Political Pariahs: Religion and Representation in Madras, 1914–26

In late 19^th century Madras a distinctively new welfare regime emerged; its programs were designed to instill in “Pariahs,” unfree agrestic servants of the lowest castes, the will to improve themselves, and ultimately, to become model political subjects. This paper will examine how, in the 1910s and 20s, a generation of Pariah political leaders, graduates of state welfare schemes, were actively enlisted by the government to act as representatives of their people.  The result, legible in Pariah politicians’ writings and speeches, was a critical assessment of key features of colonial liberalism, including its policy of religious neutrality (the forebear of postcolonial Indian secularism), and correlatively, its manner of defining the “untouchability” to which Pariahs were subject.  Pariahs sought to refute the hegemonic characterization of untouchability—championed first by missionaries and taken up enthusiastically by caste elites—as essentially a religion disability, and only accidentally a material one. Such a characterization, by defining the Pariah’s principal deprivations as a matter of religion, effectively subsumed Pariahs within the political majority defined as Hindu, and simultaneously allowed elite prerogatives to be protected, under the mantle of neutrality, as matters of religious right.  To contest this, Pariahs deployed forms of mobilization that reveal a distinctive concept of the duties proper to political representatives, as well as an understanding of the state as responsible to its citizens in a manner quite beyond the remit of the liberal notion of the “public good.”  In short, the paper attends to a critical and overlooked aspect of the historical formation of secular-liberal politics in postcolonial India, a state that continues to define Dalits (erstwhile Pariahs) as Hindus: its roots in the procedures which enfolded India’s Pariahs within an emergent welfare regime, and the concepts and practices that Pariah politicians embraced.