No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
From Bondage to Citizenship: A Comparison of African American and Indian Lower-Caste Mobilization in Two Regions of Deep Inequality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2020
Abstract
The paper explores mobilization to reduce the deepest inequalities in the two largest democracies, those along caste lines in India and racial lines in the United States. I compare how the groups at the bottom of these ethnic hierarchies—India's former untouchable castes (Dalits) and African Americans—mobilized from the 1940s to the 1970s in pursuit of full citizenship: the franchise, representation, civil rights, and social rights. Experiences in two regions of historically high inequality (the Kaveri and Mississippi Deltas) are compared in their national contexts. Similarities in demographic patterns, group boundaries, socioeconomic relations, regimes, and enfranchisement timing facilitate comparison. Important differences in nationalist and civic discourse, official and popular social classification, and stratification patterns influenced the two groups’ mobilizations, enfranchisement, representation, alliances, and relationships with political parties. The nation was imagined to clearly include Dalits earlier in India than to encompass African Americans in the United States. Race was the primary and bipolar official and popular identity axis in the United States, unlike caste in India. African Americans responded by emphasizing racial discourses while Dalit mobilizations foregrounded more porously bordered community visions. These different circumstances enabled more widespread African American mobilization, but offered Dalits more favorable interethnic alliances, party incorporation, and policy accommodation, particularly in historically highly unequal regions. Therefore, group representation and policy benefits increased sooner and more in India than in the United States, especially in regions of historically high group inequality such as the Kaveri and other major river Deltas relative to the Deep South, including Mississippi.
Keywords
- Type
- Social Lives of Categories
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History
References
Acharya, Avidit, Blackwell, Matthew, and Sen, Maya. 2018. Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Andrews, Kenneth. 2004. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.10.7208/chicago/9780226519043.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arnesen, Eric, ed. 2007. The Black Worker: Race, Labor, and Civil Rights since Emancipation. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Baker, Christopher C. 1984. An Indian Rural Economy, 1880–1955: The Tamilnad Countryside. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bandyopadhyay, Sekar. 2004. Caste, Culture and Hegemony: Social Dominance in Colonial Bengal. Delhi: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Basu, Raj Sekhar. 2011. Nandanar's Children: The Paraiyans’ Tryst with Destiny, Tamil Nadu 1850–1956. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Bayly, Susan. 1999. Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CHOL9780521264341CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beito, David T. and Beito, Linda Royster. 2009. Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard's Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Berreman, Gerald D. 1979. Caste and Other Inequities: Essays on Inequality. Meerut: Folklore Institute.Google Scholar
Béteille, André. 1974. Studies in Agrarian Social Structure. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bolton, Charles C. 2005. The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870–1980. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.Google Scholar
Boone, Catherine. 2014. Property and Political Order in Africa: Land Rights and the Structure of Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bouton, Marshall M. 1985. Agrarian Radicalism in South India. Princeton: Princeton University Press.10.1515/9781400857845CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burd-Sharps, Sarah, Lewis, Kristen, and Martins, Eduardo Borges. 2009. A Portrait of Mississippi: Mississippi Human Development Report, 2009. Brooklyn: American Human Development Project.Google Scholar
Chandra, Kanchan. 2004. Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chandra, Uday, Heierstad, Geir, and Nielsen, Kenneth Bo, eds. 2016. The Politics of Caste in West Bengal. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cobb, James C. 1992. The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cox, Oliver C. 1948. Class, Caste, & Race: A Study in Social Dynamics. New York: Doubleday.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crespino, James. 2007. In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Curry, Constance W. with Henry, Aaron. 2000. Aaron Henry: The Fire Ever Burning. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.Google Scholar
Davidson, Chandler, ed. 1984. Minority Vote Dilution. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press.Google Scholar
