more information - www.cambridge.

org/9781107029002
 A History of Prejudice

This is a book about prejudice and democracy, and the prejudice of

democracy. In comparing the historical struggles of two geographically
disparate populations – Indian Dalits (once known as Untouchables)
and African Americans – Gyanendra Pandey, the leading subaltern
historian, examines the multiple dimensions of prejudice in two of the
world’s leading democracies. The juxtaposition of two very different
locations and histories, and within each of them of varying public and
private narratives of struggle, allows for an uncommon analysis of
the limits of citizenship in modern societies and states. Pandey, with
his characteristic delicacy, probes the histories of his protagonists to
uncover a shadowy world where intolerance and discrimination are
part of both public and private lives. This unusual and sobering book
is revelatory in its exploration of the contradictory history of promise
and denial that is common to the official narratives of nations such
as India and the United States and the ideologies of many opposition
movements.

Gyanendra Pandey is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of

History and Director of the Interdisciplinary Workshop in Colonial and
Postcolonial Studies at Emory University. His books include Remem-
bering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (2001)
and Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (2006).
 A History of Prejudice
Race, Caste, and Difference in India and
the United States

GYANENDRA PANDEY
Emory University
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C Gyanendra Pandey 2013

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no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
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First published 2013

Printed in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Pandey, Gyanendra, 1950–
A history of prejudice : race, caste, and difference in India and the
United States / Gyanendra Pandey.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-107-02900-2 (hbk.) – isbn 978-1-107-60938-9 (pbk.)
1. Racism – United States – History – 20th century. 2. Caste-based discrimination –
India – History – 20th century. 3. African Americans – Social conditions – 20th
century. 4. Dalits – Social conditions – 20th century. 5. Discrimination.
6. Prejudices. I. Title.
e185.61.p22 2013
305.800973–dc23 2012016724

isbn 978-1-107-02900-2 Hardback

isbn 978-1-107-60938-9 Paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of

urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and
does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or
appropriate.
 for Ruby
&
for Nishad

mere hamnafas, mere hamnawā

 Contents

List of Figures page viii

Preface and Acknowledgments ix

1. Introduction 1
2. Prejudice as Difference 34
3. Dalit Conversion: The Assertion of Sameness 61
4. “Double V”: The Everyday of Race Relations 97
5. An African American Autobiography: Relocating
Difference 131
6. Dalit Memoirs: Rescripting the Body 162
7. The Persistence of Prejudice 194

Select Bibliography 221

Index 233

vii
 List of Figures

1 Dr. B. R. Ambedkar and the Buddha page 93

2 (a) Lynching of John William (Willie) Clark,
Cartersville, Georgia, September 1930; (b) Funeral of
George Dorsey, Monroe, Georgia, July 1946 126
3 Viola Andrews, Atlanta, Georgia, 1975; George
Andrews, Madison, Georgia, 1975; and George’s
parents, Jessie Andrews and James Orr (Mr. Jim) in the
1940s 154
4 Babytai Kamble, Phaltan, Maharashtra, January 2012 173
5 Narendra Jadhav with his wife, Vasundhara, and parents,
Damu (Dada) and Sonu, Mumbai, December 1979 184

viii
 Preface and Acknowledgments

Not many people have the opportunity of writing a second “first

book.” My move to the USA has afforded me this unusual privilege
and pleasure by enabling me to embark on a series of inquiries into
what is for me an entirely new field. The list of institutions and individ-
uals who have supported and guided me through this unfamiliar field
is long, and my debt to them impossible to acknowledge adequately.
Among institutions, foremost is Emory University, which has pro-
vided me a home and an extraordinarily supportive and collegial intel-
lectual environment for the last six years. I owe special thanks to Earl
Lewis, provost and professor of history; to Bobby Paul and Cris Leven-
duski, respectively dean and associate dean of the College of Arts and
Sciences until 2011; the current deans of the College, Robin Forman
and Michael Elliott; and Lisa Tedesco, dean of the Graduate School of
Arts and Sciences, for their unfailing support and their personal inter-
est in my work. I also thank the Department of History (my primary
home on campus), the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian
Studies, and the erstwhile Institute of Critical International Studies and
its energetic director, Bruce Knauft, for their continuous generosity.
I owe a great debt of gratitude to the librarians and staff of Emory
Library, especially Randall Burkett, Elizabeth Chase, and Randy Gue,
and their colleagues in the Manuscripts and Rare Books Library –
that wonderful resource and research establishment on the tenth floor,
with its marvelously efficient, well-informed, and welcoming staff and
services. Warm thanks too to librarians, archivists, and staff in the

ix
x Preface and Acknowledgments

following places: the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; the Uni-

versity of Chicago; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore; the Univer-
sity of Amsterdam; the British Library, London; the National Archives
of India, New Delhi; Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New
Delhi; Institute of Dalit Studies, Delhi; Indian Social Science Institute,
Delhi; Babasaheb Ambedkar University, Aurangabad; Nagpur Univer-
sity; the Vasant Moon library in Nagpur; and the English and Foreign
Languages University, Hyderabad.
Some of the ideas and material contained in this work were pre-
sented at seminars and workshops in a number of different places:
the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta; Pune Univer-
sity; the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad; the
Banaras Hindu University; Jawaharlal Nehru University and Jamia
Millia Islamia, New Delhi; the Centre for Study of Developing Soci-
eties, Delhi; the Institute of Asian Studies, University of Amsterdam;
the Social Science Research Institute, Berlin; the National University of
Singapore; the University of Tokyo and Ryūkoku University in Japan;
and the Sydney University of Technology, Australia. I presented parts
of the work at the following universities in the United States apart from
Emory: University of Minnesota; University of Texas, Austin; Uni-
versity of Washington, Seattle; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor;
University of Colorado, Boulder; University of California at Santa
Barbara and at Berkeley; Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio; City Uni-
versity of New York; and Columbia University, New York; as well
as at the annual South Asian Studies Conference in Madison, Wis-
consin, in 2007 and the annual meeting of the American Historical
Association in Boston in 2010. Shortly before the manuscript went to
press, Mahesh Rangarajan, Crispin Bates, and Sumathy Ramaswamy
invited me to present its arguments in a seminar at the Nehru Memorial
Museum and Library, New Delhi; a series of lectures at the University
of Edinburgh; and a half-day workshop at Duke University, Durham,
North Carolina, respectively. I am deeply grateful to the organizers
and participants in all these meetings for their encouraging and critical
responses.
One last set of “institutional” acknowledgments. Marigold Acland
has, once more, been a wonderful editor to work with: quietly enthu-
siastic, efficient, and judicious. Heartfelt appreciation and gratitude to
her and her colleagues at Cambridge University Press. I owe thanks
to two anonymous readers for the Press whose thoughtful responses
 Preface and Acknowledgments xi

have helped tighten my arguments and fill out the context for readers
less familiar with one or the other locus of my investigation; Shirley
Andrews and Veronica Villa for permission to use four photographs
of the Andrews family from the family collection; Narendra Jadhav
and Maya Pandit for permission to use the photographs that appear in
Chapter 6; and the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Library
at Emory University and Corbis Images, New York, respectively,
for permission to use the photographs that appear in Chapter 4; to
Nene Humphrey, wife of the late Benny Andrews, and VAGA, New
York, for permission to use Benny’s painting “Evening Prayer” on the
cover; Sue and Neil Williams, the owners, for allowing us to photo-
graph the painting; Myron McGhee for the photograph; and Juana
McGhee and Julie Delliquanti for facilitating the photography. Kelly
Basner, Pankhuree Dube, and Marcy Alexander helped most gener-
ously in the final preparation of the manuscript; Kelly took on the
additional burden of preparing the index. My sincere thanks to all of
them.
Other individuals who guided and helped me in the course of the
research and reflection that went into the making of this book are
far too numerous to name. My awareness of their incredible generos-
ity, and my deep sense of gratitude for their help, are not reduced by
my failure to list all of them. First among these are the many people
who taught me about African American and Dalit lives by inviting
me into their homes and social circles and telling me about their life
and work. In India, I owe huge thanks to Narendra Jadhav and his
extended family in Mumbai, Pune, and Ozer; Gopal Guru in Pune (and
in Delhi); Sukhdeo and Vimal Thorat in Delhi; Chandrabhan Prasad
and his extended family in Delhi and Lucknow (especially Mr. Dhanai
Ram); S. R. Darapuri, K. M. Sant, Chedi Lal, Mata Prasadji, Rita
Chaudhuri, and Suraj Bahadur Thapa in Lucknow; Kumud Pawde and
Puran Meshram and their families in Nagpur; Meenakshi Moon (and
her daughter and son-in-law, Bharti and P. T. Wakode), in Nagpur;
Urmila Pawar and Laxman Gaikwad in Mumbai; Yashwant Manohar,
Datta Bhagat, Gangadhar Pantawane, R. K. Kshirsagar, P. E. Sonkam-
ble, Avinash Dholas, S. L. Gaikwad, and Desarda in Aurangabad; Raja
Shekhar Yundru and Neerja Shekhar in Chandigarh; and Balwant
Singh and his extended family in Saharanpur.
In addition to these well-wishers, Ram Bapat, Sharmila Rege, Vilas
and Usha Wagh, Milind Wakankar, and Shrikant in Pune; Sailesh
xii Preface and Acknowledgments

Darokar and Anuradha and Ajay Kumar in Mumbai; Subhashini Ali

in Kanpur; Salim and Sufia Kidwai and Akhilesh in Lucknow; Paramjit
Singh, Gurpreet Kaur, and Harish Puri in Amritsar; Bhola and Pramo-
dini Varma in Delhi; and Maya Pandit in Hyderabad provided guid-
ance and support, the comfort of their homes, and transport, with-
out which much of this research would have been impossible. David
Page and Ruth Kirkwilson have made us part of the family and wel-
comed us into their home in London many times over. Bruce and Sally
Cleghorn have provided warm welcome and friendship in places as
far apart as Cambridge and Kuala Lumpur, as have Anish and Susan
Mathai in New York. Evean and Kashmir Chand and their families in
Bedford and Milton Keynes have extended great hospitality and sup-
port throughout this research. Shashank Sinha in Delhi has been unbe-
lievable with his generosity, interest, and assistance. Warm gratitude
for their friendship and support.
In the United States, members of the extended Andrews family in
and around Atlanta have welcomed Ruby and me most warmly, and
(almost!) made us honorary members of the family. I am especially
grateful to Shirley Lowrie, her late husband Richard, and their daugh-
ter Ramona, and to Shirley’s sisters, Veronica Villa and Deloris White,
for their generosity with time, information, and free-wheeling conver-
sation. Thee Smith and his family have invited us into their home and
church, as have Minnie Peek and Jesse Freeman and their families in
Madison, Wis., and Tony Grooms and Pamela Jackson in Atlanta. I am
humbled by, and deeply appreciative of, their warmth and hospitality.
The colleagues, students, friends, and interlocutors I have leaned
on and learned from are spread across the continents. Several leading
Americanists have acted as tutors and guides as I have entered the new
area of American history, suggesting further readings, sources, and
perspectives and saving me from many errors of fact and judgment,
among them Randall Burkett, Joseph Crespino, Leslie Harris, Earl
Lewis, Mary Odem, and Jonathan Prude at Emory; Steve Hahn at the
University of Pennsylvania; Nell Painter at Princeton; Colin Johnson
at Indiana University; and Donald Carter, Ron Walters, and William
Connolly at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. I am most grateful for their
stewardship.
Apart from those already mentioned, numerous colleagues in the
departments of History, Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies,
 Preface and Acknowledgments xiii

African American Studies, Women’s Studies, Anthropology, and Reli-

gion, and the Institute for Liberal Arts, at Emory University have been
generous with their time, interest, and suggestions, among them Ange-
lika Bammer, Kathleen Cleaver, Clifton Crais, Vince Cornell, David
Eltis, Martha Fineman, Joyce Fleuckeger, Shalom Goldman, Lynne
Huffer, Bruce Knauft, Chris Krupa, Ruby Lal, V. Narayana Rao, Gor-
don Newby, Laurie Patton, Jim Roark, and the late Elizabeth Fox-
Genovese. My graduate students – Kelly Basner, Debjani Bhattacharya,
Moyukh Chatterjee, Aditya Pratap Deo, Pankhuree Dube, Navyug
Gill, Emma Meyer, and Durba Mitra – have been equally forthcoming
with constructive ideas and criticism. Durba, Debjani, and Pankhuree
also served as invaluable research assistants, nosing out unexpected
sources and information, chasing small leads, and helping greatly to
fill out my knowledge of American history and the African American
struggle.
In India, in addition to Narendra Jadhav, Sukhdeo Thorat, Gopal
Guru, Kumud Pawde, Ram Bapat, Sharmila Rege, and other colleagues
mentioned earlier, I need to thank Anand Teltumbde, Bhalchandra
Mungekar, P. G. Jogdand, Arjun Dangle, S. Krishna, Padma Velaskar,
and Rammanohar Reddy in Mumbai; Surinder Jodhka, Valerian
Rodrigues, Vivek Kumar, Mushir and Zoya Hasan, Gulam Sheikh,
Sudhir Chandra, Geetanjali Shree, and Suresh Sharma in Delhi; Maya
Pandit, Abhai Maurya, Alok Bhalla, and Javeed Alam in Hyderabad;
and Mohandas Naimisharay and Meera Kumar in Delhi for extended
conversations and helpful suggestions. To Maya Pandit I owe great
gratitude for her extraordinary help with translations from a number
of difficult Marathi manuscripts and texts that I have used extensively
in Chapter 6.
Among colleagues in Europe, special thanks go to Peter Geschiere
and Willem van Schendel in Amsterdam; David Hardiman, David
Arnold, and Carolyn Steedman in Warwick; Christopher Bayly and
Francis Robinson in Cambridge and London; Crispin Bates in Edin-
burgh; Monica Juneja in Hanover; and Margrit Pernau in Berlin for
reading and commenting on various parts of this work. Similarly
warm thanks go to colleagues in Eastern Asia and Australia: Peter
Reeves and Tan Tai Yong in Singapore; Nariaki Nakazato in Tokyo;
Naoko Nagasaki in Kyoto; and Devleena Ghosh and Jim Masselos in
Sydney.
xiv Preface and Acknowledgments

Among my older Subaltern Studies colleagues, I need to thank Gyan

Prakash for an astute comment at a seminar in Delhi; Partha Chatterjee
and Susie Tharu for solidarity even at a distance; M. S. S. Pandian for
his comments on the chapters dealing primarily with Dalits; Gayatri
Spivak for her deeply engaged and insightful comments on the chapter
on difference; and Ajay Skaria for his wonderfully engaged, insightful,
and encouraging comments on the entire manuscript. Among newer
subalternist colleagues, I owe special thanks for extended conversa-
tions, suggestions, and shared enthusiasms to Eleanor Zelliot, doyen of
Dalit studies in the United States (and India); Kamala Vishweshwaran,
historian and anthropologist of race, caste, and gender; Swati Chat-
topadhyay, indefatigable warrior for the subaltern and the popular;
and Michael Fisher, Anuradha Needham, Anand Yang, Priti Rama-
murthy, and Paul Brass, chroniclers of subaltern travels and travails
on land, sea, and beyond.
My greatest intellectual debt is to a group of scholars in the United
States, Europe, and India who have lived with this investigation
almost from its beginnings. Apart from guiding me to many differ-
ent sources, texts, and arguments, my Americanist colleagues, Leslie
Harris, Jonathan Prude, Mary Odem, Nell Painter, Steve Hahn, Colin
Johnson, Joe Crespino, and Randall Burkett, and my non-Americanist
world historian friends, Peter Geschiere, Rita Costa-Gomes, and
V. Narayana Rao, have also commented most helpfully on various
parts of the manuscript. Jonathan Prude, Leslie Harris, and Colin
Johnson took on the additional task of reading and commenting on
the entire manuscript in a small one-day workshop in February 2011,
where they were joined by three other seasoned interlocutors: Rashmi
Bhatnagar, Milind Wakankar, and Ruby Lal. Further, Ruby Lal and
Lynne Huffer have welcomed me into a small writers’ group that has
given me unparalleled sustenance and pleasure in the course of the
writing: they have read every part of this book, some of it many times
over, and provided gentle but incisive criticism, unfailing encourage-
ment and cheer, and the kind of intellectual camaraderie one can only
dream of.
An equally great debt is owed to loved ones who take on the burdens
of one’s research through thick and thin, in their waking hours and
sometimes even when they are trying to sleep! Among these special
people are my mother, Shree Kumari Pandey, and my son, Nishad, who
 Preface and Acknowledgments xv

have wanted so much to see this book in finished form; my sisters,

Jayanti, Geetanjali, and Gayatri, who have been supportive and, by
turns, admiring and amused; and Ruby’s sister and brother-in-law,
Beena and Prabhakar, and her parents, Prabha and Manmohan Lal,
who have given us a home in Noida and in Dehradun.
Ruby has provided, and continues to provide, intellectual suste-
nance, unequaled companionship, home, love, and joy – from before
the inception of this book until (I have no doubt) long after its com-
pletion. A dedication is meager recognition of her place in my life.

Gyanendra Pandey
Atlanta, March 2012
 1

Introduction

How does one begin to write a history of prejudice, something that by

definition resists historicization – and even acknowledgment? I attempt
to do so in this book by examining the process of otherization (an
inelegant word to describe an inelegant practice), of social and political
distancing that is a central part of the history of African Americans and
Dalits (ex-Untouchables, or Scheduled Castes as they are called in the
Indian constitution of 1950), two long subordinated and stigmatized
groups in the United States and India, respectively. It is my view that
the juxtaposition of two very different locations and histories (the
African American and the Dalit) and, within each of them, of very
different kinds of public and private narratives of struggle allows for
an uncommon analysis of the workings of prejudice in an intriguing
complex of forms and places.
In order to deepen and extend the inquiry that follows, I make
another move that is perhaps not entirely predictable. I start with a
rough-and-ready distinction between what one might call “vernacu-
lar” and “universal” prejudices. The former is, in simple terms, local,
localizable, relatively visible, and sometimes acknowledged: say, the
prejudice against blacks, “Untouchables,” gays, Muslims, Jews, con-
quered indigenous populations, recent immigrants, women, and other
“minorities.” It refers to calculated behavior that we sometimes con-
demn – when we notice it, or when it is forced on our attention: racism,
casteism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, reductive monoculturalism,
prejudice thus as bias, malice, or inherited structures of discrimination,

1
2 A History of Prejudice

which the state believes it can measure or contain. I have called such
prejudice “vernacular” in order to distinguish it from another kind,
which is largely invisible because it is widespread (“universal”) and
hence seen as “natural.” This “universal” is the language of law and
state, and it passes for the common sense of modern society, rarely
acknowledged as prejudice. At this level, the history of prejudice
becomes even more intractable for it is, simultaneously, everywhere
and nowhere.
Prejudice – the “already known” – of course always appears in the
guise of common sense. It hardly requires explanation and is seldom
archived. The difficulty of archiving its history is evident. The com-
mon sense of race, caste, class, or gender relations, even when made
visible, as it sometimes is in sharply polarized societies and contexts,
is articulated in historically unpretty, and therefore generally unac-
knowledged, actions and statements: derogatory names and forms of
address, verbal and physical abuse, and sexual exploitation (justified by
the alleged “immorality” of subordinated and marginalized castes and
classes), to name a few of the most obvious. Moreover, given the fact of
disproportionately skewed access to resources and power in historical
societies of the past and the present, such abuse and dismissiveness has
not always needed to be fully articulated. It has often been reserved
for the spat-out, half-suppressed, word-of-mouth and, one might add,
for the gesture of disdain, contempt and disgust, the pause and the
recoil, the refusal to touch, what in India is called Untouchability.1
How, out of what archive, are we to write a history of these gestures?
The question will surface repeatedly in the following pages since it
lies at the heart of the specificities and challenges of writing a history
of prejudice. At this point, however, and as part of the difficulty of
pursuing such a history, I need to say one word more about the claims
of the modern as the quintessentially normal, rational, “unprejudiced.”

1 On the question of “touch” and its significance for political/historical analy-

sis, see Gopal Guru, “Power of Touch,” Frontline, 23, no. 25 (December 16–
29, 2006), http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2325/stories/20061229002903000.htm;
Gopal Guru, “Archaeology of Untouchability,” Economic and Political Weekly, 44,
no. 37 (September 12, 2009), 49–56. For discussion of this piece, see Sundar Sarukkai,
“Phenomenology of Untouchability,” Economic and Political Weekly, 44, no. 37
(September 12, 2009); and Balmurli Natrajan, “Place and Pathology in Caste,” Eco-
nomic and Political Weekly, 44, no. 51 (December 19, 2009). See also Yoginder
Sikand’s interview with Kancha Ilaiah, Mukta Mona, February 13, 2007.
 Introduction 3

The Prejudice of the Modern

Modern, Raymond Williams tells us, was through the nineteenth

century and very markedly in the twentieth “virtually equivalent to
IMPROVED or satisfactory or efficient . . . something unquestionably
favourable or desirable.” Modernity, in Peter Brooker’s words, “names
the processes of increasing rationalization in social and political life,
along with the associated technological development and accumulation
[concentration] of people in cities that combined to produce the . . . new
society of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” It also describes

the processes of industrialization associated with capitalist development . . . [as

well as] the “philosophy” of modernity: namely, a belief in scientific and social
progress, human rights, justice and democracy, which inspired the American
and French Revolutions as well as much later social, economic and political
theory, including Marxism [and, we might add, many of the great anticolonial
struggles of the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries].2

Other characteristics might be noted. It is a ruling, if generally

unstated, prejudice of the modern world that it has produced an ideal
grammar (the correct form of speaking and writing), a rational order
(the rule of reason), and an unmarked citizen (man, in the broader
sense of humans as well as the narrower sense of the male of the
species) entirely competent to implement this rule and this grammar.3
This prejudice is closely linked to ideas of what it is to be modern,
liberal, and democratic; in a word, to use a term that has been carried
over from a “medieval” discourse into the modern, civilized.
Let me be clear. In highlighting the invisible, unacknowledged, yet
global prejudice of the modern, I refer to preconceptions generalized
not by a claim of being eternal but as a historically situated “uni-
versal,” located in the era of the modern, itself overdetermined by
the tenets of Western imperialism and worldwide nationalisms. More
specifically, I allude to the common sense of mid-twentieth-century
(post–World War II) political discourse, which is the focus of inquiry

2 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1976), 208–9 (capitalization in original); and Peter Brooker, Glossary
of Cultural Theory (London: Arnold, 2003), 166–7.
3 For a fine articulation and elaboration of the proposition, see Paul Gilroy, The Black
Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1993).
4 A History of Prejudice

in this book. The era of the establishment of the nation-state as the

exclusively legitimate form for the political existence of peoples; of
modernization and development, and the much vaunted equality of
nations (and individuals) across the globe; of the universal declaration
of human rights; and of the “universal” condemnation of continuing
European imperialism, apartheid in South Africa, segregation in the
United States, and Untouchability in India.
Through the media, and through wider political and intellectual
commentary, contemporary common sense propagates a belief in the
modern as enlightened, rational (or scientific), secular (or “modern,”
“enlightened” Christian, which is often equated with the “secular”),
liberal (although that has become a derogatory term in contempo-
rary American politics), and democratic. Masculinity is not commonly
mentioned, but it is implicit, for the male of the species is taken as the
standard – the assumed, deliberative, decisive, self-made, self-making,
and self-same subject of the modern. Importantly, this narrative pro-
vides an overwhelmingly economic/institutional account of modernity:
it omits any significant analysis of the philosophy of modernity and
makes it appear natural and normal.
In spite of that economic/institutional bias, however, the discourse
of the enlightened modern, with its emphasis on rationality, delibera-
tion, order, and equal opportunity, conspicuously understates the cal-
culus of capitalism in its account of modern society. It also shies away
from naming violence as a significant factor in organizing and uphold-
ing existing social and political arrangements. Like violence, religion
and religious belief become part of the great unsaid in the modern.
What we hear about instead is the nonmodernity or premodernity of
other (non-“European”) religions, themselves brought into view with
the modern claim to be secular.4 Again, the variations are interesting,
for if a Christian secular is what reigns in the West, a Hindu secu-
lar is clearly dominant in India. Through all of this, the discourse of
the modern overlooks, undervalues, and cultivates a deep-seated anx-
iety about the rich variety and contradictoriness of human life and
history.

4 See Talal Asad’s proposition about the simultaneous birth of the categories of reli-
gion and secularism in Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam,
Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
 Introduction 5

A final trait to be noted in the modernist account of itself is that

it deals with uncomfortable facets of modern existence – slavery,
untouchability, drug-trafficking, genocide – by declaring them an aber-
ration or exception, the work of deviants or criminals, or of people
who are simply not modern enough: not our history, or at least not the
most significant part of our history. It is here, in the tortuous construc-
tion of the nonmodern, the backward, and the deviant, that we move
into the realm of what I have called vernacular, visible, prejudice.
Modernity brings with it a fable of freedom, prosperity, and peace,
available to all. A rider is quickly added. Freedom can be extended only
to those who are ready for it: not to children, for example, nor (for the
longest time) women, or the colonized, the “backward,” the illiterate,
the propertyless, and so on. The pledge of “life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness” regularly announced has also been regularly deferred.
The point may be illustrated by reference to the experience of groups
who have not been easily assimilated into the narrative of homogenous
modernity and nationhood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
among them African Americans and Dalits. Before moving on to the
latter, however, I want to address one other issue, concerning the
advantages and risks involved in juxtaposing the histories of these
disparate “communities” from two different continents.

Juxtaposing African American and Dalit Histories

Much of my research and writing over the past three decades has
focused on the conditions and histories of marginalized and disen-
franchised groups in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. Why, then,
the present shift to an investigation of the histories of Americans of
African descent and Dalits (Indians of “Untouchable” descent) in tan-
dem? The answer is by no means straightforward. It has much to do
with the political struggles and debates of the last half century and
more, the internationalization of those struggles in fascinating ways
from the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, and the
new perspectives on human society and history that have followed in
the wake of these conflicts. However, some proximate “causes” are
more easily identified.
The first is personal. After several years of living and teaching in
the United States, from 1998 onward, I woke up to the realization
6 A History of Prejudice

that I actually lived in this country and was not just a visitor as I had
been for various lengths of time earlier. I recognized at the same time
the importance, for me, of a robust and ongoing engagement with the
politics and history of the society in which I lived. My current work
on the history of African Americans and Dalits has grown out of that
recognition.
The Dalit and the African American struggles (if we may as short-
hand reduce them for the moment to two) have shared common ground
in several respects, and the connections and parallels between them
have often been noted. The nonviolent campaigns of civil disobedi-
ence against British colonial rule in India led by M. K. Gandhi were
an important inspiration for Martin Luther King, Jr., and many of his
followers. And Gandhi himself developed many of his ideas about non-
violence and civil disobedience from reading authors like Henry David
Thoreau. Similarly, though this is less commonly remarked, Frederick
Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Horace Greeley, Harriet Beecher
Stowe, and other black and white abolitionists used the idiom of caste
extensively in mounting their critique of race relations in the USA.
W. E. B. Du Bois, perhaps the leading intellectual spokesperson of the
African American struggle in the first half of the twentieth century,
deeply invested in the internationalist and anti-imperialist dimensions
of the movement, declared “color-caste” to be the ideology of imperi-
alism, and noted that the “caste of color” was so pervasive in his own
country “as to correspond with the caste of work and enslave not only
slaves but black men who were not slaves.”5
On the other side, the foremost Dalit intellectuals repeatedly
invoked the black experience in their articulation of the Dalit struggle.
Jyotirao Phule in the late nineteenth century and B. R. Ambedkar in
the twentieth, to take two of the most prominent examples, translated
key terms from the Anglo-American abolitionists’ idiom. Phule
described the Dalits’ condition as one of “Ghulamgiri” (“slavery”),
affiliating the historical degradation of “Untouchables” with trans-
Atlantic slavery. Ambedkar transcoded racial segregation in the United
States as the Dalits’ “bahishkrut samaj” (“outcaste community”). And
in the 1970s a militant group of ex-Untouchable writers and activists in

5 Kamala Visweswaran, Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cul-

tural Difference (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 112, 114, and passim.
 Introduction 7

western India invoked the Black Panthers in naming themselves “Dalit

Panthers,” thus serving to popularize the name “Dalit” for groups ear-
lier described as Untouchables, Depressed Castes, Scheduled Castes, or
(in Gandhi’s favored term) Harijans.6 It is almost as if exigent history
writing in these instances cannot be done in narrowly regionalist or
nationalist terms but requires a wider, universal frame.
Dalit – meaning (literally) “crushed,” “ground down”; (metaphor-
ically) the wretched of the earth; (historically) those who labor so that
society and “civilization” may advance; and (politically today) low-
caste and low-class groups who demand fair compensation for their
labor and equal opportunities for their talents – is not an inappropriate
term to describe the condition of subordination and marginalization of
the more impoverished and disadvantaged of these groups. Dalit as the
laboring body – the body on whose back, on whose labor, the whole
edifice of the economy and society, the privilege of culture and civi-
lization, and leisure and power has been built, and as the female body
that appears center stage in the later chapters of this book, as inordi-
nately ground down and subjected to a sometimes literally unbearable
combination of sexual and social labor – doubly subalternized: dalit
twice over. Intimations of this wider history may be readily seen in the
experience of people of African descent in the USA as well as in that
of ex-Untouchable castes and subcastes in India.
In a sense, my own reflection on Dalit and African American histo-
ries simply acknowledges and pays tribute to the universalist impulse,
and the search for new kinds of politics and new locations for them,
found in the histories of so many subaltern constituencies. It may thus
be seen as a contribution to the ongoing reexamination and rewriting of
history that has gone on actively from the middle of the twentieth cen-
tury. This reassessment includes the fundamental feminist challenge to
the male universal that has until now ruled in the realms of philosophy,
history, and democratic politics, and the widespread interrogation of
the past and the present by anticolonial and postcolonial scholarship.
It includes as well the wide-ranging African American analysis of the

6 Harijans means “children of god,” and Dalits have understandably expressed displea-
sure at the patronizing quality of the name. Ironically, Gandhi, who is a hero for many
African Americans, has been seen as the “enemy” by activist Dalits. The reasons for
this will become clearer below.
8 A History of Prejudice

race and caste underpinnings of European imperialism and the Dalit

reinterpretation of the strategies through which abolitionists seized
on liberal discourses to make political claims for black freedom and
equality.
In spite of this long history of transnational and transcontinental
inquiries, I am aware of the dangers of juxtaposing the examples of
subaltern struggles in the very different societies and historical contexts
of India and the United States – or what one might call the pitfalls
of comparative history. I share the skepticism and misgivings of many
scholars about the value of a dominant tendency in comparative history
or sociology, which relies, as one leading historian puts it, “on the most
slender trace of an analogy here, a touch of resemblance there, and a
suggestion of parallelism in yet another respect.” “Comparison is not
a neutral analytic method but a highly pointed claims-making device,”
observes another.7
Like them, I am uncomfortable about practices of comparison that
assume the givenness of the units to be compared and deal in univer-
sals, against which particular societies, communities, or histories are
either found wanting or declared commendable. For any comparative
history that consciously or unconsciously proposes a supposedly “neu-
tral” standard – commonly that of the Western European and North
American experience as understood by the ruling elites – whereby one
may assess success or failure in modern world conditions, and pro-
ceed to make judgments and hand out prizes on that basis (“mature
democracy,” “increasingly enlightened community,” “incipient secu-
lar consciousness”), is liable to be reductionist, if not deceptive or
indeed disingenuous.
My hope is that my investigation of African American and Dalit
histories side by side will not detract from the specificity, complexity,
and integrity – that is, the very history and politics – of the building of
these diverse struggles. The unlikely juxtaposition of bodies of schol-
arship and debate taken from two different continents – scholarship
and debate that is intensely local and impressively transnational at the

7 Ranajit Guha, “Subaltern Studies: Projects for Our Time and Their Convergence,”
in Ileana Rodriguez, ed., The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 37; and Micol Seigel, Uneven Encounters: Making
Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2009), 225.
 Introduction 9

same time – should extend our awareness not only of shared histories
and shared struggles in the making of the modern world but of the par-
ticularities and features of different histories and societal conditions
that experts have assumed to be well understood and hence taken for
granted. By that means, I hope it may also make for a new kind of
comparative history, one in which we deal not in universals already
understood but in the assumptions that underlie our individual histo-
ries and our particular universals – thereby challenging the very claim
to a single overriding and ahistorical universalism (or prejudice!).
To begin with, the juxtaposition of processes of minoritization
responsible for the production of multiple “minorities” at the very
time that nations and “majorities” come into being should underscore
the coexistence of very different kinds of thinking on matters like race
and caste, racism and casteism – an understanding of these in terms
of parallel but incongruent histories of class and power on the one
hand, as against those that stress a more primordial sense of identity
and inheritance on the other. I have written elsewhere of how the con-
cept of “communalism” in India – the notion of religious communities
perennially ranged against each other – was derived from “commu-
nal conflict” and the “communal riot” (the marking of violence as the
true, if not the only, relation between people belonging to different reli-
gious denominations) and not from “community” or collective modes
of being and thinking self and history.8 So, too, I submit, notions of
race and caste derive from the attempted perpetuation, or recupera-
tion, of particular structures of power and privilege through a politics
of racism and caste discrimination, not the other way around.
In spite of such beginnings, race and caste (like the politicized reli-
gious community in India) are represented as the ground or foundation
of a series of repetitive actions that regularly breach the walls of social
organization (i.e., as a societal phenomenon outside the domain of
political practice, including the political practice of the state). My jux-
taposition of different histories of racism and casteism should show
once more how incoherent and messy the parameters and logic of caste,
race, and other categories of social and political exclusion have been

8 Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India

(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990; Perennial edition, Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2012).
10 A History of Prejudice

and at the same time invalidate any attempt to root these constructions
purely in a sociological domain, excluding their political charge.
Racism and the African American question have been central to
the political debate in the United States for a very long time; hence
Du Bois’s declaration in 1903 that the problem of the twentieth
century was the problem of the color line and the Nobel Prize–
winning Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal’s Carnegie-sponsored
(and state-supported) 1944 analysis of the “Negro problem” as the
“American Dilemma.”9 There has been less open engagement with
the stigma and humiliation attending caste practices, and the under-
lying question of Untouchability, in India. In part, this was because
the “Muslim problem,” as it was called, and the struggle for and ulti-
mate establishment of a separate Muslim nation called Pakistan, had
long been seen as the national question in India. In part, it followed
from a widespread belief that class struggle, the emergence of new
economic and social forces (and, with them, of modern reason) – what
the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, called the forces
of world history – would carry all before them and relegate caste and
religion, and other such “relics” of the past, to the periphery of public
life. The history of India (and the world) has not quite lived up to
that expectation. Yet, questions of caste and Untouchability, and the
liberation of the lowest (and often poorest) castes, have not attracted
urgent attention outside Dalit circles, at least until quite recently. A
small piece of anecdotal evidence will serve to illustrate the point.
Over several years at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and
at Emory University in Atlanta, I offered four semester-long courses,
two on “A Black Bourgeosie? The Making of the African-American
and (South Asian) Dalit Middle Classes” and two on “Autobiogra-
phies/Histories: the African American and Dalit Struggles.” Both uni-
versities have numerous undergraduates of South Asian background,
described as “heritage” students, as well as a number who come
directly from South Asia. A good number of African American stu-
dents, a few students of Caribbean background, a few who have come
from Africa more recently, and some Caucasian Americans opted to

9 See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1901; reprint New York: Signet Classic,
1969), 54; and Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, Volume 1: The Negro in a
White Nation, 2 vols. (1944; reprint New York, McGraw-Hill, 1964).
 Introduction 11

take these courses – both men and women, though in every instance
more women than men. Strikingly, however, only on one occasion did
a student of South Asian background sign up for any one of these
courses. He was Sri Lankan.
That would seem to suggest, at first glance, that the Dalit question,
the rise of the Dalit middle classes, and the matter of Dalit autobi-
ographies and histories, not to mention African American history and
politics, are of little interest to students of Indian background, whether
second- (or third-) generation, American-born, “heritage” students as
they are called in the United States, more recent immigrants, or students
coming directly from the subcontinent, the vast majority of whom, at
Hopkins and Emory as in other U.S. colleges and universities, come
from well-to-do, upper- (and less often, middle-) caste backgrounds.
Indeed, I think something of the same prejudice – this is not “our”
history, or not the most significant part of our history, and in any
case a thing of the past – would apply to the majority of university
students in India from relatively well-off, upper-caste backgrounds. It
is no surprise to find that the issue of the invisibility of Dalits, or of
women, in undergraduate and graduate courses on the subcontinent
is addressed chiefly by adding on modules or topics on, say, notable
women, Dalit literature, or B. R. Ambedkar, the outstanding leader of
the Dalits in the twentieth century.10
To complicate matters, when I offered a similar course at Emory
University in 2011, under the amended title “A History of Prejudice:
Race and Caste in the USA and India,” it yielded a very different com-
position of students: roughly 60% of South Asian (Indian) background
and 40% black, Caucasian, or East Asian Americans. Perhaps this con-
firms the point that Untouchability (like slavery) is thought of as an
aberration – a matter of the past, with unfortunate echoes (if indeed
any such echoes are acknowledged) in the present – whereas caste and
race, removed from the stigma and violence of deep-seated racism and
casteism, and watered down to resemble other kinds of social division
and difference, are recognized as matters of vernacular, localizable
prejudice, to be dealt with, appropriately, by reform, education, and
(perhaps) political struggle. It is in this context that we need to consider

10 Cf. Sharmila Rege, Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Reading Dalit Women’s Testimo-
nios (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2006), 5 and passim.
12 A History of Prejudice

the more nuanced conception I have offered of what constitutes prej-

udice in the contemporary world and of what the “prejudice of the
modern” accounts as “history,” as opposed to “dross,” “relics,” issues
and attitudes left over from the past and on the way to oblivion in the
forward march of history.
That said, we may proceed to a closer examination of Dalit and
African American struggles and the account of them that is found in
the received histories of India and the USA.

Internal Colonialism and Local Prejudice

Both Dalits in India and African Americans in the United States have
been visibly stigmatized groups, long marginalized and disenfranchised
(in both the narrow and broad senses of that term) because of that very
stigmatization. Both have had to organize and fight against the con-
sequences of what could be described as a disguised form of internal
colonialism. I need hardly note that there are other groups who have
been as, if not more, seriously affected by the fact of such colonialism
in these lands, most notably the indigenous communities of the two
countries. Like Native Americans and the Scheduled Tribes (depressed
castes and classes who make up the bulk of the adivasi, or putatively
aboriginal, population of India), neither Dalits nor African Americans
have inherited geopolitical conditions that would allow them to carve
out a place for themselves as “mainstream.” However, given an ascen-
dant discourse of democracy, and the establishment of many formal
democratic structures and practices in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, these two political groups mounted powerful and important
challenges to existing structures of power and claims of democratic
practice in India and the United States as they advanced the quest for
full citizenship, more equal political and cultural opportunities, greater
social justice, and recognition of human worth.
In both the US and India, claims to the exceptional character of the
local state and society are tied to questions of modernity and nation-
hood, and to debates about democracy and justice, pluralism and sec-
ularism, and with them to particular languages of representation and
of morality. Official discourse and popular history alike have long
emphasized the idea of tolerance and openness in both countries –
the idea of the melting-pot, of syncretism and assimilation: not the
 Introduction 13

exceptionalism of slavery or the obliteration of indigenous nations in

a modern, “democratic” country called the USA; or Untouchability,
which, in colonial and postcolonial India, has marked relations not
only among people supposedly belonging to the “Hindu,” “Sikh,” or
“Christian” communities but between the bulk of the Hindus on the
one hand and the bulk of the Muslims and Christians on the other as
well.
A large proportion of India’s population has long been treated as
Untouchable, in the context of the dominant Hindu tradition and the
inherited concern with practices that are thought to be polluting. While
there is no easy way of making an accurate estimate, given the fuzziness
of the category and of the boundaries between castes and subcastes in
general, the population of castes qualifying as Scheduled Castes (or
ex-Untouchables), going by the list drawn up in the Indian constitu-
tion of 1950, was 57.5 million, or 14.67% of the total population in
1961. Scheduled Tribes, also listed for affirmative action in the Indian
constitution and also dalit in social, economic, and cultural terms,
but differentiated from the ex-Untouchable castes in being inhabitants
of hilly and forested tracts that were “Hinduized” (and colonized by
the modern state and capitalism) at a relatively recent date, made up
another 29.1 million, or 6.87% of the population. In the 2001 Indian
census, the population of Scheduled Castes is given as 166,635,700, or
16.2% of the population, and that of Scheduled Tribes as 84,326,240,
or 8.2% of the population.11
In Hindu society, some people are born into “purer” upper castes:
their men wear a sacred thread after an initiation ceremony that makes
them “twice-born” (women are of course excluded from this), do
not traditionally work with their hands, and have privileged access
to sacred texts, “learning,” and other valued cultural and economic
assets. Alongside the upper castes is the larger body of lowly peasants,
service communities, artisans, and workers (none of whom wear the
sacred thread or shun physical labor), and further, on the margins of
the community, groups of menial workers, laborers, and servants, who

11 For the 1961 figures, see Brij Raj Chauhan, “Scheduled Castes and Scheduled
Tribes,” Economic and Political Weekly, 4, no. 4 (January 25, 1969), 257,
259, 261–3. For 2001, see Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs,
“Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Populations,” http://www.censusindia.gov
.in/Census Data 2001/India at Glance/scst.aspx [accessed March 16, 2011].
14 A History of Prejudice

are decidedly “unclean.” The distinction between the lowest “touch-

able” castes and the untouchable is not always very marked. In the
reigning social system, as one scholar observes, “everyone is to some
extent impure, and . . . impurity is a relative concept.”12 The Untouch-
ables, too, even after they have come to be a socially or politically
recognized category, remain divided into hundreds of castes and sub-
castes, most of which do not intermarry and many of which refuse to
dine together or recognize one another as social groups of equivalent
status.
Nevertheless, Dalit deprivation has had several dimensions histori-
cally. It was once located, and is still to be seen, in the Untouchables’
(or ex-Untouchables’) extremely low ritual status, frequently wretched
economic conditions, and (until quite recently) denial of access to com-
mon cultural and political resources. It was also to be seen in the sexual
exploitation of their women, which the Dalits’ alleged impurity and
untouchability did nothing to prevent.13
An analogous statement might be made about the conditions and
politics of blacks in the United States, again a population group that
is not easily tallied. According to the 1950 U.S. census, “Negros”
comprised about 10% of the total population, a little over 15 million
people out of a total of over 152 million. For the purposes of this
calculation, as a special report attached to the census noted,

The concept of race . . . [was] derived from that which is commonly accepted
by the general public. It does not . . . reflect clear-cut definitions of biological
stock, and several categories obviously refer to nationalities. The information
on race is ordinarily not based on a reply to questions asked by the enumerator
but rather obtained by observation. Enumerators were instructed to ask a
question when they were in doubt.

By 2000, according to the census, approximately 12.9% of the pop-

ulation was classified as being black. In this instance, the data were

12 Robert Deliege, The Untouchables of India (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2001), 50.
13 As an old Dalit of the Satnami (or Chamar) caste from Chattisgarh said bitterly
to a senior anthropologist in 1985, “The upper castes would not touch us. They
would never eat with us. But they were always ready to fornicate. For ‘doing it’ our
women were not untouchable. . . . Even after licking the privates of Satnami women,
they would not lose their purity.” See Saurabh Dube, Untouchable Pasts: Religion,
Identity, and Power among a Central Indian Community, 1780–1950 (New Delhi:
Vistaar Publications, 2001), 171.
 Introduction 15

calculated by reference to “the answers provided by the respondents,

as well as responses assigned during the editing and imputation pro-
cesses.” The 12.9% included Afro-Caribbeans and recent immigrants
from Africa, which underscores the point that “African American”
is only a political/cultural construct. It included as well those who
reported themselves as belonging to the black and another race. The
report seems to suggest that, in cases where individuals identified them-
selves as black as well as some other race, they were counted as blacks
to prevent double-counting.14
During the period of slavery and for a century afterward, people
of African descent were commonly barred from access to a common
water supply, places in restaurants, schools, desirable residential local-
ities, public transport, and other public spaces. In addition, they were
denied access to a huge array of jobs and political opportunities, espe-
cially in the southern states, where these denials were legally enforced
and where the overwhelming poverty of the majority of the black
population had also been accompanied by the sexual exploitation of
poor black women. Following a short period of “reconstruction” and
democratization after the abolition of slavery in the 1860s, Jim Crow
laws were passed to regularize and perpetuate segregation, and the dis-
tinctly subordinate status of blacks, throughout the southern United
States. As Langston Hughes observed in 1952, “I saw [FOR WHITES
ONLY] signs when I first went South in the 1920’s. I see them still
there today. . . . A dog can sit on a WHITE bench in a WHITE park
and, if his legs are long enough, lick water out of a WHITE fountain.
I cannot. I will be put in jail. My color makes me less than a dog to
those who run the South.”15

14 U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Table A-9: Race for the United States, Regions, Divisions,
and States: 1950 (100-Percent Data),” http://www.census.gov/population/www/
documentation/twps0056/tabA-09.pdf [accessed March 16, 2011]; and Jesse McK-
innon, “The Black Population: 2000,” Census 2000 Brief, C2KBR/01-5, accessed
online at www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/c2kbr01-5.pdf. By the last decade of the
twentieth century, a very large proportion of Americans came from categorically
“mixed” families: 1 of 7 whites, 1 of 3 blacks, 4 of 5 Asians, and 19 of 20 Native
Americans were closely related to someone outside their supposed racial group, and
some 12% of young people called themselves multiracial. See Jennifer L. Hochschild,
“Looking Ahead: Racial Trends in the United States,” Daedalus, 134, no. 1 (Winter
2005), 76.
15 Chicago Defender, April 26, 1952.
16 A History of Prejudice

Walter White, a distinguished leader of the National Association

for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), had made the same
point in his 1948 autobiography, recalling the Atlanta riots of 1906,
when as a boy he gained a new awareness of the fact – and conse-
quences – of his being black:

I was a Negro, a human being with an invisible pigmentation which marked

me as a person to be hunted, hanged, abused, discriminated against, kept in
poverty, and ignorance, in order that those whose skin was white would have
readily at hand a proof of their superiority. No matter how low a white man
fell, he could always hold fast to the smug conviction that he was superior to
two-thirds of the world’s population.16

There is a parallel between post–Second World War developments

in India and the USA, in the formal abolition of Untouchability in
India in the 1950s and the dismantling of the legal apparatus of racial
segregation in the American South in the 1960s and ’70s, although
the consequences of the long history of stigmatization, discrimination,
and exploitation against large segments of the population may still
be observed in both cases. The differences between the framework
and texture of U.S. and Indian, African American and Dalit, histories
should not be understated. For example, it is clear that India’s Dalits
have remained trapped in a more intractable position than that of
African Americans because of a poorer economy and slower economic
growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and because of the
more restricted opportunities of escape from the stranglehold of caste,
which is countrywide in its spread and has long been shored up by a
claimed religious sanction in the prevailing (Hindu) tradition of social
organization and interaction.
American democracy was established in the service of what is
proclaimed as a new, young, expanding, frontier society, a land of
opportunity (and of incredible, and expanding, resources and wealth)
open to every enterprising individual, whatever his (and only much
later, her) background. The country saw itself as being quintessen-
tially modern, entirely comfortable with the spirit of bourgeois liber-
alism (the primacy of the individual, the sanctity of private property,

16 Walter White, A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White (New York:
Viking Press, 1948), 11.
 Introduction 17

faith in the justice of the free market, and a suspicion of government

intervention). Indian democracy was established, by contrast, in an
old, well-settled, densely populated land, struggling with some suc-
cess, but slowly, to overcome the worst effects of feudal and colonial
relations, long-established patriarchal and familial structures, and the
extreme inequality – the entrenched hierarchies and skewed access to
resources – that they perpetuated. Through all the dislocations and
transformations of the last two centuries, people of the Indian subcon-
tinent have lived in anguished relation to the discourse of a colonial and
postcolonial modernity and have been locked in an ongoing debate on
the appropriate structures and conditions of “the good society” in the
modern age (individual versus communal rights; private versus pub-
lic property and enterprise; state protection and welfare versus free
market individualism and profit-seeking).
The passionate commitment to local and individual rights in Amer-
ican political discourse may well have flowed originally from the ad
hoc character of the establishment of claims in the immigrant Euro-
pean expansion westward. The marked variation in social, political,
and demographic conditions in the North, South, and West of the
United States through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries proba-
bly served to deepen this sense of local entitlement. The emphasis on
individual rights is accentuated again by the differentiated character
of the African American and other assemblages, the existence of “free
men” and slaves, from the very beginning of the history of the North
American colonies. Black families of wealth, a so-called black aristoc-
racy, have long existed, and free black immigrants have continued to
arrive throughout, to add to the large numbers of enslaved, ex-slave,
and other black people already in North America, and to extend the
differentiation among them. There has been no equivalent Dalit aris-
tocracy or Dalit bourgeoisie in India, at least until very recently. Quite
simply, a local community would not have remained Dalit – “Untouch-
able,” or even very low in the caste order – if it had become aristocratic
or particularly well-to-do, as various local groups did in past centuries,
with the predictable result of finding a rather more exalted place in the
caste hierarchy.
With all these differences, what marks both U.S. and Indian his-
tories is an uphill and long, drawn-out struggle waged by a whole
variety of subordinated and marginalized population groups for the
18 A History of Prejudice

establishment of common (and, often, long-promised) rights. In the

African American and the Dalit instances, as in several others, the
difficulty is accentuated by the overwhelming poverty of large sec-
tions of the subaltern groups in question: the condition of immis-
erization is especially noticeable in the Indian case. The continued
economic and cultural power of the traditionally dominant classes,
upper castes and whites, and the continued use of violence (psycholog-
ical, physical, legal, and illegal) to maintain “society” and perpetuate
“order,” in both countries, makes the politics of this encounter all the
more obscure. Long habits of stigmatization, degradation, and denial
are not easily overturned in the minds of the oppressors, nor is the
fear that accompanies them in the minds of the oppressed. Prejudicial
structures rule, and set unacknowledged limits to democracy. Let us
revisit in this light the modern promise of freedom and development
for all.

“Rags to Riches” – or the Middle-Class Dream

Neither freedom nor prosperity and peace, the promises of the mod-
ern, have been readily or very substantively achieved for the majority
of people even in advanced capitalist societies, let alone the bulk of
countries around the globe. But the fable of freedom and opportunity
lives on. It has found a particularly enduring form in the narrative of
a largely self-made and independent middle class – a proposition of
self-making, of lifting oneself up by one’s bootstraps, as in the classic
histories of the Western European and North American middle classes,
that bears further reflection.
The privileging of the “middle class” idea flows at least in part from
its claimed universality. At times, as in nineteenth-century England
or in the first half of the twentieth century in India, the term mid-
dle class was used pejoratively to refer to the upstart bourgeois, the
uncultured and frequently migrant nouveaux riches, who attempted to
mimic upper-class practices and manners. In the longer run, however,
middleclassness came to be seen as the wave of the future, and the
middle classes as the makers of their own (as well as the wider modern
society’s) destiny – a destiny made through an individual’s and a peo-
ple’s own unaided efforts. To be middle class could even be described
as the common aspiration of all “modern” groups and individuals.
 Introduction 19

The ideal society would be one in which no one had the benefit of
aristocratic wealth or the afflictions of inherited poverty. The emer-
gence and strength of the middle classes appeared to be the measure
of human equality, of the possibility of self-fashioning, of individual
achievement and capability – the very signs of the modern.
It is merit, not inherited wealth or privilege or sectional loyalty or
networks, that counts in the making of the middle-class world, we are
told. It is improvement, and self-improvement, through education and
moral reform, individual effort, and sheer determination, that brings
advancement for society, family, and individual. The rags to riches tale,
great men building fortunes out of nothing, has been a staple of the
middle-class fable not only in the United States but also in Victorian
England and colonial India. Anyone can be middle class; and, in a
sense, everyone should be. Those who do not make it are simply not
determined or talented enough. The urge to “make it” and the promise
of its possibility are the transparent, evident sign of the modern and
the good society.17
At the same time, middleclassness – like the “modern” – has always
been defined by a series of exclusions; in other words, by what it
is not. On the one hand, the middle classes were distinguished from
manual workers by the kinds of professions they entered (occupations
in which they did not soil their hands through labor),18 the houses
they lived in, the language they spoke, and their supposedly temperate
behavior. On the other, and as critically, they were distinguished by
a notion of masculinity in which the man was the breadwinner and
presided over a household with a clearly separated private domain
inhabited by “nonworking” women and children. Middle-class men
claimed political rights and the status of citizens; the exclusion of
workers and women was long seen as being entirely natural. It was only
in later discourses of citizenship and middleclassness – such as those

17 “In democracies,” as one sociologist puts it, “the middle class is the nation proper.
The typical member of a national community is a member of the middle class.” See
Akos Rona-Tas, “Post Communist Transition and the Absent Middle Class in Central
East Europe,” quoted in Sam Vaknin, “Russia’s Middle Class,” http://samvak.tripod
.com/brief-middleclass01.html.
18 It is ironic, then, that in some countries, like today’s United States, and more gen-
erally among groups I call the subaltern middle classes, anyone, working class or
professional, who holds a steady job and even temporarily occupies a position of
intellectual, civic, or political leadership can be thought of as “middle class.”
20 A History of Prejudice

represented in the women’s movement – that this kind of exclusion

came to be challenged.
The housewife as the linchpin of domesticity and the private sphere
was largely a creation of this new middle-class world and thus inte-
grated into it. Along with laboring peoples and the aristocracy, non-
whites and the “Third World” in general were, however, seen to lie
outside the domain of the new middle-class life. Catholics, Jews, and
the Irish would not be recognized as middle class in England for a
long time; nor would Jews, Italians, or Irish in North America. Native
Americans and African Americans in the USA and Dalits in India are
not easily accommodated in the category to this day.
These exclusions are not explicable in terms of the “common sense”
middle-class proposition that these latter groups – “immigrants,”
“negroes,” “natives,” “untouchables,” “criminal castes,” Native
Americans, and adivasis (literally, the “original inhabitants” of India) –
were inherently poor, disorganized, and lazy, culturally unsuited to
middle-class modernity. To make sense of them, we need to recall not
the middle-class fable of liberal advancement in lands of the free but
the destruction and alienation that attended the establishment of mod-
ern industrial society and imperialism, along with the economic and
technological advances and promises of unprecedented opportunity
and wealth that came with them.19
The effects of this dislocation and alienation have been marked
among the working classes and immigrant populations, themselves
made up in the main of uprooted working people. They may be seen in
the history of several immigrant groups in Western Europe and North
America from the late nineteenth century to today. And they have of
course had long-lasting consequences in Europe’s Asian and African
colonies and in the condition of the internally colonized (indige-
nous peoples in Australasia and the Americas, African Americans in
the United States, Dalits in India, and so on); that is to say, among

19 For a few important commentaries, see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Colonial-
ism (Moscow: Foreign Languages Press, n.d.); Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid
Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1982);
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963); Jean
Suret-Canale, French Colonialism in Tropical Africa, 1900–1945, English trans. Till
Gottheiner (New York: Pica Press, 1971); Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating
the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990); and Gilroy, Black Atlantic.
 Introduction 21

populations marked as subordinate on the basis of race, religion, or

other inherited social condition and denied access for that reason to a
whole range of public economic and cultural resources.20
In the postcolony as in the colony, in the United States and India,
in the nineteenth century and today, notwithstanding all the political
advances that have taken place, a violence – institutionalized in prac-
tices of racism, slavery, and Untouchability – still serves to maintain
the existing social order and persistent boundaries between racially or
socially segregated communities.21 Numerous studies of the African
American middle classes have shown how black middle-class areas in
most large American cities still remain bound within segregated black
communities. In some instances, where black middle-class groups have
moved out of traditionally black neighborhoods, their relocation has
been followed by the phenomenon of “white flight” from the areas they
have moved into, leading to the establishment of separate white and
black neighborhoods once again.22 Even where this is not so obviously
the case in physical terms, as might be claimed for Dalit professionals
(smaller in number than their African American counterparts and
less easily distinguished by skin color or physical appearance),
segregation has long been the social-psychological condition under
which the ex-slave, “subaltern” middle classes have to live and find
their being.23
The violence I refer to is encountered not only in physical and sexual
abuse, rape, and flogging of lower-caste and lower-class servants and
workers, and not only in riots and police violence against blacks and
Dalits. It is found, too, in the upper-caste desertion of neighborhoods,

20 For more on these variations, see Gyanendra Pandey, “Can There Be a Subaltern
Middle Class?” in Subaltern Citizens and Their Histories: Investigations from India
and the USA, ed. Gyanendra Pandey (London: Routledge, 2010), 15–30. See also
Chapter 7, this volume.
21 This is a situation in which, as Gilroy points out, the lines between public and private
violence have often been very hard to draw. See Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 175.
22 The literature on this theme is considerable. For two important recent studies, see
Mary Patillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Mid-
dle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Kevin Kruse, White
Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2005).
23 Cf. Darryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the
Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1997).
22 A History of Prejudice

clubs, schools, public transport, and sometimes even jobs into which
the lower castes have been allowed entry. It is found in demonstra-
tions against affirmative action, in the courts and the legislatures as
well as on the streets, and in the continued abuse and punishment of
Dalits, blacks, and other such subaltern groups for appearing where
they are still not expected to be. The African American addition to the
list of offenses related to drinking and driving in the USA (not only
DUI, “driving under the influence,” and DWI, “driving while intox-
icated,” but also DWB, “driving while black” – which is, obviously,
not a legally cognizable offense!), and the Native American version
of it (in which DWI becomes “driving while Indian”), is a profound
comment on the necessity of being white, modern, and monolingual in
a very particular way to access fully the resources and opportunities
of modern civic existence in many parts of the world.
In spite of these inherited structures of prejudice and denial, which
clearly contradict the simple modernist faith in the triumph of reason
and science, important analysts, economic entrepreneurs, and political
leaders have continued to believe in the narrative of freedom and
development that democracy and rational government are poised to
bring about all over the world. Two old but well-known studies by the
Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal serve to illustrate the intricacies of
this argument as applied to the cases of the United States and India.

Quandaries of Development and Democracy

Myrdal was invited by leading corporations (supported by state

authorities) to write about the major problems of America and “Asia”
in the 1940s and 1960s. His central concern was the (statist) question
of the management of “minorities,” internal divisions, and obstacles
to development and democracy in the various countries he investi-
gated: and he presented with clarity and intriguing detail the “com-
mon sense,” if elite, perception of the fundamental problems in these
different lands.
In An American Dilemma, his detailed investigation of the “Negro
problem” in America, which I referred to earlier, Myrdal declared that
the average American (whatever he meant by “average”) was “a prac-
tical idealist.” Compared with members of other Western societies,
“the ordinary American is a rationalistic being, and there are close
 Introduction 23

relations between his moralism and his rationalism.” “This moral-

ism and rationalism are to many of us . . . the glory of the nation, its
youthful strength, perhaps the salvation of mankind,” he wrote, and
“the inherited liberalistic trust that things will ultimately take care of
themselves and get settled in one way or another, enable the ordinary
American to live on happily, with recognized contradictions around
him and within him, in a world of bright fatalism which is unmatched
in the rest of the Western world.” And further, in italics:

The American Negro problem is a problem in the heart of the Ameri-

can. . . . The ‘American Dilemma’, referred to in the title of this book, is the
ever-raging conflict between, on the one hand, the valuations preserved on the
general plane which we shall call the “American Creed”, where the American
thinks, talks, and acts under the influence of high national and Christian pre-
cepts, and, on the other hand, the valuations on specific planes of individual
and group living, where personal and local interests; economic, social, and
sexual jealousies; considerations of community prestige and conformity; [and]
group prejudice against particular persons or types of people . . . dominate his
outlook.24

This stirring commentary may be put in context by reference to a

review of Myrdal’s book written by the great African American writer
Ralph Ellison. In Ellison’s view, the chief virtue of the book, apart from
the mass of information it had assembled, was that it drew attention
to “the clash on the social level between the American Creed and anti-
Negro practices.” However, he went on, Myrdal’s talk of the American
Creed allowed him to circumvent the “American class struggle,” which
was the historical and material ground of the “American dilemma,”
and to deny the existence of “two American moralities” – money-
making on the one hand and national and Christian brotherhood on
the other.
He also challenged Myrdal’s patronizing proposition that all of the
African American’s life and struggle in the United States had been
but a “secondary reaction to more primary pressure from the side
of the dominant white majority.”25 “Can a people (its faith in an
idealized American Creed notwithstanding) live and develop for over
three hundred years simply by reacting?” Ellison asked. “Are American

24 Myrdal, An American Dilemma, vol. 1, lxx–lxxi (emphasis in original).

25 Myrdal, An American Dilemma, vol. 1, lxxv.
24 A History of Prejudice

Negroes simply the creation of white men, or have they at least helped
to create themselves out of what they found around them?”26
Writing on India two decades later, Myrdal presented a rather
different, but equally arresting, top-down view, which indicated the
asymmetry of conditions and histories in India and the USA, and (con-
sequently) the asymmetry of views about the two. The basic story he
told about India was that of a relatively enlightened, modern nation-
alist political elite attempting – somewhat arbitrarily, and often with-
out much support from other sections of the dominant classes – to
uplift a passive population. It may be well to start by noting the title
of his three-volume study of India and Indonesia (and some other
newly independent countries of South and Southeast Asia), published
in 1968: Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations. Not the
“dilemma” or “dilemmas,” the self-examination and rational deliber-
ation, of a rich, young, and pluralist nation like the United States.
The study of “Asia” has a very distinct problematic, produced by the
very “backwardness” of these nations, with their faceless masses of
poor, unenlightened people, entering into the modern world. Given
that understanding, some of what Myrdal observed was surprising, to
say the least.
At the dawn of national independence after the Second World War,
he wrote, India (and other South Asian countries) “accepted the ideol-
ogy of planning for development, and, more fundamentally . . . treated
economic development as a concern of the state and thus a political
issue.” A “commitment to egalitarianism . . . [was] an integral part of
their ideology of planning.” The inequalities of the inherited social
structures were recognized as serious obstacles to development. “Cer-
tainly the caste system in India is an obvious obstacle. It fortifies the
contempt and disgust for manual work prevalent in all social strata.
Since an orthodox Hindu regards not only those who perform this
work but everyone else outside his own caste as beyond the pale, it
also warps and stultifies ordinary human feelings of brotherhood and
compassion.”

