Dalit religion

Abstract

AbstractA reckoning with the question of Dalit religion is overdue. The religious worlds of that swath of the population of South Asia subject to the structural violence of “untouchability” have long been misapprehended—a consequence, in large part, of classificatory practices of the colonial and postcolonial state—as a kind of unlettered adjunct to Hinduism. This article assembles scholarly findings of recent years to foreground how Dalits themselves have constructed religious community across time and space. Dalit religion, we argue, is better understood not as a variant of Hinduism but as a critical provocation to all religion in South Asia, as well as a congeries of autonomous regional traditions that, too long obfuscated under colonial and brahminical taxonomies of religion, call out for study on their own terms.