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ABSTRACT
The caste order – like all social hierarchies – structures emotions in particular ways, and in turn depends on emotions, thus structured, for its reproduction over time. In North Indian vernaculars, to ask who feels ghṛṇā (disgust) towards whom is often to trace the boundaries of the touchable body politic. Ghṛṇā karnā – doing disgust – describes a set of practices often identical to those known in a political register as ‘practices of untouchability.’ Thus, ve ham se ghṛṇā karte hain (‘they are disgusted by us,’ or, better, ‘they practice disgust on us’) is among the more common ways that Dalits describe their treatment at the hands of privileged castes. This article tracks usages of ghṛṇā in two vernacular North Indian sources from the early twentieth century in order to throw critical light on the inculcation of disgust as advantaged and disadvantaged caste observers have described it. In Hindi tracts composed by members of the Hindu reformist organization the Arya Samaj, ghṛṇā appears as an impediment to the majoritarian project of Hindu encompassment of its erstwhile ‘untouchable’ other; Arya Samajist polemicists seek to expose Hindu disgust towards Dalits and to redirect it towards new targets. In oral traditions that circulated among Dalit castes engaged in sanitation labour in the late colonial period, parables of encounter between ‘touchable’ and ‘untouchable’ give utterance to a critique of ghṛṇā as antithetical to moral action and as opposed to life. Grounded in historical and ethnographic evidence, the article develops preliminary ideas towards an affective theory of caste and untouchability.
Notes
1. Chakrabarty, “The Dalit Body,” 9–10.
2. Ibid., 10.
3. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus.
4. E.g., Appadurai, “Putting Hierarchy in Its Place”; Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity; and Dirks, Castes of Mind; Inden, Imagining India.
5. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste.
6. E.g., Berreman, “Stratification, Pluralism and Interaction”; Guha, Beyond Caste; Mencher, “The Caste System”; and Viswanath, The Pariah Problem.
7. Thorat and Joshi, “The Continuing Practice.”
8. See, e.g., Dutt, Coming out as Dalit.
9. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, 245.
10. See, e.g., Brueck, Writing Resistance; Limbale, Towards an Aesthetic; Valmiki, Dalit Sahitya; and Tharu and Satyanarayana, No Alphabet in Sight.
11. Guru, Humiliation.
12. Lynch, “The Mastrām.”
13. Subramanian, “Making Merit.”
14. A pseudonym, as with the librarian quoted later in this section.
15. Haidt, McCauley, and Rozin, “Individual Differences in Sensitivity.”
16. Platts, A Dictionary of Urdu, 823.
17. On other deployments of karāhat, see Mhaskar, “Ghettoisation of Economic Choices”; and Tayob, “Disgust as Embodied Critique.”
18. For an alternative view, to which we will return, see Ghassem-Fachandi, Pogrom in Gujarat.
19. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, 31–33.
20. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion; Kolnai, “The Standard Modes”; Menninghaus, Disgust; and Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust.
21. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, 60–78.
22. Peirce, Philosophical Writings.
23. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, 233.
24. Lee, “Odor and Order.”
25. Gidla, Ants among Elephants, 8.
26. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion.
27. Irudayam, Mangubhai, and Lee, Dalit Women Speak Out, 108.
28. See, e.g., Rege, Writing Caste/Writing Gender, 222, 43.
29. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory, 78.
30. Frevert, et al., Learning How to Feel; Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling; and Scheer, “Are Emotions.”
31. Chakrabarty, “The Dalit Body,” 14.
32. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust,195.
33. Lee, Deceptive Majority.
34. Swami Shraddhanand quoted in Jordens, Swami Shraddhananda, 163.
35. Sharma, Patitoddhār, 166–167. All translations from this text and Nizami’s in the following section are my own.
36. Ibid., 14.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 15.
39. Ibid., 21.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.: 25.
42. Ibid., 24.
43. Ghassem-Fachandi, Pogrom in Gujarat; Mhaskar, “Ghettoisation of Economic Choices”; and Tayob, “Disgust as Embodied Critique.”
44. On which, see Narayan and Misra, Multiple Marginalities.
45. Often assumed to be Rishi Valmiki, composer of the Sanskrit Ramayana, though the oral traditions suggest no such connection; see Lee, “All the Valmikis.”
46. Temple, “A Story of Lal Beg.”
47. Guha, Small Voice of History, 239–265.
48. Lee, Deceptive Majority.
49. Briggs, The Doms, 544–548; Guha, Small Voice of History, 239–265.
50. Snodgrass, Casting Kings, 75–79.
51. Guha, Small Voice of History, 260; Snodgrass, Casting Kings, 75–79; Briggs, The Doms, 545.
52. Platts, A Dictionary of Urdu, 591.
53. Nizami, Ḥalālkhor, 11–12.
54. Snodgrass, Casting Kings, 75–79.
55. Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai, The Cracked Mirror.
56. Guru, “Archaeology of Untouchability,” 50.
57. Jha, “Candala and the Origin,” 18.
58. Pollock, A Rasa Reader, 27.
59. Amir, “Contempt and Labour.”
60. Quoted by Fazal, “Scheduled Castes,” 6n4.