1 A mundu is a kind of unstitched cloth worn by both men and women like a sarong over the lower part of the body in Kerala.

2 T. H. P. Chentharassery, Ayyankali (Trivandrum: Prabhath Book House, 1979), 16, my translation of the Malayalam. Chentharassery's authoritative oral history has been the foundation for subsequent scholarship on Ayyankali. Although parts of it have been translated into English, no complete version exists yet. See T. H. P. Chentharassery, “Sadhujana Paripalana Sangham: The Story of a Freedom Struggle,” and “Struggles of Freedom,” trans. T. M. Yesudasan, in No Alphabet in Sight: New Dalit Writing from South India, ed. K. Satyanarayana and Susie Tharu (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2011), 380–4 and 385–9. See also M. Nisar and Meena Kandasamy, Ayyankali: Dalit Leader of Organic Protest (Calicut, Kerala: Other Books, 2007).

3 Savarnas are caste Hindus, also referred to as “upper-caste” Hindus. The untouchable castes are the avarnas, or those without caste. In Kerala, Namboodiris and Nairs and other comparable castes constitute savarnas, whereas Nadars, Ezhavas, and all former slave castes like Pulayas, Parayas, and Cherumas are avarnas. Of these, the former slave castes are roughly analogous to today's Dalits.

4 See Richard Schechner, Between Theater & Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 36. See also Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002), 34–6.

5 I engage with and build on the work of Sharmila Rege, Shailaja Paik, and Davesh Soneji, who have written about the ways in which performance aesthetics and caste hierarchies have been coconstitutive in traditions as diverse as Ambedkarite gayan parties (singing troupes), lavani-tamasha (Marathi musical theatre), and Bharatanatyam classical dance. Their work has theoretically informed my thinking about caste scripts and methodologically shown ways to do intellectual histories of caste assertion and anticaste resistance in the repertoire of embodiment. Rege, Sharmila, “Conceptualising Popular Culture: ‘Lavani’ and ‘Powada’ in Maharashtra,” Economic and Political Weekly, 37.11 (2002): 1038–47Google Scholar; Sharmila Rege, “Introduction: Towards a Feminist Reclamation of Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar,” in B. R. Ambedkar, Against the Madness of Manu: B. R. Ambedkar's Writings on Brahmanical Patriarchy, ed. Sharmila Rege (New Delhi: Navayana, 2013), 13–56, esp. 42–56; Paik, Shailaja, “Mangala Bansode and the Social Life of Tamasha: Caste, Sexuality, and Discrimination in Modern Maharashtra,” Biography 40.1 (2017): 170–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Devesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures: Devadāsīs, Memory, and Modernity in South India (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

The historian Sanal Mohan's pathbreaking rereading of colonial missionary ethnographies to access encasted lifeworlds of the slave castes of Travancore has opened up new ways of thinking of caste and the performance of everyday life. P. Sanal Mohan, Modernity of Slavery: Struggles against Caste Inequality in Colonial Kerala (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015), esp. 4–8, 121, 214–309. I also share with Debjani Ganguly an interest in the everyday experience of caste and in thinking not so much about the caste of performance in aesthetic forms but about the performance of caste in everyday life. Debjani Ganguly, Caste and Dalit Lifeworlds: Postcolonial Perspectives (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2008). My differences with Ganguly's work are too numerous to elaborate here, but four important points stand out:

1. (1)

   (1) My theoretical framework is rooted in transnational Dalit studies, whose criticisms of postcolonial theory are by now well-established: G. Aloysius, Nationalism without a Nation in India (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Dalit Studies, ed. Ramnarayan S. Rawat and K. Satyanarayana (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Ayyathurai, Gajendran, “The Making of the Postcolonial Theory and Practice Brahminical and Transnational,” South Asian History and Culture 5.1 (2014): 133–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jangam, Chinnaiah, “Politics of Identity and the Project of Writing History in Postcolonial India: A Dalit Critique,” Economic and Political Weekly 50.40 (2015): 63–70Google Scholar.

2. (2)

   (2) The methods I adopt include archival research informed by historical anthropology, ethnographic history, and performance historiography rather than literary analysis: Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), esp. 1–48, 198–251; Mohan, 4–8, 121, 214–309.

