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Deceptive Majority
Dalits, Hinduism, and Underground Religion
By: Joel Lee
Series: South Asia in the Social Sciences
354 Pages
- Hardcover
- ISBN: 9781108843829
- Published By: Cambridge University Press
- Published: August 2021
$125.00
Review by Jon Keune forthcoming.
The idea that India is a Hindu majority nation rests on the assumption that the vast swath of its population stigmatized as 'untouchable' is, and always has been, in some meaningful sense, Hindu. But is that how such communities understood themselves in the past, or how they understand themselves now? When and under what conditions did this assumption take shape, and what truths does it conceal? In this book, Joel Lee challenges presuppositions at the foundation of the study of caste and religion in South Asia. Drawing on detailed archival and ethnographic research, Lee tracks the career of a Dalit religion and the effort by twentieth-century nationalists to encompass it within a newly imagined Hindu body politic. A chronicle of religious life in north India and an examination of the ethics and semiotics of secrecy, Deceptive Majority throws light on the manoeuvres by which majoritarian projects are both advanced and undermined.
Joel Lee is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Williams College.He teaches and conducts research on religion, language, caste and the state in South Asia. In particular his work concerns the ways in which Dalits – those communities historically stigmatized as 'untouchable' – combat structural deprivation, navigate the politics of religious majoritarianism, and contend with the sensory and environmental entailments of sanitation labor in colonial and postcolonial India. His research and teaching interests also include linguistic anthropology, semiotics, popular Hinduism and Islam, and Urdu and Hindi literature.