Identity, Rights, and Awareness: Anticaste Activism in India and the Awakening of Justice through Discursive Practices 1498541933, 9781498541930

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Identity, Rights, and Awareness

Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding in Asia Series Editor Stephanie P. Stobbe, University of Winnipeg The field of Peace and Conflict Studies acknowledges the importance of culture in the theory and practice of conflict resolution, but often takes a simplistic or monodimensional view of the cultures studied. This series intends to explore the many processes of resolution that are found in Asia, accounting along the way for the complex mix of distinct ethnic groups and their contrasting languages, cultural lineages, and practices. Books in the series will move beyond the typical top-down negotiation styles to look at the wide variety of negotiation styles used by the billions of people living in the region. Editorial Board Jay Rothman, Bar-Ilan University Honggang Yang, Nova Southeastern University Ellen Judd, University of Manitoba Paul Redekop, University of Winnipeg Charles Crumpton, JD, Crumpton Collaborative Solutions Recent Titles in the Series Identity, Rights, and Awareness: Anticaste Activism in India and the Awakening of Justice through Discursive Practices, by Jeremy A. Rinker Conflict Resolution in Asia: Mediation and Other Cultural Models, edited by Stephanie P. Stobbe

Identity, Rights, and Awareness Anticaste Activism in India and the Awakening of Justice through Discursive Practices Jeremy A. Rinker

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2018 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available LCCN 2018951436 | ISBN 9781498541930 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781498541947 (electronic) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Dedicated to Charles W. Rinker Jr. and David W. Chappell Two men who helped formulate my understanding of justice and integrity. Your influences are still felt and your steadfast resolve and engaged presence are missed. May you both rest in the vast peace and justice you helped to create. And to the many unnamed Dalits who have endured the suffering and humiliation of centuries of social ostracism, marginalization, and oppression. May this book provide one small window into your collective trauma and ongoing work for social justice.

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: At the Center and in the Periphery

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1 2 3

4 5 6

Caste and Anticaste Identity: The Evolution and Legacy of Difference in Indian Social Life Narrative Violence and Injustice Awareness: Reading Anticaste Activism as Narrative for Social Change Doing Strategy in Indian Anticaste Activism: A Systems Approach to Understanding the Struggle for Identity, Rights, and Awareness Fostering Dalit Buddhist Identity: TBMSG’s Organizing Around Ambedkar Buddhism All-India Rise Up: BAMCEF and Educating for a National Identity and Injustice Awareness Narrative Testimony as Rights Agitation: PVCHR’s International Rights Discourse

1 33

61 93 119 143

Conclusion: Identity, Rights, and Awareness: The Power of Discourse to Change Entrenched Systems of Oppression

167

Epilogue: The Making of Discursive Change Platforms and Writing from the Periphery as a Form of Resistance toward the Dominant Center

189

Bibliography

195

Index

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About the Author

Contents

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Acknowledgments

How do you adequately thank all those who gave you the time and support to pursue your interests and passions? I am privileged to have been given the space and time to read, write, and rewrite on questions that I developed and fashioned around my own set of interests. Over many years, I have been given, by so many, the gift of time and space to explore, think, and seek answers to what I experienced and observed. Though I remain unsure that I have answered any critically important questions, the time and space to ponder them is a gift that I have not received lightly. Chief among those that deserve thanks are my wife, Stephanie, and our boys, Kylor and Tarin. Their consummate patience as I sat in my study writing on many a beautiful weekend is both laudable and grievable. Their sacrifices and my regrets cannot be rewound. To times and milestones missed all I can do is apologize and express, as best I can, that I appreciate each of you. I ask your forgiveness for my many absences. I love you all dearly and I hope that this work repays a small part of your sacrifice. To my parents: Lore Ann Rinker and Charles W. Rinker Jr., your inspiration goes much deeper than words can express. Your lives continue to serve as an inspiration to me and I remain thankful that I was blessed with such caring, supportive, and dedicated social activist parents. Dad, your presence is missed but not forgotten. Mom, I look towards many more years together and hope that you enjoy reading this, my first book. While it goes without saying that many colleagues, friends, and family were instrumental in the book you now hold in your hands, too many have played important and influential roles in my intellectual and spiritual development to list in full here. Of course, like any human work, a book is never created in solitude, but rather is the product of many hearts and minds. To the late Dr. David Chappell, thank you for your friendship, inspiration, and introix

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duction to both socially engaged Buddhism and the work of TBMSG. To Haresh Dalvi, Mangesh Dahiwale, Priyadarhsi Telang, Lenin Raghuvanshi, Tanoj Meshram, Dr. Vivek Kumar, Dharmacharini Amitamati, Dharmachari Lokamitra, Dr. P. D. Satya Pal, and all those unnamed Dalits still working in anticaste movement, thank you for your friendship and research support along the way. Without each of you, and many more unnamed anticaste activists, I am sure this book would not have come to fruition. Undoubtedly, I have forgotten many important individuals, but in asking that you forgive this oversight I rest assured that your collective hurt does not compare to the continued suffering of the many Dalits still living under caste oppression today. I ask that you please forgive any mistakes I surely made in this writing by keeping those less fortunate in the forefront of your thoughts and feelings. To all those oppressed by social injustice: May your stories be your birthplace of resistance, your touchstone of resilience, and your ultimate salvation!

Introduction At the Center and in the Periphery

I began my India-based fieldwork on the Trailokya (now Triratna) Bauddha Mahasangha Sahayaka Gana (TBMSG) in late September 2006. Jolted into action by the realization that October 2, 2006, would mark the fiftieth anniversary of Dalit 1 social reformer Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar’s (1891–1956) historic conversion to Buddhism, I arrived in Nagpur’s B. R. Ambedkar airport with an outsider’s knowledge of modern Indian caste marginalization and the many political interests, normative identity constructions, and deep-seated passions that the Indian caste question enlivens. What some might call naiveté quickly turned into an inclusive feeling of excitement and camaraderie as the auspicious anniversary of Ambedkar’s conversion quickly approached. As the geographic center of India and home to a diversity of opposing political movements and ideologies (from the far-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Singh, or RSS, a youth militant wing of India’s current ruling party, to various Dalit rights movements), Nagpur city provided an appropriate prologue to attempting to discern the subtle complexities of India’s marginal social peripheries. As a key center of anticaste activism, Nagpur represents both a beginning, and possible end, to modern Indian social change. The complex socio-political milieu and the ambiguous narrative identities that low-caste communities encounter in Indian society’s marginalized periphery represent artful spaces of resistance, resilience, and, some might argue, salvation. As I experienced my first visit to Dikshabhumi (the site of Dr. Ambedkar’s historic conversion to Buddhism in Nagpur city), the complex marginalized identities of low-caste Dalits were being narrated in front of my eyes. In this center of Dalit Buddhist agitation, one could see glimpses of the marginalization that takes place on the peripheral boundaries xi

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of Indian society, as well as visions of the possibilities for change emanating from this important center of anticaste activism. Given the powerful influence of my first auspicious encounter with Dalit Buddhists, it seems appropriate to begin this work with my own short narrative reflections of this formative experience of embodied resistance at India’s anticaste center. Now, sixty years after his conversion, Ambedkar’s significance is lost on no one in either the periphery or the center 2 of Indian politics and society. Ambedkar’s story of conversion is an under-told story of Indian nonviolent resistance and collective resilience. My own experience of the fiftieth anniversary of this historic event opens important vistas on theories of social change. Even ten years after my auspicious introduction to Ambedkarite Buddhists in Nagpur, in celebrating Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s 125th birth anniversary at Michigan State University in April 2016, Ambedkar’s central importance as a leader of the marginalized and archetype of resilience remains unmistakable. Even for Indian elites, Ambedkar has been recast as a central founding father of the nation. However, just as Ambedkar is central to Dalit identity and resistance, Nagpur, Maharashtra, is more than a geographical center of India; it is the fulcrum for ongoing contemporary contention over identity, awareness, and rights across the Indian subcontinent. So, it is here, in Nagpur, that any story about Indian anticaste movement invariably begins before spreading to the periphery. October 2, 2006—The tension and excitement at Dikshabhumi (literally, conversion site) were palpable. Thousands of blue bandana–wearing youth shouted and waved their fists toward the sky from atop buses, rooftops, and the numerous teetering light posts that dotted the divided thoroughfare of Abhyankar Nagar Road. Crowds of revelers lined the streets leading to the main entrance of the giant stupa-like structure that marked the spot, in central Nagpur, where fifty years earlier Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar led one of history’s largest mass religious conversions. Like much in India, this celebratory atmosphere, in which people seemed to fill every crevice of available space, attacked all one’s senses. Clearly, many of the revelers were happy to be there—not necessarily to revere Ambedkar’s embrace of Buddhism but to show that they existed, that Ambedkar’s organizing had given them a distinctly new identity as Dalit Buddhists, or at least as descendants and acolytes of Dr. Ambedkar—the great man. Their pilgrimage to this site was evidence that they could no longer simply be disregarded, de-legitimized, and marginalized. Yet, it was also clear that this was a religious pilgrimage for many—a show of support for the deified bodhisattva Ambedkar and his important embrace of a socially engaged Buddhism aimed at improving the lives of Dalits (former untouchables), India’s most underprivileged people. Religious figure and social reformer Dr. Ambedkar is at once a polarizing and unifying figure in post-independence India. The dynamic atmosphere of Dikshabhumi underscored a unity and diversity within the Ambedkarite

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movement itself, as well as a surreptitious glimpse at the outlines of a broader Indian anticaste movement. The movement I had chosen to study, the TBMSG, a British-born transnational organization with deep local roots, was just one of many sub-movements mobilizing for collective action on this October day in India’s geographic center. If one spread out in all directions from this gathered mass of humanity, the complexity of understanding local rights, identity, and collective awareness across India seems daunting and anchor-less. The thought of even threads of connection between the marginalized peripheries and this important anticaste movement center seem unfathomable and untenable. But in the periphery, the tenuous outlines of the borders between the marginalized and India’s elite center become not only more visible but also more telling of the embedded nature of caste hierarchy in Indian society. Despite the deep tentacles of caste, my claim in this book is that through exploring and empowering the discursive practices of anticaste activists, the identity, rights, and awareness of a marginalized periphery become not only clearer but also more formidable. “In other words, social reality is produced and made real through discourses, and social interactions cannot be fully understood without reference to the discourses that give them meaning.” 3 Close attention is paid to activists’ narratives as important representations of discourse because they not only describe reality but produce and reproduce it. As activists’ narrative agency is strengthened, their capability to enact social change is augmented. In short, the stories activists tell provide not only a sense of place but also a road map for social change. In my early attempts to understand the Ambedkar Buddhists of the TBMSG (much less how they conceptualize social justice), I struggled to square the center with the periphery. I soon realized that reference to what Ambedkar Buddhists are not may provide the best clues to their identity and unique emancipatory narrative agency. The visible and boisterous youth in blue bandanas mentioned in my narrative account above were members of the Samata Sainik Dal (SSD), a youth organization that was originally begun by Dr. Ambedkar in 1927 to rally support for the Mahad Satyagraha. 4 A vestige of Ambedkar’s secular political organizing, the SSD, though largely comprised of Ambedkar Buddhists, advocates a strictly secular rights-based political agenda—exposing atrocities against Dalits and protesting (social agitation) when the government does not take appropriate action against discrimination and violence. On the other hand, the Trailokya Bauddha Mahasangha Sahayaka Gana (TBMSG), a vestige of Ambedkar’s conversion history and identity, is a religious organization that, at least originally, stayed out of direct political organizing in favor of teaching Buddhist dharma practice to newly converted Ambedkar Buddhists. Though these opposite ends of the Ambedkarite spectrum often disagree over movement strategy and tactics, on this auspicious October day

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in 2006 any disagreement was subdued by euphoric identity expressions as primarily Ambedkarites. Buddhist flags adorned activists of all persuasion and flew on the rickshaws and buses of the SSD, the TBMSG, and all other Ambedkarite pilgrims present. In such an atmosphere Ambedkarite identity was inseparable from Buddhist identity. Beyond a religious symbol the Buddhist flag, in this context, was a unifying identity symbol. As Kantowsky (2003) aptly explains: “Buddhists in India today can be appropriately understood only as a diverse multitude of groups, each with its own peculiar characteristics.” 5 The sub-group of Indian Buddhists known as Nava (new) Buddhists, who converted to Buddhism following Dr. Ambedkar’s 1956 conversion, is of both secular and religious varieties. Nava Buddhists 6 are working on not just perfecting themselves but also on changing their society. Because separating Ambedkar ideology and identity from Nava Buddhism is almost impossible, I prefer the terminology of Ambedkar Buddhists to Nava Buddhists. Encircled by a group of karate students from a nearby TBMSG-sponsored youth hostel, the group of TBMSG supporters and friends that I found myself attached to on my first visit to the Dikshabhumi stupa represented an array of nationalities. Comprised of British, Americans, New Zealanders, Thai, Taiwanese, Nepalis, Indians, and Sri Lankans, the group was representative of newly transnational engaged Buddhist networks. Ambedkar’s ashes had been placed inside the Dikshabhumi stupa soon after it was erected in the early 1990s and this was now an annual rite for Ambedkar’s followers—three circumambulations of Ambedkar’s ashes represent not just taking refuge in Buddhism but also in Ambedkar and his prolific life work to eradicate caste. Due to the huge crowds, ours was a speedy procession, encircled as much to keep everyone together in the larger crowd as to show TBMSG’s force in both organization and numbers. Everything in such a charged atmosphere is public discourse and TBMSG clearly wanted to make its unique identity and presence known. My own presence, as a foreigner, undoubtedly added to this public identity positioning, and I remained ever cognizant of my own social and political impacts on this momentous occasion. TBMSG members and friends, who were happily participating in this event as a religious ritual, intended to send a message to other Ambedkarites, a message that said working to perfect oneself is the first step in perfecting society. Any veneer of neo-colonial attitudes about the West and foreigners only helped to underpin this critical message. TBMSG’s emphasis on Buddhist practice (meditation and self-cultivation as a form of social activism) is the hallmark of TBMSG members’ worldview. Still, in this public space, many other worldviews were actively present and competing for recognition. The multitude of Ambedkarites vying for their voice to be publically heard unmasks the complexity of the deployment, limitations, and contradictions of Ambedkarite social movement narratives and marks a contested space that I quickly realized de-

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manded further scholarly attention. Though Ambedkar wrote prolifically during his life, little English language scholarship has been done on the many movements he spawned. 7 Much of the writing that follows aims to expose Western readers to B. R. Ambedkar and his impacts on contemporary Dalit Social movement. Navigating these boundaries and borders, though not easy, requires writing that “responds vulnerably” 8 to caste injustice. Stories, like the young karate students from TBMSG’s youth hostel, have a unique ability to encircle both activist and writer in a way that builds theory and mediates boundaries. The entire celebration of October 2, 2006, like many Dalit celebrations, can be read as an activist narrative script. Despite TBMSG’s regular focus on the self as the center of change, many other rights activists underscore the structural and behavioral changes in the other—in this case the peripheral elites not present at such a celebratory event. Such elites are conspicuously absent from both this narrative script and activist narratives in general. In the case of October 2, 2006, these elites were likely reveling at the more nationalistic events occurring on this same day (i.e., Gandhi Jiayanti and/or the start of the annual Hindu festival Divali). Still, it was this tension between agitating for change in self (metaphorical center) versus agitating for change in other (metaphorical periphery) that was palpable in the crowd at the fiftieth anniversary of Dikshabhumi. Even while broader political and geographic conceptions of center and periphery revolved around my own, and activists’, internal tensions, the internal tension held the center and controlled the storyline on this auspicious day. Still, the veneer of social conflict and tension that eclipsed the immediately apparent excitement and revelry of the crowd raised important questions about the means at Ambedkarites’ disposal for broader social transformation. One could even talk about levels of embedded social conflict apparent in the setting—inner ones between Ambedkarites themselves and outer ones between Ambedakrites and non-Dalit others. The inner conflicts involved what Marie Dugan (1996) would call issue- and relationship-specific levels of contestation. 9 The outer broader sub-system and system-level divergences embeded the issues and relationships and require wider circles of dialogue and interaction to address structural change. 10 Nowhere were these embedded levels of conflict more apparent than at this center of Ambedkar Buddhist organization, Dikshabhumi. Still, just a street away from the Dikshabhumi celebrations was a completely different kind of reveler. You see, October 2, 2006, was the confluence of three major celebrations. This day on the 2006 Indian calendar marked the start of a major Hindu festival—Divali— and, as importantly, a national holiday—Gandhi Jayanti. Despite the fact that the tension between Ambedkar supporters and either those celebrating the Hindu festival of lights or those celebrating the 137th birth anniversary of M. K. Gandhi could have easily risen to a level of direct violence, it did not

