Deceptive Majority: Dalits, Hinduism, and Underground Religion (South Asia in the Social Sciences, Series Number 14)

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. "What is India and when did it begin to take shape? This question is nearly two centuries old. The existing answers are fairly well known. Popular imagination identifies India as a unified civilization with a set of intrinsic values, arising in the age of the Vedas or, still better, in the Harappan times. Historians who disagree with this totalizing view lay emphasis upon plural origins and long-term processes of change and transformation. There is also an influential school of thought that rejects all antiquity claims and maintains that India is a construct of the colonial and nationalist imagination. In his radical reinterpretation of India's past, Devadevan moves away from these reifying assessments to explore the evolution of institutions, ideas, and identities that are characterized typically as Indian. In lieu of endorsing their Indianness, he explores their origins against the backdrop of the political economy and traces their emergence to the period which historians now call the early medieval. In doing so, he refines many existing postulates in early medieval historiography and rejects several others. Devadevan takes the scope of the early medieval beyond the conventional questions concerning regional state formation, urbanization, the making of an agrarian economy, and the rise of new religious beliefs and institutions to shed light on many less understood aspects of the period, such as the evolution of vernacular languages, literary traditions and performance practices, rise of pilgrimage centres, making of identities based on caste, gender, religion, and territorial self-consciousness, and advances in intellectual life. Basing himself on these rich explorations, Devadevan advances the provocative thesis that India is a product of the early medieval times. The 'Early Medieval' Origins of India is a major contribution to the debate on what India is and how it should be understood"-- Provided by publisher "In this compelling account of Hindu majoritarianism and its sly subversion by one of India's most oppressed minorities, the author calls into question foundational assumptions about caste, religion, and the politics of inclusion. Asking how it came to be common sense that one-fifth of India's population known as Dalit or 'untouchable' are and have always been Hindu, this book unearths evidence that tells a different story. The sanitation labor castes-those Dalit communities that provide nearly all of South Asia's sanitation workers-understood themselves in the colonial period to constitute an autonomous religious community separate from both Hindus and Muslims and centered on an antinomian prophet named Lal Beg. Weaving together history, ethnography, and linguistics, it charts the trajectory of this tradition: its apparent decline under pressure from mid-twentieth century nationalists and Hindu reformers, including Gandhi, as well as its clandestine continuation in the present. A chronicle of Dalit lives in the north Indian city of Lucknow and a meditation on the ethics and semiotics of secrecy, this book studies the history of the architects of the majoritarian project and of those who quietly undermine it"-- Provided by publisher This book posits that India as an idea is neither a colonial construct nor a phenomenon as old as the Vedas or the Harappan age, but a historical reality that had its beginnings in the 'early medieval' times. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the meaning of India's past.