Untouchability

Backward and Dalit Muslims: Education, Employment and Poverty by Surinder Kumar, Fahimuddin, Prashant K Trivedi and Srinivas Goli, Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2020; pp 220, ₹995.

The art of lavani as an aesthetic labour involves a contradictory sense of the self. At one level, self-realisation of an artists assigns them a complete autonomy on aesthetic production, while at another level, it also generates a sense of self-exploitation which is social and structural. 

The reorganisation of informal household garbage collection work in Delhi is analysed, as migrants from eastern states like West Bengal have begun doing manual waste work, even as their Balmikis deal only with monthly cash payments. Drawing on fieldwork, the effect on the Balmiki jamadars is noted, and the Bengali Muslims, who newly contend with the practices of untouchability in their neighbourhoods of work, are focused on. These newer migrants come to justify the shame they experience by focusing on the equivalence of scrap with money, which has redemptive potential. This reveals a dynamic process through which caste differences are being remade—”casteification”—in relation to economic life.

Caste-based spatial segregation, largely assumed to be a characteristic of rural societies, is reproduced in urban spaces as well, and a large population of Dalits continue to inhabit segregated settlements in the metropolitan cities of the country. Fieldwork conducted in one such segregated neighbourhood of Balmikis in central Delhi is drawn upon to explore how they perceive the urban space and how they think they are perceived by others.