Review of The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India by Rupa Viswanath

Abstract

Book review This book is a marvel of meticulous scholarship which fills an important gap in the history of untouchability in Tamil Nadu. It is so well-documented that more than a third of it consists of endnotes and so clearly written that its accomplishment is also best stated in its own words: “Specifically, the book shows how during the thirty years from roughly 1890 to 1920 ways of thinking emerged through the concerted efforts of a ‘caste-state nexus’ – a de facto alliance between British and Indian officials and native high caste employers of pariah labour – first to elide, and when that was not possible, to downplay and avoid, the problem that the pariah posed. As a consequence of concerted strategies of evasion, the Pariah Problem was only posed and never solved, then as now” (3). The “ways of thinking” involved referred to above are primarily three: (1) that caste, and discrimination based on it, is a religious phenomenon; (2) that social solutions to the problem should be prioritized over political and legal ones such as “the state’s enforcement of the fundamental rights to equality and access” (2); and (3) emphasis be placed on “reservation” as a mode of affirmative action, as a substitute for more fundamental structural changes. As the narrative unfolds along these lines, the book becomes an absorbing combination of scholarly erudition, analytical force, and lucid exposition. However, the book under review seems to assume from the very beginning, and throughout (268 note 48; 388), in keeping with many other accounts found in the literature on the subject, that the untouchables lie outside the Hindu fold. Such an assumption is deeply problematical, especially when found in a book which is otherwise so painstakingly accurate and well-documented. On the key question of whether untouchables fall within or outside the varṇa, or the class system within Hinduism, (Pandurang Vaman Kane 1962) has this to say: