The vulgarity of caste : Dalits, sexuality, and humanity in modern India / Shailaja Paik.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Paik, Shailaja, author.

Series:

South Asia in Motion

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Dalit women--India--Maharashtra--History--20th century.

Dalit women.

Women entertainers--India--Maharashtra--History--20th century.

Women entertainers.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (424 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, [2022]

Summary:

This book offers the first social and intellectual history of Dalit performance of Tamasha—a form of popular, secular, traveling theater—and places Dalit Tamasha women at the heart of modernization in India. Deploying the vernacular as method and drawing on untapped Marathi archival materials, ethnographies, popular writings, and films, Shailaja Paik argues that Dalit performers, activists, and leaders negotiated the violence, brutality, exploitation, and stigma in Tamasha as they struggled to claim manuski (human dignity) and transform themselves from ashlil (vulgar) to assli (authentic) and manus (human beings). In doing so, Paik illuminates how Dalit Tamasha women bent patriarchal pressures both inside and outside the Dalit community and became foundational actors in conflicts over caste, class, culture, gender, and sexuality. Building on and departing from the Ambedkar-centered historiography and movement-focused approach of Dalit studies, Paik examines the ordinary and everyday in Dalit lives, both illustrating how sexuality and the ashlil framed the political recognition and political constituency of the new assli Dalit community. Ultimately, Paik illustrates how the choices that communities make about culture speak to much larger questions about inclusion, inequality, and structures of violence of caste within Indian society, and open up new approaches for the transformative potential of Dalit politics and the global history of gender, sexuality, and the human.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Glossary

List of Figures

Introduction. Performing Precarity: Sex-Gender-Caste/Ashlil-Manuski-Assli

PART I

1 Policing Untouchables and Producing Tamasha in Maharashtra

2 Constructing Caste, Desire, and Danger

PART II

3 Ambedkar, Manuski, and Reconstructing Dalit Life-Worlds, 1920–1956

4 Singing Resistance and Rehumanizing Poetics-Politics, Post-1930

PART III

5 Claiming Authenticity and Becoming Marathi, Post-1960

6 Forging New Futures and Measures of Humanity

Conclusion. Queering the “Vulgar”: Tamasha without Women

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781503634091

1503634094

OCLC:

1300755961