26 Review of An American Dilemma (written for The Antioch Review in 1944), in

Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1994),
304, 305, 313, 315 (emphasis in original). For a more recent critique of Myrdal’s
propositions, see Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth
Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 4–5, 193.
 Introduction 25

From the beginning, too, India’s leaders embraced the ideal of polit-
ical democracy, with universal adult franchise, irrespective of caste,
class, sex, religion, language, literacy, ownership of property, or place
of birth. In the US, the majority of African Americans did not effec-
tively have the right to vote until the civil rights revolution of the
1960s. By that time, as Myrdal noted, India had “a firmly established
parliamentary government based on universal suffrage and a compar-
atively high turnout of the electorate.” However, he added, in another
display of a narrow Western (if not colonial) perspective, “in spite of
this the masses are more the object of politics than its subject. They
remain passive and inalert [inert?].”27
Jawaharlal Nehru, patrician, stalwart of the Indian struggle for
independence from British rule, Gandhi’s able lieutenant, self-styled
socialist and modernist, and prime minister from Indian independence
in 1947 until his death in 1964, in an odd way concurred. He had
written in the 1930s of an unlikely relationship between the hopeful,
sad, expectant masses and the educated, nationalist leadership: it was

as if we were . . . the guides who were to lead them to the promised land.
Looking at them and their misery and overflowing gratitude, I was filled with
shame and sorrow, shame at my own easy-going and comfortable life and our
petty politics of the city which ignored this vast multitude of semi-naked sons
and daughters of India, sorrow at the degradation and overwhelming poverty
of India. A new picture of India seemed to rise before me, naked, starving,
crushed, and utterly miserable.28

But the “spirit of the age” was with the enlightened leadership:
that spirit was in favor of equality (“though practice denies it almost
everywhere”), and it would triumph. In Nehru’s view, religion was
already dated, supplanted by nationalism, which in turn would give
way to a new internationalism: “Everywhere religion recedes into the
background and nationalism appears in aggressive garbs, and behind
nationalism other isms which talk in social and economic terms.”

27 Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, abridged by
Seth S. King (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), 146, 147, 150, 152, and passim.
For the more elaborate recension from which the statements I have quoted are drawn,
see Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, vol. 2
(New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1968), 745–6, 767, 774–6.
28 Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography: With Musings on Recent Events in India
(London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1936), 52.
26 A History of Prejudice

Further: “I wonder how people in India can worry about sectarian

problems of civilization and culture when hunger and poverty are
staring the nation in the face. It is an imperative necessity to relieve all
this which vitally affect the country before people can apply themselves
to any minor issues.”29 And so the Nehruvian regime moved toward
“planning” and “development” to bring about “a classless society with
equal economic justice and opportunity for all.” Anything that came
in the way would “have to be removed, gently if possible, forcibly
if necessary.”30 In this scenario, the “people” indeed appeared like
passive recipients; the rule of “experts” was at hand.
Many segments of the people, and many critical thinkers, have artic-
ulated other ideas, however, and challenged the assumptions underly-
ing these elitist propositions, even if they subscribed to “developmen-
talist” views of their own. The Indian nationalist claim of an already
existing unity – a mass of people living in a common territory under
a single political system, automatically constituting a nation irrespec-
tive of what caste, class, and other privilege had done to them in the
past and continued to do in the present – was widely questioned, by
Muslim politicians as well as Dalits and others. B. R. Ambedkar, as the
most prominent spokesperson of the Dalits in 1931, made the point
to the man who would be hailed as the Father of the Indian Nation,
“Gandhiji, I have no homeland.”31 And soon after Independence:
How can people divided into several thousands of castes be a nation? The
sooner we realize that we are not as yet a nation in the social and psychological
sense of the word, the better for us. For then only we shall realize the necessity
of becoming a nation and seriously think of ways and means of realizing the
goal.32

E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker, or “Periyar” (“the Great Leader”),

founder of the Self-Respect Movement and militant leader of lower-
caste assertion in South India, put it more strongly, declaring as early
as 1925:

29 Nehru, Autobiography, 472; and S. Gopal, ed., Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru,
vol. 7 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1975), 401.
30 Nehru, Autobiography, 551, 552.
31 Dhananjay Keer, Dr. Ambedkar: Life and Mission (1954; reprint Mumbai: Popular
Prakashan, 1990), 166.
32 Vasant Moon, ed., Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, vol. 13
(Mumbai: Education Dept., Government of Maharashtra Press, 1994), 1217.
 Introduction 27

In our present situation many fear that Swaraj if granted will only usher in
Brahmana Raj. If, in these days of British rule, it is possible for some to prevent
others from walking down certain streets and . . . from having access to water
from village wells and ponds . . . what would they [Brahmans and other upper
castes] . . . do if they come to wield [the] authority [of Government]?

Or again, in an address to Dalit Christians in 1933: “If you desire

true freedom you must have the courage to destroy that which validates
and constitutes the basis of your abject and enslaved condition.”33
What remains insufficiently acknowledged in much modern, nation-
alist discourse is that while certain sections of a population emerge
as “natural,” unmarked citizens of a land, others become hyphenated
(“Native/African/Hispanic Americans,” “Indian Muslims,” “Dalit
middle class”), second-class, and sometimes even suspect. The latter
must measure up to declared national standards and can only then
be “assimilated.” “White but not quite,” “white Negro,” and “Dalit
Brahman,” and other such contradictions in terms, abound in political
and intellectual discussions of such “minoritized” social groups. Such
deferral and qualification has been a large part of the history of the
African American and the Dalit communities in the period of open and
intense political struggle for their rights over the last half century and
more. These are subaltern citizens for whom the promise of freedom,
of equal opportunity and an equal share in the fruits of modernity,
has long been constantly renewed, and constantly deferred.34
In seeking to interrogate the “common sense” of the modern in
the following pages, I examine some of the more specifically marked
(more local and visible) vernacular prejudices that have gone into the
making of the recent history of African Americans and Dalits in the
United States and India. It is important to note that these vernacular
prejudices are sustained by the universal, and by the very pretense
that this universal is not itself a vernacular (the vernacular with the
strongest army, air force, and navy?): “The tradition of the oppressed
teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the

33 Cited in V. Geetha and S. V. Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From

Iyothee Thass to Periyar (Calcutta: Samya, 1998), 291, 364.
34 For an elaboration of the idea of the “subaltern citizen,” see Gyanendra Pandey,
“The Subaltern as Subaltern Citizen,” introduction to Pandey, Subaltern Citizens
and Their Histories.
28 A History of Prejudice

exception but the rule.”35 Following Benjamin, I attend closely to the

normalcy of the exception, to the violence of order and of inherited
“common sense” – a sinister shadow in the life of the oppressed –
in the following investigation of the history of the African American
and Dalit struggles for equal rights in the United States and India, and
of the place of caste, race, and patriarchal prejudice, Untouchability,
segregation, and masculinism in holding them back.

Freedom’s Dawn

The great Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto has a short story about
a poor hackney-cab driver Ustad Mangoo’s eager anticipation of the
day on which a “Naya Qanoon” (New Law or New Constitution)
is to come into being, his early-morning jaunt and anticipation of
celebration on that day, and the consequences of his exercise of the
liberty he imagines coming with that “new dawn.” Mangoo is called
“Ustad” (Master or Teacher) by fellow cabbies at his cab stand because
of his incredible fund of information, garnered from the gossip of his
passengers, regarding political developments the world over: the Civil
War in Spain, workers’ and peasants’ rule in Russia, which has become
mixed up in his mind with the “New Constitution,” and so on. The
denouement of Manto’s story is reached in Mangoo’s encounter with
an Englishman he recognizes as the drunken passenger whose verbal
abuse he’d had to suffer quietly following an altercation between them
some months earlier, aware as he was of the consequences of standing
up to a white sahib. Now, on the day of the promulgation of the New
Law, Mangoo demands an increased fare for a short trip and refuses
to alight from his seat when the sahib beckons him. When the latter
advances, threatening Mangoo with a cane, the proud cab driver can
contain himself no longer. He knocks the sahib over, proceeds to beat
him, and continues to do so until two police constables manage, with
difficulty, to drag him away and put him in jail, saying, “What ‘New
Law’ – what are you talking about – the law is what it always was.”36

35 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on History,” no. 8, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

(London: Fontana, 1973), 259. Cf. Georgio Agamben, Homo Sacer I: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
36 Atahar Parvez, ed., Manto ke Numaindah Afsane (Aligarh: Educational Book House,
1981), 31–44.
 Introduction 29

The point of citing Manto’s nonlinear and noncontinuist satire on

the subaltern Mangoo’s first experience of “freedom” is not to indicate
once more the violence of the white man and of British colonialism,
for this has been amply documented, and ruling classes in postcolonial
Asia and Africa (and in noncolonized countries like China) have been
no less skillful, or brutal, in perpetuating their power. Nor is it to
suggest that the law is, and always will be, what it has always been for
cab drivers, working people, Dalits, and blacks. It is rather to say that
there are histories beyond those written by sahibs and police officers,
histories as perceived and lived and anticipated by the Mangoos of
this world – and that a history of prejudice must reckon with these
different perspectives.
It is precisely such a contested account of long-anticipated, and con-
tradictory, moments of freedom that I present in the following pages.
For India, the “New Dawn” that I examine is the time of independence
from British rule (in 1947), the inauguration of the Indian republic and
the extension of voting rights to all inhabitants of the territory (1950),
and the abolition of Untouchability, regarded almost universally as the
worst aspect of the inherited practice of caste discrimination, in a series
of constitutional provisions and laws between 1950 and 1955. In the
United States, a set of events that is often seen as a parallel departure is
the civil rights movement and legislation of the 1960s, which, follow-
ing the abolition of slavery a hundred years earlier, established more
securely the conditions for something like equal citizenship and polit-
ical participation for the African American population of the land. In
what follows, however, I shall consider a longer struggle for civil rights
and citizenship in both cases.
How does one write a history of unacknowledged prejudice, of
simultaneous belief in the promise of freedom and the necessity of
continued deferral, to repeat the question I began with? How does one
reckon with the vexations and challenges of thinking the “subaltern
citizen,” with the history of long-subordinated groups claiming citi-
zenship, and of those who willy-nilly inhabit the double bind of the
internally colonized? I have chosen to do so by focusing for a start
on the politics of prejudice as a politics of difference, for prejudice
often appears in the pronouncement of difference, as a marker of nat-
ural, obvious talents and hierarchy: man versus woman, white versus
black, Hindu versus Muslim, Christian versus Jew, heterosexual versus
30 A History of Prejudice

homosexual, rational versus irrational, modern versus primitive, civi-

lized versus barbarian.
The proclamation of difference, I submit, forms the core of the
majority of judgments on the question of enfranchisement and disen-
franchisement, the privilege of unmarked citizenship on the one hand
and the handicap of marginality on the other. Through a tracing of
these conscious and unconscious markers of hierarchy, and some of
the consequences that flow from them, one might begin to chart a
history of prejudice in specific times and places, as I do in Chapter 2.
I analyze the matter in some detail in that chapter, as a technique of
organizing social order and yet as a discourse that provides a range of
resources to Dalits and African Americans, and other disenfranchised
communities, for struggles against marginalization and subordination.
In Chapter 3, I consider the question of Dalit conversion, which
might also be described as the struggle for Dalit liberation, in several
of its aspects. As an entry into the history of the civil rights movement
in the USA, I devote Chapter 4 to the campaign for Double Victory
(or “Double V”) against the opponents of American democracy and
freedom at home and abroad during the Second World War. Through
an analysis of the call for Dalit conversion to citizenship in India
and the “Double V” campaign in the USA, I seek to interrogate the
received history of liberation and democracy in the two countries. I
go on in Chapters 5 and 6 to investigate other aspects of the yearning
for dignity, opportunity, and equal access – the struggle for control of
the body as well as for access to mobility, schools, and other resources
of modern society – within these communities and outside, within
the confines of the home as well as in the public arena. I conclude
in Chapter 7 by pointing to the persistence of narrow-mindedness,
bigotry, and intolerance in many forms, very much at odds with the
promise of democracy and claims of exceptional tolerance, justice, and
enlightenment that are central to the official U.S. and Indian narratives
of themselves.
A word of explanation about the variety of sources I have drawn
on in the following pages. As I have indicated, the archive that a his-
torian of prejudice must use is likely to be unconventional, and even
“illicit.” Prejudice is not always set out openly in political manifestos,
media commentary, or individual articulations and pronouncements.
The evidence of prejudice surfaces in improbable forms and unexpected
 Introduction 31

places, and often appears as impressionistic and anecdotal; not quite

the stuff of disciplinary history. Given the particular challenges con-
fronting anyone who would write a history of prejudice, and given
the shadowy character of its archive, I make no apology for my use
of fragmentary, “trivial,” unarchived (and perhaps unarchivable) evi-
dence, along with records and documents emanating from the state
and recognized intellectual and political movements. I have therefore
turned to an array of autobiographical and fictional writings, folk-
songs and poetry, letters to the press, and blogs on the Internet, as well
as published and unpublished public documents and correspondence
related to the history of African Americans and Dalits, to construct my
account of their struggles.
The question of how we may write a history of prejudice is, how-
ever, even more recalcitrant than this comment on sources might sug-
gest. How does one begin to write a history of a notion that has itself
undergone a sea change since the Enlightenment? Until the Renais-
sance, as Gadamer reminds us, prejudice referred to the assumptions
we work with, which were clearly subject to challenge and rewriting by
evidence that contradicted them. Following the Enlightenment’s “prej-
udice against prejudice,” however, the term came to refer only to the
assumptions (of others) of which we disapprove.37 How, one might
ask, do we write a history of prejudice, the common-sense assumptions
of others, from which we do not exclude ourselves?
What I do in this study is to inhabit the realm of prejudice – the com-
mon sense of the modern – even as I write about it. What I undertake
is, to a large extent, a work of translation between vernacular and uni-
versal prejudices. In attending to narratives of the modern and stories
of democracy, as these are found (heard and invoked, appropriated,
translated, and recast) in the lives and histories of America’s blacks
and India’s Dalits, I pay close attention to arguments about why the
resources of modernity and democracy are (sometimes) kept from such
groups because of their “difference,” their need still to catch up and to
become worthy of participating fully in the fruits of modern democ-
racy. I seek to examine the record of the articulation of difference

37 Cf. “Hans-Georg Gadamer,” sect. 3.1, “The Positivity of ‘Prejudice,’” Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, first published
March 3, 2003; substantive revision June 8, 2009).
32 A History of Prejudice

both by “outsiders” viewing America’s blacks and India’s Dalits as

unified objects of inquiry or commentary and by African Americans
and Dalits themselves. I take both African Americans and Dalits, there-
fore, as important subjects, as well as objects, of prejudice.
Thus, to anticipate an argument I will elaborate in the following
chapters, the Dalit leader Dr. B. R. Ambedkar presented himself, and
continues to be presented, as a consummately modern figure. Neverthe-
less, he harbored and expressed many of the signature contradictions
of liberalism when it came to the governance and rights of “tribes,” or
dalit groups of hill and forest tracts in India now classified as Scheduled
Tribes. In the course of the Indian Constituent Assembly debate on the
Fifth and Sixth Schedules for “tribal-areas,” for instance, Ambedkar
declared: “The Aboriginal Tribes have not as yet developed any polit-
ical sense to make the best use of their political opportunities and they
may easily become mere instruments in the hands either of a majority
or a minority and thereby disturb the balance without doing any good
to themselves.” The “tribes” for him fell below what Uday Mehta has
called the anthropological minimum of inclusion into the space-time
of the modern.38 The proposition epitomizes my argument about uni-
versal prejudice – all the more so because it is the most important
leader of the Dalits in the twentieth century who here articulates the
narrow-mindedness of the modern.
One may point to other, very different kinds of examples. “How
can we be prejudiced against our own selves; we are all of one race,”
a group of older black women teachers said to Alice Walker when she
asked them to write about color prejudice within their own families
at a workshop in 1969.39 “Historically,” writes Audre Lorde, “dif-
ference had been used so cruelly against us that as a people we were

38 Babasaheb Ambedkar, “Communal Deadlock and a Way to Solve It” (1945), in

Moon, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, vol. 1 (1979), 375. I am grateful to Townsend
Middleton for drawing my attention to this statement. See Townsend Middle-
ton, “Beyond Recognition: Ethnology, Belonging, and the Refashioning of the Eth-
nic Subject in Darjeeling, India,” (PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology,
Cornell University, 2010), 228–339, for his analysis of Ambedkar’s views on Sched-
uled Tribes. See also Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in
Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999).
39 Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (Orlando, FL: Harvest Books,
1983), 29.
 Introduction 33

reluctant to tolerate any diversion from what was externally defined

as Blackness. . . . [W]e could not bear the face of each other’s differ-
ences because of what we feared those differences might say about
ourselves.”40 Following Walker and Lorde, I believe we have to ask
how questions of power and privilege, subalternity and difference, are
navigated within subalternized constituencies and assemblages them-
selves.
What happens within the African American and Dalit communities
to issues of class and gender, not to mention color? When and how
have these internal contradictions been resolved, or shelved, in the
interests of the larger struggle? How do “unpoliticized” women write
about the struggles of the poor and the disadvantaged in comparison
with “politicized” men, writing of a more visible, public struggle?
What happens when we set these public and private narratives side
by side (as I do in Chapters 4 and 5), narratives that appear at first
sight simply to talk past each other, speaking in rather different voices
about what would appear to be rather different worlds, unable (or
unwilling) to engage one another? What does this dissonance tell us
about the prejudices of modern society and history as encountered
in the ghettoes and other neighborhoods that are home to people of
African descent in the United States and those belonging to formerly
Untouchable castes in India? And what does it tell us about ourselves,
the readers and writers of books like this one, university and college
students and teachers, educated professionals and other well-to-do
middle-class folk, the “unmarked” citizens of modern fantasy?

40 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), 136.
 2

Prejudice as Difference

Prejudice, I have suggested, often parades as difference. The positing of

difference works as a means of othering – or otherization. Let me spell
out the argument in terms of dominant discourses of social and cultural
difference (that is, the common sense of the modern) before turning
to an investigation of how subaltern assemblages and constituencies
like African Americans and Dalits have, in their turn, deployed ideas
of difference (and sameness) in their own political struggles.
A prominent theme in the history of the world since the eighteenth
century has been the promise of emancipation, including the emanci-
pation of societies and groups marked out as “backward,” disadvan-
taged, or simply adrift from the “mainstream” of human history and
progress as it has been conceived since the Enlightenment. It is against
this background that differences of gender, sexuality, caste, race, and
so on were foregrounded by the state (colonial and noncolonial), and
by dominant groups and classes, in different parts of the world through
most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is important to note
the terms of this differentiation. Men are not described as different; it
is women who are. Foreign colonizers are not different; the colonized
are. Caste Hindus are not different in India; it is Muslims, “tribals,”
and Dalits (or ex-Untouchables) who are. White Anglo-Saxon Protes-
tant heterosexual males are not different in the United States; at one
time or another, everybody else is. White Australians are not different;
Vietnamese boat people, Fijian migrants to Australia, and, astonish-
ingly, Australian Aboriginals are.

34
 Prejudice as Difference 35

Difference becomes a mark of the subordinated and the marginal-

ized, measured as it is against the purported mainstream, the “stan-
dard” or the “normal.” What we are presented with are two terms
in binary opposition, “hierarchically structured so that the dominant
term is accorded both temporal and logical priority.”1 As Simone de
Beauvoir pointed out long ago, the binary of man and woman, for
example, is hardly symmetrical, for the former is not only one pole
in the pair but also the “sole essential” against which the other will
be evaluated.2 It is in the attribution of difference, then, that the logic
of dominance and subordination commonly finds expression. And the
proclamation of difference becomes a way of legitimating and rein-
forcing existing relations of power.
In the context of new discourses of nationhood in nineteenth-
century Europe, the problematic of difference takes the political form
of the “Jewish Question,” and Marx’s essay on that question becomes
a lasting comment on the impossibility of the political emancipation of
the Jew as Jew: that is, of political emancipation in a liberal mode – tol-
erating difference but demanding uniformity. The supposedly enlight-
ened, tolerant, civil society of modern Europe, and with it the idea
of the abstract citizen subject in the rational, universal order of the
nation-state, is challenged by the very existence – and individuality –
of the Jew, who is seen as being too particularistic and yet too global,
too rooted, and yet too dislocated at one and the same time.3 This is
of course a very specific, nationalist contextualization of the question
of difference, but it informs a more pervasive discourse of the political
in modern times.
It is necessary to note that the Jewish Question is a metaphor for
far more than the Jews. We may notice, if we care to do so, that it is
Muslims who are the Jews of the late twentieth and early twenty-first

1 Elizabeth Grosz, “Derrida, Irigaray, and Deconstruction,” Intervention: Revolution-

ary Marxist Journal, 20 (1986): 72.
2 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949; reprint London: Vintage, 1997), 17 and
passim.
3 There is extensive writing on this theme. For one important example, see Han-
nah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron Feldman (New York:
Schocken Books, 2007). For a postcolonial elaboration, focused on the question of
Muslims in South Asia, see Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish
Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2007), 51 and passim.
36 A History of Prejudice

centuries – once again, too narrowly community-centered and too

worldwide, too parochial and too deracinated, to fit in as responsi-
ble (read: unmarked and naturally belonging) members of the nation-
state. This is not to deny the critical differences between the history
of the Jews – a consistently tiny minority in Europe, perceived as rad-
ically Other, as killers of Jesus, as the only religious minority until the
post-Reformation era (given that European Muslims were so largely
rendered invisible), a people without a state until the formation of
modern Israel – and that of the world’s Muslim communities, substan-
tial populations that have controlled large territories and held state
power in many places from the inception of Islam until today. In that
respect, the oft-noted parallel between Jews and homosexuals may be
somewhat more tenable, given their similar histories of being small
minorities that were persecuted in Christian Europe (the experience
elsewhere was perhaps more mixed) until late modernity, culminat-
ing in the Nazi Holocaust.4 My point, however, is about metaphor in
contemporary political discourse. The Jew and now the Muslim is a
metaphor for a minority that never quite fits and is seen as dangerous
to the nation-state; hence, the Jewish Question in nineteenth-century
Europe and the problem of Muslims today.
Yet, there is another dimension to the question of difference and
marginalization in the modern nation-state. If the Muslims are the Jews
of recent decades, the unrecognized Other of the era from the eigh-
teenth century onward have been slaves and Untouchables, women,
and other “invisible” groups whose existence and particularity mount
an equally important challenge to the existing discourses of civil soci-
ety, uniform civil rights, and the abstract citizen subject of the new
national and democratic order. Whereas the Jew/Muslim is viewed
very quickly as a fully formed, alternative culture, the “eternal out-
sider” and dangerous Other, the precise status of women or slaves or
Untouchables as Other (or as minority) is itself in doubt, for they are
insider/outsiders, essential to the maintenance and survival of a given
social order and yet not recognized as key to it.

4 Cf. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; reprint New York:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994); and Matti Bunzl, Symptoms of Modernity: Jews
and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999).
 Prejudice as Difference 37

In rethinking the diverse uses of the idea of difference and the beliefs
underlying them, then, the example of what have in different contexts
been seen as classically subaltern communities – Dalits, blacks, con-
quered indigenous populations, women – may have something unusual
to tell us. These are uncertain and fluid assemblages that have at partic-
ular junctures been accorded collective yet secondary status and come
to be described as “different,” “backward,” “not quite ready” for full
citizenship.5 The politics of their pronouncement as different is likely
to repay closer examination.
The specific character of the Dalit or black and, stretching the point
a little, also the women’s case is that it is seen as being marked above
all by conditions of subordination and deprivation, as opposed to
the Jewish/Muslim case, which is reckoned primarily in terms of what
would be described as “cultural deviance.” What are the distinguishing
features of the history of this classically “subaltern” difference and
consequent marginalization? In turning to this question, we need to
attend first to the making of difference or otherness, or, in other words,
of a minority (or minorities) not already established in their difference
from the start. Moreover, if we take seriously the proposition that
the production of difference, and minority, is a process, not a given
demographic or sociological condition,6 it is necessary to examine the
kind of minoritization we encounter in the history of particular states
and societies as well as the implications of distinct forms of minority
existence.
A postcolonial critic, Aamir Mufti, has written of his interest in
“how liberalism historically has talked about the modes of apart-
ness of the Jews and the history of their persecution in Western soci-
ety, and the kinds of solution it has offered.”7 Is the same kind of
statement even conceivable for Dalits, or blacks, or women? Is the

5 I should explain why the laboring poor do not appear as a central instance here.
Although they were long categorized as different – in being “dangerous classes,” phys-
ically and mentally wanting or even deformed, almost a different species of being –
laboring people have emphatically (more so than women, for example) claimed same-
ness, rather than difference, as the grounds of their politics, except insofar as they
present themselves as ethnic, caste, or racial communities (Irish, Italians, Hispanics,
Dalits, blacks, Protestants, Hindus, etc.). They have therefore not been described as
an identifiable minority, except in the latter sense.
6 Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony, 209.
7 Ibid., 11.
38 A History of Prejudice

Dalit/black/women’s question ever so precisely formulated? What

would be the “modes of apartness” of Dalits, blacks, or women? Can
the Dalit/black/women’s question be posed as a question of eman-
cipation/assimilation by a dominant discourse that already claims to
accommodate or include them? To say nothing of the question, how
can women – or for that matter assemblages like Dalits or African
Americans – lay claim to the rights of separate nationhood (although,
as we know, both Dalits and African Americans have done so at certain
stages)?
Or again consider the argument that nationalism necessarily “unset-
tles” large numbers of people, rendering the minoritized populations
potentially movable and leading in many cases to the uprooting of
entire populations.8 One might point out that the minoritization of
Dalits, blacks, or women does not automatically render them mov-
able. On the contrary, given the nervousness about losing their labor
in many instances (in the American South in the early decades of the
twentieth century, or in the sphere of domestic work much more per-
vasively), subordination and minoritization is often a way of keeping
them in their place – in both senses of the term. On the other hand, the
uprooting of populations (in the sense of settled social structures) may
be precisely what a subaltern minority calls for in many circumstances.
I have made the point that the deployment of difference by the
state and the dominant classes of the modern era becomes a way
of legitimizing established prejudices and existing relations of power.
What the disadvantaged, the marginalized, and the subordinated –
women, blacks, Dalits, sexual minorities, conquered indigenous peo-
ples, migrants, and dislocated populations – have done in more recent
times is to utilize the very category of difference to demand a re-
arrangement if not an overturning of prevailing structures of access
and privilege. Thus they have challenged anew the hierarchical arrange-
ments and underlying structures of belief that, for two hundred years
and more, from at least the late eighteenth century, disadvantaged
groups had struggled to overturn largely through striving for recogni-
tion as equals – the same.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many colonized peoples,
organized women’s groups, and others stressed their distinctiveness

8 Ibid., 13.
 Prejudice as Difference 39

and special circumstances as grounds for a demand for changes in

social and political regulation and order. However, it was the rhetor-
ical power of the discourse of equality that undergirded their claims.
The history of such struggles in different parts of the world appeared as
a history of sameness and the right to sameness: “one man, one vote,”
equal pay for equal work, the need to end inherited structures of dis-
crimination and denial, and gain an “equal” share in public resources
and state power. By the late twentieth century, however, the battle
of many such opposition forces had been self-consciously extended to
encompass another rhetoric and another demand: the demand for an
acknowledgment of the vitality and productiveness of difference.
The force of the revised argument on difference grows out of an
awareness not only that differences of gender, of communal practices
and ways of being, even of incommensurable languages and beliefs
have provided the grounds for the diversity, density, and richness of
human experience. The altered stance follows from a recognition that
difference, and the very deployment of ideas of difference, has been
the grounds for claims of identity, unitariness, priority, and privi-
lege. A great deal of feminist work has refused to accept any simple
dichotomy between claims to equality and claims to difference and
has argued instead that equality requires the recognition and inclusion
of differences. “It is not our differences which separate women,” as
Audre Lorde put it, “but our reluctance to recognize those differences
and to deal effectively with the distortions which have resulted from
the ignoring and misnaming of those differences.”9
Such oppositional scholarship calls for an interrogation of the ways
in which the idea of difference is deployed and of the operations of
categorical difference – an operation that of course marks out only
particular differences as relevant to the making of our broader social
and political arrangements.10 It mounts a critique of a politics that
insidiously privileges certain kinds of difference – as not different.
It leads us to ask how discourses of dominance and subordination,
normalcy and marginality, come to be constructed, and by that means
to investigate the play of prejudice in these constructions.

9 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, 122; see also 112 and passim.
10 Joan W. Scott, “Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference,” Feminist Studies, 14,
no. 1 (1988), passim.
40 A History of Prejudice

It may help at this point to underline the central proposition I have

been advancing so far. Social or cultural difference is not a given,
flowing from manifest deviance, a disordered or medicalized condi-
tion, or genetic inheritance. What the pronouncement of difference
signals, rather, is political position and political maneuver. By defini-
tion, one might say, the idea of difference is manifold and fluid, and
it is always strategically invoked and mobilized. Like the notion of
dominance and subordination, only perhaps more obviously so, the
idea of difference cannot be thought of, or organized, along a single
(say, cultural or biological) axis. Distributed along multiple grids, it
comes in innumerable forms, appearing differently in different places:
malleable, evolving elements and tendencies that come into view and
disappear, change, coalesce, and reappear, in other forms, amid other
networks, in other contexts.
The deployment of the idea by the subordinated and the marginal-
ized in modern national societies is marked, in turn, by its own contra-
dictoriness, its own presumptions, and its own blindnesses, as I hope to
show in the next two sections of this chapter, dealing with the politics
of identity and difference as these are elaborated in the Dalit strug-
gle in India and the African American and women’s movements in
the USA.

India’s Dalits

The Dalits, or ex-Untouchable castes, of India – known at differ-

ent stages as Untouchables, Outcastes, Depressed Castes, Harijans,
or Scheduled Castes (referring to the list or “schedule” of Untouch-
able castes drawn up for the Government of India Act of 1935 and
included, with modifications, in the Indian constitution of 1950) –
have been haunted by deep internal divisions, even as important sec-
tions among them have sought to fashion new community and sol-
idarity in the context of the anticolonial and postcolonial struggles
for democracy and social justice. In the decades preceding the end of
British rule, as is well known, a number of Dalit leaders laid claim
to being a “statutory minority,” a “separate element in the national
life,” a “necessary party” to political negotiations regarding the coun-
try’s future, a separate community, even a “nation,” like the Muslims
 Prejudice as Difference 41

and the Sikhs.11 There were many different grounds on which such
spokespersons advanced the claim for the identification of the Dalits
as a significant minority or community, among them the shared expe-
rience or history of labor and exploitation, propositions about shared
sentiment and suffering, and at the other extreme the very fact of
statutory recognition.
The particular difficulty faced by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the pre-
eminent Dalit leader of the twentieth century, and by other Dalit
spokespersons, in making the claim that Dalits were a minority no
different from Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Anglo-Indians, and other
such minorities was plain. The Shudras, Atishudras, Untouchables,
Depressed Classes, Scheduled Castes, whatever the term used for the
assemblage, gained their distinctiveness – at least until they became a
legally recognized minority – precisely from the fact of their untouch-
ability, that is, the discrimination they suffered at the hands of Hindu
society. Gandhi was quick to point out the paradox inherent in the
Dalit claim to existence as a separate minority. “We do not want on
our register and on our census Untouchables classified as a separate
class,” he declared at the Round Table Conference in London in 1931.
“Sikhs may remain as such in perpetuity, so may Muhammadans,
so may Europeans. Will Untouchables remain Untouchables in
perpetuity?”12
In this respect, the Dalits were caught in an extraordinary bind,
being defined by Hindu society and at the same time part and not part
of it. Although one might argue that, with all the particularities of its
diverse manifestations, this is in fact the general condition of subalter-
nity: that of the insider/outsider – refined in some cases (Jews, Muslims,
Dalits, blacks?) to the outsider within.13 Consider the ambivalence that
appears in Ambedkar’s presentation, as independent India’s first law

11 See, for example, Moon, Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, vol. 9 (1991), 181, 190;
vol. 17, pt. 3 (2003), 418; and vol. 1 (1982), 368; Eleanor Zelliot, From Untouchable
to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement (Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1996),
97; and Sekhar Bandhopadhyay, “Transfer of Power and the Crisis of Dalit Politics
in India, 1945–47,” Modern Asian Studies, 34, no. 4 (2000), 903, 906.
12 Moon, Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, vol. 9, 68.
13 For one articulation of the argument in the African American case, see Patricia Hill
Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of
Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1991), 11 and passim.
42 A History of Prejudice

minister, of the case for the reform of the personal law of the Hindus.
At one stage in the debate on the Hindu Code Bill, he referred to the
Hindu shastras as “your shastras.” To a member’s interjection (“Your
shastras?”), he responded by saying, “Yes, because I belong to the
other caste”; and, a little later, “I am an unusual member of the Hindu
community.” At another point in the same debate, he spoke of “our
ancient ideals which are to my judgement, most archaic and impossible
for anybody to practice.”14
There was clearly no easy escape from the aggrandizing character of
“Hinduism,” even for a leader who had declared fifteen years earlier:
“I had the misfortune of being born with the stigma of [being] an
Untouchable. . . . It is not my fault; but I will not die a Hindu, for this
is in my power.”15 It is in this context that Ambedkar opens up the
question of the meaning of so-called Hindu society or community,
with a radical reinterpretation of the Indian past – and therefore of the
needs of the Indian future. Ambedkar’s recasting of Indian history as an
extended and unfinished struggle between Brahmanism and Buddhism
was a move of far-reaching implication. He was able to propose it,
I submit, precisely because he spoke for a constituency very different
from that claimed by the leaders of other “preexisting” (that is to
say, on the face of it, already given and recognized) religious or racial
minorities (or majorities).
Whereas the Congress’s distribution of the divide between the
nation/people’s friends and enemies was into something called “India”
and its “development,” on the one side, and anyone who would par-
tition the country or detract from its development, on the other, and
the best known “minority” version of the recent history and current
predicament of the subcontinent was the Muslim League’s proposi-
tion of a federation of communities threatened by an arrogant and
unduly fixed “majority,” Ambedkar went further in his reexamina-
tion of how these putative communities and their claims on the land
and the people came to be. “India is the land which has experienced
class-consciousness, class struggle [in its most extreme form],” he
wrote, “ . . . the land where there has been fought a class war between
Brahmans and Kshatriyas which lasted for several generations and

14 Moon, Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, vol. 14 (1995), 270–1 and 1162.
15 Zelliot, From Untouchable to Dalit, 206.
 Prejudice as Difference 43

which was fought so hard and with such virulence that it turned out
to be a war of extermination.”16
Ambedkar saw caste formation as a group or class formation. “The
history of India before the Muslim invasions is the history of a mor-
tal conflict between Brahmanism and Buddhism.”17 Inequality was
the “official doctrine” of Brahmanism; Buddhism opposed it root and
branch: witness the very different opportunities it offered to Shudras
and to women.18 India’s Untouchable communities were originally
Buddhist, Ambedkar wrote in his 1948 book entitled The Untouch-
ables. They were thrust into the demeaning position of untouchability
when they clung to Buddhism in the midst of a warrior and court-
inspired resurgence of Brahmanical Hinduism: “broken men,” who
declined with Buddhism. “We can . . . say with some confidence that
Untouchability was born some time about 400 A.D. It is born out of
the struggle for supremacy between Buddhism and Brahmanism which
has so completely molded the history of India.”19
And yet the claim on a Buddhist past, and the 1956 conversion to
Buddhism, were not primarily aimed at recovering some lost “orig-
inal” history of the Dalits and providing “memory to a memoryless
people,” to use D. R. Nagaraj’s evocative phrase, although that was
certainly part of the object. Rather, the presentation of Indian history
as the history of struggle between Brahmanism and Buddhism was, to
restate an argument I have made elsewhere in characterizing the South
Asian Subaltern Studies intervention in historiographical debate, to
rethink the pattern of historical development as a whole, grasp the
contradictions that lie at its heart, and outline political possibilities
that have been suppressed or that remain to be elaborated.20

16 Babsaheb Ambedkar, “India and the Pre-requisites of Communism,” in Dr. Babsaheb

Ambedkar: Writings, Debates, Interviews, Handwriting, Photos, Voice, Video, edited
and compiled by Anand Teltumbde (Mumbai, 2004), 8.
17 Babsaheb Ambedkar, “Revolution and Counter-revolution in Ancient India,” in Tel-
tumbde, Ambedkar: Writings, Debates, pt. II, 32.
18 Babsaheb Ambedkar, “What Is Saddhamma?” in Moon, Ambedkar: Writings and
Speeches, vol. 11 (1992), 302; and Ambedkar, “Revolution and Counter-revolution
in Ancient India,” pt. II, 57.
19 B. R. Ambedkar, The Untouchables: Who They Were and Why They Became
Untouchables (1948; reprint Shravasti: Bharatiya Bauddha Shiksha Parishad, 1977),
204.
20 Introduction to Pandey, Subaltern Citizens and Their Histories, 3.
44 A History of Prejudice

The Dalit conversion, as Ambedkar’s restatement of Buddhism

showed very clearly, was to be a conversion for the future. Ambed-
kar’s reinterpretation of Buddhism cast it as a “religion” for our times,
an ethic that promoted rationality and scientific thinking, refused all
superstition, and recognized the need for the state to promote social
justice and human dignity, or in more familiar political terms, Lib-
erty, Equality, and Fraternity – tenets derived not from the French
Revolution, as he said repeatedly, but from the ancient moral insights
contained in the teachings of “my Master, the Buddha.”21
Investigators from the 1960s onward found that the most common
argument given by Dalit converts in western India in favor of the
Buddhist dhamma was an argument about universal human dignity,
the opportunity to “live like a man,” the restoration of self-respect,
and an end to feelings of inferiority, all of which followed from the
rejection of Hinduism and its caste hierarchy: with conversion “we
became human beings.”22 “Gautama’s dhamma is like no other,” as
an anonymous Dalit woman’s song has it, “A man finds humanity
there.”23
Let me cite one recollection of a conversion ceremony to illustrate
the point. This account of the embracing of the Buddhist dhamma
in a remote Konkan village, a few months after Ambedkar’s death
in December 1956, comes from Urmila Pawar’s recently published
autobiography, Aaydaan (items made of bamboo, the weaving of
which was the traditional occupation of the Mahar community in her

21 For some important discussions of Ambedkar’s reinterpretation of Buddhism, see

Valerian Rodrigues, “Buddhism, Marxism and the Concept of Emancipation in
Ambedkar,” in Dalit Movements and the Meaning of Labour in India, ed. Peter Robb
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 299–338; Surendra Jondhale and Johannes
Beltz, eds., Reconstructing the World: B. R. Ambedkar and Buddhism in India (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2004); A. K. Narain and D. C. Ahir, eds., Dr. Ambedkar,
Buddhism and Social Change (Delhi: B. R. Publishing Corporation, 1994); Deb-
jani Ganguly, Caste and Dalit Lifeworlds: Postcolonial Perspectives (Delhi: Orient
Longman, 2005), chap. 7; and Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the
Politics of Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), especially
chap. 3.
22 E.g., studies by Eleanor Zelliot, Adele Fiske, and Surendra Jondhale, cited in John
C. B. Webster, Religion and Dalit Liberation: An Examination of Perspectives (Delhi:
Manohar Publications, 1999), 84, 88.
23 Cited in Eleanor Zelliot, “New Voices of the Buddhists of India,” in Narain and
Ahir, Ambedkar, Buddhism and Social Change, 196. See also the poems by Daya
Pawar and Namdeo Dhasal, and Zelliot’s commentary on them, at 203.
 Prejudice as Difference 45

region).24 “Actually none of us understood very well what exactly

conversion meant,” writes Pawar, “nor did we know much about this
man Ambedkar who advised us to convert.” Yet the day of Babasaheb
Ambedkar’s passing came to be “indelibly printed” on her memory.
Pawar, who was 12 at the time, returned from school to discover
family elders and neighbors weeping. One of them, who worked in
another town, decided to take the overnight train to Mumbai to catch
a last glimpse of Babasaheb’s body. The atmosphere of mourning
lasted for months, while information about Ambedkar’s death, his
struggle, and his wishes trickled in through Dalits working in various
places outside the village. Sometime during this period, preparations
for dharmaantar (conversion) began. The “conversion” itself was a
dramatic moment. Something changed, Pawar recalls. Faith in evil
spirits, possession, and “incidents of ‘actual’ experiences of ghosts”
ended with conversion, and people like Urmila’s mother, who had
strongly believed in such things, seemed to take on a new life.
The dharmaantar ceremony took place on the grounds of Gogaté
College in Ratnagiri, the nearest large town. Urmila and her sib-
lings went with their mother and other people of the village. “Peo-
ple . . . poured in from everywhere,” she writes. In the midst of vari-
ous announcements, the mantra of “Buddham sharanam gacchami”
(“I enter into the Buddha’s protection”) “floated down to us and we
joined our voices with the chanting crowd.”
After the ceremony, the villagers were told to discard the gods they
worshipped and throw the idols into the water. Urmila half expected
that her mother would refuse, given that theirs was a priest’s family
and that many of the family idols were rather valuable. Instead, her
mother “picked up some idols and threw them . . . [away] herself.” A
Dalit elder placed a small statue of the Buddha and a photograph of
Ambedkar in Urmila’s mother’s prayer room. People went from house
to house every evening venerating the Buddha, recalls Pawar. “Their
faces glowed. You would think there was no longer any need to ask
for happiness . . . as . . . [it] had automatically come to us” (emphasis
mine).

24 Urmila Pawar, Aaydaan (Mumbai: Granthali, 2003), 90–3. I have relied on Maya
Pandit’s translation of these passages in Rege, Writing Caste/Writing Gender, 285–8,
with minor additions and emendations in the light of the original Marathi.
46 A History of Prejudice

Other recollections of Dalit conversions to Buddhism in different

villages and towns following Ambedkar’s embracing of the dhamma
in 1956 provide a similar sense of anticipation and of a political differ-
ence already at hand. In account after account, “conversion” appears
as a magical time. “The diksha ceremony was carried out in a joyful
atmosphere,” writes Shantabai Krishnaji Kamble of the ceremony in
her husband’s village of Kargani in 1957. “The struggle yielded us three
jewels –,” writes another Dalit memoirist, Baby Kamble, “humanity,
education and the religion of the Buddha. . . . The flame of Bhim started
burning in our hearts. We began to walk and talk. We became con-
scious that we too are human beings.”25
Without wishing to understate the power of the continuing divisions
among the hundreds, if not thousands, of Dalit castes and subcastes,
differentially arranged as they are in an unyielding caste hierarchy, or
the force of gender, age, and class divisions even among the lowest
castes in India, I am suggesting that the Dalit conversion is ideally
aimed at inaugurating a new difference, signaled by a new body, a
new community, and a new politics and culture. This is a point to
which I shall return later in this chapter.

African Americans and African American Women

By contrast with the history of the Dalit struggle to forge a unified and
recognizable Dalit community to establish its difference, the separate
identity of the African American people and culture appears to have
been in place from their arrival on American shores – or so the legend
has it. The experience of slavery, the legal and social barriers against
access to basic resources for people of African descent in much of
the USA for much of its history, the visibility of skin color, and the
discourse of nineteenth-century “science,” “civilization,” and “race”,
have served to establish this as common sense. Hence the force of Du
Bois’s moving statement of how the African American
ever feels his twoness – an American, a Negro, two souls . . . in one dark
body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The

25 Rege, Writing Caste/Writing Gender, 187, for Shantabai quotation; and Baby
Kamble, The Prisons We Broke, trans. from the Marathi by Maya Pandit (Chennai:
Orient Longman, 2008), 122.
 Prejudice as Difference 47

history of the American Negro is the history of this strife – this longing to
attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer
self.

The American Negro does not seek to “Africanize America,” Du Bois

goes on to say, “for America has too much to teach the world and
Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white
Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the
world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a
Negro and an American.”26
And yet, as we know, an African American character, culture, and
politics has never been present so simply or in such an accessible form.
The point is well illustrated by the uncertainty, ambiguity, and con-
tradiction that attends the claim of African American identity and
culture, given the diverse origins, multidirectional migrations, misce-
genation, and geographical and social dispersal of the peoples
involved27 and again by the debate among black feminists in the United
States over black women’s primary political identity or commitment
and the “community” they would (or could) speak for.
Important activists and writers engaged with the issue of how the
struggles against racism and sexism in American society might be
brought into alliance have adopted divergent positions on the ques-
tion. For bell hooks, “racial imperialism,” as she calls it, trumps
“sexual imperialism” in U.S. history. “Racism took precedence over
sexual alliances in both the white world’s interaction with Native
Americans and African Americans, just as racism overshadowed any
bonding between black women and white women on the basis of
sex.”28 Theoretically and in the law, white women may also have been
the “property” of their men, she notes, yet they were not systematically
subjected to the brutal oppression and dehumanization of the black
slave. The attempt of some white feminists to suggest a similarity in

26 Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 45.

27 For the wider context, and a powerful critique of the common sense of black/white
relations in America, see Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Lan-
guage of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1993).
28 bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press,
1981), 122.
48 A History of Prejudice

the day-to-day experiences of white and black women only reveals a

shocking insensitivity to the plight of the latter.
Other commentators have reiterated the argument. “In their poverty
and vulnerability,” writes Jacqueline Jones,

black people experienced . . . historical economic transformations in funda-

mentally different ways compared to whites regardless of class, and black
women, while not removed from the larger history of the American work-
ing class, shouldered unique burdens at home and endured unique forms of
discrimination in the workplace.29

Consequently, black women have remained single more often, borne

more children, had the burden of heading single-parent families more
frequently, remained in the labor market longer and in greater num-
bers, had less education, earned less, and been widowed earlier than
their white counterparts.
In addition, as several scholars have noted, white women have
widely served as agents of racism in the USA. As one middle-aged
black woman domestic worker cited by Jones put it, “Black men will
make a fool out of me if I let them, but it was a white woman who
had me crawling around her apartment before I was thirteen years
old, cleaning places she would never think of cleaning with a tooth-
brush and toothpick!”30 hooks recalls that in the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury Sojourner Truth had to bare her breasts to prove that she was a
woman before she was allowed to speak at a political meeting, and
this happened at an antislavery rally of white women and men. For
whom, and on whose behalf, could the black woman (or man) speak
when blacks were recognized only as “female” and “male,” chattel
and property by most of white America?31
Audre Lorde writes about differences among women that American
feminists must reckon with: “Poor women and women of Color know
there is a difference between the daily manifestations of marital slavery
[on the one hand] and prostitution [on the other] because it is our
daughters who line 42nd Street [shorthand for New York City’s major

29 Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the
Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 9.
30 Ibid., 316.
31 hooks, Ain’t I a Woman, 159.
 Prejudice as Difference 49

theater and red-light district].” Lorraine Bethel states the position more
polemically: “WHAT CHOU MEAN WE, WHITE GIRL?”32
The point is simple. Although the importance of the women’s move-
ment is self-evident, the category of “women” and “women’s rights,”
in the United States as elsewhere, is constituted only by suspending
other differences – between women of different races, for example.33
Likewise, the category of “blacks” or “African Americans” works to a
large extent by covering over a number of important differences within
the black “community” – differences of color, and the advantages that
pale skin and straight hair might bring, in addition to differences of
gender, sexuality, age, class, and so on.
In the reconstruction of the history of the Black Freedom Struggle,
Darlene Clark Hine observes, “Black women were conspicuous by
their absence.” She notes that, for some time even after she became a
professor of history, she herself had not thought of black women “as
historical subjects with their own relations to a state’s history.” It was
an unwelcome invitation from a local schoolteacher and head of the
Indiana unit of the National Council for Negro Women, Shirley Herd,
which shamed Hine – as the only tenured black woman historian in
the local university – into turning her attention to the history of black
women in Indiana.34
As she began reading late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
autobiographies of “migrating, or fleeing, black women,” it became
clear, says Hine, that these women were sexual hostages and victims

32 Lorde, Sister Outsider, 112; Bethel cited in hooks, Ain’t I a Woman, 152. We should
note of course that after the early work of hooks and Lorde, intersectionality has
opened up another lens on these questions; see Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the
Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,”
Stanford Law Review 43 (1991), 1241–99; Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Combahee River
Collective Statement,” in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda
Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1997), 63–70; and Elsa Barkeley Brown, “‘What
Has Happened Here’: The Politics of Difference in Women’s History and Feminist
Politics,” in Nicholson, Second Wave, 272–87.
33 hooks observes that the common comparison of “women” and “blacks” in white
feminist critiques of American history serves to exclude black women from consid-
eration. Even feminists like Helen Hacker and Catherine Stimpson use “women” to
refer to white women and “black” to refer to black men, she argues, and others
(“including even some black people”) make the same assumption; see hooks, Ain’t I
a Woman, 140.
34 Darlene Clark Hine, Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-construction of American
History (New York: Carlson Publishing, 1994), xxiii.
50 A History of Prejudice

of domestic violence throughout the United States. The relationship

between black women and the larger society – white men and women
and, to a lesser extent, black men – “has always been, and continues to
be, adversarial,” involving as it does a “multifaceted struggle to deter-
mine who would control black women’s productive and reproductive
capacities and their sexuality.”35
Interestingly, Hine now began to divide her survey courses on mod-
ern African American history into four broad themes: the Civil War
and Emancipation, the Great Migrations, the Civil Rights Movement,
and the Changing Status of Black Women. The lack of fit between the
first three and the last tells its own story.36 In any event, investigations
of the history of black women underscored for Hine the need for inter-
sectional analysis, for “this particular group of Americans has always
occupied the bottom rung of any racial, sexual, and class hierarchy.”
Three issues have been central in the history of the protest and migra-
tion of black women, she argues: the fact (and fear) of rape, domestic
violence, and the desire to escape severe economic exploitation and
deprivation. Among other oversights, historians and other social sci-
entists have paid too little attention to the working-class status and
economic condition of black women: “The fact is that the vast major-
ity of black women have lived in overwhelming poverty, and a lack of
attention to that fact has helped to foster erroneous impressions in the
larger society of the mythical, heroic, transcendent black woman able
to do the impossible, to make a way out of no way.”37
With those cautionary observations in mind, let us mark the specific
conjuncture, and the specific constructions of history and social rela-
tions, that produce Du Bois’s “problem of the color line” as the central
problem of the age and his articulation of the “striving in the souls of
black folk” toward the “ideal of human brotherhood, gained through
the unifying ideal of Race.” Recall that this is at the very beginning
of the twentieth century.38 Du Bois follows the preceding statement
with the stirring lines:

35 Ibid., 41.
36 “The fourth theme has been problematic,” writes Hine somewhat problematically;
ibid., 51.
37 Ibid., 38, 51, 52.
38 Italy and Germany had been unified, Japanese nationalism was on the rise, a regime
of Poor Laws (to protect all the nation’s people) was well established in Britain and
 Prejudice as Difference 51

[T]here are today no truer exponents of the pure spirit of the Declaration of
Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true American music
but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and
folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole
oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.39

Here, race and culture emerge in a somewhat essentialist form as the

unifying principles in the history of African Americans and their strug-
gle for human dignity, attributes almost inherent in the genes – and in
“the souls” of black folk. At a later stage in his career, when he was
strongly influenced by Marxism, Du Bois would have shrunk from
many aspects of the preceding formulation. The claims vary. Yet the
subaltern assertion of difference – a claim to difference and sameness
(a different sameness?) at one and the same time – has also commonly
been a claim to an already existing subaltern unity and solidarity,
although a great deal of the historical evidence points to the need to
forge this unity and solidarity in the very course of struggle.

The Struggle for Identity

I want to return at this point to the history of the Dalit “conver-

sion” to Buddhism, for Ambedkar’s reflections on this long, drawn-out
event help to clarify something about the manner of the establishment
of political (or for that matter religious) community and difference.
Increasingly from the 1930s, Ambedkar and a number of other Dalit
leaders had begun to advocate the renouncement of Hinduism as a
means of solving “the problem of the Untouchables.” Gandhi, ded-
icated in his own way to the abolition of Untouchability, differed.
What was needed, he argued, was the reform of Hinduism, or “self-
purification.” Conversion was not the answer. One cannot change
one’s religion as if it were a house or a cloak, Gandhi wrote. For him,
the threat of Dalit conversion flowed from a political rather than a
religious impulse.40

elsewhere, and even as European (and American) imperialism extended its sway in
Africa and Asia, the idea of the self-determination of nations was gaining ground.
39 Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 52.
40 D. G. Tendulkar, Mahatma: Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, vol. 4 (New
Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government
of India, 1960), 41.
52 A History of Prejudice

Ambedkar’s rejoinder to this is important for my purposes. Apart

from making a pointed comment on precisely the political character of
much of the religious history of the world, and of much that counted
as conversion, he met Gandhi’s house-and-cloak metaphor with an
equally polemical but telling response. Religion today was like a piece
of ancestral property, he noted, passed on from parent to child and
accepted unthinkingly. “What genuineness is there in such [religious
belief]?”41 “The conversion of the Untouchables if it did take place,”
he wrote, after a Dalit conference in Bombay that considered the ques-
tion in May 1936, “would take [place] after full deliberation of the
value of religion and the virtue of different religions. . . . It would be
the first case in history of genuine conversion.”42
The Dalit leader here points to the long process of thinking and
deliberation, both social and individual, that must accompany a Dalit
conversion. It is the process, the epistemic effort, that counts, he
might have added, for Ambedkar’s “first case . . . of genuine conver-
sion” might also be seen as a first step in the making of a difference –
which would be a political difference, whatever else it was.
The articulation of a similar political difference is evident in Du
Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, too. Du Bois writes of the “little commu-
nity” in the hills of Tennessee where he taught school for two summers
in the 1880s, a community built around figures like the 20-year-old
Josie, who worked day and night – at service (in white people’s homes),
in her own home, in the fields and orchards – and her mother, who
talked of the sewing machine Josie had bought to supplement the fam-
ily income, of how Josie longed to go to school but they never had the
savings to allow it, how the crops failed, and how “mean” some white
folks were. “I have called my tiny community a world,” writes Du Bois:
and so its isolation made it. There was among us but a half-awakened common
consciousness, sprung from common joy and grief . . . ; from a common hard-
ship in poverty . . . ; and, above all, from the sight of the Veil that hung between
us and Opportunity. All this caused us to think some thoughts together; but
these, when ripe for speech, were spoken in various languages.43

41 Moon, Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, vol. 5 (1989), 404.

42 Ibid., 404–5.
43 Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 102–3, repeated sixty years later in W. E. B. Du Bois,
The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois (New York: International Publishers, 1968),
120 (emphasis mine).
 Prejudice as Difference 53

For the blacks and the Dalits, as for many other subalternized minori-
ties – the internally colonized, who do not inhabit a geopolitical space
that provides easy grounds for a politics of separatism or of indepen-
dent nationhood (and I would include women here) – it has never
been a straightforward task to mark out a sequestered domain of an
autonomous “culture.” The claim of a unified and alternative cul-
ture and tradition is established here, if it is established, only through
long and hard struggle. Witness the strong arguments for and against
claiming a distinct culture of “womankind” in the early stages of the
women’s movement.
It is at the level of the everyday that the larger structures of preju-
dice are challenged – and reproduced. At this level, and among subal-
tern groups generally, “culture” and “tradition” are more deliberately
forged, and far more openly contested, than the cultural claims of
more privileged assemblages with rather more secure cultural insti-
tutions (and funding) and greater access to political power. And the
politics that accompany their construction are never quite so easily
wished away.
There are unexpected sites of struggle. The socially and culturally
marked body becomes the most common sign of the difference, the
otherness and lowly position of the subaltern. The black man “can-
not escape his body” – the “slow composition of my self as a body,”
as Fanon puts it. A small white boy expresses fear at the mere sight
of that body: “Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” In the train,
notes Fanon, the black man is given “not one but two, three places.”
His body is returned to him “sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad
in mourning.”44 The body, and the embodied difference of the Dalit/
black/woman, comes to stand in for the cultural difference of classic
minorities like the Jews and the Muslims, although of course the sup-
posed deviance of the latter has its bodily markers, too. Consequently,
the struggle of the Dalit/black/woman against these arguments – of pre-
ordained, or long-established, humors, dispositions, and disabilities –
must necessarily take on the task of rescripting the subaltern body.
In the event, the subaltern finds resources in her experience and her
body, even the body as it is ground down. Du Bois’s first encounter

44 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952;
reprint London: Pluto Press, 2008), 47, 83, 84, 86 (emphasis original).
54 A History of Prejudice

with prayer in the southern black church illustrates the proposition

very well:

A sort of suppressed terror hung in the air and seemed to seize them. . . . The
black and massive form of the preacher swayed and quivered as the words
crowded to his lips and flew at us in singular eloquence. The people moaned
and fluttered, and then the gaunt-cheeked woman beside me suddenly leapt
straight into the air and shrieked like a lost soul, while round about came
wail and groan and outcry, and a scene of human passion such as I had never
conceived before.45

Viola Andrews, a poor black woman from rural Georgia about whom I
write in a later chapter of this book, provides another indication of the
power of traditional resources. “The white man could not loose [lose],”
she says in her unpublished autobiographical writings, “The colored
man could not win.” Most blacks in the early twentieth-century
American South lived on plantations, chopped and hoed cotton, and
worked “from can’t to can’t” (cannot see before day to cannot see
after dark). “They never had enough” (emphasis original).46
However, although southern blacks had no wealth or social privi-
lege, they had music. “That’s one thing the colored folks had: they had
a song. There is something about Singing, one can survive if they have
a Song.” So, Viola tells us, barefoot, working in the fields, or walking
to church, the black folk sang:

“Go down Moses: way down in Egypt land: Tell old pharaoh: let my people
go.”
or “I’m so glad: trouble don’t last always.”
or “I got shoes, you got shoes, all God’s Chillins [children] got shoes.”