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on this auspicious day in the geographical center of India. The sacred honor inherent in the pilgrimage and homage to Ambedkar and Dikshabhumi seemed to trump secular political and nationalist disagreements, which Ambedkar Dalits in the crowd surely had with their Hindu counterparts and ardent supporters of Gandhi. 11 Just as the divisions between the segmented arms of the Ambedkarite movement seemed to take a back seat to the auspiciousness of this important day, so too the potential for violence among large crowds of diametrically opposed collectives took a back seat to decorum. Identity commitment here seemed to hold some power, or was there something else that might help explain the veneer of outward social conflict not turning to outward destructive expressions of anger and violence? Despite a lack of attention to this question in the literature on Ambedkar Buddhists, 12 such a veneer of social conflict is not denied even by TBMSG leaders. 13 While it is rather obvious to anticaste activists that low-caste peoples regularly live with the tension and unaddressed trauma of protracted social conflict, for the outsider this reality may be more ambiguous and uncertain. Surely, the distinctly religious framing of an Ambedkar Buddhist identity represents an adept response to the Indian socio-political context—a context where such secular versus religious distinctions are rarely, if ever, made. But what does this blending of both a political and religious identity say about those who consider themselves Dalit Buddhists? What does it say about those who describe themselves as anticaste activists or allies? Which identity and sense of awareness are most preeminent among those present at Dikshabhumi—Dalit, Buddhist, Ambedkarite, or social or political activist? Finally, what can a comparison of these internal movement identities together with amorphous external Others in the public sphere do for an improved understanding of modern anticaste activism and anticaste activists’ responses to social injustice and conflict? It is the above questions that are rarely asked in attempts to answer the question: who are anticaste activists and what do they want? In fact, such questions, even among Ambedkar Buddhists, seem to be taboo; it is as if a desired unity in the Ambedkar Buddhist identity trumps any desire for deeper worldview reflection on the divisions within the community or the role the communities’ self-conception and strident identity plays in reconstructing marginality. My own shift from understanding how the anticaste movement works to what it means 14 took time, contemplation, and self-reflection. Given the historic difficulty that low-caste leaders, including Ambedkar, have had in creating a pan-Indian identity for their people, the taboo against exploring identity too deeply makes good sense. As one TBMSG leader puts it, “Caste is not just high-middle-low; it is graded inequality in which there is low-lower-lowest.” 15 Finding oneself in such graded forms of inequality is to be continually aware of who is not only above but also below. Because caste is a marker of both your social status/standing (varna) and birth/kinship (jati),

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when cooperation and social interaction is developed between distinct caste groupings despite the numerous social constraints, a tendency arises to limit any discourse that could potentially disrupt this social cooperation. In fact, much of TBMSG’s work is aimed at building inter-caste dialogue and cooperation. The auspicious fiftieth anniversary of Amberkar’s conversion provided an opportunity to celebrate together and foster unity without creating too much disjuncture in the wider Dalit community. Still, obvious internal divisions remain in the Ambedkar community, as they do in other spaces of anticaste activism and anti-marginalization work elsewhere in the world. Such social divisions restrict collective reflection on past trauma and hamper the construction of a shared and equally coherent social justice discourse and vision. A key argument throughout this book is that thoughtful stories can engender such reflection, dismantle marginalization, and work to construct a shared vision of change. Strategically narrated stories can build dialogue and coordinated movement for identity, rights, and awareness of ongoing injustices. Still, at the heart of such realization remains a critical question: How then do we foster pro-social stories in the midst of social conflict? Put another way, how do we tell the stories to make meaning of who we are, while simultaneously transforming conflict, as opposed to simply managing and, thereby, potentially re-establishing it? The story of my own golden Dikshabhumi experience is a story of identity awareness, power dynamics, and rights. Such stories articulate meanings that are replicated in other contexts and settings across India and around the world. The conflict and tension apparent to me at the center of Dalit Buddhism (i.e., Ambedkar’s site of conversion, Dikshabhumi) is felt just the same in Indian communities in the periphery, far afield from this activist center. For example, in what is often considered the center of the Hindu world, Banaras, Uttar Pradesh, insider/outsider tensions over marginalization are as equally palpable and real as at Dikshabhumi in Nagpur. While the identities differ, the dynamics and power relations are similar. Telling the stories of social conflict in the periphery is as important as telling stories of social conflict at the center. The palpable tensions at Dikshabhumi in Nagpur mirror those of even more marginalized communities challenging other boundaries. Banaras, also referred to as Kashi and Varanasi, in the northern India state of Uttar Pradesh, is believed by Hindus to be founded by Lord Shiva. As the home of Shiva, the auspicious and formless God, Banaras represents an important center for Hindus, especially those near the end of life. However, despite its dominant Hindu orientation, Banaras is historically home to famous religious syncretic traditions, which include the writings of Kabir and Tulsidas, and currently boasts a population of roughly 3.5 million people, a quarter of which are Muslim. 16 Multicultural Banaras is a historically complicated place; center of the Hindu cosmos; seat of Hindu orthodoxy; and

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archetype for religious multiculturalism. 17 Still, the tension between marginalized peripheries and a powerful center is no less evident in Banaras than in Nagpur. That Banaras is a historically complicated place is not in question, but as the center of the Hindu cosmos, Banaras has a unique and overlapping relationship with other central spaces of religious and political identity. Like Nagpur, Banaras and its immediate environments sit on the front lines of an ongoing fight for collective identity, rights, and awareness. June 13, 2013—Over seven years after my first experiences of Dalit worldviews at Dikshabhumi, I found myself in a small village in eastern Uttar Pradesh. I came to Sarai village on the outskirts of Banaras city, in Northeastern India, with human rights workers from the People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (PVCHR) to witness what local activists call an honor ceremony. 18 As the first in a series of speakers giving their public testimony about their past experience of torture and organized violence (TOV), Ram seemed an unlikely orator. Ram, a short diminutive man, stepped to the makeshift stage and took the microphone to give a formal welcome to this central space of his home village. As the welcome ended, one could feel the rising tension and anticipation of the event, a tension quite reminiscent of my previous experiences at Dikshabhumi. With little pause Ram launched into his own story, and soon an animated pain and anger were flush in him. Ram’s story was of past torture and bonded labor at the hands of a powerful local high-caste 19 landlord. Voiced in the central open courtyard of his low-caste Mushahar 20 village, the narrative container 21 for his story was this central village space. As I realized that the same tension that was so apparent at Dikshabhumi in far off Nagpur was also evident here in Sarai, it became clear to me that each periphery has its own center, and each center its periphery boundaries. The contexts, though quite different, were both infused with the possibility for either direct violence or constructive social change. From Sarai village, only yards away lay the home of the highcaste landlord that owns the surrounding fields of corn and other vegetables; fields that many of these community members regularly tilled for their livelihood. People of such resources have much reason to dislike awareness-raising events. Stories of torture and organized violence, like Ram’s, convey critical potential for resistance, conflict transformation, and resilience amidst the discourse and material reality of ongoing suffering and human rights abuse. In retelling his story, one can see and feel the tension between the “haves” and “have-nots” in this rural setting and can only wonder what life after such an honor ceremony will be like. One thing is for sure: The complex machinations of center and periphery abound here as clearly as in any other Indian locale. The complex social dynamics between the oppressed and the oppressor, though locally constructed and involving separate communities, are generative of important unaddressed social tensions.

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Ram is a survivor of bonded labor. Having worked for over a decade in a tiny brick kiln a few kilometers from Sarai village, Ram was at one time forced to pack and stack mud bricks for ten to twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Faced with the burden of paying for his younger sister’s marriage, Ram’s situation deteriorated quickly. Indian customs related to dowry often place an impoverished Indian family like Ram’s in a seemingly interminable economic hardship. In order to cover wedding costs, Ram, in fulfilling his filial duty, needed to find money quickly. Not surprisingly, Ram, having no access to capital, was forced to go to the only person he knew with access to money, the owner of the brick kiln in which he worked. In asking his boss for a loan Ram was certainly aware of the risks, but given his responsibilities to his family he felt he had little choice. With a 10,000 rupee (roughly $250) loan from his boss, Ram was able to help his family cover the costs of his sister’s marriage. However, with no means to repay the loan and a salary less than 10 rupees a day, Ram was now locked in what human rights experts in India call bonded labor. Human rights activists estimate that there are nearly ten million people working as bonded laborers in India (the tenth largest economy in the world) today. 22 In Ram’s case, when he began to complain about the injustices of his impossible situation, his boss responded with direct violence. Ram was beaten randomly and his regular ten- to twelve-hour days soon became fifteenhour days of forced brick production. Denied food, water, and/or breaks, Ram was forced to work until he paid off his debt, a numerical impossibility given the compounding interest that his debt was accruing. After two horrible years of fearing for his life and feeling helpless, Ram escaped this situation with the help of another more humane loan secured by family members. Still, for years afterward, the lingering legacy of his traumatic and violent experience has left a shadow and perpetual tension in his life. That post-traumatic stress is collective and contagious as well; it infected his relationships with his family and wider community. While there is no clear way to measure the impact of this internal stress and tension on Ram’s physical health and livelihood, long after the financial burden had been lifted, his relation with both the socially voiceless and socially powerful had changed. Yet, the experience of telling his story has awakened him to working for change as a means to displace his stress and trauma. He now is a human rights activist and voice for change; the telling of his story has helped him cope with his trauma and treat it as a social infection. Working with the PVCHR, the diffuse tension that his story and story retelling unleash does not just motivate Ram, but it motivates other members of the local community both at the center and in the periphery of power. Stories like Ram’s represent a space to reflect and respond in other-than-violent ways to injustice. This resilience and resistance, whether in Banaras or Nagpur, form the seedbed to construct socially just nonviolent futures. Despite the many boundaries humans construct, the pow-

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er of retelling traumatic narratives and reflecting on their construction is crucial to working for change in marginalized realities. Identity, rights, and awareness become a triumvirate for making structural change lasting, and narrative becomes the space to build, manipulate, and maintain this triumvirate. One final story from my own field notes illustrates more fully the powerful narrative threads that the awareness of “victimhood psychology” 23 creates in activists. Just as Banaras constructs its own boundaries between the powerful and the marginal, other peripheral spaces do so in their own unique ways. July 25, 2016—Nearly ten years after first visiting the center of Dalit activism, I found myself back in Nagpur having lunch with Dr. P. D. Satya Pal, a South Indian Dalit activist long involved in the BAMCEF movement. BAMCEF, which stands for the All India Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation, is a membership body of employed Indians that describes itself as “a non-political, non-agitational, and non-religious welfare federation of the scheduled caste, scheduled tribes, and other backward classes and minority communities” with the general aim of “paying back to society.” 24 Dr. Satya Pal, the head of the Anthropology Department at Andhra University in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, gave me a whole new perspective for understanding India’s complex centers and peripheries. I [had] just spent two full days with Dr. Satya Pal at the Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Institute for Social Revolution of the D. K. Khaparde Memorial Trust in Ringnabodhi, about thirty kilometers outside of Nagpur city. As a leader in BAMCEF, Dr. Satya Pal has long played the role of a cultural broker between South and North India. His rich experience traveling and organizing for BAMCEF makes him an extremely helpful translator of BAMCEF’s history and culture. I am exhausted from days of doing nonstop interviews with BAMCEF activists, and the more informal discussion with Dr. Satya Pal is refreshing. It is also daunting because it opens new layers of complexity—geographic, political, religious, cultural, and social. Dr. Satya Pal comes from a well-educated Christian family in South India. As the fourth generation of his family to be educated, he is representative of a privileged Dalit vanguard. He is one of only seven or eight activist leaders within BAMCEF’s leadership that can speak fluent English, Hindi, and Marathi. As a South Asian, his mother tongue is Telegu, and he resources a deep repertoire of experiences of caste exclusion across India. Dr. Satya Pal’s grandfather founded two high schools, one of which Dr. Satya Pal himself attended. His stated goal in our discussions was “to get me to develop another angle for looking at India.” 25 In helping me to realize that South India represents a uniquely neglected periphery, Dr. Satya Pal articulated a deep and broad knowledge about the complicated relationship between religion and caste. As a southern Christian, he realized early in life the opportunities that he and his family were afforded, which other religious

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communities simply were not. He has two brothers and two sisters, and like him, all have doctorates in a range of fields from education to genetics. Though we were in Nagpur eating lunch together, the conversation veered back to Visakhapatnam and Dr. Satya Pal’s family and early upbringing. Our informal interaction is representative of both the deep traumatic effects of caste and the importance of field notes in unearthing formative narratives of resistance. For Satya Pal, his first touch with discrimination occurred when he entered college; only then did he begin to realize that Christians were divided by caste. He began to challenge his teachers and the administration over their caste-based practices. As a result, in 1980 he was expelled from college for questioning how caste hierarchies had seeped into his Christian school and, more broadly, the Church. When I asked him how his family responded, he quickly replied, “They renounced Christianity!” 26 While this may seem drastic to those that have not experienced caste oppression, the bonds of caste and kinship run deep in Indian history and society. Despite his father’s initial plan to send him to the Salvation Army, like his grandfather before him, this experience of being expelled from college awakened him to his condition of oppression and drew him away from the church and toward politics. However, this awareness did not prompt him to become politically active until Satya Pal decided to leave home and study at the Tata Institute for Social Science (TISS) in Mumbai. As the premiere school for social science in India, TISS/ Mumbai remains a hotbed of Ambedkarite social awareness. In Satyal Pal’s own words, he became “an Ambedkarite first and a Buddhist later.” 27 Dr. Satya Pal’s conversion to anticaste activism was itself born of the experiences of traveling from periphery to center, from one bounded space to quite another. In analyzing his experiences in both South and Central India he came to see the work of activism and academics as complementary means to social change. “My job is to find the victims of the caste system and ask them what is their condition.” 28 His teaching, born of awareness, exudes a secular spiritualism, as does the work of most BAMCEF cadres that I spoke to during my 2016 research trip to India. Dr. Satya Pal’s activist ideology, born of the meeting of periphery with center, starts with the idea of creating collective awareness on the part of the marginalized and powerless. His own awakened awareness, born from the experience of crossing boundaries, has both theoretical and experiential components. The stories I retell in the proceeding chapters aim to further introduce the three movements into which I have here only provided a glimpse. Even more importantly, the following stories and their retelling aim to explore the boundary positions between the multiple identities, competing ideologies, and overlapping spiritualties of the modern anticaste movement. Like anticaste activists working in the TBMSG and PVCHR, Dr. Satya Pal is the product of a discursive worldview created and maintained by the narrative experiences and discursive responses to a

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historical legacy of graded inequality. In probing this discursive worldview, my aim is to better understand anticaste identity, rights, and awareness. In returning to the concept of peripheral Others, one final example of the power of impactful narratives and dialectics from India’s geographical center helps explain the historical complexity of caste resistance. Remarkably, Nagpur is a city that has seen both the rise of Dalit identity politics and the rise of the radical Hindutva youth organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). 29 Like in Banaras, Nagpur as a center of hegemonic ideology fosters both inclusive pluralist responses for change in the periphery and resistance from others outside the dominant ideology but still close to the center. The fact that Nagpur is the historical center of the Ambedkar Buddhist conversion movement and the Hindutva activism of the RSS draw attention to the shared discursive space within which these movements interact and mobilize. The competing narratives that these two movements reinforce and empower rely on what Rothbart and Korostelina (2006) call “collective axiology” and create a “totalizing effect” on those that are party to caste conflict. 30 Though seldom acknowledged as connected, these diametrically opposed movements discursively feed off each other. The symbiotic relationship between radical dominant ideologies and anti-hegemonic ideologies of resistance and resilience manifests a social tension over difference that is potentially either destructive or constructive. When the negative value commitments of the collective axiology are allowed to persist unchecked, what Rothbart and Korostelina (2006) would call a “low degree of axiological balance” will likely occur. It is such a case of persistent negative attributions and characterizations of the Other that drives ongoing caste conflict and limits anticaste change. Close attention to discourse represents a key means of intervention in such persistent conflict. While the story of Hindutva and anticaste contention is a complicated one, the symbiotic dynamics of this discursive interaction will be seen throughout the narratives in the proceeding book. Despite little to no direct social interaction, these movements, from their respective beginnings in Nagpur, have been, and remain, in a discursive public encounter with each other. Ambedkar Buddhists’ desire for inclusion runs counter to the RSS discourse of exclusion and, though this point of comparison (or direct reference to the other) is never made explicit in activists’ speech acts, this construction of difference is an important aspect of Ambedkar Buddhist identity and self-awareness. The juxtaposition of boundary spaces often makes such difference more explicit. Counteracting the exclusive rhetoric 31 of the Sangh Parivar (family of Hindu radical right religious parties) is an important aspect of the Ambedkar Buddhist conversion identity. Similarly, a focus on inclusive narrative is also foundational to the rights rhetoric of the PVCHR in Banaras and BAMCEF activists in a wide range of peripheries across India. Whether conversion identity, rights advocacy, or a historically grounded awareness, the goal of escape from this dominant and controlling

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ideology of the privileged center is the same in these different anticaste peripheries, even if close attention to discourse is not always evident. The outright expression of Hindu nationalism and chauvinism provides the motivation for a more moderate inclusive discourse among anticaste and anti-marginalization activists. It is in this broad discursive terrain that Dalits are constantly negotiating with non-Dalits over the legitimacy of the traditional social system and our historical understanding of it. Such a dynamic and reactive relationship between central power and peripheral identities is as evident in Banaras-based anticaste and pro-Muslim resistance movements like the PVCHR, as it is in the Ambedkar Buddhist movement of the TBMSG. Just as this center-periphery dynamic can be seen in Nagpur or Banaras, in South India, new and innovative manifestations of resistance also take root. Whether through BAMCEF’s anthropological use of historical narrative to raise the awareness of a critical oppressed mass or PVCHR’s use of narrative testimony in developing what they call “people friendly” 32 villages across Uttar Pradesh, anticaste activists are working to counter the exclusivist rhetoric of an increasingly hyper-nationalist Hindu-right. Building a movement from the periphery, the PVCHR, like the TBMSG in Maharashtra, works to build an identity and awareness of rights and duties among the marginalized. While each activists’ primary emphasis is different (identity and self-esteem construction for TBMSG; rights and self-awareness for the PVCHR; and a collective awareness of the legacy of historical injustice for BAMCEF) their activist methodologies are all focused on the power that stories contain to achieve social uplift and systemic transformation. Still, this similarity should not belie the fact that narratives, though powerful, are also limited without collective awareness of storytellers’ narrative agency (a point to which I will return in chapter 2). 33 Motivation to act without clear analysis of action can be dangerous. Therefore critical narrative analysis is my own motivation for what follows. The proceeding book aims to walk the reader through contemporary stories of anticaste activism in distinct locales and activist spaces of India. These are stories that demand retelling outside the movements in which they are often heard and retold. They are stories that hold within them the opportunities for structural and systemic change and, thus, lasting social transformation. In excavating these assets for anticaste activists, I can only hope that some change can come to their ongoing plight and marginalized existence. From the vantage point of this introduction and the sharing of my own interactions with activists, I aim to enrich a better understanding of anticaste activism through recourse activist’s own stories. Activists’ stories ability to socially construct real change is undervalued. Despite the fact that the proceeding stories also hold destructive potentials, the boundaries they enliven and differences they describe are critical to the development of voice. While many of the stories are hard to hear, as they are full of violence, suffering,