Davis, Allison, Gardner, Burleigh B., and Gardner, Mary R.. 1941. Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Dejong, Greta. 2016. You Can't Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dirks, Nicholas B. 2001. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Dittmer, John. 1994. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Fairclough, Adam. 1995. Race & Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915–1972. Athens: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Frymer, Paul. 1999. Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Frymer, Paul. 2008. Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Garrow, David. 1978. Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Garrow, David. 1986. Commentary on Nancy J. Weiss, Creative Tensions in the Leadership of the Civil Right Movement. In Eagles, Charles W., ed., The Civil Rights Movement in America. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press: 55–64.Google Scholar
Gibson, Edward L. 2013. Boundary Control: Subnational Authoritarianism in Federal Democracies. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gilmore, Glenda E. 2009. Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.Google Scholar
Gough, Kathleen. 1989. Rural Change in Southeast India: 1950s to 1980s. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hahn, Steven. 2003. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hamlin, Françoise N. 2012. Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harriss-White, Barbara. 2003. India Working: Essays on Society and Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Heller, Patrick. 1999. The Labor of Development: Workers and the Transformation of Capitalism in Kerala, India. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Herring, Ronald J. 1983. Land to the Tiller: The Political Economy of Agrarian Reform in South Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hill, Lance. 2004. The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Hill, Marianne. 2008. The Economic Status of African-Americans in Mississippi. At: http://www.mississippi.edu/URC/downloads/africanamerican_economic.pdf (last consulted 19 June 2020).Google Scholar
Honey, Michael K. 1993. Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Jacoway, Elizabeth and Colburn, David R., eds. 1982. Southern Businessmen and Desegregation. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2002. India's Silent Revolution: The Rise of Low Castes in North Indian Politics. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Jagannathan, S. 2003. Land for Tillers Freedom: A Humane Approach to the Land Problem. In Thangaraj, S., ed., Land Reforms in India—Tamil Nadu: An Unfinished Task. Delhi: Sage, 64–81.Google Scholar
Jayal, Niraja G. 2013. Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jeffries, Hasan Kwame. 2009. Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Jenkins, Laura D. 2003. Race, Caste and Justice: Social Science Categories and Antidiscrimination Policies in India and the United States. Connecticut Law Review 36, 3: 747–86.Google Scholar
Juergensmeyer, Mark. 1988. Religious Rebels in the Punjab: The Social Vision of Untouchables. Delhi: Ajanta.Google Scholar
Kelley, Robin D. G. 2015. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kessler-Harris, Alice. 2001. In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kirwan, Albert D. 1951. Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics, 1876–1925. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.Google Scholar
Krishnan, Rajam. 2014. Paathayil Padhindha Adigal [Footsteps imprinted on the pathway]. Chennai: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.Google Scholar
Kumar, Dharma. 1965. Land and Caste in South India: Agricultural Labour in the Madras Presidency during the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lieberman, Robert C. 1998. Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Marshall, T. H. 1977. Class, Citizenship and Social Development: Essays by T. H. Marshall, with an Introduction by Seymour Martin Lipset. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
McAdam, Doug. 1999. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970. 2d ed.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McMillen, Neil R. 1989. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Mendelsohn, Oliver and Vicziany, Marika. 1998. The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty, and the State in Modern India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Menifield, Charles E. and Shaffer, Stephen D., eds. 2005. Politics in the New South: Representation of African Americans in Southern State Legislatures. Albany: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Menon, Saraswathi. 1979. Responses to Class and Caste Oppression in Thanjavur District: 1940–52. Social Scientist 7, 6: 14–31; 7, 7: 57–68; 7, 10: 52–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Menon, Saraswathi. 1983. Social Characteristics of Land Control in Thanjavur District during the 19th Century: A Sociological Study. Ph.D. thesis, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.Google Scholar
Mickey, Robert. 2014. Paths out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944–1972. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Moore, Barrington Jr. 1966. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Moses, Robert P. et al. 1989. The Algebra Project: Organizing in the Spirit of Ella. Harvard Educational Review 59, 4: 423–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Myrdal, Gunnar. 1944. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Natrajan, Balmurli and Greenough, Paul, eds. 2009. Against Stigma: Studies in Caste, Race and Justice since Durban. Delhi: Orient Blackswan.Google Scholar
