Argumentative Indian Chamars: a Subaltern Narrative of Modernity

Modernity, with class and identity

Together with concerns of dignity and equality, the work exudes a powerful discourse of identity of a historically marginalized community in Manupur, a north India village. The research configuration tells of new entanglements between pasts and presents and of human agencies which defied, in many different ways, the dichotomy between tradition and modernity. Saturated with ethnos, the focus on Chamar and their agency shifts the attention from the relationship between them and Western modernity to the internal dynamics of the nation state. The author observes the unfolding of a socio-economic ‘short circuit’ within a circumscribed locality at a particular temporal juncture. The author argues that the Chamars, in particular the aspiring middle-class section, are a phenomenon of ‘retro-modernity’, a neologism coined to express the condition by which certain individual and communities embrace a form of passé modernity, while remaining at the margin of what it means to be modern, in contemporary India. The model for modernity adopted by the Chamars is not one of Western modernity, but that of the Indian middle classes from the 19th century onwards. The models of modernity of aspiring middle-class Chamars and that of the new middle classes share codes of belonging, but they are not at all attainable. Retro-modernity points to this mismatch between assimilating into a passé prototype of modernity in which the Chamars are caught up.

Conventionally, the Chamar world-views were often shaped by dichotomies between the past and the present. The tension between modernity as ‘process’ and as ‘attribute’, which seems impossible to attain in India, is made evident in the work. Manupur Chamars were not just Levi Straussian subjects; it was the interplay between binaries and Chamar vernacular categories which formed one of the most interesting entry points into their modernity configurations. Ciotti emphasizes through a return to the past, not a Chamar local past, but mobilizes someone else’s past (unlike ‘sanskritisation’) for the purpose of self and community transformation. They borrowed a number of features and distinctions like civilizing effects of education, science and progress, girl’s education, community reform and women’s reform, and the design of respectable domesticity, which Indian middle classes had produced in the 19th century. Along with this process, the Chamars were also able to capitalize on the pasts of a larger and politicized ‘imagined community’ – of Dalit leaders and self-respect movements – but also on pasts which had aptly been rewritten by low-caste historians.

Looking beyond the tension between Western and non-Western modernities and turning her attention to ‘agency’, the author shows how a specific set of actors appropriate, transform and desire master narratives of the modern born within the same national context at different historical junctures. The author beautifully breaks down the sociological coherence of the agency of Indian modernity and bring to the fore the fundamental differences citizens from within the same nation state experience in their social transformation trajectory and in their enchantment with what they consider to be modern.

Ciotti also analyses the history of weaving in the Chamar community, the recruitment of the rural male workforce into apprenticeship for the city’s Muslim master weaver, the creation of a class of Chamar artisans and the weaving profession’s gradual disappearance from the 1990’s onwards. It is argued that the weaving era represented a historical niche of relative prosperity for the Chamar community, which contributed to the progressive disentanglement from the local landed elite’s ties of domination. This independence refers to the end of labour for a village, upper-caste elite, rather than the end of labour patronage tout court.

Community-engineering through education and non-rational modernity

The work analyses education and, in particular, the ways in which it is deployed for self and community improvement. Contextually, the author shows the contradictory nature of the effect of education. On the one hand, there is the constructed and shared ‘educated’ substance which acts as a unifying force amongst the Chamars vis-à-vis outsiders. On the other, education is an individualizing experience and related processes of upward mobility fragment the community body politics, leaving the ‘liberating’ effect of education embedded in the production of new inequalities. The work analyses elements of the religious and moral universe of the Chamars as a reflection of the making of the ‘modern’ in this community. The attributes of the civilized and modern rationality and of the ‘backward’ that the Chamar evoke in their self-representation are shown to merge into an isomorphism when these religious practices are at stake. A powerful example of socio-cultural critique is also carried out through the oral reworking of a text of high caste tradition. The reinterpretation of the ‘Satyanarayan katha’ (worship of the God ‘Vishnu’) operates on the basis of a reversal of the moral universe and demonstrates a different order in which to address issues of social injustice.

Sociality of politics and gendering retro-modernity:

This work shows that the political cause among the Chamars was linked to a much broader range of interests than just electoral democracy or identity politics. Thus apart from dealing with caste identity, it also aimed to establish a dialogue between this and wider economic, cultural and political phenomena.

Sociality speaks of their involvement in the Chamar community’s transition from the long-standing allegiance to the Congress party to the BSP. The work shows how this transition rests on a local history of changing working relations, sociality, of increasing separation between communities within the village, with an increasing perceived feeling of caste-ism, especially amongst the young generation.

Interestingly, the Chamar women’s embourgeoisement complements the ethnography of male discourse and agency: it explores the ways in which women have been affected in the process of the socio-economic and political transformation, changing notion of women’s work, and the forging of high-status alliances through marriage have penetrated the social texture of the Chamar community and reflected on its womenfolk. It shows how the making of gender regimes is pivotal to the project of retro-modernity vis-à-vis gender relations which took place in 19th century middle class households.

Appropriating a substantial reader in the field of postcolonial and subaltern studies, especially South Asia, the work focuses on the deep implications of looking at modernity through the lens of a subaltern community and contributes to postcolonial studies’ new agenda of a ‘double disentanglement from the binaries of postcolonial studies in its formative period’.

About the Author:

Ashish Saxena, Associate Professor in Sociology at Central University of Allahabad, U.P (India). He has research interests and significant publications on the issues related to rural development and subaltern community studies in India; especially Jammu and Kashmir State.