The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion and the Social in Modern India

PARIAH IS A CRUEL WORD. Yet most speakers of English know nothing of its brutal history. In this exposé, Rupa Viswanath traces the emergence of what was called the ‘Pariah Problem’: native elites and British colonizers appeared to recognize Dalit servitude publicly for the first time, only to immediately disavow their status as beneficiaries of an agrarian regime that depended on unfree Dalit labor. Landlords, state officials, and well-intentioned missionaries defined Dalit oppression as a matter of religion rather than labour, foreclosing real solutions, even as ordinary Dalit women and men engaged in extraordinary acts of resistance. Slavery that passed for benign servitude