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and ongoing collective trauma, they are critical to connecting the struggle of the marginalized to the resilience necessary for creating peace. In hearing these stories and histories, the listener (or reader) paradoxically straddles the emotional suffering of marginalization and their own struggles to realize their privilege and/or overcome oppression. In hearing them, the listener places herself in the marginal periphery but also at the center of peaceful transformation. I hope you will join me on the important journey ahead. I believe that only through listening at the periphery can we assist others in reaching the collaborative center of lasting social change. NOTES 1. The word “dalit” means “broken” or “downtrodden” in Sanskrit and was “used as far back as 1931 in journalistic writing.” S. M. Michael, ed., Dalits in Modern India: Vision and Values (New Delhi: Vistaar Publications, 1999), 99. In his introduction to the dalit autobiography Joothan: An Untouchable’s Life, Mukherjee (2002) says: “The term Dalit . . . comes from the Sanskrit root dal, which means to crack open, split, crush, grind, and so forth, and it has generally been used as a verb to describe the process of processing food grains and lentils . . . Jotirao Phule and B. R. Ambedkar, two towering figures in Dalit history, were the first to appropriate the word, as a noun and an adjective.” Arun Prabha Mukherjee, “Introduction,” in Omprakash Valmiki, Joothan: An Untouchable’s Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), xviii. Throughout the book readers will encounter this word being used in place of the more pejorative and assumption-laden “untouchable” and colloquially popular “Harijan”—a term coined by M. K. Gandhi which means literally “children of god” and is perceived by many former “untouchable” castes as demeaning and pejorative. 2. By using the terms center and periphery I resource what Appadurai (1986) has called “the problem of place” [Arjun Appadurai, “Theory in Anthropology: Center and Periphery,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 28:2, 1986, 361] to illustrate the critical importance of boundaries and boundary creation in seeking to understand modern marginal realities. Reflecting on the differing vantage points of center and periphery forms a central theme of this book. The problems of place, both geographical and social, will play an important role in the complicated stories that this book will tell. 3. Nelson Phillips and Cynthia Hardy, Discourse Analysis: Investigating Processes of Social Construction (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002), 3. 4. R. K. Kshirsagar, Dalit Movement in India and Its Leaders (New Delhi: MD Publications, 1994), 102. The Mahad Satyagraha remains a high point in Ambedkarite activists’ remembrance of their leader, Dr. Ambedkar. In 1927 Ambedkar led a group of local “untouchables” in Mahad to the local Chawdar water tank and drank from it (an act that was prohibited by the local Brahminical order). In the nonviolent protests that followed, Dr. Ambedkar was beaten along with other protesters. This story is concisely told in Christophe Jafferlot, Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Fighting the Indian Caste System (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 5. Detlef Kantowsky, Buddhists in India Today: Descriptions, Pictures and Documents (New Delhi: Manohar, 2003), 58. 6. For a further discussion on Nava Buddhism, see Christopher Queen. “Dr. Ambedkar and the Hermeneutics of Buddhist Liberation,” in Queen and King, eds., Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia (New York: SUNY Press, 1996), 45–72. 7. Outside the works of the later Eleanor Zelliot (2013) and still-active sociologist Gail Omvedt (1993), few Western scholars have taken up detailed study of Ambedkar and his legacy. See Queen (1996), Hardtmann (2009), and Jaffrelot (2005) as the few exceptions to this statement. Eleanor Zelliot, Ambedkar's World: The Making of Babasaheb and the Dalit Movement (Delhi: Navayana Publishing, 2013); Gail Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolu-

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tion: Dr. Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1993); Christopher Queen, “Dr. Ambedkar and the Hermeneutics of Buddhist Liberation,” in Queen and King, eds., Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia (New York: SUNY Press, 1996). Eva-Maria Hardtmann, The Dalit Movement in India: Local Practices, Global Connections (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Fighting the India Caste System (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 8. Ruth Behar, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks your Heart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 176. Behar eloquently writes: “The anxiety around such work is that it will prove to be beyond criticism, that it will be undiscussable. But the real problems is that we need other forms of criticism, which are rigorous yet not disinterested; forms of criticism that are not immune to catharsis; forms of criticism that can respond vulnerably, in ways we must begin to try to imagine” (175). 9. Marie Dugan, “A Nested Theory of Conflict,” A Leadership Journal: Women in Leadership, vol. 1, 1996, 9–19. 10. In the words of Dugan (1996), “a system-wide structural conflict will have manifestations on all the other levels” of her nested model. Marie Dugan, A Leadership Journal, 16. 11. For a detailed discussion of some of the many disagreements between the contemporaries Dr. B. R. Ambedkar and M. K. Gandhi, see Arundhati Roy. “The Doctor and The Saint,” in Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition, ed. by S. Anand (New York: Verso, 2014), and A. K. Vakil, Gandhi Ambedkar Dispute: An Analytical Study (New Delhi: Ashish Publishing, 1991), among others. 12. During the course of this research I found only one reference to this problem. Kantowsky (2003, op. cit.) remarking on the potential for social conflict among New Buddhists in religious procession says: “As is well known, processions in India are often a cause for the outbreak of brutal excesses because they are aimed at provoking emotions of people of a different faith” (36). But, in attempting to explain why this aspect of the New Buddhist movement has not been explored, Kantowsky (2003) only offers the following explanation: “This may have something to do with the fact that New Buddhism in Maharashtra is a new subject for investigation by social sciences, and is very difficult to deal with” (Kantowsky, Buddhist in India Today, 36). The lack of attention to Buddhist involvement in anticaste social movement has continued unabated and many in the anticaste movement cite this as evidence of Brahmin control of the structures of power (including Indian social science research) [Personal interview with BAMCEF leader, March 2016]. 13. In a personal interview with Dharmachari Lokamitra, head of the TBMSG movement, in October of 2006, he admitted the potential for social conflict, but insisted on the necessity of ritual occasions for continuing to build collective identity as newly awakened and self-aware Buddhists. 14. Nelson Phillips and Cynthia Hardy, Discourse Analysis: Investigating Processes of Social Construction (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications 2002), 12. 15. Brown Bag Talk by Mangesh Dahiwale and Maitreyanath Dhammakirti, George Mason University’s Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, May 15, 2007. 16. Jonathan Perry, Death in Banaras (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 33. See also Vasanthi Raman, The Warp and the Weft: Community and Gender Identity among Banaras Weavers (New Delhi: Routledge Press, 2010), 263. 17. Priyankar Upadhyaya, Communal Peace in India: Lessons from Multicultural Banaras (Occasional Working Paper, Banaras Hindu University, 2010). 18. This is not to be confused with the violent retributive responses to adulterous women all too familiar to South Asia watchers. These “honor ceremonies” involve the public retelling of past trauma born of experiences of torture and organized violence (TOV). 19. The term “high-caste” is used here to denote those predominately Hindu elite who benefit in social, economic, and/or political ways from the current caste-based status quo in Indian society, and do not have any reason to question a system that “works” for them. The term “low-caste” on the other hand refers to those on the lower rungs of the caste-based hierarchy, sometimes referred to by other monikers in India parlance [e.g., Dalit, Scheduled Castes (SCs), Other Backward Castes (OBCs), Adavasi or Scheduled Tribes (STs), Muslim,

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etc.—see chapter 1 of this book for more clarity on these terms] that are marginalized in various ways by “high-caste” elites. Indian stratification is complex, but there is a clear gap between “haves” and “have-nots” in Indian society. For detailed analysis of the caste dynamics of India see: Kancha Ilaiah, Why I am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture and Political Economy (Kolkata: Samya Publishing, 2009) and B. R. Ambedkar, The Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (London: Verso, 2014), among others. For an informative critique of the Dalit identity construction as too narrow, see http:// mulnivasisangh.net/index.php/ideology/mulnivasi-bahujan-identity, accessed May 2, 2016. 20. Mushahars are on the bottom of the local caste system of graded inequality and are among the poorest populations in Eastern Uttar Pradesh and neighboring Bihar. The Mushahar name is said to derive from two words meaning “rat catcher” and it is assumed that this name came from the tendency to eat rodents in times of famine. In fact, it is not uncommon today in Varanasi to hear these people described and dehumanized as “mouse eaters” or “rural untouchables” despite legal decrees against such labels. 21. John Paul Lederach speaks of the primary foundations of social healing and resilience after trauma as being “the building of safe space as the container for sharing story.” John Paul Lederach and Angela Lederach, When Bones and Blood Cry Out: Journeys Through the Soundscape of Healing and Reconciliation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 68. This book plays on the metaphor of narrative as a container of opportunity for change. 22. Humphrey Hawksley, “Punished by Ax: Bonded Labor in India’s Brick Kilns,” BBC News Magazine, July 11, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27486450, accessed September 21, 2015. 23. Joseph Montville, “Justice and the Burdens of History,” in Reconciliation, Justice, and Coexistence, ed. M. Abu Nimer (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), 133. 24. BAMCEF Constitution (New Delhi: BAMCEF Central Executive Committee, 2003), 6. 25. Personal Interview with Dr. P. D. Satya Pal, July 25, 2016. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. The term “Hindutva” is derived from the two terms “Hindu Tattva,” which literally mean “Hindu Principles.” Hindutva became an operational ideology via two main sentiments in pre-independence India; the fear of outsiders defaming, destroying, and subsequently bringing about the loss of Hindu identity, and the desire to take active political steps in order to insulate Hinduism from foreign rule and oppression. The first sentiment resulted in the formation of a social service organization, the other the formation of a political movement. The social organization formed was the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), while the political movement went through various periods of gestation culminating in the current Sangh Parivar family of Hindu nationalist-based political parties, the most prominent of which is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—India’s current ruling party. Though these manifestations of Hindutva were initially separate responses to the perceived threat of colonialism and modernization, they later melded together under an identity of Hindu nationalism and communalism. For a detailed discussion of the RSS see Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, “Being Hindu and/or Governing India? Religion, Social Change and the State,” in The Freedom to Do God's Will: Religious Fundamentalism and Social Change, ed. G. ter Haar (New York: Routledge, 2003). 30. Daniel Rothbart and Karina Korostelina, Identity, Morality, and Threat: Studies in Violent Conflict (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 49–50. Rothbart and Korostelina define collective axiology as “a system of value commitments that offers moral guidance in relations with those within, and outside of the group . . . Armed with its collective axiology, a group traces its path from a sacred past and transcends the finitude of individual life” (49). The systems and processes they describe map well onto the dynamic and persistent discursive contention between Hindu nationalists and anticaste activists. 31. As an example of this exclusive rhetoric a spokesman for the RSS was quoted in the Washington Post reacting to the arrests of some Hindu radicals expected of involvement in a September 2008 bombing of a Muslim teashop in Malegon, Southern India, saying “you cannot call it Hindu terrorism. If you must, then call it retributive terrorism” [Lakshmi (November 25, 2008).]

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32. Lenin Raghuvanshi, S. Khan, and I. Agger, “Giving Voice: Using Testimonial Therapy Intervention in Psychosocial Community Work for Survivors of Torture and Organized Violence,” A Manual for Community Workers and Human Rights Defenders (Uttar Pradesh, India: PVCHR, 2008), 6. 33. Francesca Polletta (2006) has written eloquently on this by pointing out the complexity of social norms in using stories to create change. “Encouraging disadvantaged groups to tell their stories may give others a new appreciation for their plight. But the limited range of responses to stories that are popularly considered appropriate may prevent people from doing much more than expressing appreciation.” Francesca Polletta, It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 3.

Chapter One

Caste and Anticaste Identity The Evolution and Legacy of Difference in Indian Social Life

Caste is one of those complicated topics that every India watcher yearns to understand, but few find the open discursive space and the inter-caste relationships needed to build deep cultural understanding of this complex social status system. As DeVotta and Ganguly have written, “there are no experts on India. Notwithstanding the plethora of knowledgeable commentators on specific subjects pertaining to India, only those who are arrogant or ignorant dare claim to be an ‘expert’ on this maddeningly diverse country.” 1 For an outsider to India, much of the subtlety of caste interactions are lost in translation, and the frustrations of trying to understand how the caste system impacts Indian citizens’ sense of social identity and social behavior seem daunting at best and impossible at worst. This chapter, despite these real (and imagined) challenges, attempts to broadly trace the evolution of modern caste exclusion as a contemporary fight over contested histories and the political legacies of constructed and inherited social difference. While any overview of modern caste oppression is bound to be imperfect, especially when written by one who has no direct personal experience of it, a cursory overview of the realities of the modern caste system, recounted within the context of its long and contested history, has value as a stage setting for the social movement organizations that are currently amassed at caste’s periphery. The late Tip O’Neill, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, is often credited with saying that “all politics is local.” 2 All politics is also about power. Tracing the social and political legacies of often contested histories and identities develops a preliminary platform for understanding the work of locally based anticaste social movements. 1

2

Chapter 1

With the aim of destroying caste, these social movements represent a vanguard of the immense experiential knowledge of caste and raise important questions about how the center of dominant caste oppression in modern Indian society holds. In bringing to light a broad picture of the structural inequities that remain in modern Indian society, this admittedly broad summary of modern caste exclusion and the enduring power of both caste and anticaste identity lays the contextual groundwork for understanding the movements for awareness and rights that the rest of this book privileges. In the words of Andre Beteille: “Clearly, an assessment of the future of the Backward Classes cannot be made in isolation from social and political forces, which operate through the entire range of Indian society.” 3 The traumatic legacy of millennia of suffering at the hands of the caste system have left both the oppressed and the oppressor broken and analytically [encumbered] to build deliberative coalitions for positive social change. This chapter does not profess to explain the full origins or social/religious meaning of India’s labyrinth caste system; for this see the plethora of works on caste in India by Ambedkar (1936/1979), Dumont (1980), Dirks (2001), Beteille (1991, 1996), and Quigley (1999), among many others. Instead, this chapter attempts to lay bare the complexity of caste exclusion and to explore how the fragile center of such an unequal system holds despite its continual evolution. While emphasizing the contested historical identities that have been socially constructed by the institution of caste, a specific aim here is also to underscore the discursive opportunities available to those working against caste and for lasting social change. The aim is less to define the ambiguous and multivalent nature of the phenomenon of India’s byzantine caste system than to better explain the legacy of exclusion and oppression, which is symbolized in the catchall concept of the caste system. As Nicholas Dirks (2001) has written, “an extraordinary range of commentators . . . accept that caste— and specifically caste forms of hierarchy, whether valorized or despised—is somehow fundamental to Indian civilization, Indian culture, and Indian tradition.” 4 While caste is not the only defining institution in Indian society, it is a critical vector for both social stasis and change. As a critical reality of modern Indian social life, the caste system is the principal site for the vital contestation over Indian history, as well as modern political coalitions and primary identities. Admittedly, this is complex historical and discursive terrain. Caste identity and awareness inform all public debate in India, and the complex layers of this ongoing debate over caste forms the contours and edges of any attempts at social change. As a culturally codified and unwritten system of hierarchy, caste is both difficult to generalize and easy to see in social practice. In focusing on the evolution and legacies of difference, I argue that spaces for change in social justice praxis can be developed. In order to understand these legacies, we must first come to some sense of what it means to be of a certain caste. To advocate, as anticaste activists do, for

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rights and awareness we must have some grasp of what it means to have a caste, as well as be willing to fight to not have one. “It cannot be too strongly emphasized that objectivity in social research is not merely a question of good intention of even professional competence. It is also a function of the social position of the person who conducts the research.” 5 My role as an outsider, which provides a “certain advantage,” 6 of course, also presents limitations. As readers follow my own attempt to lay a ground knowledge of the caste system, I humbly claim no special expertise. Rather, my hope is that readers will see this argument as a critical grounding for the archeological analysis of low-caste stories and my field experiences of them, which I am attempting to archive. SITUATING THE CASTE SYSTEM, CASTE, AND DISCURSIVE AGENCY In his now famous Columbia University seminar paper entitled “Castes in India,” B. R. Ambedkar (1916) writes, “A caste is an enclosed class.” 7 This simple definition underscores the complex relational dynamics of caste identity as a historical and economic evolution of exclusion and difference. The caste system is the complex constellation of social norms, behaviors, and practices that reinforce caste identities. Later in Ambedkar’s same seminar paper, he writes: “There is no such thing as a caste: there are always castes.” 8 While it may seem obvious that systems of oppression are always plural, the extreme plurality of caste groups in India (there are thousands of low-caste communities on the Indian subcontinent, not to mention many higher caste communities) makes change in this diversity of difference exceedingly difficult and convoluted. Add to this the Indian government’s own attempt to group these “backward classes” after the Mandal commission upheld reservation policy in 1980, and the level of complication and labeling can become mind-numbing. 9 For the above and other reasons, narratives about the caste system have become flattened or “restricted.” 10 Castes themselves represent a sort of background knowledge for social interaction. As difference requires the awareness of other groups, one’s awareness of their own identity group, as it is being discriminated against, is often unclear. Rooting out caste discrimination is greatly complicated by the plethora of names and categories for the marginalized. “A person’s group identities may be for the most part only a background or horizon to his or her life, becoming salient only in specific interactive contexts.” 11 Caste identity can only be understood, then, in observing the social interactions between differing caste identities. For this reason, historical and relational memories play a critical role in both forming and changing systems of exclusion.