3. (3)

   (3) I view caste through the analytical lens of performance and performativity, as opposed to representational analysis of discourse.

4. (4)

   (4) Finally, my understanding of colonial modernity contrasts considerably with the postcolonial view, particularly in relation to the political use-value of the universal, which I see not as melancholy indicators of the limits of encompassment but as incendiary sparks that ignited insurrectionary flames—as I argue here and in greater detail in Narayan, Vivek V., “Mirrors of the Soul: Performative Egalitarianisms and Genealogies of the Human in Colonial-Era Travancore, 1854–1927,” CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion 1.1 (2020): 125–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), xii. See also J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).

7 My conceptualization of “caste scripts” is influenced by Robin Bernstein's “scriptive things” and Natalia Molina's “racial scripts”: Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood and Race from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 8–13; Natalia Molina, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014), 6–10. Also relevant is Kwame Anthony Appiah's formulation of collective identities as “scripts,” which he defines as “narratives that people can use in shaping their projects and in telling their life stories”; Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 22.

8 Ambedkar, Madness of Manu, 104, my emphasis.

9 I use “traditional” here quite self-consciously in Hobsbawm and Ranger's sense that traditions are always invented; The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). I mean here that these “traditional” legitimizations are often nonscriptural and are simply accepted as commonsense everyday practice. The contrast between scriptural and traditional is not so much that one is true and the other false, or that one is more legitimate than the other but, rather, that the scriptural is textual whereas the traditional is invented in narratives that codify what Malinowski called “the imponderabilia of actual life”; Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922; repr. Abingdon, Oxon, and New York: Routledge, 2002), 16. My usage of “traditional” here maps onto Pierre Bourdieu's “doxa,” by which he means the unquestioned common sense through which every established order produces “the naturalization of its own arbitrariness”; Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 164–71, quote at 164.

10 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen / Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, 4th ed. (Blackwell Publishing, 2009), ¶371. Henceforth cited as “PI” and paragraph (¶) or page number.

11 PI ¶373.

12 See B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition, ed. S. Anand (New Delhi: Navayana, 2014). I am thinking of Ambedkar's influential theorization in which caste is “not merely a division of labour. It is also a division of labourers” (233, ¶4.1, original emphasis). As “a hierarchy in which the division of labourers are graded one above the other,” caste systematizes graded inequality (234, ¶4.1; 294–6, ¶¶21.15–17).

13 My conception of encasted experience as a performative process is influenced—in form, if not in substance—by similar theories of race. Two important works have been formative in my thinking: Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century, ed. Hazel R. Markus and Paula M. L. Moya (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2010); and Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London and New York: Verso, 2012).

14 PI ¶43; PI ¶¶19–23; and PI, 235. See also Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 15–16.

15 PI ¶¶7, 23.

16 PI ¶23.

17 Das, 16.

18 Ibid., original emphasis.

19 See Richard Schechner, “Drama, Script, Theatre, and Performance,” TDR: The Drama Review 17.3 (1973): 5–36, at 6.

20 I am thinking specifically of Joseph Roach's formulation of surrogation and Diana Taylor's theorization of acts of transfer and scenarios; Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); and Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

21 My usage of “fingerprints” here, and, more generally, my thinking that caste scripts can also follow and bear evidence of prior enactment—in contrast to Schechner's blueprint that preexists enactment—is influenced by Fields and Fields. They suggest that “racecraft” exists in “human action and imagination” as “collective yet individual, day-to-day yet historical, and consequential even though nested in mundane routine.” Racecraft is, ultimately, “a kind of fingerprint evidence that racism has been on the scene” (18–19, original emphasis).