“Mentally,” she observes, “they dipped into the far future – into eter-
nity: . . . when God will vindicate his own.”
Her “greatest Blessing,” Viola writes, “was finding and knowing
God when I was young.” At Easter in 1961, she heard on the radio, “He
arose, He arose and he arose from the Dead.” And “I believed it. . . .
Yes I believed in the God of the Bible and I trusted in him.”47 As a

45 Du Bois, Autobiography, 120.

46 Emory University Manuscripts and Rare Book Library, Viola Andrews collection,
Mss 813, Box 17, FF 7 and 8; and Box 21, FF 8, for this and the next paragraph.
47 Andrews collection, Box 18, FF 3.
 Prejudice as Difference 55

child, she recalls, she sometimes thought that there were two Gods, two
Heavens, one for the colored, one for the white. In general, however,
she was skeptical about the white folks’ religion. “The colored had no
faith in thier [the white folks’] Christianity.” Would blacks and whites
be separated in heaven, someone in the African American community
occasionally asked. The answer was “No.” There would be no white
people there since it says in the Bible, “Treat every man as a Brother”
(Viola underscores “every” with a double line). On Sundays, passing
by the white folks’ church, where services began earlier than in the
black churches, blacks sometimes heard them sing, “Will there be any
stars in my crown?” The blacks often answered in song: “No not one,
No not one.”48
In the course of such struggles, subaltern groups have also appro-
priated weapons from the discourse of the dominant, from republican
constitutions and universal declarations of human rights. Hence, we
get the language of nationhood and of minority rights in much of the
Dalit and African American politics of the twentieth century, as Dalit
and African American thinkers explore and rewrite the history of labor
and exploitation; the oppressions of caste and race, quite aside from
the matter of economic production and distribution; the subordination
and confinement of women; the challenges and prospects of different
religious as well as political ideals and practices. This critical work
underlines the process of the creation of specific historical confine-
ments and oppressions, along with the accompanying ideologies and
promises, identifications and ideals.
The body of the subaltern comes to be scripted in a new way in the
articulation of a new “identity.” Recall Baby Kamble’s comment on
how the Dalit struggle “yielded us three jewels – humanity, education
and the religion of the Buddha. . . . The flame of Bhim started burning
in our hearts. We began to walk and talk. We became conscious that
we . . . are human beings.”49 “Yielded” is an important word, and it
applies to the “us” in this statement, the Dalits, as well as to humanity,
education, and religion. The struggle yielded up the Dalit community,
a Dalit politics, and the outlines of a Dalit future, not in the sense of
an already existing community coming to consciousness of itself but

48 Andrews collection, Box 17, FF 7; also FF 8, 9, 10, 12.

49 Baby Kamble, Prisons We Broke, 122.
56 A History of Prejudice

of historical conditions and political practice producing new senses of

community and difference. It is perhaps necessary to stress that the
same kind of historical process is at work in the case of Jews/Muslims
as well, even if that is not how it has been presented.

Difference – and Otherness

Let me sum up the argument I have been making in the preceding

pages. The deployment of ideas of identity and difference, mainstream
and minority, the nation and its Other, signals above all, and fun-
damentally, a claim to power. In the hands of dominant groups and
classes, the move follows from a belief in enduring hierarchies based
on natural or (in its most generous construction) historically very deep-
rooted distinctions in the qualities and abilities attributed to discrete
populations. In the rise of insurrectionary movements mounted by
long-subordinated or marginalized sections of society, it more clearly
indexes a history and politics of a becoming, and with that the search
for an alternative ethics – of self in relation to others – a position from
which to act without fear, to demand one’s rights, to live.
In the case of dominant as well as oppositional discourses, the
proclamation of difference (in the former case, usually also a dec-
laration of otherness) flows from a certain political position and
perspective. Plainly, the difference articulated in the Dalit, black, or
women’s movement is not that of an already available culture or iden-
tity – the culture or identity of women, ex-Untouchables, or people
of African descent. What is involved rather is the enunciation of dif-
ference, as Homi Bhabha has it, “a process of signification through
which statements of culture or on culture differentiate, discriminate
and authorize the production of fields of force, reference, applicabil-
ity and capacity.”50 The facet of resistance, the “foreign accent” and
“respectful distance,”51 found here is not the resistance of another
culture. It is instead the resistance of a different politics, the call for a
differently imagined future.

50 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 34.

51 Cf. Doris Sommer, “Resisting the Heat: Menchu, Morrison, and Incompetent Read-
ers,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 407–32.
 Prejudice as Difference 57

The point is demonstrated again, if further demonstration is needed,

in the very history of subordinated or marginalized groups naming
a social assemblage as Dalit, black, African American, adivasi, ab-
original, First Nation, gay, lesbian (not to mention LGBTQ), and for
that matter even women. The distance traveled in the quest for self-
definition and self-respect by Dalits as well as African Americans is
indicated in the changing names given to these assemblages or adopted
by their spokespersons:
Negro → colored → black → Afro-American → African American → people
of color → ___, in one case;
outcastes → pariahs → Untouchables → depressed classes → Harijans →
Scheduled Castes → Dalits → ___, in the other.

In the latter case, Harijans, or “children of god,” Gandhi’s appellation

for the untouchable castes, is now angrily rejected by Dalit militants
as patronizing and vapid: “If we are children of god, whose children
are you?” some of them have asked sarcastically. Scheduled Castes is
still commonly used, even by Dalit professionals and political leaders.
However, Dalit is the preferred term of self-description among Dalit
activists today. Defined in the dictionary as crushed, broken, or down-
trodden, it has since its use by the militant Dalit Panther movement
in the 1970s become a term of self-assertion, reclaiming a millennial
history of exploitation and humiliation and of resistance to it.
It is this ever-unfolding politics of becoming, this shifting, unpre-
dictable struggle over inherited beliefs and practices and their underly-
ing justifications, that makes the question of sameness and difference,
self and Other, such a difficult and important one to track. Indeed, as
I have suggested, the politics of becoming, the malleability of social
networks and solidarities, and the internal contradictions of claimed
community are downplayed by subaltern movements themselves.
While subaltern discourses on “conversion” (or liberation), such as
that of the Dalits, regularly foreground the need for greater access and
opportunity in the face of discrimination and oppression, and speak
as well at times of the need to convert the oppressor in the course of
converting the self, the “converted” self, the fullness of the new Dalit
or black citizen, is often taken rather for granted – as if the self, the
community, the Dalit or black already exists in her/his/its unity and
integrity. The evidence to the contrary is of course substantial. For just
58 A History of Prejudice

one illustration, let me return to an autobiographical account I cited

earlier in connection with the Mahar (Dalit) community’s struggle for
dignity and self-respect in central India in the mid-twentieth century,
a memoir that graphically describes the village Others’ (the Mahars’)
production of their own Others.

The other world had bound us with chains of slavery. But we too were human
beings. And we too desired to dominate, to wield power. . . . So we made our
own arrangements to find slaves – our very own daughters-in-law! . . . Young
girls, hardly eight or nine or ten years old, were brought home as daughters-
in-law. Girls, even younger, were married off. . . . For the girl, marriage meant
nothing but calamity.52

Baby Kamble’s critique of the treatment meted out to daughters-in-law

by community elders is detailed and insistent. The daughter-in-law
of the better-off Mahar households “was kept busy all twenty-four
hours of the day.” The men sometimes brought in loads of meat,
which had to be preserved. More often than not, this arduous task
was assigned to the daughter-in-law, often no more than a child. Even
at other times, she suggests, the child (bride) was continually harassed:
wakened before dawn, set to grinding grains for flour, off to the river
to fetch water once the grinding was done, returning to cook bhakris
(local flattened bread). If any of this was done unsatisfactorily, the
mother, sisters, and even brothers-in-law “slap[ped] the girl on the
face . . . , pinch[ed] her cheeks, and shower[ed] a million abuses on
her. . . . The poor girl had to endure the abuses of everybody in the
household.”53
The author notes that even when the influence of the Ambedkar
movement spread strongly among the Mahars, and both her brother
and her father could think of little else, her father forbade her mother
from stepping outside their home. She writes of the “terrible thrashing”
that her mother got as “almost a daily routine” because she protested
against such confinement.54 Husbands beat their wives severely on the
slightest suspicion, she observes at several points in the memoir.
Notwithstanding such evidence of internal hierarchy and repres-
sion, propositions of a seamless unity, and of the need to maintain

52 Kamble, Prisons We Broke, 87, 93.

53 Ibid., 73–4, 94–5.
54 Ibid., 107; cf. 97.
 Prejudice as Difference 59

solidarity against all comers appear commonly in the militant discourse

of insurrectionary subaltern movements. Sometimes the proposition is
advanced by moving in an apparently reverse direction – and marking
the oneness, and indivisibility, of the oppressive Other. Eric Goldstein
cites an arresting example from Harlem, New York, in 1995 in his
book on Jews, race, and American national identity.55
The violent attack and torching of a building in which eleven peo-
ple were killed arose out of the attempt of a Jewish store owner, Fred
Harari, to evict a black subtenant for business activities that he had
presumably not permitted. Harari’s employees included whites, blacks,
Puerto Ricans, and Guyanese. In spite of knowledge of this complex
racial mix, the African American attackers described the trader as “a
white intruder” and “usurper” of black economic opportunities in
the predominantly black business district. Even after the tragic fall-
out and the deaths of eleven employees and residents, their supporters
continued to present the incident as an instance of black-white con-
flict, “a characterization that allowed them to view it with a certain
moral clarity.” For many blacks, concludes Goldstein, “the black-
white divide is the inviolable boundary that separates the privileged
from the oppressed.”56
The upper-caste/lower-caste divide is presented in parallel black
and white terms by many Dalits and Dalit spokespersons in India.
A very good illustration is found in a well-known polemical treatise
entitled Why I Am Not a Hindu, by the Dalitbahujan intellectual Kan-
cha Ilaiah. Writing of his childhood, Ilaiah emphasizes the aspect of
autonomous caste existence in his native Andhra Pradesh: “My parents
had only one identity and that was their caste: they were Kuru-
maas. . . . My playmates, friends, and of course relatives, all belonged
to the Kurumaa caste. Occasionally the friendship circle extended to
Goudaa boys and Kaapu boys . . . friends because we were all part
of the cattle-breeding youth.” At the same time, however, he refers
to the Dalits (or, more expansively, the Dalitbahujans, comprising

55 Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 221–2.
56 Ibid., 222, 223. Compare the Nation of Islam’s regular characterization of an undif-
ferentiated white people as “devils” or “a devil race” of “bleached-out white people,”
neatly summarized in Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York:
W. W. Norton and Co., 2010), 375.
60 A History of Prejudice

ex-Untouchable as well as other lower-caste laboring and artisanal

groups) as a unit, as against that of the “Hindus”:
I, indeed not only I, but all of us, the Dalitbahujans of India, ha[d] never heard
the word “Hindu” – not as a word, nor as the name of a culture, nor as the
name of a religion in our early childhood days. We heard about Turukoollu
[Turks, or Muslims], we heard about Kirastaanapoollu (Christians), we heard
about Bapanoollu (Brahmins) and Koomatoollu (Baniyas) [or merchants] spo-
ken of as people who were different from us.

With the Brahmans and the Baniyas, he writes, “we had no relations,
whatsoever”: no common religious or cultural festivals, no shared
activities of labor or education.57 Hence, implicitly, we have Dalits
(Dalitbahujans) on the one hand, Brahmans and Baniyas (Hindus) on
the other: a collective self against a collective Other. Recall again in
this context the comment that the African American teachers made to
Alice Walker, “How can we be prejudiced against ourselves; we are
all of one race,” or Du Bois’s lament about the inescapable “twoness”
of blacks in North America: “an American, a Negro, two souls . . . in
one dark body.”
Arguments of this kind go against the grain of what one might call
a world-transforming vision, of the struggle to forge new communities
and new social arrangements out of the multiplicity and contradictori-
ness of human interactions and inconsistencies, ambitions and foibles,
in the past and the present. And they have held back such movements
from squarely facing up to internal divisions within the constituencies
invested in a new democratic future (Dalit, African American, or other)
and confronting the problem of prejudice, discrimination, and lack of
privilege within these putative communities. These are questions that
I turn to directly in the second half of this study, but it is necessary
to bear them in mind as we consider the Dalit and African American
arguments for self-respect and citizenship at the “new dawn” of Indian
independence and American civil rights, which I examine in Chapters
3 and 4.

57 Kancha Ilaiah, Why I Am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy,

Culture and Political Economy (Calcutta: Samya, 1996), xi, 1, 2 and passim.
 3

Dalit Conversion

The Assertion of Sameness

The term “Dalit conversion” refers at first glance, and in its most com-
mon usage, to the mass conversion of Dalits to Buddhism in 1956 and
afterward, which I mentioned in Chapter 2, as well as to Islam, Chris-
tianity, and other religions at various other times both before and after
1956. I use it, however, to describe a number of different dimensions
of the Dalit struggle for self-definition and the redefinition of society,
for the conversion represents a remarkable attempt to escape from cen-
turies of stigmatization and oppression. The struggle occurred on many
fronts in the mid- and late twentieth century, extending far beyond the
realm of religious practice and the attendant social prejudices.
I use Dalit conversion, for one thing, to refer to the Dalit entrance
into formal citizenship. That step is marked by the abolition of
Untouchability in the Indian constitution of 1950, the institution of
universal adult franchise, the extension of key legal and political rights
to all sections of the Indian population, and the introduction of statu-
tory safeguards and support for specially disadvantaged groups (in the
form of “reservations” or reserved quotas in education and a number
of public services), with all the consequences this has had for Indian
society and politics. I use it also to register a more diffuse, but per-
haps no less significant, aspect of the Dalit objective, which may be
described loosely as a conversion to the modern, a condition signi-
fied by a discourse of individual rights, self-making, science, urbanity,

61
62 A History of Prejudice

and a democratic public sphere.1 These are clearly ongoing processes.

Indeed, as I have already suggested, one might argue that the most
noteworthy feature of the Dalit conversion is that it is a conversion
for the future to a large extent in the future and involving ideally the
conversion of all humanity, Dalit and non-Dalit, with the non-Dalit
also being recast in that future in a new Dalit mold.
In proposing such a universalist scale for the making of a new cit-
izen and a new consciousness, Dalit and non-Dalit, it is important to
consider carefully which commonalities and histories the insurgent dis-
course privileges and which it denies. What is it that the Dalit (and non-
Dalit) need to be converted out of? What practices are they allowed to
retain as part of a distinct heritage, or simply as “internal,” “custom-
ary” matters? In identifying the priorities of the movement, or what
used to be called the principal contradiction, what are the contradic-
tions, hierarchies, and privileges that the new Dalit discourse treats
as secondary, relatively inconsequential, or even trivial (a word that I
shall return to later in this analysis)? What does it elide, through the
very rhetoric of the new citizen that it employs, or through arguments
about the needs of this particular historical juncture? This chapter and
those that follow attempt to provide a few tentative answers to these
questions.

The Double Bind of the Internally Colonized

The question of the Dalit conversion, in the wider sense in which

I have used the term, is linked in the India of the 1940s and ’50s
to the question of decolonization, which in turn is tied up with
the real or perceived threat of persistent internal colonialism(s). The
matter of internal colonialism was raised directly or indirectly by
numerous Dalits, as well as by Muslims and others, in the India
of the 1940s and afterward. The charge is not advanced commonly

1 The concept of Dalit liberation (what I am calling conversion) is based to a significant

extent, writes Timothy Fitzgerald, on an appeal to “the ethical autonomy of indi-
viduals and their ability to transform themselves and their society through collective
political action.” See Timothy Fitzgerald, “Analysing Sects, Minorities, and Social
Movements in India: The Case of Ambedkar Buddhism and Dalit(s),” in Jondhale
and Beltz, Reconstructing the World, 277. See also Christopher S. Queen, “Ambed-
kar, Modernity, and the Hermeneutics of Buddhist Liberation,” in Narain and Ahir,
Dr. Ambedkar, Buddhism and Social Change, 99 and passim.
 Dalit Conversion 63

now,2 but the argument underlying it remains important and provides,

in my opinion, one of the more significant frames for a discussion of
the Dalit struggle from Indian Independence in 1947 to today.
As indicated in Chapter 1, in the Dalit case, as in that of the Indian
Muslims, we are dealing with a population that is widely distributed
over a national territory and with disadvantaged communities that
have come over time to some kind of mutual accommodation with
more privileged, numerous, and powerful groups, although the results
are still markedly hierarchical. The political question at issue is what
happens to the minority, to Muslims or Dalits in India (or to African
Americans or Native Americans in the United States), if the “majority”
gains an apparently unfettered right to rule over the minorities and a
sense of colonialism persists even after the establishment of formal
democracy. The difficulty faced by the “colonized” in this situation
is clear, although it has not been widely discussed or theorized. The
problem with this kind of internal colonialism is that the colonized
cannot escape from the given physical, economic, or even cultural
realm. They have no independent territory of their own: they cannot
emigrate, and they cannot send the colonizers home. What is more,
in some cases they cannot easily lay claim to an independent history
and culture – indeed they gain their identity at least in part by their
incorporation into the dominant culture or society: African-Americans,
Indian Muslims, Untouchable (Dalit) Hindus.
What makes the Dalit example particularly paradoxical is not only
the historical location of Dalit groups and individuals on the bound-
aries of Hindu society – not apart from it, but not quite part of it either –
but their identification as Dalits precisely because of that stigmatized
marginality. For the Dalit leadership, the first challenge was to have
the Dalits accepted as a minority. In the process, the aporia of internal
colonialism was further compounded by the need to underline a histor-
ically inherited subalternity, for it was precisely their Untouchability
within Hindu society that Dalit leaders had to assert in order to try
and gain recognition as a “minority,” with the safeguards and rights

2 By contrast, of course, the charge of internal colonialism – or outright colonialism –

continues to be made by various political leaders and movements in relation to a
number of regional nationalities on the northern and northeastern borders of the
territory of the Indian state, in Kashmir and the states and territories of the northeast.
64 A History of Prejudice

appropriate to a minority in a democratic republic. Moreover, once

the principle of affirmative action (through reserved quotas in educa-
tional institutions and public services) had been accepted to give the
disadvantaged and “backward” classes a fairer chance in the life of the
republic, this minority status as an Untouchable community was what
Ambedkar and others had to fight to preserve, even after the formal
conversion of particular Dalit groups to Buddhism, Christianity, or
other religions. Hence Ambedkar’s comment in the course of a speech
after his initiation into the Buddhist dhamma on October 14, 1956 –
“Even after conversion to Buddhism, I am confident, I [or “we,” the
Dalit community] will get the political rights”3 – and the demands
made in recent years by groups of Christian and Muslim Dalits for an
extension of the benefits of reserved quotas to them.
Whether the Dalits were Hindus or not became the subject of lengthy
and heated controversy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies. As the colonial state’s codification and classification of “custom-
ary” divisions and practices developed, and the question of numbers
gained importance, Hindu leaders and reformers grew active in the
effort to “reclaim” the Dalits and “reeducate” them in their identity as
Hindus. The assertion of community identity gathered pace at many
levels – Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Nadar, Patidar, Namasudra, Bihari,
Oriya, Telugu – and economic and political competition between (and
within) these groups acquired a new edge. In this context, militant
Hindu leaders and organizations initiated a variety of moves to con-
solidate the Hindu community.
Among these was the shuddhi (“purification”) campaign, which
had gained significant support among reformist Hindus by the early
decades of the twentieth century. Shuddhi was a direct rejoinder to
Christian missionary attacks on Hinduism and their efforts at convert-
ing low- and, to a lesser extent, high-caste Hindus in the nineteenth
century. In response, the reformist Arya Samaj movement cast itself,
against the grain of orthodox Hindu practice, in the mold of a pros-
elytizing Christian sect. As one of its leaders, Lala Lajpat Rai, put it,
“the Arya Samaj, being a Vedic church, and as such a Hindu orga-
nization, engages itself in reclaiming the wandering sheep who have

3 Moon, Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, vol. 17, pt. III, 536.
 Dalit Conversion 65

strayed from the Hindu fold, and converts anyone prepared to accept
its religious teachings.”4
Historians have commented on the impact of the so-called Gait Cir-
cular, which directed that separate tables be drawn up in the 1911 cen-
sus for groups – like the Untouchables and many tribal communities –
who were not unambiguously Hindu. The circular “proved a good
tonic for the apathy of orthodox Kashi,” Lajpat Rai wrote:

One fine morning the learned pandits . . . rose to learn that their orthodoxy
stood the chance of losing the allegiance of 6 crores of human beings who, the
Government and its advisers were told, were not Hindus, in so far as other
Hindus would not acknowledge them as such, and would not even touch
them. . . . The possibility of losing the untouchables has shaken the intellectual
section of the Hindu community to its very depths.5

Over the same period, from the later nineteenth century on, many
Hindu reformers spoke out against “perverse” Hindu religious notions
and practices, “silly” “anti-national” distinctions of caste, restrictions
on interdining and travel overseas that were until that time fairly
strictly observed, as well as ideas of pollution and the consequent
difficulty of reconversion, which ensured that “millions of forcibly
converted Hindus have remained Muslims even to this day.”6 Yet the
matter was not so easily settled, for, given the inherited Hindu tra-
ditions, the organization of different classes and vocational groups
into distinct castes, and the overriding concern with issues of purity
and pollution, all the indications were that the Dalits would have to
remain very lowly Hindus – a minority that could not be made part of
the majority but that the majority would not treat as a minority either.
The Dalits themselves had an ambivalent, fragmentary relationship
with this majority. Were particular Dalit groups Hindu, non-Hindu,
animist, or something else altogether? The politics of colonial and
postcolonial India gave the subordinated and the marginalized a new
opportunity to challenge the inherited structures and relations of power

4 Lajpat Rai, A History of the Arya Samaj (Delhi, 1915; reprint Bombay: Orient Long-
man, 1967), 120 (emphasis added).
5 Ibid., 124–5.
6 V. D. Savarkar, Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History, trans. S. T. Godbole (New
Delhi: Bal Savarkar Rajdhani Granthagar, 1971; reprint 1980), 154–7, 188, 192–3,
and passim.
66 A History of Prejudice

amid which they lived. As the religious communities of the subconti-

nent went about “purifying” and reconstituting themselves, and as
urbanization and migration, educational opportunities, and political
consciousness grew, numerous Dalits responded with questions about
existing social and political arrangements and demanded greater access
to the resources of the modern society and state. Census operations
became one of the major sites for an extended contest over status and
inherited rights, with attempts by lower-caste groups to rename and
redefine themselves and their histories.7 Another part of this effort,
which I referred to earlier, was the attempt by Dalit leaders to redefine
the Dalits as a historically distinct community – or minority.
The point about this claim to minority status for the Dalits was to
seek safeguards – such as separate electorates and the reservation of
seats in legislative bodies and public services – of the kind that had been
granted to other minority communities in the early twentieth century.
As is well known, Ambedkar and Gandhi disagreed sharply on the mat-
ter of separate representation for Dalits. The differences between them
reached a climax in 1932, when the British government announced a
Communal Award that included the grant of separate electorates to
Untouchables in the areas of their greatest concentrations. This award
followed negotiations that had stalled – most evidently on the issue of
separate electorates for Untouchables – at the Round Table Confer-
ences held in London to work out the details of a revised framework
for the continued government of India under British control.
Gandhi, and others in the Congress, saw the grant of separate elec-
torates – and the earlier demand for it by Dalit leaders – as a way of
splitting and therefore weakening the Hindu community, a develop-
ment that would only compound what the British had already accom-
plished through their institution of separate electorates for Muslims.
Ambedkar, by contrast, saw separate electorates as an essential lever
in the struggle to advance the downtrodden castes. He was forced to
concede in 1932, unable to resist the pressure brought to bear on him

7 See, for example, Mark Juergensmeyer, Religion as Social Vision: The Movement
Against Untouchability in 20th Century Punjab (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1981); Vijay Prashad, Untouchable Freedom: A Social History of a Dalit Com-
munity (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999); Dube, Untouchable Pasts; and
my discussion in Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), chap. 7.
 Dalit Conversion 67

by the fast unto death that Gandhi launched against this extension of
separate electorates. But the way in which the conflict played out left
him deeply embittered, and he seems never to have forgiven Gandhi
and the Congress for what he saw as their betrayal.8
The issues involved in the clash between Ambedkar and Gandhi
were brought into even sharper focus with the acquisition of citizenship
by all the inhabitants of the country, and the statutory abolition of
Untouchability in the 1950s. At one level, what was at stake in the Dalit
struggle before and after Independence was the question of differential
access to the state and its resources. Equally at issue, however, was a
question of pride and human dignity, the question precisely of being
equal citizens in a modern, democratic society. What this required
was a restructuring of Indian, especially Hindu, society from top to
bottom.

Converting the Converter

Consistently through the 1940s and ’50s, Ambedkar and other Dalit
leaders and activists called for a transformation of Hindu practices.
In the context of claims to establish the new democratic society, they
put forward the demand that the judges first judge themselves, the
converters look to their own conversion. “Those who want to con-
serve must be ready to repair,” Ambedkar said during the debate on
the Hindu Code Bill. “If you want to maintain the Hindu system,
the Hindu culture, the Hindu society, do not hesitate to repair where
repair is necessary.” Hindus were the “sick men” of India, he wrote on
another occasion, in 1944. It was necessary to generate a new life in
Hinduism. For this the Hindus could draw on principles found in their
own ancient sources.9 And the surest means of assuring progress and
the greatness of the country, and of the wider world, was to embrace
the faith of the Buddha and its fundamental principles – Liberty, Equal-
ity, and Fraternity.
Inequality was the “official doctrine” of Brahmanism, Ambedkar
declared; Buddhism opposed it root and branch.

8 See Ambedkar’s writings of the 1940s, especially B. R. Ambedkar, What Congress

and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (Bombay: Thacker, 1945).
9 Moon, Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, vol. 14, pt. I, 283; vol. 1, 26, 77–8.
68 A History of Prejudice

The Shudra could never aspire to be a Brahmin in the Vedic regime but he
could become a Bhikshu [or Buddhist mendicant] and occupy the same status
and dignity as did the Brahmin. . . . Similar change is noticeable in the case
of women. Under the Buddhist regime she became a free person. [S]he could
acquire property, she could acquire learning and what was unique, she could
become a member of the Buddhist order of Nuns and reach the same status
and dignity as a Brahmin.10

“Indians today are governed by two different ideologies. Their polit-

ical ideal set out in the preamble to the Constitution affirms a life of
Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Their social ideal in their religion
denies them.” Thus Ambedkar in 1954. It was necessary to radically
reform Hindu society to generate new life in it. Hindus would have to
convert to the religion of the Buddha “for their own good.”11 “When
[in the early years after Christ] Christianity was struggling for exis-
tence, the poorer people became its first converts and the upper folks
ignored it,” Ambedkar declared in an interview with journalists on the
day before he and a large number of his followers embraced Buddhism
on October 14, 1956, “The same thing will happen here also. . . . In
the course of time all Hindus will become Buddhists.”12
There is something ironic in the determination shown by a law min-
ister who had vowed not to die a Hindu to do everything he could to
bring about fundamental reform in Hindu society for the progress of
“the country as a whole”: “I have to do the work of conversion.”13 It
was in this context that Ambedkar placed the extraordinary empha-
sis he did on the Hindu Code Bill of 1951. This attempted codifica-
tion of a multitude of inherited practices related to marriage, divorce,
adoption, and inheritance in Hindu households was a wide-ranging
piece of legislation. Ambedkar declared it to be “the greatest social
reform measure ever undertaken by the Legislature in this country.”
He went on to explain why he thought this was so: “To leave inequal-
ity between class and class, between sex and sex which is the soul of
Hindu society untouched and to go on passing legislation relating to

10 Ambedkar, “Revolution and Counter-revolution in Ancient India,” 57; and

Ambedkar, “What Is Saddhamma?”’ 302.
11 Moon, Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, vol. 17, pt. III, 503, 505; vol. 14, pt. I,
283; vol. I, 26, 77–8.
12 Hitavad, October 14, 1956.
13 Moon, Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, vol. 17, pt. III, 503.
 Dalit Conversion 69

economic problems is to make a farce of our Constitution and to build a

palace on a dung heap. This is the significance I attach . . . to the Hindu
Code.”14
It goes without saying that in the years preceding and following
Indian Independence, many other Dalit groups and individuals far less
visible than exceptional political leaders like Ambedkar did what they
could to bring about meaningful changes in the country’s social and
political practices. An excellent illustration of contemporary think-
ing among young, educated Dalits comes from the career of a junior
bureaucrat who served in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) for
five years, from 1959 to 1964. Balwant Singh’s autobiography, writ-
ten in the years after his resignation from the IAS in May 1964 and
published in the 1990s, tellingly entitled An Untouchable in the I.A.S.,
provides a detailed account of the circumstances that led him to quit
what was in the 1950s and ’60s, and for some time afterward, the
service of the educated middle class’s, and even more emphatically the
Dalit graduate’s, dream.
“In an independent country, the responsibilities of the administra-
tion are not confined merely to law and order, for [the maintenance of]
the status quo,” the author declares. “In a welfare state the man in the
street also has something at stake and his progress and development
are of paramount importance.” Like Ambedkar, he speaks of the
need to purge the Hindu religion of its social evils, “for a house built
on discrimination and hatred cannot stand and this ancient religion
should ensure a life of dignity and respectability to its poor and
low brethren. . . . That is not possible until it is free from the stigma
of high and low and [as long as it is] without equality, liberty and
fraternity.”15
Young men like him joined the IAS, the successor to the famed
Indian Civil Service of British colonial times, Singh observes, in the
hope that in a democratic, independent India this “prestigious service
would be responsive to the common man and provide relief and suc-
cour by alleviating his sorrows and sufferings.” However, five years in

14 Moon, Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, vol. 14, 1325–6.

15 Balwant Singh, An Untouchable in the I.A.S. (Saharanpur: Balwant Singh, n.d.),
216, 199. It is no accident that the book is dedicated to Nelson Mandela, president
of South Africa, “the champion, crusader and liberator of the insulted, humiliated
and discriminated mankind.”
70 A History of Prejudice

the service “totally disillusioned” him. “The I.A.S. was still the protec-
tor of the rich and the socially privileged and the man in the street did
not count much in their scheme.” The old order had enormous power.
Caste and communal bias persisted among the high-caste officers, and
“one was reminded of the taluqdari system [a particularly oppressive
form of high landlordism upheld by the British in Awadh and certain
other parts of northern India] where law was the rod or the whims of
an individual and social equality was out of [the] question.”16
Singh’s brief career in the IAS ended soon after he recorded a com-
bative statement against persistent caste prejudice, derision, and dis-
crimination in public life. The statement appeared as part of his judg-
ment in State v. Bhaiyan, a case in which a poor wayside barber showed
his disinclination to cut the hair of a Dalit customer and finally cut his
hair outside, rather than inside, the shop, and at an inflated cost. The
facts of the case were quickly established: “Sri Shyam Lal went for a
hair-cut to the shop of Sri Bhaiyan. . . . [H]e was refused the service on
account of his being a Barar. . . . Sri Bhaiyan demanded a very exorbi-
tant price for a simple hair-cut and to add further insult he also asked
Sri Shyam Lal to sit out[side] the shop to get his hair-cut by which
Sri Bhaiyan thought he was giv[ing] a befitting status to Sri Shyam
Lal, the unfortunate untouchable in the society.” Given the facts, the
young magistrate could have proceeded immediately to pronounce his
judgment and sentence the accused.
However, Balwant Singh felt the need to comment on the wider
social forces and prejudices at work in the course of the judgment:
In the eyes of a Hindu even a dog can be allowed to enter the shop but not
a human being who by force of circumstances and ill-luck happened to be
born in so called scheduled castes. The Hindu society is a society of defeat
and degeneration and it can inspire no confidence in the mind of a sensi-
ble human being. . . . It is a society of meanness and a store house of degra-
dations. . . . Every conservative Hindu house is a South Africa [a domain of
apartheid] for a poor untouchable who is still being crushed under the heels
of Hindu Imperialism.17

The fallout was predictable. According to Balwant Singh, the judgment

was followed quickly by a series of charges and complaints against

16 Ibid., 221–2, 216.

17 Ibid., 224–7.
 Dalit Conversion 71

the Dalit official for his acts of commission and omission. He was
accused by the local Congress member of the state legislature of lying
in connection with his efforts to maintain peace on the occasion of
a hunger strike by a Hindu Mahasabha worker. He was described as
unduly sensitive by the chief secretary, the senior-most civil servant of
the province: “My friend, your work is not the consideration. You are
supersensitive and not settling down.” By Singh’s account, he was also
told by the same worthy to “shut up” and not “talk like a clerk or a
tehsildar” (lower-level officials, unworthy of the status and standing of
the IAS!) when he sought an explanation for the effective “demotion”
he was being given through a posting as assistant commissioner.18
The distinction between “their” administration and “the man in
the street” is a recurrent motif in the Dalit bureaucrat’s reminiscences,
and he lines up not with the administration but with the oppressed
people: “For officers from the low castes things were . . . complicated.
They were acceptable if they accepted the prevailing . . . social norms.”
Balwant Singh might have made the point more strongly still, for it is
probably fair to say that such officers were tolerated if they accepted
upper-caste ways and attitudes and yet never fully accepted as social
peers.19 Low-caste officers suffered from much social indignity and
humiliation. Expressions of grievance on their part were commonly
met with the response that these were “trivial,” “inconsequential”
matters.20 However, it is perhaps precisely the history of the trifling
that those who write from a feminist, subalternist, lower caste and
class, or other minority perspectives need to track. Just how frequently
do trivial or inconsequential insults have to be repeated before they
are seen as historically or politically significant?

18 Ibid., 210–17.
19 One could adduce all kinds of evidence to show this. Among striking examples that
I came across in my own interviews are the recollections of a retired upper-caste
IAS officer’s wife that in the bureaucratic circles of her husband, an ex-Untouchable
officer (whom she recalled clearly) was superficially treated as a friend, but “hamesha
heya drishti se dekha karte the (he was always looked upon with some revulsion)”;
and the recollections of Meera Kumar, the major Congress leader and long-term
cabinet minister Jagjivan Ram’s daughter, later herself a central government minister
and Speaker of the Lok Sabha or lower house of Parliament, about her experience of
being visited at home by several school and college friends but never being invited to
their homes in return.
20 Singh, Untouchable in the I.A.S., 196–7.
72 A History of Prejudice

A Statutory Reinscription of Difference

It will help to turn at this point to a rather different class loca-

tion for another example of the Dalit struggle for citizenship in the
wake of Independence – the neglected, “trifling” history of efforts by
Punjabi Dalit laborers and poor peasants to change their circumstances
after they were forced out of areas of West Punjab (which became
part of Pakistan) and found themselves being resettled in East (Indian)
Punjab following the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. At this end
of the Dalit spectrum – that of men and women without any formal
education, legally recognized assets, or obvious political connections –
there were similar struggles and similar contradictory outcomes, some-
times with clearly more punishing consequences.
I should first note that in the received historical account of the famed
Punjab village community – made up, as the received account has it, of
sturdy peasant proprietors and village brotherhoods, in a mixed popu-
lation of Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs – the place of the Dalits has gone
largely unacknowledged: the menial and artisanal groups of the lowest
caste status have appeared only tangentially, as nondescript “village
servants.” Thus, although there is considerable evidence of bitter and
extended struggles over land and property that accompanied the evic-
tion of Muslims and non-Muslims from different sides of the Punjab
during Partition, little attention has been paid to the struggles of the
Dalits or ex-Untouchables in the course of the forced migrations or the
attempted restoration of “normalcy” on both sides of the new border.
We know very little, too, about the local conflicts that arose when it
came to the official resettlement and rehabilitation of refugees, and
how the contest between local refugees and refugees coming in from
distant districts, and between refugees and more stable and privileged
(or lucky) groups, affected the lower castes and classes as it affected
other sections of the populace.
“We were neither Hindu nor Muslim, so we were not affected,” a
number of Dalits are reported to have said in talking about Partition.21
The records of the time and the more detailed recollections of these
interviewees themselves, however, tell a somewhat different tale. A

21 For one example, see the interview with Maya Rani in Urvashi Butalia, The Other
Side of Silence (New Delhi: Viking Press, 1998), 256.
 Dalit Conversion 73

contemporary report on the needs of rural refugees who had found

their way from West to East Punjab provides the following description
of the kinds of groups that migrated. There were the well-publicized
yeomen farmers, including many (we are told) whose families had
migrated to the canal colonies of West Punjab from East Punjab a
couple of generations earlier. Next, there were numerous noncultivat-
ing landlords, especially from the Rawalpindi and Multan divisions,
who held a certain amount of land cultivated largely by Muslim ten-
ants but whose primary income was derived from village trading and
moneylending. There was also a not insignificant category of larger
landholders in the Multan division, the canal colonies and a couple
of other districts. Finally, as this summary statement has it, “men-
tion may be made of sections of [the] non-Muslim population who
lived either by labour or by tenant-farming . . . or by devious pursuits
such as those of Bazigars [sic!].” This last group is specifically identi-
fied as consisting of Harijans, Raidasi Sikhs, and Bazigars – all Dalit
groups.22
What is clear is that, partly because of local pressures and partly
because of the efforts of the Indian government and various Hindu
propagandists working with it, the forced migration of Dalits occurred
on a large scale. According to the best estimates we have, some 6% to
7% of the Hindus and Sikhs who migrated from West to East Punjab
were from such “untouchable” communities. This would add up to
the bulk of the Dalit population of the western districts.23 It is the
aftermath of this displacement that I want to consider here.
Many Punjabi Dalits saw in 1947 an opportunity to right past
wrongs. In this they were supported by a few of their more enlight-
ened social and political allies. With the departure of Muslim artisans
and the wider choice of occupations for Dalit workers, caste, these
groups argued, would no longer be tenable as a hereditary basis for
occupation.24 “The Harijans [Gandhi and the Congress’s favoured
term for a description of Dalits], who generally comprise landless
labourers and village artisans, have become fully conscious of their

22 India Office Library and Records (hereafter IOR) Mss Eur F152/178, F. L. Brayne,
“Economic Rehabilitation of Rural Refugees.”
23 See Kirpal Singh, The Partition of the Punjab (Patiala: Punjab University, 1989), 188.
24 Mss Eur F152/178, Brayne, “Economic Rehabilitation of Rural Refugees.”
74 A History of Prejudice

rights as citizens,” M. S. Randhawa, an Indian Civil Service (ICS)

official responsible for rural rehabilitation in East Punjab, wrote in the
early 1950s. “There is considerable urge among them to acquire the
respectable status of landowners, as ownership of land, however small
in area, confers dignity and status.”25
The reconciliation of the interests of different castes and classes
among the refugees was, however, never going to be easy. Although
the number of Muslims fleeing from East Punjab, and of Sikhs and
Hindus coming into the province, was roughly comparable, the land
and property they left behind was not. Officials estimated that whereas
the economically better-off Sikh and Hindu refugees had left behind
some 60 lakh acres of land in West Punjab, the Muslim evacuees
from East Punjab and adjacent princely states had left only 45 lakh
acres.26 Landholding and property-owning groups among the refugees,
demanding “full compensation” for their own losses, saw no justice
in the argument that the contemporary dislocation offered a conve-
nient opportunity for reform.27 They were supported by influential
elements in the administration who wanted to see the maintenance of
the “village community” and, with it, rural order.
According to the policy initially laid down by the regional govern-
ment, the 45 lakh acres left by Muslim evacuees from East Punjab
would be allotted to landowners among the incoming refugees, “as
distinguishable from mere tillers of the soil [such] as Harijans.”28 As
Chaudhri Chotu Ram, a leading spokesman of the Punjab zamindars
and erstwhile minister in the Unionist government of undivided Punjab
put it, the low and menial castes could not be included in the list of
statutory agriculturists, as this would adversely affect the protection
given to “agricultural castes” under the Punjab Alienation of Land
Act.29

25 M. S. Randhawa, Out of the Ashes: An Account of the Rehabilitation of Refugees

from West Pakistan in Rural Areas of East Punjab (Chandigarh: Public Relations
Department, Punjab, 1954), 213–14.
26 One lakh = 100,000.
27 Mss Eur F152/178, Brayne, “Economic Rehabilitation of Rural Refugees.”
28 National Archives of India, Rajendra Prasad papers, File 5-R/48, col. 3, letter no.
977, Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation, Harijan section, Rameshwari Nehru to
Rajendra Prasad, Congress President, 3 May 1948.
29 Ishwar Das Pawar, My Struggle in Life (Chandigarh: I. D. Pawar, 1982; 3rd edition,
1993), 51. Dalit spokespersons and their allies campaigned actively for the repeal of
 Dalit Conversion 75

There are conflicting reports on how much was done for the Dalits
in the rehabilitation program, an important arena in the new nation-
alist desire for “scientific” planning of the economy and society. The
temporary allotment of evacuee lands was begun in September 1947
to provide initial refuge and work for the mass of refugees. Many
of the larger landholders, noncultivating landlords as well as the big-
ger farmers, refused to accept these temporary measures. On the other
hand, numerous landless groups, including Dalits, appear to have taken
advantage of the scheme.30 Officials were also instructed to pay special
attention to the needs of rural artisans and village servants in the mat-
ter of jobs, loans, establishment of cooperative societies, and allotment
of houses in the countryside. Again, numerous Dalits benefited from
these initiatives.31
Against this, however, a detailed analysis from May 1948 speaks
of 250,000 Dalit refugees in East Punjab, 90% of them agriculturists,
“living a life of misery and idleness” in makeshift camps and depend-
ing on the “free but inadequate rations” supplied by the government.32
Around this time, in the first flush of freedom, with the sympathy
it generated for democratic aspirations and social justice and moti-
vated further by Gandhi’s martyrdom in January 1948, Gandhians
like Rameshwari Nehru, Vinoba Bhave, and Rajendra Prasad turned
up the pressure on the East Punjab government to take some con-
crete action, however gradual, to rehabilitate the Dalit refugees as full
citizens.

the Land Alienation Act, and it was finally repealed by presidential decree in 1951;
(IOR) Mss Eur F158/641B, Indiagram 11 April 1951.
30 “It will be a problem of considerable size,” an official noted in 1948, “to [re-]
settle 42,000 families of non-landholders who are at present holding temporary
allotments”; see Mss Eur F152/178, Brayne, “Economic Rehabilitation of Rural
Refugees.” See also Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition
in South Asia (London: Routledge, 2000), 129.
31 Rameshwari Nehru papers, Subject File no. 1(a), pt. III, “Harijan Welfare in
Punjab,” published by the Public Relations Department, Punjab (n.d.; information
and statistics cover the period to December 1952). The report notes, for example,
that by December 1952 there were twenty-four cooperative societies for shoemaking,
weaving, basket work, and so on. These had been granted loans adding up to a total
of Rs. 84,200.
32 Rajendra Prasad papers, File 5-R/48, col. 3, letter no. 977, Ministry of Relief and
Rehabilitation, Harijan section, Rameshwari Nehru to Rajendra Prasad, Congress
President, 3 May 1948.
76 A History of Prejudice

At a conference in June 1948, they urged Gopichand Bhargava, the

premier, to give the 50,000 Dalit families still in refugee camps 5 lakh
(i.e., 500,000) acres of land to cultivate. “If no land was allotted to
the landless Harijans they would once again be relegated to the status
of . . . [kamins].”33 The East Punjab government responded cautiously.
After the minimum needs of “landowners” had been met, they said,
Dalits could perhaps be allotted the estimated remaining 21/2 to 3 lakh
acres. By August, they had reduced the amount they could hand out
to the Dalits to “say, 75,000 acres,” about a quarter of what they had
suggested two months earlier. Premier Bhargava explained the govern-
ment’s reasoning: “all Harijans were not agriculturists.” Many were
artisans and should be absorbed in industrial channels, and a good
number worked as day laborers. Hence, “they could not legitimately
be allotted land.”34
Indeed, the actions of the landowning castes, refugee and local, to
appropriate as much land as possible went further. Throughout East
Punjab and the neighboring princely states, there was a rush to parti-
tion common lands (abadi and shamilat zamin) owing to landowners’
fears that these areas would be entrusted to newly constituted village
panchayats, or democratic councils of local self-government. This fur-
ther eroded the rights of Dalits and other village workers. Ishwar Dass
Pawar, the first Dalit to be appointed to the Punjab Judicial Service,
visited several villages in the Sonepat subdivision in connection with
cases that had been brought before him and found that “Harijans had
lost all the small plots of land already in their possession from long gen-
erations. . . . In some cases, for example, of weavers and rope-makers,
they had no place to carry on their professions as they needed . . . long
stretches of land to serve as rope-walks.”35
Another notable development was the attempt to push several Dalit
communities back into the status of criminal tribes. The Punjab Crim-
inal Tribes Act had classified numerous Dalit castes and subcastes
as Criminal Tribes and placed restrictions on their movement out of

33 Rajendra Prasad papers, File 1-C/48, col. 1, Rajendra Prasad to Gopichand Bhargava,
7 May 1948; and minutes of informal conference convened by Dr. Rajendra Prasad,
New Delhi, 25 June 1948 (signed Rameshwari Nehru, Head of Harijan Section).
34 Ibid.; and Rajendra Prasad papers, File 5-R/48, col. 5, Partap Singh, Rehabilitation
Minister, East Punjab, to Rajendra Prasad, Congress President, 23 August 1948.
35 Pawar, My Struggle in Life, 91.
 Dalit Conversion 77

designated villages and settlements, with members singled out by the

administration for sundry reasons (such as their being unemployed)
being asked to report regularly at police posts. In the aftermath of
Partition, some segments of the so-called Criminal Tribes who had
earlier escaped such classification, or at least some of its worst conse-
quences, appear to have been forced back into the category. Witness
the following petition from the Dalit refugees who came from the agri-
cultural settlement of Bauriya Criminal Tribes at Kot Khalsa in Tehsil
Khanewal, in the Multan district. As many as 3,500 non-Muslims of
the settlement were massacred in August 1947, the petition tells us:

There were 98 landholding hereditary Patedars tenants of the Government

in the above mentioned Criminal Tribes settlement with agreements [that is,
pattis, records of rights in land; hence Patedars or, more accurately, pattidars]
for 15 years.
About 91 of the total landholders had been murdered, only 7 of us the under-
signed survived. . . .
Having suffered so much we come to understand that the Pakistan Authorities
have not sent our Jamabandi Records [records relating to rent and revenue
payment]. . . . We could not bring the patta deeds enacted with Government
for 15 years as hereditary tenants to serve as documentary evidence.
Over and above all this, the Criminal Tribes Dept. has imposed upon us
restrictions of giving attendance every day and leaving station with Police
permits which we or our parents and ancestors were absolutely exempted
from.36

I do not know what came of this petition. What is clear is that the
issue had become part of a wider struggle over the matter of access to
democracy, citizenship, and law and order.
Rameshwari Nehru protested in September 1949 against an act of
police firing in Jaipur State that resulted in a number of casualties from
among the poor tribal group of Meenas. The government refused to
institute an independent inquiry into the incident, apparently because
the Meenas “belonged to the so-called criminal tribes, their lives were

36 Rameshwari Nehru Papers, Subject File no. 1 (a), pt. I, petition of 7 residents of vil-
lage Qutbewal Arain, Tehsil and District Ludhiana, through Shri A. S. Satyayarthi,
Regional Working Secretary, Displaced Harijans Rehabilitation Board (Central Gov-
ernment Agency), Civil Secretariat, Jullunder (n.d., but received on 5 August 1950,
according to a note on the file).
78 A History of Prejudice

supposed to be cheap and it was not considered necessary to institute

any inquiry.” Nehru noted that the Criminal Tribes Act was being
repealed piecemeal: “It is not understandable why this heinous Act is
being repealed province-wise. An all-India measure to wipe out this
blot is the urgent need of the day.”37
More than three decades later, however, Pawar would write in his
autobiography: “The only thing done so far is that the pernicious
law has been repealed, and now they are termed as Vimukt-jatis, the
‘liberated castes.’”38 In many places, this is a designation that has
served only to perpetuate the segregation of these groups and mark
them out for continued discrimination.

A Law Minister from the Wrong Caste

The evidence presented here should suffice to indicate the major trans-
formations contemplated, and to some extent set in motion, in the
India of the 1940s and ’50s. It should tell us something about the
extraordinary hopes and expectations of the time and the sense of
betrayal and consequent bitterness felt by many among the depressed
castes and classes. Yet, as the preceding sections have indicated, the
consequences of inherited prejudice were not confined to the poorest
and the most downtrodden among them.
It is instructive to juxtapose the preceding accounts of continuing
caste discrimination with reports of Ambedkar’s experience as law
minister at the hands of his fellow parliamentarians in the course of the
debates on the Hindu Code Bill. I have already stressed the importance
of this piece of legislation for Ambedkar. Let me reinforce the point
by adding that he resigned from the union cabinet in October 1951 in
large part because of the failure of the Congress government to enact
the measure at this time in a form that he deemed adequate to the
needs of the country.
A number of remarkable exchanges took place in the course of the
debate on the Hindu Code between upper-caste members of Parliament
and the distinguished Dalit leader, a member of the central cabinet in
the first government of independent India, hailed as the architect of

37 Rameshwari Nehru, letter to The Hindustan Times, September 10, 1949.

38 Pawar, My Struggle in Life, 54.
 Dalit Conversion 79

the Indian constitution, and acknowledged by now as an outstanding

scholar and writer on a wide range of subjects. One is struck
repeatedly – even on the basis of the written record alone – by the
deep-seated caste prejudice and spite displayed in this most public and
supposedly most advanced of Indian political forums. A few extracts
from the proceedings of September 20, 1951, will suffice to make the
point.
Presenting the bill, Ambedkar argued that the much vaunted adapt-
ability and absorptive capacity of the Hindu social order had not
helped to democratize it. It had failed to assimilate the Buddha’s
preaching of equality and would “never give up its social structure
[designed] for the enslavement of the Sudra and . . . of women. It is
for this reason that law must now come to their rescue.”39 Ambedkar
referred to the charge that reforms like the Hindu Code Bill were sim-
ply an attempt to bring India in line with Western nations that insisted
on monogamy and liberal provisions for divorce. Those who made
this charge, Ambedkar noted, “have said that our ideal should be,
what? Somebody said Ram; somebody said Dasaratha; somebody said
Krishna. . . . I do not wish to comment upon any of the ideals which
have been presented to the House, and I do not.” At this point, he was
interrupted by Shyamnandan Sahay, who declared: “You will be well
advised not to do so.”40
I should note that some Muslim members of the legislature, a par-
ticularly vulnerable group in the wake of Partition, had also suffered
such injunctions not to speak on matters relating to Hindu tradition.
But the animus displayed in further comments directed at the Dalit
leader was of a different kind. The law minister noted that the consti-
tutionally guaranteed liberty and equality of citizens necessitated the
extension of greater rights to Hindu women in questions of marriage
and inheritance: “That is the reason why we are proceeding with this
Bill and not because we want to imitate any other people or [because]
we want to go in for our ancient ideals which are to my judgement,
most archaic and impossible for anybody to practice.” The second part
of that statement, which I quoted earlier in Chapter 2, was of course
not going to remain unanswered.

39 Moon, Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, vol. 14, 1160.

40 Ibid., 1160–1.
80 A History of Prejudice

Dr. C. D. Pandey: We are ready to support the Bill, but we do not want these
invectives. How far the Hon. Minister is justified in dealing with this subject
[in this way?] and resorting to such invectives . . .

An Hon. Member: Why vilify the Hindu religion?

Dr. Ambedkar: Now, I come to the specific amendments that have been tabled
by various Members to clause 2.
Shri Krishnanand Rai: The House is for divorce and monogamy, but not for
this kind of abuse.
Dr. C. D. Pandey: We are for these provisions, but we do not want these
abuses and invectives.

At this point, the prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, intervened with

a comment on the “tender skins” of some members. Many sharp
comments had been made in earlier speeches against the Bill with-
out objection from anyone, he observed. He couldn’t understand why
people were responding so heatedly to Dr. Ambedkar’s statements.
However, an agitated Pandit Lakshmi Kanta Maitra proceeded with
another interjection: “We have been listening with rapt attention to
Dr. Ambedkar, but what we do not want is these invectives and reflec-
tions on some of the best ideals which we cherish. The provisions
can be defended without injuring the religious susceptibilities of Mem-
bers.” “Side conversations” and disturbances, as they are described
in the official record, continued for a while before the house set-
tled down to hear the rest of the law minister’s statement on this
clause.41
Earlier in the debate, when Govind Malaviya remarked that Hindu
society prescribed “rights and privileges” for the Chandala (among the
lowest of the so-called Scheduled Castes) as much as for the Brahman,
various members, including the deputy speaker, raised objections on
the grounds that the use of any name suggesting Untouchability was
now “unconstitutional.” To the further argument that the reference
was “only to history,” the deputy speaker responded by saying, “all
history is not very good to mention.” The exchange that followed is
extraordinary:

41 Ibid., 1162–3.
 Dalit Conversion 81

Pandit Malaviya: I was referring to it [the word Chandala] not as to an indi-

vidual, but as to a system in the past. However, I will abide by what you [the
Deputy Speaker] have said.
Dr. Ambedkar: Why should you?
Pandit Malaviya: The Hon. Law Minister asks, why I should. Only because
I am a law-abiding Member and not the other name that I had been
mentioning.42

The scarcely veiled reference to Ambedkar’s origins in an Untouch-

able community, presumably among people who could easily act like
Chandalas (that is to say, scum) rather than like law-abiding citizens,
was perhaps the lowest point in the debate. But the controversial ques-
tion of the ability of ex-Untouchables to speak for Hindu society, and
more broadly democratic India, runs through the exchanges like an
undercurrent.
There was some ambivalence in the Dalits’ relation to Hindu soci-
ety, almost inevitably as I have noted: they were defined by it, and at
the same time part and not part of it. The ambiguity of this position
affected not only Ambedkar but also the caste Hindus who opposed
the Hindu Code Bill he was piloting through Parliament. Did some-
one from a once Untouchable community, denied the right to study or
interpret the sacred texts of the Hindus, have the knowledge and her-
itage appropriate to a reformer of their laws? More than one legislator
challenged the right of the Dalit leader to seek to don the mantle of
Manu, Yajnavalkya, and other renowned Hindu lawmakers.
One referred to vast “traditions which [the Law Minister] per-
haps does not know,” reflective of the “collective wisdom,” the antiq-
uity and greatness of India and its people.43 The comment points to
more than the limits of an individual’s capacity. It seems to me to
point also to the illegitimacy of an “untraditional” interpreter, an ex-
Untouchable to boot, seeking to define and overhaul Hindu tradition
(or for that matter Indian democracy). It is another example of those
trifling slights and incidents referred to earlier in this chapter that are
brushed aside as inconsequential – of prejudices that remain pervasive

42 Ibid., 1112.
43 Ibid., 1280.
82 A History of Prejudice

and pernicious, and yet unacknowledged, and thus all the more diffi-
cult to contend with.
This was the context in which the call for religious “conversion”
gathered renewed strength in several Dalit quarters.

The Question of a Religious Conversion

As already mentioned, the matter of religious affiliation was one over

which Gandhi and Ambedkar clashed sharply. For Gandhi, the crusade
against Untouchability was an internal affair of the Hindus. Ambedkar
saw the issue instead as one of civil rights – even during the years in
which he argued for the Dalits’ right to enter Hindu temples and public
tanks. Gandhi was opposed to attempts to translate “the problem of
untouchables” into the language of modern politics. Such translation,
he argued, would prevent the “natural growth” of the Dalits in the
“organic community” of Hinduism and prevent the upper castes from
making honorable amends. “The evil [of Untouchability] is far greater
than I had thought it to be,” he wrote in May 1933. “It cannot be
eradicated by money, external organization and even political power
for Harijans, although all these three are necessary. . . . To be effective,
they must follow . . . self-purification.”44 His advocacy of a cultiva-
tion of the harmonious village community, the simplicity of village
life, and the ideal Bhangi (the respected and self-respecting sweeper)
was in line with this belief in the essential goodness of an organic
Hinduism.
Ambedkar, born in a lowly Mahar family and discriminated against
as a Dalit in spite of his PhDs from Columbia University (New York)
and the London School of Economics and his professional and polit-
ical standing, had little time for the village pastoral and the nostalgic
view of the past that arose with Indian nationalism. He argued that
the Mahars and other Dalits had to look to the future and to their
own inner strength. They had to trust themselves rather than look to
the mercy and benevolence of the upper castes and classes. In what
was to become a battle cry for his followers, Ambedkar advocated

44 Cited in D. R. Nagaraj, The Flaming Feet: A Study of the Dalit Movement in

India (Bangalore: South Forum Press, 1993), 19. The paragraph draws heavily from
Nagaraj’s argument.
 Dalit Conversion 83

“Education, Organization and Agitation” in the struggle for equality.

Finally, in 1935, he took the Gandhian (and the general upper-caste
Hindu) position head on when he announced his decision to leave
Hinduism.
The fact is that the matter of ritual impurity and religion could not
be separated from economic dependence and political powerlessness
of the lower castes and classes in India. One student of caste and
religion in a south Indian district writes: “There is no evidence that the
Harijans’ status is more clearly defined by their religious role as funeral
servants, than by their economic role as labourers.”45 The converse
may perhaps be said with equal validity. Hence Ambedkar’s insistent
identification of caste, as another scholar has it, as “the most powerful
vehicle of dominance – ritual as well as political and economic – in
India.”46 Or, as he put it angrily when asked by reporters whether the
economic conditions of his followers would improve if they embraced
Buddhism, “I am willing to go hungry [rather] than to lose my self-
respect. Honour comes first and foremost.”47
The anthropologist R. S. Khare noted that the Dalit (Chamar) rick-
shaw pullers he studied in the city of Lucknow spoke repeatedly of
the “cobweb” of caste, which they had to work “sometimes along and
sometimes across.”48 The cobweb is a significant metaphor. The Hindi
word for it, jaala, is related to jaal (net). It is not easy to escape from
either, but the cobweb is more insidious, invisible, scary. “Hinduism
is not ours,” a group of Punjabi sweepers told Mark Juergensmeyer.
It is a religion of oppression, the religion of the rich and the upper
castes. At the same time, as they went on to say, because the concept
of Untouchability was a religious one, a change of religion would have
to accompany economic and social progress to bring about its end.49
It is for this reason that the question of conversion has been central to
the Dalit struggle.

