Deceptive Majority: Dalits, Hinduism, and Underground Religion: 14 (South Asia in the Social Sciences, Series Number 14)
Cambridge University Press, 6/10/2021
EAN 9781108843829, ISBN10: 1108843824
Hardcover, 354 pages, 23.4 x 19.6 x 2.5 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
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.
Part I. Untouchability and Alterity, Now and Then
1. Introduction
Signs, the Census, and the Sanitation Labor Castes
2. Lal Beg NÄÂma
Dalit Religion before the Hindu Majority
Part II. Making 'Untouchables' Hindu, or, the Great Interpellation
3. Missionary Majoritarianism
The Arya Samaj and the Struggle with Disgust
4. Trustee Majoritarianism
Gandhi and the Harijan Sevak Sangh
5. Hinduization and its Discontents
Valmiki comes to Lucknow
Part III. Semiotics of the Oppressed
6. Victory to Valmiki
Declamatory Religion and the Wages of Inclusion
7. Lal Beg Underground
Taqiyya, Ethical Secrecy, and the Pleasure of Dissimulation
Epilogue.