4

Chapter 1

The caste system, which has evolved and adapted to changing relational contexts and historical memory over thousands of years, is pernicious and entrenched. It is also a living system that evolves and is reinforced by a collection of individual speech acts and human interactions. As Thorat and Newman (2010) argue, “understanding the nature of exclusion, insights into social relations and institutions of exclusion, are as important as delineating their outcomes in terms of deprivation for excluded groups.” 12 In other words, in cataloging the institutions of exclusion, a clear delineation from the oppression that the excluded feel must be made. Still, while objective facts are important points of persuasion, rather than simply focusing on the outcomes of caste one must explore the processes of the institutions of exclusion to fully situate caste. Explained in another way, assuming that caste is transformable through structural changes to structurally violent systems supports one approach to overcoming and understanding social exclusion (i.e., that state intervention, or what Judge (2014) calls “intervention from above” 13 is necessary). While in no way does this approach to intervention assume that social structures and institutions are static, on the contrary it assumes that social institutions, including caste itself, have gone through many changes throughout Indian history. Given the caste system’s dynamic nature, important opportunities for change can also come from the masses in what Judge (2014) calls “intervention from below.” 14 An important goal in writing this book is to better explain the “specific interactive context[s]” 15 of modern caste exclusion by focusing on the narrative and discursive terrain through which group identity and rights become salient vectors for change. Such an understanding, or awareness, in the hands of the activists studied represents a radical and powerful tool for democratic social change. Activists armed with discursive awareness become more effective agents of structural change from below. Neither arrogant expert nor ignorant mouthpiece, activists aware of their narrative agency and socio-political identity are more confident of the rights and duties their own language enacts as it empowers, albeit incrementally, real change. DEFINING CASTE AS CONNOTING GROUP DIFFERENCE The term caste was probably first used by the Portuguese settlers (in 1563) on the Northwestern Indian coast to describe the economic and status associations between the Indian traders that they encountered (see Hutton 1946 and Quigley 1999 for an etymology of the Portuguese term). The Portuguese traders were early ethnographers trying to understand how the complex social interactions of the natives they encountered affected their trade and commerce, but like all ethnographers, their observations were influenced by their own cultural position and experience. European conceptions of status

Caste and Anticaste Identity

5

and nobility inscribed meaning on the use of the term caste. Derived from the word casta in Portuguese, the term literally meant pure or chaste and had colloquial connotations that connected the idea of purity to color. 16 Early Portuguese traders likely used the term casta to try and understand what they perceived as a system designed to maintain the purity of familial bloodlines. 17 Early social scientists continued the tradition of understanding caste as a social system defined by group relations and behaviors as they are observed in the everyday interactions with others. For example, Hutton (1946) describes caste in the following way: The truth is that while a caste is a social unit in a quasi-organic system of society, and throughout India is considered enough to be immediately identifiable, the nature of the unit is variable enough to make a concise definition difficult. If it be enough to define the system, the following formula is suggested—“a caste system is one whereby a society is divided up into a number of self-contained and completely segregated units (castes), the mutual relations between which are ritually determined in a graded scale.” 18

Despite the ease of understanding apparent in the idea of segregated units, the reality is more complex. “To set out with the idea that castes are, in general, bounded groups with a fixed membership is to embark on a path of endless frustration.” 19 In fact, there is no word in Indian languages that effectively translates the Western social anthropological understanding of caste. 20 Caste is indeed a foreign way to understand and describe South Asian social relations among identity groups. The word used most often by Indians to describe what we in the West understand as caste, is the word jati. The word jati is found in almost all Indian languages and is connected to concepts of lineage, kinship, and birth, but it is often confused with the concept of varna, which is used colloquially to denote both color 21 and social function. 22 The term varna comes from the chaturvarna system or four-varna system described in the Purushasukta hymn of the ancient Indian scripture, the Rg Veda. Teltumbde (2010) clarifies: “Varna represents Hinduism’s hierarchical framework, but it is jati, which really dictates the rules and regulations of life for the average Hindu.” 23 Another way to put this is that varna ritually organizes all castes in relation to the origin myth of the cosmic man Purusha while jati articulates the specific rights and duties that are assigned to each caste and enforced in relation to others. As we already see, it is extremely difficult to separate discussions of caste from discussions of Hindu ritual, doctrine, and belief. Still, Gail Omvedt (1994) reminds us that “the identification of caste, for instance, as caused by, in some sense, Hindu ideology, cannot explain the fact that the system appears to have its origins before the consolidated dominance of Hinduism as a religion in India.” 24 Much like identity is created in juxtaposition to other identities, caste, or jati, is enforced by the real and perceived differences between the thousands of

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jatis that exist in modern India and that were developed and evolved over thousands of years. Each of these jatis may be hierarchically organized within the varna system as either Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudhra, or AtiShudhra, but it is the existence of many other jatis within each broad varna category that perpetuates the exclusive system as a whole. Many scholars have attempted to explain the caste system via the sociological theory of social stratification, 25 a reality that is argued to be universally found in all human society. However, as Shrirama explains, “the traditional pattern of social stratification in India has certain characteristics, which are rather unique, and these have attracted and intrigued many scholars all over the world.” 26 The relative importance of the varna (hierarchical and stratified categories of the cosmic man, later loosely tied to function or occupation) and jati (categories determined by birth and kinship) systems of Indian society in upholding caste-based social stratification have been long argued and debated. Despite the ongoing contestation over the social meanings of this complicated terminology, the roots of such systems, most scholars agree, begin with the interactions between Aryan and Dravidian populations in northwest India around 1500 B.C.E. This story, pieced together largely from linguistic and archeological evidence, is a story often recited by scholars of caste to explain the origins of the caste system (see Srinivas 1962, 1966; Deliege 1993; Dumont 1980; Hutton 1946; and Charsley 1996; among others) and, therefore, will not be explored with critical depth here. Via a cursory retelling of the outlines of this important historical interaction, it should be noted that this is contested ancient history with competing shards of evidence. Competing archeological theories form the discursive foundation of anticaste claims for identity justice, as well as the bedrock of modern Hindu nationalistic identity formations. As a contested historical narrative, the Aryan-Dravidian contact must be understood as a process of social change over time. What we know of as the modern caste system is certainly a byproduct of this interaction (as well as many other later cultural interactions, i.e., via processes of conquest, colonialism, and globalization), even if the specific origins, processes, or power relations are not fully clear. While there is some archaeological evidence of Aryan migration from the Central Asian step to the Indian subcontinent, even this is contested historical terrain. 27 Regardless of whence the Aryan-Vedic culture originates, how this new culture and ethnicity assimilated with indigenous Dravidian populations in the northern Indian subcontinent remains contested due to the lack of written texts from the era. Linguistically, the clear similarities between IndoAsiatic and Indo-European languages ensures some trans-global interaction and migration of Aryan populations, but to what extent remains unknown. Both cultures (Aryan and Dravidian) were oral traditions in the pre-literate phase of human cultural development when they first encountered each other. With them the Aryans certainly brought oral rituals (what later became

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written and codified as the Vedas, possibly the world’s earliest religious texts). The social structures and worldviews that the interaction of these distinct cultures generated clearly seem to be a syncretic blend of Aryan and Dravidian cultures. For example, the ritual traditions of purity seem to have clear connections to the Aryan culture, but the vegetarian eating habits of high-caste communities seem to come from Dravidian eating habits. Without getting into the many complicated and nationalistic origin debates, it is enough to say that this interaction changed both cultures and developed a unique and syncretic social and economic stratification seen nowhere else in the world. The important essentials to realize about any story of the origins of the stratified structure of Indian society are: (1) that what we know of as modern caste is an institution, which has continually evolved and adapted throughout India’s long history; (2) that early on there existed a community that was on the very bottom, and often outside, of this ritual structure; British colonizers and missionaries came to label these communities untouchable; 28 (3) that as a group, castes are by no means a homogenous ethnic or cultural entity; and (4) that it is by no means clear that an outside Aryan migration was the only, or most important, factor in developing what we know today as Vedic culture. The foundations of the current instantiation of the caste system in India is a complicated historical process of social and economic composition with multiple narrative twists, closely connected to the human predilection for identifying difference, pursuing power, and maintaining hard-won privileges. The story of Aryan-Dravidian cultural interaction is referenced here to help the reader realize that the social construction of caste is connected to difference, though that difference may not always be well defined. Like the term caste, the term Aryan does not so much identify an ethnicity as it does a culture in this early historical context. Though many people today associate Aryan with [a] Nazi-sense of racial purity, the Aryans of the ancient Indian subcontinent, though possibly of lighter skin tone than the Dravidians they encountered, were of a completely different social milieu. This difference in cultural habits and shared experience was the defining difference of initial Aryan-Dravidian interactions. Concepts of racial purity only came in much later during colonial times. In the words of Dirks (2001), “The universal language family of Sir William Jones and the racial unity of Aryans posited by Muller became the basis for race theory that cast Britons and Indians in a relationship of absolute difference.” 29 While racial difference evolved historically later than caste difference, like other systems of oppression, caste is the outgrowth of interactions between power and privilege, a topic that we delve further into later in this book. Though there is little we can say with certainty about the origins and early operations of the caste system in India, we can say that it is a socially constructed status system that adapts to time, place, and situation, and relies on the prevailing perception of

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difference to be strengthened and maintained. Therefore, the differences of early Indian history seem to be much more distinct in relation to religious and cultural practices than to racial or occupational difference. Only later did new conceptions of difference adapt caste into what we know it as today. Today across India there exist over 6,000 scheduled castes and subcastes, 30 which “are strictly endogamous and sometimes quite fastidious about avoiding each other.” 31 These castes are considered avarna (literally without varna), falling outside the Vedic chaturvarna system. These castes carry a number of labels and names, the most well-known to Western audiences being “untouchables.” Kumar (2014) calls these people the “fifth varna.” 32 How exactly to classify this group of avarna, ati-shudra (literally below shudra) peoples is fraught with the politics of exclusion. While the practice of untouchability is now taboo and politically incorrect in India, the shock of these practices has left an indelible mark on the Western understanding of caste. Given that not all avarna are “untouchable,” the term does not accurately describe the marginalized experience and ongoing practices faced by many low-caste communities. The official government label for the complexity of avarna or ati-shudra people is, therefore, “scheduled caste” or simply SC, but like any label, this one too is contested and fraught. 33 These castes’ relation to other castes, though regionally differentiated, are almost universally legitimated by the chaturvarna framework (i.e., the Vedic splitting of society into four castes with “untouchables” falling outside of this religiously sanctioned division) and the varnasramadharma system (i.e., those norms and duties that underpin the maintenance of the chaturvarna framework). Together these two frameworks have provided religious license for the institution of caste for thousands of years. Though the chaturvarna hierarchy (see figure 1.1 below) is well understood by the average Indian, how this gradation of society affects social relations is subtle and often subconscious. Despite the reality that empirical measures of caste inequality have been largely shirked by Indian academia due to the systematic, and arguably intentional, oversight by ruling elites, recent studies have begun to report the caste system’s modern economic realities 34 and castes’ role as a major factor in electoral political change. 35 Though discussion of caste inequality has increasingly become taboo in the Indian public sphere, the reality of caste difference, and its related social exclusions, has by no means disappeared from Indian society. Fuller (1996) writes: Because people cannot openly speak of castes as unequal, they describe them as different . . . they may avoid the terms “caste” or jati and refer instead to “community” or samaj. As Mayer (1960) suggests, this change may indicate greater commitment to equality, but it is at least as likely that it does not, for terms like samaj [community] are frequently euphemistic and the language of

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Figure 1.1. Purusha (cosmic man) and Chaturvarna System (as conceived in the Rg Veda). Graphic courtesy of the author.

difference can be a coded means to assert the status of one’s own caste and to justify the inequality among castes. 36

Such linguistic nuances abound in attempting to paint a picture of the modern expression of caste exclusion. The fact is, there is no singular expression but rather multiple expressions of what modern caste is and means. In these differences is coded and political meaning. While these complexities confound the researcher of caste, they should not dissuade researchers from endeavoring to understand the qualitative lived experiences of low-caste communities. The experience of social exclusion, though dynamic, is real and of primary relevance to those oppressed by caste. Such rampant expressions of the hard realities of caste oppression in modern India are daily being exposed by brave activists like those working for the three broad social movement organizations that this book introduces to non-Indian readers. These movements are exemplar in their methodology of change and fortitude in resistance.

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It is a key contention of this book that the best means to understand the complexity of modern caste oppression is through hearing the stories of those both most affected by it and those actively working to change it. One cannot grasp the soul-crushing experience of caste marginalization and oppression by taking a perspective of history, sociology, and politics from above. Rather, what is needed is an ability to hear the “infrapolitics” 37 of difference from the perspective of those most affected. This involves accessing the “hidden transcripts” 38 of the marginalized, those forms of resistance that are spoken by the marginalized to each other, often in private or more intimate settings. While academics like Omvedt (1994) have attempted to provide a view of social movement from below by critiquing academic study of anticaste movement as simply focusing on either class or anti-imperialist/nationalist grounds, the access to low-caste voice has still remained limited in the academic discourse on caste. 39 To attempt to understand caste requires that one engage with the language of those most motivated and actively working to create social change, not just the sociological realities of their economic and political discrimination. This access to the “infrapolitics” of caste through activists’ language, though evident in Dalit literature, 40 is absent in critical academic analysis of caste. UNDERSTANDING ANTICASTE ACTIVISM AS A SOCIAL IDENTITY Milner’s (1994) assessment of the breadth and reach of caste hierarchy in modern Indian society is helpful in understanding the all-encompassing nature of the thousands-year-old institution of caste. He writes, “The proportion of the population that falls into each varna varies greatly by region, but in most areas, none of the top three varnas constitute as much as 10 percent of the population, and the total of these three is less than 30 percent.” 41 Logically, this places the other roughly 70 percent of India’s population as either lower castes, Muslims, or other religious/tribal minorities. But if these top three varnas, which control the majority of the available resources including land and water in most Indian villages, is only roughly 30 percent of the population, then why does the majority not rise up? Given an imbalanced and structurally violent system in which high castes have recourse to social and economic capital, as well as social networks to which low castes just do not have access, the constraints on low-caste resistance are numerable. For example, a February 2007 India-wide Human Rights Watch report describes, “Only 10 percent of Dalit households have access to sanitation (as compared to 27 percent of non-Dalit households).” 42 Such imbalances in access to the resources needed for advancement are perpetuated by endemic and often discounted unequal opportunities for social mobility among the lower castes.

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Mungekar (1999) reports that “in the year 1987, in as many as 41 universities in the country the share of SC communities in the grades of professors, assistant professors and lecturers was 0.61, 1.04, and 3.16 percent respectively.” 43 Such quantitative evidence, largely unchanged in twenty years, confirms the unequal history of a system in which huge sections of the population are availed little or no opportunity to progress. Add to this reality of structural violence that most low castes face the fact of what Srinivas (1966) has famously termed “Sanskritization,” 44 and the reasons for lack of organized activism become even more transparent. In the words of one anticaste activist I interviewed, “The psychology of caste is you salute above and kick below.” 45 Structural violence and the social processes of Sanskritization make awareness and rights obscured to many marginalized communities. Despite a clear sense of social identity, conditioned by a system of graded inequalities, space for a more global awareness of oppression or collective organization for rights is much less evident to most low castes. Potential activists in such contexts must make their primary identity about abolitionist activities that are aimed at raising low-caste consciousness. In order to break away from a more mainstream construction of caste they develop a model of caste uplift that denies the institution of caste any sense of social utility. Many anticaste activists become aware that caste identity of any sort hampers their ability to make lasting change, but this awareness for someone brought up in the social disease conditions of the caste system is extremely difficult to foster. The outlier who takes on an anticaste activist identity must overcome the difficulties of building the self-esteem and independent identity necessary to accept this complete rejection of the caste system. Anticaste activism requires a complete identity shift from pliant subject with strong kinship ties to active citizen willing to make kinship identity a secondary identity. Such a shift is extremely difficult given the existing cultural and social constructions and impediments. In this context, anticaste activists represent a vanguard among the marginalized and oppressed. This vanguard represents a separate identity all its own. This anticaste activist identity rests on the emancipatory nature of education, the ability of critical thought to develop awareness and a sense of rights. As Indians with means have fled the public education system in mass, “99 percent of Dalit students are enrolled in government schools that lack basic infrastructure, classrooms, teachers, and teaching aids.” 46 Despite such persistent structural inequalities, Dalits and low castes have embraced education as the defining conduit for change. While structural realities make it difficult to overcome caste discrimination, an undying belief in education has developed a renewed sense of identity and belief in Dalits’ own individual abilities. Education has been the grounds for developing resistance among Dalit communities in particular, grounds that involve privileging a self-identity over historical kinship identity. Merit and achievement in India’s British-

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influenced educational system represent a unique sphere of individualism in Indian society that can act, over time and increased education, as a more important driver of behavior than community for some Dalits. Education as a form of resistance, therefore, forms the bedrock of anticaste collective identity and has become a space where everyone has some level of independent agency to work for change. Among the anticaste movements studied in this text, education is a critical universal in their resistance identity. Much of this focus on education among Dalits stems from a reverence and deification of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the most educated and important of the twentiethcentury caste social reformers (and an important anticaste leader that reemerges throughout the narrative arc of this book). Dr. Ambedkar once said: “The backward classes have come to realize that after all education is the greatest material benefit for which they can fight . . . that without education [backward classes] existence is not safe.” 47 While the modern realities of caste still act to stifle the opportunity of education, Ambedkar understood the importance of education for developing self-esteem, fostering an identity of agitation, and organizing a lasting social change. Knowledge is power and the domain of learning thus became the front-row seat from which to change existing systems of power. Much of Dr. Ambedkar’s social activism was, therefore, aimed at “making [Dalits] conscious of their position” so as to “concentrate their energy and resources on politics and education.” 48 Such innovations in modern Dalit activism have had a lasting effect on anticaste activism across India. As the foundation of Dalit and anticaste identity, education has become an important vector for the development of rights and awareness. Indeed, we know the emphasis on education to be important in many other contexts of social oppression and structural violence. In the words of Bell hooks (1994), “The classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility . . . This is education as the practice of freedom.” 49 Such a liberatory approach to education has enabled the development of a modern social identity of anticaste activists to flourish in India. This may be best illustrated by way of a brief introduction to the three social movement organizations that form the ethnographic bedrock of this book, and to which the preliminary stories in the book’s introduction refer. As modern actors in the anticaste drama, the three distinct social movement organizations introduced and analyzed in this book each preach education as the grounds for liberation and operate in the margins of the broad field of psycho-social development. Building upon the snapshots of these social movements, the aim here is to further develop these movements’ identities with particular respect to their pedagogy of liberation. For readers interested in a deeper dive into the history and missions of these complex social movement organizations as systemic responses to oppression, you will find this in chapter 3.

