Manuela Ciotti. Retro-modern India: Forging the Low-caste Self. London: Routledge, 2010. xix + 292 pp. $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-415-56311-6.
Reviewed by Ramnarayan Rawat (University of Delaware)
Published on H-Asia (April, 2012)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha (The University of Texas at Austin)
Chamar Modernity: A Derivative Discourse?
Manuela Ciotti examines the Chamar community’s relationship with the craft of weaving in twentieth-century northern India, thus drawing attention to a less-studied aspect of Dalit society. Through ethnographic research conducted in a village outside of Benares, her study seeks to “illustrate how the Chamar production of distinctions in pursuit of the modern has been powerfully shaped and mediated by modernisation discourses, and the belief in progress, science and development” (p. 6). She suggests that “Chamars were particularly attracted by the State’s [developmentalist] vision of change” (p. 6), and therefore argues that “the modernity recipe enacted by the Chamars had already occurred within the same national context” (p. 12). This leads her to conclude that “aspiring middle-class Chamars took refuge in a passé symbolism of colonial make [sic] linked to the middle classes in north India and their experience of modernity in the 19th century” (p. 12). Ciotti coins the phrase “retro-modernity” to capture this process of appropriation by Chamars of the middle-class values and distinctions of what she calls “a past modernity” (pp. 12, 35).
In chapter 1 Ciotti focuses on occupational shifts in the Chamar basti in Manupur village to understand and explain their move from agriculture to weaving. Indeed, by the time of her research in 1999, weaving was the primary source of income in twenty-nine out of the fifty-three Chamar households in the village, and forty-three households had been engaged in weaving at some point (p. 76). She describes how the Chamar basti was organized around three Chamar families considered the jar (root), who all owned major portions of land in the village and in three adjoining villages. Many families who were involved with weaving have continued to own small portions of land, but because land “did not ensure the Chamars a year-round income,” they began to search “for new avenues of employment within handloom weaving” (p. 72). According to Ciotti, Muslim weavers actively recruited Chamar workers “as allies” within the heavily communalized context of the 1930s and in response to the Shudra (low caste) communities’ visible appropriation of militant Hinduism (p. 92). She compares the skilled Chamar weavers of the silk industry in the 1930s with traditional rural Chamars who wove coarse cotton cloth to argue that it was in the city of Benaras that Chamars first moved to a nontraditional urban industrial occupation, in contrast to those who worked in the leather industries of Kanpur, an occupation regarded by many as more traditional.
Ciotti argues that weaving created a perfect opportunity for Chamars to engage in “‘de-ideologising’ work (to counter the tight link between work and Untouchable identity)” (p. 83). She contrasts the weaving industry with colonial employment opportunities, arguing that the latter resulted in the “consolidation or hardening of Untouchable identity” (p. 87), while the weaving industry contributed to a “positive self-representation divested of the attributes of untouchability” (p. 88). She lays out two conditions that facilitated Chamars’ entry into the silk sari industry in the 1930s. First, the increased demand for silk saris in the 1920s created new economic opportunities, and second, a threatened Muslim community “chose low-caste Chamars as well as other Untouchable communities as allies” to establish a reliable economic relationship (p. 92). In chapter 2 Ciotti continues this attention to weaving, tracing the benefits brought to Manupur Chamars through their occupational shift to weaving and examining the social and cultural aspects of Chamar relations with Muslim traders/weavers, and Hindu merchants after independence. Liberalization of the Indian economy after 1992 caused the decline of the silk-weaving industry in Benares, at which point, Ciotti argues, Chamars began to value government jobs because they were a stable source of income and constituted a position of privilege in the village context.
