Joel Lee’s Deceptive Majority: Dalits, Hinduism, and Underground Religion is a detailed exploration of how a widespread view of caste and religion in India arose—that Dalit people are Hindu by default. Through ethnography and historical research sensitive to changes in terminology and context since the late 19th century, Lee traces the political programs and conceptual paradigms that made this idea seem obvious. The book focuses on “sanitation worker castes”—a term that plays two key roles. Generally, it refers to Dalit communities across South Asia whose occupations included removing human waste and who were stigmatized for doing this necessary labor.
Specifically, Lee focuses on the northern state of Uttar Pradesh and especially the city of Lucknow, where one group has gone by various names—Balmiki, Lal Begi, 583 clan of Chuhras, and Bhangi—that fit with different socio-political and religious projects over the past two centuries. Importantly, sanitation worker castes typically are regarded as socially below the larger and more powerful Dalit group in the region, the Chamars.
In contrast to more widely studied anti-caste movements of majority Dalit groups that draw on Ambedkarite ideology, Lee points out the different tactics of minority Dalit groups, which he dubs “Harijan politics” (24). These can appear acquiescent to authority but actually involve secrecy, dissemblance, and agency. As sanitation worker castes adjusted to and sometimes joined efforts from outside the community to persuade and coerce Dalits into identifying as Hindus, Lee shows how the deceptive Hindu majority that is the book’s title arose in modern India.
Lee’s book proceeds in three stages. In part 1, he highlights ways in which census takers and the Indian government routinely tidy up the demographic category of “religious identity” of sanitation worker castes. These overly neat statistics differ from the bafflement expressed in the 19th century by Christian missionaries and colonial administrators about this community’s relations to religious belonging, which seemed to change radically and often. Part 2 traces the path by which the default Hindu identity of Dalits was normalized in the early 20th century, at first through persuasive missionary efforts and then more paternalistic administrative means. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi portrays the image of a dutiful Bhangi (minority Dalit group) as the model for how Dalits should relate to caste roles and Hindu belonging. Calling himself a “Bhangi by choice,” Gandhi undermined the Dalit self-representation leadership of B. R. Ambedkar (who came from a majority Dalit community).
Following Gandhi and his Harijan Sevak Sangh, leaders within the sanitation worker castes in Lucknow who worked on behalf of the Congress Party promoted a process of Hinduization by claiming that the community’s identity was based on being descendants of the sage Valmiki. Part 3 draws on the author’s own extensive ethnographic observations among community members in Lucknow to highlight ways in which their own words and practices still reveal continuities with the deeper, non-Hindu past. Lee cites one of his interlocutor’s statements, “we deceived every one of them,” (209) as indicating a tactic of ethical secrecy for the sake of self-preservation.
Central to the book’s argument is that sociological notions of identity and belonging fail to illuminate sanitation worker castes’ tactics as clearly as the Hindi-Urdu term pahchān (27-30), which conveys an intersubjective sense of identity recognition involving both the self and others’ observations of the self. Pahchān captures the reality that however sanitation worker caste people choose to relate to different religious systems and practices, people outside the community still “know who they are”—a problem that has accompanied religious conversions of all Dalit and low-caste communities, majority and minority alike. Deceptive Majority focuses on the carefully calibrated responses of disempowered groups to make the best of the limited options available to them, knowing that they are unable to change their environments and power dynamics. Secrecy, tactical concealment, passing, and calculated acquiescence may be the most reasonable and ethical of responses to preserve themselves from harm.
Having read this deeply informative and thought-provoking book, I was left with two questions. First, how ought we to understand the relation of the specific groups and regions studied in this volume to India more generally? Since the figure of the Bhangi was so important in Gandhi’s rhetoric, and since Gandhi was so influential to Indian national politics, is it simply a historical fact that representations of sanitation worker castes in northern India were more significant nationally than Dalit groups elsewhere for setting India-wide policies about affirmative action and religion? If this is an accurate historical narrative (which the book’s contents raise no apparent reasons to doubt), then what relation might the specific tactics of Lee’s Lucknow-based Dalit interlocutors have to groups elsewhere? Should we anticipate seeing similar modes of acquiescence, secrecy, and dissemblance among other minority Dalit groups, or have we learned mainly about the peculiarities of a particular group in northern India?
Second, given the divergence in how religion is handled between assertive Ambedkarite-style “Dalit politics” and less confrontational “Harijan politics,” as well as Lee’s note that Harijan politics are “in no obvious way liberatory—indeed much of it is quite the opposite” (30), one wonders about the future of intra-Dalit group relations and whether the division between majority and minority Dalit groups is destined to remain. Especially in light of the surge of attention that Indian politicians of all stripes have given to Ambedkar (in name and image at least, if not ideology) in the past decade and ongoing efforts by scholars within and outside India to consider Ambedkar as a political thinker, there seems to be a growing pervasion of Ambedkarite thought, whether connected to Buddhist conversion or only as political ideology. If Harijan politics and their relation to Hindu majoritarianism have developed (perhaps necessarily) over against an Ambedkarite path historically, how will minority Dalit communities negotiate religion and politics amid the greater prominence of Ambedkar in the future? However this may transpire, Deceptive Majority has offered great insight into the wide variety of options and positionalities among Dalits in modern times.
Jon Keune is an associate professor of religious studies at Michigan State University.
Jon Keune
Date Of Review:
August 21, 2024