22 PI ¶23.

23 I use political action in Hannah Arendt's sense of that which mediates between humans to give birth to history. Moreover, action bears a close connection to the “human condition of natality”: that is, the ability to act is inseparable from the ability to make something new. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2d ed., trans. Margaret Canovan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 8–9. In the context of Ayyankali's long political career, the villuvandi samaram and those that follow are political actions in that they organized new forms of association based on shared experience and solidarity, and created new ways of being. See also Judith Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

24 Although I focus here on Ayyankali and the jati maryada of colonial-era Kerala in order to make a case for understanding caste as performance, I do not mean to suggest that his political actions were autochthonous. On the contrary, Ayyankali's transgressions were in dialogue with egalitarian discourses circulating at the time. I refer to these transnational flows of egalitarian discourses as the “genealogies of the human.” In nineteenth-century Travancore, the genealogies of the human include Enlightenment universal values that came via British Protestant missionaries; discourses and practices of nondualistic equality in Narayana Guru's reinterpretation of Advaita Vedanta; and the Tamil Yogic tradition of Saiva Siddhanta, with its threefold conceptual framework of Pati–pasu–pasam (or, godhead–soul/spirit–substance/matter). For a longer discussion, see my “Mirrors of the Soul.”

25 The period following the villuvandi samaram was especially marked by violent conflict between the savarna communities led by the Nairs, and the Pulayas led by Ayyankali. In fact, every major milestone of Ayyankali's political career that I list in the next note was met with savarna violence asserting caste. The reward–punishment spectrum maintained by the caste order is not unique to Kerala. For a comparative discussion elsewhere in twenty-first-century India, see Anand Teltumbde's study of the Khairlanji massacre, Khairlanji: A Strange and Bitter Crop (New Delhi: Navayana, 2008). The “reward,” now as then, may be as little as a measure of rice for the day's only meal handed out to those who worked in the fields from dawn till dusk. I am also thinking here of Ambedkar's analysis in Annihilation of Caste, where he points out that the caste system “must perpetually face the problem of the transgressor. Unless there is a penalty attached to the act of transgression, . . . [the] system will break down” (268, ¶16.6).

26 Other struggles against the caste order codes followed the villuvandi samaram and the agitations for freedom of movement. The yearlong strike for education (1904–5) that Ayyankali organized is widely regarded as the first-ever labor strike in Kerala, in which agricultural workers of the Pulaya caste struck work to demand access to schools. These organizational efforts resulted in the formation of the Sadhu Jana Paripalana Sangham (SJPS, the Association for the Welfare of the Poor People) in 1907, following which he established a community law court that signaled the emergence of a modern political subject. The kallu mala samaram (stone bead necklace protest) of 1915 was another significant political effort organized by Ayyankali and the SJPS, in which women of the Pulaya caste discarded the humiliating stone bead necklaces forced upon them by jati maryada. Finally, Ayyankali represented the Pulaya community in the citizen's council of Travancore, the Sree Moolam Praja Sabha (Sree Moolam Popular Assembly) during 1911–32.

27 These are only two notable recent reenactments apart from the hundreds of performances that occur on Ayyankali's birthday, 28 August. To know more about the demonstration by Dalit women for right of entry to Sabarimala, see TNM Staff, “Kerala Dalit Women to Ride on Bullock Carts to Fight for Rights to Enter Sabarimala,” 14 December 2018, The News Minute, www.thenewsminute.com/article/kerala-dalit-women-ride-bullock-carts-fight-rights-enter-sabarimala-93329, accessed 2 June 2021. The recent dispute over the “caste gate” in the Malankara Estate in Thodupuzha referenced the villuvandi samaram as Bhim Army activists demolished the gate that barred their right of way; see Dool News Desk, “Bhim Army pravarthakar enthinu aa gate polichu, Malankarayile vivadamaya ‘jati gate’ enthanu?” [What is the controversial ‘caste gate’ in Malankara and why did Bhim Army workers tear it down?], www.doolnews.com/what-is-malankara-caste-gate-issue-and-why-it-was-demolished-by-bhim-army-workers.html and “26 varshamayi sanchara swathantharyam nishedichcha Malankara jati gate polichchu mattiya Bhim Army” [Bhim Army tears down the caste gate that denied freedom of movement for 26 years], www.doolnews.com/bhim-army-malankara-caste-gate-idukki-132.html, both (in Malayalam) at Dool News, 16 March 2021, accessed 2 June 2021. Note especially the poster in the background depicting the villuvandi samaram.

28 Ambedkar, Madness of Manu, 84. See also Chakravarti, Uma, “Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class and State,” Economic and Political Weekly 28.14 (1993): 579–85Google Scholar; and Chakravarti, Uma, “Gender, Caste and Labour: Ideological and Material Structure of Widowhood,” Economic and Political Weekly 30.36 (1995): 2248–56Google Scholar.