45 D. Mosse, “Caste, Christianity and Hinduism: A Study of Social Organization and

Religion in Rural Ramnad,” PhD thesis, Institute of Social Anthropology, Oxford
University, 1985, 247, cited in Deliege, Untouchables of India, 67.
46 N. B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 7.
47 Hitavada, October 14, 1956.
48 R. S. Khare, The Untouchable as Himself: Ideology, Identity, and Pragmatism among
the Lucknow Chamars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 147.
49 Juergensmeyer, Religion as Social Vision, 1.
84 A History of Prejudice

Much of the writing on religious conversion deals with it as an

individual act,50 following on something like a vision or an individual
awakening. Against this, what we are concerned with in the Dalit case
is a question of collective or mass conversion. One might venture the
suggestion that this is what has happened in most instances of conver-
sion in human history. But I want to underscore two other aspects of
the moment of the Dalit conversion. First, it is preceded by serious and
extended deliberation. Second, it is perhaps best seen as only a stage in
a process: not the culminating point of a period of agitation or distress
(a culmination reached through a sudden revelation, as it were) but in
some senses a beginning, one step in an ongoing transformation and
self-making.
The conversion of subaltern groups and peoples cannot be under-
taken “in a fit of absent-mindedness”; there is quite simply too much
to lose.51 What follows from this is the express need for deep and
extended reflection in the process of the Dalit conversion. The point
is illustrated well by Ambedkar’s own preparation before his formal
conversion to Buddhism in front of a huge gathering of his followers
in Nagpur in 1956. He had declared his intention of leaving the Hindu
fold in 1935. Yet it was only 21 years later, just two months before
his death, that he entered the Buddhist order. He spent the intervening
years studying a variety of religious traditions that he saw as possible
alternatives to Hinduism, talking to their practitioners and mission-
aries in an attempt to understand them better. Between 1951 (when
he appears to have decided to adopt the Buddhist dhamma) and 1956,
he wrote at length about his understanding of “the Buddha and the
future of his religion,” the title of an important 1951 article. Toward
the end of his life, when he knew he was very unwell, he was writing
frenetically to try and complete his major work on the subject, The
Buddha and His Dhamma. “I am in a great hurry and I want the book

50 Thus, even in Gauri Vishwanathan’s recent study, which stresses the social and polit-
ical context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century conversions in Britain and India,
it is the conversion of the individual that remains the central object of investiga-
tion; see Gauri Vishwanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
51 I have borrowed Ranajit Guha’s phrase as applied to acts of subaltern insurgency
generally; see Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial
India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 9.
 Dalit Conversion 85

to be published by September [at] the latest,” he wrote.52 That dead-

line was determined by his decision to formally embrace Buddhism in
October 1956, for he wanted to make available to his followers a clear
and elaborate statement of his reasons for choosing the Buddhist path,
or more precisely his version of it.
The widely publicized conversion of several thousand Dalits to
Islam in and around Meenakshipuram (Tamilnadu) in 1981–2 pro-
vides another dramatic illustration of the prolonged deliberation that
often accompanies the conversion of subaltern groups. This set of
conversions was preceded by a sharpening of regional and national
debates on the inequities of caste and the need for positive discrimi-
nation, by violent clashes between caste Hindus and Dalits in Maha-
rashtra in 1978 and a militant agitation in Gujarat in 1981 to protest
against “reservations” for the Scheduled Castes in medical colleges.
They were preceded, too, by continual discussions and planning among
local Dalits. In Meenakshipuram, young Dalit converts reported that
village elders had been “thinking of converting to Islam for the last
twenty years.” They had considered the option “time and again.”
“Since there was no support and unanimity three times earlier, they
did not convert.” The December 1980 killing of two Thevars – a low
(but “clean”) landowning caste to which several of the local revenue
and police officers belonged – brought “a new wave of police torture
and harassment” on the Dalits. In a gathering of Dalit villagers a short
time afterward, a proposal to convert, made by one of the young men
who had converted to Islam earlier, was finally accepted. “This con-
version came as a collective decision of converts,” writes Abdul Malik
Mujahid in his closely detailed account of this set of conversions,
“albeit in three installments.”53
Similar claims to human dignity and self-respect had been made
through other conversions to Christianity, Islam, and Sikhism, in the
recent as in the distant past.54 The mass conversion to Buddhism at
Nagpur in 1956 followed in this track but was perhaps even more
deliberate, and certainly more organized and widely publicized. The

52 Keer, Dr. Ambedkar, 488.

53 Abdul Malik Mujahid, Conversion to Islam: Untouchables’ Strategy for Protest in
India (Chambersburg, PA: Anima Books, 1989), 55 and passim.
54 For some indication of the process, see Deliege, Untouchables of India, 157ff; and
Juergensmeyer, Religion as Social Vision, 26–7, 181ff.
86 A History of Prejudice

event increased the number of Buddhists in India by half a million, a

dramatic jump from the 141,426 Buddhists recorded for the country
in the census of 1951; and the total increased to 3,206,142 by 1961.
Most of the new converts were members of Ambedkar’s Mahar com-
munity. The conversions have continued since and extended to many
other Dalit constituencies: Buddhists numbered nearly 6 million by the
1990s, and the numbers have grown further since.55

Implications of the Dalit Conversion

It is necessary to underline the polyvalent, religious/secular character

of the discourse that goes with the Dalit movement for conversion.
The watchwords of Dalit discourse from the middle of the twentieth
century have been liberty (for every individual), equality (of all citi-
zens), and fraternity (of all those belonging to a community, a village,
a town, or regional, national, and even international society). Even if
in Ambedkar’s later writings these ideals came to be described as deriv-
ing from the teachings of the Buddha, they appeared in the developing
Dalit struggle for freedom as self-evident truths: the fundamental prin-
ciples of modernity and civilization, a religion for our epoch – secular
and sacred at the same time!
It is not coincidental that in Dalit homes, Buddhist viharas, and
at pilgrimage sites and celebrations associated with Ambedkar and
the new Buddhist identity the image of Gautam Buddha is found jux-
taposed with, and even superimposed on, the image of Babasaheb
Ambedkar. (See Figure 1 below.) While Ambedkar himself is most
commonly represented as the quintessential modern leader and intel-
lectual, as we have noted, he is also described as a modern-day bod-
hisattva. What kind of religious thinker, or guide, do we have here?
Ambedkar’s bhikku is more social worker than traditional holy
man, observes one scholar.56 The same kind of understanding comes
through in the Dalit Buddhist poetry of Maharashtra. Here is Daya
Pawar’s Buddha, as depicted in his 1974 poem with that title:

55 Viswanathan, Outside the Fold, 225; Narain and Ahir, Ambedkar, Buddhism and
Social Change, 12–13; and Jondhale and Beltz, Reconstructing the World, 12.
56 See Johannes Beltz, “Contesting Caste, Hierarchy, and Hinduism: Buddhist Discur-
sive Practices in Maharashtra,” in Jondhale and Beltz, Reconstructing the World,
247.
 Dalit Conversion 87

I see you
Walking, talking,
Breathing softly, healingly,
On the sorrow of the poor, the weak;
Going from hut to hut
In the life-destroying darkness
Torch in hand . . .

The most common argument put forward by Dalits interviewed about

their embracing of Buddhism, as I noted in Chapter 2, was that it gave
them the chance of living with honor and dignity:

I am the daughter of Bhima [i.e., Bhimrao Ambedkar]

And the granddaughter of Gautama.
....
Gautama’s dhamma is like no other;
A man finds humanity there.
There are no different gods, no different castes;
High or low, all are equal . . . 57

What kind of “god” is it who discriminates against particular groups

of human beings, another anonymous Dalit woman’s song asks:

What kind of Srihari is he

Who hates some human beings?58

Sharankumar Limbale makes the same point in his account of how

an uncle in his future in-laws’ home spoke out on his behalf when a
marriage proposal for him was put in jeopardy by talk of his “impure”
blood: “There is no high or low in our Buddhist religion. I will give
my daughter to him.”59
A Dalit woman’s recollections of the conversion ceremonies in
which she participated helps to elaborate the argument. Shantabai
Krishnaji Kamble, who was born in 1923 and began teaching in a

57 Eleanor Zelliot, “New Voices of the Buddhists of India,” in Narain and Ahir,
Ambedkar, Buddhism and Social Change, 196 (the middle verse of these three is
also cited in Chapter 2, this volume). See also the poem by Namdeo Dhasal, and
Zelliot’s commentary on it, that appears in ibid., 203.
58 Cited in Rege, Writing Caste/Writing Gender, 61.
59 Sharankumar Limbale, Akkarmashi (1984; 2nd edition, 1990), translated from
the Marathi by Santosh Bhoomkar and published under the title The Outcaste:
Akkarmashi (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 88.
88 A History of Prejudice

District Board school in 1942, was the first Dalit woman teacher
in her district. Shantabai’s son, the well-known writer and Dalit
Panther activist Arun Kamble, urged her to write her life story when
she retired from teaching in 1981, and the memoir, Mazhya Jalmachi
Chittarkatha, was published soon afterward. In it she describes the
conversion ceremony in her husband’s village, Kargani. “The year
1957. The people in our community had decided that people from
seven different villages would convert to Buddhism at Kargani.”60
Upper-caste villagers in Kargani threatened a boycott of the Dalits
when they heard about this move. The Dalits responded by calling a
meeting of concerned castes from 32 surrounding villages and drawing
up a plan of action to go through with their intent. On the day fixed
for the initiation by specially invited Buddhist monks, people from
many villages gathered at a central site in the village, under blue flags,
with placards reading “If you want to live as humans, convert!” and
shouting slogans of “Ambedkar Zindabad” and “Bhagwan Gautam
Buddha ki jai.” The Buddhist monks garlanded photographs of the
Buddha, Ambedkar, and Phule (the renowned non-Brahman leader
of the nineteenth century, now seen as a precursor of Ambedkar in
the inauguration of a Dalitbahujan movement) and lit candles and
incense sticks. Following this, the assembly took the Buddhist vows as
composed by Ambedkar – taking refuge in the Buddha, the dhamma,
and the sangha, accepting the panchsheel, or five ethical principles of
Buddhism, and rejecting brahmanical Hinduism.
From that moment, the local Dalits abandoned the demeaning tasks
traditionally assigned to them: dragging dead animals out of the village,
performing compulsory labor for the upper castes, running between
villages to deliver news of deaths, and so on. “How long would we rot
like this? That is why we embraced Buddhism. Dr. Ambedkar showed
us the new path. . . . We began to live as human beings after having
embraced Buddhism.”
The moment of conversion is invoked as a magical time in account
after account by ordinary Dalit converts, as I have noted already.

60 In what follows, I use Maya Pandit’s translation of certain passages as cited in Rege,
Writing Caste/Writing Gender, 186–8, while adding a few details from the original
Marathi in Shantabai Krishnaji Kamble, Mazhya Jalmachi Chittarkatha (3rd edition,
Pune: Sugawa Prakashan, 1998), 107–8.
 Dalit Conversion 89

From this point of view, the conversion to Buddhism may indeed be

said to mark a supernatural, religious transformation, one suffused
with the promise of new and fuller lives and linked with the purest
and most inspiring of ideals – embodied in the Buddha and Babasaheb
Ambedkar. “How did millions of illiterate people follow one man?”
Baby Kamble asks about Ambedkar, though her question – and
answer – could equally apply to the Buddha:

He was a man who believed in himself. He had courage and fortitude. . . . He

never changed his positions; nor did he ever compromise his principles for
selfish gain. Money, prosperity, fame – nothing could tempt him. . . . His heart
was soft and tender, full of love for the downtrodden. . . . His character was
spotlessly clean, without any blemish.61

I would go a step further and suggest that this moment of joy and
purity associated with the dharmaantar is an aspect of the rescripting
of the Dalit body. In the elaboration of the making of the Dalit as a full-
fledged citizen, Dalit leaders have laid quite exceptional emphasis on
this rescripting. They have underlined the importance of education, of
refined speech (sadhu bhasha) and manners, and of modern dress and
cleanliness. On occasion, Ambedkar spoke of the need to look and
act like the upper castes and classes. A striking illustration is found
in a 1942 speech in which Ambedkar congratulated his mainly Dalit
audience on their growing political awareness, progress in education,
and entry into state institutions like the army, the police, and the
legislatures, and added: “the greatest progress that we have made is
to be found among our women folk. Here you see in this conference
these 20,000 to 25,000 women present. See their dress, observe their
manners, mark their speech. Can any one say that they are Untouchable
women?”62

61 Baby Kamble, Prisons We Broke, 120–1.

62 Report of Depressed Class Conference, Nagpur Session (Nagpur: G. T. Meshram,
1942), 28–9, cited in Zelliot, From Untouchable to Dalit, 131. See also the autobio-
graphical memoir written at the end of the 1930s or in the 1940s, in which Ambed-
kar refers to the first train journey that he and three other children of his extended
family took to Goregaon, where his father was stationed as a cashier in the army.
“We were well-dressed children,” he wrote. “From our dress or talk no one could
make out that we were children of . . . untouchables”; see Valerian Rodrigues, ed.,
The Essential Writings of B. R. Ambedkar (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002),
48–9.
90 A History of Prejudice

References to spotless white occur again and again in Dalit accounts

of the Ambedkarite movement. The family memoir of a leading Dalit
intellectual, Narendra Jadhav, recalls the army of local leaders and
activists who emerged in Bombay in the 1940s and ’50s, inspired by
Dr. Ambedkar, all of them with two things in common – “immacu-
lately clean attire and impressive oratory.” Jadhav writes of huge pro-
cessions on Ambedkar’s birthday, in which activist women “dressed
all in white” played a major part, and he recalls how his own working-
class parents, affected by the Ambedkarite struggle, while thrifty about
clothes, “insisted that we always wear shoes.” They “brooked no com-
promise in this regard . . . their idea of being ‘up-to-date’ was firmly
linked to wearing shoes.”63 Again, we are told that the cloth stores
in Nagpur ran out of white saris at the 1956 initiation of Ambedkar
and his half million followers, and that some of the women among the
initiates actually wore men’s white dhotis.64
The Dalit stress on books and formal education, “cultured” speech
and urban manners, and clean clothes and shoes in the construction
and presentation of the Dalit self speaks to the common sense of the
modern and of course makes good sense in the struggle to transform
attitudes of inferiority or superiority – among the Dalits as well as
among their opponents. If rationality, science, and a belief in progress
was to provide the spirit of a modern, democratic society, and adult
franchise, elected legislatures and governments, a free press, univer-
sal laws, and an independent judiciary its political institutions, then
education, articulate speech, and self-confidence reflected in dress and
manners were clearly necessary conditions of their use.
“Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men,” Fanon has
written, “the ‘thing’ which has been colonized becomes man during the
same process by which it frees itself.”65 Rationality, social morality,
and the possibility of individual choice were, from the Dalit standpoint,
the need of the hour. The city was their location. D. R. Nagaraj writes
of the motif of escape from persecution and the journey to the Promised
Land: “[T]his time the promised land is the modern city.”66 In direct

63 Narendra Jadhav, Outcaste: A Memoir (Delhi: Viking Press, 2003), 228–30.

64 See Rege, Writing Caste/Writing Gender, 56.
65 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 36–7.
66 Nagaraj, Flaming Feet, 58.
 Dalit Conversion 91

opposition to the Gandhian advocacy of the harmony and simplicity

of village life, as I have mentioned, Dalit leaders have stressed the need
for Dalits to look to the future and to move to the towns where they
could escape from some of the worst disabilities of the caste system as
experienced in the countryside.
“I am . . . surprised that those who condemn Provincialism and
communalism should come forward as champions of the village,”
Ambedkar observed. “I hold that these village republics [he uses
the Gandhian phrase, borrowed from colonialist writings, with some
irony] have been the ruination of India. . . . What is the village but
a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and
communalism?”67 “In this republic there is no place for democracy.
There is no place for equality. There is no room for liberty and there
is no room for fraternity. The Indian village life is the very negation of
a Republic.”68
Ambedkar was hardly alone among Dalit thinkers in his condemna-
tion of the caste-ridden, traditional village community. Traditionally,
Dalits were expected to perform functions – to follow paths, literally
and metaphorically – that were symbolic of their very low status in
ritual and social life, especially in the villages. Given the weight of this
history, politically conscious Dalits have in one instance after another
called for rejection of the very instruments and expertise – say, in
music or in particular handicrafts – that they have inherited as a mark
of their lowly status. Nagaraj wrote of an activist friend, Krishna, for
whom “the art of playing drums is linked with the humiliating task
of carrying dead animals. The joy of singing oral epics is traditionally
associated with the insult of the artist standing outside the houses of
upper caste landlords with a begging bowl.” He will have none of
these, even when it is friends and activist colleagues who are celebrat-
ing. “I want to forget all this,” he screamed one night, “I want to
forget their gods, their folk epics, their violence.”69
The discarding of the demeaning dress and speech and deference of
that earlier humiliating condition is thus a necessary part of the Dalit

67 Rodrigues, Essential Writings of B. R. Ambedkar, 486.

68 Moon, Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, vol. 5, 26, cited in G. Aloysius, National-
ism without a Nation in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 166.
69 Nagaraj, Flaming Feet, 74–5.
92 A History of Prejudice

struggle for full citizenship. To Gandhi’s choice of the loincloth, and

his advocacy of vegetarianism, manual labor and the simple village
life, Dalit spokespersons respond with the statement that they already
have these; indeed they have had too much of them. What they need
instead is the hat and the three-piece suit, the pipe and the spectacles.
It is not an accident, Timothy Fitzgerald suggests, that the dominant
mode of representing Ambedkar in sculpture and painting, in calendar
art, and in little images found in Dalit homes and offices and fairs all
over the country is “not as a mendicant with [a] begging bowl, or as
a meditator [bodhisattva] beneath a bodhi tree, but as a middle-class
intellectual, wearing glasses, a blue suit, and carrying a book which
symbolizes the Republican Constitution and the power of education
and literacy.”70 (See Figure 1.)
But there is more. The representation of Ambedkar as the immac-
ulately attired, unambiguously rational, learned, imperturbable, and
unshakeable modern leader , no less than his representation in the garb
of a bodhisattva, returns to the proposition of indomitable courage and
fortitude, unselfishness and compassion – the spotlessly clean charac-
ter, without blemish. The struggle of the subaltern citizen proceeds on
many fronts.

A Different Sameness

Religious conversion classically involves the making (or embracing) of

a new society and community, a new relationship with other human
beings and the world, whatever one’s conception of the latter – seeking,
even if never attaining, perfection. This is all the more so with the Dalit
conversion in India, which takes place in the context of a national,
democratic struggle to establish a just, fair, and egalitarian society,
and in an era that emphasizes the making of the self through the
making and remaking of the modern world.
I have argued that the Dalit conversion aims at the making of the
new citizen, the rational, deliberative individual, associating with oth-
ers in the making of a new Dalit self and calling on non-Dalits to join
in the refashioning and improvement of the world. What Dalit dis-
course fails to do satisfactorily, however, is to recognize what might

70 Fitzgerald, “Analysing Sects, Minorities, and Social Movements in India,” 270.

 Dalit Conversion 93

figure 1. Dr. B. R. Ambedkar and the Buddha (calendar art; purchased at

Nagpur, 2008)

be called the “internal” challenges of constituting the new Dalit self

and the new Dalit citizen – in spite of talk of the “first case” of gen-
uine conversion and the long process of deliberation and discussion
that would go into effecting it. It takes Dalit unity, or shall we say
94 A History of Prejudice

the spirit and irreducibility of Dalit unity, much as upper-caste lead-

ers of the Indian national movement took Indian national unity, or
the oneness of India, as a transcendental presence, and it fails to
deal robustly with questions of gender oppression, or discrimination
between different castes (or subcastes) and classes within the Dalit
constituency.
Let us return for a moment to Ambedkar’s attempt to unpack the
category of caste. It was class conflict that lay at the root of caste
and Untouchability, he argued: the Untouchables were “broken men,”
Buddhists of old who came to occupy the bottom of the social hierar-
chy when the Brahmans defeated the Buddhists after a long and bitter
conflict. While this challenging account clearly points to the fluidity
and changeability, shall we say the historical production and perpet-
uation, of caste, what it does not capture adequately is the hold that
notions of purity and pollution, and hence touchability and untoucha-
bility, came to have in Indian society: the consciousness and prejudice
that have limited (and organized) social interaction in very specific
ways, both between Untouchables/ex-Untouchables and caste Hindus
and among the Untouchables/ex-Untouchables – those who would be
Dalits – themselves.
Consider the experience of caste discrimination on the ground
within the Dalit constituency in Ambedkar’s home province of
Maharashtra, as recorded by a leading Dalit writer from northern
India two and a half decades after Independence. Looking at Maha-
rashtra’s Dalit neighborhoods in the 1970s filled his heart with sad-
ness, Om Prakash Valmiki wrote in his autobiography, referring to the
part of the country where the Ambedkarite movement, and hence the
advancement of education and upward mobility and Dalit assertive-
ness, had been most pronounced. On account of the Dalit movement,
members of Ambedkar’s own Mahar caste had taken to education en
masse. But other important Dalit castes in the region, Matangs (or
Mangs), Chambhars (Chamars), and Mehtars among them, remained
largely illiterate. The feeling of caste differences persisted, even among
Dalit activists. Although they talked about overcoming the discrimi-
nation between these different castes, “internally they were caught in
the clutches of these beliefs. . . . One could clearly perceive the hes-
itation of the activists [most of them Mahars] when they entered
 Dalit Conversion 95

Mehtar bastis.” On the other hand, the Mehtars, “placed at the very
bottom of the social ladder . . . were suspicious of the Dalit leader-
ship.”71
Similarly, recent accounts by Dalit women have brought to the fore
the cruel forms of exploitation and torture, physical and psycholog-
ical, that Dalit men have inflicted on Dalit women. As one account
has it, “Dalit men did not hesitate in chopping off the nose[s] of those
Dalit women who according to the former failed to abide by the patri-
archal norms.”72 It is important to record the dissonant voice, even
as we note the existence and value of the loud and clear call to end
the Brahmanical oppression of women, which is articulated repeatedly
in the discussion of the long, drawn-out contest between Brahmanism
and Buddhism in India’s history. For, in a paradoxical way, that his-
torical analysis seems to suggest that problems like gender discrimina-
tion, domestic violence, male alcoholism, and exploitation of females
are not particularly relevant to Dalit society, or at any rate will sort
themselves out as this society gains in education, economic security,
and political consciousness: a long-standing part of modern common
sense.
In the turn I have described, the Dalit argument works to under-
score the statement of an already existing Dalit unity and solidarity in
beliefs, practices, and aspirations: insurgent Dalits on the one hand, the
declining upper castes on the other. In treating this changeable and yet
substantial caste identity as their overriding concern, the ready ground
of a political struggle aimed at changing that ground, Dalit leaders
are not only caught in the eternal bind of the subaltern, the outsider
within, but also shackled in the range of issues that they believe nec-
essary to tackle in order to produce the new citizen. Like progressive
male (masculinist) thinkers in other spheres, they thereby arrive at a
position in which questions of gender, and often class, and other inter-
nal divisions come to be treated as epiphenomenal – problems that will
be overcome “automatically” by the forces of progress in the unfolding
of world history.

71 Omprakash Valmiki, Joothan: A Dalit’s Life, trans. Arun Prabha Mukherkjee

(Calcutta: Samya, 2003), 109.
72 Gopal Guru, “Afterword,” in Kamble, Prisons We Broke, 166.
96 A History of Prejudice

In this respect, Dalit discourse produces a somewhat reduced and

unhistorical view of the Dalit movement. I consider some of the conse-
quences of this reduction in Chapter 6. Before I do that, however, it will
help to take a break from India and examine another movement for
“conversion” – the struggle for democracy in mid-twentieth-century
USA.
 4

“Double V”

The Everyday of Race Relations

The last chapter should have shown how Dalits used the idea of con-
version out of the dominant religion of India to claim their rights
as citizens and to call for an altered social and political arrangement
in the country. For people of African descent in the USA, the idea
of conversion (or of opting out) has had a rather different history.
Physically removed from the African part of their heritage, they were
converted to the new religion of Christianity, or various forms of it,
in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (As we know, different
kinds of conversion, not least to a new form of Islamic solidarity, con-
tinued strongly in the twentieth century, but these were less pervasive.)
Over that time, it became increasingly obvious to African Americans
that they were as American as any other immigrants to the country,
and they demanded their rights as Americans. To do so, they appro-
priated the reigning political slogan in the United States, the idea so
eloquently and loudly proclaimed in the constitution of 1788 and
since, of the common rights of all inhabitants of the land, “We the
people . . .” – not to mention a central proposition of the Bible, “All
men are brothers. . . .” Quite self-consciously, then, and with increas-
ing militancy over the middle decades of the twentieth century, it was
for African Americans a matter not of opting out but opting in.
I need to reiterate that opting out and opting in are not polar oppo-
site, irreconcilable options, for there is no clear-cut out or in for most
subordinated groups in a society. It is necessary to emphasize that, as
with the Dalits, there was no single strategy or platform that African

97
98 A History of Prejudice

Americans as a body adopted for the amelioration or advancement of

their social, political, and economic condition. Through most of the
second half of the nineteenth century and all of the twentieth, there
were those who worked for integration in order to eradicate racial
and caste privileges, and there were black nationalists who spoke of
the need for a separate geopolitical space for African Americans –
most notably represented, it is said, in the Garveyite call for a return
to Africa (although even in Garvey’s case what was at stake was the
redemption of Africa, and by that means the redemption of people
of African descent everywhere).1 There were other perspectives, too,
built, for example, around the notion of a black working class and the
primacy of labor struggle, aimed at a radical social transformation.
Yet, as scholars have noted, these competing paradigms – integration,
nationalism, transformation – were not exclusive, but overlapping,
braiding, and shifting even in individual cases.2
Amiri Baraka captured the convergence and the common ground
well in a 1972 address on “The Pan-African Party and the Black
Nation.” “Nationalists,” “repatriation,” and “separation” people
must understand, he said, that “we,” African Americans, “ain’t going
anywhere.” “Back to Africa” was certainly the right slogan, but it
applied “wherever we are.” “We must move to have self-determina-
tion, self-sufficiency, self-respect and self-defense wherever we exist
in large numbers – whether it is Chicago or Johannesburg.”3 That
claim to sameness, to equal rights and opportunities, and an end to
discriminatory practices, pre-judicial and judicial, was the common
ground for the African American freedom struggle as it has been
called, of civil rights and Black Power.
One important feature of the history of American democracy and
American liberty has been a claim to universalism, the applicability of
these ideals to one and all, both at home and abroad – in spite of the
obvious limits evident in the exclusion of women, blacks, and Native

1 Cf. Randall K. Burkett, Black Redemption: Churchmen Speak for the Garvey Move-
ment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978), especially “Introduction,” 8, and
passim.
2 The preceding summary statement is taken from Manning Marable and Leith
Mullings, eds., Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and
Renewal (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), “Preface,” xviii–xxi.
3 Ibid., 497, 498.
 “Double V” 99

Americans from equal access in the United States. From the moment of
the American Revolution down to World War II, and indeed up to now,
there has been a continuing American urge (and repeated American
actions) to spread capitalism and “democracy” to the “backward”
nations of the world. The justification of World War II for the US
and its allies lay in an argument about democracy and freedom for all
the people of the world; the end of colonialism and imperialism (in its
current incarnation of white men’s rule over the darker peoples of Asia
and Africa); and the end of all notions of racial supremacy, Aryan or
other. The call for “Double V[ictory]” – victory against the opponents
of democracy and freedom, and for the end of colonialism and racism,
at home and abroad – appeared in this context, given the denial of basic
democratic rights to African Americans (Native Americans, women,
and other second-class citizens, or noncitizens, were not a prominent
part of the national debate at this time).
I take the African American call for Double V as a centerpiece
in this chapter for a number of reasons. The record of this period
of struggle indicates, as I hope my discussion of the Dalit drive for
conversion has done, the very lengthy (and often hidden) history of
the fight for civil rights and citizenship, and the many fronts on which
it was waged. The campaign reaffirms several of the most fundamental
propositions and tendencies of the black struggle from the days of the
fight for the abolition of slavery to today – issues of human dignity
and self-respect, equal political and economic opportunities, and a
stake in government. At the same time, it reveals another, perhaps
inadequately stressed, aspect of the American experience and American
discourse – the unusually strong link between masculinism, militarism,
and citizenship in this history.
Military service and citizenship are commonly coupled in the
rhetoric and history of modern nation-states. Yet, the connection seems
to have been especially strong in the USA, perhaps because it is a young
nation that, almost to the very end of the nineteenth century, was still
seeking by military force to expand its borders and secure the unchal-
lenged writ of government. Political rights here were long assumed
to be gained by defending the land – which is one of the main rea-
sons why women were excluded from citizen status. The conservative
judge Thomas P. Brady’s rant, in a speech on “Black Monday: Segrega-
tion or Amalgamation,” delivered in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1955,
100 A History of Prejudice

was perhaps unusually blunt, but certainly not uncommon in its logic.
Talking of how America “came of age” in the years between 1620 and
1936, Brady declared: “Thirteen pathetically weak colonies oppose the
greatest military power on earth, Great Britain. They were not with-
out assistance, and after almost seven trying, bloody years, victory is
won at Yorktown, and a nation is born.” And then to the punchline:
“It is ridiculous to assume that the American negro played any part
in this struggle, though he had been in this country approximately
one hundred and fifty years. He made no contribution whatsoever.”
Next stage, 1812: “Like the war of 1776, the War of 1812 was a just
war, and the United States emerged victorious.” Followed again by the
punchline: “It is ridiculous to assume that the American negro played
any part in this struggle, though he had been in this country almost
two hundred years.”4
Much has changed since the fabled frontiersmen, pioneers, and Lone
Rangers fought the wars of 1776 and 1812, or the 1840s (annexation
of New Mexico and California), or 1890 (the attack on and killing of
over 300 Native Americans camped at Wounded Knee, South Dakota).
The example of recent wars (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan) indicates
that, in our day, to have class and racial privilege often means, pre-
cisely, to be excused from military service.5 For all that, in one of those
unquestioned paradoxes of modern nationalism, the close intertwin-
ing of military duty and citizenship, and the attendant celebration of
the nation’s military forces, remains daily on display. Even after the
heated debate over the legitimacy of U.S. intervention in Vietnam and
Iraq, it is the one expression of national duty that remains sacrosanct:
one questions “the men and women of the armed forces” – and hence
military action? – at one’s peril.
The exceptionally close tie between masculinism, militarism, and
citizenship is important for my analysis. Civil rights has provided the
framework for much of the investigation of American democracy in
the twentieth century. All of African American history – and with

4 Clayborne Carson et al., eds., The Eyes on the Prize: Civil Rights Reader. Documents,
Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle, 1954–1990 (New
York: Penguin Books, 1991), 84, 85. In fact, African Americans did serve in both
wars – when the military needs grew dire.
5 See Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
 “Double V” 101

that, much of U.S. history – has been written around the struggle
against racialized stigmatization and exploitation: slavery and segre-
gation. However, if the racism of American democracy and society was
called, loud and clear, by the African American struggle at the time of
the Second World War (as well as before and after), the masculinism
of the African American (and the wider American) discourse of the
time has not been sufficiently noticed – by contemporaries, or by sub-
sequent analysts. We need to bear this in mind as we work through the
history, the twists and turns as well as the achievements, of Double V
and the longer civil rights movement in the struggle for full citizenship.

The Double V Campaign6

In the extended history of civil rights, one might suggest, the time of
the most rapid expansion of the province of these rights has been a
time of war – the Civil War, World War I, World War II – to which
one might add the campaigns in Korea and Vietnam, the military
expression of the Cold War, as it were. The Civil War, with Frederick
Douglass’s famous call to arms as the path to citizenship, was perhaps
the crucial moment in establishing the link between African American
military service and African American rights. But it has been followed
by others. “The emerging black freedom movement of the twentieth
century . . . was cataclysmically moved by the guns of August 1914 and
the onset of ‘the great war’,” writes Vincent Harding. The American
establishment’s call “to make the world safe for democracy served to
heighten the already vivid consciousness of Afro-Americans concerning
the tragic contradictions endemic to their own native, alien land.”
Again, World War II “seemed like déjà vu, a reenactment of all the
tendencies of ‘the war to make the world safe for democracy’, with
many elements now intensified and magnified.”7

6 The Pittsburgh Courier, February 14, 1942, introduced the phrase “Double V” for
“victory over our enemies at home and victory over our enemies on the battle-fields
abroad.”
7 Vincent Harding, “We the People: The Long Journey Toward a More Perfect Union,”
in Carson et al., Eyes on the Prize, 3, 17, 18, 29. For important comments on the
enormous impact of the Second World War, see Glenda E. Gilmore, Defying Dixie:
The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton and Co.,
2008), especially pt. III, 297–444; Richard M. Dalfiume, “The ‘Forgotten Years’ of
the Negro Revolution,” in Bernard Sternsher, The Negro in Depression and War:
102 A History of Prejudice

The New York journalist and war correspondent Roi Ottley’s 1943
book on African American history as seen from Harlem, New World
a-Coming, underscores the imbrication of military and political cam-
paigns in the black struggle, as in all U.S. history. Although the declared
objective of the Civil War was the preservation of the United States
as a unit, he observes, abolitionists quickly recognized it as a critical
moment for the campaign against slavery. African American leaders
offered Lincoln’s federal government three regiments of troops, fully
equipped and maintained by the black population. While that offer
was declined, blacks were subsequently allowed into the Union Army.
The alternative, Lincoln observed, would have been to abandon the
Union and the Constitution. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued
in September 1862 and effective from January 1, 1863, “decreed that
all persons held as slaves . . . [in the rebellious Confederate states] were
to be freed, and those of suitable condition were to be ‘received into
the armed service of the United States.’”8
It was a similar kind of military/political necessity that opened up
the opportunity for an expansion of the struggle for black rights in
World Wars I and II. The U.S. entry into the First World War led to
a dramatic increase in the demand for industrial and military forces.
“Large numbers of white men left industrial pursuits for military ser-
vice both in the United States Army and in the armies of their native
lands,” Ottley notes. What followed was a “mad race” to get hold
of southern black labor. Aided by the federal government and rail-
road entrepreneurs seeking increased profits, agents went to the South
and recruited large numbers of blacks over the objections of southern
whites.9
“At no time since the days following the Civil War had the Negro
been in a position where he stood to make greater gain or sustain

Prelude to Revolution, 1930–1945 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), especially

299; Morton Sosna, “More Important than the Civil War? The Impact of World
War II on the South,” in Perspectives on the American South: An Annual Review
of Society, Politics and Culture, vol. 4, ed. James C. Cobb and Charles R. Wilson
(New York: Gordon and Breach, 1987); and Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The
United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
8 Roi Ottley, New World a-Coming (1943; reprint New York: Arno Press and New
York Times, 1968), 19–20.
9 Ibid., 33–4.
 “Double V” 103

greater loss in status,” James Weldon Johnson noted in his 1933 auto-
biography, Along This Way:

The exodus of Negroes to the North, pulled there to fill the labor vacuum in
the great industries, was in full motion; the tremors of war in Europe were
shaking America with increasing intensity; circumstances were combining to
put a higher premium on Negro muscle, Negro hands, and Negro brains than
ever before; all these forces had a quickening effect that was running through
the entire mass of the race.10

And when, in the middle of that war, two days of organized white
attacks in East St. Louis, Illinois, left two hundred blacks dead (indis-
criminately shot, burned, and hanged) and thousands homeless, the
NAACP and other black leaders in Harlem organized a demonstration
of 15,000 African American men, women and children, who marched
silently down New York’s Fifth Avenue, carrying banners that said:
“Mr. President, Why Not Make America Safe for Democracy?”11
The sentiment was radicalized, deepened, and greatly extended dur-
ing World War II, to make Double V a central slogan of the African
American struggle. African Americans were quick to seize on the argu-
ment that active participation in the defense of the country gave them
a claim on equal citizenship. The black press’s commentary on the war
illustrates very well the shared faith in a militaristic nationhood as well
as the idea that all citizens had the duty to fight for the country. Con-
sider the response of the Atlanta Daily World, the South’s only African
American-owned daily, to Georgia governor Ellis Arnall’s “work or
fight” directive. “Work or fight” orders, first introduced in World
War I, directed that able-bodied individuals of military-service age
(now described by federal Defense official Anna Rosenberg as being
on “loan” from the military to civilian life during wartime!) accept
“useful occupations” or risk being jailed. During World War II, start-
ing in late 1942, a series of “work or fight” ordinances came into
force in different southern states in response to the need for labor on
rural farms and a shortage of domestic servants. The Louisiana Weekly
appropriately dubbed them “work or jail” orders since even a refusal

10 James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon
Johnson (1933; reprint New York: Viking Penguin, 1991), 308, 315, and see also
330, 332.
11 Ottley, New World a-Coming, 37–8; Johnson, Along This Way, 319–21.
104 A History of Prejudice

to take on domestic positions could lead to imprisonment. In 1943,

before the harvest season, Arnall ordered all sheriffs to enforce “work
or fight” regulations for men and women throughout Georgia.12 While
expressing some misgivings that local officials might misuse the power,
as they had in the past, pushing African Americans into unsuitable
lowly positions, the Atlanta Daily World endorsed Arnall’s order in
ringing terms: “In these critical hours in our history and amid the acute
shortage in man and womanpower, it is not only unpatriotic for able-
bodied citizens to go loafing about the city streets, but it is down-right
sinful.”13
In an earlier piece entitled “The Case for the Negro,” the Atlanta
daily had cited the Kentucky Irish American to say: “The war is help-
ing to do away with racial and religious prejudice as men and boys of
different races are united in the fight for freedom and liberty. . . . The
Negro is a beneficiary of this situation as he is again demonstrating
proof of his loyalty and patriotism.”14 Long before then, the Com-
mittee for Participation of Negroes in the National Defense, a pres-
sure group formed in 1938 by African American army officers who
had served in World War I, had written an open letter to President
Franklin D. Roosevelt that said: “[W]e are expecting a more dignified
place in our armed forces during the next war than we occupied during
the [First] World War.” The great labor leader Asa Philip Randolph
amplified the argument in January 1941: “We loyal Negro-American
citizens demand the right to work and fight for our country.”15 By
the end of World War II, nearly one million African American men
and women had been recruited into the armed forces, and nearly half
of them had served overseas. Indeed, although it is often overlooked

12 Albert A. Blum, “Work or Fight: The Use of the Draft as a Manpower Sanc-
tion during the Second World War,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 16,
no. 3 (April 1963), 367; Charles D. Chamberlain, Victory at Home: Manpower
and Race in the American South during World War II (Athens: University of Geor-
gia Press, 2003), 62, 80–1; and Risa L. Goluboff, “The Thirteenth Amendment
and the Lost Origins of Civil Rights,” Duke Law Journal, 50, no. 6 (April 2001),
1656–9.
13 Atlanta Daily World, September 8, 1943.
14 Atlanta Daily World, May 17, 1943.
15 David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American
Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2000), 465; and Dalfiume,
“‘Forgotten Years’ of the Negro Revolution,” 305. See also Appy, Working-Class
War, 21.
 “Double V” 105

completely, the women’s work in auxiliary services gained them some

legitimacy in their political struggles. The consequences for the wider
democratic struggle were hardly small.
Ruling classes and governments should not expect a colonized,
unfree people to go to war to defend freedom in other parts of the
world. The Indian National Congress had made the point categori-
cally by refusing to support Britain’s war against the Axis Powers until
India itself was promised freedom. African Americans, not quite so
obviously colonized, but segregated, ghettoized, impoverished, crim-
inalized, and treated at best as second-class citizens, made the same
argument. If no part of the world could be denied the chance of democ-
racy and self-government, every part of the United States, and every
part of its population, was entitled to no less (and, as many African
American and other antiracist commentators pointed out at this time,
the American South, too, was part of the USA!). African Americans
made the case even more stridently because no one (or practically
no one) now argued that they were not “Americans,” whatever their
social, economic, or political disadvantages. World War II – with its
loud proclamations about the preservation of liberty and democracy –
provided the opportunity to argue strongly for an expansion of their
part in the national economy and military forces, and the right to be
treated as full Americans. And the fact that large numbers of African
Americans fought in the war reinforced the case immeasurably.
The NAACP had made the point simply even before the United
States had formally declared war: “[T]he hysterical cries of the preach-
ers of democracy for Europe leave us cold. We want democracy in
Alabama and Arkansas, in Mississippi and Michigan, in the District
of Columbia – in the Senate of the United States.” A discharged black
army corporal from Alabama put it more bluntly after the war: “I
spent four years in the army to free a bunch of Dutchmen and French-
men, and I’m hanged if I’m going to let the Alabama version of the
Germans kick me around when I get home. No sirree-bob! I went into
the Army a nigger; I’m coming out a man.” Ottley sums up the argu-
ment: “Negroes are . . . insistent that, if they must die as equals, then
they must be treated as equals.”16

16 Dalfiume, “‘Forgotten Years’ of the Negro Revolution,” 302 (emphasis original);

Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, eds., To Make Our World Anew, Volume II:
106 A History of Prejudice

The African American struggle grew exponentially during this

period of democratic resurgence, as did other labor movements such
as the Communist Party of the USA. The NAACP expanded from
its 355 branches and 50,556 members in 1940 to 1,073 branches
with just under 450,000 members in 1946.17 Even before America’s
entry into battle, and more emphatically after that, the Second World
War brought a rush of new opportunities for African American and
other depressed sections of the American population. Langston Hughes
noted how Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802 brought “more than a
million Negro workers into contact with machinery” for the first time
and allowed thousands of African American women to escape from
“the underpaid servitude of white kitchens and laundries.” It was in
1941 (after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor) that “the war broke
out,” he wrote in his column in The Chicago Defender in January 1943.
“Before that there wasn’t no defense work much. And the President
hadn’t told the factory bosses that they had to hire colored. . . . Now,
it’s 1942 – and different. Folks have jobs. Money’s circulating again.
Relatives are in the Army with big insurances if they die.”18
Ottley’s synoptic account of the making of the president’s Execu-
tive Order 8802 of June 1941, whereby the Roosevelt administration
outlawed racial discrimination by companies and unions doing war
work on government contracts, and established the Fair Employment
Practices Committee (FEPC) to enforce the order, illustrates the inten-
sification of African American aspirations and organization at this
time. In the months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he
writes, “Negro communities in the urban areas were seething with
resentment.” The Depression, which had hit both white and black
folks hard, was over, and the economy was expanding once more. But
over one million African Americans (out of 5.4 million of working
age) were unemployed. A government survey found only 142 blacks
among 29,215 workers employed in ten war plants in the New York
area. Fifty-six war-contract factories in St. Louis, Missouri, employed

A History of African Americans from 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press,
2005), 174; and Ottley, New World a-Coming, 312.
17 Dalfiume, “‘Forgotten Years’ of the Negro Revolution,” 306. The phrase “period
of democratic resurgence” comes from Ralph Ellison’s 1944 review of An American
Dilemma; see Ellison, Shadow and Act, 317.
18 Chicago Defender, April 20, 1946 and January 9, 1943.
 “Double V” 107

an average of three blacks each. In Michigan, 22,042 of 26,904 defense

jobs were reserved for whites. It was not only skilled jobs that were
denied to African Americans: the survey found that 35,000 of a total
of 83,000 unskilled jobs were also closed to them.19
It is well known that Roosevelt’s executive order followed
A. Philip Randolph’s brilliant organization of a March on Wash-
ington Movement. Joe W. Trotter, Jr., suggests that the idea of the
movement actually came from a black woman participant at a meeting
of civil rights groups in Chicago, who said angrily:

We ought to throw fifty thousand Negroes around the White House, bring
them over from all over the country, in jalopies, in trains and any way they
can get there, and throw them around the White House and keep them there
until we can get some action from the White House.

“I agree with the sister,” Randolph is reported to have said, as he

offered the resources and leadership of his organization, the Brother-
hood of Sleeping Car Porters, for the movement.20
The March on Washington Movement spread rapidly, set up offices
in all the major industrial centers of the North and West, and joined
forces with the NAACP, the National Negro Congress, and Urban
League, as well as local churches and other associations. In short order,
writes Ottley, buses and trains were chartered, and a demonstration of
over 50,000 African Americans (revised upward from an initial goal
of 10,000 to 20,000 and then 50,000) was planned for July 1, 1941.
Alarmed by the audacity and scale of these developments, Washington
sent several emissaries, including first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, to appeal
to the leaders to call off the movement.
Four days before the threatened march, the leaders of the movement
were called to Washington and the order against discrimination in
federally funded defense employment was issued. The policy of the
government, it declared, was

to encourage full participation in the national defense program by all citi-

zens of the United States, regardless of race, creed, color, or national origin,
in the firm belief that the democratic way of life within the Nation can be

19 Ottley, New World a-Coming, 289–90.

20 Joe W. Trotter, Jr., “From a Raw Deal to a New Deal, 1929–1945,” in Kelley and
Lewis, To Make Our World Anew, vol. II, 164–5.
108 A History of Prejudice

defended successfully only with the help and support of all groups within its
borders.21

A year later, in the summer of 1942, Roosevelt sent the following

message to the NAACP’s annual convention: “I note with satisfaction
that the theme of your significant gathering read, ‘Victory is Vital
to Minorities.’ This theme might well be reversed and given to the
nation as a slogan. . . . ‘Minorities are Vital to Victory.’”22 It was an
extraordinary acknowledgment, the first great victory of civil rights,
could one say, since the abolition of slavery and the citizenship and
voting rights amendments of the 1860s?

The Geography of Prejudice

Old habits die hard, however. Although Executive Order 8802 opened
up many opportunities for African Americans and other colored Amer-
icans, it also led to conflict with sections of organized labor that had
an established policy of excluding blacks, and with “southern poli-
tics” more generally. More than a million African Americans joined
the military during the war, as already noted. Only 5% of the army in
summer 1941, they comprised 10.3% of it, roughly equivalent to their
proportion of the total population, by December 1942. And the ques-
tion of where these forces should be posted, trained, fed, and allowed
to sleep or travel was the cause of considerable tension and mis-
giving.23
Ottley refers to a few of the many demonstrations of deep-rooted
prejudice. Alabama’s governor, Frank Murray Dixon, a decorated
World War I veteran, refused to accept an army contract for tent
cloth because it contained a clause against racial discrimination.
Numerous white spokespersons defended the exclusion of blacks from

21 Ottley, New World a-Coming, 291–3.

22 Ibid., 320.
23 See Donald L. Grant, The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 361; Robert J. Norrell, The House I Live
In: Race in the American Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 123,
126. See also Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America
in World War II (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 2000).
 “Double V” 109

trade unions and complained that the federal government was forc-
ing employers to hire blacks in jobs that had always been reserved
for white men. Fearing the consequences of blacks working along-
side whites in offices and factories, one retired politician proposed a
“state-wide, South-wide, nation-wide League for White Supremacy”
to combat this “menace to our national security and our local way of
life.” In a letter to the Army chief of staff, Alabama senator John D.
Bankhead declared that the federal government was doing “a disservice
to the war effort by locating Negro troops in the South in immediate
contact with white troops.” If black soldiers had to be trained in the
South, he added, it would be better to place southern blacks there –
since they knew the social rules – and keep “Northern Negro soldiers
in the North.” The Southern Governors’ Conference reinforced the
point, asking the War Department to “send no Northern blacks to
the South and to refrain from placing black soldiers where they might
mingle with white soldiers.”24
Even outside the South, all was hardly smooth sailing. Events in
Detroit, now hailed as the military “arsenal of democracy,” illustrate
the point well. As Ottley reports it, 2,000 whites attacked 500 blacks
to prevent them from moving into the Sojourner Truth housing project,
“built with public funds for Negro war workers.” “At secret meetings,
Ku Klux [Klan]ers received orders to keep the Negro workers from
entering their new homes. . . . The National Workers’ League, a pro-
Nazi group whose officials were later indicted, cooperated with the
Klan in preparing and staging the subsequent riot in which scores
of people were injured.”25 While the facts of the violence in 1942
were more complicated and investigators learned that several Detroit
officials had come out in favor of the very poorly housed African
American workers, Ottley’s account clearly reflects what many blacks
were feeling and saying during this period. The “epidemic of interracial
violence” the following summer, in Detroit, Harlem, Washington, and
other places, only served to confirm such feelings.26

24 Ottley, New World a-Coming, 302–3, 311–12. For the governors’ plea, see Grant,
The Way It Was in the South, 361.
25 Ottley, New World a-Coming, 319–20.
26 The phrase “epidemic of . . . violence” comes from Harvard Sitkoff, “Racial Militancy
and Interracial Violence in the Second World War,” Journal of American History,
110 A History of Prejudice

When the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) first an-

nounced hearings in Birmingham, Alabama, a newspaper in the neigh-
boring town of Gadsden declared: “A bunch of snoopers, two of whom
are Negroes, will assemble in Birmingham, June 18 [1942], for a
three-day session to determine whether the South is doing right by
Little Sambo.” Another referred to the FEPC as “dat committee fer de
purteckshun uv Rastus & Sambo.” The self-professed “liberal” Mark
F. Ethridge, a member of FEPC and editor of the Louisville (Kentucky)
Courier-Journal, said that he would never have accepted membership
on the committee had he thought its purpose was to destroy segrega-
tion. And further: “there is no power in the world – not even in all the
mechanized armies of the earth, Allied and Axis – which would now
force the Southern white people to the abandonment of the principles
of social segregation.” In essence, he was saying nothing different from
what a white railroad mechanic in Macon, Georgia, said at the end of
the war: white feelings toward blacks were “like the affection one has
for a dog, we love ’em in their place.”27
On the other hand, as we have seen, fewer African Americans were
now willing to take such views lying down. Earl B. Dickerson, one
of the black members of the FEPC, responded to Ethridge: “I am
unalterably opposed to segregation, whether in the South or North.”
The South was no more entitled to its own special regulations than any
other region, he asserted, for it was “still a part of the geographical
boundaries of the United States.”28 William Holmes Borders, minister
at Wheat Street Baptist Church in Atlanta, and a leading advocate
for civil rights already in the early 1940s, put the matter in Christian
terms in a series of “Radio Sermonets.” Along with the need to defeat
Japan and Germany across the seas, and to liberate India and China
and Africa, it was necessary to spread democracy everywhere. Peace
and democracy at home and abroad may well require “ten thousand
years of Christian discipline.” Justice under God would be ours only

58, no. 3 (1971), 674. The Detroit “riots” of that summer were among the worst in
the history of the United States: 34 people were killed, 25 of them black; over 700
were injured; and over 1,800 were arrested, perhaps 85% of them black.
27 Mark F. Ethridge, Oral History interview by Richard D. Mckinzie, June 4, 1974
(Harry S. Truman Library and Museum); Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 362; Ottley, New
World a-Coming, 302–3; and Grant, The Way It Was in the South, 362.
28 Ottley, New World a-Coming, 303, 312.
 “Double V” 111

when we “crush Hitler in Germany and Hitlerism in Georgia,” for

“democracy, like charity, begins at home.”29
The depth of feeling among leading African Americans is clear from
the outrage occasioned by Zora Neale Hurston’s reported (or misre-
ported) remark, in February 1943, that “the Jim Crow system works.”
This was not the time for publicity-seeking people to come up with such
“arrant and even vicious nonsense,” declared Roy Wilkins, secretary of
the NAACP. It is evident also in Hurston’s own response to contempo-
rary events: “We are being foolish . . . ,” she wrote to Alain Locke after
the Detroit violence of June 1943, “if we let it rest as we have done
other riots.” Race prejudice and violence was not a sectional, southern
matter; it was national, and needed to be recognized and confronted as
such. The North was simply more hypocritical, she noted, reiterating
the argument that was misread as her justifying the Jim Crow South for
being more honest. Northerners used the Negro vote to get into power,
and “then bar us from jobs and decent living quarter, and if there is
any protests [sic], riot, and terrify Negro workers away from town and
jobs, and then . . . brush it off with folklore about the south.” Once they
realized that the “THEM SOUTHERNERS DONE IT” argument was
not going to be accepted, they would have to think twice.30
Hurston’s statements on the worldwide hypocrisy, racism, and
violence of the whites, or Anglo-Saxons, as she called them, reflected a
heightened global perspective in African American political commen-
tary at this time. Racism and violence went with the Anglo-Saxons,
she wrote: “The Anglo-Saxon is the most intolereant [sic] of human
beings in the matter of any other group darker than themselves. Did
the southerners colonize Africa and India, and put over the outrages
based on race there?” “I can think of [Truman] as nothing else but
the BUTCHER OF ASIA,” she writes in a letter of July 1946: “Of
his grin of triumph on giving the order to drop the Atom bombs on
Japan. . . . Of his slighting the Inauguration of the new nation of the

29 William Holmes Borders, Seven Minutes at the ‘Mike’ in the Deep South (1943;
reprint Atlanta: B. F. Logan Press, 1944), 94, 98, 99. I owe thanks to Randolph
Burkett for drawing my attention to Borders’s work.
30 Carla Kaplan, ed., Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (New York: Doubleday,
2002), 439–40, 491–2. On the traditional assumption of southern exceptionalism,
see Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino, eds., The Myth of Southern Excep-
tionalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
112 A History of Prejudice

Philipines [sic] by not bothering to be present.” There had not been

a word of protest from the black press, she noted: “Is it that we are
so devoted to a ‘good Massa’ that we feel that we ought not to even
protest such crimes?”31
In December 1945, indeed, Hurston published an essay entitled
“Crazy for this Democracy,” in which, as her biographers have noted,
she restated several of the political propositions that her publishers had
insisted on weeding out of her 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on
a Road. She wondered if she had misheard when Franklin Roosevelt
talked of the United States as the arsenal of democracy. Did he perhaps
mean “arse-and-all,” given American support of English, French, and
Dutch campaigns to recolonize millions of people in Asia? “I thought
when they said Atlantic Charter, that meant me and everybody in
Africa and Asia and everywhere. But it seems like the Atlantic is an
ocean that does not touch anywhere but North America and Europe.”
She’s all for trying out this “gorgeous thing” called democracy,
Hurston says in an echo of Gandhi.32 The thing that keeps her from
“pitching headlong” into it is the existence of the Jim Crow laws in
America. The need of the hour, in her judgment, is simple: “the repeal
of every Jim Crow law in the nation here and now . . . complete repeal
of All Jim Crow laws in the United States once and for all, and right
now. For the benefit of this nation and as a precedent to the world.”33
Hurston had long avowed that she was not interested in politics, in
the sense of making grand political statements one way or another
on major political issues; she would rather live courageously, and
let the individual example show the world what she thought of its
judgments and arrangements. Even if her comments between 1943
and 1946 are seen as a defensive reaction to the charge of betrayal
made against her, they are also a sign of the greatly heightened emo-
tions of the time. Something of that emotion is reflected in a letter

31 Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 474, 491, 546.

32 When asked what he thought of Western civilization, Gandhi famously said: “It
would be a good thing.”
33 Zora Neale Hurston, “Crazy for This Democracy,” Negro Digest (December 1945),
reprinted in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . and Then Again When I Am
Looking Mean and Impressive, ed. Alice Walker (New York: Feminist Press, 1979),
165–8; Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (New
York: Scribner, 2003), 380–1; and Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A
Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 294.
 “Double V” 113

she wrote to Walter White in November 1942, before the interview

on Jim Crow that was used against her. In it, she wrote of condi-
tions in the Signal Corps school in St. Augustine, Florida, that had
been established, under pressure from black leaders, for the training of
African American officers. Hurston wrote of the unsatisfactory living
quarters and the poor quality and quantity of the food. “The dis-
satisfaction is tremendous.” The black officers, most of them college
graduates from middle-class backgrounds, were continuously insulted
by the head of the school, who would ask them when they had ever
had three meals in a day before they got there. “Well, the Negroes
have been bitched again! . . . Remember that this is the ONLY [train-
ing school] for Negroes in the U.S., though the whites have several. I
feel that the whole body of Negroes are being insulted and mocked.”34
There were other dramatic illustrations of the depth of African
American sentiment. Consider the sign displayed by an African Amer-
ican doctor in Harlem on the back of his car in 1942 or ’43:
IS THERE A DIFFERENCE?
JAPS BRUTALLY BEAT
AMERICAN REPORTER
GERMANS BRUTALLY BEAT
SEVERAL JEWS
AMERICAN CRACKERS
BRUTALLY BEAT
ROLAND HAYES & NEGRO SOLDIERS35

Recall that Roland Hayes (1887–1977), a child of former slaves, was

the first African American to win international fame as a concert per-
former, with an inaugural international performance in London in
1920. He and his wife had a home in Brookline, Massachusetts, as
well as in Curryville, Georgia, where they owned a 600-acre farm. In
July 1942, Hayes’s wife and daughter were thrown out of a shoe store
in Rome, Georgia, for having sat down in its “whites-only” area. When
Hayes confronted the store clerk, he and his wife were arrested by the
local police and Hayes was beaten up. In response to the incident,
Governor Eugene Talmadge warned blacks who opposed segregation
to stay out of Georgia. All this now made national headlines.

34 Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 469–70 (emphasis Hurston’s).

35 Ottley, New World a-Coming, 307.
114 A History of Prejudice

One result of traditional white fears and the growing black determi-
nation to reconstruct American social and political life was a polariza-
tion of strong positions on both sides. The problems that confronted
returning Georgia veterans reflect the challenges faced widely by south-
ern black soldiers. This was a new stage in the fight for “tradition.”

The War Comes Home

African Americans had been cruelly disillusioned at the end of the

First World War, as wartime promises evaporated and political and
social life on the ground returned to normal – or worse. The year 1919
brought a wave of black-baiting and lynching that had not been wit-
nessed for some time, as well as “riots” (in the South and the North)
that were quite unprecedented – in part perhaps because, unlike on
many former occasions, black communities now fought back. “The
Red Summer of 1919 broke in fury,” wrote Johnson. “The great
majority [of colored people] had trustingly felt that, because they had
cheerfully done their bit in the war, conditions for them would be
better. The reverse seemed to be true. There was one case, at least, in
which a returned Negro soldier was lynched because of the fact that
he wore the uniform of a United States soldier.”36
Langston Hughes captured the cynicism and anger of many black
spokespersons, not to mention ordinary African Americans, in a piece
he wrote in 1934 entitled “Negroes Speak of War”: “When the time
comes for the next war . . . remember the last war,” he wrote. “Does
any Negro believe . . . that the world was actually saved for Democ-
racy?” After the Chicago riots, the Washington, D.C., riots, the East
St. Louis riots, and the “lynched black workers hanging on trees all
around Tuskegee, . . . is it some foreign army needs to be fought?”

[W]hen the next war comes, I want to know whose war and why. . . . There’s
plenty of perils right here at home that needs attending to: what about those
labor unions that won’t admit Negroes? And . . . all them factories where I
can’t work even if there was work? And . . . the schools I can’t go to, and the
states I can’t vote in, and the juries I can’t sit on? . . . And what about a voice
in whose [sic] running this country and why – before I even think of crossing
the water and fighting again?