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As the largest democracy in the world, India allows for a vibrant civil society sector in which social movements often take advantage of “political opportunity structures” 50 to frame and disseminate their message. 51 In this brief introduction of the following distinct anticaste social movement organizations, one sees how caste identity (as well as anticaste activist identity) has evolved alongside ongoing historical and cultural debates about caste and the origins of caste hierarchy. As anticaste identity has developed in the modern area, so have the debates about the history and origins of the caste system. Given that caste issues crosscut so many realities of public life, different social movements are at any one moment actively fighting various aspects of the broader caste problem. Still, even within this diversity of approaches lies the common anticaste activist aim of developing what Gil (1998) has called a “critical consciousness.” 52 In developing a collective critical consciousness that is inseparable from anticaste activist contestation over Indian history, anticaste identity, and contestation for rights, these goals converge despite these movements’ differing foci and tactics. Each of the three anticaste social movements organizations with which I have been privileged to interact over the last decade have honed a unique blend of activities and projects aimed at either developing a positive social identity, organizing to contest for rights, and/or “re-authoring” 53 the historical narrative in order to develop collective awareness. Each of these movements projects important elements of a unified response to caste discrimination. These movements’ activities best illustrate the anticaste activist identity, the foundations of which, born in caste exclusion, I have labored to describe above. Instances of caste contention, as opposed to outcomes of discrimination, help define both caste and anticaste identity. To further the reader’s understanding of how caste identity operates in India, I now turn to briefly explaining these three social movement organizations that are exemplar of the “who” of anticaste activism. SKETCHING ANTICASTE IDENTITY THROUGH GETTING TO KNOW TRANSFORMATIVE SOCIAL MOVEMENTS My own interest in caste conflict came from critical study of the role of religion in social change and was sparked during my Master’s program in comparative religion. Before long, my research took me to Dalit Buddhism and particularly to Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s mass public conversion to Buddhism. The diversity of social, political, and religious civil society movements this conversion spawned represented a relatively under-researched area of the Indian state. As a vestige of that historic conversion movement, the Trailokya Bauddha Mahasangha, Sahayak Gana (TBMSG), a Dalit Buddhist social movement active in Maharashtra, India, was a natural case study of religion as an opportunity space to develop intra- and inter-caste dialogue

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and narrative activism for prosocial change. 54 What I came to understand upon first visiting the TBMSG in Nagpur in 2006 was the degree to which collective social identity was socially constructed through activists’ narrative agency. Realizing this, a natural next step in my thinking about social transformation became to explore ways in which this narrative agency was and was not being employed to achieve activists’ desired change. A later 2013 Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship took me to Northern India, where I was introduced to another more secular human rights organization called the People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (PVCHR). The vast similarities and differences in these organizations’ mission, goals, and tactics were both intriguing and confounding, but they also raised many important questions about anticaste activism as primarily focused on either identity or rights, as well as the value of a specific form of narrative intervention called testimonial therapy. 55 Finally, in coming into closer contact with activists from the All India Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation (BAMCEF) during a summer of 2016 return visit to Nagpur, India, I again renewed and re-thought my original interests in identity justice, historical memory/rights, and social awareness. On my most recent research trip to India, I found myself focused on more emotive and experiential methods to understand caste conflicts, what Schirch (2001) would call a “symbolic approach” 56 to conflict resolution. While interviewing BAMCEF leaders, the symbolic nature of social identity’s connection to collective consciousness started to become clearer to me. The evolution of my own critical research process has consistently led me back to the primary questions of any conflict analysis: Who are the conflict parties? Specifically, who are these anticaste activists and what are their interests as they relate to the existing caste system? The three movements explored in this book are representative of a diversity in anticaste activism and offer a means to think of collective responses to the problem of caste. The two questions above are connected, of course, as how activists pursue their interests is directly related to their identity. Directly related to this pair of basic questions is an exploration of what tactics activists are using to achieve their interests. I take up the first two questions below to further develop insight into the evolution of what I have been calling caste and, thus, anticaste identity. A deeper dive into these organizations, with particular focus on the question of tactical approach to systemic change, is the focus of chapter three. WHO ARE THE TBMSG? The Trailokya (recently renamed Triratna) Bauddha Mahasangha Sahayaka Gana (TBMSG), which literally translates as “The Association of Friends of the Buddhist Order of the Three Realms,” 57 today is the largest indigenous

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Buddhist organization on the Indian subcontinent. Professing to speak for over ten million Indian Buddhist followers, 58 TBMSG is larger than many Christian religious denominations in the United States and, indeed, much larger than its parent organization the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO) in England. 59 As a transnational organization that cannot be separated from both its Indian and British roots, the TBMSG is a non-governmental organization (NGO), formed as an Indian trust. The TBMSG was birthed, and continues to work closely with, the Trailokya Bauddha Mahasangha, or TBM, the movements’ ordinal body. The members of the TBM and TBMSG collaborate to train newly converted Indian Buddhists. In developing a philanthropic system of hostels for young Dalits and community health centers in the slums of Pune, Mumbai, and other major cities of Maharashtra, TBMSG came out of the founding work of TBM order members and has grown tremendously as a social movement organization since its founding in 1979. TBMSG stresses a social doctrine and socio-political interpretation of historical Buddhism by placing a primary importance on the individual and stressing the role of Buddhist identity and practice in bringing about both individual and collective change. The TBMSG as a movement is less a Buddhist revival than an awakening to the legacy of social and psychological injustice perpetuated against low castes (particularly Dalit Buddhists). TBMSG’s “theory of change” 60 is squarely focused on Buddhism and Buddhist identity creation. If Ambedkar’s 1956 conversion was the catalyst for the movement of Dalits to Buddhism, Dharmachari Sangharakshita’s dharma teachings were the catalyst for the formation of TBMSG as a charitable religious organization. Still, it was Dharmachari Lokamitra, one of Sangharakshita’s earliest English disciples, that made the TBMSG into not just a charitable religious organization but an activist human rights advocacy movement. Both these dynamic personalities are central to the question of who is the TBMSG. Sangharakshita (born Dennis Lingwood) grew up in London. In 1944, just nineteen years old, Lingwood was conscripted by the British army and found himself in India and Ceylon. At the end of World War II, in 1946, Lingwood applied for a six-week leave of absence from his post and never again returned to the British army. Lingwood, who had a lifelong interest in Buddhism, was ordained in 1949 as a shramanera or novice monk and was given the name Sangharakshita. As a newly ordained monk, Sangharakshita chose to study under the Venerable Jagdish Kashyap, who held the chair in Pali and Buddhist studies at Banares Hindu University. After only a few years of study, on a visit to a Tibetan border hill station named Kalimpong, Kashyap instructed Sangharakshita to “work for the good of Buddhism” 61 and left him completely on his own. 62 This unorthodox arrangement (a Theravadan monk would typically follow the teacher under whom he was ordained for the rest of that teacher’s life) allowed him to continue to study

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Buddhism while developing his own deep ties in the Indian Buddhist community. Upon returning to England after twenty years in India, Sangharakshita formed the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO) on April 6, 1967. Ordaining nine men and three women as the nucleus of the Western Buddhist Order (WBO), the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO) was intended for those unwilling to full-heartedly enter the WBO but who had a desire to be in a like-minded community of Buddhists. The stated purposes of the FWBO remain “to encourage and facilitate the growth of real individuals” and to “create a new society in the midst of the old.” 63 As the parent organization of the TBMSG, the FWBO provided a newly transnational and radical vision of Buddhist life in the modern world. It is this broad vision and institutional foundation laid down by Sangharakshita (upon this writing in 2017, he is ninety-one years old and still active among British Buddhists) from which the story of TBMSG originates. While both Ambedkar and Sangharakshita were crucial to the formation of the TBMSG’s “ex-untouchable” base of support, it took the dedicated leadership of Dharmachari Lokamitra (aka Jeremy Goody) to organize and empower the community to act. Goody joined Sangharakshita’s Western Buddhist Order (WBO) in 1972 and became ordained in 1974. In October 1977, Lokamitra, now one of Sangharakshita’s most senior disciples, decided to take a six-month yoga study tour in India. Even though Sangharakshita had given him contacts and hoped that the FWBO could rekindle some of the work that Sangharakshita had left undone, it was by chance that Lokamitra happened upon a rally in Nagpur on the twenty-first anniversary of the famous Ambedkar conversion. This event was the catalyst for Lokamitra’s interest in the Ambedkarite ex-untouchables. Writing from Pune to Sangharakshita, Lokamitra saw the importance of the Buddhist community in India to the overall success of the FWBO: I think it is very likely that once the FWBO gets going in India, among exuntouchables, it will be the fastest growing area of our activities. . . . Twenty years ago a few million people changed their religion. They therefore want to know how to live, practice, and develop as Buddhists. It is vitally important to them. . . . As far as I can see there is no one, besides Sangharakshita, and no other movement besides the FWBO, capable of working with the situation. 64

The TBMSG organization was inaugurated in India in 1979 by Sangharakshita himself and more ex-untouchables were converted by the newly formed Trailokya Bauddha Mahasangha (TBM), the Indian ordinal branch of the WBO. Like the FWBO in England, the TBMSG was conceived of as a loose institutional arrangement in which a Buddhist Sangha could be created and fostered, while the TBM, like the English WBO, was the official body of religious ordination for both lay and monastic adepts alike. In other words, the TBMSG was the dharma work branch of the new Indian wing of the

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WBO (i.e., the TBM). 65 The various branches of this complex organization stem from the foundation of a Buddhist order and, thus, their activities broadly aim to reflect Buddhist dharma (teaching). Specifically, the TBMSG seeks to put the dharma into practice in three ways: (1) by giving dharma course lectures, (2) through retreats of intensive Buddhist practice, and (3) through the creation of dharma communities in which members work together for the common good of that community. The first two of these institutional goals were immediately taken on by the TBMSG while the third goal was a bit more problematic in modern Indian society. In order to overcome obstacles of funding and programming, and to achieve the goals of this third practice of the dharma, the Indian TBM decided, with the help of WBO leaders, to create a social work arm of the organization. Thus the Bahujan Hitay “for the welfare of the many” was created, and the first public health project was started in Pune’s Dapodi slum. Today, with twenty-plus dharma centers situated throughout India (mostly in Maharashtra State), TBMSG is the setting for the community-based social work of Bahujan Hitay. These activities include health projects, educational hostels, kindergartens, vocational training instruction, and movement activism. In 1999, Lokamitra, realizing the need for funding diversification, founded a new Indian trust that he called the Jambudvipa Trust. “Jambudvipa, the ancient Buddhist name for the Indian sub-continent, represents for us the transformation of society and culture through the ethical and spiritual values.” 66 Working on parallel tracts as the TBMSG and Bahujan Hitay, the Jambudvipa Trust runs a number of inter-related programs that are aimed at two areas of societal transformation: the support of “disadvantaged sections” of Indian society and “bringing people together through spiritual practice to transcend barriers.” 67 These two rather broad aims find life in the work of the Manuski Center, the Pune-based home of Jambudvipa’s largest and most expansive project. Run by local members of various scheduled castes, the Manuski Center embodies Dr. Ambedkar’s call to organize, educate, and agitate. In developing a network of activists to monitor and report on atrocities against Dalits across India, Manuski was instrumental in organizing and leading activism in response to the 2006 Khairlanji massacre (see Teltumbe, 2010). Working with the Nagrujuna Institute at Nagaloka (another Jambudvipa project near Nagpur), Manuski works to educate Dalits across India about Buddhism and social change. TBM, through Manuski, Nagaloka, and other education programs, works both locally and transnationally. TBMSG/Jambudvipa/Manuski’s work is best understood as a family of organizations, 68 and projects with activists from one arm freely move among other arms as opportunities are opened both organizationally and politically. The International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB) is a foundational member in

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the work of this family of organizations and networks, collaborating on conferences and other international Buddhist gatherings. With the foundation of a socially engaged Buddhist identity, TBMSG is exemplar of a Dalit Buddhist anticaste identity. TBMSG’s socially engaged Buddhism can be, and has been, questioned as either neo-traditional or selfserving, but its strength and impact are testament to the power of a religiously based collective identity. While the TBMSG family of Ambedkar Buddhist activists continues to face challenges, it remains a force in Maharashtra’s politics and has crafted an identity position that is uniquely its own. While the movement’s own rhetorical statements that it is on the vanguard of turning all of India into Buddhists may be fanciful, the TBMSG has strengthened the Ambedkar Buddhist identity and created a network of Dalit anticaste activists that spans the globe. Still, the TBMSG must be seen as one Ambedkar Dalit activist response among many. Dr. Ambedkar’s life example and writings act as the basis for not just TBMSG but also for many other social movement organizations working for identity, rights, and awareness across India. WHO ARE THE PVCHR? The People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (hereafter PVCHR) is a member-based secular human rights movement that was begun in 1996 in Banaras, Uttar Pradesh. In working with women, children, Dalits, Adivasis (tribal communities), and Muslims, the PVCHR works to ensure human rights and build grassroots advocacy for those most marginalized. With a working base in the villages surrounding the ancient city of Banaras, PVCHR prefers a secular frame as a rights-based social movement organization but actively takes a national movement posture. While PVCHR’s work may seem a far cry from the work of the TBMSG movement, there are similar identity commitments to anticaste activism among members of the two movements despite what some might call differences in the degree of social awareness within these two groups. 69 PVCHR, working in over 120 villages across Uttar Pradesh, has cultivated a network of activists across India (with a stronghold in Uttar Pradesh) focused on creating Jan Mitra Gaon (literally “people friendly villages”) aimed at opening space for the marginalized to work for positive social change in local communities. 70 With the aim of empowering local human rights workers, the PVCHR uses the power of identity, awareness, and storytelling to challenge the elite discourse about caste, ethnicity, and difference in Indian society. PVCHR’s work aims to reconstruct the grammar of the marginalized in order to awaken an awareness of privilege in the powerful. In short, the leadership sees the work of the PVCHR as the work of truth and reconciliation. In a 2014 interview, Dr.

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Lenin Raghuvanshi said PVCHR is working to make “the environment conducive for Truth and Reconciliation.” 71 The PVCHR’s own mission reads like a revolutionary manifesto: “To provide basic rights to all, to eliminate situations, which give rise to exploitation of vulnerable and marginalized groups and to start a movement for a people friendly society (Jan Mitra Samaj) though an institutional approach.” 72 Like TBMSG, PVCHR runs educationally focused hostels and afterschool programs for marginalized communities. Children seem an easy starting place to capture the imagination of both the next generation and those already in powerful positions in society. Casting the net of its impact wider than TBMSG, PVCHR’s marginalized beneficiaries include not only Dalits but also Adavisis, Muslims, and other excluded segments of the Indian population. PVCHR’s more secular and rights-based message allows it to attract Dalit Ambedkarites and Buddhists, as well as, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Adavisis. Fostering an identity that is more globalized citizen than Buddhist, or even Ambedkarite Dalit, allows for a similar focus on awareness of marginalization but less emphasis on social identity among PVCHR members than what one sees in the TBMSG movement. As they argue that “the point of departure . . . is always the meticulous analysis of the individual case,” 73 the PVCHR, like the TBMSG, is filling the void of lack of government services by providing health, education, and rights awareness to marginalized communities. As such, PVCHR, like TBMSG, is in constant conflict with the Indian State structures and bureaucracy. Still, unlike the TBMSG, PVCHR is less focused on collective social identity than on rights awareness to empower the rule of law. Despite the focus on rights awareness to disrupt a “culture of impunity,” 74 PVCHR does advocate a pan-Indian identity in similar ways that we will see that the All India Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation (BAMCEF) does (see Who is BAMCEF? section below). For PVCHR, true change will come through building a “neo-dalit” 75 identity and movement that emphasizes the rule of law, not of “feudal lords.” 76 By focusing on the creation of a neo-Dalit movement, the PVCHR is both taking a multidisciplinary approach to social change and working to break down socially constructed identities that the caste system imposes on individuals. The call for a neo-Dalit movement stems from a social analysis that Dalits alone do not represent a large enough majority to affect lasting social change. In a sense, this call for neo-Dalit movement is a critique of the identity politics of caste. Focusing on the violation of rights, or more broadly speaking, social injustice of the most marginalized and excluded, allows PVCHR movement activists to reconfigure the categories of social action based on social, political, and economic factors that impinge upon actors’ individual rights. Calling for neo-Dalit movement is a call to revolutionary organizing around marginalized rights, not specifically anticaste agitation, and to conceptualize the

