Finding One's Path to Citizenship. Bhangi Activism in Uttar Pradesh in the 1950s

Academic discourse tends to equate Dalit political subjectivity with the Ambedkarite movement. However, for several decades after independence, the Congress party was able to impose its hegemony while the Ambedkarite movement’s influence remained limited to certain strongholds and particular Dalit castes. My presentation will discuss the attempt of the Bhangis of Uttar Pradesh (a Dalit professional community of sanitation workers) to reclaim political agency within the dominant ideological framework. Based on a case study of a local organization in Kanpur in the decade following Independence, I will show that in response to their political disqualification as “harijans” and passive benefiters of state welfare, these educated activists reclaimed their political citizenship by publishing political literature and acting as active citizens responsible for their community’s progress. While remaining within authorized ideological boundaries of the Congress regime, they engaged in appropriation and radical resignification of Hindu reformist discourses.

Nicolas Jaoul is Researcher in Anthropology at the CNRS, Paris, attached to the Institut de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur les Enjeux Sociaux (IRIS, EHESS), Paris. He is specialized in the ethnography of the Ambedkarite movement, and interested as well in the manners in which other ideologies like Marxism, Gandhism and Hindu Nationalism have addressed the question of untouchability.