36 Johnson, Along This Way, 341 (emphasis in original).

 “Double V” 115

Who said I want to go to war? If I do, it ain’t the same war the President wants
to go to. No, sir, I been hanging on a rope in Alabama too long.37

A good part of the vehemence of the Double V campaign came from

a sense of the unfulfilled promises of World War I. The end of World
War II was to bring renewed frustration among African Americans,
and with it greater agitation and a new assertiveness.
I have cited the comments of the “liberal” editor Mark Ethridge
and an unnamed white mechanic from Macon, Georgia, on the sub-
ject of keeping blacks in their place. Many whites had openly expressed
the fear that, after the war, black soldiers would return with the idea
that now that they had fought for their country they were owed the
same rights as whites and that, because they had learned to use guns,
they would use them. “Negroes were the shock troops of the future
Jewish-communist revolution,” and “the Americans [sic] who had
died in Europe had not given their lives so that niggers could marry
American white women,” Emory Burke, president of a newly formed
fascist organization called the Columbians, told an Atlanta audi-
ence in November 1946. Eugene Talmadge, longtime governor of
Georgia; Frank M. Dixon, governor of Alabama until 1943; Senator
Theodore G. “The Man” Bilbo and Congressman John E. Rankin,
both from Mississippi; and other prominent white supremacists, made
the same point repeatedly.38
Not surprisingly, the end of the war in Europe and Asia brought
numerous aggravated racial clashes at home. There were many
instances of collective racial assaults in the Midwest and the North,
but the South – where 70% of the African American population still
lived – bore the brunt of the violence. “Race riots” were reported
from Columbia, Tennessee, in February 1946, and from various places
in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee

37 Langston Hughes, Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Writings of Langston

Hughes, ed. Faith Berry (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1992), 40–2.
38 J. Wayne Dudley, “‘Hate’ Organizations of the 1940s: The Columbians, Inc.,” Phy-
lon, 42, no. 3 (1981), 262, 268; and Norrell, The House I Live In, 143. See also
Manning Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and
Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2007); and Jason M. Ward, Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segre-
gationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936–1965 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
116 A History of Prejudice

between July and September, and there were other cases of serious
racial violence. Thus, to take a few examples from Georgia, a 21-
year-old military veteran was beaten up by a masked gang at Atlanta
Municipal Airport in February 1946. Willie Dudley, a member of the
American Federation of Labor, was flogged by four men wearing Ku
Klux Klan masks in June 1946 for his refusal to give up his trade union
work. Macio Snipes, a military veteran and the only African Ameri-
can in Taylor County who voted in the Democratic primary, was shot
dead while sitting on the porch at his home three days later, on July
20, 1946. He had not heeded the signs posted on many black churches
warning African Americans not to vote: “The First Nigger to Vote Will
Never Vote Again.”39
In the months of July and August 1946 alone, as many as nine
African Americans were lynched in the South, and there were almost
certainly other attacks that went unreported. Several of the incidents
made national headlines. One of the most widely publicized was the
case of the retired army sergeant Isaac Woodard, who was imprisoned,
beaten, and blinded by the police in Batesburg, South Carolina, while
he was on his way home from the war, for his temerity in asking
the bus driver to let him use the toilet when they stopped at a drug
store. Because Woodard was a veteran, because he was assaulted and
permanently blinded by an officer of the law, and because he survived
to tell the tale, writes Kari Frederickson, he became “an emblem” of
the racial order that still prevailed in America, especially in the South.40
A quadruple lynching that occurred in Georgia on July 25, 1946,
received something of the same national attention. On that day, a mob
of some twenty armed men lynched George Dorsey, a discharged sol-
dier recently returned after five years in the army, including service in
Australia and North Africa, along with his wife, Mae (or May) Murray
Dorsey, and his sister and brother-in-law, Dorothy and Roger Mal-
colm. Their bodies were riddled with dozens of bullets, and in one

39 Dudley, “‘Hate’ Organizations of the 1940s,” 263–4; Grant, The Way It Was in
the South, 366; Kari Frederickson, “‘The Slowest State’ and the ‘Most Backward
Community’: Racial Violence in South Carolina and Federal Civil-Rights Legislation,
1946–1948,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, 98, no. 2 (April 1997), 179–80;
Atlanta Constitution, July 26, 1946; and Atlanta Journal, July 27, 1946.
40 Frederickson, “‘The Slowest State’ and the ‘Most Backward Community,’” 184 and
passim.
 “Double V” 117

or two cases their faces blown up and unrecognizable. The murder of

the two couples at Moore’s Ford Bridge in Walton County, near the
town of Monroe, Georgia, was a return to a form of collective violence
that had apparently declined in the preceding years, even decades. It
was the first multiple lynching in Georgia since 1918, and one of the
instances in which women, too, were lynched. It may help to examine
the context and fallout of this event in some detail for what it tells us
about the contemporary stage of the struggle for democracy.41
Relying on the testimony of J. Loy Harrison, a prosperous white
farmer, who reported the lynching, local newspapers reconstructed
the sequence of events that led to the lynching as follows. Harrison
was driving the four African Americans back to his farm from Atlanta,
after having obtained the release of one of the men, Roger Malcolm,
on bail. By his account, his car was stopped and surrounded at the
wooden bridge spanning the Appalachee River, which divided Walton
and Oconee counties, and he was held at gunpoint while an armed mob
dragged the four men and women down a side road and blasted them
in three fusillades of shots from rifles and shotguns. The talk among
members of the crowd suggested that they had come for Roger. Seeing
two black men in the car, they seized both. When the women began
shouting and one of them evidently recognized one of the attack-
ers, they were pulled out as well. Harrison himself was spared, he
told investigators, because he did not recognize anyone among the
attackers.42
Malcolm had been arrested eleven days earlier for stabbing and
wounding Barney Hester, a young white man on whose farm he
worked as a sharecropper. The arrested man’s wife, Dorothy, worked
for Loy Harrison. She and her mother, who lived on his farm, entreated
Harrison to stand surety for Roger Malcolm and get him out of jail.
They persuaded him after considerable pleading. Harrison said he
agreed because he needed additional farmhands.43 On July 25, he took

41 I have assembled the “facts” in the following account on the basis of reports in the
Atlanta Daily World, Atlanta Constitution, and Atlanta Journal in July and August
1946. For a book-length reconstruction of the event and subsequent investigation,
see Laura Wexler, Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America (New
York: Scribner, 2003).
42 Atlanta Constitution, July 27, 1946; and Atlanta Journal, July 26, 1946.
43 Atlanta Journal, July 27, 1946.
118 A History of Prejudice

Dorothy Malcolm, her brother George, and George’s wife, Mae, to

Atlanta to obtain Roger Malcolm’s release. “I made bond for Malcolm
at the courthouse. I came outside and told the Negroes I’d pick them
up later on.”44 He did so three hours later – after repairs to his car,
he said – and then set off for his farm. They were waylaid en route.
Investigators suggested that the route chosen by Harrison was not the
most direct one to his farm. That he could not identify anyone in
the crowd of attackers and couldn’t remember the name of the man
Dorothy Malcolm had called by name may also suggest foul play.
However, local reports also suggested that he was an “unusually good
and . . . indulgent [landlord].”45 In any event, no one was able to bring
charges against him, or against anyone else, for any part in the crime –
in spite of offers of rewards totaling tens of thousands of dollars for
information leading to the apprehension of the criminals.46
Like Harrison, other residents of the habitations around Moore’s
Ford, black as well as white, retreated into silence after the lynching.
Major William E. Spence, Georgia’s Director of Public Safety, who was
put in charge of the investigation (working with the Georgia Bureau of
Investigation and a hurriedly summoned FBI), expressed total frustra-
tion: he was getting no cooperation from the citizens of the area, and
his forces couldn’t cope with the stonewalling. A letter to the editor
of the Atlanta Constitution from A. O. B. Bailey of Savannah, Geor-
gia, referring to Spence’s reported reaction, described a “conspiracy of
silence” among local inhabitants, flowing from the “terror” spread by
the perpetrators of the crime, and suggested “martial law,” “house-
to-house searches,” “the closest questioning [of] every male citizen in
the area affected,” and “a careful ballistics study . . . to determine the
guns from which the bullets found in the bodies were fired.”47
If there was resentment among the white inhabitants of the area,
there was fear among the poor, rural blacks. One group of visiting

44 Atlanta Constitution, July 28, 1946.

45 Atlanta Daily World, August 4, 1946.
46 It was estimated that the total reward offered for the apprehension of the culprits
by government and other organizations in Georgia and other states already totaled
$42,000; see Atlanta Journal, August 1, 1946.
47 Atlanta Constitution, July 28 and August 1, 1946. The phrase “conspiracy of silence”
comes from Stetson Kennedy, “Is the U.S. ready?” Atlanta Daily World, July 30,
1946.
 “Double V” 119

journalists wrote: “Fear has Walton County in its grips [sic]. Fear of
death, fear for relatives and kindred. Stark realization that to squawk
to the authorities means certain death. Fear that no one who has not
talked to these people of the Appalachee Valley and its environs can
imagine.”48 Black families, a later report said, were “frightened and
terrified” when approached by FBI agents. “One [white?] farmer fled
into a cotton field and had to be chased down, eventually telling an
investigator he had been warned not to talk.” Boyzie Daniels, a young
black man who had struggled to register black voters in the area,
recalled that the attempt to continue private investigations in the years
after 1946 generated fears among local blacks very like their fears in
registering to vote.49
For decades, Georgia had been dominated by conservative white
opinion in the countryside. Eugene Talmadge, famed for his raw
racism, had emerged as the symbol of this white power, serving as
governor of the state three times by 1942 and winning the election
again in 1946. The Democratic Party ruled pretty much unchallenged,
and state elections were largely determined by a whites-only Demo-
cratic primary. The poll tax qualification barred many poor whites
and most blacks from the privilege of voting, while a “county unit”
system reinforced a “politics of rural racism,” giving disproportionate
weight to small rural constituencies, in spite of dramatic growth in the
urban population. In 1946, Kevin Kruse notes, the 132 votes of rural
Chattanooga County carried the same weight as the 14,092 votes of
Atlanta city’s Fulton County.50 However, a number of developments
since the 1930s, and especially during the war, threatened to upset the
existing order of things.
Increased migration from the rural areas, new aspirations and agi-
tation generated by the war, continuous mobilization by the NAACP
and other organizations around injustices suffered and demands made
by blacks, and a number of local political developments in Georgia

48 Atlanta Daily World, August 4, 1946.

49 Wexler, Fire in a Canebrake, 231–2; Greg Bluestein, “Ex-governor Investigated in
1946 Lynchings” (Associated Press, updated June 15, 2007), http://www.msnbc.com/
id/19251476/; and Kathy Lohr, “FBI Re-examines 1946 Lynching Case” (July 25,
2006), http://www.npr.org/templates/story/Id=5579862.
50 Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 20–2.
120 A History of Prejudice

converged to produce new pressures on the government. In 1943,

Georgia had its first conviction of lynchers since the early 1920s: three
local law officials were sentenced to three years imprisonment and a
fine of $1,000 for beating a black prisoner to death while he was in
handcuffs, and the Supreme Court upheld the conviction in 1945. In
1945 also, Governor Arnall dropped the poll tax qualification for vot-
ing, in spite of earlier court approval for it in 1937. In October 1945,
following the Supreme Court’s pronouncement of the unconstitution-
ality of the practice in Texas the year before, Georgia’s whites-only
Democratic primary was invalidated; the ruling was confirmed by an
appeals court in March 1946.51
At the end of the war, with the proclaimed victory for the “forces
of democracy” abroad, these developments served to heighten black
expectations of democratic advances at home. Encouraged by the
determined efforts of the NAACP, as well as churches and other local
organizations and activists seeking to make an impact in the impend-
ing primary election for governor, 135,000 African Americans had
registered as voters by the summer of 1946. In the city of Atlanta,
African Americans now constituted 25% of the electorate, with the
number of registered black voters going up from 3,000 to 21,000.52
White supremacist and fascist elements (including a revived, if flail-
ing, Ku Klux Klan) of course fought back. With blacks voting, Eugene
Talmadge declared, the laws protecting our schools, hotels, trains,
even our women, would disappear. These laws had to be protected, if
necessary by force.53
Tempers let loose by the closely fought gubernatorial primary
clearly added to other causes of tension leading to the Moore’s Ford
violence. There were rumors that George Dorsey, recently returned
from the war, was “uppity” beyond his station, flirting with white
women, perhaps secretly dating one – just as there was a story that
Roger Malcolm had attacked Barney Hester because he suspected

51 For the preceding, see Kruse, White Flight, 23, 33; Grant, The Way It Was in the
South, 360–3; and Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women and
the Mob (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), chap. 5.
52 Grant, The Way It Was in the South, 364; and Kruse, White Flight, 23. It was
reported that 100,000 African Americans voted in the Georgia primary in July; see
Atlanta Daily World, August 16, 1946.
53 Kruse, White Flight, 24.
 “Double V” 121

Hester of making sexual advances toward his wife, Dorothy. Tal-

madge is reported to have visited Monroe a day after the fight in which
Malcolm wounded Hester. He met the brother of the stabbed farmer
and apparently offered immunity to anyone who “took care of the
negro.” His visit was connected with the Democratic Party primary,
which was held two days later: Walton and other small rural counties
were critical in the election.54 Several days afterward, reporters saw a
car at the scene of the Moore’s Ford lynchings with a sticker that said
“Elect Talmadge, he keeps his promises.” And Talmadge himself, on
a post-primary vacation in the West, when told of the July 25 mas-
sacre, offered no more than the comment “Such incidents are to be
regretted.”55
Under the circumstances, there was widespread fear in Monroe and
its environs in the aftermath of the lynching, especially with Talmadge
winning the primary (and hence, effectively, reelection as governor).
The fear even affected the funeral services that were held for the Dorsey
and Malcolm couples. In the case of George Dorsey and his sister
Dorothy Malcolm, relatives and family members failed to appear at
the time of the church service in the town of Bishop. They were “too
scared,” and the ceremony had to be delayed until a few of them could
be assembled.56 However, as the preceding account indicates, that fear
was now only one part of the social and political equation.

The Everyday of “America”

Three words appear again and again in the long and animated debates
surrounding the violence of these years (at home and abroad): Chris-
tianity, civilization, and democracy. To these we might add the cluster
America, American, and un-American, into which they were often
translated. The nation was on trial. The denial of justice to its African
American minority, and especially to its returned African American
military heroes, was un-Christian, uncivilized, and undemocratic; in
a word, un-American. This was not the language of churches and

54 Apel, Imagery of Lynching, 169; Kruse, White Flight, 24; Grant, The Way It Was
in the South, 366; Lohr, “FBI Re-examines 1946 Lynching Case”; and Bluestein,
“Ex-governor Investigated in 1946 Lynchings.”
55 Atlanta Daily World, August 4, 1946; and Atlanta Journal, July 27, 1946.
56 Atlanta Daily World, July 30, 1946; and Atlanta Constitution, July 29, 1946.
122 A History of Prejudice

ministers alone; it was also the “secular” language of the young nation
of pilgrims established on these shores not so long ago, a nation that
had pledged to welcome all comers, all hard-working and God-fearing
men (and with them women), into what was to be a bastion of democ-
racy and the land of the free.57 African Americans, liberal whites, and
even some conservative white politicians were now forced to think
of the concept of “America” in a new, more challenging, and more
international context.
James Weldon Johnson had written in 1933 of how the fight against
southern racism, lynching, and Jim Crow was a fight to save “black
America’s body and white America’s soul.” The poet Langston Hughes
wrote five years later of the need to convert America to “American-
ism”: “O, let America be America again – The land that never has been
yet – And yet must be. . . . ” And further: “O, yes, – I say it plain, –
America never was America to me, – And yet I swear this oath –
America will be!” He reiterated the sentiment many times during the
war, and at its termination in 1945. The call to “make America mean
what America is supposed to mean”58 was more open and widespread
now than ever before.
“When a Mayor and a City Marshal can take a negro Sergeant off
a bus in South Carolina, beat him up and put out one of his eyes, and
nothing is done about it by the State authorities, something is radi-
cally wrong with the system,” President Harry S. Truman, no great
champion of the rights of the common people, declared. Even J. Strom

57 Cf. Gunnar Myrdal’s comments on what he, following many others, called the Amer-
ican Creed – Christianity, civilization, and democracy; liberty and equality (and, one
might add, private, individual enterprise, which supposedly depended on the former
two). “Americans” continuously invoked the Creed, Myrdal observed, “lamenting
[the nation’s] want of conformity to it”; it represented “the national conscience.” See
Myrdal, American Dilemma, vol. 1, 22, 23. Du Bois had made the same kind of point
as early as 1903: “Deeply religious and intensely democratic as are the mass of the
whites, they feel acutely the false position in which the Negro problems place them.
Such an essentially honest-hearted and generous people cannot cite the caste-levelling
precepts of Christianity, or believe in equality of opportunity for all men, without
coming to feel more and more with each generation that the present drawing of the
color-line is a flat contradiction to their beliefs and professions”; see Du Bois, Souls
of Black Folk, 207–8.
58 Johnson, Along This Way, 318; Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again”
(1938), emphases added; and Hughes in Chicago Defender, June 23, 1945. See also
Langston Hughes, “My America” (1944), in Marable and Mullings, Let Nobody
Turn Us Around, 280–6.
 “Double V” 123

Thurmond, governor of South Carolina from 1947, himself a war

veteran, was moved to say that “mob rule” was “against every prin-
ciple for which we have so recently sacrificed so much.” And Colonel
William H. Davies of Newton, Massachusetts, wrote to the Atlanta
Constitution in August 1946: “After over three and a half years over-
seas in England, France, Luxembourg and Germany with soldiers from
all over our nation who thought they were fighting for something that
Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln stood for, my heart sickens when
I wonder how our friends and enemies will construe the ghastly hap-
penings at Monroe.”59
Protests over the Monroe lynchings occurred in New York, Philadel-
phia, San Francisco, and Chicago, along with extensive coverage in the
national and international press, and determined efforts at organiza-
tion, education, and mobilization around the issue by black churches,
schools, and numerous community organizations that could only be
described as being deeply invested in civil rights. There was evidence
of a sharp urban–rural divide. With the increasingly urban character
of the black population all over the US, this meant that there was con-
siderable protest activity, even in Georgia and other southern states.
William F. Knowland, Republican senator from California, touched
off an angry Senate debate when he condemned the Moore’s Ford
lynchings and insisted on inserting a news dispatch about the inci-
dent in the Congressional Record (violating state rights, as various
southern senators charged). More than 5,000 people “of both races”
assembled in Chicago, under the banner of a Citizens’ Protest Com-
mittee, and contributed $1,555 on the spot to build pressure for fed-
eral government action to apprehend the lynchers. A group of 700
women delegates in Washington to attend the Golden Jubilee Con-
vention of the National Association of Colored Women marched in
silent protest, holding up banners that said: “America Our Home: Let
It Be Known” (Georgia); “Can a Great Nation Afford Lynching?”
(Wisconsin); “Down with Lynching. Practice Democracy” and “We
Beat Hitler’s Mob; Can’t We Win at Home?” (District of Columbia).
Forty national organizations, meeting in Washington at the initiative of
the NAACP, called for united opposition and established a committee

59 See Frederickson, “‘The Slowest State’ and the ‘Most Backward Community,’” 184,
189; and Atlanta Constitution, August 6, 1946.
124 A History of Prejudice

to plan “direct action” against the rising tide of interracial violence.

This gathering was addressed among others by the NAACP leaders
Arthur B. Spingarn and Walter White; by Isaac Woodard, the war
veteran whose beating and blinding in South Carolina had become
a cause célèbre in the national press; and Oliver Harrington, pub-
lic relations counsel and former war correspondent of the Pittsburgh
Courier, who declared that “the Georgia lynchings were . . . part of the
highly organized conspiracy to ‘put the returned Negro veteran in his
place.’”60
President Truman had instructed the civil rights section of his Justice
Department to aid the local investigation in every way it could. This
was judged by many as being not nearly enough. Calls for federal
intervention – and for making lynching a federal offense – came from
various quarters, in Georgia as well as outside. “I’m going to ask the
Governor to appeal to every Congressman to help pass Federal legis-
lation against mob violence,” the director of public safety in Georgia,
Major Spence, said within days of taking charge of the investigation.
New York Representative Democrat Arthur G. Klein and American
Labor’s Vito Marcantonio, the Negro Newspaper Publishers’ Associ-
ation in Chicago, leaders of the National Negro Congress, and many
others urged direct federal intervention, including the dispatch of
federal troops. Klein expressed a common sentiment in saying that
something had to be done by the federal government: “[I]t is obvi-
ous that we cannot depend upon the state authorities in Georgia and
Mississippi.”61
In Georgia, numerous individuals and groups, churches, civic asso-
ciations, newspaper editors, and college teachers in Atlanta and other
towns expressed their sense of outrage and shame. Churches all over
the state – in Atlanta, Athens, and Valdosta, as well as the First
Methodist Church in Monroe – spoke out against this barbaric and un-
Christian act. The editors of the Atlanta Constitution wrote repeatedly
and urgently of the need for the protection of the constitutional rights
of all citizens. Until elementary justice and human dignity was estab-
lished, said Ralph McGill, the South will continue to be “a national

60 Atlanta Journal, July 28, 1946; and Atlanta Daily World, August 6, 7, and 14, 1946.
The quotation from Harrington appears in Apel, Imagery of Lynching, 170.
61 Atlanta Constitution, July 27, 28, and 30, 1946; and Atlanta Journal, July 30, 1946.
 “Double V” 125

story . . . with more than 40 of the nation’s 48 states looking at us with

fear and wondering, with our deeds recited to the nations of the world
who join in condemning them.” “It is easy to be courageous about
what is the matter with China,” Wright Bryant, editor of the Atlanta
Journal, told the Carolinas Advertising Executives Association, “but
somewhat more difficult when the editor speaks about controversial
issues on his own doorstep.”62
The Atlanta Daily World carried on an even more sustained and vig-
orous campaign to bring about justice. The newspaper was at the fore
in publicizing the national and international outcry against the quadru-
ple lynching and the wide-ranging protests that followed in Georgia
and elsewhere – as a mere sampling of headlines in the first half of
August indicates: “Wheat Street Meet Tonite To Aid Lynching Fam-
ilies. Statewide Plans for Funds to be Launched Tonite” (August 1);
“U.S. Officials Probing Klan Activities” (August 1); “World Reporters
Revisit Lynch Scene” (August 4); “Church Lethargy Seen in Monroe
Lynchings,” a report on a statement issued by a gathering of Protes-
tant ministers in New York (August 6); “700 Women Marched in
Lynch Protest Parade” in Washington, D.C. (August 6); “Protests to
Georgia Lynchings Continue” in Chicago and Philadelphia (August 7);
“National Organization Plans Joint Action on Wave of Terror in
South” (August 14); “Big Wheat Street Mass-Meet Tonite” (August 16).
It joined the call for new kinds of government action, demanding the
immediate establishment of one or more Negro units of the National
Guard in the state, for instance. It also participated actively in the drive
for funds to aid the criminal investigation and prevent attacks of this
kind in the future, declaring on August 16, the day of a long-planned
mass meeting at the Wheat Street Baptist Church in Atlanta: “There
is nothing which should prevent those 100,000 Negroes who voted in
the Georgia primary last July 17 from . . . giving One Dollar each to
make life and limb safe for them and their families.”63
In and around Monroe, Georgia, while a few church leaders and
individuals spoke out, there was too much fear for any large-scale
protest to be mounted. Many relatives of the victims stayed away from

62 Atlanta Journal, July 29, 1946; Atlanta Constitution, August 3, 1946; and issues for
late July and early August generally.
63 Atlanta Daily World, August 16 and 18, 1946, and issues from July 27 onward.
126 A History of Prejudice

(a) (b)
figure 2. (a) Lynching of John William (Willie) Clark, Cartersville, Geor-
gia, September 1930 (African American Photograph Collection, Box 1,
Folder 17; courtesy – Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Library, Emory
University); (b) Funeral of George Dorsey, Monroe, Georgia, July 1946
(
C Bettmann/CORBIS; courtesy Corbis Images, New York)

the funerals, as I have mentioned. Yet for those who attended there
were significant new signs, beginning with the way in which George
Dorsey’s body was prepared for burial. As Dora Apel has noted,
the photograph of the lynching that was most widely circulated in
the national press showed not contorted and terrified faces but the
body of the “fallen soldier” draped in an American flag (Figure 2).
“The abject black body of the lynching victim, usually stripped or
clothed in rags, was reimagined as a military hero lying in uniform, a
citizen of the nation.”64 The wheel appeared to have come full circle.

Difference Redefined

Given the context of the Double V campaign, the authorities in Georgia

were pushed into a more democratic and antiracist stance in the years
after the war. William Hartsfield, mayor of its capital city, Atlanta,
was soon making symbolically significant concessions in the course of

64 Apel, Imagery of Lynching, 170; see also 166.

 “Double V” 127

establishing the first genuinely biracial political base for the mainte-
nance of his power in the city. In 1948, he appointed the city’s first
black policemen: eight were appointed in March of that year, even if
their beat was restricted to the African American neighborhoods. By
1950, with over a third of Atlanta’s population now black, streetlights
appeared on Auburn Avenue, the major black business district, and
Hartsfield directed city officials to address black residents as “Mr. __”
and “Mrs. __” in all communications. In 1951, when the NAACP held
its national convention in Atlanta, he enthusiastically presided over the
opening ceremonies. And an attempt by Herman Talmadge, Eugene’s
son and anointed successor, to restore the whites-only Democratic pri-
mary in Georgia in 1947 was defeated by an alliance of black political
organizations and black and white churches, which pronounced the
plan “contrary to the teachings of Jesus Christ.”65
New positions were adopted at the national level, too. The outbreak
of egregious interracial violence in the United States in the wake of
the war to make the world safe for freedom and democracy, and
the NAACP’s nationwide campaign to publicize the attacks and call
for justice, compelled Truman to appoint a President’s Committee on
Civil Rights in 1946 to suggest means of strengthening the capacity
of government, at federal, state, and local levels, to safeguard the civil
rights of the people.66 Indeed, civil rights became a central political
issue during the presidential election of 1948. The 1950s and ’60s
would see that centrality further underlined. But the chief lines of the
argument had been clearly established in the campaign for Double
Victory in the 1940s – the “decisive first phase” of the Long Civil
Rights Movement, as one historian has described it.67
The African American claim to equal citizenship during and after
the Second World War was based on an argument of sameness –
an equivalence in individual potential, ownership, responsibility, and
duty that was imputed to all inhabitants, irrespective of race, color,
or continent of origin (although not as yet education and gender).
We are as American, as nationalist, as masculine, as fine at war, the

65 Kruse, White Flight, 34, 36, 38; and Grant, The Way It Was in the South, 366–7.
66 Executive Order 9808 – Establishing the President’s Committee on Civil Rights,
December 5, 1946.
67 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of
the Past,” Journal of American History (March 2005), 1245.
128 A History of Prejudice

argument seemed to go, as any white American. Yet, if the proposition

was that black Americans were not to be denied the right to work,
to serve in the military and therefore to vote, to freely enter public
parks and restaurants, and to share in decision making on the grounds
of the universal claims of American Democracy, the rhetoric of the
struggle seemed to suggest that it was only half of the African American
population that was directly concerned. It was men whose citizenly
rights were at issue: black men who had served in the military overseas
and at home, a black messman who responded to the Japanese attack
on American naval ships berthed at Pearl Harbor, black men who were
segregated in military training camps and residential quarters, men
who were maimed or killed in battle, men who returned as veterans
still to be denied the right to travel freely on public buses or to exercise
the right to vote. Even the work of women in the auxiliary services of
the military seemed to be overlooked.
Curiously, black women were often presented as appearing only in
the wings of this unfolding political drama – as supporters, as mothers,
as mourners at the grave of the soldier killed in battle; in other words,
as reproducers of the citizen and the military hero (black no less than
white), not as military personnel, which many of them were, or activists
in their own right. Even after the Second World War, when the focus of
the protest against anti-black violence shifted “from the tortured body
of the black male to the person of the grieving mother,” as Apel argues
in her analysis of the imagery of lynching, it was still a mother grieving
over the fallen soldier, the war hero who had done his all for the
nation and democracy. Emmett Till’s mother was cast as a war widow
in 1955, Emmett Till himself as the son of an American soldier.68
It is notable in this context that in explaining his issuance of Exec-
utive Order 9808 establishing the Presidential Committee on Civil
Rights, Truman highlighted the shameful fact that “even women” were
lynched in Monroe, Georgia. Although a number of women had been
lynched earlier without any such reaction, the lynching of women was
now declared to be simply unacceptable.69 In illustration of another

68 Apel, Imagery of Lynching, 185–8. For details of the Emmett Till lynching in Mis-
sissippi in 1955, see Norrell, The House I Live In, 174–5.
69 New York Times, December 6, 1946. Close to 200 women were lynched in the South
between 1880 and 1930; see Crystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the
Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
 “Double V” 129

facet of American, “frontier society” masculinism, women, even black

women, were presented as deserving of protection by the men. That
was why, as a white Mississippi man put it in 1920, women should
never have the right to vote, even if black men had had it theoretically
since Emancipation: “We are not afraid to maul a black man over
the head if he dares to vote, but we can’t treat women, even black
women, that way. No, we’ll allow no woman suffrage.”70 Needless to
say, the raping, mauling, and physical chastisement of black women
continued, unhindered by this twisted patriarchal racial logic.
The discourse of nations and of recognized (“public”) political
affairs has long been masculinist. So was the idiom of the African
American struggle, well into the period of formal civil rights and Black
Power in the 1960s and ’70s. Publicly at any rate, few commentators
invoked what Pauli Murray describes as the “heroic, but formidable”
black woman, standing shoulder to shoulder or even one step ahead of
the men in every phase of the struggle, and “exhorting her children and
grandchildren to overcome every obstacle and humiliation and to ‘Be
somebody!’”71 Recall Sojourner Truth and Ida B.Wells, but also the
large number of African American women who served in the armed
forces during the war and the unnamed woman who urged African
Americans to throw 50,000 demonstrators around the White House
before Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802.
There was little questioning, too, of militarism and the need for
military action – in near and distant lands – in the service of the nation.
With Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the rise of the anti–Vietnam War
campaign, some of this would change. And with the emergence of a
powerful new body of black women as public spokespersons, writers,

70 Cited in Christine Stansell, “A Forgotten Fight for Suffrage,” New York Times,
August 25, 2010. Note that the ratification of the nineteenth amendment to the U.S.
Constitution, giving women the right to vote, was almost brought to a halt in 1920
by nine southern states and Delaware. It finally obtained ratification by the required
two-thirds majority of state legislatures when Tennessee accepted the amendment by
one vote, a legislator changing his mind at the last minute on account, as he said,
of his mother. Nine southern states did not ratify the amendment until the 1940s
or later: Maryland in 1941; Virginia and Alabama in 1952 and 1953, respectively;
Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and North and South Carolina between 1969 and 1971;
and Mississippi not until 1984.
71 Pauli Murray, “The Liberation of Black Women,” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of
African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: The New
Press, 1995), 186.
130 A History of Prejudice

and interpreters, another stage would open up in the reconstruction

of American democracy – beginning with the notion of politics itself,
which could no longer automatically exclude the domestic and the
personal. I examine some of these issues in the next chapter, on an
“ordinary” African American woman’s reconstruction of her life and
struggles through this period.
 5

An African American Autobiography

Relocating Difference

In focusing this chapter on the reminiscences of a relatively unknown

woman, mother, sharecropper, seamstress, writer, and religious edu-
cator from Georgia, Viola Perryman Andrews, who began writing in
the era of the civil rights struggle, my purpose is more than simply
to document another (“hidden”) aspect of African American history.
It is rather to identify two different kinds of history, or perhaps one
should say two different perspectives on the history of prejudice and
difference, and the attendant matter of civil (civic) rights.
Recall in this context my proposition that the prejudice of the mod-
ern requires us to speak in a standard, recognizable idiom, and a
standard recognizable manner, to have our words (ourselves?) deemed
worthy of attention. I juxtapose an analysis of Viola Andrews’s per-
sonal account with the analysis of the more public accounts presented
in the last chapter precisely because these narratives are constructed
very differently and seem at first sight (as I stated in the Introduc-
tion) to talk past each other, apparently unable or unwilling to engage
one another. In fact, as I shall show, they speak of many of the same
issues: of racial privilege and prejudice, of unequal access to resources
and opportunities, of the daily struggle to survive and maintain one’s
dignity. For all that, they speak in rather different voices, with rather
different emphases.
Autobiography is history for many sections of the world’s peo-
ple who have not had ready entry into the historical academy and
national archives: women, blacks, Dalits, and leaders and participants

131
132 A History of Prejudice

in all kinds of anticolonial struggles. Across the globe, a good deal

of subaltern history-writing has taken the form of life-story, memoir,
autobiography, or testimony, as it has variously been called. Analysts
have pointed to the distance between the collective and the individ-
ual “I” – the difference between the self found in bourgeois (male)
autobiographies and memoirs and the community/self that emerges in
subaltern life-stories – as the critical difference between classical and
subaltern autobiography.1 “The ‘I’ in black women’s autobiographies
often reflects an ‘I’ that is not simply of this world,” writes Johnnie M.
Stover, “but exists as a connection between community, individual,
and God.”2 Indeed, subaltern and bourgeois life-writings have been
seen as oppositional, working to divergent ends in dissimilar worlds.
On the one hand is bourgeois autobiography, an articulation of the
self in the sense not so much of the display as the very production of
a subject and an interiority; on the other is what might be described
as subaltern community memoir – a “collective” autobiography, in
which the self is less self-centered and egotistical and autobiography
also serves as history.
It is important to note that academic and market perceptions and
classifications work to underscore untouchability, slavery, humilia-
tion, immiserization, and the struggle to overcome them as the chief
conditions of subaltern life and history. When black, ex-slave, ex-
Untouchable, or other subaltern elements are offered a chance “to
speak for themselves” in the wider economic and cultural market, as
it were, it seems clear that there is a preferred, not to say prescribed,
language in which they must construct their narratives in order to be
published and read widely. African American autobiographical writing
becomes a part of something described as Black Literature or Black
Studies, as Dalit writings become part of Dalit Studies: a new ver-
sion of area studies, one might say – exotic and uplifting at the same

1 Joanne Braxton, Black Women Writing Autobiography (Philadelphia: Temple Uni-

versity Press, 1989), 19; Gopal Guru, “Afterword,” in Kamble, Prisons We Broke;
Debjani Ganguly, “Pain, Personhood and the Collective: Dalit Life Narratives,” Asian
Studies Review, 33, no. 4 (December 2009), 433. Sharmila Rege advocates the con-
venient terms “life-narrative” and “life-writing” for subaltern writings in the auto-
biographical mode; see her explanation of their advantage in Rege, Writing Caste/
Writing Gender, n7 and 1–15.
2 Johnnie Stover, Rhetoric and Resistance in Black Women’s Autobiography
(Gainesville: University of Florida, 2003), 5; cf. 30–1.
 An African American Autobiography 133

time – and not simply another aspect, or new dimension, of literature,

autobiography, and memoir.
Hence, while there is force in the argument that subalternist life-
writing recounts the tale not of an unusual or unique individual but
the story of a subaltern community in general, the proposition calls
for further reflection. It is fair to say that the articulation of the self
and the will that is found in such writings is seldom flamboyantly
autonomous. What we encounter here is a more social, fragmented,
and searching “I” than that of the imagined, self-generated, and self-
perpetuating human subject of the Enlightenment: an interiority and a
self produced in constrained, often damaging, conditions – something
that male, upper-class, bourgeois autobiography never acknowledges
in full. Yet, even in the case of the latter, the writing itself is often fairly
equivocal about the possibility of self-possession. The suggested oppo-
sition between individualist and collectivist, bourgeois and subaltern,
genres of life-writing may not then be as straightforward as it seems at
first sight.
The composition of the self, and the “community” (or world) in
which it is located, is decidedly complex in every case. In spite of their
differences, as one scholar has noted, both subaltern and classical,
or bourgeois, autobiographies seem to share an aspiration to recover
the personhood of the protagonist/victim-rebel, an aspiration that is
“articulated in the language of ‘rights’ squarely based on a conception
of the ‘individual.’” Thus many subaltern autobiographies and mem-
oirs join the political quest for equal citizenship, even as they recognize
the impossibility of that quest given what Debjani Ganguly calls the
inability of the ideal (with its logic of abstract equivalence) “to address
the singular nature of Dalit [or African American, or women’s] pain.”3
I attempt to push the question of the articulation of the “singular
nature of [subaltern] pain” further in the following pages through a
close investigation of the contexts and modes of a number of Dalit and
African American “autobiographies,” beginning in this chapter with
the voluminous autobiographical writings of Viola Andrews: jottings
and life-narrative, letters and fables, “fictional” and “non-fictional.”4

3 Ganguly, “Pain, Personhood and the Collective,” 433.

4 The writings are held in the Emory University Manuscripts and Rare Books Library
(MARBL), Mss 813, Viola Andrews collection. The holdings also include manuscript
134 A History of Prejudice

It is hardly necessary to underscore the enormous variation in individ-

ual lives and perspectives in the lives of African American women in
the South as of any other section of a society or people. Viola Andrews
is not Zora Neale Hurston or Alice Walker, to take the example of two
southern women who will reappear later in this chapter. Alice Walker,
again, isn’t Zora Neale Hurston (or Fannie Lou Hamer, or Rosa Parks):
she doesn’t write like Zora and doesn’t follow her political manners,
in spite of her extraordinary admiration for Zora. Viola, then, is not
“everywoman” of the South, or for that matter every laboring black
woman who escaped from the rural South in the Jim Crow era of
the early and mid-twentieth century. Nevertheless, what she has to say
about her life and times, her particular circumstances, and her struggles
has a great deal to tell us about the broader history of African Ameri-
cans in twentieth-century America – and not just the South, as the last
chapter will have reminded us. Through a juxtaposition of her story,
as told by herself, with the more widely known story of public encoun-
ters, as told by newspapers, public persons, and political activists in the
course of the African American struggle, I draw attention to an “inner
life” of race and caste conflict, positing this inner life not as a counter
to some alleged “outer life” but aiming through it to give the history
of race (and caste and gender) – that is to say, of race and caste and
gender prejudice, and their consequences – a greater depth and density.

Accessing the “Inner Life”

The issue of the inner experience of historical subjects has been

invoked frequently in the ongoing debate on the black freedom struggle
and twentieth-century American politics more generally. Thus, Julius
Lester criticized William Julius Wilson’s important revisionist work
The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American
Institutions, published in 1978, for being “divorced from the inner
experience of blacks. It relies on economic data, omitting the experi-
ences of the people the data represent.”5 Making much the same point,

correspondence between Viola and several of her children, as well as Viola’s “fictional”
writings, interviews, and documentation of other notable events.
5 Julius Lester, “The Mark of Race,” The Civil Liberties Review, 5, no. 4 (January–
February 1979), 117.
 An African American Autobiography 135

a reviewer of Thomas J. Sugrue’s recent study Sweet Land of Liberty:

The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North argues that “Sweet
Land’s activists analyze their dilemmas in a cultural and emotional
vacuum; they can seem like walking position papers.” The challenge is
to “animate those damning statistics, and the lives of those who strug-
gled against them.”6 Note that these criticisms are made here even in
the case of works that do not set out to chart the realm of interiority.
By contrast, other historians have directly attended to the issue of the
inner life and how that is affected when groups like African Americans
(or Dalits) are treated as a problem rather than a people. Prominent
among them are Darlene Clark Hine, who writes of black women cre-
ating an “appearance of openness and disclosure” that “shielded the
truth of their inner lives,” and Nell Irvin Painter, who has focused, in
a succession of studies on the American South, on “what historians
usually gloss over: personal violence and its psychological sequelae.”7
My exploration of a relatively unknown – and in that sense “ordi-
nary” – African American woman’s life-story in the twentieth-century
American South follows from the preceding critiques. That South is
often seen as the counterpoint to America as the fabled land of lib-
erty and democracy. Bible belt, province of slavery, conservatism, and
the traditional family, strictly controlling sexuality and sin (among the
subordinated), the South has also become a symbol for certain endur-
ing old world values – loyalty, obedience, faith, forbearance – clearly
related to notions of the proper ordering of society and the appropri-
ate positions of different classes and races. These principles are neatly,
if unconsciously, captured in a widespread common sense about the
place of a woman, not least her duty to reproduce children and tradi-
tion, submission, and obedience, or what one historian has called “the
core values of slavery” and “the key words of patriarchy and piety.”8

6 Scott Saul, “Off Camera,” The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090622/

saul).
7 Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West:
Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” Signs: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society, 14, no. 4 (1989), 912; Hine, Hine Sight, 37–47; and Nell Irvin
Painter, Southern History across the Color Line (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2002), 10.
8 Painter, Southern History across the Color Line, 18; see also 93–133 and passim. For
a wide-ranging exploration of the idea of southern exceptionalism, see Lassiter and
Crespino, The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism.
136 A History of Prejudice

How do these values and principles affect the inner lives of specific
historical actors in the century after the formal abolition of slavery?
I consider the autobiographical writings of Viola Andrews to com-
plicate what might be seen as commonsense answers to this question.
I ask what her telling of her life teaches us about black women in
the southern states of the US in the first half of the twentieth century,
disenfranchised as they were in sundry ways, the demands placed on
women as mothers, and the inheritances (social, familial, and spir-
itual, as well as material) that women worked with. A number of
themes stand out in Viola’s manuscript autobiography: the struggle
against want (economic, political, and cultural), black/white relations,
and patriarchy (or, more precisely, a woman’s struggle in a patriar-
chal world). Underlying it all is her extraordinary faith in the Word
of the Lord, and an unyielding determination. We are left with a story
of an unlikely heroine’s quest to fashion a new life for her children
(and latterly herself), told by the woman and several of her children.
Through an analysis of Viola’s writings, I seek to examine what one
might call the less explored, “intimate” aspects of racial and sexual
subordination, race relations, and patriarchal power in the Jim Crow
South – and thereby the politics of race and prejudice.
The generosity of several of Viola’s children emboldens me to pub-
lish this reflection on her life: they responded to an earlier draft by
thanking me for introducing their “real” mother to them and helping
them to see her “not just as [a] mother but even more so as a woman.”
“Through your . . . writing,” says Veronica, now in her 60s, “she has
come across as a real person to me as opposed to this heroic bearer
of countless burdens of almost mythic proportions that I was told
about over the years by her and my older brothers and sisters.”9 That
response, and Viola’s own writings, resist any assimilation of this life
into the simple category of the “mythical, heroic, transcendent black
woman,”10 or the downtrodden and helpless victim, and point to a
more recalcitrant, and inventive, working through of the unevenness
and mutual crisis between citizenship and subalternity.11

9 E-mail from Shirley Lowrie, July 28, 2009; letters from Deloris Andrews and Veronica
Villa, January 5 and 6, 2010.
10 Hine, Hine Sight, 38, 51, 52.
11 I elaborate the point about the relationship between citizenship and subalternity in
“The Subaltern as Subaltern Citizen,” Introduction to Pandey, Subaltern Citizens
and Their Histories, 1–12.
 An African American Autobiography 137

My account of Viola’s life and work is bookended as it were by the

writings and reflections of two great heroes of contemporary black and
feminist history, Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) and Alice Walker
(1944–), who are at one with her in their sharp critique of patriarchy,
racism, and hypocrisy, as well as pride in their race and individual
development. However, Viola probably knew little or nothing about
the other two, and Zora and Alice almost certainly knew/know noth-
ing about her. In making this somewhat surprising juxtaposition, my
purpose is not to provide an analysis or comparison of the autobio-
graphical writings of these three women or an indication of possible
influences one way or another. I am responding instead to a rather
different invitation that I see in Hurston’s and Walker’s work: the
invitation to examine the everyday, unnoticed, yet remarkable strug-
gles of ordinary, “everyday” people.
Alice Walker has written eulogistically of Zora Neale Hurston – as
we might write of Alice Walker – praising her fierce independence,
individuality, creativity, stardom (reckless, individualistic, brilliant,
“genius of the South”). Viola Andrews doesn’t belong to the club
of famous women. Nevertheless, her still unpublished autobiography
and the greater ordinariness of her story may be of some interest in
the context of Hurston’s and Langston Hughes’s (and Walker’s) cele-
bration of the “common people,” “the man farthest down.”12 Indeed,
Viola’s story seems to me to be a very good example of what Hurston
once called America’s “best-kept secret,” “the average, struggling, non-
morbid Negro.”13
Several features of her autobiography illustrate the point. Most
people who write autobiographies, or are invited to write autobiogra-
phies, men as well as women, are already distinguished in public view
or appear alternatively as examples of a wider and noteworthy politi-
cal struggle. Viola Andrews’s life story fits neither of these categories.
It is unusual in being, professedly, a mother’s narrative. The subject
of this autobiography is perhaps best known outside her family and
local community in Atlanta and Madison, Georgia, as the mother
of two prominent African American artists, the painter and activist
Benny Andrews and the writer Raymond Andrews. Her life as she
tells it is that of a mother continuously, obsessively, unforgivingly

12 Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 235.

13 Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 406.
138 A History of Prejudice

committed to lifting up her children – and only late in life herself, her
writing, and her career. Hence her comment on her artist sons Benny
and Ray’s reactions on their reading the first portions of her auto-
biography – “‘I did not know that,’ what did you mean? You did not
know that I was once young or I was an individual or what?” – and
her comment on the art critics and admirers who greeted her with
astonishment at Benny’s first solo exhibition at the High Museum in
Atlanta in January 1975: “No one had any idea that you Benny had
a Mother. . . . Several talked with me and could not comprehend you
having a Mother! Next! They wanted to know what did I do the reason
you are an artist!”14
Many black autobiographies emerged out of the growing African
American struggle against white privilege, slavery, and segregation.
Yet, even though she begins writing at the height of the civil rights
movement in one of its most important headquarters, and writes
throughout those tumultuous years, Viola Andrews claims to pay little
attention to race politics. “The reader may wonder,” she interrupts her
writing, begun in 1963, to say in 1979, “why I am not writing about
Race Relations. I am writing as I knew and saw it then and there.
In our community, all the colored owned or rented their land . . . ,”
by which she refers to the fact that large numbers of blacks in the
rural South could do neither: “I was young and I knew nothing about
Race Relationship.”15 We shall have an opportunity to consider what
she meant by this, for much of what Viola writes about is in fact
black/white relations. However, one point is clear: for her, the theme
of her narrative is her family and its struggle to make good in an
exceptionally difficult environment.
Alice Walker says of Zora Neale Hurston’s work: “it spoke the
language I’d heard the elders speaking all my life . . . and she did not
condescend to them, and she did not apologize for them, and she was
them, delightedly.”16 In Viola Andrews’s case, it seems to me, there
is a small but significant difference. This isn’t the language the author
hears the elders speaking as she grows up, or one she remembers and
recovers as she moves away from, and later returns to, the “elders”; not

14 MARBL, Benny Andrews Papers, Mss 845, Box 115, Viola’s letters to Benny and
Mary, January 7 and 22, 1975.
15 MARBL, Viola Andrews Papers, Mss 813, Box 17, FF9.
16 Alice Walker, Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism (New York:
Random House, 1997), 46.
 An African American Autobiography 139

the position of the insider/outsider that Zora and Alice inhabit. This is
the “insiders,” the “elders,” speaking for themselves, as they and their
children negotiate the “outside” and grow away from themselves into
other selves.
In a note inserted at more than one place in her manuscript auto-
biography, Viola insisted that the character of her writing, even the
untutored and unpolished prose, should not be changed if these words
were ever published.
I want my biography to be – to remain on the level of the day and the time and
the place which it was written. That will make it more interesting. . . . Some of
my paragraphs are kinda jumble: its okay to re arrange the words: if you do
not put my biography on a higer level.

P.S. please, please do not change it and put it on your Academic Intellectual
Level, please. It will not be me (mine) if you do: it will be yours. [June? 1978]17

Her autobiography has not yet been published. And I only hope that my
reflections on her writing, and the extracts I cite here, retain something
of the “kinda jumble” that she presented as her life and times.

Echoes of a Life in the South

Viola Andrews lived from 1912 to 2006. She was the sixth child in
a relatively comfortable farming family of Morgan County, Georgia,
which was of mixed black, white, and Indian heritage and part of
“a nice prosperous community so far as the coloreds were consid-
ered” in that they owned and/or rented their land.18 Her parents,
John Crawford and Lula Allison Perryman, were forward-looking, and
determined that their children would obtain education (and salvation)
and never become wage-hands. But the severe economic downturn of

17 MARBL, Mss 813, Box 19, FF 8 (emphasis original). In citing from Viola Andrews’s
autobiographical manuscripts in the following pages, I have kept footnotes brief since
the writings are full of repetition and have several different sequences of numbers, as
well as several pages inserted at many points in the form of additional material for
particular phases of Viola’s life.
18 The information and quotations in this paragraph and the next come from sev-
eral folders in Mss 813, Box 17. See also Raymond Andrews, The Last Radio
Baby: A Memoir (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1990); J. Richard Gruber, Amer-
ican Icons: From Madison to Manhattan, the Art of Benny Andrews, 1948–1997
(Augusta, GA: Morris Museum of Art, 1997); and J. Richard Gruber, The Dot
Man: George Andrews of Madison, Georgia (Augusta, GA: Morris Museum of Art,
1994).
140 A History of Prejudice

the 1920s put an end to some of those dreams. Viola’s father went
to the lumber mills, ill health dogged them, and the family moved
to sharecropping and “one of the poorest made houses I have ever
seen.”
In 1930, when she had studied to the eighth grade, Viola mar-
ried someone she had met several years earlier and long corresponded
with, George Andrews. George was the son of a white man from a
prominent plantation-owning family of Plainview, Morgan County,
Jim Orr (“Mr. Jim”), and a beautiful black woman of Indian, white,
and black ancestry, Jessie Rose Lee Wildcat Tennessee (who had ear-
lier been married, and technically remained married, to his hired hand,
Eddie). The Depression destroyed the Orr plantation. Jim and Jessie
lived on in separate houses, hers on a parcel of land he had given to her.
Viola and George and the four oldest of their ten children lived near
Jessie and Jim, from 1936 in a new two-room house built for them on
land owned by Jim Orr.19 Economically cushioned, they were scarcely
independent, even though Jim was away working on the railroad in
Virginia until about 1940. George remained under the thumb of his
parents, ever a Mama’s boy in Viola’s view.
Though Jim Orr had supposedly set up home with Jessie, “South-
ern etiquette dictated that they could not sit down together at the
same table,” as Viola’s writer-son, Raymond Andrews, puts it in a
novel constructed around the figure of his paternal grandmother. On
Sundays, Mr. Jim always breakfasted with Jessie. When he rode up
to her house, she would have his breakfast “steaming and ready.”
But he always ate alone at the table: “she waited out on the back
porch . . . until he had finished and left the kitchen, whereupon she’d
come back inside and eat whatever was left.”20 At a later stage, finding
Jim Orr and his conduct less and less palatable, Jessie moved out of
the vicinity. When in Plainview, Mr. Jim then began having his major

19 Viola had nine children with George. An older child, Harvey, who was born while
Viola was in high school, lived with Viola’s mother until 1934 (see the next section
of this chapter).
20 Raymond Andrews, Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee (New York: Dial Press, 1980),
12. In an autobiography, Andrews notes that after the death of his mother, who had
lived with him, Mr. Jim started coming to Jessie’s house for each of his three daily
meals. Jessie fixed and served the meals, but Jim always ate alone in the kitchen
and no one else entered there until he had finished and left; Last Radio Baby,
120–1.
 An African American Autobiography 141

meal in Viola’s house, with the same sequence – of cook and cook’s
family, food, guest diner, and cook’s family – following one another in
the kitchen, never sharing it together. Viola’s children recall Mr. Jim
becoming increasingly “white” in his attitude as he grew older: he had
no interest in his grandchildren and never knew their names.
In 1943, Viola finally persuaded George to move to a neighbor-
ing farm, where he worked as a sharecropper and later in other jobs.
The next few years were hard. As the eldest daughter, Valeria, put it,
“Benny, Raymond, and I . . . slept crossways in the bed together . . . my
mother and father and the baby [Shirley] slept in . . . the straw mat-
tress. . . . You would lay on it and it would get flat. . . . We had to sleep
crossways . . . mama had rubber sheets and (if) we wet the bed . . . it
just wet everybody.”21 “We were at rock-bottom,” writes Viola. “I
had a Pair of Men Shoes that my Sister gave to me. I went Bare foot
through the Week and wore the Men Shoes [to Church] on Sunday;
[or] if any one came to see me.”22
George’s temper and physical abusiveness made matters worse.
Timid, afraid of thunder and lightning, and unambitious, he was
extremely courteous and gentle with outsiders, seeking everyone’s
approval. As if to compensate, he asserted his “masculinity” at home;
he was often cruel to Viola and the children, hitting Viola on her head
and face for using too much salt or dropping a bar of soap.23 They
quarreled incessantly about whether the children could be spared from
the fields to attend high school (she believed they had to be); whether
a person could make a living from drawing, which both George and
the older children loved and pursued with whatever materials came
to hand (he stoutly denied the possibility; without knowing anything
about the art world, she insisted one could);24 and who should use the
small transistor radio (George thought only he should since batteries
cost money!)

21 Jesse Freeman’s interview with Valeria Anderson at her home in Richmond, CA.
(Mr. Freeman kindly provided me with a transcript of interviews he conducted
between 2003 and 2005 with several members of the Andrews family); see also
Gruber, American Icons, 18.
22 Mss 813, Box 18, FF 1; and Box 20, FF 4.
23 Mss 813, Box 17, FF 7; Box 20, FF 8, for instance.
24 Both Benny and George were to become fairly well-known “professional” painters;
see Gruber’s studies of their work cited in n18, this chapter.
142 A History of Prejudice

After World War II, the three older boys left home for Atlanta
one after another and joined the military successively. Valeria Belle
followed in 1951. Together, they began preparing to get the rest of the
family out of Morgan County. In 1953, after much secret planning,
a pregnant Viola moved to Atlanta with her five younger children.
(Gregory, the tenth and last, was born soon after.) George, who had
not believed she could leave, refused to give up his connections to
Morgan County and his parents. After the move, Viola rejected the few
feeble efforts George made to resume their lives together and refused
him any further part in her or her children’s future. It was a turning
point, and the beginning of a new life. “When we moved to Atlanta
Feb. 7 (or 8) 1953,” she wrote (probably in 1978), “I not only left
Morgan County physically, but I left mentally – with no regrets. . . . I
had been a Slave all the years I spent with my Husband. The reason
that I love atlanta; I have gained my Freedom here.”25
In Atlanta, circumstances were initially not much easier than they
had been immediately before. Viola started with the little furniture she
had managed to bring from Morgan County. This was supplemented
with a fridge, some more furniture, bedding, dishes, and clothes that
Viola received within two weeks of her leaving, on the death of her
elder sister Soncie in Madison. Viola and the younger children survived
on the government checks and other help her older children gave her,
until Viola began work as a part-time nurse at the nearby McLendon
Hospital on a night shift after taking courses at the Beaumont School
of Nursing in 1955–1956. The hospital was a 10 minute walk from
her home: she left at 10:50 and worked from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. “I slept
a little when the children returned from school,” she writes, “however,
I survived somehow.” Later, she worked as a maid for one day a week
(“I was not housemaid material”) and as a seamstress for many years
(“at least it was not servant work”).26
During these years, Viola lived very alone, avoiding neighbors and
even her beloved church – a circumstance that her younger daughters,
reading of it in this essay, find incredible. When she resumed occasional
attendance at Sunday service around 1957, an acquaintance from Mor-
gan County noticed her depression and suggested she see a Christian

25 Mss 813, Box 17, FF 7; and “Looking Back,” Box 20, FF 4.

26 Mss 813, Box 18, FF 2 and 4.
 An African American Autobiography 143

spiritualist.27 Grateful for the spiritual solace, if unconvinced by the

“therapy,” Viola became even more committed to her faith. And the
faith watched over her, as she watched over, and prayed for, her chil-
dren’s progress. At Easter in 1961, she writes, she heard on the radio
(her own, bought by her older children – another sign of “freedom”!):
“He arose, He arose and he arose from the Dead.” And: “I believed
it. . . . Yes I believed in the God of the Bible and I trusted in him.”28
Her own career as a religious educator from the 1970s follows
logically. She attended Bible School and in 1971 started teaching at
the (white) Lakewood Presbyterian Church. Sister Viola soon became
director of the Church Education Department and, in 1980, Staff Reli-
gious Editor of the “Metro Atlanta Community Bulletin.”
In 1953, when Viola arrived in Atlanta, Harvey, Benny, Valeria, and
Raymond had already taken steps toward further education and new
careers. In the following years, she put her remaining children through
high school, and most through college, and onto secure life and career
paths. When Greg, the youngest, finished elementary school, then high
school, then college, she writes, she could not believe that after sending
children out to study for 42 years she now no longer had a child at
school!
At 47 Holly Road, where she lived from 1953 until the end of her
life, she now found more time for writing, religious education, and
travel. In a 1968 letter, she writes of how, with the children grown up,
“I can entertain myself with my Church and playing around with flow-
ers and vegetables! Trying to write a little (because of my [seamstress’s]
job that goes so slow . . . ).” And in 1979, when she was teaching Bible
classes on Saturday and Sunday mornings and on Tuesday evenings, as
well as a class at a white Presbyterian Church “across town,” looking
after her house and garden, and traveling several times a year to visit
her children in distant cities: “I am one of the busiest elderly women I
know.”29
Benny Andrews spoke for many in the rural South when he wrote
of New York as “the place I’d always set out to come to” and Georgia

27 Mss 813, Box 18, FF 2; see also Box 18, FF 1; and Benny Andrews collection, Mss
845, Box 114, Viola’s letter to Benny and Raymond, August 31, 1957.
28 Several entries in Mss 813, Box 18, FF 3.
29 Mss 845, Box 114, Viola’s letter of October 27, 1968; Box 115, letter of August 31,
1979.
144 A History of Prejudice

as “the place I’d set out to leave.”30 It is important to remember

that this rural South, Georgia, and New York are best thought of
metaphorically, for the themes of race prejudice, feudal and patriarchal
oppression, dreams of the city, and the search for new opportunities,
education, and equality are widely encountered in the twentieth cen-
tury. How these conditioned the life of Viola Andrews and others like
her, the articulation of a woman’s duty, and the organizing of social
relations is a matter of more than local interest.

The Destiny of a Woman

A poor black woman in the twentieth-century American South was

sustained by faith as much as by anything else. Looking back on events,
Viola wrote of how her “greatest Blessing was finding and knowing
God when I was young.”31 She believed in God’s miracles: “It’s a
miracle how we got this brand new house in a decent community.”
Not yet in Atlanta, she was pregnant, without a job, without money
for a down payment, or references. “The bank let me have this new
House; Thats a miracle.” Another “miracle” happened with her second
mortgage, when the man who owned it waived the last few installments
on discovering Viola’s inability to pay.32
Yet, that same religious upbringing required her to accept as God-
given many inherited circumstances, to be resigned to what God had
ordained. One instance of the “ordained” that Viola put up with for
23 years (and lived with for longer) was marriage. Marriage, she had
been taught, was forever. Whatever a husband did – drinking, gam-
bling, philandering, or abusing his wife and children – one had to make
the best of it. “If you make your Bed hard, turn [it] over more often,”
as Viola’s mother taught her.33 Paradoxically, even as she celebrated
her “liberation” from her husband, she lived with long-lasting feelings
of guilt and inadequacy.
Viola saw the move to Atlanta in 1953 as her one chance of build-
ing another kind of life. Nevertheless, she writes, she was troubled

30 Gruber, American Icons, ii.

31 Mss 813, Box 20, FF 3.
32 Mss 813, Box 20, FF 6.
33 Mss 813, Box 17, FF 12.
 An African American Autobiography 145

about leaving her husband: “the older children would be very

disappointed.”34 For the rest of her years, it is important to note, Viola
refused to contemplate another marriage, in spite of several opportu-
nities. In 1957, a man she met on the train to Chicago asked if he
could come and see her in Atlanta. She declined, she tells us, but for
the next eight years, he visited once or twice a year, saw her, and asked
about the family. One Easter, he sent her a beautiful orchid, “perhaps
from Hawai’i”! Eighteen years later, the Hamptons, old family friends
from Morgan County, visited her, and Willie Hampton’s brother, Hay-
wood, asked her to marry him. Taken aback, she could only write to
him later, saying that it was impossible. He was a “fine looking man,”
she muses, and she might have considered marriage if he wasn’t in
another city. It was also in her view “too late” for her to change. Some
of her children were also “deadly against the idea,” believing that their
father needed a partner but not their mother! “That’s common among
children,” she observes.35
Given her views, Viola never overcame her ambivalence on the issue.
In 1975, she advised her youngest daughter, who was troubled by her
in-laws, to accept woman’s fate. “The thing is to smile sweetly and
go on with one’s life, as I did with my mother-in-law and family,”
she wrote,36 setting aside in that moment all her struggles against
her husband and “in-laws” and the “escape” from them that she so
joyously celebrated. In 1977, when her son Benny’s first marriage
broke up, she wrote that she believed Benny and Mary Ellen should
certainly get a divorce, for they were “liberated,” twentieth-century
people. By contrast, she described herself as “a 19th century Southern
Country Black Woman,” still living with the belief that man and wife
are to be together always.37 In 1964, when her husband wrote to
his children pathetically begging for money and old clothes, she was
scathing about him: “I hope that I have forgiven him but, I do not plan
to loose [lose] any time thinking about him.” Yet a few years later
she wondered if this lonely life was “what I have been striving for”

34 Mss 813, Box 18, FF 1.

35 Mss 813, Box 18, FF 2; Box 20, FF 3 and FF 7. See also Mss 845, Box 114, Viola to
Benny and Raymond, August 31, 1957.
36 Mss 845, Box 115, Viola to Benny and Mary, January 22, 1975.
37 Mss 845, Box 115, Viola to Benny, March 21, 1977.
146 A History of Prejudice

and recalled a verse from the scriptures, “It is not good for Man to be
alone.”38
In 1983, then over 70, she wrote of feeling sorry for “my children’s
Father. He lost his wife; I hope he find another.” And in 1995, when
George passed away and she was unable to go to his funeral (she was in
southern California, visiting her daughter Veronica, whose mother-in-
law fell seriously ill just then), she comforted herself about her decision
not to attend: “the – His Children – our children could and would take
care of everything. In A way, in A sense, I mourn My Husband’s Death.
The past can not be changed. So, time goes on.”39
Another critical dimension of a woman’s duty, of affairs settled in
heaven and burdens a woman must bear, that Viola wrestles with is
the matter of children. Her children, she tells us, were her reason for
living: “If I did not have them . . . life would be completely empty.”
“What does A woman or how does A woman do when she does not
have any children?”40 Nevertheless, children were a mixed blessing
in the rough years after her marriage. Benny, Viola’s first child with
George, was born in 1930; Valeria Belle in 1932; Raymond in 1934.
In 1934, Harvey, her eldest son, born of an unwanted pregnancy while
she was in high school, who had been in her mother’s care since 1927,
also came to live with them. In 1935, Viola was pregnant again (with
Shirley). There was nothing like birth control in those days, she writes,
“I would have been an outcast if I had inquired.”41
Viola describes her routine in 1931, when she had only one child,
Benny, to look after. The day went in rushing from work on the farm,
to cooking, to feeding Benny (left in the care of a young babysitter).
George didn’t see why it should take her so long to cook or to nurse
the child. “The only rest I had was while I ate,” she writes. “Other
than being Pregnant, giving berth,” she wrote later, and attending to
the children, her husband also expected her to work in the fields, and
she did. “How I lived through those years . . . Only the Lord know.”
“My youth was the only way that helped me to survive.”42 And, one
might add, her faith.