29 The practice of relegating Namboodiri women to their homes through spatial codes, for instance, also informed embodied codes that governed their forays into the outside world, requiring them to be hidden from view with veils and umbrellas.

30 The Namboodiri reformist collective, the Yogakshema Sabha, which emerged in the early twentieth century, was particularly engaged in these efforts. The classic statements of the lives of Namboodiri women and the social reform movement are Lalithambika Antarjanam's 1976 novel Agnisakshi: Fire, My Witness, [1980], trans. Vasanthi Sankaranarayanan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press with DC Books, 2015), and V. T. Bhattathiripad's 1929 play, Adukkalayil ninnum arangathekku [From the kitchen to the stage] (in Malayalam) (Kottayam: DC Books, 1994).

31 The Channar Lahala of 1822–59 began as a demand by Channar women to be allowed to cover their upper bodies, and later evolved to include protests against forced caste labor. These protests inaugurated a century of social upheaval that is somewhat contentiously referred to as Kerala Navothanam, or Kerala Renaissance. For a detailed discussion, see N. V. Sheeju, “The Shanar Revolts, 1822–99: Towards a Figural Cartography of the Pretender,” South Asia Research 35.3 (2015): 298–317. Also see Robert L. Hardgrave Jr., “The Breast-Cloth Controversy: Caste Consciousness and Social Change in Southern Travancore,” Indian Economic & Social History Review 5.2 (1968): 171–87.

32 The noted feminist historian J. Devika discusses the ways in which the modern individual was engendered in Kerala through the language of reforms, in particular the patriarchal elisions of public–masculine, and private–feminine. J. Devika, En-gendering Individuals: The Language of Re-forming in Twentieth Century Keralam (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007).

33 The renowned Dalit intellectual and historian K. K. Kochu holds the devolution of language to “varna language” responsible for the failure of communities/castes in Kerala to integrate culturally or assimilate in Kerala. K. K. Kochu, “Language and People,” in The Oxford India Anthology of Malayalam Dalit Writing, ed. M. Dasan et al. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), 248–55, at 250.

34 B. R. Ambedkar, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, 17 vols. (in 20), ed. Vasant Moon et al. (Bombay: Education Dept., Government of Maharashtra, 1957–2003) [henceforth cited as BAWS], 2: 506.

35 Samuel Mateer, Native Life in Travancore (London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1883), 291, 334; James Forbes, Oriental Memoirs: A Narrative of Seventeen Years Residence in India, 2 vols., 2d ed., ed. Countess de Montalembert (London: Richard Bentley, New Burlington Street, 1834), 1: 254; Abbe J. A. Dubois, Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, 3d ed., trans. Henry K. Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 61.

36 Rustom Bharucha, Terror and Performance (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 28.

37 Although I say “temples” here, they were not the only places of worship governed by spatial caste codes. Access to other places of worship, especially churches, also inspired anti-caste struggle. But temples outweighed churches in their zealous commitment to caste codes, and temple entry became a more celebrated cause among the avarna communities than admission to church congregations.

38 For the Channar Lahala, see note 31 above. Sree Narayana Guru (1856–1928) is a towering presence in Kerala history whose numerous spiritual–political actions protesting caste included consecrating a temple at Aruvippuram. Being an Ezhava himself, the consecration violated caste codes that decreed that only Brahmins could perform this ritual. Guru's response when confronted by a group of savarnas is now legendary; he said, “I have only installed an Ezhava Siva.” M. K. Sanoo, Sree Narayana Guru—Life and Times [1976] (in Malayalam), trans. P. R. Mukundan, ed. O. V. Usha (Kochi [Cochin]: Open Door Media, 2017), 59. The Vaikkom (or Vykom) Satyagraha of 1924–5 was a temple entry movement organized by Narayana Guru's disciple T. K. Madhavan (1885–1930) under M. K. Gandhi's leadership. The anticaste protest began with a dispute about the use of public roads around the temple; see Mary Elizabeth King, Gandhian Nonviolent Struggle and Untouchability in South India: The 1924–25 Vykom Satyagraha and the Mechanisms of Change (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015).