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self in individualistic and humanistic terms. Some might interpret this approach as an expression of privilege since it elides the need for Dalit identity creation in favor of developing a broader sense of awareness. Still, the labeling of social action as neo-Dalit is an indirect call for caste change. While this oblique call to organize anticaste (shudra and ati-shudra) identities for change is not unique to the PVCHR, it is unique given their local context of Banares. Described by many anticaste activists as “ground zero” 77 for caste politics in India, Banares is replete with exclusive Hindu spaces and institutions. PVCHR activists regularly put themselves in grave danger in such a context by challenging the status quo of caste-based control. 78 The PVCHR boasts a diverse staff and civil society organizational structure, which benefits and constrains their work among certain populations of people, making the call for neo-Dalit movement complicated. Like all anticaste movements studied herein, the ability to build diverse coalitions of the marginalized is hampered by the complex social relations of caste. Founded by Dr. Lenin Raghuvanshi and his wife, Shruti Nagvanshi, in 1996, the PVCHR was conceived of as an organized movement pushing for change and empowerment through accountability and democratic institutions. As a student, Dr. Raghuvanshi was involved in bonded labor protests and United Nations youth organizing and realized that from his relatively privileged position he could affect much change by empowering the marginalized to claim and pursue their rights as both people and active citizens of the state. In 1993, Lenin became the head of the Uttar Pradesh chapter of the United National Youth Organization. 79 Taking his organizing experience forward, his vision has been one formed by a sense of inclusion and his own relative privilege as an educated upper-caste Kshatriya. Lenin’s radical alterity as a high caste working for the low-caste rights places him in a socially complicated position with both elites and the less fortunate downtrodden. Envisioning themselves as on the vanguard of neo-Dalit movement, Lenin and Shruti have assembled a diverse team of collaborators and agitators to model their own organization and model the democratic change they want for society. Despite at least two books written on the work of PVCHR, 80 little has been written externally about the organization’s historical development, organizational structure, and theory of social change. When in the midst of praxis, documentation of either ongoing or past structural development processes or project activities is often deficient. Clear priority is given to action, social, political, and economic, and this is born of Lenin Raghuvanshi’s own early experience as a community organizer and protest leader. In chapter 3, the tactics and programs of PVCHR are further explained and analyzed. Here the goal is to provide a broad overview of the vision, mission, and organizational structures, which are inspired by, and inspire, these activists’ identity. PVCHR as a secular rights-based social movement is best described by resourcing movement documents and the above cited recent work of Raghu-

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vanshi (2012) and Kaushik and Nagvanshi (2016). Approached holistically, activists privileging of a narrative of empowerment and democratic voice provides a critical accounting of the work of the PVCHR. With a “theory of change” 81 that relies heavily on trust in democratic institutions, PVCHR has grown into a movement, which it claims is 62,000 members strong. 82 While accounts of PVCHR’s work typically begin with an introduction to the bleak context of divided Banaras and an impoverished India, 83 such description is limited here (see foregoing chapters for more on this). In focusing on the who and the why of the movement, rather than on the how (as noted above, movement tactics are further addressed in chapter 3), we begin to understand the complex social constructions that resistance to the caste system creates. These social constructions are borne of resistance to the grim context of marginalization but also require an analysis detached from the processes of problem solving. In other words, in refocusing attention away from the problems to be solved, focus on PVCHR’s professed goals can slow down the systems at play in constructing and maintaining marginalization. While this is important to understanding the PVCHR, it is often the atrocities that drive our understanding of the caste system and the movements for its annihilation. Understanding PVCHR’s theory of change, while it is problem-focused, requires us to remain mindful and attentive to the process of “problem-setting” 84 within the movement. In casting the context of modern India as devoid of truly democratic institutions, PVHCR sets the problem as one of weak citizen awareness and engagement, as well as feeble institutions of governance. Different than TBMSG emphasis on identity and awareness, PVCHR emphasizes rights and awareness and calls the newly aware to engage in different practices and behaviors than those made aware through recourse to common religious or nationalist identity. For this reason, PVCHR spends an inordinate amount of work hours involved in modeling democratic process and advocacy both within the structure of the organization and within the communities it serves. Such work underscores a commitment to a theory of change that privileges democratic institutions and rule of law as a means to build collaborative community relationship rather than simply awareness education. In 2010, PVCHR went through a comprehensive organizational development process. 85 This organizational development process called for the streamlining of the organizational setup and “institutionalizing professionalism in the organization.” 86 The organizational structure that emerged from this process was one in which a governance structure of an organizational board and representative assembly of movement members had regular contact with the Office of the PVCHR director (Lenin Raghuvanshi). Under the director are administrative and financial teams, which through a smaller executive team now manages the day-to-day work of the various programs in which PVCHR is engaged. In modeling a democratic organizational struc-

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ture, the PVCHR is modeling its unique theory of change. Rather than focusing on awareness and identity creation, as the TBMSG does through supporting the Buddhist dharma (teaching) and Sangha (community), PVCHR is involved in building relations between diverse communities through modeling and teaching awareness of individual rights and rule-of-law institutions. PVCHR, as focused on inclusive ideas of reconciliation between the historically marginalized and privileged, represents a secular and rights-based wing of the larger anticaste activist movement. How organizations such as PVCHR emphasize rights and awareness over identity is directly related to who they are and where they perceive that their key constituencies/beneficiaries sit within society. WHO IS BAMCEF? While the national anticaste movement All India Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation (BAMCEF) has had little written academically about it, 87 this middle-class movement’s impact on anticaste movement thinking and discourse greatly outweighs this relative lack of scholarly attention. BAMCEF’s influence as a torch bearer of anticaste activism stems from the context and life of its primary founders, Kanshi Ram and D. K. Khaparde. In the context of the early 1970s, a time when faith in electoral politics was at an ebb, Kanshi Ram and D. K. Khaparde, both civil servants in the local Pune, Maharashtra, government, began to dream about a middle-class response to injustice, which would shun the political trappings of existing political parties and energize local constituencies. Following what they term the “Phule-Ambedkaritism ideology 88 that calls those with means to give back to society, these leaders saw the great untapped potential of a growing Dalit middle class that had just begun to reap the rewards of Dalit uplift. Frustrated with the Pune government’s published list of official holidays, which overlooked Dr. Baba Saheb Ambedkar’s birthday in favor of a high-caste nationalist leader, Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920), these leaders organized a collective protest from low-caste government employees in Pune. Rajivlochan and Rajivlochan (2014) see this action as unique in two ways: “one, seldom do office employees of the government of India express collective umbrage for causes other than service conditions. . . . Two, those who were taking umbrage in the present instance were confined to what earlier would have been known as belonging to the depressed classes.” 89 In marking a shift in middle-class awareness, Ram’s and Khaparde’s resistance awakened many low castes to the power of their collective voice. This initial local Maharashtra-based foray into organizing was the catalyst for a nationallevel organizing that began in 1973 and that would eventually grow BAMCEF into a social movement organization. In the words of one BAMCEF

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cadre leader, the “Phule-Ambedkarite ideology constructed by BAMCEF represented an important contribution to anticaste movement in the postAmbedkar period.” 90 It did so by reframing anticaste activism as not tied to either politics or religion and focusing on activists as “engaged in the production and maintenance of meaning for constituents, antagonists, bystanders, or observers.” 91 Khaparde’s and Ram’s protest at their government posts marked an auspicious shift in the modern anticaste struggle. While internationally, trust in government and politics was at an all-time low at this time, following highlevel scandals such as Watergate in the United States, locally this dynamic opened opportunity space to mobilize new sites of resistance. In Pune, a stronghold of support and reverence for both Phule and Ambedkar, the political party that Ambedkar himself had formed, the Republican Party of India (RPI), was broiled by infighting and corruption. As this jockeying for power within the party limited its reach and effectiveness, middle-class workers were left little outlet for their skills and concerns. In this context, Khaparde’s and Ram’s protest “underlined something that had been left unsaid in public spaces till now.” 92 Despite great leaps forward in education and economic advancement by the depressed classes, there still remained social exclusion, humiliation, and caste-based control in the status quo across India. With no effective means to overcome the humiliation of social exclusion, many educated and newly economically independent Dalits were hungry for a way to give back to their community. While TBMSG and PVCHR both began as efforts to organize from below, BAMCEF emerged from a different cultural context. As a movement concerned primarily with organizing the upper crust of the Dalit community—those with some access to resources—to have a real impact on social change, BAMCEF was born out of an ambitious fiveyear planning process among this Maharashtra-based leadership. By 1978, BAMCEF was officially inaugurated as a national movement. Fashioning itself as a non-political movement for “social revolution,” 93 BAMCEF abjures politics and instead focuses on organizing the oppressed majority, or what it has come to call Mulnivasi (indigenous) peoples. Who these Mulnivasi peoples are is of great interest to the BAMCEF movement, as well as a location of identity contention with other anticaste movements. In describing who is BAMCEF, it is almost impossible to overlook the term Mulnivasi; in fact, one could argue that it is the real meaning of the “M” in BAMCEF. BAMCEF’s own descriptions of its movement seem to be unable to omit this important socio-historical understanding of Indian society. In describing the constituent parts of its name, BAMCEF-produced literature states: As far as the term Minority is concerned, it refers to the religious minorities. Social scientists have proved that during the course of history some of the

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Chapter 1 Mulnivasi (indigenous people) of India i.e. the present day S.C., S.T., and O.B.C. got converted to different religions at different points of time. These mainly include Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and Buddhists. It is for this reason that we have decided to organize employees from S.C., S.T., O.B.C. and converted minority communities. 94

The goal of creating a Mulnivasi Bahujan Samaj (literally indigenous majority community) inculcates the cadres of BAMCEF workers with missionary zeal. At its retrospective and introspective twenty-fifth National Convention in 2004, BAMCEF articulated what it means by its broader objective of social change by listing, among others, the following important sub-objectives: 1. To inculcate the feeling of “pay back to society” among the intellectual class as social obligation. 2. To strengthen the non-political roots in the Mulnivasi Bahujan Samaj. 3. To develop objective-oriented and objective-inspired awakening of the Mulnivasi Bahujan Samaj. 4. To create awakening among the 6,000 Backward castes of Mulnivasi Bahujan Samaj and a feeling of brotherhood among them and to attain social polarization by uniting them. 5. To generate human and financial resources for making our social movement self-reliant. To utilize and manage developed human resources. 95 As is clear from these sub-objectives, the importance of an indigenous majority community of the humiliated and marginalized is a grounding identity for BAMCEF movement activists, which are formed into what they call cadres. While discussion of the structure and tactics of BAMCEF cadres will be taken up further in chapter 3, additional exploration of this Mulnivasi identity is needed to understand the practical and collaborative means of awareness advocated by BAMCEF cadres. As a social movement organization involved in what BAMCEF itself calls “missionary works,” 96 BAMCEF promotes its works through a nonpolitical and non-religious cadre-based structure that ensures new recruits are brought into the fold of their ideology before becoming active movement members. This work originates from the central-level leadership of the organization and disseminates outwards to the villages. The goal of this work could be broadly construed as shifting the awareness of the marginalized toward a collaborative understanding of their true historical connections and present-day power base. While this identity is both complicated and contested by segments of the larger anticaste movement, it is BAMCEF’s belief that raising awareness and organizing around this identity non-politically can

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form the foundation for creating lasting social change in the caste system. Although BAMCEF frames the fact that it cannot “take part in activities of any political party” because doing so “shall amount to violation of the Civil Service Code of Conduct” as a “limitation,” 97 in fact this “limitation” can be seen as engendering a strict practicality in the movement. Indeed, BAMCEF is practical, methodical, and in lockstep as it creates this identity, being careful not to jeopardize the progress it has worked to develop over many years. When asked to describe his identity, one BAMCEF leader and former volunteer cadre said: We are the Mulnivasi of India—we are Mulnivasi of India. Earlier in our forefathers’ day, there were no Varnas and Jatis, [no] caste and discrimination but when Aryans became powerful they divided us to Varna and Jati and they deprived us of education. Our forefathers were illiterate, but now I am literate and educated . . . and also I am an intellectual. I am against this Varna and Jati. I believe in humanity. 98

This is not a rare sentiment or description of their identity from many interviews I conducted with BAMCEF leaders and cadre. Caste annihilation is a battle for history; the evolution of difference, for BAMCEF, is an evolution that ends in rule by the Mulnivasi majority. BAMCEF is a complex social movement organization, both similar and different than the other social movement organizations outlined above. Like PVCHR, BAMCEF’s primary focus is to raise awareness to inaugurate a social revolution, but like TBMSG, BAMCEF is also working hard to establish a new identity, even if that identity is not religious in character (though possibly in practice). Like TBMSG and PVCHR, BAMCEF is aiming for the annihilation of caste, but its theory of practice for how this casteless state of affairs will be realized is quite different. Not through fear, but rather a unique blend of historical awareness and indigenous identity, BAMCEF sees itself on the vanguard of a class revolution in India. While TBMSG talks of a Dharma revolution, 99 BAMCEF talks of “rais[ing] the social level of the oppressed and exploited society as a whole.” 100 While PVCHR speaks of supporting the neo-Dalit movement, BAMCEF talks of Mulnivasi Bahujan Samaj (indigenous majority society). The scope and reach of BAMCEF, while predominantly India-focused, is greater than either TBMSG or PVCHR. In playing out these many similarities and differences throughout the rest of this book, the goal is to underscore the discursive opportunities available to all these various wings of the anticaste movement and explore the evolution of change through narrative.

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CONCLUSIONS: CONFRONTING CASTE AS A COMPLEX SYSTEM OF DIFFERENCE THROUGH THE ONGOING EVOLUTION OF CASTE NARRATIVE While this chapter has outlined the ideas of caste and anticaste identity in India, it is by no means the final word on this complex concept. As will be evident throughout this book, words, like narrative, matter greatly. In understanding caste as a unique evolution of difference, movements can realize differing strategies to realize change. There is no claim to generalized caste expertise here; rather, experience and interaction with anticaste activists and movements opens a critical and reflective lens. My experience and interaction with anticaste activists and movements holds important opportunities for realizing continued, yet positive change, in the caste system. Realizing that difference is resource, not just a constraint or limitation, can have powerful impacts on the anticaste fight. That modern caste exclusion has become a contemporary fight over contested histories, while overwhelming to the researcher of caste, is an opportunity for anticaste activists working on the front lines of identity, rights, and awareness. Attention to discourse and language is a critical aspect of this opportunity. The following chapter explores further injustice awareness and the role that narrative plays in constructing, maintaining, and overcoming unjust systems. While a narrative approach to injustice by no means solves all problems of caste oppression and difference, in building on this broad overview of the caste system in India, it is being argued that narrative understanding and analysis are critical to both grasping the lived experience of the marginalized and initiating lasting social change. NOTES 1. Neil DeVotta and Sumit Ganguly, Understanding Contemporary India, 2nd edition (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 2010), 2. 2. Charles Pierce, “Tip O’Neill’s Idea That All Politics is Local,” Esquire, July 17, 2015. See: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a36522/how-all-government-is-local-and-thats-how-it-dies/. Retrieved March 29, 2018. 3. Andre Beteille, “The Future of the Backward Classes: The Competing Demands of Status and Power,” in Society and Politics in India: Essays in a Comparative Perspective (London: Anthlone Press, 1991), 150. 4. Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 5. 5. Andre Beteille, “The Future of the Backward Classes,” 151. 6. Ibid., 150. 7. Bhimrao Ambedkar, “Castes in India,” quoted in The Essential Writings of B. R. Ambedkar, ed. Valarian Rodriguez (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 253. 8. Ibid., 260. 9. See the Complete Mandal commission Report, http://www.ncbc.nic.in/User_Panel/ UserView.aspx?TypeID=1161, accessed May 31, 2017. Of the several official categories of difference that the Indian government established in Mandal are the categories of Scheduled

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Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), and Other Backward Castes (OBCs). These broad distinctions are used by the Indian Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment to ensure fair allocation of social and economic development resources from the Indian state. These somewhat arbitrary government classifications, though contested, are critical for the operation of the Indian caste reservation system. There is substantial debate over the exact number of OBCs in India, though it is generally estimated to be one of the more sizable populations of the marginalized in India. OBCs in particular are a broad and contested category with castes and communities regularly being added or removed depending on social, educational, and economic factors. 10. Sara Cobb, Speaking of Violence: The Politics and Poetics of Narrative Dynamics in Conflict Resolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 89. Much more will be said on Cobb’s approach to narrative violence as we progress though this book. 11. Iris Young, “Five Faces of Oppression,” in Seth Asumah and Methchild Nagel, eds., Diversity, Social Justice and Inclusive Excellence (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 11. 12. Sukhadeo Thorat and Katherine Newman, “Introduction, Economic Discrimination: Concepts, Consequences, and Remedies,” in Blocked By Caste: Economic Discrimination in Modern India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5. 13. P. S. Judge, Mapping Social Exclusion in India: Caste, Religion, and Borderlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 6. 14. Ibid., 7. 15. Iris Young, “Five Faces of Oppression,” 11. 16. Diane Mines, Caste in India (Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2009), 15. 17. Anand Teltumbde, The Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders and India’s Hidden Apartheid (New York: Zed Books, 2010), 12. 18. J. H. Hutton, Caste in India: Its Nature, Function and Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946), 50. 19. Declan Quigley, The Interpretation of Caste (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 9. 20. Debjani Ganguly, Castes and Dalit Lifeworlds: Postcolonial Perspectives (Hyderabad: Orient Black Swan, 2005), 3. 21. Diane Mines, Castes in India, 15. See also Vivek Kumar, “Situating Social Exclusion in the Context of Caste: A Case of Dalits in India,” in P. S. Judge, ed., Mapping Social Exclusion in India: Caste, Religion, and Borderlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 57. 22. Declan Quigley, The Interpretation of Caste, 5. 23. Anand Teltumbde, The Persistence of Caste, 13. 24. Gail Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr. Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1994), 31–32. 25. See Milner (1994), Sharma (1997), Beteille (1996), and Shrirama (1999) among many others. 26. Shrirama (1999), 42. 27. See Edwin Bryant and Laurie Patton, eds., The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in India History (New York: Routledge, 2005). 28. Rosalind O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict, and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Lowcaste Protest in Nineteenth-century Western India (London: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 6. While there is much debate as to the origins of the term untouchable many scholars tie it to the economic classifications systems used during British colonial times. See also Hutton (1946), Deliege (1999), and Dirks (2001). Dirks (2001) argues that in many parts of India the colonial “debate over classification revolved around the question of whether to identify groups on the basis of their depressed status (which could be established by their social, economic, and cultural backwardness) or in reference to the specific criteria of ritual and social exclusion” (277). 29. Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind, 133. 30. Personal interviews with TBMSG movement leaders and International Center for Dalit Rights (ICDR) activists (Summer 2008). See also, Diane Mines, Castes in India, 14.