38 Mss 845, Box 114, Viola to Benny (undated, but 1964); and Mss 813, Box 20, FF 3.
39 Mss 813, Box 20, FF 9; and Box 21, FF 1.
40 Mss 845, Box 114, Viola to Benny, November 25, 1965; and Mss 813, Box 20,
FF 11.
41 Mss 813, Box 17, FF 12.
42 Mss 813, Box 17, FF 12; and Box 20, FF 8.
 An African American Autobiography 147

The young mother survived those years, she says in retrospect, by

hanging onto the things her mother had said to her: “There is hope
between the Stub and the Ground.” “All things is possible with God if
one keep the Faith.” She recalls the spirituals she had heard and sung
in church while she was growing up and during her years with George:
“I’m so glad that trouble don’t last allways.” God had delivered the
Israelites from Egypt: “what he does for others, he could do for me.”43
The cycle of pregnancies tested not only the young woman’s body;
it tested her faith. With a baby coming every two years, Viola realized,
she would quickly be worn out. In the spring of 1933, when she
already had three children, she used her small savings from working
in the fields to order a syringe from Sears. She used this as a douche
to prevent pregnancy, “successfully,” as she proudly told her mother.
Unfortunately, the babysitter discovered and accidentally broke the
syringe. Viola couldn’t replace it, given the cost and time required
to get another from Sears; buying one from the local drug store in
Madison “would have been everybody’s Business.” “Again, I say that
I was destined to have ten children.”
In this context, Viola’s reading – the one love she and George shared
with the children – provided an unexpected lifeline. While George and
the older boys concentrated on sports magazines and comics, she read
many women’s magazines, which now increasingly discussed the issue
of birth control. Through them, she heard about the rhythm or cycle
method of avoiding pregnancy, around the time when her sixth child,
Harold, was born, in May 1938. “At that time anything concerning
‘Birth Control’ was considered sinfull: which I agree in part,” she
wrote, “but I did not believe that ‘the Cycle Method’ was sinfull.” She
decided to try it: “I vowed that I would have no more children. I did
not feel sinfull or immoral: I had taken no drugs nor done anything to
my body. I was jubilant.”
Their decision to abstain from sex several days a month, Viola says
with relief, was one thing George didn’t tell his mother! In December
1939, Harold was 20 months old, and she was not pregnant, she notes
happily: “I hoped to be able to continue reading the cycle method
correct[ly].” In December 1940, she was optimistic: “My Baby was
2 years and 8 months old and I was not pregnant.” She repeats the
sentiment for May 1941, when Harold was three, marveling over the

43 See Mss 813, Box 17, FF 7 and FF 12 for this and the next four paragraphs.
148 A History of Prejudice

“cycle method” but worried about the “narrow line” between “do”
and “don’t.” She didn’t fully understand the cycle or the risks, but
couldn’t ask anyone about it: “I would have been considered Immoral,
allmost a criminal: everyone would have known, there is no secrets in
the country nor small Towns.”
In 1942, she was pregnant again – and downhearted. However,
when John was born, at the end of August 1942, Harold was four
years and three months old. Viola continued to use the cycle method,
praying that she would not be pregnant again for a long time. Veron-
ica, her eighth child, was born in April 1948, five and a half years
after John. Viola recalls looking at the newborn and thinking that,
whatever the benefits of the cycle method, it was her destiny to
have children, and they “were the only, the only thing that I had”
(her emphasis).44
Viola lived with an undying sense of guilt and sin because of the
child she had before marriage. She writes of how, in getting involved
with an unnamed “smart, charming, clever . . . city boy” while still
at high school in Madison, she had “committed the unpardonable
moral sin.” For some time, she could not bring herself to tell anyone
of her pregnancy, and suffered alone. Then she wrote about it to her
mother, who stood by her. When the baby was born, “Ma and I prayed
together . . . she said God will forgive my grave mistake.”45
It is instructive to put Viola’s sense of shame and penitence in con-
ceiving a child outside marriage alongside Alice Walker’s account of
her own discovery that she was pregnant when she returned to college
in New York from a trip to Africa, her failure to find an abortionist,
and her thoughts of committing suicide. “I did not eat or sleep for three
days,” Walker notes. “When I thought of my family, and . . . began to
see their faces around the walls, I realized they would be shocked and
hurt to learn of my death, but I felt they would not care deeply at all,
when they discovered I was pregnant. Essentially, they would believe I
was evil.”46 It was when she was contemplating suicide because of her

44 There were two more babies: Deloris, born in 1950, and Gregory – a “disappoint-
ment” to Benny and Raymond when they visited from their posts in the Air Force
because they hadn’t expected that their mother would have more children – in 1953,
shortly after Viola and the other children had moved to Atlanta.
45 Mss 813, Box 17, FF 11.
46 Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, 245–6.
 An African American Autobiography 149

unwanted pregnancy, she writes, that she “began to understand how

alone a woman is, because of her body.”47
It is this loneliness of the woman’s body – when divorced from poli-
tics, and torn away from the community of other women by the institu-
tion of the modern heterosexual family, segregation, and the insistent
demands of childbearing and mothering – that emerges poignantly in
large parts of Viola’s autobiography. Yet there are other dimensions
in Viola’s anguish and ambivalence, related to her clear sense of the
duties of a black woman and a Christian.
Viola’s husband, George, regularly said that he, a “black man,”
was “nobody,” and that no one in a black family should try to be
“somebody.” By contrast, Viola declares: “I felt I was somebody even
though I had an illegitimate child.” Later in life, when she celebrated
the children’s success, independence, and self-respect, she still often
introduced Harvey as “my illegitimate son.” It was a comment on her
belief in the responsibilities of a woman of faith, and a mother, an
ethical position on childbearing and the sanctity of the body. While
she seemed to implicate Harvey in the illegitimacy of his birth by her
repeated reference to it in his presence, she also spoke of her duty to
her firstborn: “I didn’t kill my child. He’s a part of me.” At other
times she referred to him in biblical terms – “He led us out of Morgan
County, off the farm”48 – an appropriate point for us to return to the
question of liberation from slavery.

The Problem of the Color Line

I have said little so far about what is considered the problem of the
South, Du Bois’s problem of the twentieth century, the problem of the
color line – and thence the African American struggle against it. In
part this is because the protagonist of my story in this chapter does not
address the history of that struggle very directly in her writings.
Viola Andrews wrote her memoirs between the mid-1960s and the
1990s, from the inauguration of the most visible and effective phase

47 Ibid., 248.
48 Wendell Brock, “The Amazing Life of Viola Andrews,” Atlanta Journal Constitution,
January 21, 2001, Arts, L 7–8. See also Mss 813, Box 17, FF 12 (emphasis mine).
Viola’s daughters, Shirley, Veronica, and Deloris, also recall her obsessive fear, during
their school-going years, that they might go out with a boy and become pregnant.
150 A History of Prejudice

of the civil rights movement, in the city where its most important
leader was born and lived, a city whose leaders were proud of their
achievements in changing race relations. Several of her children became
active in the movement: one, Benny, as a leader and organizer of the
struggle for the rights of black artists; another, Harold, as a Black
Muslim minister. Viola writes about these developments in her chil-
dren’s lives; she expresses some anxiety, for example, about what it
means for a son of hers to become a Muslim brother. But she spends
remarkably little time on the question of civil rights and the African
American struggle in general.
She says little or nothing, for example, about conditions in the
armed forces and the treatment of military personnel on their return
from duty (including the lynchings after the Second World War that
I discussed in the last chapter), although all six of her sons went into
the military and used the provisions of the GI Bill to further their
education and build careers after they were discharged; the oldest,
Harvey, served in the army for twenty years.49 Viola would probably
have seconded what Zora Neale Hurston wrote in the 1920s: “I am
not tragically colored. . . . Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my
life, I have seen that the world is to [for?] the strong regardless of a
little pigmentation more or less.”50
Viola’s artist sons, Benny and Raymond, the first readers of the
earliest parts of her autobiography, wrote more than once to ask why
she didn’t write about the black struggle. “Negroes progress . . . ,” she
responds in a letter of April 1965, “It is such a big thing and such
a miracle. I do believe in miracles. . . . I saw one of the marches here.
Yes the Nuns were with the marchers[,] also quite a few other Whites,
which is surprising.” She notes the big changes occurring – African
American policemen on the streets of Atlanta, bus drivers, firemen,
store clerks, nurses – and follows up with proud comments on Martin
Luther King, Jr.’s Nobel Peace Prize, the Selma march, and the large
numbers of young blacks ready and organizing to help Dr. King. At
Grady Hospital in Atlanta, she writes, they’d adopted a “first come,

49 The government should give her a medal for furnishing so much assistance to the
country, Viola told an interviewer in 1980; Time Capsule, 4, no. 1 (Spring 1980).
50 Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928), in Walker, I Love Myself When
I Am Laughing . . . , 153.
 An African American Autobiography 151

first served” system; “so many of the workers are colord. So many
of the nurses, maybe most nurses. Really, they [whites?] have no way
out.” In addition, the federal government had now offered money
for public schools, and Viola felt that Atlanta would have to accept
the funds – and the consequences. “In a few years there will be no
Segregation. The person with the money and Education will be in
front.”51
Yet, in the very same letter, Viola writes that she “never remember[s]
to mention” the matter of race relations and black progress in the
“biography” she is so meticulously compiling at this time (“from [her]
memory bank”). She tries to explain this omission at a later point in the
writing of her life-story, in a few sentences that I have already quoted:
“I am writing as I knew and saw it then and there. In our community,
all the colored owned or rented their land. . . . I was young and I knew
nothing about Race Relationship.”52
When she writes that she has not attended to race relations, Viola is
clearly thinking of demonstrations, sit-ins, and other dramatic events
of the civil rights struggle in the 1950s and ’60s. Yet, although she
rarely refers to these developments in her autobiography, there is no
escape from the business of race (or color, which has often stood in for
race) in the lives of black, brown, or white people in twentieth-century
Asia, Africa, and Europe, or in the private lives of rural blacks, or
public exchanges in city spaces and governmental institutions in the
United States. Notwithstanding her caveat on the matter, then, Viola’s
writing about the fortunes of the family, and the effort to find the
minimum resources necessary for survival and the education of her
children, is rarely far removed from what whites and blacks, men and
women, rich and poor, had given to them by law and inheritance. Her
account of her life in the segregated – conservative, conformist, and
Christian – South has a great deal to say about matters that scarcely
figured in the public debate on Double V, and not very much in the
discourse of the Black Liberation in the 1960s and ’70s either: about
a woman’s reproductive rights, bodily integrity, and the impact of
race on all of this, and on the psychological and bodily attitudes and
expectations – of whites and blacks.

51 Mss 845, Box 115, Viola to Benny, April 28, 1965.

52 MARBL, Viola Andrews Papers, Mss 813, Box 17, FF9.
152 A History of Prejudice

“The white man could not loose[lose],” Viola writes in her notes on
“growing up,” “ pryor to 1920,” repeating the proposition three times
on one page. “The colored man could not win.” The whites bragged
that they were “Free, White and Twenty-one,” young and powerful.
“They looked down on everyone else”: not only “Niggers” as they
called them, but all races, “Orientals, Asians.”53
In Chapter 2, I cited Viola’s, and the local African American com-
munity’s, skepticism about the religiosity of the whites: what kind of
Christians were these who did not heed the Bible’s injunction to “treat
every man as a Brother”? As the young Viola heard it, “the Whites
seldom spoke of Heaven.” “Actually,” muses the older Viola, “they
were living Heaven like here on earth.” For all that, white men, at least
“the wealthy, intelligent, educated ones – never the poor ones,” lived a
double life. On the outside, the white man had a “clean life,” with his
wife, children, church, and work. Behind the scenes, “he had his col-
ored concubines.” Colored folks knew that “all well to do white men
had their colored concubines.”54 Occasionally, she notes, the white
man lived with a colored woman as his common-law wife, and never
married anyone else (as was the case with her father-in-law, Mr. Jim).
But the bottom line was that the white man, especially the rich white
man, was immoral.
All of this comes together in Viola’s reconstruction of her own life
with George and his family. “I never heard any Profane Language in
our home – nor in our neighbors home.” On the other hand, George
“used God’s name in or with cuss words daily.” So did his “white
Father,” Mr. Jim. Not so his black mother: “never.” Viola recalls her
father-in-law as being “mean and cruel.” When a cow got loose, he
cursed Viola soundly. She had to accept this quietly for fear that he
would hit her, even if no damage was done. “Anyway he was a white
man and I was on his place, also I was Black.”55
There were times, she says, when she would look at her husband
George’s “blue eyes, look at his completely white skin and ash Blond
hair and know in my heart that I was married to a low moral white
man.” She believed that he was someone who had absolutely no qualms

53 Mss 813, Box 17, FF 7 and FF 8; and Box 21, FF 8.

54 Mss 813, Box 17, FF 10 and FF 7.
55 Mss 813, Box 17, FF 12.
 An African American Autobiography 153

about right or wrong. He never went into church, preferring to sit

outside chatting with other men. A Mama’s boy, all he wanted was
his quota of liquor, hanging out with his mates (and Jim and Jessie’s
family), and spending Saturday nights “with his girl-friend.”56
On the question of the children’s future, race divided the couple –
in unexpected ways. In spite of her racially mixed, Indian-African-
Caucasian heritage, Viola was dark, and proud of it. George, born
of someone seen as a racially pure “white” father and a very mixed
“black” mother, was exceedingly fair, blue-eyed, blonde-haired – and
ashamed of it. “He shaved his head rather than let his blonde hair
show,” his son Benny has written, “he shuffled more, ‘yassuhed more’,
scratched his head . . . because he was totally ashamed of his whiteness.
He was more of a crushed and defeated man than any out and out black
man could ever be.”57 (See Figure 3.)
George was “Deadly against Educated Niggers” and “ashame for
his children to be in school especially if they were a little more regular
or ahead of others.”58 Viola held the polar opposite view: “How,
how could a White Man [which her husband was, in her view] . . . be
against his child getting an Education. I thought that white . . . men
and Education were Related, how could they and it be separated.”59
George believed he was a “nobody,” as Viola notes frequently in her
autobiography, and that African Americans should never try to be
“somebody” – a lesson he had learned, paradoxically, from his black
mother rather than his white father.
Jim Orr had wanted all his children to go to Booker T. Washington,
the first black public high school in Atlanta. His partner, Jessie, refused.
She didn’t see why her children should leave Plainview, their little patch
of Morgan County: black kids in the country would gain nothing from
a high school education since most of them dropped out after a little
elementary education and went to work in the fields. In this as in other
matters, George followed her views faithfully.
Viola had to fight tooth and nail to ensure that her children went
to school, saving every dime and cutting corners wherever possible.

56 Mss 813, Box 18, FF 1.

57 Benny Andrews, “Forty Years,” Mss 845, Box 117 (emphasis Benny’s).
58 Mss 813, Box 17, FF 7 and FF 12.
59 Mss 813, Box 17, FF 12 (emphasis Viola’s).
154 A History of Prejudice

figure 3. (clockwise from top left) Viola Andrews, Atlanta, Georgia, 1975;
George Andrews, Madison, Georgia, 1975; and George’s parents, Jessie
Andrews and James Orr (Mr. Jim) in the 1940s (courtesy Shirley Lowrie;
photos of Viola and George Andrews by Veronica Villa)

In 1944, when Benny was 13, she worked out a compromise with the
overseer on the farm where the family worked, whereby Benny could
go to Burney Street, the black high school in Madison five miles away,
on rainy days or when there was no work in the fields. The overseer
 An African American Autobiography 155

spat, and George sulked, but Benny started high school, and this was
the beginning of a new phase in their lives.60 Benny’s entry into high
school and Harvey’s move to Atlanta, where he lived in the YMCA
and found odd jobs to make a living before he went into the army,
opened the way for the other children.
For the mature Viola, now in far more comfortable circumstances,
the proud mother of children who had gained considerable personal
and professional success, and even fame, racial privilege and its atten-
dant prejudices were still impossible to forget. She writes of the
appalling conditions in which chain gangs of prisoners were forced
to work early in the century (“the chained gang were colored, the
[armed] Bosses were White”) and about how they sang “Go down
Moses, Way down in Egypt Land, tell old Pharoah, let My people
go” and other songs of redemption – underlining again that, whatever
else they had or did not have, “they had a song.” “Yes, one day we
Colored Folks will be free. . . . [T]he Bible says so and God will bring
it to pass.”61 And many of her letters, from the 1960s to the 1990s
(almost to the end of her life), reveal a deep-seated distrust of south-
ern whites. Only the exceptional younger white man or woman could
possibly escape the older generation’s calculated investment in racial
privilege and segregation. Thus, the archivist who acquired her papers
for the Emory University manuscripts library was “very Brave” and
“Benevolent” to take such an interest in her writings and to discuss
her work publicly “in a Sophisticated place Emory’s”: “Evidently he
is not a Klans-man.”62
Not surprisingly, the high point of the Andrews saga is reached
for Viola when the white folks of Madison, Georgia, recognize the
achievements of Benny and Raymond Andrews: a lesson to them about
what blacks could achieve, and how her children had placed them
on the cultural map of America in a way that “white Madisonians”

60 Mss 813, Box 17, FF 12; Gruber, American Icons, 31; Viola’s letter to Benny quoted
in Andrews, “Forty Years.”
61 “Go Down Moses,” Time Capsule, 4, no. 1 (Spring 1980). Viola notes that the story
“is not fiction,” though the editor of the New York artists’ magazine (“a northern
person”) classified it as such; see Mss 813, Box 21, FF 7. The quotations I have used
come from the handwritten version found in Mss 813, Box 17, FF 10.
62 Mss 813, Box 22, FF4, Viola to Kathy and Richard Hawke, March 17, 1999 (see
also other letters in this box); also Mss 813, Box 20, FF 13; and Mss 845, Box 114,
Viola’s letters of June 16 and 19, 1966.
156 A History of Prejudice

had never even dreamed of. In May 1978, when Benny’s drawings
and Raymond’s forthcoming book were exhibited at Peachtree Sum-
mit, Atlanta, she declared this “a Monument . . . a Milestone” for the
Andrews family, and the climax of her story.63 In 1980, Viola wrote
of “the ultimate” having happened, Benny’s “painting [a mural] in
the Largest Airport in the world. . . . The Home Town see and Realize
your qualifications. I cannot ask for more.” And a couple of years
later, when Benny returned to his native Georgia to attend another
function in Madison: “To think that he [Benny] could not attend the
School that belonged to the white – now – today he is being honored
here in the [same] Building he could not attend; and he is the greatest
Artist ever from G[eorgi]a. . . . God moves in A mysterious way.”64
And here the story returns to the very private. In November 1982,
Benny and Raymond were felicitated respectively for their artwork and
books at the Cultural Center in Madison, the same building that they
were denied entry into as children. The large gathering, consisting of
more whites than blacks, included Viola’s husband, George, whom her
eldest son, Harvey, had brought along. Her comments on the occasion
are noteworthy: “That white Man . . . my Husband! I didn’t recognize
him. . . . I see that he is not the strong Dominant Man that he appeared
to be when we were together. Looking at that little Man; thinking
about how cruel he was to me and the children; how could that little
Puny looking Man be so cruel.”65
And further: “I have overcome the ‘Madisonians’ my worst ene-
mies.” “The White People were very nice; I could hardly believe what
had happened after 29 years. We went back in style – on different terms
than when we left. This was the Ultimate. . . . I never dreamed that this
could happen. My children (us) left the cotton fields of G[eorgi]a and
My children had made good. . . . WE HAVE ARRIVED.”66

The Body of History

Viola Andrews came from a relatively comfortable, literate, and proud,

though still poor, family of small farmers; her parents sent her to high
school and, like her parents and her husband’s father (though not her

63 Mss 813, Box 20, FF 4.

64 Mss 845, Box 115, Viola to Benny, October 1, 1980; and Mss 813, Box 20, FF 11.
65 Mss 813, Box 20, FF 9.
66 Ibid.; and Mss 845, Box 115, Viola to Benny, November 29, 1982.
 An African American Autobiography 157

husband), she recognized the importance of education for the younger

generation. Both she and her husband had early in their lives cultivated
a love for reading, a “hobby” they persisted with and encouraged in
their children, even in hard times. While she was growing up and
during her years of marriage, Viola would almost certainly have heard
of, if she hadn’t seen or read, slave accounts of their life in bondage and
their exceptional, fortuitous, plucky escapes to freedom. In any event,
the motif of slavery and liberation is a central one in her account of
her life: “I had been a slave too long.” “The reason that I love atlanta;
I . . . gained my Freedom here.”67 The “biography” that she started
writing in the early 1960s – journal, memoir, repetitive notes on her
life, however we classify it – is clearly marked by this upbringing and
this heritage.
The reasons she gives, in the early stages of writing, for committing
her memories to paper are several: “I wanted to put some things on
paper, if possible; some of the ways of life that I saw, also experienced.
there was so much that I could not put in print no matter how hard I
tried; anyway, I and my inner self communed together while I wrote.”
In addition, as she said in a letter written in April 1963, at 50 a person
has “sweet memories [sic].” So she wanted to write, if only for the
children. “It can be family property and Greg [her youngest son, still
barely 10] may rewrite it one day, who knows.”68
As Viola notes repeatedly, her children were her life. But as the
younger children grew, and became independent, she was able to turn
more and more to other things. By the mid-’60s, the family already
seemed to have turned the corner. “How about us going Republican?”
she asked in November 1964. “We are big time folks now.” Greg
was by this time expressing admiration and envy for his older brother,
Harold, who had become a Black Muslim activist. He wanted to be
like Harold, noted Viola, and bragged that he (Harold) used to pick
cotton!69
By 1967, Viola was committed to writing: “I have to write.” Along
with her life-story, she was writing short stories: “AND – I – have –
a – big – dream! It might sell. It’s possible.” In 1981, aged almost 70,
she returned to school to learn typing; and unusually for her, given

67 Mss 813, Box 17, FF 7; and “Looking Back,” Box 20, FF 4.

68 Mss 813, Box 18, FF 4; Mss 845, letters of April 20, 1963, and April 24, 1965.
69 Mss 845, letters of November 20, 1964, and March 17, 1965.
158 A History of Prejudice

her thriftiness, she even looked for a paid typist for her work, which
her daughters had helped type until then.70 What I read in all of this is
the poignancy of Viola’s relation to her writing, and her life: a woman
coming into her own in a quite unprecedented way.
For all that, or perhaps one should say because of it, the Andrews’
saga is not the familiar rags-to-riches tale of the great American story.
The American Dream is skewed in Viola’s recounting. In the years
after her move to Atlanta in 1953, struggling to get by with several
minor children in an alien environment, Viola suffered what would
today almost certainly be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder.
She kept entirely to herself, even staying away from church, as I have
noted. She envied other people’s “social life” but believed that kind
of life was not for her, an “ex-slave.” “Yes. I was free but I still had
the marks.”71 She was beset by endlessly repeated dreams of failure,
which she writes about over and over again, every few pages at some
points in the autobiography: imagining a child left behind in Morgan
County who would only be saved if she returned to her husband,
and a cow she’d brought from the country but neglected so that the
animal suffered greatly. Remarkably, the trauma comes at the very
moment of liberation. “I suffered for 30 years more or less in those
Dreams.”72
Expecting her tenth child when she left Morgan County, Viola
hardly forgives herself for leaving her husband: “I knew the older
children would be very disappointed but I knew that ‘even this would
pass.’” She had escaped “slavery” but still bore the marks. When she
went into downtown Atlanta with her eldest daughter, Valeria, who
took her fair color from her father, “Some of the clerks in the stores
asked me, was I her nurse? People watched us so much. . . . I started
walking behind her!”73 A “hiding behind” is evident also in those early
years in Atlanta in her isolation from her neighbors, and even from
the house of God; and, in the longer term, in her refusal to counte-
nance any liaison with men. This is the “soul murder” that Painter has
written about, “the violation of one’s inner being, the extinguishing of
one’s identity, including sexual identity.”74

70 Mss 845, letters of January 1, 1967; March 13, 1968; November 1, 1970; Septem-
ber 3, 1979; March 25, 1981.
71 Mss 813, Box 18, FF 2 and FF 4.
72 Mss 813, Box 18, FF 1, and several other files.
73 Mss 813, Box 18, FF 1, for the preceding quotations.
74 Painter, Southern History across the Color Line, 15, 17.
 An African American Autobiography 159

Power in this account is shown to us in its naked, most irreducible

form. Recall Viola’s comment on the fallout when a cow broke loose
on the farm in Plainview and her father-in-law, Mr. Jim, cursed her for
the happening. There was nothing she could do about it, as she wrote:
“He was a white man and I was on his place, also I was Black.” Yet
Viola’s construction of this history is a little removed from the standard
narrative of white oppression and black liberation. To the white man’s
authority signaled in the sentence just quoted, one would have to add
her emphasis on the despotism of a father-in-law and of men more
generally. As the autobiographical writings convey it, Viola’s sense of
being a prisoner and a slave is inextricably linked not only to the legacy
of slavery and the oppressions of segregation but to the persistence of
patriarchal power. However, the politics surrounding them is scarcely
straightforward. Consider the identification of “blacks” and “whites.”
Viola’s natal family was in her own words “related to the Indians,
related to the Afros, related to the Caucasians.”75 George, the son of
a white man and a person I’ve described as a beautiful, part Indian,
part white, black woman, looked completely white and wished to be
completely black. If the “hierarchy of racism,” “white” dominance,
and “black” subordination expresses a clear ranking of classes,76 it
clearly has a political – and, for Viola, moral – connotation, too: “How
could white men and Education be separated.” Patriarchal power, too,
is implicated in the historical and political privilege attained by white
men over the last several centuries. The private and the public are, in
critical ways, one and the same. “I see that [that “low moral,” “puny
looking” white man] is not the strong Dominant Man that he appeared
to be.”
Through the later decades of the twentieth century, Viola took
increasing pride in her writing, her editing of a religious bulletin, her
Bible teaching, and her radicalism! A 1979 letter captures her mood
well: “Guess what! I completed My Masterpiece! . . . the first (story) I
started. It’s the longest one. It was difficult to get rid of My Characters!
but I did. Really, I think it is my best. . . . Someday a movie may be
made from Ray’s work, also mine. Our work is a little Radical for the
South but we gotta believe.”77

75 Atlanta Journal Constitution, January 21, 2001, L8.

76 Painter, Southern History across the Color Line, 113.
77 Mss 845, Box 115, Viola to Benny, August 31, 1979.
160 A History of Prejudice

Viola’s life-story defies the scholar’s attempt to give it political

coherence. Her detailed and often repetitive autobiography points to
the instability – but not for that reason the reduced force – of assumed
identities and the powers and privileges attendant on them. It shows the
fragmented, interrupted, “kinda jumbled,” and for that reason chal-
lenging and enriching articulations that have constituted “ordinary
life” – all life – in the twentieth century and beyond. This is perhaps
what is at stake when Viola says, “Please, please do not change it [my
biography] and put it on your Academic Intellectual Level.”
Scholars analyzing women’s autobiographies, and more specifically
the autobiographical writings of black women in the segregated soci-
ety of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, have
remarked on their pronounced “uncertainty,” “confessional” mode,
and strategy of “dissemblance.”78 However, we have another frame
for engagement with Viola’s account: that of assembling a life that fails
to assemble, not because it has no coherence or guiding principle(s) but
because it has too many Others, too much common sense, to contend
with – a whole variety of powerful forces bent on otherizing her life,
bending it to their will, and creating clear-cut, well-marked, measur-
able distances. For Viola, the woman’s body, subjected to unrelenting
sexual and social labor, is the bearer of the Cross. Yet, like Jesus, it may
triumph – with the aid of God and the assistance of God’s instrument,
Moses, here found in the form of her own children, perhaps above all
in that of her “illegitimate” son, Harvey.
There is in Viola’s account a refusal to conform to academic and
social/racial expectation. There is the struggle to retain control of her
body and her sexuality; the location of race relations (and much else
of what is called politics) in questions of personal morality, bodily
disposition, and the sphere of intimate relations; the challenging of the
common sense and inheritances of what a woman – and a woman in the
rural South of the mid-twentieth-century United States – ought to be

78 E.g., Patricia Spacks, “Selves in Hiding,” and Regina Blackburn, “In Search of the
Black Female Self: African-American Women’s Autobiographies and Ethnicity,” in
Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism, ed. Estelle C. Jelinek (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1980); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “My Statue, My Self: Auto-
biographical Writings of Afro-American Women,” in The Private Self: Theory and
Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina, 1988); and Hine, Hine Sight, 37–47.
 An African American Autobiography 161

and to do.79 Yet, even as she celebrates her liberation from “slavery,”
there is also her lament about her failed marriage: the Bible says, “It is
not good for Man to be alone.” And her comment on her husband’s
death: “In A way, in A sense, I mourn My Husband’s Death. The past
[cannot] be changed. So, time goes on.” And her repeated reference to
Harvey – who “led us [Moses-like] out of Morgan County” – as her
illegitimate son.
In his illustrations and paintings, Benny Andrews, by then an impor-
tant black artist and activist, regularly portrayed his mother as the
dignified Southern Black Woman of faith. “He always paint me with
the Bible,” Viola commented jocularly. “[He make] me out to be a
missionary!”80 Viola Andrews would not be constrained in this way,
even by the Bible. She comes across, in her own work, as very much
more conflicted, “ordinary,” historical and heroic. With the overar-
ching presence of God and in an era of great civil rights struggle, she
is struggling daughter, wife, mother, seamstress, gardener, traveler,
religious educator, author – individual, woman.
Centrally at issue here is the difficult question of the rescripting of
the subaltern body. In an earlier chapter, I cited Apel’s finding that
after the Second World War, “The abject black body of the lynching
victim, usually stripped or clothed in rags, was reimagined as a military
hero lying in uniform, a citizen of the nation.”81 (See Figure 2.) Viola’s
description of her every day before, during, and after that war provides
another account of how difference lodges in the body of the subaltern
woman; her writing serves to bring that body into historical time.
I pursue the matter of rescripting the subaltern body further in the
next chapter through an examination of a number of important, and
unusual, Dalit autobiographies.

79 Cf. the comment of Janie Crawford’s grandmother in Zora Neale Hurston, Their
Eyes Were Watching God (1937; reprint New York: Harper and Row, 1990), that
she never had the opportunity “to fulfill [her] dreams of whut a woman oughta be
and to do,” cited and used as the title of her work by Stephanie J. Shaw, What a
Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers during the Jim
Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1.
80 MSS 813 Box 1, TV interview on The Public Affair, conducted by Angela Rice
(produced by Atlanta Interfaith Broadcasters Inc., 1994).
81 Apel, Imagery of Lynching, 170; also 166.
 6

Dalit Memoirs

Rescripting the Body

Dalit autobiography emerged as a category in the 1970s, along with

a new kind of protest poetry as well as fiction that was not always
removed from writings in an autobiographical mode. Many of these
writings foregrounded the vicious history of (vernacular, visible) caste
prejudice. They did so through a recitation of the practices of othering –
discrimination, exclusion, and humiliation – that have been central
to the rural (and urban) performance of caste and, not least, through
their depiction of the bodies of suffering, laboring lower-caste men and
women, bodies that come to bear the distinct marks of such oppression,
discrimination, and exclusion. In their description of the Dalit struggle
to overcome the history of this oppression and to inhabit a different
kind of body, they also tell us a good deal about the play of a less
visible, universal prejudice – the common sense of the age, or of the
community that says, casually, that’s how it is, and, implicitly, how it
is meant to be.
The reminiscences I consider in this chapter belong to the category
of what might be described as resistance literature, emerging out of and
building on recognized traditions of political and intellectual resistance.
The very titles of numerous Dalit life-writings indicate the history
of stigmatization, oppression, and poverty against which the Dalit self
(individual or collective) is insistently, and perhaps necessarily, artic-
ulated: Joothan (the leftovers of the upper castes’ food that we lived
on); Apne Apne Pinjre (our own individual cages); Upara (outsider);
Uchalya (thief, or pilferer); Akkarmashi (half-caste, or bastard); Baluta

162
 Dalit Memoirs 163

(the services traditionally required of the lowest castes in rural Maha-

rashtra); Aaydaan (the weaving of baskets from bamboo, condemned
as an Untouchable occupation); Dohra Abhishaap (twice cursed).
Translations of these texts into English and other European lan-
guages have constrained their location and meaning even more, with
their titles focusing almost jarringly on the matter of caste discrimina-
tion and Untouchability. Narendra Jadhav’s Aamcha baap aan aamhi
(Our Father and Us) (1993), about which I shall have more to say later
in this chapter, is translated into French as Intouchable (2002) and
into English as Outcaste (2003), with the American edition (2005)
spelling out the subject further as Untouchables: My Family’s Tri-
umphant Journey out of the Caste System in Modern India. Vasant
Moon’s beautifully titled Vasti (neighborhood, or community) (1995)
becomes Growing up Untouchable in India: A Dalit Autobiography
when translated and published in English five years later. Om Prakash
Valmiki’s Joothan (1997) gains the subtitle “A Dalit’s Life” on its
publication in English in 2003. Urmila Pawar’s Aaydaan (2003), nicely
translated as The Weave of My Life (2008), now has the added subtitle,
“A Dalit Woman’s Memoir.”
The making of a new Dalit politics and history in the late twenti-
eth century was conditioned by the heightened expectations that came
with the establishment of an independent Indian state in the 1940s
and ’50s, educational advance and social mobility in the later colonial
period (which expanded greatly after Independence, assisted by new
policies of affirmative action), and the very emergence of Dalit auto-
biography and memoir as a form of protest literature and a means of
documenting the Dalit struggle. The shift followed the gradual collapse
of the promise and aspirations of Nehruvian democracy in the wake of
independence, the apparent taming (and marginalization) of the philo-
sophical challenge mounted by the mass conversion to Buddhism, and
the splintering of Ambedkar’s own political movement. A number
of political fractions came out of this splintering and accommodated
themselves in varying degrees and various ways to the dominant polit-
ical discourse and dominant political parties. At the same time, how-
ever, a newly militant cultural/political movement emerged, led by a
first generation of college-educated Dalit intellectuals and profession-
als and gaining particular visibility (and notoriety) under a loosely
organized group called the Dalit Panthers. Although this movement
164 A History of Prejudice

was far from being closely coordinated or centralized, and was to suf-
fer serious internal division and disintegration by the 1980s, it left its
mark in the form of a body of autobiographical writings that has come
to stay and that has had wide impact – in the literary world and in
Dalit consciousness.
The outpouring of Dalit autobiographical accounts was particu-
larly remarkable in Maharashtra, western India, the home province of
B. R. Ambedkar and the area of his greatest initial influence. The
critical acclaim and popularity that attended the publication of Daya
Pawar’s Marathi autobiography Baluta (1978) was followed by a spate
of autobiographical writings, especially by individuals from Ambed-
kar’s own caste of Mahars, but soon extending to other Dalit castes and
other regions of India, with publications in Hindi, Kannada, Tamil,
and other languages. The movement heralded a literary revolution,
producing fresh modes of narration, a changed literary consciousness,
and novel ideas of history.
With the establishment of a market for Dalit literature in the 1980s
and ’90s, and the emergence of Ambedkar, posthumously, as a tow-
ering national figure and an unparalleled intellectual, visionary, and
leader whom Dalits all over India begin to invoke, many life-writings
appear in the form of fairly direct political commentary and induce-
ment to Dalit mobilization. The figure of Ambedkar is critical, and the
writings take on the character of early modern charitra (literally “char-
acter”) – biographies or accounts of the lives and character of saints,
written in order to claim discipleship and an empowering connection
with the saint. Ambedkar now becomes a flame that lights other flames:
disciples who are chosen individuals in their own right, and who see
no distinction between exceptional writers and ordinary people.1 The
meaning of this literary/political revolution requires closer examina-
tion, however, for the politics of particular subaltern autobiographical
traditions and practices are not, by any means, monochromatic or
transparent.
I have argued that subaltern writings in the autobiographical mode
are denied the space of the unmarked universal, which is occupied

1 I am grateful to Rashmi Bhatnagar for discussions on this point and for stressing
to me the relevance of the charitra tradition; for an extended discussion of chari-
tra, see Rashmi Bhatnagar, World and Bhāsa Literatures: Revolutions in Philology
(forthcoming).
 Dalit Memoirs 165

by male, upper-class, bourgeois autobiography. They are consigned

instead to the local, the vernacular, and the marked: subjects (or, shall
we say, objects) that appear as something of a deviance from the
“normal” condition of modern existence, the autonomous self, and
autobiography. They are also denied their individuality and variety,
the very stuff of human life in the liberal understanding. I want to
suggest, however, that this is a channeling, a confinement, that owes
something to the agenda and politics of specific subaltern constituen-
cies as well as to the compulsions of the market and a wider common
sense.
Life-story/autobiography/memoir involves the production, not the
presentation, of an already available self, as I have already observed.
I suggested in Chapter 3 that in treating caste discrimination, and in
particular the treatment of ex-Untouchable castes by Touchable castes,
as their overriding concern, Dalit leaders overstated the claim of Dalit
unity and understated the force of divisions and tensions “internal”
to the putative Dalit community. An important question of political
choices arises, then, even in the subset of subaltern life-writing that
one might call political autobiography. It is these choices that I set out
to explore in the following pages.

The “Inner Cry”

Numerous examples of subalternist life-writing convey the sense of

releasing an irrepressible, inner cry. Thus the leading poet of the
Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes: “Because my mouth/ Is wide
with laughter/And my throat/ Is deep with song/ You do not think/
I suffer after/ I have held my pain/ So long?” Or the Dalit Professor
of Sanskrit, Kumud Pawde’s autobiographical narrative Antah-sphot
(1981), literally “inner explosion,” an inner cry like a volcanic erup-
tion. Is the subaltern memoir an archive of that cry, one might ask?
And whose cry? The individual? The collective? The times?
Let us begin with a quick examination of the circumstances of the
men and women responsible for this outpouring of autobiographical
literary work among Dalits – when and how these accounts are written,
in what circumstances, at what stage in the protagonist’s life – which
helps to indicate some of the more distinctive aspects of this body of
writing. When people asked Om Prakash Valmiki, the distinguished
Hindi writer and memoirist from Uttar Pradesh in northern India, why
166 A History of Prejudice

he had written an autobiography so early in life, he responded: “Don’t

compare this narrative of pain with the achievements of others.”2
Aravind Malagatti from Karnataka (southern India) makes much the
same point in a note to the reader (“before you read”) at the start of
his autobiography, published in Kannada under the English title Gov-
ernment Brahmana (1994): “I do not have any illusions of becoming
a mahatma [a “great soul”: the implied reference is apparently to
Mahatma Gandhi] by presenting these few pages of my life story. I am
quite ordinary. . . . At the same time, I cannot resist saying that these
experiences are those of every ordinary dalit.”3 The politics of this
assertion of ordinariness bears reflection.
The memoirs in question are not the works of well-schooled, com-
fortable, degree-holding, trained or leisured intellectuals, ruminating
on life, love, and the mysteries of human being. On the contrary.
Early women writers in nineteenth-century Bengal, we might recall,
frequently learned to read and write on the sly, against the injunctions
of “respectable” society: Shanta Nag, standing silently on the other
side of a table at which her older brother was being taught the Bengali
primer, which the young girl also cleverly learned to read – but only
with the book held the wrong way around; Rassundari Debi stealing a
page on which her son had written the alphabet, and using it painfully
to decipher individual pages that she removed, one at a time, from the
household copy of a religious text – with no one but a few household
maids aware of her self-teaching.4 Although Dalit children in the mid-
dle and later decades of the twentieth century were not denied access
to schools and textbooks in quite the same way, it was still far from
easy for them to gain fluency in the “high,” literary languages of the
different parts of India and even less easy – for Dalit women, even
more than for Dalit men – to become writers.
As with Viola’s children, the first question asked about school-
ing beyond a minimal primary stage was what, if anything, Dalit (or
black) children would gain from the effort. And more emphatically,

2 Valmiki, Joothan, viii.

3 Aravind Malagatti, Government Brahamana (Chennai: Orient Longman, 2007), 1.
4 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1993), 140, 142. Ashraf-un-nisa Begum provides a striking parallel example
from northern India; see Ruby Lal, Coming of Age in Nineteenth Century India: The
Girl Child and the Art of Playfulness (forthcoming).
 Dalit Memoirs 167

what would they gain from “writing” (or, in the Andrews’ case, “col-
oring and drawing”)? What good would it do for their livelihood and
survival? Along with the dominant classes, subaltern society frowned
on such attempts to ape the upper classes. When it came to women
writers, the men (and older women) of their local communities were
particularly blistering in their comments. These young, “educated,”
often urban (or urban-returned) folk were giving themselves airs; they
thought they had become pundits (or Brahmans). One outcome is seen
in the examples of a female and a male writer whom I discuss at
greater length later in this chapter. Baby Kamble kept the writing of
her memoirs a secret from her husband and all her relatives, except
perhaps an elder brother,5 for twenty years. So did Damodar Jadhav,
who, after his retirement from work in the Bombay Port railway yards,
secretly jotted down reminiscences (and short stories) of his early life:
his well-educated and now well-placed (middle-class) children, who
had given him the notebooks and encouraged him to write, say that
they discovered his writings only after his death.
In large part, at least in the early stages of Dalit (and other subal-
tern) autobiographical ventures – and I use the term advisedly, for the
process is a discovery of literacy and of genre as well as of self – the
writing, to quote one student of Dalit autobiographies, “has no liter-
ary purpose” (or ambition): it is rather “a laborious effort in quest of
oneself.”6 In many instances, indeed, in nineteenth-century bhadralok
Bengali women’s accounts, as in twentieth-century subaltern women’s
and men’s accounts, the writing takes the form of an interaction with
an inner self. Recall the mode of Rassundari Debi’s narration of her
life, Amar Jiban, in which the successive chapters read like a series
of entreaties to god. Or again, an important reason offered by Viola
Andrews for writing about her life: “[A]nyway I and my inner self
communed together while I wrote.”
Consider in this context the example of Madhav Kondhvilkar, the
son of a cobbler, who became a schoolteacher and was sent to his own
village to teach in the very building where as a pupil, before Indian

5 Guy Poitevin, “Dalit Autobiographical Narratives: Figures of Subaltern Conscious-

ness, Assertion and Identity,” 13, http://aune.lpl.univ-aix.fr/-belbernard/misc/ccrss/
dalitautobio.htm.
6 Ibid., 21.
168 A History of Prejudice

independence, he was made to sit in a corner and treated as an untouch-

able. The scholar-activist Guy Poitevin writes of how Kondhvilkar
continued to be slighted by the upper castes in the village, as well as
“misunderstood and rebuked” by his own caste fellows, and how, as
this renewed experience of caste oppression blended with memories
of his childhood, Kondhvilkar started keeping a diary, “in a complete
social isolation, prompted by an inner urge to write, speak out and
cry out.” His writing becomes, as it did for Viola, “his confidant,
the support of his inward dialogue with himself, the witness to his
aspirations and torment, a means to record his expectations when no
one else takes him seriously.”7
The articulation of the subaltern subject – the assertion of human-
ity, agency, subjectivity – occurs in a fairly untypical manner. The
distinction between subject and object often disappears, as in the char-
itra genre of early modern writing of saintly and exceptional lives in
the Indic tradition, though in a rather different context. In the for-
mer, saint and god, disciple and saint, are merged into one. In Dalit
life-stories, the “community” is the omnipresent; hence, the subject
who writes and the object of reflection are not easily separated. On
occasion, an apparently unconscious slide from first- to third-person
narration, and the other way around, signals the particularity of the
experience – possibly suggesting also that the first-person voice cannot
bear the weight of the life being relived. I shall have occasion to refer
to this move in analyzing Baby Kamble’s account of her and her com-
munity’s life, as well as Narendra Jadhav’s family memoir, later in this
chapter. Here, let me illustrate the point quickly with three quotations
from the Bengali domestic servant Baby Halder’s Aalo Andhari, where
subject and object appear as one and the same – sometimes in the same
sentence.
As a little girl, sitting quietly after serving visitors in her aunt’s
home, Halder writes: “I thought of all those people who had praised
my work – what would they have said if they had known that ever
since she was a small child, Baby had known little other than the hard
drudgery of household chores?” Recalling her time in the hospital
having her first child: “I – a child, not even fourteen years old – I,
Baby, lay there alone crying and screaming. When the other patients

7 All quotations in this paragraph are from Poitevin, ibid.

 Dalit Memoirs 169

began complaining, Baby was moved to another room, where she was
put on a table and her arms and legs were tied.” “I, Baby, lay there
crying”; “she (Baby)” was put on a table with her arms and legs tied.
Or again, on the day when she sees her mother, who had left her father,
and the children with him, years earlier:

I wondered again how she could have left such small children and gone
away. . . . Did she even remember that she had managed to get rid of her
little girl, Baby, by bribing her with ten paise on the day she left home? Did
she remember that she hadn’t turned around once to look back? How then
could she have known that Baby stood there and watched her until she became
a mere speck on the horizon?8

Perhaps even more emphatically than in the case of the relatively

comfortable middle-class (or bourgeois) individual, the agency, sub-
jectivity, or selfhood of newly literate and still disenfranchised groups
is not already available, ready-made as it were. Against the examples
of resistance to the first-person singular, in the interest of some larger
self, many Dalit commentators have articulated the need for a strong
assertion of the long-denied “I.” Dalits, “who have for so long been
treated as commodities owned by others, must shout out their self-
hood, their ‘I’, when they rise up,” Raj Gauthaman observes.9 The
new literature of Dalit selfhood that has emerged in recent decades has
sought to establish “the dignity of the untouchable person” through
“powerful words,” writes Sharankumar Limbale.10
At the same time, as Limbale goes on to say, “The experience
described in Dalit literature is social, hence it is articulated as collective
in character. Therefore, even when the experience expressed . . . is that
of an individual, it appears to be that of a group.”11 And elsewhere, in
his autobiographical account of the “half-caste” “bastard” produced
by the sexual abuse of his Untouchable laboring mother by a high caste,
landlord “father”: “I regard the immorality of my father . . . [towards

8 Baby Halder, A Life Less Ordinary, translated from the Hindi by Urvashi Butalia
(New Delhi: Zubaan, 2002), 30, 57, 117.
9 Raj Gauthaman, cited in Lakshmi Holmstrom, “Introduction,” in Bama, Sangati,
translated from the Tamil by Lakshmi Holmstrom (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2005), xv.
10 Sharankumar Limbale, Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature, translated from the
Marathi by Alok Mukherjee (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2004), 26.
11 Ibid., 36; cf. 31.
170 A History of Prejudice

my] mother as a metaphor for rape. . . . I grow restless whenever I read

about a rape in the newspaper. A violation anywhere in the country, I
feel, is a violation of my mother.”12
Thus, the loudly declaimed subaltern “I” is located in a no less
forcefully proclaimed “we.” Dalit writing cannot be severed from its
relationship with pain, says Limbale.13 “My mother used to weave
aaydans [baskets or containers made of bamboo],” writes Urmila
Pawar in a 2003 book that sharply critiques both caste society and
Dalit patriarchy. “I find her act of weaving and my act of writing
are organically linked. The weave is similar. It is the weave of pain,
suffering and agony that links us.”14 In a similar vein, the translator
and critic Maya Pandit has described Baby Kamble’s autobiographi-
cal account Jina Amcha (1986) as more a socio-biography than the
autobiography of an individual.15 Kamble herself describes it as “the
autobiography of my entire community”: “The suffering of my people
became my own suffering. Their experiences became mine. . . . I really
find it difficult to think of myself outside of my community.”16
We return here to the question of the “singular nature of [subal-
tern] pain”17 and of the body as archive for the writing of subaltern
history. These are the issues that I pursue in the remaining sections
of this chapter, through a focus on two important autobiographical
accounts of Dalit life and history in Maharashtra (western India): Baby
Kondiba Kamble’s life-story, Jina Amcha (Our Lives), first serialized
in a Marathi journal in 1982, published as a book in Marathi in 1986,
and translated into and published in English in 2008; and Narendra
Jadhav’s compilation Aamcha Baap aan Aamhi (Our Father and Us),
first broadcast as a life-story on regional Marathi radio and published
in Marathi in 1993, and translated, or rather rewritten, by the author
and published in English in 2003, with a French translation having
appeared in 2002 and translations into numerous other Indian lan-
guages subsequently.

12 Limbale, The Outcaste, ix.

13 Limbale, Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature, 35.
14 Urmila Pawar, The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs, translated from
the Marathi by Maya Pandit (Calcutta: Stree, 2008), x.
15 Maya Pandit, “Introduction,” in Pawar, Weave of My Life, xv.
16 Kamble, Prisons We Broke, 157, 136.
17 Ganguly, “Pain, Personhood, and the Collective,” 433.
 Dalit Memoirs 171

Baby Kamble and Narendra Jadhav both come from Ambedkar’s

caste group, the Mahars. Both write in the tradition of Dalit life-writing
that I have described above. And both write of Ambedkar and the
Ambedkarite struggle as an integral part of the family story, so much so
that one might say of these accounts what Jonathan Spence says about
Zhong Dai’s biographical sketches in seventeenth-century China: that
they “are also – or could it be ‘are mainly’?” about the wider political
struggle, the emergence of an unprecedented Dalit movement under
the inspiration of Ambedkar.18 It is this facet of the reminiscences that
perhaps explains the juxtaposition of the autobiographical narrative
with what we could classify as ethnography and reportage, as well as
the easy shift from first-person to third-person narration: this is my/our
story, but it is also a broader history.
It is perhaps unnecessary to add that the Kamble and Jadhav mem-
oirs are overdetermined by the broader political trends of the times in
which they were written, the early 1980s and the early 1990s, respec-
tively. In the case of the latter, the text was indeed recast and rewritten
several times in the decade following its initial publication, and the
rewriting was done by individuals who are no longer in anything like
a subaltern position, yet remain strongly committed to the principles
of the Ambedkarite struggle and the advancement of the lower-caste
group they originally came from (and of other castes and classes caught
in a similarly disenfranchised position).
Although both Baby Kamble and Narendra Jadhav build on a long
tradition of Dalit aspiration and struggle, their work also marks impor-
tant departures in the history of Dalit autobiography that need to be
noted. Kamble’s book has been lauded by Maya Pandit as “redefin[ing]
the tradition of autobiographical writing in Marathi” in terms of nar-
rative strategy and the description of the community that is at its heart:
the Mahar community of rural and small-town western Maharashtra
in the period of Ambedkar’s national ascendancy in the 1940s and
’50s and in the decades that followed. In particular, Pandit notes, Jina
Amcha gives us one of the earliest and most sustained “internal cri-
tique(s)” of patriarchal relations in Dalit society and the consequences

18 Cf. Jonathan Spence, “Cliffhanger Days: A Chinese Family in the 17th Century,”
American Historical Review, 10, no. 1 (February 2005), 1–10.
172 A History of Prejudice

of patriarchal practices for Dalit women, who are doubly subalter-

nized – by caste and by gender.19
Jadhav’s Aamcha Baap aan Aamhi has been hailed as providing
a significant new turn in Dalit literature, with its end product (and
aspiration) being that of the global citizen. It has been characterized
as the life-story of “an emancipated de-caste” Dalit family,20 a “story
of success” rather than suffering, of the potential of individuals to
overcome all odds, one no longer focused on the issue of caste or the
fact of being a Dalit and written (as a number of critics put it) in a
“balanced, cultured, civilized” style, without any virulence, bitterness,
or invective.21
I have chosen to counterpose these two texts here for what they
tell us, in their different ways, about a Dalit perspective on demo-
cratic rights, discrimination, and prejudice, and because they represent
two different, not to say contradictory, possibilities in the matter of
rescripting the subaltern body.

The Body as Text

The late Baby Kamble (or Baby Tai as she was affectionately called as
an elder, until her death in April 2012; see Figure 4) was born in 1929
in a relatively comfortable working-class family that had prospered
modestly under British rule. The details of her personal life, activities,
and experiences are directly relevant to the story she tells, so it will
help to outline them briefly.
Baby Kamble’s maternal grandfather and grand uncles had worked
as butlers for various British officials and “spoke excellent English.”
Her father was a labor contractor, who provided and managed the
laborers required for canal building in various parts of Maharashtra,
and later in his career worked on the construction of the Mumbadevi
Temple in Mumbai and a milk dairy in Pune owned by the central
government. He earned a fairly good living, although (she tells us)
he saved little; he had “a bungalow for himself” when he worked in
Pune, and “no dearth of servants either.” Because Baby Tai’s father

19 Kamble, Prisons We Broke, vii, ix, xi, 160.

20 Maya Pandit in Pawar, Weave of My Life, xvi.
21 Shailesh Tribhuvan, ed., Aamcha Baap aan Aamhi: Svarup ani Sameeksha (Mumbai:
Granthali, 2008), 7, 77, 82, 204.
 Dalit Memoirs 173

figure 4. Babytai Kamble, Phaltan, Maharashtra, January 2012 (photo by

Pinak Kalloli; courtesy Maya Pandit)

traveled a lot, she and her mother lived until she was eight or nine in
her maternal grandparents’ home in Veergaon, in the Purandar district
in western Maharashtra. The house was “a storehouse of food,” she
writes, and the only Mahar household in the locality that had and
served tea!22
There are other snapshots of Kamble’s pampered life as a child:

Whenever my father went to Mumbai, he used to buy lots of things for me –

thick silver anklets, thin and hollow silver anklets, a silver nose ring with a
red bead, gold earrings with red stones, three big silver tassels for my hair, silk
for a long skirt and blouse, and a red chunni with a crescent on it. He used to
send all these to me through my mawshi [mother’s sister].
In the maharwada of Veergaon, I behaved as if the locality was my personal
property. I called all men mama [maternal uncle] and their wives mami [aunt],
and their parents aaja and aaji [grandfather and grandmother]. All those fifteen

22 Kamble, Prisons We Broke, 45, 51–2, 103, 105. All the information in the following
paragraphs comes from Baby Kamble’s autobiography, Jina Amcha (third printing,
Pune: Sugava Prakashan, 2008). Hereafter, page numbers follow direct quotations
in the text, which come from Maya Pandit’s English translation, The Prisons We
Broke, except in a few instances (footnoted) where I have felt it necessary to modify
her excellent translation.
174 A History of Prejudice

or sixteen houses in our maharwada were like family to me. . . . I used to walk
in style with silver tassels down my back, silver anklets on my feet, silver
chains clinking above them, my half-tola nose ring, earrings, and silk clothes!
(Kamble, Prisons We Broke, 6–7)

The move to her father’s house in Phaltan, in the Satara district, was
a comedown – perhaps not surprisingly. This had to do not only with
moving out of the loving embrace of her grandparents’ home but also
with the coming of “mature” age for a girl. Baby Tai was married at
13: she’d passed the Standard IV examination and was thought already
to be getting too old for marriage.
Inspired by the emergence of Ambedkar to regional and national
fame, and by his emphasis on education, self-respect, and equality for
the Mahars and other Dalit groups, Baby Kamble’s father insisted on
sending both her and her brother to school in Phaltan (the school had a
total of ten girls, counting all castes, high and low). Her uncle Narhari
Kakade, not much older than her elder siblings, was the first one from
the local Mahar community to go to the high school, situated of course
outside the Mahar neighborhood. Her cousin Pandharinath Kakade
and some forty other Mahar boys followed suit, and Pandharinath
named a building that was given to them as a hostel Harijan Boarding
after Gandhi’s preferred term for the Dalits. Baby Tai herself attended
school for a few years. Her husband, Kondiba Kamble, who studied
in the same school as her brother, went longer – up to high school.
Marriage brought new responsibilities and burdens for the teenage
girl. Her marital home in Phaltan had “fifteen or sixteen” people living
in it, and she had to work nonstop to keep up with the demands made
of a young wife and daughter-in-law. Her husband, deeply attached to
notions of family honor and respectability, expected her to stay within
the bounds of the home, just as her own mother had been forced to
do by her father. To make matters worse, he was jobless – until she
came up with the suggestion that they start a small trade in groceries,
working from a room at the front of the house.
Baby Tai attributes the idea of establishing an independent business,
rather than entering another family’s service, to Ambedkar’s inspira-
tion and advice to the Mahars, and declares her own devotion to the
Dalit movement from the age of 7 or 8. With the setting up of the
grocery store, she and her husband gained a steady source of income,
 Dalit Memoirs 175

and they used their education and their shop for the advancement of
the Dalit movement. Along the way, as part of the duties of a married
woman in a respectable Mahar household, she had ten children – the
same number as Viola. Unlike in the Andrews’ case, however, three
of Kamble’s children died early. The remaining seven, three sons and
four daughters, have done well, becoming bank officials, schoolteach-
ers, lower-level government functionaries, and in the case of the two
youngest daughters, marrying a rich farmer and a doctor, respectively.
It will be clear that Baby Kamble’s family, both in her natal and
her married homes, had escaped the extreme condition of poverty and
deprivation in which the majority of Mahars lived, especially in the
countryside. In spite of this, what her autobiography emphasizes is the
poverty and filth that abounded in the community. And in this por-
trayal the immediate family and the wider caste group are continuously
interlinked.
“Roughly speaking,” she says of her grandparents’ village, Veer-
gaon, “we were fifteen or sixteen [Mahar] households.” Save for three
or four of them, related to the head of the Mahar caste group, who
got 16% of any payments received for traditional services performed
for higher-caste villagers (removing animal carcasses, carrying notices
of death and other urgent messages to neighboring habitations, guard-
ing the village, sweeping village roads, serving visiting officials, etc.),
the rest lived in exceptionally poor houses – “tiny huts really,” “eter-
nally stricken by poverty.” “Children looked as if they had rolled in
mud, snot dripping from their noses in green gooey lines . . . their bod-
ies . . . completely bare without a stitch on them. Each hut contained
at least eight to ten such kids; some even had fifteen to twenty.” The
Goddess Satwai, who was supposed to determine the fate of every
individual, “had stamped hunger” on every Mahar forehead.23
Indeed, Veergaon comes to stand in for the condition of the Mahars
at large – in Phaltan, in Pune, and all over Maharashtra. Baby Tai
suggests it affected her own family: “Poverty was common to my
husband’s house and mine.” Once her father gave up work because of
his increasing involvement in Ambedkar’s movement, “we often had

23 Kamble, Prisons We Broke, 7, 8, 82. I have modified the translation in the first
sentence quoted to underline Baby Kamble’s stress on counting all 15–16 Mahar
households in Veergaon as her community; see Kamble, Jina Amcha, 13.
176 A History of Prejudice

to go hungry” (ibid., 107, 141). For the rest, “the maharwada [Mahar
neighborhood] symbolized utter poverty and total destitution.” “All
the dirty and laborious jobs were the privilege of the Mahar!” “Poverty
oozed out of their house[s]” (ibid., 46, 76, 80).
Occasionally, she writes, after long periods without food, some
Mahar laborers would secretly poison a buffalo. When summoned to
clear away the remains, she goes on to say in the third person, “the
Mahars were more than ready.” They skinned the carcass, cut the flesh
into pieces, and distributed it among the households. The family of the
caste-head got the largest share, others got their allotted shares – some
more, some less – “but everybody got at least a basketful.” During
epidemics, when they heard news of several cattle having died, “the
joy of the Mahars knew no bounds.”

The Mahars considered animal epidemics . . . a boon. . . . The inside of some

animals would be putrid, filled with puss and infected with maggots. There
would be a horrid, foul smell! . . . But we did not throw away even such ani-
mals. We cut off the infected parts full of puss, and convinced ourselves that
it was now safe to eat the meat.24

Observe once more the easy slide between third- and first-person nar-
rative.
Liberation in this account comes in the form of a miracle wrought
by a savior, Babasaheb Ambedkar:

[He] breathed life into lifeless statues, that is, the people of our community.
It was he who lighted a lamp in each heart and brought light to our dark
lives . . . he made us human beings . . . [h]e made it possible for us to receive
education. . . . [I]t is because of him that the age-old suffering of millions of
people could be wiped out within fifty years. (ibid., 118)

Baby Tai etches this story of liberation, of a move from darkness to

light, by underlining the intensity of the ignorance and squalor that
existed before. “The entire community had sunk deep in the mire
of . . . dreadful superstitions. The upper castes had never allowed this

24 Kamble, Prisons We Broke, 83, 85; Kamble, Jina Amcha, 66, 68. Compare Aime
Cesaire: “At the hour before dawn, on the far side of my father and my mother, the
whole hut cracking and blistered, like a sinner punished with boils. . . . And the bed of
planks from which my race has risen . . . as if the old bed had elephantiasis, covered
with a goat skin, and its dried banana leaves and its rags, the ghost of a mattress that
is my grandmother’s bed,” cited in Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, 71.
 Dalit Memoirs 177

lowly caste of ours to acquire knowledge. Generation after generation,

our people rotted and perished by following such a superstitious way of
life.” “The condition of the Mahars was no better than that of bullocks,
those beasts of burden, who slogged all their life for a handful of dry
grass” (ibid., 37, 80).
The body of the Mahars – unclean, grimy, superstitious, irrational,
lacking in human dignity, self-confidence, and self-respect – is the mark
of their degradation. Jina Amcha presents the marked subaltern body
in crushing detail as the archive of this history.

People would be covered in thick layers of dust and dirt, a black coating on
their skin. You could see the deep marks where moisture trickled down. Hair,
untouched by oil, fell over their shoulders in thick tangles. They looked like
rag dolls, nibbled and torn by sharp-teethed mice. The thick tangles of hair
would be infested with lice and coated with lice eggs. (ibid., 8)

The majority of Mahars – laborers and servants – were “like insects

crawling around in hunger. With no food to eat, at least a couple of
people would be ill in each house, lying down in rags . . . almost lifeless
with hunger. . . . They breathed, therefore they were supposed to be
alive” (ibid., 103, 104).
The promise of transformation, of self-respect and human dignity
and liberty, brought by Ambedkar is in turn visible in the leader’s body.
For those who had seen him and those who had not, the celebration
of Babasaheb’s physical appearance accompanied the celebration of
his message. “This boy of our Mahar community” had arrived – at
this meeting or that, in Mumbai or Jejuri – in his own car, dressed
in European clothes, speaking the white sahib’s tongue: it was quite
incredible. He had studied overseas and returned to Mumbai in a ship,
a truly learned (young) man.
In words that Baby Tai puts into the mouths of her grandparents,
“My, my, that Bhimrao Ambedkar, that tender young boy! He has
returned after getting educated with the sahibs beyond the seven seas.”
As for his personality, “what can I tell you! So tall, so strong, so fair,
with such a high forehead. He dresses like a white sahib and looks like
one too. When he got out of his car, it was as if a governor had stepped
out. And what a speech that was! As if it was the court of [Lord]
Indra!” The grandparents, in common with other elder (and younger)
Mahars, go on to retail what Ambedkar is reported to have said
178 A History of Prejudice

on these occasions: “Give up these [disreputable] Mahar ways now.