39 Robin Jeffrey, The Decline of Nair Dominance: Society and Politics in Travancore, 1847–1908 [1976, with spelling Nayar], 2d ed. (1994; repr. New Delhi: Manohar, 2014), 78, 275 n. 55.

40 Ibid., 79, 275 n. 60.

41 The prohibition on slave castes using public roads was enforced through violence. Duncan, Jonathan, “Historical Remarks on the Coast of Malabar, with Some Description of the Manners of Its Inhabitants,” Asiatic Researches 5 (1799): 1–36Google Scholar, at 5; Forbes, 253; J. H. Hutton, Caste in India: Its Nature, Function and Origins [1946], 4th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 80; Mateer, Native Life, 291; Dubois, 61. See also analyses by C. J. Fuller, The Nayars Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 44–5; Jeffrey, 78; P. Chandramohan, Developmental Modernity in Kerala: Narayana Guru, SNDP Yogam, and Social Reform (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2016), 11–12, 155–6; and Udaya Kumar, Writing the First Person: Literature, History, and Autobiography in Modern Kerala (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2016), 4.

A Nair pramani, who was usually armed with a sword or dagger, may, upon encountering a slave caste such as a Pulaya or a Cheruma, stab and kill him. When the slave castes had something to sell—palm-leaf umbrellas carried by Namboodiri women, for example—they set them by the roadside and hid in the fields when they saw their Namboodiri customers approaching. Similarly, the slave castes were forbidden entry into temples, palaces, and upper-caste residences. Mateer, Native Life, 291, 308–9, 334; Samuel Mateer, The Land of Charity: A Descriptive Account of Travancore and Its People with Special Reference to Missionary Labour (London: John Snow & Co., 1871), 46; Forbes, 254; Dubois, 61.

42 Similar spatial caste codes existed—and continue to exist—in other parts of India. Two examples separated by nearly a century—early twentieth-century Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu two years ago—will suffice to show that these absolute spatial codes were, and remain, commonplace across India. The Kalaram Temple Satyagraha in Nashik, Maharashtra, challenged the caste codes that denied access to the “Depressed Classes” (Ambedkar's favored term for the then-untouchable castes). Ambedkar was deeply involved in organizing this agitation, though he noted in a letter to Bhaurao Gaikwad on 3 March 1934 that “I didn't launch the temple entry movement because I wanted the Depressed Classes to become worshipers of idols which they were prevented from worshiping or because I believed temple entry would make them equal members in and an integral part of the Hindu Society.” It was, his letter goes on to note, to assert their humanity and rights (BAWS, 17, pt. 1: 202; more generally, see 181–207). Ambedkar, like Ayyankali, saw transgressing caste codes as integral to his emancipatory project. More recently, reports emerged from Tamil Nadu of Dalit communities—a self-adopted political term for the ex-untouchable castes—not being allowed to carry their dead to cremation through public roads. I do not mean to imply that things are unchanged, but rather that they are not safely in the past. TNM Staff, “Denied Road Access, Dalits in Vellore Forced to Lower Body from Bridge for Cremation,” The News Minute, 22 August 2019, www.thenewsminute.com/article/denied-road-access-dalits-vellore-forced-lower-body-bridge-cremation-107621, accessed 2 June 2021.

43 I understand “choreography” here and throughout not so much as the work of an authorial individual, whether as a sole creator, or as a facilitator of collaborative artistic enterprise, but in Daisuke Muto's sense of “meshwork,” which emphasizes “lines of movement or growth” that are realized collectively within particular social contexts. Daisuke Muto, “Choreography as Meshwork: The Production of Motion and the Vernacular,” in Choreography and Corporeality: Relay in Motion, ed. Thomas F. DeFrantz and Philipa Rothfield (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 31–50, at 42. For Muto, meshwork choreography “is not the realisation of individual intent or vision” but, rather, is a means to “bring about motions and changes in a collaborative way, but without the need to move in unison” (45). For a genealogy of choreographic authorship, see Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (Abingdon, Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2011). Muto's meshwork choreography is helpful in thinking about caste, as its spatial choreography has neither a sole author nor a facilitator; it is instead a dense meshwork choreography that constitutes encasted experience. While challenging those encasted norms can be, and often was, the work of individuals—Ayyankali's villuvandi samaram, for example—its political significance almost invariably involves changes in the meshwork. Muto's theorization of choreography, then, helps contextualize these radical acts within a dense meshwork rather than overestimating the effect of individual acts. In short, my usage of “choreography” here and throughout is in the sense of a performative realization and representational approximation of repetitive meaningful action.

44 The critical attention paid to “distance pollution” has extended from nineteenth-century missionaries to contemporary scholars: Duncan; Forbes; Mateer, Native Life; Hutton; Fuller; Jeffrey; M. R. Raghava Varier and Rajan Gurukkal, Kerala Charithram (Randam Bhagam) [Kerala history (volume two)] (in Malayalam) (Sukapuram: Vallathol Vidyapeetham, 2012); Mohan; Chandramohan; and Kumar.

45 In an excellent turn of phrase, the British Protestant missionary Samuel Mateer noted that the caste system extended from the Brahmins to the slave castes in a “nicely graduated scale” (Land of Charity, 28). Ambedkar formulated this thought with characteristic rigor in what has since become its most fundamental definition; he called caste a system of “graded” inequality (Annihilation of Caste, 234, ¶4.1; 294–6, ¶¶21.15–17).

46 Mateer, Land of Charity, 32.

47 A relationship of untouchability existed between Namboodiris and Nairs and provides a good example of the contradictions that constitute caste oppression. Namboodiris and Nairs engaged in the practice of sambandham, a polyandrous and polygamous system of marriage that was inextricably linked to the matrilineal tharavad system of Nair inheritance. The relationship of untouchability was, then, to belabor the point, performed only in public. K. Saradamoni, Matriliny Transformed: Family, Law, and Ideology in Twentieth Century Travancore (New Delhi: Sage, 1999).

48 Dubois, 61, 188.

49 Mateer, Native Life, 334; Mateer, Land of Charity, 32; Francis Day, The Land of the Permauls, or Cochin, its Past and its Present (Madras: Gantz Brothers, 1863), 322.

50 Mateer, Native Life, 309; Hutton, 78–81; Mencher, Joan P., “Kerala and Madras: A Comparative Study of Ecology and Social Structure,” Ethnology 5.2 (1966): 135–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 154; Chandramohan, 11. Since the tiyyapad and the cherumapad derive from spatial caste codes, they must have been approximate. Such “spatial measurement must be anything but exact,” notes Hutton, “as not only is the polluting distance less for a Nayar [Nair], for instance, than for a Brahman [Namboodiri], but different standards are mentioned by different authorities” (79). The tiyyapad, in particular was highly contingent upon the speaker—referring to about thirty-six feet when spoken by a Namboodiri, and around twelve feet when used by a Nair—since Ezhavas and Thiyyas had social interaction with Namboodiris as well as Nairs. There is some consensus that, given the Pulayas/Cherumas were not allowed to interact with Namboodiris, the cherumapad refers to the distance between Pulayas/Cherumas and Nairs, which is variously reported as sixty-four or sixty-six feet.

51 Mencher, 154; Fuller, 43–5.

52 More than one nineteenth-century ethnographer notes that violators were punished by being “cut down.” See Mateer, Native Life, 291; Forbes, 254. Dubois notes that if a Nair encounters a Pulaya on the road, he is “entitled to stab him on the spot” (61).

53 This understanding applies to most existing accounts I have seen so far: Duncan; Forbes; Mateer, Native Life; Hutton; Fuller; Jeffrey; Warrier and Gurukkal; Chandramohan. A few recent works (esp. Mohan; Kumar) theorize spatial mobility and aspects of embodiment as ways in which caste is constituted.

54 Bhaskaran Unni, Patthompatham Noottandile Keralam [Kerala in the nineteenth century] (in Malayalam) (Thrissur: Kerala Sahitya Akademi, 1988), 59–70.

55 Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (1971; New York: Perennial Classics, 2001), 161–84.

56 Bernstein, 73.

57 The sacred thread of the Brahmins, the poonol, is perhaps the paradigmatic example of an encasted thing. It marks the wearer as Brahmin though it is little more than knotted strands of white thread, and costs nearly nothing.

58 Unni, 63–4. See also V. Nagam Aiya, The Travancore State Manual, vol. 2 (Trivandrum: Travancore Government Press, 1906), 253.

59 Aiya, 2: 266–7.

60 Ibid., 267.

61 Unni, 62.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid., 63.

64 Mateer, Land of Charity, 61.

65 Aiya, 2: 351.

66 If his loving description of the “long black hair growing luxuriantly” on the heads of Nair women did not reveal how he felt about them, Nagam Aiya clarifies, presumably without irony, that the topknot among Nair women is “a very pretty observance and one that is worth imitation in more civilized countries” (2: 350). The language of Nagam Aiya's ethnographic descriptions, caught in the vortices of contempt and desire toward various castes—from the “savage” Pulayas to the lovingly described Nair women and the awestruck descriptions of the Namboodiris—is a reminder of both the dangers and possibilities of intersubjectivity in the ethnography of caste.

67 Ibid., 2: 350–1.

68 While this caste is self-described as Nadars—indeed, that continues to be their name in contemporary times—I refer to them as Channars because this caste name is associated with a major political event: the Channar Lahala.

69 Two historical incidents will serve to illustrate the ambivalent position of the intermediate castes such as the Channars. Christian converts were prominent in the agitation led by Channar women for the right to cover their upper bodies in the Channar Lahala; Sheeju, N. V., “The Shanar Revolts, 1822–99: Towards a Figural Cartography of the Pretender,” South Asia Research 35.3 (2015): 298–317Google Scholar. However, these protests against encasted humiliation did not exactly expand into an emancipatory zeal: Channar Christians resisted the admission of slave-caste converts to their churches and even attempted to build separate churches for slave-caste congregations; Samuel Mateer, “The Malayalam Country. XIV—London Missionary Society: North Travancore,” in The Missionary Conference: South India and Ceylon, 1879, vol. II (Madras: Addison & Co., Mount Road, 1880), 147–63, at 155.

70 See Dubois, 341; Mitavadi (1.4), January 1916; Aiya, 2: 404; Mateer, Land of Charity, 60. These necklaces have an important place in Kerala history, for they inspired a landmark agitation led by Ayyankali in 1915, in which Pulaya women discarded the humiliating practice of wearing these encasted things. Today, this historic event is known as the kallu mala samaram, or the stone bead necklace protest.

71 For extensive discussions on the slave trade in Kerala, see Mohan; K. K. Kusuman, Slavery in Travancore (Trivandrum: Kerala Historical Society, 1973); Adoor K. K. Ramachandran Nair, Slavery in Kerala (Delhi: Mittal, 1986); Mateer, Land of Charity, 28, 32, 42–8; Mateer, Native Life, 32, 42–4, 82, 297–318; John Abbs, Twenty-Two Years’ Missionary Experience in Travancore (John Snow & Co., 1870), 149–69, esp. 150; Aiya, 2: 402–7.

72 P. M. Gireesh, Keralathile Achara Bhasha [Kerala's language customs] (in Malayalam) (Thiruvananthapuram [Trivandrum]: Kerala Bhasha Institute, 1998), 7.

73 Chentharassery, 16, my translation.

74 Gireesh, 7.

75 Ibid., 7–8.

76 Mateer, Native Life, 334–5.

77 BAWS, 2: 506.

78 While Gireesh notes that language is both product and instrument of society, he adopts a reflectionist approach that conceives social inequities as being out there beyond language (1–2). See also P. K. Balakrishnan, Jathivyavasthithiyum Keralacharithravum [The caste system and Kerala history] (in Malayalam) (1983; Kottayam: DC Books, 2008), 269; and Kumaran Vayaleri, Bhashayum Samoohavum [Language and society] (in Malayalam) (Payyannur, Kerala: Pusthaka Bhavan, 2010), 27.

79 Elaine W. Chun and Adrienne Lo, “Language and Racialization,” in The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology, ed. Nancy Bonvillain (New York: Routledge, 2016), 220–33, at 223. See also Jonathan Rosa and Christa Burdick, “Language Ideologies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Language and Society, ed. Ofelia García, Nelson Flores, and Massimiliano Spotti (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 102–23.