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31. Robert Deliege, “The Myth Origin of the Indian Untouchables,” Man, 28:3, 1993, 535. 32. Vivek Kumar, “Situating Social Exclusion in the Context of Caste,” 58. 33. Many of the ongoing social conflicts over reserved seats (i.e., reservations) in India can be explained with reference to relative deprivation theory—one caste or sub-caste feeling deprived of the benefits of reserved seats relative to another caste or sub-caste. See Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). 34. See the excellent quantification of caste discrimination in Indian markets by Thorat and Newman (2010) as an example. Sukhadeo Thorat and Katherine Newman, eds., Blocked by Caste: Economic Discrimination in Modern India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 35. See the important work of Jaffrelot (2003), among others. Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of Low Castes in North Indian Politics (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003). 36. Christopher John Fuller, ed., Caste Today (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 13–14. 37. James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 183. 38. James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 4. 39. Gail Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution, 13–14. Omvedt calls such approaches “diversionary” (14) and argues that they miss the “development of ideologies of Dalit liberation” (17). While this author agrees with Omvedt’s analysis, the argument developed in this work aims to place greater emphasis for change on the “discursive formations” (17) Omvedt identifies but seems to overlook in her analysis of Dalit movement ideology. 40. See, for example, Valmiki (2003); Kamble (2008); Dangle (2009); and Pawar (2015). 41. Murray Milner, Status and Sacredness: A General Theory of Status Relations and an Analysis of Indian Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 46. 42. Stephanie Barbour, Tiasha Palikovic, Jeena Shah, and Smita Narula, Hidden Apartheid: Caste Discrimination Against India’s “Untouchables” Shadow Report to the UN Committee on the Elimination of racial Discrimination (New York: The Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and the New York University School of Law, 2007), 14. 43. B. L. Mungekar, “State, Market, and the Dalits: Analytics of the New Economic Policy,” in S. M. Michael, ed., Dalits in Modern India: Vision and Values (New Delhi: Vistaar Publications, 1999), 294. 44. Srinavas (1996) defines this process as such: “Sanskritization is the process by which a ‘low’ Hindu caste, or tribal or other group, changes its customs, ritual, ideology and way of life in the direction of a high, and frequently, ‘twice-born’ caste. Generally, such changes are followed by a claim to a higher position in the caste hierarchy than that traditionally conceded to the claimant caste by the local community.” M. N. Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1966), 6. 45. Personal interview with Dr. P. D. Satya Pal, Nagpur, July 25, 2016. 46. Mungekar, “State, Market, and the Dalits,” op. cit. (1999, 294). 47. Vasant Moon, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, vol. 2. (Mumbai: Government of Maharashtra, 1982). 48. Zelliot (1992) quoted in Kumar (2002). Eleanor Zelliot, From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement (New Delhi: Manohar, 1992), 131. Vivek Kumar, Dalit Leadership in India (New Delhi: Kalpaz Publications, 2002), 100. 49. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress. Education as the Practice of Freedom (London: Routledge, 1994), 207. 50. Sydney Tarrow, Power-In-Movement: Social Movement and Contentious Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 20. 51. One recent example of civil society taking advantage of political opportunity can be seen in the responses to the November 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks. These horrific events opened up activism around the poor government response to the attacks and led activist organizations to engage in creative critical organizing. See also Micah White, The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution (Canada: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016) for a discussion about political opportunity structures and the recent Occupy Movement.

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52. D. G. Gil, Confronting Injustice and Oppression: Concepts and Strategies for Social Workers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 39. See also Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, M. B. Ramos, Trans. 30th Anniversary ed. (New York: Continuum, 2006). 53. For a good discussion of the aesthetic ethics “re-authoring” others’ stories in conflict practice, see Sara Cobb, Speaking of Violence: The Politics and Poetics of Narrative Dynamics in Conflict Resolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 238–40. In “re-authoring” their collective awareness, I believe that anticaste activists are less focused on conflict resolution than they are on transformation of the caste problem. In short, anticaste activists aim to help low-caste to re-author their understanding of their past victimization not necessarily with the aim of resolution, but rather agitation and transformation. 54. For more on this see Jeremy Rinker, “Why Should We Talk to People Who Do Not Want to Talk to Us? Inter-Caste Dialogue as a Response to Caste-Based Marginalization,” Peace and Change, Volume 38: Number 2 (April 2013): 237–62, and Jeremy Rinker, “Justpeace Prospects for Peace-building and Worldview Tolerance: A South Asian Movement’s Social Construction of Justice,” Doctoral Dissertation, Doctor of Philosophy in Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University, 2009. 55. See both Jeremy Rinker, “Narrative Reconciliation as Rights-Based Peace Praxis: Custodial Torture, Testimonial Therapy and Overcoming Marginalization,” Peace Research: The Canadian Journal of Peace and Conflict Studies (Vol. 46: No. 1 & 2, 2016) and Jeremy Rinker, “Engaging Narrative as Rights-Based Peace Praxis: Framing, Naming, and Witnessing in Overcoming Structural Violence and Marginalization,” chapter 18, in T. Matyok and P. Kellet, eds., Communication and Conflict Transformation through Local, Regional, and Global Engagement (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 355–76. 56. Lisa Schirch, “Ritual Reconciliation: Transforming Identity/Reframing Conflict,” in M. Abu Nimer, ed., Reconciliation, Justice, and Coexistence: Theory and Practice (New York: Lexington Books, 2001), 146. Schirch writes: “Symbolic approaches grow out of an understanding that humans have a need to symbolically understand who they are and how they relate to their environment.” Such an approach moves away from the functionalist emphasis on conflict process and instead directs attention to relationship and experience. Conflict transformation practice that takes a symbolic approach places agency back in the hands of conflict parties, eliciting organic solutions through participatory work with actors’ own narratives. 57. See Alan Sponberg, “TBMSG: A Dharma revolution in Contemporary India,” in C. Queen and S. King, eds., Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia (New York: SUNY Press, 1996), 73–120. See also Kantowsky (2003), who translates TBMSG slightly differently as the “Union of the Helpers of the Buddhist Great Order of the Three Worlds.” Detlef Katowsky, Buddhists in India Today, op. cit., 135. In 2010, the worldwide movement changed the beginning of its name, upon the request of both Indian and English leadership, from the Trailokya to Triratna; the significance of this change established the focus of the community on the three jewels (Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha) as opposed to a more numinous conception of the three realms or Worlds. 58. This claim of representation is disputed by other Ambedkar Buddhist anticaste groups and activists, but there is little dispute that Ambedkar Buddhists represent the largest indigenous Buddhist community in modern India. 59. In 1991, the number of FWBO members worldwide was estimated to be only about 100,000. See Martin Baumann, “Work as Dharma Practice: Right Livelihood Cooperatives of the FWBO,” in C. Queen, ed., Engaged Buddhism in the West (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2000), 372. 60. C. Argyris and D. Schon, Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1974). 61. Dharmachari Subhuti, Bringing Buddhism to the West: A Life of Sangharakshita (Birmingham: Windhorse Publications, 1995), 39. 62. Dharmachari Sangharakshita outlines his own story in autobiographical form in Facing Mount Kanchenjunga: An English Buddhist in the Eastern Himalaya (London: Windhorse Publications, 2004). 63. Martin Baumann, “Work as Dharma Practice,” op. cit., 372.

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64. Dharmachari Subhuti, Buddhism for Today: A Portrait of a New Buddhist Movement (London: Windhorse Publications, 1983), 147. 65. For an overview of the structure and organizations which are run and managed by TBMSG members, see Alan Sponberg, “TBMSG: A Dharma Revolution in Contemporary India,” op. cit. 1996. 66. Padmapani, the annual review of the Jambudvipa Trust, 2007–2008, 4. 67. Ibid., 3. 68. In this sense TBMSG operates in much the same way that their far-right ideological nemesis, the Sangh Parivar, operates. Of course, their ideological foundations are polar opposite to that of Hindutva forces. 69. In colloquial slang discourse concerning U.S. race relations, activists often talk about being “woke.” This signals a social awareness about the issues of race and privilege and can be used to socially position people as more or less aware of the concrete everyday effects of race on people’s lives. In the Indian context, activists are similarly positioned as more or less aware of the Dalit marginalization experience and abuses of their rights. PVCHR is often criticized by other Dalit rights activists as too rights focused or too Gandhian in their approach. For example, the PVCHR focus of Jan Mitra Gaon (People Friendly Villages—described further in this chapter and chapter 3) has been cited as an example of this difference by anticaste activists not directly involved with the PVCHR movement (Rinker, Field Notes, July 2016). Any attempt to return to Gandhi-style village life is interpreted by many anticaste activists as neo-colonial and unawares of the experience of Dalit life in Indian villages. 70. PVCHR, “13 years a Struggle of PVCHR (1996–2009),” Voice of the Voiceless, 1:1 (November 2010), 44. 71. Mushtaq Ul Haq, “Prominent Activist and Co-Founder Peoples Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (PVCHR), Lenin Raghuvanshi in a conversation with Mushtaq Ul Haq Ahmad Sikander, about his early life, influences, work, Hindutva and future plans”—accessed March 10, 2017—http://thekashmirscenario.com/2014/04/prominent-activist-co-founder-peoples-vigilance-committee-human-rights-pvchr-lenin-raghuvanshi-conversation-mushtaq-ul-haq-ahmadsikander-early-life-influences-work-h/. 72. PVCHR, “13 years a Struggle of PVCHR (1996–2009),” 44. 73. PVCHR, “13 years a Struggle of PVCHR (1996–2009),” 46. 74. Lenin Raghuvanshi, Justice, Liberty, Equality: Dalits in Independent India (London: Frontpage, 2012), 5. 75. Ben Duboc, “Call for a neo-Dalit movement to overthrow feudalism, neo-fascism, and neo-liberalism through popular action,” in Voice of the Voiceless, 4:1 (January 2013), 1. 76. Lenin Raghuvanshi, Justice, Liberty, Equality, op. cit., 5. 77. Rinker, Field Notes, July 2016. 78. See Lenin Raghuvanshi, Justice, Liberty, Equality, op. cit., 118–119. Here the writer and co-founder of PVCHR describes his own house being surrounded in “an attempt to assassinate me” (118) and documents his, thus far fruitless, attempts at recourse through democratic human rights institutions in India. 79. Mushtaq Ul Haq, op. cit. 80. See Raghuvanshi, Justice, Liberty, Equality: Dalits in Independent India (London: Frontpage, 2012) and A. Kaushik and S. Nagvanshi, Margins to Centre Stage: Empowering Dalits in India (London: Frontpage, 2016). 81. See C. Argyris and D. Schon, Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1974). J. P. Lederach, R. Neufeldt, and H. Culbertson, Reflective Peacebuilding: A planning, monitoring, and learning toolkit (Notre Dame, IN: Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame, 2007). Available at: http:// kroc.nd.edu/sites/default/files/reflective_peacebuilding.pdf. 82. Amit Singh, “Human Rights situation in India going from bad to worse: Prominent Indian Human Rights Defender Dr. Lenin Raghuvanshi, tells The Oslo Times,” February 4, 2017. http://www.theoslotimes.com/article/human-rights-situation-in-india-going-from-bad-toworse%3A-prominent-indian-human-rights-defender-dr.-lenin-raghuvanshi,-tells-the-oslotimes#sthash.1Xmjdk6i.dpuf—accessed March 8, 2017.

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83. See Raghuvanshi (2012) and Kaushik and Nagvanshi (2016) as prime examples of this trend. 84. Donald Schon, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 19. 85. PVCHR, “13 years a Struggle of PVCHR (1996–2009),” Voice of the Voiceless, 1:1 (November 2010). 86. Ibid., 36. 87. Tanoj Meshram, “Anticaste Movement in India led by BAMCEF: A Case Study.” Unpublished paper, Heller School of Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University, 2014. 88. The “Phule-Ambedkaritism ideology,” in invoking the names of anticaste revolutionaries Jyotirao Phule (1827–1890) and Bhimrao Ramji Ambebkar (1891–1956), is the kind of ideology where “praxis-ideals and strategies are blended.” In short, “Phule-Ambedkaritism is the ideology of annihilation of caste.” BAMCEF, “Souvenir on the Occasion of Silver Jubilee National Convention” (New Delhi: BAMCEF National Headquarters, 2004), 8. 89. Meeta Rajivlochan and M. Rajivlochan, “Coping with Exclusions the Non-Political Way” in P. S. Judge, ed., Mapping Social Exclusion in India: Caste, Religion, and Borderlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 95. 90. Tanoj Meshram, “Anticaste Movement in India led by BAMCEF,” 11. 91. Robert Benford and David Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An overview and Assessment,” Annual Review of Sociology, 26 (2000), 613. 92. Meeta Rajivlochan and M. Rajivlochan, “Coping with Exclusions the Non-Political Way,” 95. 93. BAMCEF Central Executive Committee, BAMCEF: An Institution of Social Change (Mumbai: D. K. Khaparde Memorial Trust, 2004), 6. 94. Ibid., 4. 95. BAMCEF, “Souvenir on the Occasion of Silver Jubilee National Convention,” 7. 96. Central Executive Committee of BAMCEF, BAMCEF: An Institution of Social Change, 20. 97. Central Executive Committee of BAMCEF, BAMCEF: An Institution of Social Change, 19. 98. Personal Interview with BAMCEF leadership, D. K. Khaparde Memorial Trust, Ringnabodhi, Maharashtra, July 23, 2016. 99. See Alan Sponberg (1996), op. cit. 100. Central Executive Committee of BAMCEF, BAMCEF: An Institution of Social Change, 5.

Chapter Two

Narrative Violence and Injustice Awareness Reading Anticaste Activism as Narrative for Social Change

Even though low-caste identity is forged in opposition to other, more privileged identities, the meaning of caste identities is always conveyed through narrative storytelling. Human beings not only live by making meaning through story but produce profound social change and social inertias in the process of telling stories and constructing complex collective narratives. Individual narratives (what are here synonymous with stories) express identity through character development, convey virtues through plot structure, and develop meaningful awareness through setting and context. Collective narratives are themselves crafted from the parts of individual stories. How the meaning of marginal caste identity is formed, maintained, and transformed through individual stories and collective narratives is the focus of this second chapter. As important as it is to understand caste identity as the evolution of difference through processes of the othering associated with power and privilege (see chapter 1), it is equally critical to appreciate this evolution as a narrative process, and as such dependent on social constructions and their malleable and dynamic nature. Without mincing words, it is through processes of narrative construction that social identities are formed, solidified, and changed. The stories people tell, as parts of larger narratives, hold the power to control and change social systems. The stories we tell matter; they are vested with power that few realize or acknowledge. How stories change social systems in turn depends on social network mobilization and political opportunities 1 available to social actors. In the words of Arthur Frank: “Peo33

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ple choose stories, but they have less choice about the principles that set their choosing.” 2 The same may be said about social actors’ primary identities— they choose them, but not independently of a number of factors outside of social actors’ own control and manipulation. Frank calls the work of exploring these many factors a process of “socio-narratology” 3 and emphasizes the fact that stories have their own socially constructed facility. Narrative, though a much-abused concept in the modern social sciences, has its own social agency—it is not benign and harmless, but rather meaning making and potentially controlling of actors’ social behaviors. Narratives exert a control over the ways that social actors tell, hear, and listen to stories. Following Jabri’s (1996) sense of narrative as texts, they “do not describe things, they do things.” 4 Caste, then, is perpetuated and controlled, to some extent anyway, by narrative means. It is within the discursive space of narrative agency that identity is grounded, power is transformed, and social change is initiated. By narrative agency I am referring to “the capacity to develop a story about self in which one is an agent.” 5 Stories are told within a discursive space that is aimed at changing or maintaining narrative agency, and thus, larger collective narrative and discursive structures. The analysis of narrative is, therefore, crucial to understanding identity, awareness, and rights. In privileging narrative analysis 6 as a methodological and theoretical grounding for lasting social change, this second chapter, like chapter 1, provides a contextual and theoretical framing for the anticaste social movement organizations that are critically interrogated in the rest of the book. While understanding narrative is no silver bullet for creating positive social change, it is a key element in grasping the lived-experience of injustice, which is an important first step in initiating what I have come to call protracted social change. 7 In a sense, a narrative approach works to equalize stories from below. Simply put, how social collectives make sense of past injustices 8 has profound impacts on how they make sense of themselves and their future goals. So how do anticaste activists use stories, and what can we learn from activists’ deployment of stories? Such questions lead us toward a strategic awareness of language as a means to honor identity while simultaneously pressing for social change. Language in this sense is the grounds for identity, rights, and awareness for social change. In attempting to answer questions about the use and deployment of stories, I will revisit both some hagiographic and some more recent narratives of the Indian anticaste movement. 9 Such narratives hold clues for identity, awareness, and rights as much as they hold the keys for broader social change of unjust systems. Stories map the terrain of what, building on Booth’s (2001) idea of “memory justice,” 10 I have, elsewhere, come to call “identity justice.” 11 Inseparable, identity and justice, in movements for social uplift of the marginalized, become a cognate term. By cognate term, I mean to say that the idea of identity and the conceptual-

