Who is the true Halalkhor? Genealogy and ethics in dalit Muslim oral traditions

Abstract

The social worlds that dalit Muslims in North India daily negotiate are pervaded by contradictions between caste practices and Islamic ethics. Dalit Muslims engaged in manual scavenging and related forms of sanitation labour experience these contradictions acutely in the distinctive spatial and affective conditions of this labour, which I characterise as ‘intimate untouchability’. Grounded in historical and ethnographic research in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, this article demonstrates how dalit Muslims use narratives mobilising the genealogical and ethical concept of the Halalkhor—a caste label that also denotes ‘one who earns an honest living’—to critique their higher status co-religionists and to engender a more egalitarian Islamic community. The category of the Halalkhor is tracked in the historical record and in its deployment in dalit Muslim oral traditions about the origin of the community and its association with sanitation work.