80 Agha, Asif, “Voice, Footing, Enregisterment,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15.1 (2005): 38–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 38.

81 Ibid., 39.

82 Kapikkad is echoing Ambedkar's formulation that caste puts in place an “ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt” (BAWS, 2: 506). Sunny M. Kapikkad, “The Dalit Presence in Malayalam Literature,” in Oxford India Anthology of Malayalam Dalit Writing, 249–66, at 260.

83 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 63. “Strong evaluation” refers to distinctions of “right and wrong, better or worse, higher or lower, which are not rendered valid by our own desire, inclinations, or choices, but rather stand independent of these and offer standards by which they can be judged” (4). In other words, strong evaluation distinguishes between desires and goods. Given that moral interpretations of the good always involve affirming “a given ontology of the human” (5), strong evaluation undergirds human agency and identity by defining what makes life worth living.

84 Ibid., 64.

85 Ibid., 76; more generally, see 25–90.

86 Ibid., 79–82, 85.

87 Ibid., 93.

88 For an illuminating discussion of “genealogies of performance,” see Roach, 25–31.

89 Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), 9.

90 Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 2.

91 Taylor, 12.

92 The historian Sanal Mohan has argued that the emergence of the concept of equality characterizes modernity for the slave castes. “[T]he project of modernity,” he points out, “entailed equality” (121).

93 I am drawing upon the work of Althusser, Foucault, and Butler in making this assertion. See, for instance, Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 85–126; Foucault, Michel, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8.4 (1982): 777–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

94 The slave castes adopted and deployed universals such as equality in their struggles against caste. These contingent and historical appropriations, which articulated particular claims in universalistic language for strategic purposes, I call “repurposing universals.” The political action of repurposing universals refers to the double process of bringing the weight of universals to bear upon particular political struggles, and of elevating particular struggles to universal proportions. I describe the situated practice of repurposing universals in Travancore in “Mirrors of the Soul.”

95 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new ed. (New York: Harvest Books, 1976), 296–8, quote at 298.

96 Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, 226, ¶2.22. In Ambedkar's work, the process of transgressing caste codes of subjection accompanies and constitutes modernity. Discussing caste subjection in eighteenth-century Peshwa-ruled Pune, Ambedkar notes that discarding those dehumanizing practices, and adopting the emancipatory logic of anticaste social reform, was a “necessary preliminary” to political change. As Ambedkar famously pointed out, given that caste subjection has a “divine basis” (289, ¶21.3), the only way to effect this notional change is “to destroy the belief in the sanctity of the shastras” (Annihilation of Caste, 287, ¶ 20.9). Ambedkar asserts that it is impossible to destroy caste without also destroying the Hindu scriptures, whose tenets espouse and legitimize the caste order, eventually concluding that the task at hand was to “destroy the sacredness and divinity with which caste has become invested. In the last analysis, this means you must destroy the authority of the shastras and the Vedas” (289). Throughout, while Ambedkar retains a textual emphasis, his examples include humiliating social performances: from the pots and brooms that Peshwa rule imposed on Mahars (213–14, ¶2.8) to practices such as widow remarriage (251–2, ¶¶9.1–3). In Ambedkar's words: “Under the rule of the Peshwas in the Maratha country the untouchable was not allowed to use the public streets if a Hindu was coming along lest he should pollute the Hindu by his shadow. The untouchable was required to have a black thread either on his wrist or in his neck as a sign or a mark to prevent the Hindus from getting themselves polluted by his touch through mistake. In Poona, the capital of the Peshwa, the untouchable was required to carry, strung from his waist, a broom to sweep away from behind the dust he treaded on lest a Hindu walking on the same should be polluted. In Poona, the untouchable was required to carry an earthen pot, hung in his neck wherever he went, for holding his spit lest his spit falling on earth should pollute a Hindu who might unknowingly happen to tread on it.” (213–14, ¶2.8). He goes on to conclude that “the emancipation of the mind and the soul [i.e., anticaste social reform that discards such humiliating practices] is a necessary preliminary for the political expansion of the people” (226, ¶2.22).