feminists and presents a perspective from the margins. Finally, while reading the text, I often wondered about the absence of any discussion of Parsi theatre and the presence of Muslims in rich, cosmopolitan Bombay.
Chinnaiah Jangam
Carleton University, Ottawa