Pandey, Gyanendra. 2013. A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Payne, Charles. 1995. I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Pedriana, Nicholas and Stryker, Robin S.. 2017. From Legal Doctrine to Social Transformation? Comparing U.S. Voting Rights, Equal Employment Opportunity, and Fair Housing Legislation. American Journal of Sociology 123, 1: 86–135.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pettit, Becky. 2012. Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Powdermaker, Hortense. 1939. After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South. New York: Viking.Google Scholar
Ramakrishnan, N. 2010. Oru Pannai Adimaiyin Viduthalai Porattam [A manorial slave's freedom struggle]. Chennai: South Vision.Google Scholar
Rao, Anupama. 2009. The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robinson, Cedric. 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London: Zed Press.Google Scholar
Sanders, Crystal R. 2016. A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi's Black Freedom Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schulman, Bruce J. 1994. From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South 1938–1980. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Sellers, Jeffery M. 2019. From Within to Between Nations: Subnational Comparison across Borders. Perspectives on Politics. 17, 1: 85–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sharma, B.A.V. 1982. Development of Reservation Policy. In Sharma, B.A.V. and Reddy, Madhusudhan, eds. Reservation Policy in India. New Delhi: Light and Life Publication, n.p.Google Scholar
Slate, Nico. 2012. Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Rogers M. 1997. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Solai. 2006. Puratchiyil Pootha Gandhiya Malargal [The Gandhian flowers that bloomed in revolution]. Tamil. Chennai: International Craft Research Center.Google Scholar
Somers, Margaret R. 2008. Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sonachalam, K. S. 1970. Land Reforms in Tamil Nadu: Evaluation of Implementation. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Stokes, Susan C. et al. 2013. Brokers, Voters and Clientelism: The Puzzle of Distributive Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Subramanian, Narendra. 1999. Ethnicity and Populist Mobilization: Political Parties, Citizens and Democracy in South India. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tamil Nadu Vivasayigal Sangam (TNVS). 2008. Agniputhran [Son of fire]. Chennai: Tamil Nadu Vivasayigal Sangam.Google Scholar
Tarrow, Sidney. 2010. The Strategy of Paired Comparison: Toward a Theory of Practice. Comparative Political Studies 43, 2: 230–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thorat, Sukhadeo and Umakant, , eds. 2004. Caste, Race and Discrimination: Discourses in International Context. Jaipur: Rawat Publications.Google Scholar
Tilly, Charles. 1998. Durable Inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Timberlake, Michael, Williams, Bruce B., Dill, Bonnie Thornton, and Tukufu, Darryl. 1992. Race and Economic Development in the Lower Mississippi Delta. Memphis: Working Paper, Center for Research on Women, Memphis State University.Google Scholar
Tuck, Stephen G. N. 2001. Beyond Atlanta: The Struggle for Racial Equality in Georgia, 1940–1980. Athens: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Umoja, Akinyele Omowale. 2013. We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
van Schendel, Willem. 1991. Three Deltas: Accumulation and Poverty in Rural Burma, Bengal and South India. New Delhi: Sage.Google Scholar
Veeraiyan, Ko. 1980. Tamizh Naattil Vivasaayigal Porattam [Peasant struggle in Tamil Nadu]. Madurai: Theekkathir Pathippakam.Google Scholar
Veeraiyan, Ko. 2010. Sengodiyin Paadhaiyil Neenda Payanam [Long journey along the path of the red flag]. Chennai: Chennai Book House.Google Scholar
Visser-Maessen, Laura. 2016. Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Viswanath, Rupa. 2014a. Rethinking Caste and Class: “Labour,” the “Depressed Classes,” and the Politics of Distinctions, Madras 1918–1924. International Review of Social History 59, 1: 1–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Viswanath, Rupa. 2014b. The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Warner, W. Lloyd. 1936. American Caste and Class. American Journal of Sociology 42, 2: 234–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weisskopf, Thomas E. 2004. Affirmative Action in the United States and India: A Comparative Perspective. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, Michael Vinson. 2011. Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wood, Spencer D. 2006. The Roots of Black Power: Land, Civil Society, and the State in the Mississippi Delta, 1935–1968. PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison.Google Scholar
Woods, Clyde A. 1998. Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Wright, Gavin. 2013. Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wright-Austin, Sharon D. 2006. The Transformation of Plantation Politics: Black Politics, Concentrated Poverty, and Social Capital in the Mississippi Delta. Albany: SUNY Press.Google Scholar