Tracing the Movement

Dalit radicality in the name of Ambedkar is threatened of decay and cooption, thereby running the risk of receding into the landscape of caste

- Nicolas Jaoul

DR BR Ambedkar referred to the French Revolution, which abolished the three orders of feudal society, as an inspiration for the anti-caste movement. So, one could think that it was natural for a French scholar of India to study this movement. Paradoxically, however, as a European, I first had to come to terms with the orientalist stereotypes of India, in which the untouchables’ legendary subordination holds an important place, at least rhetorically.

Let me start by introducing my interest in the anti-caste movement in a biographical manner. I started taking an interest in caste quite early when I first visited India in 1991. I was just 20 and travelled on my own through North India. My anthropology teacher had advised me to read Homo Hierarchicus as a must-read on Indian society. He even advised me to bring it with me as a sort of user’s manual in order to open my eyes to the local social structures during my trip.

However, the hierarchical society that Louis Dumont theorised did not reveal itself openly to a young tourist. What I could witness from my own eyes was only the extreme poverty. All that I could guess regarding caste was that it probably functioned in an invisible way. Did the intensity of religious activity that I also witnessed, mean that I should accept Dumont’s theory according to which so-called untouchables accepted their social status as their fate to focus instead on improving their future lives, therefore abiding by the social status ascribed to them by birth, in the name of Hindu orthodoxy?

I wondered if India could really provide a sort of ethnological exception to the paradigm of class consciousness, and thus challenge its claim to universality.