Ramnarayan S. Rawat. Reconsidering Untouchability

For all of the innovation that Subaltern Studies, with its mission to write history from below, has brought to the study of the South Asian past, relatively few works have as yet centered on the history of Dalits, those “broken to pieces” by the cruelties of the so-called caste system. This book, an important corrective, helps us “reconsider untouchability,” as the title indicates, not only by bringing to light little-known stories of Dalit life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century north India, but just as significantly by revealing how much of a role the modern historian has played in perpetuating mistaken assumptions that continue to frame how people see themselves and others. The book is essentially divided into two interrelated parts. The first, comprised of three chapters, focuses on questions of political economy, while the second, made up of two chapters, largely deals with issues of identity. Ramnarayan S. Rawat is primarily concerned with the life histories of peasant Chamars in the modern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (U.P.). Members of this community are popularly understood to be linked with the leatherwork trade since time immemorial. The colonial state associated them with cattle poisoning and classified Chamars as a tiny population of criminals.

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