See how our people have progressed in the cities. Start sending your
children to schools. Stop carting the filth of the village. Don’t eat the
flesh of dead animals.”25
“Suddenly the times changed,” says Kamble, summing up the gifts
bequeathed by Ambedkar in words I have quoted before: “The struggle
yielded us three jewels – humanity, education and the religion of the
Buddha. . . . We began to walk and talk. We became conscious that we
too are human beings.”26 Here was the making of the new Dalit – and
the new Dalit body.
With all her attention to the miserable, unclean, superstitious, and
irrational body of the Mahar “in general,” however, the history that
Baby Tai recounts also foregrounds another body that is no less marked
by its specific oppression – the body of the Mahar woman. I have
quoted her comment on the Mahar families’ treatment of daughters-
in-law in Chapter 2 – “The other world had bound us with chains
of slavery. But we too were human beings. And we too desired to
dominate, to wield power. . . . So we made our own arrangements to
find slaves – our very own daughters-in-law!” – and cited her account
of the confinement of Mahar girls and women, and of their chastise-
ment and punishment for small mistakes and the slightest suggestion
of transgression.
Two kinds of subaltern bodies appear in Baby Kamble’s narra-
tive, the first is the body of the poor (child, laborer, woman) –
with runny noses, sweat pouring down emaciated and exhausted bod-
ies, blood and dirt (from meat and refuse) running out of baskets they
must carry, and seeping into their hair and down their faces. The sec-
ond is the body of the girl/woman, most dramatically embodied in
the figure of the daughter-in-law and the wife – which (and the pro-
noun is appropriate) is constantly exploited, overworked, disciplined,
punished by a jealous patriarchal order that doesn’t hesitate to show
its manliness by cutting off the noses of women for real or imagined
transgressions.27 Outside the home, we are told, poor, laboring Mahar

25 Kamble, Jina Amcha, 52–4.

26 Kamble, Prisons We Broke, 122 (also cited in chap. 2, this volume).
27 Kamble, Jina Amcha, 78 and passim.
 Dalit Memoirs 179

women walked on the side of the village roads “with utmost humility
so as not to offend anyone. They tried to make themselves as incon-
spicuous as possible, hiding themselves from all others.” Inside the
home, they bore other burdens: “A Mahar woman would continue to
give birth till she reached menopause. Perhaps, this became possible
because of the inner strength that she had. . . . Hardly a few of the
babies would survive. . . . But somehow the cycle of birth and death
would go on” (ibid., 54, 82).
In spite of the careful detailing of the parallel histories of these two
subaltern constituencies, however, the woman’s body finds negligible
place in the account of the struggle that Baby Tai foregrounds. There
is a recognition of the marking of that body but little indication of
the possibility of its reinscription. What is rewritten is the potential
of the universal (male) subaltern body, which may now be imagined in
the image of the indomitable leader, Babasaheb Ambedkar: the body of
the superstitious, ignorant, “untouchable” (or more generally lower-
caste) laboring poor, long deprived of education or opportunity for
self-improvement but not to be denied any longer with the coming of
Ambedkar and the rise of the Dalit movement.
Women and girls are utterly central to Baby Kamble’s narrative.
Even in the account of the liberation struggle set in motion by Ambed-
kar, they appear as major protagonists, and a Mahar woman of course
gives birth to Babasaheb. For all that, women do not figure as an inde-
pendent, guiding force in the community or its struggle. The source
of that energy lies elsewhere: “After having undergone the ordeal of
fire for ages, [a Mahar woman, steeped like all women in patience and
fortitude] finally gave birth to a divine flame.” “A small sapling grew
out of this . . . soil [that the Mahars had sustained and enriched with
their labor]. It went on to become a huge tree of light and truth. It gave
shelter to millions who were suffering. The tree transform[ed] beasts
into human beings.” This new force was “that ideal human being, our
very own Buddha,” Bhim Rao Ambedkar (ibid., 62, 102).
In the depiction of Ambedkar’s achievements, again the matter of
the liberation of women from age-long oppression is underscored,
but women, and Baby Tai herself, appear as humble interpreters of a
supernatural leader’s vision. “The man who gave birth to the Hindu
Code Bill [which “tore off the net in which men had trapped women
180 A History of Prejudice

for ages”] was my king Bhim, the son of Morality, saviour of the world.
It is because of him that my pen can scribble out some thoughts. It is
because of him that I have understood truth” (ibid., 102).
I cited earlier the author’s statement that Jina Amcha is the “auto-
biography of my entire community.” She was caught up in the Ambed-
karite movement from an early age, she says in several places, attend-
ing meetings along with her husband and helping to mobilize Dalits in
the small town of Phaltan. Following Ambedkar’s advice that Dalits
should try to set up small businesses rather than look for service
jobs, she persuaded her husband to begin selling grapes, buying loose
grapes from the surrounding countryside and selling them at a small
profit. With that start, they went on to open a small grocery shop
(in an additional room built on the front of the house) that quickly
became a center of trade and political discussion, located as it was
just opposite the Mahar chawdi (or public gathering place) of the
neighborhood.
It was during her long hours sitting at the shop, waiting for cus-
tomers, that Baby Kamble began writing her memoirs – in hiding.
Asked by her translator why she hid her writing for twenty years, she
said: “because of my husband. He was a good man but like all the men
of his time and generation, he considered a woman an inferior being.”
She recalls how deeply suspicious her husband was of her littlest moves,
and how he beat her repeatedly on flimsy grounds. “In fact,” she states,
“this was the life most women led. . . . Women are still slaves. . . . (They)
used to be afraid of even looking up at their husbands.” “Fathers used
to teach their sons to treat their wives as footwear! A wife’s place was
near her husband’s feet.” Pressed to explain why she never felt the
need to write about all this, the memoirist says simply: “Well, he was
my husband after all! . . . Besides I had my community to consider, our
lack of education, progress. It would be so demeaning.” And further,
“I had to suffer like many other women. But how do you . . . talk about
it when everyone is suffering?” (ibid., 147, 154–7).
Recall that Baby Tai makes exactly the opposite argument in rela-
tion to the suffering of the Mahars and the wider Dalit population:
“I wrote about what my community experienced. The suffering of my
people became my own suffering. Their experiences became mine. . . . I
really find it difficult to think of myself outside of my community.”
 Dalit Memoirs 181

Thus, the self that Baby Kamble constructs is a self-consciously

Dalit, anti-upper-caste self, inspired by Ambedkar. The community
whose suffering she writes about is distinctly defined by the Dalit
struggle, or a certain construction of it. Hence her foregrounding of
how she and her husband worked together in Ambedkar’s movement,
her emphasis on the fresh ideas that the movement brought, and her
celebration of the unprecedented sense of freedom and energy. “Times
were changing fast,” she writes, “Because of Dr. Ambedkar, many new
norms were coming into force. . . . [B]oth my husband and I started
doing a lot of social work. That became my life” (ibid., 145). And
that becomes the primary theme of Jina Amcha, a moving and power-
ful “socio-biography,” now beautifully and sympathetically translated
into English by Maya Pandit under the telling title of The Prisons We
Broke.
Yet, given such complex and contradictory narratives, we have to
continue to ask questions about the conditions in which a subaltern will
and consciousness, a Dalit self, and Dalit politics are produced. The
plainly intractable issues of “natural” community and the autonomy
of the individual become even more problematical when it comes to
the writings of Dalits who have moved some distance from their origi-
nal homes (and communities) and established themselves as successful
professionals, entrepreneurs, or writers in a very different location. It is
one such narrative that we have in the Jadhav family memoir, Aamcha
baap aan aamhi (“Our Father and Us”).

The Indomitable Self

The Jadhav story is marked by rather more dramatic upward mobility

than that of Baby Kamble. A tale of three generations, the memoir
begins with a family and community caught up in hard labor in the
fields of the Nasik district and the railways and slums of Bombay.
It documents the family’s journey through education, determination,
and struggle to high bureaucratic office in India for the second
generation (including the vice-chancellorship of a leading university
and membership of the powerful National Planning Commission for
the youngest son, the distinguished economist and now well-known
writer Narendra Jadhav), and goes on to refer to a third generation,
182 A History of Prejudice

which, with its highly privileged education and life in Mumbai and
overseas, hardly grows up with a sense of being Dalit. The story is
told in several voices (some of which literally appear and disappear
in different editions of the text) and is now available in three very
distinct versions in three different languages.
Before the published Marathi text, we have the manuscript note-
books of Narendra Jadhav’s father, Damodar (or Damu), written in a
rural dialect Marathi. Narendra generously gave me a copy of these. He
readily acknowledged their importance for the researcher, but warned
me that I would find the rural idiom difficult. He was right. The accom-
plished translator Maya Pandit, who helped me with the translation,
also struggled in deciphering and making sense of the narrative at
points. Narendra also told me the story of how his father scribbled
these notes (along with some short stories) in secrecy from the rest of
the family, who discovered the writings only after Damodar Jadhav’s
death. A familiar motif in subaltern reminiscences, and sometimes
apocryphal, it speaks to the power of the written word and of inherited
traditions in which writing played no part, in which indeed writing –
and book-learning – could be seen as a hindrance to the performance
of other, unavoidable tasks.
Next is the literary Marathi of the published form of the memoir,
which has now gone through a number of editions. (In what follows, I
use the fifth, people’s, edition, dated 2007, in the main.) Finally, there
is the English transcreation published in Delhi in 2003, not to men-
tion translations (usually of this English version) that have appeared
in numerous other languages in India and abroad. These several recen-
sions, and the possibility of tracing the translation (by the lead author
Narendra Jadhav himself) from one language to another and one con-
text to another, give us an unusual opportunity to consider how the
individual and collective self of a successfully mobile “ex-subaltern”
family comes to be narrated.
The available Marathi and English texts of the Jadhav family
memoir feed on a number of different genres. We begin in Damu’s
manuscript notebooks with the recapitulation of a “common” man’s
common struggles, itself originating in childhood memories, captured
in the Marathi of the Mahars of Ozer, soaked in the texture of everyday
life (of togetherness in labor and travel, of community, names, colors,
smells, petty foibles, and common dangers – including the sighting of
 Dalit Memoirs 183

a leopard in the fields, the burning of a child’s fingers on a tawa or

hot-plate, and a sleeping child falling off a bullock cart and remaining
asleep while the caravan moves on a long way ahead!) – and told in a
quite matter-of-fact tone. It is the story of an “I” located firmly in a
disparate, scattered “we” of the laboring poor, first in the village and
the surrounding farms, jungles, and pathways, and then in an urban
working-class neighborhood in the big city of Bombay – environments
that are distinctly made by both human and nonhuman forces.
In the published Marathi version, the tale becomes a more emo-
tional family saga. The text includes chapters divisible into autobio-
graphical fragments, biographical commentaries, and social descrip-
tion and analysis.28 The narrative works through its many authors
(father, sons, and in some editions daughters, daughters-in-law, and in
the most recent edition a granddaughter, too) to center the “I” (of the
father, mother, sons, granddaughter) amid a narration of exceptional
family endeavor and achievement, initiated by an extraordinary and
invincible father, Dada, as Damu is called by his children.29
The family story is now constructed by Narendra Jadhav around an
unusual, and unusually rewarding, father–son relationship. The early
editions of the Marathi publication begin with a chapter entitled “Mee,
aan maazha baap” (“My father and I”). In some later editions, this is
preceded by a very brief chapter on the father’s mother (“Rahi aai ga!,”
a rather Brahmanical diminutive for the grandmother), the title of the
chapter on the father is changed to “Aamcha baap” (“Our father”),
and the chapter writer’s name (Narendra Jadhav) is dropped. After
a comment on the straightforward, “caustic” language that Damodar
favored – hence Narendra’s choice of the robust, earthy “Baap” rather
than the sweet, polite “Vadil” for father – the chapter goes straight
into a discussion of Damodar’s character:

All of us brothers and sisters called him “Dada” [“elder brother,” presum-
ably following the form of address used by other elders in the home and
vicinity]. Medium height. Dark, asymmetrical face. Stern manner, but with a

28 One reviewer calculates the distribution as 50 pages of biographical accounts, 190

pages of the autobiographical, and 30 pages of social analysis, although one might
add up the pages differently and they differ in any case in different editions; see
Ramesh Dhongade, “Pach Pellu,” in Tribhuvan, Aamcha Baap: Sameeksha, 71.
29 In later editions of the Marathi text, there is also a brief chapter on an extraordinary
and indomitable grandmother; see Aamcha baap aan aamhi, 5th edition, 3–7.
184 A History of Prejudice

figure 5. Narendra Jadhav with his wife, Vasundhara, and parents, Damu
(Dada) and Sonu, Mumbai, December 1979 (courtesy Narendra Jadhav)

mischievous look in his eyes when talking to little children. Dhoti [loin-cloth],
white shirt, khaki coat and black hat, this was his regular dress. A staff in his
hand: only, the staff was used less for support than to intimidate [others].30
(See Figure 5.)

A few pages later, the fifth edition has several paragraphs that are
not found in the first and second editions: “We were six brothers
and sisters in all. Our childhood was spent in Wadala [in Mumbai].
Given the economic, social and cultural circumstances in which we
grew up, the other boys and girls of the locality fared as one might
expect. The sole difference [between them and us] was this, that we had
Dada with us!” “Dada’s self-confidence was extraordinary [khupats
daandga]. ‘Get me a long enough stick, I’ll flatten this circular earth
and show you’, so he would announce like an Archimedes [the Western
trope is Narendra Jadhav’s – a conscious, or unconscious, gesture
towards scientific modernity?]. Dada was a believer in rational thought

30 Jadhav, Aamcha Baap aan Aamhi, 2nd edition, 3; 5th edition, 8.

 Dalit Memoirs 185

and the individual’s effort, and intolerant of any kind of blind faith.”
“The Father from the little hamlet of Ozer, involved with the nitty-
gritty of everyday struggle for existence, is according to the author
eternal because he is not an individual but a striving force,” as one
commentator observes.31
In this transcendental statement, however, whereas the force and
presence of the protagonists, the father and the son(s) especially, is
greatly enhanced, the presence of the wider community and environ-
ment is much reduced. In the case of the father’s autobiographical
jottings as they appear in the published version, this is signaled in part
by a reduction of the dialect (something that is understandable in terms
of the requirements of publication and markets) and a greater use of a
standardized, literary, and, one might say, elite Marathi.32 Finally, the
English version recounts the story of two generations (plus a third in
the “Epilogue”) in an uncommon mix of romantic novel, ethnography,
and political commentary. The Jadhav story now appears as a tale of
individual romance and a rugged, masculine individualism, set in the
context of Ambedkar’s struggle for Dalit dignity and rights. Related in
the form of a rags-to-riches story, it is a celebration of two remarkable
individuals, Ambedkar and Damu, and of their heirs.
Very different sensibilities emerge in different versions of the narra-
tive. The point may be illustrated by comparing the descriptions of a
few events and individuals as presented in the manuscript notebooks
and the published Marathi. Here are two examples, one very small,
one slightly longer. The first is a statement about Damu’s mother,
Rahibai, that appears in the opening paragraphs of the notebooks and
in an early chapter of the published Marathi. In the former, she is
introduced as the daughter of Bhiu Nimba:

She had ([or] There were) two brothers . . . and three sisters. . . . Elder one was
Sonu; she was given away at Dindori. She had only one son. The second sister
was Reu and she was married off at Gangapur; she had one son, Mohan. The
youngest was my mother; her name was Rahibai.33

31 Ibid, 5th edition, 14–15; and Vidyut Bhagwat, “Ek streevadi vatsan,” in Tribhuvan,
Aamcha Baap: Sameeksha, 229.
32 Cf. Dhongade, “Pach Pellu,” in ibid., 83–4.
33 I have not provided page references for citations from Damodar Jadhav’s manuscript
notebooks since there are several notebooks, somewhat haphazard in their presen-
tation, not fully numbered, and repetitive in many places. Page numbers in the text
186 A History of Prejudice

We have here the description of a family, conceived of as a unit,

although spanning several generations. The mother was one of five
siblings, “two brothers and three sisters”; the youngest of these was the
writer’s mother. In the published version, the description is altered very
slightly, yet the small shift of emphasis serves to center the mother more
fully and makes this a statement about Rahibai rather than her natal
family. “Bhiu Nimba’s daughter, Rahibai. She was my mother. My
mother was the youngest [in her family]. She had two brothers. Their
names, Chahadu and Haari. Two sisters. Sonu and Reu” (Jadhav,
Aamcha Baap, 53).
Consider again the account of the part played by Damu’s wife and
sister, Sonu and Najuka, in a protest over Ganpati celebrations in
Mumbai (probably in 1928), as it appears in the unpublished note-
books and the published Marathi. Damu writes of the quiet progress
of the procession:

Some people were walking to and fro and I also was keeping an eye, moving
back and forth. Suddenly some goondas threw a stone at the procession. There
was a commotion. The scouts blew their whistles. People started running.
There were a lot of women as well. The sisters-in-law [nanad-bhavaj] were
also among them. They snatched away the sticks in the hands of the scouts.
Some other women also followed their example and chased the goondas away.
Our procession went on till Chunabhatti. There we immersed our Ganpati in
the water. . . . Then people praised my sister and wife and put garlands around
their necks.

The report is almost exactly the same in the Aamcha Baap aan Aamhi,
except that the phrase “patni Sonabai aani baheen Najuka” (“wife
Sonabai and sister Najuka”) in parentheses replaces the “they” after
the sentence “The sisters-in-law were also among them” (ibid., 97–8).
A minor alteration serves to specify the individuality of the women
concerned.
The English text goes very much further in its construction of an
individualist, not to say liberal, sensibility. The account of Sonu and
Najuka’s part in the 1928 Ganpati celebrations, presented in Sonu’s
voice, becomes much more personal, marriage-centered, deliberative,
and romantic. To summarize briefly, every locality had its Ganapati

following other quotations refer to the fifth edition of the published Marathi text and
to the Indian edition of the English version, Outcaste (2003).
 Dalit Memoirs 187

image. Some placed Babasaheb’s picture by its side, and music and
theater performances were held around them. Damu sometimes ob-
tained permission from his mother to take his wife and sister along
to the programs. “My man often held my hand and pulled me along,
much to my embarrassment,” Sonu recalls in this version. He also
urged Sonu to take an interest in the lectures that were given and
not just in the music and dance. Dalit speakers talked of the Dalit
liberation struggle, asking: “Is it a sin to be born a Mahar? Baba-
saheb has made us aware that we are as human as any other people.
We have to unite and agitate against discrimination.” Initially, Sonu
says, she was bored by all this, but “Before I knew it . . . all those
speeches and my husband’s talks had an effect on me. Then an incident
occurred that totally changed my passive attitude” (Jadhav, Outcaste,
117–19).
On the occasion of the Ganapati festival, the Dalit procession was
attacked, stones flew, and a fight ensued. In the melee, a group of men
began misbehaving with the girls in the procession “under the pretext
of controlling the crowds.” Sonu noticed that they weren’t wearing the
armbands of the Ambedkarite volunteers.

I became so enraged that I snatched a baton from one of the volunteers.

Emboldened by me, even Najuka snatched a baton and together we started
hitting the miscreants. We hit them so hard that finally the police inter-
vened. . . . Eventually, our procession continued in a low-key and we immersed
the idol. When we returned home, everyone fussed over us and called us brave
women and garlanded us. . . . my husband was very proud of me. “I am so glad
that you are not just a pretty face,” he said. (Ibid., 118–20)

Many of Damu’s childhood experiences are recounted in the English

transcreation as part of a budding romance with his very young wife.
Several of them emerge in a conversation between husband and wife
in the account of one long journey from Ozer to Mumbai in 1930.
“When we reached the outskirts of Nasik,” Sonu observes, “we had
walked continuously for almost four hours” (ibid., 122).
The romance of the couple is matched by the romance of the lib-
eration struggle launched by Ambedkar. In Nasik, Damu learns of
Ambedkar’s impending arrival and of the upcoming satyagraha at the
local Kalaram Temple, and tells his wife, “We will stay . . . (to) partic-
ipate in this movement” (ibid., 123). Living in poor railway workers’
188 A History of Prejudice

quarters in Bombay, and surrounded by the politics of the city, the

family imbibes the lesson of human dignity and self-respect preached
by Ambedkar. A first step in this is cleanliness and good grooming. The
women now insist on daily baths, neat and clean clothes, the women’s
hair tied in a bun, the house kept immaculately clean with pots and
pans shining. “We sensed a change in the way we carried ourselves. We
proudly proclaimed ourselves Dalits, with our chin up, and we looked
everyone in the eye. We began to lose our former servility, associated
with being born in a low caste” (ibid., 178). Strikingly, in this recen-
sion, Damu’s personal memoir ends on the day of Ambedkar’s funeral,
with Damu and Sonu taking solace in their allegiance to Ambedkar’s
ideas (ibid., 199).
“As a participant and an observer in the social movement,” writes
Narendra, “my father was the veritable symbol of a new spark of self-
respect ignited among the untouchables by Dr. Ambedkar. Dada would
come home electrified by Babasaheb’s thinking, and talked about it to
us every day” (ibid., 210–11). This is a life-story sparked by the life of
a saintly leader, in the image of the saintly leader’s life: in the image,
one might say, of the biography of saints. And the fifth edition of the
Marathi text carries a new dedication to Babasaheb Ambedkar, who
was “father [baap] to everyone of us in a larger sense” – a remarkable
play on the title Aamcha Baap aan Aamhi (“Our Father and Us”). For
the record, Damodar Jadhav’s “Notebooks,” written in the late 1970s
and ’80s, have very little to say about Ambedkar and his struggle,
although, as the author/translator/presenter (Narendra) has said to
me, he talked a great deal about the leader and the movement over the
same period.
Narendra Jadhav describes his mother as less “intelligent” and
broad-minded than his father. In later life, he tells us, she told a
reporter from an English weekly that the qualities she most admired
in her husband were that “He never drank, never abused me. Best of
all, he never raised his hand (on) me.” “A telling comment,” Narendra
remarks, “on the meagre expectations of women of her generation”
(ibid., 217, 258). For all that, the English version of the memoir has
Sonu speaking in tones that suggest a developed bourgeois sensibility
and clear consciousness of men’s and women’s equal rights.
“My man” is a curious mode of address, with all that it implies
in English, even if this is a literal translation of the Marathi phrase
“mazha maansa”; and it is notable that, according to Narendra, his
 Dalit Memoirs 189

mother always addressed his father as “Jadhav” in later life. Yet this is
how the exchanges between the two, on the journey from their village
home and in Mumbai, are described in Outcaste: “In Mumbai, my
man and I hardly had any opportunity to talk openly. It would have
been a sign of disrespect to the elders, like my mother-in-law. [But]
now, my man seemed anxious to share his childhood with me. He
continued talking even as we resumed walking.” “Now there was no
stopping my man.” “I discovered that my man looked charming telling
stories. His eyes twinkled and his gestures grew livelier as he became
absorbed in his narrative.” “‘I am sure you were a very naughty boy,’ I
said, leading him on.” At other times, for example when he reminisced
about a young English girl with whom he had played, “I also had tricks
of my own to distract him. I was amazed at my own ability to be coy.
I sent him fleeting glances and looked away just when he seemed to
have caught my eye” (ibid., 49–51, 103).
And, on another note: “It’s always you, you and you . . . Damodar
Runjaji Jadhav. What about me? I am the insignificant Sonu, always
nodding my head to whatever you say and walking behind you like
a shadow.” By this point in the narrative, Sonu, too, has learned the
lesson of individual reasoning and self-help that Damu has brought
to them from Ambedkar. Having lived all her life in accordance with
what her husband wanted, she will take it no more: “I have come of
age,” she tells her sister-in-law, “I [have] learned to think for myself”
(ibid., 174, 176).

The Question of Dalit Selfhood

We may return at this point to the question of the political choices that
go into the rescripting of the Dalit body and the production of a new
Dalit consciousness. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s life and work, the great
anti-caste movement that has followed in its wake, and the Dalit litera-
ture of the 1970s, ’80s, and on have mounted an exceptional challenge
to the received account of Indian society and history. The writings of
Baby Kamble, Narendra Jadhav, and other Dalit thinkers are extraor-
dinary, powerful, and moving interventions in this history, essential to
any plausible understanding of the Indian past and present. Yet many
of these work with inherited assumptions about the transparency of
community and individual, and the motive force of history, that bear
further scrutiny.
190 A History of Prejudice

For a start, the matter of community needs to be recognized as a

question of politically legible community. As we know, such commu-
nity is rather more easily accepted on the basis of claimed religious,
racial, or ethnic unity, rather less so when the claim is based on class
or gender. Accompanying that circumstance is the long-standing, com-
mon-sense understanding of the “natural” domain of the political –
supposedly found in a public and institutional location, with the possi-
bility of recourse to the law and the state, not so much in the realm of
the domestic and the personal. What follows from these assumptions
is an emphasis on already established community and culture, arising
out of a shared history and providing the grounds for a politics of
resistance, and, with that, on the idea of a preexisting self, implicated
variously in, yet separable from, community and culture.
What Dalit memoirs of recent decades, and especially those of
women, present as a clash between “feudal” (hierarchical) and patri-
archal ideals and practices on the one hand, and bourgeois (modern),
democratic (and yet patriarchal) ideals and practices on the other, is
at the same time a clash between different kinds of politics. The polit-
ical contests involved are played out at the level of family and local
community, as well as that of the wider society and polity. However,
what is striking in the autobiographical works examined above, and
in other writings of the same kind, is a persistent tendency to expel
the political question from the domain of family and community and
locate it instead in the realm of the political party and the state. Such
a move involves not a removal of questions about values, appropriate
relationships, and acceptable behavior from the realm of the political,
but a shifting of them to the domain of constitutional politics. The
proposed resolution to problems of poverty and deprivation, patri-
archy and caste, is to be found not in personal and familial practices
and arrangements but in formal politics and in an embrace of ideas
of progress, political action, and political modernity focused on the
state.
Shared political perspectives produce important commonalities in
Dalit life-stories. Individual circumstances and experiences are never-
theless varied, and there are significant differences between different
accounts. Consider the rescripting of the body in the two texts here dis-
cussed in detail. Babasaheb Ambedkar in both the Kamble and Jadhav
narratives, and Damodar Jadhav in the latter, symbolize the new Dalit
 Dalit Memoirs 191

body: imposing, rational, self-confident, and self-sufficient – in need of

no one else’s support (“a staff in his hand [but] used less for support
than to intimidate”). But this body is still an ideal – in the future, and
indeed in danger of being forgotten, in Baby Tai’s rendering of recent
events. It seems rather more at hand in Narendra Jadhav’s.
Rarely in Kamble’s reconstruction of Dalit life do we feel we are face
to face with the self-same, self-generated, autonomous individual. The
conditions of Mahar life in Phaltan and Satara remain contradictory,
unbalanced, troublesome; the narrative troubled, fragmentary, inter-
rupted, and multi-tonal. The agential subject appears very differently,
however, with the emergence of a markedly bourgeois sensibility and
the centering of the liberal subject in the later versions of the Jadhav
family memoir. What the smoothly flowing story of a family’s journey
from rags to riches, an indomitable, clear-sighted father, and an excep-
tionally clear-sighted struggle produces, in the latter instance, is rather
like the ideal of the coherent, rational, post-Smithian economic indi-
vidual. What it erases, as in many popular upper-class and middle-class
success stories, is any suggestion of incoherence in the self we construct,
or of limits to individual capability in given historical conditions.
Let me illustrate the point, and conclude this exploration of Dalit
memoirs, with a few brief extracts from the recollections of Narendra
Jadhav’s daughter, Damu’s granddaughter, Apoorva, in which the high
point of the individualist presentation is reached. The reminiscence
appears as an epilogue in the English edition of the memoir as well as
in the latest versions of the printed Marathi text. “When my dad asked
me to write about my life,” writes Apoorva, “I was skeptical to say
the least. . . . I am only sixteen years old! What ‘life’ have I had? But I
decided why the hell not? I would get to know myself in the process”
(ibid., 260; emphasis added).
Born in Bloomington, Indiana, and brought back to India when she
was two years old, Apoorva returned to the United States at a later
stage and was studying there in high school when she wrote this short
entry for the family memoir. She came to know that she was a Dalit at
the age of twelve, she tells us. “I didn’t know what it meant and was
confused. . . . [T]his teacher in sixth grade . . . recognized my name, I
guess, and asked, ‘Are you the daughter of Dr. Narendra Jadhav? the
Dalit scholar?’ I was proud, but confused. . . . My dad is famous, but
what does Dalit have to do with it” (ibid., 261).
192 A History of Prejudice

Back in the United States, she writes:

No one reminds me that I am a Dalit. I mean, that’s who I am – take it or

leave it. When I hear about people deliberately marrying into their own caste
or sub-caste, it bothers me. . . . Recently, I was appalled to learn that the relief
in the earthquake stricken area in Gujarat was being distributed on caste-
basis. . . . Now I can see why Dad talks about Dalit issues with such fervour.

And further:

Now, I think I know who I am. I am Apoorva, not tied down by race, religion
or caste. My ancestors carried the burden of being a Dalit and bowing down
to demeaning tasks even after India’s Independence. I have the torch they have
lit for me and nothing can stop me. (Ibid., 262–3)

In the fifth edition of Aamcha Baap aan Aamhi (2007), where

Apoorva’s account appears for the first time in Marathi, this self-
confident, universal, autonomous self becomes even more resplendent.
I presume that the translation here is done by Narendra, and so take
this as his articulation of the self in his daughter’s generation. The
Marathi version says:

I am Apoorva. Just Apoorva. A global citizen without any caste or religious

label. A global citizen with Indian roots. Now, no one tells me that I am a
Dalit. I couldn’t care less if anyone suggests that I might be handicapped in
some way because of my Dalit background. They have a problem. They need
psychiatric treatment! [The words here italicized appear in English, written in
the Nagri script, in the Marathi text.]

The last lines of Apoorva’s ruminations are now presented differently.

She speaks of the path cleared for her by the sacrifices and unremitting
labor of her Dalit ancestors and then goes on:

I stand on their shoulders, that is why the distant horizon becomes visible,
[and] beckons me. Believing in a religion of humanity, I am a global citizen of
Indian roots. Dr. Babasaheb has handed on to me a blazing torch. With that I
will clean up [brighten] everything all around. I will make my own future! No
one can stop me. (Jadhav, Aamcha Baap, 287)

In this articulation, the expansiveness, self-confidence, and self-

generated quality of the post-Dalit self becomes almost boundless.
In “stand[ing] on their shoulders,” we still return to the bodily:
the erect, powerful, self-confident, laboring body of the Dalit, the true
 Dalit Memoirs 193

global citizen of the past and the future. However, we have moved
away from the palpable physicality of Damodar Jadhav’s notebooks
(also found in Baby Kamble’s memoir), the human-animal-natural
environment in which men and women lived and had their being, and
indeed the extraordinary toil that went into the making of the world.
It is an unmarked, unconquerable, but at the same time disembodied
spirit that triumphs in the later versions of the Jadhav saga. Animals,
and dirt, and labor disappear from our world: that may be seen as
one of the gains of modern life. What Narendra Jadhav (re)produces
in the end, then, is the abstract citizen of the Enlightenment, the citi-
zen without a body, at any rate without a body that may be felt as a
burden.
What is lost, it seems to me, when the writer produces a narrative of
bourgeois individuality and individual aspiration, success, and social
mobility, accessible to all – irrespective of gender, caste, class, or eth-
nicity – is a robust appreciation of the concrete material and historical
conditions that allow, or deny, access to resources and opportunities
to different classes, groups, and sexes in a multitude of different ways.
Gone are the specific historical constraints, the confusing, contradic-
tory, generative, and damaging conditions of all life – that of subaltern
groups as well as those in positions of privilege and comfort. What is
downplayed as well is the singular experience and detail of caste humil-
iation and inequality, even though these are painted into the picture in
bold, broad-brush strokes.
Also reduced is something of the questioning and self-doubt neces-
sary to a different politics and culture and a differently imagined future,
and with that the trace of alternative sensibilities and perceptions that
is still found in many Dalit writings (emanating from both working-
class and middle-class individuals and families), perhaps especially in
Dalit women’s memoirs: writings that challenge the modern preju-
dice of the unmarked individual and unambiguous belonging, and the
prospect of self-help and progress for all.
I consider these issues further in the next chapter, which examines
the persistence of race, caste, and cultural prejudice in the case of
African Americans and Dalits who have in social and economic terms
clearly moved out of a working-class or underclass, subaltern milieu.
 7

The Persistence of Prejudice

What I have attempted to do in this book is to explore some of the cir-

cumstances and ways in which the matter of prejudice – “vernacular”
and “universal” – has shaped the history of African Americans and
Dalits, and by extension the history of the United States and India,
over the last century and more. It should be obvious that many of
the quandaries and challenges considered here do not apply to these
minorities alone, although it will be clear, too, that prejudice and its
costs affect different populations, and differently disenfranchised and
marginalized groups, in many distinct ways. The proposition is perhaps
self-evident. However, its force and its fallout, not always adequately
appreciated, may be illustrated simply.
“Hindustan mein rehna hai, to humse milkar rehna hoga/ Hindustan
mein rehna hai, to bande mataram kehna hoga,” as Hindu right-wing
political forces have it, in a slogan that has appeared over and over
again in attacks against the Muslim minority in India, in the mouths of
political agitators, and on city walls, especially since the 1980s. “Those
who wish to live in Hindustan will have to live like us/ Those who
wish to live in Hindustan will have to say ‘Bande Mataram’ [Victory
to the Mother; i.e., the mother goddess, who is also Mother India].”
In an echo of the “Jewish question” of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, Muslims can live in India, as long as they stop being Muslims.
Samuel Huntington articulates much the same kind of proposition for
immigrants from Mexico who have come to live, work, and die in the
United States (in quite significant numbers even in military service, to

194
 The Persistence of Prejudice 195

which the American establishment readily welcomes them). “There is

no Americano dream,” he writes. “There is only the American dream
created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share
in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English.”1
Here, the suggestion goes, as in the case of Jews ceasing to be Jews, or
Muslims Muslims, is another impossibility.
The two slogans just quoted should suffice to indicate some of
the demands still being made of minorities, Muslims in India and
Latina/Latino migrants to the USA, in these instances, to assimilate,
to conform, to change themselves – if indeed they can. Upward social
mobility is the presumed route out of conditions of subordination and
marginalization the world over. Yet, the implications and rewards of
upward social and economic mobility have not always been as straight-
forward or smooth as narratives of rags to riches, or fortune favoring
the brave (or the enterprising), would have it. What is it that thwarts
some subaltern citizens for so long from gaining the full benefits of
modern, liberal society? That is the question I ask in this final chap-
ter, focused to a considerable extent on the continuing dilemmas of
the increasingly visible African American and Dalit middle classes:
the “black bourgeoisie” and “Dalit brahmans,” as they have been
called, white but not quite, groups that are under pressure to be cit-
izens of the modern world (rational, meritocratic, and universalist in
their outlook) on the one hand, and to speak for their still underpriv-
ileged communities (“not to forget where they come from”) on the
other.
The focus on middle-class elements tied to communities that are seen
historically, but also somehow inevitably (by definition), as communi-
ties of lower-class and underclass individuals and families allows me
to address two specific questions in these concluding pages. What hap-
pens to members of these communities (or assemblages) who inhabit,
or come to inhabit, not the positions of the down-and-out where they
allegedly belong but those of more comfortable, educated, often pro-
fessional, middle-class individuals?2 And, reversing the question, what

1 Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 256
(emphasis added).
2 The educated, professional middle-class position has been the major aspiration, and
avenue of advancement, for the widest sections of the lower classes, American blacks
and Indian Dalits included. As E. Franklin Frazier put it, “Education is the chief means
196 A History of Prejudice

does the history of the struggles of Dalit and African American elites
tell us about the conditions necessary for the consolidation of partic-
ular groups as full rights-bearing citizens – middle class, modern, and
unmarked?
The slogans about Indian Muslims and Hispanic migrants to the
United States cited above should also serve to underline a point I made
in Chapter 1, that the archive for a history of prejudice is almost certain
to be unconventional, indeed subterranean. The evidence that identifies
or signifies prejudice, even in its more commonly recognizable forms,
is fleeting and chancy, scrappy and ambiguous. Hence the common
response, and even more common feeling, that Viola Andrews, Baby
Kamble, Om Prakash Valmiki, and others like them write of trivial,
trifling matters, unscientifically and emotionally, in texts that inhabit
the domain of the merely ordinary. “The everydayness and repeatabil-
ity of untouchability in these texts [as of racial and sexual humiliation
in others] place them outside the domain of history.”3
Prejudice is not proclaimed from the rooftops, I have noted. It is
hardly self-conscious. It appears instead as common sense, as the natu-
ral order of things: what is, is – and, if all were properly ordered, must
be. It is largely in this way that the self-serving idea of the lazy, dirty,
inefficient, slow to learn, and yet untrustworthy, aggressive, clannish
Dalit or black (or other impoverished denizen of the ghettoes and the
slums) has lived on. This “common sense” is articulated in unarchived
archives. I draw on two other parts of this curious archive for purposes
of my analysis in this final chapter: the derogatory names given to and
the insulting meanings often attached to the names of the lowest castes
and classes; and the abusive language used toward them (on occasion,
even in letters to the press) when members of these long-subordinated
castes and classes happen to mount a political challenge to the power of
those providentially assigned to rule. In addition, as we know, evidence
of prejudice is still to be found in routine attitudes and actions. The
scarcely concealed gesture of hesitation and suspicion directed at Dalits
and African Americans, the withdrawal and the caution, the sarcasm

by which the Negro escapes from the masses into the middle class”; see E. Franklin
Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (1939; revised ed. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1966), 331.
3 M. S. S. Pandian, “Writing Ordinary Lives,” in Pandey, Subaltern Citizens and Their
Histories, 101 and passim.
 The Persistence of Prejudice 197

and the patronizing insinuation of appropriate place and appropriate

behavior, has hardly disappeared altogether – in spite of all the formal
changes that have taken place over the last half century and more, and
the declarations that continue of the need for further change. I shall
have occasion to refer to such evidence again in these final pages.

Passing – into the Mainstream

Various surveys conducted toward the end of the twentieth century,

using a variety of different indices, classified between 10% and 20%
of the Dalit population in India as middle class. Around the same time,
some 20% to 30% of the African American population was estimated
to be of middle income, which is often taken as the crucial gauge of
middle-class status in the United States, although, as I suggested in
Chapter 1, income is by no means all there is to middle-classness.
Significantly, there are strong suggestions of a fall in the number of
African Americans who qualified as middle class in the 1990s, another
indication of the fragile nature of a subaltern middle-class identity.4
Let us take these figures as broadly representative of a longer-term
trend toward upward mobility in the ranks of the Dalits and African
Americans over the latter half of the twentieth century. Even with
these suggestions of the proportion of Dalits and African Americans
who have “made it” into the ranks of the materially and socially
more comfortable middle classes (plus a sizable number of blacks and
a smaller number of Dalits who would qualify as belonging to the
upper middle classes), the issues of appropriate belonging, of second-
class citizenship, of being targeted as not quite right (not quite in the
right place), continue to dog the Dalit and black populations across
the board. Thus, as an uncle of the New York Times columnist Bob

4 For Dalits, see Minna Saavala, “Low Caste but Middle Caste: Some Strategies for
Middle Class Identification in Hyderabad,” Contributions to Indian Sociology, 1, no.
35 (2001), 293–318; and D. L. Sheth, “Caste and Class: Social Reality and Polit-
ical Representations,” in Contemporary India, ed. V. A. Pai Panandiker and Ashis
Nandy (New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill, 1999), 337–63. For African Americans,
see William H. Frey, “Revival,” American Demographics, October 2003 (Spe-
cial Series: America’s Money in the Middle), 27–31, http://www.frey-demographer
.org/briefs/B-2003-5 Revival.pdf.; and A. J. Robinson, The Two Nations of Black
America, An Analysis: Percentage of Blacks and Income Group, 1970–1994, http:
//www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/race/economics/analysis.html.
198 A History of Prejudice

Herbert put it a generation ago, there is a continuing need for African

Americans to “fight on all fronts, at home and abroad.”5 That need
did not end in the 1970s.
Herbert sums up the present situation of the majority of African
Americans as follows:

[A] third of black children live in poverty; . . . more than 70 percent are born
to unwed mothers; . . . by the time they reach their mid-30s, a majority of
black men without a high school diploma has spent time in prison. . . . No
one has been able to stop this steady plunge of young black Americans into a
socioeconomic abyss.6

It is not only, as some imagine, the dropouts and the incorrigibly poor
among blacks who suffer the consequences of enhanced policing and
surveillance but also the minority that have done exceptionally well.
The number of well-to-do, respectable, and widely respected blacks
who are pulled over for driving fancy (or indeed not-so-fancy) cars is
legion. As an American Civil Liberties Union report of 1999 has it,
“No person of color is safe from this treatment anywhere, regardless
of their obedience to the law, their age, the type of car they drive,
or their station in life. In short, skin color has become evidence of
the propensity to commit crime, and police use this ‘evidence’ against
minority drivers on the road all the time.”7 Nor, it seems, is a person
of color, even the distinctly privileged, entirely safe trying to enter his
or her own house in the event of losing the keys, if the house happens
to be in a “non-black” neighborhood – judging by the arrest of Henry
Louis Gates, Jr.
The renowned African American professor at Harvard, listed among
Time magazine’s 25 most influential Americans in 1997, was suspected
of trying to break into his own house on his return from a trip to

5 Bob Herbert, “This Raging Fire,” New York Times, op-ed article, November 16,
2010.
6 Ibid.
7 David A. Harris, “Driving While Black: Racial Profiling on Our Nation’s High-
ways,” An ACLU Special Report, June 1999, http://www.aclu.org/racial-justice/
driving-while-black-racial-profiling-our-nations-highways. The report notes that
racial profiling is often justified by the police on the grounds that most drug offenses
are commited by minorities, which is a self-fulfilling allegation because police look
for drugs primarily among African Americans and Latinos and hence find them there
more often than among other sections of the population.
 The Persistence of Prejudice 199

China to the posh locality in Cambridge where he lives. A woman

who worked down the street from Gates’s home saw two black men,
Professor Gates and his driver, trying to push his front door open, and
rang the police about this suspicious activity. The fact that Gates is 60,
bespectacled, walks with a cane, and was wearing a blue blazer, and
that the hour was just after midday, made no difference. By the time
the two men were inside the house and Gates got onto the phone to
call someone about the door, a policeman had arrived to interrogate
them about their bona fides. “A black man in a tony neighborhood
simply seems out of place,” as one commentator put it. “Any black
person can stand in for any other, and be made to bear the burden
of all,” noted another,8 an observation that the “crime” of “Driving
While Black” demonstrates all too well.
The story of the ex-slave middle classes has thus diverged in some
important respects from the modernist account of the emergence of an
unmarked, privatized, and even invisible middle class; that is to say,
one that does not parade itself as a collective or special interest group.
We might set this history alongside the history of the mainstream mid-
dle classes in the Asian and African colonies. As they consolidated
their position, the latter moved from the native town into the Euro-
pean enclaves, frequently advancing to take them over completely after
the attainment of independence. The Dalit and the African American
middle classes emerged at a later stage, without an equivalent exit
route. With no sovereign state or territory of their own, they have
continued to suffer from disguised as well as overt discrimination long
after the formal establishment of independence and democracy. They
remain tied as well to lower-class communities, cultures, and histories,
and even to marked residential localities that other more invisible, yet
once subaltern, groups have been able to escape more easily. Thus the
Irish, the Jews, and the Italians in America were not identified by color.
Perhaps more importantly, like Muslims or Christians in India, they
have been seen as more differentiated internally, and not as naturally,
necessarily, belonging to the lowest classes.

8 Michael Eric Dyson, “Commentary: Professor Arrested for ‘housing while black,”
July 22, 2009, http://articles.cnn.com/2009-07-22/living/dyson.police; and Brandon
M. Terry, “A Stranger in Mine Own House: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and the
Police in ‘Post-Racial’ America,” July 21, 2009, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
brandon-m-terry/a-stranger-in-mine-own-ho b 242392.html.
200 A History of Prejudice

The situation of these late-arriving middle classes may be compared,

in yet another significant aspect, with that of the modular European
or even the North American white middle class. The latter are urged
to build their culture and morality and peace of mind in the secluded
home; the modern privileges privacy, individuality, and family as the
site of improvement, of the individual and of society at large. By the
mid-nineteenth century in upstate New York, as Mary Ryan notes, a
good deal of popular literature was pushing the “responsible bread-
winner, no less than . . . [the] loving mother, into a narrowing social
universe, one even more solitary than privacy – the domain of the
self, the individual, of ‘manly independence.’”9 The Dalit and African
American middle classes are rarely allowed the luxury of such priva-
tized retreat. “Among African Americans, marriage itself was polit-
ical,” writes Glenda Gilmore, “a testimony to capability as piercing
white eyes peered through domesticity, searching for degeneracy.”10
If the subaltern middle classes celebrate individual achievement, pri-
vacy, and the nuclear family, they must do so in the interests of the
larger family, the “community” that nurtured them and gave them
birth.
It is not only the establishment, the media, and a self-proclaimed
popular common sense that calls on the successful individuals of
once-enslaved communities to remember what we (the mainstream,
upper-caste Hindus, upper-caste whites) have done for you. Members
of the disadvantaged communities, too, urge the upwardly mobile –
bureaucrats and teachers, doctors and lawyers, clergy and social
workers – not to forget where they come from, to stay close to the
community’s experience, to foreground it and to work for the uplift
of brothers and sisters left behind. The privileged position of black
professional women workers in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century
America did not relieve them of their “obligation to work in the public
sphere,” Stephanie Shaw notes, “Not to use their advantages for the
advancement of the race was deemed selfish and even traitorous.”11

9 Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York,
1790–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 147, 238.
10 Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White
Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1996), 18.
11 Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do, 119 and passim.
 The Persistence of Prejudice 201

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his turn, writes of his “feelings of guilt and
anxieties of having been false to our people, of having sinned against
our innermost identity,”12 although, as the preceding chapters should
have shown, the category of “our people” as of “our innermost iden-
tity” is hardly so self-evident. In the African American and Dalit cases,
as among other minoritized populations, not to say all sections of
society in the world today, these continue to be politically produced.
It is in this context that we have to consider the nagging question, or
temptation, to pass as white – for those African Americans who were
light enough to do so – of “disappearing” into mainstream society and
being forced to obfuscate, deny, and separate oneself from a significant
part of one’s background and roots. Once again, the examples are
legion, although the anguish surrounding the question is far from being
well recognized. Thus, at the very end of the nineteenth century, Anita
Hill became the first black graduate of Vassar, an elite women’s college
in New York State. It was only a little before she graduated that her
roommate and, through her, other members of the college learned of
Hill’s black background. The authorities felt betrayed but allowed her
to graduate. The New York World reported the story as follows:

Society and educational circles . . . are profoundly shocked by the announce-

ment . . . that one of the graduating class of Vassar College this year was a
Negro girl, who concealed her race. . . . She has been known as one of the
most beautiful young women who ever attended the great institution of learn-
ing, and even now women who receive her in their homes as their equal do
not deny her beauty. . . . Her manners were those of a person of gentle birth,
and her intelligence and ability were recognized alike by her classmates and
professors.13

Over three-quarters of a century later, we have the now well-known

story of Anatole Broyard. The protagonist of this tale was a prominent
literary critic, regular book reviewer for the New York Times for two
decades, and “one of literary America’s foremost gate-keepers” in the
1970s and ’80s.14 In living his life and performing his editorial duties,

12 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (New York:
Random House, 1997), 127.
13 Randall Kennedy, “Racial Passing,” Ohio State Law Journal, 62, no. 1145 (2001).
14 Gates, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, 180. The following account is
based on Gates and on Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life – A Story
of Race and Family Secrets (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2007).
202 A History of Prejudice

Broyard felt that he had to make a choice between being an aesthete

and being a Negro. As he told close associates on more than one
occasion, he wanted to be appreciated as a writer, not a black writer.
Light enough to pass for white, he did so for most of the period during
which he was an acknowledged and prominent literary figure. His own
children did not find out that he was black until he was on his deathbed
and they were in their late twenties, when his (Caucasian American)
wife insisted on the need to tell them before he died. Others, even
among some of his closest friends and associates, found out only at
his funeral, which his sister and other relatives (many of them much
darker than he was) attended.
As regards his willingness to live a lie all his life, Broyard appears
to have put forward the following argument, to himself and to those
friends who knew his background and with whom the question came
up in his later years. “Why shouldn’t I (and my children) pass for white
if we can?” he asked, given the discrimination, disadvantage, and even
humiliation that they would suffer simply for being black. Broyard’s
parents, light-skinned Creoles from New Orleans, “had to pass for
white in order to get [certain kinds of ] work in 1930s New York,”
and growing up in Brooklyn, New York, where the family moved when
he was six, Anatole (the fairest of three siblings) was taunted by white
and black kids alike, according to the account given to his son and
daughter by their mother. Recalling their last meetings on his sickbed,
his daughter, Bliss Broyard, writes of how his secret seemed even more
painful than the advanced cancer he was suffering, and how hard her
mother had to push him to reveal it. “He’d removed his legs from my
lap and curled them into his body . . . he looked uncomfortable and cor-
nered,” she writes – as one would of a child, and perhaps a prisoner.15
Indeed, the issue of passing was frequently even more complicated
than that, given the number of reverse propositions to which the ques-
tion of being sufficiently black (or insufficiently so) regularly led. The
distinguished philosopher Adrian Piper’s experience as a graduate stu-
dent and an academic illustrates the point all too well. Piper recalls
being accosted, at the incoming graduate student reception in the
prestigious graduate school that she attended in the 1970s, by the
person who was the most famous member of the department, with

15 Broyard, One Drop, 10, 11, 16, 17.

 The Persistence of Prejudice 203

the words: “Miss Piper, you’re about as black as I am.” That is to say,
she was just not as “black” as he expected. The implicit question here
is the opposite of the one asked of Anatole Broyard: Why claim, or
rather pretend, you’re black?16
Earlier, as a light-skinned member of a light-skinned middle-class
family in the predominantly black working-class neighborhood of
Harlem, Adrian Piper had been taunted by black kids as a white and a
paleface, not unlike Anatole Broyard’s earlier experiences in Brooklyn
or that of Viola Andrews’s husband, George, and their “yaller” chil-
dren over a rather more extended period in rural as well as urban
Georgia. “I had always identified myself as black (or ‘colored’ as we
said before 1967),” writes Piper, “But fully comprehending what it
meant to be black took a longer time.” Her parents had believed, “ide-
alistically,” that education and individual achievements would shield
her from the effects of racism. They had even argued that she should
refuse to name her racial classification in her application to graduate
school to prove that she had been admitted on merit alone. The young
woman refused because that seemed to her to be dishonest. However,
she muses, “My choice not to pass for white in order to gain entry
to the academy, originally made out of naiveté, [has] resulted in more
punishment than I would have imagined possible.”17
In large part the punishment has had to do with “an essentializing
stereotype into which all blacks must fit” and the common expecta-
tion that as a black she must know how all blacks feel on questions of
envy and resentment, broken families, drugs, the lot. “The individuals
involved . . . make special efforts to situate me in their conceptual map-
ping of the world, not only by naming or indicating the niche in which
they felt I belonged, but by seeking my verbal confirmation of it.” In
fact, as Piper notes, “no blacks . . . fit any such stereotype.” The fault,
as Bliss Broyard has it, lies in the question “What are you?” and in the
expectation that Dalits, blacks, women, Native Americans, Australian
Aborigines, and all other marked citizens may only answer once and
in doing so provide one (“correct”) answer.18

16 Adrian Piper, “Passing for White, Passing for Black,” in Passing and the Fiction of
Identity, ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 234
and passim.
17 Ibid., 238, 239, 241.
18 Ibid., 238; Broyard, One Drop, 463.
204 A History of Prejudice

If Broyard’s question “Why shouldn’t we pass for white if we can?”

captures one facet of the history of a stigmatized, subaltern middle
class – gays and lesbians in the military (“don’t ask, don’t tell”), the
promising schoolchild from a working-class background, the Jewish
entrepreneur in 1930s and ’40s Europe – an equally serious challenge
appears in the question “Why should I pass for white, even if I can?”
There are no correct answers.

Passing – by Other Names

There is to my knowledge no term for “passing” among the lower

castes and classes in India, and given the practical indeterminacy of
caste on the basis of skin color, the procedure for passing is very
different from that found among Americans of African descent. Yet
the question of whether a successfully mobile individual (or group)
should try to pass, or refuse to do so – and the irresolvability of
that question – is perhaps just as insistent. Among the various paths
to this merging with a mainstream, as I have noted, has been the
possibility of conversion out of the demeaning Hindu community with
its institutionalized practices of untouchability.
The 1956 conversion to Buddhism initiated by Dr. Ambedkar has
become part of the inspiring mythology of the modern Dalit struggle.
It was an act that gave memory to a “memoryless” people, to invoke
D. R. Nagaraj once more19 – for the desire to look to the future alone
must inevitably be a forlorn hope. It has instilled new pride among
millions of downtrodden Dalits, and especially among the Dalit middle
classes. And it is well known that the same sorts of claims to human
dignity and self-respect were made through conversions to Christianity,
Islam, and Sikhism in the recent as well as in the not so recent past.
That the call for conversion, for getting away from the shadow
of Hinduism, has often been articulated in militant terms is scarcely
surprising. As Ambedkar put it in his emotional address to the gath-
ering at Nagpur on October 14, 1956, “This conversion has given
me enormous satisfaction and pleasure unimaginable. I feel as if I
have been liberated from hell.”20 Periyar, E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker,

19 Nagaraj, Flaming Feet, 58, cited in chap. 2.

20 D. C. Ahir, Buddhism in India after Dr. Ambedkar (1956–2002) (Delhi: Blumoon
Books, 2003), 10.
 The Persistence of Prejudice 205

another remarkable, and fiery, leader of the lower-caste struggle in

the twentieth century, put it this way: “Our disease of being Shudras
is a very big monstrous disease. This is like cancer. . . . There is only
one medicine for it. And that is Islam. . . . To cure the disease, [and]
stand up and walk as worthy humans, Islam is the only way.”21 And,
in line with these thoughts, some Buddhist converts in Maharashtra
have been heard to say, “We should have become Muslims first, then
Buddhists when we had won equality.”22 Yet the break from the stigma
of Untouchability has been far from easy or complete.
The experience of Bama, a Dalit woman schoolteacher from
Tamilnadu who gave up her career to join a Catholic religious order
and then gave up that order to continue the fight for the dignity of
her fellow beings by other means, illustrates the point about the obsta-
cles faced in the attempted break from the past. “If you look at our
streets,” Bama writes in her autobiography, “they are full of small chil-
dren, their noses streaming, without even a scrap of clothing, rolling
about and playing in the mud and mire, indistinguishable from pup-
pies and piglets.” In the churches, she tells us, “Dalits are the most,
in numbers only. In everything else, they are the least. It is only the
upper-caste Christians who enjoy the benefits and comforts of the
Church.” Of the convent she went into, she says: “[T]he Jesus they
worshipped there was a wealthy Jesus. . . . There was no love for the
poor and the humble.” “You can sit on your chair inside a convent, and
say whatever you like about the struggling masses, about justice and
the law. . . . But in that place you can never experience another people’s
pain.” And further: “[N]ow that I have left the order, I am angry when
I see priests and nuns. . . . When I look at the Church today, it seems
to be a Church made up of the priests and nuns and their kith and kin.
And when you consider who they are, it is clear that they are all from
upper-castes.”23
Abdul Malik Mujahid, whom I cited in Chapter 3 on the matter of
Dalit conversions to Islam, describes the same kind of outcome after

21 Periyarana, 115–16, cited in Anand, The Buddha: The Essence of Dhamma and Its
Practice (Mumbai: Samrudh Bharat Publication, 2002), 190.
22 Eleanor Zelliot, “New Voices of the Buddhists of India,” in Narain and Ahir,
Ambedkar, Buddhism and Social Change, 201.
23 Bama, Karukku, translated from Tamil by Lakshmi Holmstrom (Chennai: South Asia
Books, 2000), 68, 69, 91–2, 93, and 102.
206 A History of Prejudice

the conversions to Buddhism in western India, pointing to continued

discrimination and humiliation of converted Dalits, accompanied by
physical attacks, in Maharashtra, Gujarat, and elsewhere: “The term
neo-Buddhist has become more or less synonymous with the terms
untouchable or Harijan. . . . The Maharashtra riots of 1978 and a con-
stant high rate of atrocities against them establish . . . the fact that the
same stigmas are attached to this ‘changed’ identity as well.”24 There
are indeed many striking illustrations of the discrimination that even
well-to-do, relatively privileged, middle-class converts continue to suf-
fer. Again, Dalit autobiographies and oral accounts, as well as more
general journalistic and academic reports, provide innumerable exam-
ples. Perhaps one will suffice here.
This is the story recounted to me by a very successful member of
the Indian Revenue Service of his experience as a government offi-
cer. The IRS is one of the most sought-after, “Class I,” services of
the government of India. Entry into it was a matter of pride for the
middle classes, upper-caste and Dalit, until the era of globalization pro-
duced another, international, economic order that the most privileged
among them could enter, with new “global” salaries and aspirations.
A writer, a Buddhist preacher of some repute, a sophisticated and con-
scientious intellectual and professional who gained early recognition
for his administrative abilities and was chosen for several challenging
positions in consequence, the Dalit officer told me of a senior colleague,
his boss, who treated him as a favorite junior, assigning him to numer-
ous sensitive and difficult projects and showering him with uncommon
praise. One day, however, he noticed an image of the Buddha in a cor-
ner of the younger man’s office. Taken aback, the senior officer blurted
out that he “could not have imagined that someone so brilliant was an
SC [i.e., a member of the Scheduled Castes].” It was the kind of double-
edged comment that students and independent professionals from
Dalit, African American, and other “colonized” backgrounds – and,
for a very long time, women – have had to face over and over again,
and the outcome was also familiar. “His whole attitude and interaction
with me changed after that,” the young bureaucrat observed.25

24 Mujahid, Conversion to Islam, 86 (emphasis original).

25 Interview, Bombay, November 24, 2003. I have withheld the name of the interviewee
at his request.
 The Persistence of Prejudice 207

If individual or, more commonly, collective conversion was one way

of seeking an escape from the humiliation of Untouchability, the adop-
tion of new caste names and altered ritual, occupational, and social
practices was another, and this appears as a closer parallel to the
African American option of passing. Not surprisingly, there has long
been debate over the use of inherited, and derogatory, caste names
among the lower castes in India. The matter gained urgency with the
inauguration of decennial census operations in the late nineteenth cen-
tury, when, in a classic colonial move, colonial officials attempted to
classify all castes and subcastes in India in a universally agreed hier-
archy! Along with other low castes, many Dalit groups struggled to
improve their “official” status and to gain better access to economic,
social, and cultural resources through a claim to new names, new tradi-
tions, and new histories.26 Today, in an ironic reversal, in a new stage
of political struggle generated by growing lower-caste self-confidence
and pride and by amplified state promises of affirmative action for
historically disadvantaged groups, many lower-caste and lower-class
groups are seeking recognition as Dalits (ex-Untouchables) or “back-
ward castes.” But the underlying unease about passing or not, of assert-
ing citizenship by claiming the privileged, unmarked social origins of
the mainstream, remains a daily choice – and conundrum.
The issue of how to name the collectivity, whether the larger assem-
blage of ex-Untouchables or Dalits or the smaller local caste group,
has been one part of the struggle. Dalits from different walks of life
continue to use inherited caste names – which can be deprecatory and
humiliating in many contexts – in everyday descriptions of particu-
lar habitations and their populations, while describing themselves as
Dalits or Buddhists or S.C.s in other situations. However, in line
with the earlier struggle to upgrade themselves in the existing caste

26 For just a few examples, see Owen Lynch, The Politics of Untouchability: Social
Mobility and Social Change in a City in India (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1969); Andre Beteille, “Caste and Political Group Formation in Tamilnad,”
in Caste in Indian Politics, ed. Rajni Kothari (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1970);
Juergensmeyer, Religion as Social Vision; Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest
and Identity in Colonial India: The Namasudras of Bengal, 1872–1947 (Richmond:
Curzon Press, 1997); Dube, Untouchable Pasts; Prashad, Untouchable Freedom; and
Chinnaiah Jangam, “Contesting Hinduism: Emergence of Dalit Paradigms in Telugu
Country, 1900–1950,” PhD thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University
of London, 2005.
208 A History of Prejudice

hierarchy, many Dalits argue that such caste names in fact derive from
a history very different from that commonly associated with them.
Thus, as a retired Dalit bureaucrat said to me, “Chamar [the most
common north Indian name for groups associated with leather work
and shoe-making] comes not from chamra [leather], but from Chinvar
or Chanvar, names of lineages that once ruled this region.”27
Among politically conscious Dalits, and middle-class Dalits more
generally, there has been a corresponding contest in the matter of sur-
names. The question here is one of social and political identification,
in the sense of “identifying with” particular populations or assem-
blages. Even today, family names are among the clearest indicators of
caste background in this deeply caste-conscious society. The struggle
over surnames has therefore been a central issue in the matter of pass-
ing, or being accepted in a class or collectivity that is not one’s natal
community or supposed social group.
The requirement of surnames is a fairly recent phenomenon in many
parts of the world.28 In India, surnames became mandatory in colo-
nial times. They were needed for bureaucratic identification and clas-
sification, and for admission to schools and other civil and military
institutions. Until recently – and in parts of small town and rural
India, to this day – children and youths were known as the sons or
daughters of so-and-so (the father), with the latter additionally being
identified by caste, especially in the case of lower-caste people. The
surnames subsequently adopted (or assigned by sundry authorities)
often derived from caste names or what were thought of as the tra-
ditional occupations of particular castes, although some alluded to
geographical origins, administrative or professional position, learning,
and proficiency in various trades.29
In this context, upwardly mobile Dalit individuals and families, strug-
gling against the discriminatory caste order, often assumed “neutral”

27 Interview with Balwant Singh, Saharanpur, January 11, 2007. Such recasting of
history was very much part of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century struggles for
dignity and self-respect.
28 Cf. James C. Scott, John Tehranian, and Jeremy Mathias, “The Production of Legal
Identities Proper to States: The Case of the Permanent Family Surname,” Comparative
Studies in Society and History, 44, no. 1 (2002).
29 Among certain groups, especially in southern India, the first name of the father came
to be used as an individual’s second name.
 The Persistence of Prejudice 209

surnames, tied to places of origin or to unmarked administrative or

social positions such as headman or soldier, which did not immediately
reveal their caste background.30 In other places, they adopted appel-
lations hitherto used by higher castes or by people belonging to other
religious traditions, such as Christians, Sikhs, or Buddhists. In many
instances, they dropped surnames or titles altogether and lived with a
single name. Sometimes this was supplemented by a middle name like
Lal, Kumar, or Kumari (meaning “son or daughter of” or “junior”
member), or Ram or Prasad (something like a “gift from the gods”),
which could become a surname in its turn.
The following example from eastern Uttar Pradesh, in northern
India, illustrates the point very well indeed. The oldest living male
member of one Dalit family, who became a middle-rank district police
officer in the 1960s, used the surname Ram throughout his career.
Ram was the tag added to the names of men in the family in his
father’s generation, all of whom worked as farmers, craftsmen, and
laborers in the village. By contrast, all the younger male members of
the police officer’s family, now educated and urban-dwellers, go by
other surnames.
The police officer gave his younger brother, fifteen years his junior
and now a prominent Dalit ideologue, the surname Prasad. His four
sons use the surnames Chandra, Kumar, and in two cases Pracheta.
The name Pracheta, first adopted by the older of these two sons when
he went to college in Delhi, is particularly difficult to place in the exist-
ing social order because it has no established caste connotations. In this
respect, it is a little different from Ram, Prasad, Chandra, and Kumar,
which are commonly used by Dalits today without being exclusive
to them. A cousin of the police officer has taken on the upper-caste
surname Sahni, and like many other middle-class Dalits prefers to use
the initials of his earlier name in place of a personal name: D. R.,
the “R” in this instance standing for Ram. He took the name Sahni
after a young niece had adopted it on entering high school in a town
near Delhi. Another cousin of the police officer continues to use the

30 For the purposes of this exploration, I constructed over a hundred family trees, or
more accurately (given the nature of the evidence) partial family trees, of Dalits in
northern and western India. My information comes from interviews, supplemented
by autobiographical writings and “fictional” accounts. I have kept footnotes to a
minimum in order to protect the identities and confidentiality of my informants.
210 A History of Prejudice

surname Ram, but his two daughters have adopted Chaudhri, tradi-
tionally meaning caste or village headman and now used by individuals
and families belonging to several castes, high as well as low, in many
parts of India. Among two generations of this one family, then, seven
different surnames are in use – not counting those that come from
marriage into other families.
In recent years, as the Dalit struggle has grown in strength and
militancy, scores of Dalit activists have embraced once-derogatory
caste names (Dusadh, Paswan, Jatav, Jadhav, Mahar, Chambhar, and
the like) as their new surnames. But the urge, and the convenience,
of adopting unidentifiable, not already marked, surnames remains
strong. The double movement observable here says something about
the predicaments of the subaltern middle classes. This may not be
very far removed from the purificatory and modernizing quandaries
observable among the mainstream middle classes in the past as they
aspired to higher social position and respectability. But for particular
historical reasons, which I have outlined, the questions appear to be
more persistent in the case of the more recent, marked, ex-slave and
ex-Untouchable middle classes. Where is it that they come from? How
universal is their heritage? Whom can they speak for? I turn now to
another aspect of this problem.

