Drawing from publications by Swami Achutanand and the Adi-Hindu Mahasabha press between 1916 and 1940, this article examines the role of this north Indian Dalit organization in creating language and categories of liberalism in the Hindi vernacular. The Mahasabha poet-activists published numerous song-booklets in a variety of Hindi song genres to intervene in ongoing discussions on the subjects of representation and equality which they characterized as mulki-haq and unch-niche. Histories of liberties in late colonial India have typically examined its emergence within dominant Hindu and Muslim middle-class groups. This article uncovers the unique contributions of Dalit poet-activists who recognized the value of liberal ideas and institutions in challenging caste and abolishing “Manu’s Kanun” (lawgiver Manu’s Hindu law codes). It highlights the methodological importance of mohalla (neighborhood) sources usually located in Dalit activists’ houses in untouchable quarters. The chapbooks found in mohalla collections have enabled the writing of a new history of the Mahasabha’s activism and of the initiatives taken by poet-activists in founding a new Dalit politics in northern India. I explore the emergence of a Dalit literate public which sustained the activities of the Mahasabha and which responded with enthusiasm to its articulation of the new social identity of Achut (untouched) and a new political identity of Adi-Hindus—original inhabitants of Hindustan (India). Offering a new methodological approach in using mohalla sources and song-booklets composed in praise of liberal institutions, this essay makes a significant contribution to the recovery of a forgotten Dalit public sphere in early twentieth-century India.

This article discusses Chaudhari Mulkiram (April 1910–August 1954) and the contesting ideologies, memories, histories, and socio-political conditions surrounding his career from the 1920s to the mid-1950s. Mulkiram belonged to the Dhangar, a sub-caste of the Khatik caste in Meerut. He was the first Dalit of the United Provinces (UP) who qualified for the Public Service Commission in 1939. This article shows his socio-religious and socio-political relations and responses to the Arya Samaj, Congress, and Scheduled Caste Federation. It reveals how the representatives of these agencies portrayed his life and work. This article also discusses how his relations and responses helped and influenced his caste members in the western UP. It argues that the Arya Samaj, Harijan Sevak Sangh, and Congress used the first generation of Dalit civil servants like Mulkiram to cultivate local leaders and to mobilize local Dalits, peasants, labourers, and villagers to act in their political interests against Ambedkar’s movement. Hence, in the 1940s and early 1950s, Mulkiram presented himself as a Gandhi bhakt, Jan Neta (public leader), and Sanyasi (household monk and socio-religious reformer).

We examine unequal outcomes in the implementation of India’s national rural electrification program in Uttar Pradesh. We ask two questions: (1) to what extent did Dalits, the lowest group in India’s caste hierarchy, receive less attention when the state electrified rural communities? (2) Was BSP, the state’s Dalit party, able to reduce this inequality? Using data from a hundred thousand villages, we provide robust evidence for unequal outcomes. Villages inhabited solely by Dalits were 20 percentage points less likely to be covered by the program than villages without any Dalits. Moreover, a regression discontinuity analysis shows that the electoral success of BSP failed to reduce such differences. These results highlight the magnitude and persistence of caste inequality in the implementation of democratic public policy, despite political representation.

This essay explores a global and existential problem—how ordinary people live and contend with historically deep subordination, humiliation, and exclusion—through an examination of the everyday lives of formerly untouchable caste Dalit communities in Kerala, India. I look at this through the lens of neighborliness: how people discuss how they live together with other castes and classes in small town and rural Kerala. Their continuing struggles with and experiences of humiliation and subordination must be placed within the historical context of Kerala, where deep inequality previously constituted every social relationship, and where the communist movement and other important social and political transformations have radically transformed living conditions and provided new languages and possibilities of equality within the official public sphere, if not the household. Drawing from the anthropology of ethics and engaging with philosophical discussions of living with others, I scrutinize neighborliness as an ethical landscape for Dalits living in new kinds of neighborhoods produced by political and social transformation. In doing so, I also reflect upon the ongoing conversations and interactions within which, for Dalits, respect, dignity, and worth are at stake. The essay also suggests new ways of understanding publics that are neither private nor part of the official public, but rather are networks of houses within rural neighborhoods—what I call “private-publics,” which are constituted through gendered caste relations.

In this qualitative study we examine the role of caste, class, and Dalit janitorial labor in the aftermath of floods in Chennai, India, in 2015. Drawing from a variety of sources including interviews, social media, and news coverage, we studied how Dalit (formerly known as ‘untouchable’) janitors were treated during the performance of janitorial labor for cleaning the city. Our study focuses on two theoretical premises: (a) caste-based social relations reproduce inequalities by devaluing Dalit labor as ‘dirty work’; and (b) Dalit subjectivities, labor, and sufferings including occupational hazards become invisible and ungrievable forcing Dalits to provide a counter narrative to preserve the memory of their trauma and dignity injuries. We find that the discursive construction of janitorial labor as dirty work forced Dalit janitors to work in appalling and unsafe working conditions. Janitors suffered several dignity injuries in terms of social exclusion and a lack of recognition for their efforts and accomplishments. Specifically, we examine various ways through which caste, dirty work, and dignity intersected in the narrative accounts of Dalit janitors. We also explore memory and how processes of remembering and forgetting affected the dignity claims of Dalit janitors.

In many Indian villages, the Dalits (Scheduled Castes or former Untouchables) are victims of daily atrocities at the hands of the dominant castes. With respect to the 2006 murder of a family of Dalits by their village’s ruling caste, we show how the police, the medical profession, the courts, and the authorities combined to deny them justice and obstruct the enforcement of laws that are aimed at protecting them – with the involvement of many Dalit officials. In conclusion, it would seem that none of the options or strategies pursued by researchers or activists is likely to improve conditions for the Dalits in the near future: a caste system that is highly adapted to globalisation is far from disappearing; nor is the "practice of untouchability" prohibited by the Constitution (1950).