At the same time, Ciotti also demonstrates that access to literacy and education enabled Chamars to exclude Brahman priests from their own religious practices, a theme developed in chapter 4. Chamars performed their own versions of the Saraswati Puja and other Hindu rites and rituals. Ciotti shows how education contributed to Chamars’ political awareness, especially of Bhimrao Ambedkar’s ideology, yet also created the conditions for cultural integration with the dominant Hindu society. As Ciotti argues in chapter 5, the objective of Chamar modernity was to replace oppressive forms of “tradition and religion with liberating ones” (p. 147). As an example, she discusses the ways in which Chamars have adopted Satyanarayan Katha, subverting caste Hindu domination in the process, first by removing Brahmins and reciting the story themselves, and second, by transforming it into a “love story of a Harijan man and a Brahmin woman” (p. 165).
Chapters 6 and 7 are the most useful in drawing our attention to less frequently studied themes in Dalit society. In chapter 6, there is a fascinating discussion of the crucial role played by inter-caste dining movements in creating electoral alliances between Chamars and Brahmin groups. Ciotti shows the ways in which the Chamars of Manupur became far more politically engaged in the 1990s with the rise of the Dalit political party, the Bahujan Samaj Party. Chamars also began to put up their own candidates to contest Brahmin dominance of the local village council elections. Indeed, “food for politics” became a useful strategy for sustaining electoral alliances (p. 170). Yet Ciotti uses her fieldwork notes to argue that despite Chamars’ support for the BSP, they still recognized and valued the significant role of Indira Gandhi in implementing policies of land redistribution and affirmative action in the 1970s. Chapter 7 examines at length the implications of class distinctions among Manupur Chamar women in relation to marriage, mobility, and access to resources. By the 1990s, a new class division had become visible among the Chamars of Manupur, distinguishing those who had stable incomes from government employment from those who continued to work as agricultural laborers.
Her argument prompts us to ask how Dalits may have engaged their world in ways that were not purely derivative, creating new forms of political, economic, and religious practice that had not previously existed, and acting not just as recipients of others’ initiatives, but as agents in their own right. For instance, it would be worthwhile to explore the ways in which Chamars’ own narratives may provide further information on their entry into the silk-weaving industry in the 1930s to supplement Ciotti’s discussion of the communalized context as the primary reason for their recruitment by Muslims. S. H. Freemantle’s 1906 report on labor in Uttar Pradesh, the 1923-24 UP District Industrial Surveys, and several other government reports provide valuable information on the presence of various castes and communities in different industrial occupations.[1] These accounts offer several additional explanations for Chamars’ presence in “non-traditional occupations” like textiles, emphasizing new opportunities created through the expansion of economic activity between the 1890s and the 1920s. As early as 1888, William Crooke pointed out that several Chamar families were full-time weavers in rural areas.[2]
Ciotti concludes by arguing that aspects of Chamar modernity were “a rehearsed script which had been written and personified by other Indians [the caste Hindu middle class] a century earlier and within India itself” (p. 247). Many Manupur Chamars originally became weavers in order to claim a pure caste status. Later, in the 1990s, weaving families sought government employment. They embraced Saraswati Puja and Satyanarayan Katha, adopted gendered roles for women in the family and workplace, and reflected norms already idealized by the Indian middle class. Yet at the same time, Ciotti’s research reveals a wide range of practices that show that Chamars sought to engage with the dominant ideological practices. Expelling Brahmans from their ritual practices and allying politically with Bahujan Samaj Party are just two important examples. Anthropologists and historians of South Asia who are interested in exploring these less-studied areas of Dalit life will find this monograph a useful source.
Notes
[1]. S. H. Freemantle, Report on the Supply of Labour in the United Provinces and Bengal (Naini Tal: Superintendent of Government Press, United Provinces, 1906).
[2]. William Crooke, “Report on Etah District,” in A Collection of Papers Connected with an Inquiry into the Conditions of the Lower Classes of the Population, Especially in Agricultural Tracts, in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, Instituted in 1887-88 (Allahabad: North-Western Provinces and Oudh Government press, 1888), 50-110.
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Citation:
Ramnarayan Rawat. Review of Ciotti, Manuela, Retro-modern India: Forging the Low-caste Self.
H-Asia, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2012.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=33133
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