The Question of Community, or Appropriate Constituency

Early in 2001, a Dalit columnist began writing a weekly column enti-

tled “Samasyaen Daliton Ki” (The Problems of the Dalits) in a major
Hindi daily published from New Delhi. The following examination of
the issue of appropriate political constituency or audience, or whom
the lower-caste middle classes may speak for in India, is based on the
public exchange that followed in the form of letters written to the
columnist in 2001 and 2002.31 To put the discussion in context, it
needs to be said that this columnist’s writings are marked by some
aggression, and a polemical quality not unlike that found in many

31 I am grateful to the columnist for his kindness in letting me read and copy the letters
he received, and for his permission to let me use them. Translations from the Hindi in
the quotations that follow are mine. After prolonged consideration, and consultation
with the columnist, I have withheld his name and other particulars to prevent the
personalization of the larger issues at stake here.
 The Persistence of Prejudice 211

political interactions between Dalits and non-Dalits since at least the

time of Ambedkar, the preeminent Dalit leader of the 1920s to the
1950s. This is hardly surprising, given the gross inequality and evident
lack of respectful communication between the two parties over a very
long period. Just as important, the aggression and polemic are hardly
restricted to one side when it comes to open political argument.
Among the hundreds of letters written to the columnist, a large
number come from Dalit youths asking advice or seeking help – to
get a job or a loan, to find ways of continuing their education, to
learn more about Ambedkar or Buddhism (the religion that Ambedkar
and his followers embraced in the last year of Ambedkar’s life, as
we have seen, and that other Dalits have embraced since), and to
express their own desire to contribute to the struggle to change society.
There are numerous letters from Muslim readers, which is unsurprising
given the contemporary ascendancy of an aggressive right-wing Hindu
movement dominated by the upper castes. In the face of the latter,
targeted and vulnerable communities like the Muslims have sought
to build new political coalitions and found in the Dalits a potentially
important political ally.
For these non-Dalit well-wishers as well as for Dalit readers, the
columnist is more than just a writer. He is also, immediately, a leader –
of the Dalits and other oppressed communities. Dalit correspondents
condemn as traitors those Dalit intellectuals, officials, and other pro-
fessionals who fail to represent the interests of the Dalits at large, and
call on the columnist to continue to lead the struggle to raise Dalit con-
sciousness and establish Dalit power. The stakes involved are indicated
in the very forms of address: highly reverential in the case of letters
from supporters and sympathizers, and often downright abusive in
letters from opponents.
For some of his supporters or “followers,” the columnist is no less
than “today’s Ambedkar”: in one instance, he is called “more coura-
geous than Ambedkar.” For opponents, usually from higher castes
(including some from the “backward castes,” who have also suffered
the indignities of lower-caste status but, having been classified techni-
cally as “clean” castes, do not see themselves as “Dalit”), he is any-
thing from “Mr. Dalit,” “Mr. Dalitji,” “Dalit Maharaj” (or “Almighty
Dalit”), “The all-knowing one,” and “The pimp of the Dalits” to “Mr.
Pig,” “Mr. Shit,” “Dog,” “Goonda, Suvar, Chamar, Dom” (where
212 A History of Prejudice

the first two words translate as “hooligan,” “pig,” and the last two
refer to two of the lowest ex-Untouchable castes), to provide a sam-
ple of the names used. More than a few of these letter-writers, from
“respectable” backgrounds as they frequently aver, heap many kinds
of sexual abuse on the female relatives of the Dalit columnist, freely
using obscenities that they would normally be careful to keep out of
their “middle-class” homes.
Some of the letters warn the columnist of anthrax attacks32 if he
does not stop abusing his upper-caste readers; that is, if he does not stop
criticizing the Hindus and their religion, dividing the nation, forgetting
the duties of Indian citizens, forgetting what we have done for you, and
forgetting his – inherited – place. Some of the same letter-writers, while
abusing and threatening the columnist and his relatives, also demand
the publication of their letters and warn of untoward consequences
if publication is refused. This exhibition of unashamed aggression on
the part of the “respectable” must give us pause. The threat of open
violence, accompanied by the use of lower-caste names such as Chamar
and Dom as insulting epithets to humiliate the addressee, a usage that
is now a cognizable offense under Indian law, speaks of the arrogance
of power, of groups who believe they are above the law and other
requirements of “civil” society, at least in their dealings with certain
kinds of people, and of unshaken belief in the upper castes’ right to
rule.
Two letters make the point succinctly. One says: “Upar vale ne
tumhein banaya hai hamari seva karne ke liye” (“The Almighty has
made you [precisely] to serve us”). The second: “Hamare joothe tukde
khane vale, hamare bailon-bhaison ke gobar mein se dane nikal kar
khane valon, hamare mare hue jaanvar khane vaalon, hamare saamne
tumhari himmat kaise hoti hai hamare khilaf baat karne ki . . . ?” (“You
who eat the crumbs left over on our plates, who eat the grains you
pick out of the shit of our cattle, who eat the remains of our domestic
animals that have died, how dare you speak out against us, in our
presence . . . ?”)
I could multiply these examples of abuse and arrogant statement
of inherited privilege. Instead, I will conclude by referring to a much

32 Recall that many of these letters were written in the wake of the terrorist attacks of
September 2001 in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C.
 The Persistence of Prejudice 213

more polite intervention that nevertheless restates the dominant upper-

caste and upper-class belief in the appropriate place of the Dalit, or
any other minority voice, in the order of things and in the business of
development. This particular letter comes from a Brahman male who
lives in Delhi, on the eastern (less salubrious) side of the river Jamuna.
Addressing the Dalit columnist in the most respectful traditional terms
(“honorable Mr. ___,” “respectful salutations”), he writes that he has
been reading the column on “The problems of the Dalits” for some
time and recognizes that “somewhere,” in some important way, “what
you say is true.” However, he asks,

Will you tell me whether you think of yourself first as a Dalit, [a member of]
a so-called low caste, or as an Indian? If the answer is “Indian”, then I plead
with you not to divide this nation up further, physically or psychologically.
In my view you are capable of lifting up the Dalit community of the entire
country through education, thereby contributing to the progress of the nation.
You must endeavor to lift them up out of the feeling of being Dalits or so-
called low castes, and make them [conscious of being] Indians. Let them know
that we are not Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Shudras, we are nothing but
Indians and will remain [nothing but] Indians.

The correspondent then expresses his judgment against affirmative

action, or constitutional provisions for the reservation of a quota of
educational and political positions for people from lower-caste back-
grounds: “There are other ways of lifting up [the Dalits].” “Reserva-
tions,” he declares, “ . . . harm the nation.”
This “sympathetic” reader believes in the necessity of the columnist
playing the role of the leader, not of course of the country at large but
of his community: “you are capable of lifting up the Dalit community”
and thereby “contributing to the progress of the nation.” Note the lack
of self-consciousness in the inquiry “Are you an Indian first or a Dalit
first?”, a question periodically posed to Muslims and other minorities
as well, but never to upper-caste/upper-class Hindus, for the latter
are the nation, invisibly and axiomatically. In this framework, India
(and “mainstream” Indians) are abstract and unmarked categories,
while Dalits emerge as a local, vernacular grouping, with identifiable
but manifestly local problems: minorities that must never forget that
these are, in the end, sectional matters, minor in comparison with the
universal concerns of mainstream India and mainstream humanity.
214 A History of Prejudice

A parallel invective, not entirely dissimilar from that heaped on the

Dalit columnist, is found in a very large number of right-wing com-
mentaries on the current president of the United States. The canard
extends from claims about Barack Obama’s supposed foreign birth,
suggesting that as someone who is not a native-born American he
is ineligible to be president of the country, to accusations that he
is a closet Muslim, a traitor, even a supporter of terrorists. Thus
Rush Limbaugh stated in August 2010: “I have not (called him)
Imam Hussein Obama. . . . Imam Barack Hoover Obama is the correct
nomenclature.” However, says Limbaugh, the number of Americans
who believe he is Muslim is increasing: “Imam Obama is becoming
more well-known and the media can’t protect him.” He offers an
explanation: “[W]hy did I start calling him Imam Obama?” It was
“the natural thing to do when he came out in favor of the mosque
[a proposal to build a private Muslim community center in a build-
ing near Ground Zero in New York, which became notorious as the
“mosque” controversy]. It’s no different than calling it the Hamasque,
because Hamasque [Hamas, the militant Palestinian party that cur-
rently forms the government in the Gaza strip] has come out in favor
of the mosque.”
However much leftists, liberals, and other “‘un-American” types
try to hide who they really are, Limbaugh goes on to say, “the truth
is eventually gonna surface.” But “once you start telling lies and once
you start living a lie, you are doomed because you will not be able
to remember who you told what. You’re gonna get found out, you’re
gonna get caught at some point.” Further: “[W]e are a great country
at risk in a dangerous world. We have threats external and internal.
And it is not a good sign. It is not something healthy for the Ameri-
can people to not know what religion their president is, . . . where he’s
been and who he is, it’s not healthy, it’s not good.”33 The easy assump-
tion of the position of proconsul, of the purveyor of the “good” and
the “healthy” and the defender of Americanness, is a mark of main-
stream arrogance; more specifically, that of the white, Anglo-Saxon,
Protestant, heterosexual male. “It is inconceivable,” as a New York

33 Rush Limbaugh, “Imam Barack Hoover Obama and Fellow Democrats Are Liv-
ing a Lie,” August 19, 2010, http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site 081910/
content/01125110.guest.html.
 The Persistence of Prejudice 215

Times editorial put it, “that this campaign to portray Mr. Obama
as the insidious ‘other’ would have been conducted against a white
president.”34
Consider just one more example of this common-sense, modernist
call to militarism and masculinism, with its singular reason and its
singular understanding of the “natural” American and the healthy and
good society. Dinesh D’Souza recently published an article in Forbes
magazine previewing a longer statement in a book entitled The Roots
of Obama’s Rage – an article that drew praise from the former Speaker
of the U.S. House of Representatives and candidate for the Republican
nomination for president in 2012, Newt Gingrich. “Incredibly,” writes
D’Souza, “the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo
tribesman of the 1950s [Luo being the Kenyan tribe Obama’s father is
said to have come from]. This philandering, inebriated African social-
ist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his
anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the
reincarnation of his dreams in his son.” Thus, one can understand the
president only “if (one) understands Kenyan, anticolonial behavior.”
And then we get to the clinching argument about “the Other.” Barack
Obama was raised “offshore”: he spent “his formative years – the first
17 years of his life – off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia
and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa.”35 Voilà!
The call is this, in other words: “Imam Barack Hussein Obama,
take yourself and your crazy, socialist ideas back to where you/they
come from – Africa (or Indonesia, not to mention Pakistan).” Not
quite on par with the extremist Hindu right wing’s demand in India:
“Babar ki santan/Jaao Pakistan ya Kabristan” (“Descendants of [the
Mughal Emperor] Babar [i.e., Muslims of India], [take your choice]:
go to Pakistan or to the grave”). There is no parallel foreign country to
which people of African descent in the United States (or of Untouchable

34 “A Certificate of Embarrassment,” New York Times, April 28, 2011, A22.

35 See Dinesh D’Souza, The Roots of Obama’s Rage (Washington, DC: Regnery Pub-
lishing, 2010). I take the citations in this paragraph from Maureen Dowd, “Who’s the
Con Man?” New York Times, op-ed article, September 15, 2010, A25. For doubts
about Obama’s place of birth expressed by other leading Republicans, including
another aspirant to the presidential nomination in 2012, Donald Trump, see Bill
Carter and Brian Stelter, “If Trump Runs in ’12, ‘Apprentice’ is in Limbo,” New
York Times, April 18, 2011, B4; and Kirk Johnson, “Despite the Evidence, ‘Birther’
Bills Advance,” New York Times, April 22, 2011, A11.
216 A History of Prejudice

descent in India) may be banished, even ideologically. But the attack

is not altogether different in its effect. It is a proposition that we have
encountered many times over in the annals of American and Indian
democracy and nationhood: don’t forget how lucky you are; don’t
forget where you came from (and what you’ve attained); don’t forget
what we – the unmarked, natural citizens, the real Americans and
Indians, the nation – have done for you.
It is instructive in this context to set the response elicited by the
Delhi columnist and cited earlier – “Are you an Indian first or a Dalit
first?” – alongside certain reactions to the popular 1980s American
television series The Cosby Show, about an eminently normal African
American family of successful professionals, reveling in loving parent-
hood, education, and affluence, and (to take a very different example)
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the story of a
black girl’s quest for a sense of self and independence in Florida in the
early twentieth century.
Hurston’s 1937 novel was panned in several quarters for turning
black life into a minstrel show, in part because of her use of accents and
vocabulary common among African Americans in the 1920s; the critics
included leading intellectuals such as Richard Wright. At the same
time, while it was applauded for its engagement with contemporary
issues of gender and sexual politics, it was criticized for “its inability to
speak to the local, particularized politics of its time” – that is to say, for
not adequately addressing the specificity of the black experience in the
post-Reconstruction South.36 Decades later, the specificities of black
experience were again an important part of the debate on Bill Cosby’s
television production, although in this instance the charge was more
that the show was “not black enough.” Several critics declared that
the series “obscured the issues of class and race” and reinforced facile
and unhistorical arguments about how African Americans, like anyone
else, could make it in modern-day America if they had the will.37
There is a common thread here. What is posited is a choice of
political/cultural/media constituency that is in fact a negation of choice.

36 Carol Batker, “Love Me Like I Like to Be: The Sexual Politics of Hurston’s ‘Their Eyes
Were Watching God,’ the Classic Blues and the Black Women’s Club Movement,”
African American Review, 32, no. 2 (1998), 199; and Mary Helen Washington,
“Preface” in Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God.
37 Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis, Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences &
the Myth of the American Dream (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 7. See also
 The Persistence of Prejudice 217

Recall the appeal made to the Dalit columnist. What he must do, the
suggestion goes, is to represent both Dalits and India. Yet, he can
represent India only as a Dalit, acknowledging where he comes from,
representing the community that is his from birth and recognizing its
given – yet decidedly “improving” – place in the society.
A paradoxical, and inconsistent, demand is made of both the
African American novelist and T.V. producer and the Dalit columnist.
Each of these artists and professionals must write/create for everyone.
They must entertain, inform, educate by universal – which is to say
our – standards. At the same time, they must represent the Dalits or the
African Americans first and foremost. In truth, they cannot represent
anyone else. They must not imagine that they are, or might in some
peculiar combination of circumstances be, the mainstream of society.

The Vernacular and the Universal

I have presented in broad brush strokes some of the conditions

that make it necessary for important sections of the modern middle
classes – in this instance, those who have emerged from ex-slave, ex-
untouchable populations such as the Dalits and African Americans –
to continue to struggle with the issue of quite where and how they
belong in their modern, democratic societies. The fact is that the elec-
tion of Barack Obama as the president of the United States, like the
election of Indira Gandhi as India’s prime minister or the election of a
Dalit woman leader, Mayawati, three times over as the chief executive
(chief minister) of India’s most populous province, Uttar Pradesh, has
not signaled a dramatic shift in the situation of middle-class women or
Dalits or African Americans in general, to say nothing of those from
poorer working or unemployed families. Even after large numbers of
Dalits and African Americans have reached the point where they do
not need to hide aspects of their caste or racial ancestry, and indeed
many of them display it with increasing pride, the demand for confor-
mity to “mainstream” norms continues to bedevil individual lives and
careers – not excluding that of the U.S. president.
Let me conclude my reflections on this history of prejudice by draw-
ing on an insight that has been foregrounded in many investigations

Leslie B. Inniss and Joe R. Feagin, “The Cosby Show: The View from the Black
Middle Class,” Journal of Black Studies, 25, no. 6 (July 1995), 692–711.
218 A History of Prejudice

of the history of rape and sexual violence. We know something now

of the trauma frequently undergone by the victims of rape (or, more
generally, sexual harassment) in the course of rape trials and inves-
tigations of sexual exploitation: the victim has too often become the
accused in such moments. I want to suggest that the common sense
of prejudice – vernacular and universal – functions through some of
the same procedures of open attack and covert insinuation. It is not
always in the form of physical torture or verbal abuse that practices of
discrimination, objectification, and humiliation are perpetuated or that
instigation to (renewed) violence occurs. The preceding pages should
have provided enough examples of moments in which the parapher-
nalia of prejudice comes into view much more subtly.
Why can’t you stop being Dalit or black, Dalits and blacks have long
been asked, and simply be Americans or Indians? Sometimes Dalits or
African Americans have asked the same question, and urged disad-
vantaged assemblages to stop pleading special circumstances: among
them, on occasion, Bill Cosby and Barack Obama – not to mention
Condoleezza Rice.38 It is an argument with a long pedigree, extending
back to the Jewish Question in nineteenth-century Europe, if not ear-
lier. And the coercion persists in various forms: “As a practicing Jew
[in the USA],” Hillel Levin wrote in 2006, “I am always aware of my
minority status within the dominant secular and/or Christian culture,
and at times I feel the pressure to cover.” Again, John T. Molloy’s
popular self-help manual New Dress for Success, observing that the
“model of success” in the country is “white, Anglo-Saxon and Protes-
tant” (he doesn’t even bother to mention “male” and “heterosexual,”
as these are so utterly taken for granted), still advises African Ameri-
cans (men obviously) to avoid “Afro hairstyles” and to wear “conser-
vative pinstripe suits, preferably with vests,” and Latinos (Latinas are,
once more, invisible) to avoid “pencil-line mustaches,” “any hair tonic
that . . . give(s) a greasy or shiny look,” and “any articles of clothing
that have Hispanic associations.”39

38 On Condoleezza Rice’s position that she, and her family, always stood and made it
on their own, see Allen Tullos, Alabama Getaway: The Political Imaginary and the
Heart of Dixie (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 214–32.
39 Hillel Levin, “Kenji Yoshino’s ‘Covering,’” January 23, 2006, http://prawfsblawg
.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2006/01/kenji yoshinos .html. John T. Molloy’s New Dress
for Success is cited by Kenji Yoshino, “The Pressure to Cover,” New York Times,
 The Persistence of Prejudice 219

The demands made by the mainstream – those in positions of power

and privilege, masking the very marks of their privilege and their inher-
itance under the sign of the universal – can be much more vague and
pernicious. Bear in mind the sympathetic upper-caste reader’s appeal
to the Dalit columnist: “Will you tell me whether you think of your-
self first as a Dalit, [a member of] a so-called low caste, or as an
Indian? . . . [W]e are not Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Shudras, we
are nothing but Indians and will remain [nothing but] Indians.” The
common sense of society, and reigning prejudices, affect the disenfran-
chised themselves in many surprising as well as unpredictable ways.
Hence Baby Kamble’s exclusion of her husband’s physical abusiveness
from the account of her life because it was “so common”; or Viola
Andrews’s refusal to contemplate a second marriage because it was
“un-Christian”; or George Andrews’s insistence that blacks should
never try to get above themselves because they “should not.”
With all that, once a formal citizenship, the abstract right to vote,
and a putative equality of opportunity have been granted to the minor-
ity, mainstream demands change in ingenious ways. Recall the Indian
parliamentarians’ and the Indian Administrative Service bosses’ state-
ments to B. R. Ambedkar and Balwant Singh, respectively, that it
was not the latter’s actions, policies, or proposals that bothered their
upper-caste colleagues but rather their attitude, their comportment
and disposition. The prescription is now roughly as follows. Recently
enfranchised (and naturalized) groups need to be less demanding, less
sectional – less different and less emotional. They need, rather, to be
more temperate, more reasoned: in a word, more like us. The follow-
up in such matters is, however, a delicate affair – because the “us” and
the “more” are eminently malleable.
That is what one might describe as the cunning of prejudice – also
called reason: the beauty and subtlety of the language of modernity
and of the self-generated, autonomous, unmarked subject of history.

January 15, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15gays.html.

Goffman and later Yoshino have called the practice of playing down “outsider iden-
tities” without denying them, “covering” – although the difference between covering
and passing is not always so clear. See Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Man-
agement of Spoiled Identity (New York: Touchstone, 1963); and Kenji Yoshino,
Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights (New York: Random House,
2006).
220 A History of Prejudice

Consider once more the comment by Huntington that I quoted at

the beginning of this chapter: “There is no Americano dream. There
is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society.
Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only
if they dream in English.” If we needed proof of the demand for
one language, one culture, one (disguised, white, male, “European”)
order, we could scarcely ask for a better example. Unsurprisingly,
talk of multiculturism, the diversity and richness of human experience,
the “United Nations,” the social/historical construction of gender and
nationality, minority rights and women’s rights, minority histories and
non-Western philosophy, all disappear.
The move brings us back to the issue we began with: of how
mainstreams are established, of the differences that are suppressed
to establish the difference (or outsider status) of some, of what goes
into the making of the vernacular and the universal, the marked and
the unmarked citizen. It brings us back to the question of political
power for, to paraphrase the author of the Anglo-Protestant American
dream, there is no unmarked modern and no unmarked citizen. It is
only our dreaming, our historical privilege, and our current political
clout that let us think it so.
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 Index

Aalo Andhari, 168–169 living conditions, 15–16, 18, 50, 54,

Aamcha Baap aan Aamhi, 90, 163, 170, 113, 138–139, 198
172, 181–189, 191–193 middle class, 21, 113, 195–204, 216
Aaydaan (The Weave of My Life), 44–45, militancy, 7, 97
163, 170 military service, 100, 101–105,
adivasi, 12, 20, 57. See also indigenous 108–109, 113, 116, 121, 126,
populations; Scheduled Tribes 128–129, 142, 150, 161
affirmative action, 13, 22, 64, 163, 207, nationalism, 98
213. See also reservations struggle, 6–7, 23, 27, 97–98, 106, 138,
Africa, 4, 15, 47, 51, 69, 70, 98, 116, 149–150
148, 151, 153, 215 violence against, 16, 21, 103, 109,
colonial, 20, 51, 99, 110, 111, 112, 113–126, 128, 161
199, 215 See also Negro; people of color
postcolonial, 29 agency, 23–24, 25, 168, 169, 191
students from, 10 Alabama, 105, 108, 109, 110, 115,
See also South Africa 129
African American Ambedkar, B.R., 11, 26, 32, 211, 219
church, 54–55, 107, 110, 116, and conversion, 43–46, 51–52, 64,
121–122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 141, 67–68, 83–94, 204, 211
142–143, 147, 152, 153, 158 on Dalits as a minority, 41, 66–67
conversion, 97, 150 on history, 42–43, 67, 94
criminalization, 22, 105, 148, on the Hindu Code, 67–69, 78–81,
198–199 179
elites, 17, 196 movement led by, 58, 163–164,
history, 1, 6, 10–12, 16–18, 23, 46–47, 171–181, 187–189, 190, 207
49–51, 97, 100–102, 131, 134, 137, on untouchability, 6, 82–83, 89, 94
159, 194 American Civil Liberties Union, 198
identity, 32, 46–47, 57, 60, 126, 137, An American Dilemma, 22–24
153, 160, 161, 200 An Untouchable in the I.A.S., 69–71
labor, 48, 102–111, 114, 134 Andrews, Benny, 137, 138, 141,
leadership, 16, 102, 103, 104, 107, 143–144, 145, 146, 148, 150,
113, 124, 125, 150 153–156, 161

233
234 Index

Andrews, Raymond, 137, 140, 141, 143, Bhabha, Homi, 56

146, 148, 150, 155, 156 Bhargava, Gopichand, 76
Andrews, Viola, 54–55, 131–161, 166, Bhatnagar, Rashmi, 164
167, 168, 175, 196, 203, 219 Bible, 54–55, 97, 135, 143, 152, 155,
anti-colonial struggles, 3, 7, 40, 132, 215. 159, 161
See also colonialism; postcolony bigotry. See prejudice
apartheid, 4, 70 Bilbo, Theodore G., 115
Apel, Dora, 126, 128, 161 Black Panthers, 7
archive, 131, 165 Black Power, 98, 129
body as, 170, 177 blacks. See African American
of prejudice, 2, 30–31, 196–197 body
See also history; unarchived histories of African Americans, 53–54, 126,
Arnall, Ellis, 103, 104, 120 128, 161
Arya Samaj, 64 of Dalits, 7, 162, 177–179, 188,
Asad, Talal, 4 189–193
Ashraf-un-nisa Begum, 166 question of dress, 89–92, 173, 177,
Asia, 22, 115, 151 184, 218
Asian Americans, 11, 15, 152 rescripting of, 53, 89–90, 161, 172,
colonial, 20, 51, 99, 111, 112, 199 177–178, 188, 189–193
postcolonial, 24, 29 subaltern, 53, 55, 161, 170, 172,
Asian Drama, 24–25 177–179
assimilation, 63, 195. See also difference; of women, 7, 147, 149, 151, 160, 161,
sameness 178–179
Atlanta, 10, 16, 103–104, 110, 115, 116, Bombay. See Mumbai
117–120, 124–127, 137, 138, Brady, Thomas P., 99–100
142–145, 148, 150, 151, 153–156, Brahmanism, 27, 42–43, 67, 88, 95. See
157–158. See also Georgia also caste; Hinduism
Atlanta Constitution, 118, 123, 124 Brahmans, 27, 42, 60, 68, 80, 94, 95,
Australian Aboriginals, 34, 203 167, 213, 219
autobiography Dalit Brahmans, 27, 195
African American, 16, 49, 103, 112, Brooker, Peter, 3
131–161 Broyard, Anatole, 201–204
bourgeois, 132, 133, 165 Buddha and his Dhamma, 84
and community, 131–133, 168, 170 Buddhism
Dalit, 44–46, 69–71, 78, 94, 162–193 conversion to, 44–46, 51, 61, 64, 68,
as history, 31, 131 83, 84–95, 163, 178, 204, 205–207,
production of the self, 165, 167, 211
191 history of, 42–43, 67–68, 95
as protest literature, 162, 163 Burke, Emory, 115
subaltern, 131–133, 164, 165,
167–168 capitalism, 3, 4, 13, 17, 18, 99, 122. See
translations of, 163, 170, 182–189, also development; industrialization;
192 modernity
and women, 44–46, 49, 112, 131–161, caste
165–170, 172–181, 190, 191–192, as class, 43
205 forced labor, 88, 175, 176
hierarchy, 13–14, 17, 44, 46, 59, 65,
Baluta, 162, 164 74, 94, 207–208
Bama, 205 history of, 10–12, 42–43, 55, 67–68,
Baraka, Amiri, 98 72, 94, 134, 162
 Index 235

identity, 57, 59–60, 66, 95, 188, Civil Rights Movement, 25, 29–30, 50,
207–210 60, 98–108, 127–129, 131, 138,
logic of, 2, 9, 16, 24, 65, 192 150, 151, 161
names, 7, 40, 57, 66, 80, 196, Civil War (USA), 50, 101–102
207–210, 212 class, 2, 9, 19, 25, 26, 70, 190, 193
as slavery, 6 and caste, 94
census consciousness, 42
American, 14–15 hierarchy, 50, 135, 159
Indian, 13, 41, 65–66, 86, 207 inequality, 46, 49, 50, 68
Cesaire, Aime, 176 laboring poor, 37, 72, 179, 183
Chamar, 14, 83, 94, 208, 211, 212. See lower class, 7, 21, 193, 196, 199, 207
also Dalit; Harijan; Scheduled ruling, 8, 24, 29, 105
Castes; untouchability struggle, 10, 23, 42, 94
Chandala, 80–81. See also Dalit; Harijan; upper class, 18, 20, 82, 133, 165, 167,
untouchability 191, 196, 213
charitra (as genre), 164, 168. See also working class, 19, 20, 48, 50, 98, 172,
autobiography 183, 193, 203, 204. See also middle
Chicago, 98, 107, 114, 123, 124, 125, class; social mobility
145 colonialism, 17, 34, 63, 99, 112, 199
Chicago Defender, 106 anti-colonialism, 3, 7, 40, 132,
Christianity, 61, 64, 68, 85, 97, 215
204 British, 5, 6, 13, 19, 25, 27, 29, 40, 64,
and caste, 205 65, 69, 163, 172
as faith, 54, 136, 143, 144, 146–147, colonial knowledge, 25, 91, 207, 208
149, 161, 219 decolonization, 62, 90
as modern, 4 and race, 111–112
and race, 55, 152 See also imperialism; internal
as values, 23, 55, 110, 121, 122, 124, colonialism; postcolony
127, 151, 218 color line, 10, 50, 122, 149. See also race
Christians, 29, 36, 209 colored. See African American; people of
Dalit, 27, 64 color; Negro
as a minority, 13, 41, 60, 64, Columbians (fascist organization), 115.
199 See also conservatism (America); Ku
missionaries, 64, 161 Klux Klan; right-wing; white
citizenship supremacy
conversion to, 30, 61–62, 89, 92, 95, Communal Award (1932), 66–67. See
97 also reservations (under Indian
global, 172, 192, 193, 206 constitution)
military service and, 99–101, 103–105, communalism, 9, 70, 91
107, 126, 161, 195, 204 community
second-class, 19, 27, 37, 99, 105, 197, belonging, 13, 15, 19, 36, 193,
219 194–195, 197, 217
struggle for, 12, 17–18, 29, 60, 72, 74, communal rights, 17
75, 77, 79, 86, 92, 99, 101, 103, identity, 64
104, 124, 127, 128, 133, 207 and the individual, 131–133, 169, 170,
subaltern, 27, 29, 37, 57, 81, 92, 136, 181, 185, 189, 190
195, 212 internal differentiation, 40, 57, 94,
unmarked, 3, 27, 30, 33, 35, 36, 196, 165, 199
203, 213–216, 220 obligation to, 200, 211
See also franchise; nation; rights political, 51, 190
236 Index

conservatism (in American politics), 99, See also caste; Harijan; Scheduled
119, 122, 135, 151. See also right Castes; untouchability
wing (in USA) Dalit Panthers, 7, 57, 88, 163
constitution, 28, 55 Debi, Rassundari, 166, 167
American, 97, 102, 120, 124, 129, democracy
190 concept of, 3, 4, 8, 12, 22, 25, 30, 98,
Indian, 1, 13, 29, 40, 61, 68–69, 190
78–80, 92, 213 limits of, 13, 18, 22, 30, 31, 63, 91,
conversion, 51, 52, 57, 84, 92 112, 114, 121, 122, 135, 163, 199,
African American, 97, 150 216
of the community, 84, 92 struggle for, 7, 17, 18, 40, 77, 79, 81,
Dalit, 30, 43–46, 51–52, 57, 61–96, 92, 96, 97–130
97, 99, 163, 204–207 Depressed Castes, 7, 12, 40, 78. See also
to modernity, 61 Dalit; Scheduled Castes
See also liberation Detroit, 109, 110, 111
Cosby, Bill, 216, 218 development, 4, 18, 22, 24, 26, 42, 69,
cotton farming, 54, 119, 156, 157 213. See also capitalism;
Criminal Tribes, 20, 76–78 industrialization; modernity
dhamma. See Buddhism
D’Souza, Dinesh, 215 dharmaantar. See conversion
Dalit difference
citizenship, 37, 61–62, 67, 72, 74–75, and the body, 53, 161
81, 86, 89, 92–93, 95 as empowering, 38, 39, 41, 46, 51, 56
community, 40, 46, 55, 165 insider/outsider, 36, 41
conversion, 43–46, 51–52, 61–96, 97, and power, 32–40, 46, 56, 57
99, 163, 204–207 proclamation of, 29, 31, 35, 37, 40,
criminalization, 76–78, 81 52, 53, 56, 220
history, 1, 6, 10–11, 12, 16, 41, 42–43, See also discrimination; sameness
57, 62, 63, 66, 72, 91, 94, 95–96, discrimination, 1, 16, 39, 57, 60, 199,
163, 164, 171, 189, 194, 196, 208 218
identity, 7, 55, 57, 59–60, 64, 66, 95, against women, 48, 95
188, 192, 208–210, 213 caste, 1, 9, 29, 41, 57, 69–70, 78, 82,
labor, 7, 13, 41, 60, 72, 83, 88, 91, 94, 162–163, 165, 172, 187,
162, 169, 172, 175, 176, 177, 178, 205–206
179, 181, 182, 192–193, 209 racial, 9, 15, 16, 48, 98, 106–109,
leadership, 40, 57, 63, 66, 89, 91, 95, 202
163, 211, 213, 217 See also prejudice
living conditions, 14, 18, 162, disenfranchisement, 5, 12, 30, 136, 169,
172–180, 187–188 171, 194, 219. See also
middle class, 167, 195, 197, 199–200, enfranchisement; franchise;
204–213, 217 marginalization
militancy, 6, 26, 57, 163, 204, 210 Dixon, Frank M., 108, 115
minority status, 40–42, 63–67 Dorsey, George, 116, 118, 120–121, 126
patriarchy, 58, 95, 170, 171–172, Dorsey, Mae Murray, 116
178–180 “Double Victory” Campaign, 30,
struggle, 6–7, 28, 46, 55, 61–63, 72, 99–108, 115, 126, 127–129, 151
83, 86, 162, 163, 171, 175, Douglass, Frederick, 6, 101
179–181, 187, 204, 210 Du Bois, W.E.B., 6, 10, 46–47, 50–54,
violence against, 21, 85, 91, 187, 206, 60, 122, 149
212 Dust Tracks on a Road, 112
 Index 237

education honor, 174

against social evils, 11, 123 marriage, 58, 68, 79, 87, 144–146,
exclusion from, 48, 60, 72, 127, 166, 148, 157, 161, 174, 180, 186, 187,
176, 177, 179, 180 188, 200, 219
and gender, 48, 166 middle class, 19, 193, 195, 200, 203,
and race, 153–155, 159, 203 216
reservations for, 61, 64, 85, 213 surnames, 208–210
uplift through, 19, 89–90, 143, 144, Fanon, Frantz, 53, 90
150, 151, 174, 176, 178, 181, 195, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 118, 119
213 feminism, 7, 39, 71, 137
value of, 46, 55, 83, 89, 90, 92, 94, 95, black feminism, 47–49
157, 167, 178 See also gender; women
and women, 11, 48, 143, 166 Fitzgerald, Timothy, 62, 92
Ellison, Ralph, 23–24, 106 franchise, 25, 29, 61, 90, 116, 120, 219
emancipation, 34, 35, 38, 50, 102, 129, poll tax, 119–120
172 voter registration, 119, 120
Emancipation Proclamation (USA), women’s suffrage, 129
102 See also citizenship;
legal, 50, 102, 129 disenfranchisement;
political, 35 enfranchisement; rights
See also liberation; slavery Frederickson, Kari, 116
enfranchisement, 30, 219. See citizenship;
disenfranchisement; franchise; rights Gandhi, Indira, 217
Enlightenment, 31, 34 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 75, 90–92, 166
human subject of, 133, 191, 193 and anti-colonialism, 6, 25, 112
See also modernity and untouchability, 7, 26, 41, 51, 57,
equality, 4, 8, 19, 25, 38–39, 44, 67–70, 66–67, 73, 82–83, 174
79, 83, 86, 104, 105, 122, 174, 205, Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, 198–199, 201
219 gay, 1, 30, 36, 57, 204. See also
equal opportunity, 4, 7, 12, 26, 27, heterosexual; lesbian; LGBTQ;
98–99, 122, 219 sexuality
See also inequality; sameness gender, 2, 33, 34, 39, 46, 49, 95, 134,
Ethridge, Mark F., 110, 115 135, 161, 190, 193, 216, 220
exclusion, 9, 19–20, 49, 98, 99, and caste, 172
108–109, 162. See also equality, 188
discrimination; disenfranchisement inequality, 34, 50, 68, 94, 95, 127,
Executive Order 8802, 106, 108, 129. 180
See also Fair Employment Practices intersectionality, 49, 50
Committee; labor and race, 47–49
exploitation, 16, 41, 55, 57, 95, 101, 178 sexism, 47
economic, 50 See also gay; heterosexual; femininity;
sexual, 2, 14, 15, 169, 218 lesbian; LGBTQ; masculinity;
patriarchy; sexuality; women
Fair Employment Practices Committee, Georgia, 16, 54, 103, 104, 110, 111,
106, 110. See also discrimination; 113–114, 123–129, 131, 137–156,
Executive Order 8802; labor 158–159, 203. See also Atlanta;
family, 17, 19, 48, 135, 136, 149, 176 Madison, Ga.; Monroe, Ga.
and autobiography, 138, 151, 171, Ghulamgiri, 6. See also caste; slavery
172, 181–183, 190, 191 Gilmore, Glenda, 200
domesticity, 20, 200 Gilroy, Paul, 21
238 Index

Goldstein, Eric, 59 Hughes, Langston, 15, 106, 114, 122,

Guha, Ranajit, 84 137, 165
Gujarat, 85, 192, 206 humiliation, 10, 57, 71, 91, 129, 132,
162, 193, 196, 202, 206, 207, 212,
Halder, Baby, 168–169 218. See also untouchability;
Hamas, 214 stigmatization
Harijan, 7, 40, 57, 73–76, 82–83, 174, Huntington, Samuel, 194, 220
206. See also Dalit; Scheduled Hurston, Zora Neale, 111–113, 134,
Castes; untouchability 137, 138, 150, 161, 216
Harlem (NY), 59, 102, 103, 109, 113,
165, 203. See also New York identity
Hartsfield, William, 126, 127 African American, 32, 46–47, 57, 60,
Hayes, Roland, 113 126, 137, 153, 160, 161, 200
heterosexual, 29, 34, 214, 218. See also Dalit, 7, 55, 57, 59–60, 64, 66, 95,
gay; lesbian; LGBTQ; sexuality 192, 208–210, 213
Hill, Anita, 201 question of, 9, 39, 40, 46–47, 51–60,
Hindu Code Bill, 42, 67–69, 78–81, 179 63, 64, 158, 197, 201, 202–203,
Hinduism 206
community, 41–42, 63–67, 79–82 representation of, 66, 81, 217
Dalit rejection of, 42–44, 51, 83–84, See also difference
88, 204 Ilaiah, Kancha, 2, 59–60
Hindu leadership, 64 immigrants, 1, 11, 15, 17, 20, 38, 97,
Hindu Right, 194, 211, 215 194
militancy, 64, 85 imperialism, 3, 4, 6, 8, 20, 47, 51, 70, 99
reform of, 42, 51, 64–65, 67–69, Indian Administrative Service, 69–71,
78–81 219
Hine, Darlene Clark, 49–50, 135 Indian National Congress, 105
Hispanics. See Latina/Latino indigenous populations, 1, 12, 13, 20,
history, 1–12, 30–31, 34, 131, 134, 193, 32, 34, 37, 38, 57. See also adivasi;
196, 219 Native Americans; Scheduled Tribes
African American, 1, 6, 10–12, 16–18, individual
23, 46–47, 49–51, 97, 100–102, individualism, 17, 132, 133, 181, 185,
131, 134, 137, 159, 194 186, 191, 192, 193, 200
autobiography as, 131 individuality, 35, 38, 137, 165, 186,
comparative, 8–9, 16 193, 200
Dalit, 1, 6, 10–12, 16, 41–43, 57, 62, rights, 17, 61
63, 66, 72, 94–96, 163–164, 171, subjectivity, 168, 169
189, 194, 196, 207–208 industrialization, 3, 20, 76, 102, 107. See
discipline of, 31, 131 capitalism; development; modernity
of the nation, 4–5, 10–12, 16–18, 30, inequality, 17, 24, 43, 67, 68, 85, 91,
42–43, 47, 51, 98–101, 102, 104, 193, 211. See also equality
189, 194, 199, 219 inner life, 134–135, 136, 157, 158, 165,
struggle over, 5, 7, 10–12, 42–43, 167, 168. See also autobiography;
49–51, 55, 57, 62, 63, 66, 71, 80, individual
159, 171, 179, 207, 208. interiority. See inner life
of subaltern groups, 7–12, 17–18, internal colonialism, 12, 13, 20, 29, 53,
27–31, 37, 39, 55, 56, 57, 63, 71, 62–63. See also colonialism;
99, 132, 170, 196, 204 postcolony
See also archive; unarchived histories Irish, 20, 37, 199
hooks, bell, 47–48, 49 Italians, 20, 37, 199
 Index 239

Jadhav, Damodar, 167, 182–191 liberation

Jadhav, Narendra, 90, 163, 168, black, 151, 159
170–172, 181–184, 188–193 Dalit, 10, 30, 62, 176, 179, 187
Jews, 1, 20, 29, 35–36, 37, 41, 53, 56, history of, 30
59, 113, 115, 194, 195, 199, 204, liberated castes, 78
218 as a motif, 144, 145, 157, 158, 161
Jewish Question, 35–36, 194, 218 from slavery, 149
Jim Crow laws (USA), 15, 111–113, 119, of women, 144, 179
120, 122, 134, 136. See also See also conversion; emancipation
discrimination; inequality; race; Limbale, Sharankumar, 87, 169–170
segregation Limbaugh, Rush, 214
Jina Amcha (The Prisons We Broke), 170, literacy, 25, 92, 156, 166, 167, 169
171–181. See also Kamble, Baby illiteracy, 5, 89, 94
Johnson, James Weldon, 103, 122 See also education
Jones, Jacqueline, 48 Lorde, Audre, 32–33, 39, 48–49
Joothan, 162, 163 lynching, 114, 116–118, 121–126, 150,
161
Kamble, Baby Kondiba, 46, 55, 58, 89, of women, 117, 128
167, 168–181, 189–191, 193, 196,
219 Madison, Ga., 137, 142, 147, 148,
Kamble, Shantabai Krishnaji, 46, 87–88 154–156. See also Georgia; Monroe,
Kenya, 215 Ga.
Khare, R.S., 83 Mahar, 44, 58, 82, 86, 94, 164,
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 6, 129, 150 171–180, 182, 187, 191, 210. See
Kruse, Kevin M., 119 also Dalit; untouchability
Kshatriyas, 42, 213, 219 Maharashtra, 85, 86, 94, 163, 164,
Ku Klux Klan, 109, 116, 120. See also 170–175, 205, 206. See also
conservatism (in America); Mumbai; Nagpur; Ozer; Pune;
Columbians; right-wing; white Satara
supremacy Malagatti, Aravind, 166
Kumar, Meera, 71 Malcolm, Dorothy, 116–118, 121
Malcolm, Roger, 116–118, 120–121
labor, 7, 19, 20, 24, 37, 38, 41, 55, 60, Mandela, Nelson, 69
76, 92, 102–111, 134, 172, Manto, Saadat Hasan, 28–29
177–179, 181–183, 192, 193, 209 marginalization, 2, 5, 7, 12, 17, 30,
organized, 108, 114, 116, 124 35–40, 56–57, 63, 65, 163, 194,
struggle, 98 195. See also difference;
of women, 48, 106, 134, 160, 169 disenfranchisement; subalternity
See also class Marx, Karl, 35
Latina/Latino, 27, 37, 195, 196, 198, Marxism, 3, 51
218, 220 masculinity, 4, 19, 127, 141, 178,
lesbian, 57, 204. See also gay; 185
heterosexual; LGBTQ; sexuality masculinism, 28, 95, 99, 100, 101,
Lester, Julius, 134 128–129, 215
Levin, Hillel, 218 See also femininity; gender; patriarchy
LGBTQ, 57. See also gay; heterosexual; Mayawati, 217
lesbian; sexuality Mazhya Jalmachi Chittarkatha, 87–88
liberalism, 3, 4, 8, 16, 20, 23, 32, 35, 37, Meenakshipuram (Tamilnadu), 85
79, 110, 122, 165, 186, 191, 195, Mehta, Uday, 32
214 memoirs. See autobiography
240 Index

middle class, 10–11, 18–21, 27, 33, 69, nation

92, 113, 167, 169, 191, 193, nationalism, 3, 25, 38, 50, 82, 98, 100
195–212, 217. See also class; social nationhood, 5, 12, 26, 35, 38, 53, 55,
mobility 103, 216
minorities nation-state, 4, 35, 36, 99
insiders/outsiders, 36, 213 National Association for the
minoritization, 9, 27, 35–38, 41, 201 Advancement of Colored People, 16,
rights, 55, 63, 64, 219, 220 103, 105–108, 111, 119–120, 123,
and the state, 22, 36, 53, 63, 108, 198 124, 127
See also difference; stigmatization; Native Americans, 12, 15, 20, 22, 27, 47,
subalternity 63, 98–99, 100, 153, 203. See also
Mississippi, 99, 105, 115, 124, 129 indigenous populations
modernity, 3–5, 12, 27, 31, 86, 184, Negro, 16, 22–24, 46, 47, 51, 53, 57,
190 100, 102–107, 111–114, 137, 202.
colonial, 17 See also African American; people of
discourse of, 4, 219 color
middle class, 20, 217 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 10, 25–26, 80, 163
modernization, 4 Nehru, Rameshwari, 75, 77–78
philosophy of, 2, 3, 4, 31, 34 New York, 48, 59, 82, 102, 103, 106,
and religion, 4, 25, 44 123–125, 143, 144, 148, 200, 201,
self-made individual, 4, 19, 61, 84, 92, 202, 212, 214
133, 185, 219 non-violence, 6. See also violence
See also capitalism; industrialization;
liberalism Obama, Barack, 214–215, 217, 218
Molloy, John T., 218 othering, 1, 34, 36, 37, 53, 56–59, 160,
Monroe, Ga., 117, 121, 123–126, 128 162, 214–216. See also difference
Moore’s Ford lynching, 120, 121, Ozer (Maharashtra), 182, 185, 187
123–126. See also lynching; violence
Mufti, Aamir, 37 Painter, Nell Irvin, 135, 158
Mujahid, Abdul Malik, 85, 205–206 Pakistan, 10, 72, 77, 215
Mumbai, 45, 52, 90, 167, 172, 173, 177, Pandit, Maya, 45, 88, 170, 171, 173,
181, 182, 183, 186, 187–189 181, 182
Muslim League, 42 Partition, 72–78, 79
Muslims Dalit refugees, 72–78
in India, 10, 13, 26–27, 34, 43, 60, resettlement, 72–76
62–66, 72, 73, 74, 79, 199, 205, passing, 197, 204, 208, 218, 219
211, 213, 215 as upper caste, 204, 208
as a minority, 35, 36, 40–41, 53, 56, as white, 158, 201–204, 207
63, 66, 194–196, 211 See also identity; naming
prejudice against, 1, 27, 29, 34, 79, patriarchy, 1, 17, 19, 28, 58, 95, 129,
194–196, 213–215 135–137, 144, 159, 170–172, 178,
Myrdal, Gunnar, 10, 22–25, 122 190. See also gender; masculinity
Pawar, Daya, 86–87, 164
Nagaraj, D.R., 43, 82, 90, 91, 204 Pawar, Ishwar Dass, 76, 78
Nagpur, 84, 85, 90, 204 Pawar, Urmila, 44–45, 163, 170
naming people of color, 48, 57, 106, 138, 139,
and caste background, 7, 40, 80–81, 150, 151–152, 155, 198. See also
196, 207–210 African American; Negro
and political struggle, 7, 27, 57, 66, Periyar. See Ramaswamy E.V. Naicker
207–210 Phaltan, Satara District, 174, 175, 180,
See also identity; passing 191
 Index 241

Philadelphia, 123, 125 Rankin, John E., 115

Phule, Jyotirao, 6, 88 rape, 21, 50, 170, 218. See also
Piper, Adrian, 202–203 exploitation (sexual); violence
Pittsbugh Courier, 124 reform, 11, 19, 42, 51, 64–65, 68, 74,
Poor Laws, 50 79
postcolony, 5, 13, 17, 21, 29, 65 Rege, Sharmila, 132
postcolonial scholarship, 7, 35, 37 reservations (under Indian constitution),
postcolonial struggles, 40 61, 64, 66, 85, 213. See also
See also colonialism; imperialism affirmative action
poverty, 15–19, 24–26, 48, 50, 52, 162, Rice, Condoleezza, 218
175–177, 190, 198. See also class right wing (in India), 194, 211, 215
prejudice right wing (in USA), 214. See also
caste, 60, 70–71, 78–82, 94–95, 134, conservatism
162, 172, 218–219 rights
as common sense, 2–3, 11, 22–23, 33, civil, 29, 36, 82, 99, 101, 107–108,
193, 196, 218–219 110, 123, 124, 127–129, 150
historicization of, 1–2, 11, 29, 30–32, discourse of, 55, 133
131, 196, 217 human, 3–4, 55
politics of, 1–2, 18, 29, 34, 38–39, 53, individual, 17, 61
81, 136 minority, 27, 38, 55–56, 63–64, 66,
racial, 1, 9–11, 21, 47–48, 99, 101, 219, 220
104, 108, 111, 119, 121, 131, 134, political, 19, 29, 32, 39, 61, 64, 74, 76,
137, 155, 159, 203 97, 99, 102, 172, 196
vernacular and universal, 1–2, 5, 11, state, 123
27, 31, 32, 162, 194, 218 women’s, 38, 49, 79, 151, 188, 220
See also discrimination See also citizenship
Presidential Committee on Civil Rights Roosevelt, Franklin D., 104, 106, 107,
(1946), 127, 128 108, 112, 129
Pune, 172, 175 rural life, 119, 143. See also village life
Punjab, 72–77, 83 Ryan, Mary, 200

race sameness, 34, 37, 38, 39, 51, 57, 61, 92,
as caste, 6 98, 127
and class, 98, 216 Scheduled Castes, 1, 7, 13, 40, 41, 57,
concept of, 2, 9, 14, 46, 50 70, 80, 85, 206. See also Dalit;
hierarchy, 50, 110, 116, 135, 159 Harijan; untouchability
history of, 10–12, 134 Scheduled Tribes, 12, 13, 32. See also
identity, 32–33, 46–47, 51, 60, 137, adivasi; indigenous populations
141, 153, 192, 201 secularism, 4, 8, 12, 86, 122, 218
integration, 98, 109 segregation, 4, 6, 15–16, 21–22, 28, 60,
and power, 9, 21, 34, 55, 100, 119, 78, 99, 101, 105, 110, 113, 128,
131, 151, 155, 159 138, 149, 151, 155, 159–160. See
racism, 1, 9–11, 21, 47–48, 99, 101, also discrimination; Jim Crow laws
111, 119, 122, 137, 159, 203 Self-Respect Movement, 26
relations, 47, 97–130, 136, 138, 150, sexuality, 34, 47, 49, 147, 216
151, 159, 160 control of, 50, 135, 160
See also passing sexual identity, 158
Rai, Lala Lajpat, 64–65 sexual minorities, 38
Ramaswamy Naicker, E.V., 26–27, sexual mores, 115, 147–149, 169
204 See also gay; gender; heterosexual;
Randolph, Asa Philip, 104, 107 lesbian; LGBTQ
242 Index

sharecropping, 117, 131, 140, 141 Talmadge, Eugene, 113, 115, 119–121,
Shaw, Stephanie, 200 127
shuddhi campaign, 64–65 Tamilnadu, 85, 205. See also South India
Sikhs, 13, 41, 64, 72, 73, 74, 85, 204, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 161,
209 216
Singh, Balwant, 69–71, 219 Thurmond, J. Strom, 122–123
Sitkoff, Harvard, 109 trauma, 158, 218
slavery, 5, 6, 11, 13, 15, 21, 46, 101, Trump, Donald, 215
132, 135, 138 Truth, Sojourner, 48, 109, 129
abolition of, 15, 29, 108, 136
abolitionism, 6, 8, 48, 99, 102 U.S. South, 15–16, 17, 38, 54, 102–105,
and caste, 6 108–111, 114, 115–116, 122–123,
as a motif, 48, 58, 142, 157, 158, 159, 124–125, 129, 134–137, 138–140,
161, 178, 180 143–145, 149, 151, 155, 159,
social justice, 12, 40, 44, 75 160–161, 216
social mobility, 94, 163, 181, 182, 193, unarchived histories, 1–2, 29, 71–72, 95,
195, 196, 197, 200, 204, 208. See 135, 161, 177, 178, 196. See also
also class; middle class archive; history
Souls of Black Folk, 52 untouchability
South Africa, 4, 69, 70 abolition of, 16, 29, 51, 61, 67, 80
South Asia, 5, 10–11, 24, 43 concept of, 2, 5, 13–14, 17, 28, 82–83,
South Carolina, 115, 116, 122, 123, 124, 94
129 history of, 10, 11, 13, 43, 94, 132
South India, 26, 83, 85, 166, 207, 208. and minority status, 36, 40–41, 63–64,
See also Tamilnadu 65–67, 82
Southern U.S.A. See U.S. South routine violence of, 2, 14, 21, 70, 81,
stigmatization, 1, 10, 11, 12, 16, 18, 42, 167–168, 196, 204
61, 63, 69, 101, 162, 204, 205, 206. as slavery, 6
See also marginalization; as stigma, 10, 42, 89, 163, 205
minoritization Untouchable. See Dalit
Stover, Johnnie M., 132 Untouchables, The, 43
Subaltern Studies, 43 upper castes, 11, 27, 64, 78–82, 91, 94,
subalternity 95, 162, 168, 169, 211–213
and the body, 53, 55, 161, 170, 172, distancing of, 14, 21–22, 59–60
177–179 privilege of, 13, 18, 71, 83, 88–89, 95,
and citizenship, 27, 29, 37, 57, 81, 92, 176–177, 200, 205
136, 195 See also Brahmans; caste
and difference, 32–33, 34–35, 37–41, urbanization, 3, 66
51, 53, 63, 95, 167, 219
of middle classes, 19, 21, 195–196, Vaishyas, 213, 219
197, 200, 204, 210 Valmiki, Om Prakash, 94, 163, 165–166,
subaltern militancy, 59 196
subaltern movements, 8, 17, 27, 55, village life, 72–74, 82, 91–92, 175. See
57, 59, 92 also rural life
and subjectivity, 168, 170, 181 violence, 2, 4, 18, 21, 28
of women, 7, 172 against women, 49–50, 58, 95, 141,
See also difference; disenfranchisement; 144, 156, 180, 188, 219
marginalization; minorities colonial, 29, 111–112
Sudras, 41, 43, 68, 79, 205, 213, 219. See in language, 2, 28, 81, 113, 152, 196,
also caste; Dalit; Scheduled Castes 211–212, 218
 Index 243

intercaste, 21, 85, 91, 187, 206, 212 women

interracial, 16, 21, 103, 109, 111–126, and autobiography, 44–46, 49, 112,
128, 161 131–161, 167–170, 172–181, 190,
police, 21, 77, 85, 113, 116, 120 191–192, 205
routine, 2, 28, 71, 196 and child-bearing, 146–149, 168, 179
sexual, 15, 21, 50, 129, 170, 218 and citizenship, 5, 19–20, 37–40, 79,
See also lynching; non-violence; rape 99, 128
Vishwanathan, Gauri, 84 and the community, 179
domestic duties, 58, 135, 146, 168,
Walker, Alice, 32, 33, 60, 134, 137, 138, 174, 175, 178
139, 148 and labor, 48, 106, 134, 160, 169
Washington D.C., 105, 107, 109, 114, and race, 47–50
123, 125, 212 rights of, 38, 49, 79, 151, 188, 220
Washington, Booker T., 153 subordination of, 7, 14–15, 34–35, 37,
Wells, Ida B., 129 55, 58, 95, 135–136, 141, 172,
white supremacy, 109, 115, 120. See also 178–180
conservatism (in America); violence against, 49–50, 58, 95, 141,
Columbians; Ku Klux Klan; 144, 156, 180, 188, 219
right-wing and the vote, 129
White, Walter, 16, 113, 124 women’s movement, 20, 40, 49, 53,
whites, 15, 18, 48, 55, 59, 102, 107, 56
109–115, 119–122, 127, 150–156, Woodard, Isaac, 116, 124
159, 200 World War I, 101, 102, 103–104, 108,
Why I Am Not a Hindu, 59–60 114–115
Williams, Raymond, 3 World War II, 99–115