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ization of justice become connected in such a way that one cannot be understood without reference to the other. The symbiosis of these ideas is subtle and powerful. As activist stories of injustice become imbricated with stories of identity formation and each concept becomes inextricably linked to the other, social actors’ ability to transform the narratives to which they are a party becomes increasingly difficult. In other words, this metonymic 12 relationship between identity and justice has interesting implications for narrative agency and social change. It is in exploring and understanding these implications that movement assets and resilience to oppression can be strategically developed. While one could remain mystified by the complexity of identity justice as a compound term, by resisting the inclination to understand identity and justice as distinct social realities and building instead a sense of identity justice among anticaste activists, reflective attention is drawn toward discursive awareness and narrative agency and away from destructive social positioning. 13 While this does not discount the very real dynamics of power at play in systems of oppression, it does take an appreciative approach toward change inquiry. In simultaneously challenging existing narratives of injustice and developing discursive awareness of their collective identity, anticaste activists can strategically deploy stories that have the ability to change long solidified and calcified narratives and shift unfavorable discourses. But how activists tell these stories does have an impact on who chooses to hear them. When and where they are deployed also matters. While the act of storytelling can work to change societal narratives of past injustice and create concrete avenues for awareness and change in the present, they also can reify unjust systems of power and solidify opposition to change from the periphery. In reading anticaste activism as a narrative of social change, we build a strategic awareness of the power of stories to construct prosocial narratives of change. Without getting too deep into the complex sociological debate over structure versus agency, 14 suffice it to say that both identity and justice are effected by, and effect, the other. In this symbiotic relationship narratives, and more basically, meaning as articulated through stories, represent an important vector of both social understanding and change. Stories play an important mediating role for both anti-social and prosocial transformations of society. Listening to and providing space for stories are, therefore, a crucial aspect of any conflict transformation process. 15 Of course, developing the space and structures to build relationships are primary to any process of social change in identity, rights, and sociological awareness. But beyond space and structure, conflict transformation processes also demand strategic attention and reflection on communicative norms, social positioning, and narrative context. “Parties to a conflict develop a narrative that anchors themselves in relation to their opponents. Alterations to the narrative can destabilize identity and relationships across networks of people.” 16 Helping parties

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in conflict to understand the narratives that anchor them is a critical first step in creating social change. In looking closely at the stories of anticaste, and particularly, Ambedkarite activists, my aim is not to discredit their unique worldviews or challenge their need for the creation of a distinct and socially powerful identity, but rather to provide a critical assessment of the effectiveness of their framing and deployment of stories and, thus, their unique use of narrative agency and social identity. That activists’ narrative agency comes through the interconnection of identity and justice is an important realization for the marginalized, but of equal importance is an understanding that narrative holds much power to make change. Taking a critical lens to the narratives that activists tell can help to develop strategic awareness of narrative processes among activists. This strategic awareness is important because without it stories can, at best, have little effect, and, at worst, reproduce marginalization. In her book It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics, Francesca Polletta explains “with the right narrative tools, disadvantaged groups today may be able to style victims as guides to the social bases of inequality.” 17 In this sense then, this chapter, and indeed the entire book, is an example of “action research,” 18 in that it aims to develop narrative awareness, and thus strategic capacities, among anticaste activists as social change agents. Developing a metaphorical activist tool box of narrative strategy is best achieved and articulated through the analysis of the stories activists themselves tell. The remainder of the chapter explores the concept of narrative violence within the context of anticaste movement narratives, both old and new. Working to overcome narrative violence involves a complicated interplay between identity and justice, as well as an awareness of the social relationships and collective impacts of structural violence. In using stories to illustrate the, often hidden, role of narrative violence in systems of oppression, the chapter builds a foundation for a deeper explanation and critical analysis of three exemplar modern anticaste organizations and their discursive strategies for fermenting social change from both the center and periphery of anticaste activism. ACKNOWLEDGING NARRATIVE VIOLENCE: THE LESSERKNOWN COUSIN IN A SYSTEMATIC TYPOLOGY OF VIOLENCE Much like the unique personage of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar is seen as the father of the Indian nation and an important father of anticaste activism, fields of study also have their respective “fathers.” In the field of Peace and Conflict Studies, Johan Galtung is often seen as such a father (or grandfather) by many scholars and activists alike. We, in the field of Peace and Conflict Studies, regularly rely on Johan Galtung’s seminal typology of violence to understand how to develop peaceful systems. Galtung, in endeavoring to

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define peace, clearly understood that he first had to better understand its opposite—violence. In his seminal 1969 article entitled “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” 19 he developed a typology of violence that is often represented as the three sides of an equilateral triangle. With direct, structural, and cultural violence representing each side of this equilateral triangle, as if each side’s understanding was equally critical to realizing and actualizing peace, Galtung’s violence triangle simultaneously complicates and clarifies any path toward sustained positive peace. Galtung’s (1969) violence triangle helped develop the base understanding for him to coin critical concepts like “structural violence” and “negative and positive peace,” which have propelled much writing and thinking on peace research and social change over the last almost half a century. Galtung’s concept of structural violence, as it is linked closely with ideas of social justice, has particularly spawned much discussion and new ideas in not just the peace studies and conflict transformation discipline, but also other disciplines as well (see Farmer [2004], Ho [2007], Caprioli [2005], among others as examples of this critical and interdisciplinary discussion). 20 It is, indeed, the pervasive and elusive reality of structural violence in the lives of anticaste activists that mobilizes an identity for change and builds an awareness of rights. In this regard, structural violence represents the foundational context to challenge in creating social change. But, how does one challenge the agent-less and systemic beast of structural violence? This is the perennial question for those that revere Dr. Ambedkar as the father of the modern anticaste movement. Structural violence refers to systematic ways in which social structures harm or otherwise disadvantage individuals in a society. As systemic and structural, unlike direct or personal violence, this form of violence does not have a clear perpetrator or social agent. It is often hidden and cunning to those attempting to expose and eradicate it. Structural violence is also culturally and historically conditioned in such ways that its emergence is often difficult to predict or notice. One example Galtung (1969) himself uses to illustrate the concept of structural violence is the disease tuberculosis (or TB). If a person died from TB in the eighteenth century, one could not conceive of this as a form of violence because it might have been completely unavoidable—with no understanding of the disease, society had no ability to cure or even control it. This lack of individual or collective agency marks such misfortune and suffering as distinct from any form of violence. On the other hand, if one died of TB today that would be an example of structural violence since we (as a global society) have the means to stop and treat TB. 21 Because we have agency (what Porter calls “the self-awareness to make selfchosen choices” 22) any failure to act is a product of structural constraints (whether financial, logistical, or policy oriented) that produce, for Galtung, an agentless form of structural violence. Note that this distinction has nothing to do with the subjectivities of suffering—no one can doubt that death by TB

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in the eighteenth century would produce equal (if not more) suffering as compared to death by TB today. What marks today’s death as structural violence is the means with which we as a society have at our disposal to foreclose such possibility. Failure to use these means of foreclosure is an avoidable failure, even if its implementation might be structurally complex. For Galtung, it is the absence of structural and cultural violence that allows for the possibility of social justice, and eventually the ideal of positive peace. This, of course, assumes that direct violence and its historical legacies are controlled or managed, if not transformed. While direct violence is often the instrument of control to maintain injustice in the present, it is structural and cultural violence that maintains the legacy of injustice into the future. Cultural violence is the use of cultural symbols and signifiers to perpetuate marginalization and oppression again another. In the words of Galtung, “Cultural violence makes direct and structural violence look, even feel, right—or at least not wrong.” 23 Even though there is no type of violence that seems to deserve our primary attention over any other type of violence, it is clear that conflict transformation demands more than simply the absence of direct violence. If we agree that a “justpeace” requires the absence of all of Galtung’s types of violence, can we definitively say that Galtung’s typology of violence exhausts the human need to understand violence? Certainly not. As the regular litany of new books about human violence should attest, 24 there is no monopoly on any particular typology of human violence. The reality is that writers in the broad field of Peace and Conflict Studies continue to grow our understanding of violence, and therefore, expand our means of potentially achieving a lasting positive peace. Such growth is crucial to activists and scholars alike and demands critical attention in order to listen to the unique suffering of social actors as they narrate their lived experience and strive to meet their full potentials. Recently Sara Cobb (2013) has written of what she calls “a new kind of violence” 25—narrative violence. Rather than new, one might better call it newly discovered. Narrative violence is a special kind of violence that operates in the subtle spaces of storytelling, communication, and discursive listening. Cobb argues that “structural violence, by definition, is difficult to ‘story’ in that its existence does not seem to accompany specific history.” 26 As agentless and systemic, Galtung’s sense of structural violence maintains an elusive connection to particular characters, histories, and/or settings and therefore makes plotlines blurry and amorphous. An understanding of narrative violence helps to narrow this elusive disconnection as narrative violence creates what she calls a “state of exception” 27 for those embroiled in conflict. In describing this “state of exception” as something more than the impersonal and agentless structural violence described by Galtung, Cobb describes a context and people (or identity) that many Dalit rights activists would readily recognize as actively describing their everyday modern lives. For Cobb this

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“state of exception” is “a place where law has been used to create a place without law, a place that defies narrative itself.” 28 The people that populate this “state of exception”—i.e., the victims of narrative violence—are “isolated and disenfranchised, they live in the shadows of the public sphere, their relation to state and community broken.” 29 The context and peoples that Cobb describes eerily map to Dr. Ambedkar’s own descriptions of the Dalit/ low-caste experience and resonate closely with modern descriptions of the experience of both caste oppression and other forms of political violence. In her own studies of the lasting legacies of India’s violent partition history, Vena Das (2000) has written: In the context of the Partition, historians have often collected oral narratives that are formulated to answer the question, What Happened? . . . I have chosen to not frame the question in these terms. In that sense, my work has been animated by seeing how the violence of the Partition was folded into everyday relations. 30

In privileging the present consciousness and memory of past events, narratives can help explain how an ongoing “state of exception” 31 has been “incorporated into the temporal structure of relationships.” 32 Thus, this newly discovered narrative violence provides a critical lens to understand caste oppression and anticaste resistance. Applying this lens of narrative violence to caste-based violence gives life to the histories and present experiences of anticaste activists. Narratives expose how caste was “folded into everyday relations” 33 and how narratives continually get uncritically reproduced. In Annihilation of Caste, Ambedkar writes: “A caste has no feeling that is affiliated to other castes, except when there is a Hindu-Muslim riot. On all other occasions, each caste endeavors to segregate itself and to distinguish itself from others.” 34 Living in such a state of exception for low castes involves a constant process of drawing boundaries between their identity and that of others both higher and lower in rank status. In such context, the telling of stories can be understood as oblique or “hidden transcripts” 35 that challenge any sense of divergent conceptions of rights and question any lack of awareness of the low-caste social predicament. In other words, narrative violence creates the boundary conditions for identity, rights, and self-awareness that become, over time, powerful discourses to attempt to challenge the status quo. The newly significant type of narrative violence that Cobb identifies is at the core of all systems of oppression, and, therefore, such narratives are the center of any process of overcoming such systems, displacing processes of “othering,” and creating positive social change opportunities for the downtrodden and dispossessed. The dynamics of this narrative violence are clearly evident in caste-based oppression, as well as within the “talk” of social movements that are aimed at ending this oppression. The remainder of

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this chapter is geared toward providing some examples of narrative violence circulating among anticaste activists and thinking about ways that such narrative violence can be best used toward the creation of positive peace and social uplift for low-caste peoples. Ambedkarite activists often tell hagiographic stories about their patriarch, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. In my experience of meeting and talking with Dalit anticaste activists, there is an unquestioned reverence and respect for the life and work of Dr. Ambedkar that can be compared only with a demigod or modern pop icon. This reverence is expressed through the telling of stories about Babasaheb’s life and work. My own experiences interacting with Dalit diaspora Ambedkarites on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of his birth was no exception to my previous experiences of this phenomenon of hagiographic storytelling. On this jubilant occasion, I spoke to an audience of Ambedkarites at Michigan State University and asked them to fully consider their own agency as speaking social agents. In being invited to give a lecture to Ambedkarite anticaste activists, there is always a balance between gently suggesting pragmatic action and providing critical analysis of the ongoing anticaste movement. As should be evident by now, I do not think narrative is an inanimate and agentless fact of social interaction. Nor do I think that stories, or narratives, are just subjective expression of personal truths devoid of any social and political relevance for social change. Therefore, my focus in such invited lecture or workshop situations is often to draw attention to the stories that I hear activists themselves voice. Balancing my own position as one outside the caste hierarchy with my scholar-practitioner voice is best mediated by activists’ own stories. It is in these stories that a clear sense of methodology as the grounding for theory-building comes forth. 36 As a social constructionist, I believe firmly in the power of stories to influence social and structural change and I am intentional about placing the agency for change among the people who have experienced, and in turn, tell (and retell) such stories. I have written elsewhere about the elliptical character of these stories and their ability to mobilize activism. 37 But, beyond movement mobilization what do stories do? How do they work to strengthen identity boundaries and build awareness of rights and self-worth? How do they actually create social change? Beyond the common conception of stories as mythic and fanciful, stories have real social power. In the words of Michele Foucault: “People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.” 38 In endeavoring to assist anticaste Ambedkarite activists to understand what their stories do to change (and, at times, support) the social structure, both my interpretation of my field notes and my narrative analysis aim to empower activists to make prosocial change in society. Following Sara Cobb, I believe that narratives matter and have unique agency—“they have gravitas; they are grave. They have weight.” 39

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Narratives themselves can act to change discourse, and thus, change systems. So, I want to be clear in saying I also concur with the sentiment of Arthur Frank (2010) when he says “I make no attempt to define stories. The emphasis is on watching them act, not seeking their essence.” 40 Having said that, analysis implies some level of understanding on the part of the analyst. My decade-long interaction with Dalit rights activists has developed some, albeit rudimentary, understanding of the conflict dynamics at play in India’s ongoing contentious tryst with caste. While narratives hold within them multiple interpretations and narrative violence has complex social and psychological sources, this should not deter us from attempting to develop further understanding through attention to narrative’s use. Narrative violence, in fact, implores us to analyze it—now that we have learned of its existence we must think and act in ways that tap narrative’s power to act for social good; to build justpeace. 41 Just as narrative can incite violence, it can also engender peace. So how do narratives operate in the anticaste movements of Dalit activists? Below are a few examples that I believe show how stories can be both opportunity and constraint for change activists. Through a brief analysis of these formative identity narratives, I hope that the important opportunities in Dr. Ambedkar’s life story and experience can be excavated, built upon, and reflexively mined for their inherent and complex opportunities to create lasting change. In focusing on the legacies of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar and the complex connections between his life and Dalit identity justice, I am eager to underscore the ways anticaste activists can develop the strategic use of story to frame injustice, build identity, and advance awareness among the marginalized. Not leaving aside the constraining aspects of these stories, I wish to make a claim for not just understanding the injustice inherent in these stories but realizing what Dalit activists should “stand under” 42 in these stories to continue to press for social change. Failure to re-contextualize narratives of Ambedkar’s life and work, using them as more than hagiographies of Dalit leadership or extreme examples of unjust victimization, misses the valuable resource such stories hold for social change. As Cobb (2013) aptly admonishes conflict resolution practitioners: if we could refocus our attention on narrative patterns and not find ourselves, as analysts [or activists], mired in the game theoretic discourse of “needs” and “interests” or “rights,” we might be able to track the process of conflict escalation as a function of narrative and contribute to the transformation of . . . conflict . . . [thereby] generat[ing] new, less dangerous narrative patterns. 43

Movement narratives, as repeated re-visioning of history, highlight the contestation over the shared experience of identity, rights, and awareness in the anticaste movement. In order to transform a complicated and hierarchical

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system like modern caste, activists must systematically analyze their stories and deploy them in ways that uplift a positive philosophy of co-existent identities, co-equal rights, and collective social awareness. EXPOSING THE PATTERNS OF NARRATIVE VIOLENCE AND MAPPING A COURSE FOR SOCIAL CHANGE: EXEMPLAR ARCHETYPAL STORIES IN AMBEDKARITE ANTICASTE CIRCLES Story 1: “The Dheds Have Polluted the Tank” One of many hagiographic stories of Ambedkar’s life involves his 1934 trip to Daulatabad Fort in Maharashtra. 44 Though relatively recent history, the level of contestation such a story enlivens in the non-Dalit spaces of India should not be discounted. By de-constructing such a conflict-saturated story, and then by reconstructing an alternative storyline in which identity, awareness, and opportunities for conflict transformation are exposed, hidden forms of resistance as well as opportunities for change in the privileged are highlighted. Traveling with a group of about thirty “untouchable” friends and arriving late and exhausted to these historical ruins, the party stopped to wash and refresh by a small tank of water that was near the entrance to the fort. Feeling newly refreshed as they entered the front gate of the fort, an old Muslim man came running to the entrance yelling “The Dheds (meaning ‘untouchables’) have polluted the tank!” 45 After some tense debate with the local authorities, the party was eventually allowed to see the ruins of the fort, but not without an armed guard to ensure that they did not “touch water anywhere in the fort.” 46 Dr. Ambedkar’s own autobiographical sketch of this episode ends with the evaluative statement “This will show that a person who is an untouchable to a Hindu is also an untouchable to a Mohammedan.” 47 Such a story is still retold with disbelief and frustration by Dalit activists and recreated as street plays in many low-caste communities today. As prototypical of more recent Dalit injustice narratives, this story is emotionally impactful to Dalits. But what are the actual effects of retelling such a story? Such a well-known story, while illustrative of the injustices that low-caste Dalits face, does little to project positive identity, develop co-equal rights, or create inter-caste awareness and understanding. Further, outside of the Ambedkar Dalit community, the story does little more than justify the existence of caste oppression as more than simply a Hindu phenomenon. While Dr. Ambedkar clearly told this story toward the goal of illustrating an evaluative judgment about the dehumanizing demerits of the caste system even outside of the Hindu-fold, he also, in telling such a story, must have known how little control he would have over this narrative going forward. Again, in the words of Cobb, “narrative authorship is partial and dependent” and, therefore, we often “arrive at narratives that we did not make.” 48 While

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such a narrative helps to build a collective identity as marginalized, it also paradoxically positions Dalits in identities that they have little control over. Further, their repeating of the narrative simply further solidifies their lack of control. How followers and detractors use this story to make their own evaluative judgments and build support for their own identity concerns represents a crucial question for anticaste activists pushing for social change. While this story clearly communicates the injustice and inhumanity of the situation Dalits consistently face, it also constructs their identity as distinct from, and possibly in opposition to, Muslims. Such a story, therefore, creates a paradox for Dalit activists. It creates an identity of other that supports and reinforces an identity and experience of self as “othered.” 49 While Ambedkar’s story underscores the inhumane and unjust realities of life as a Dalit or SC, it also closes off dialogue with others (in this case Muslims and possibly other downtrodden and economically depressed potential allies) by strengthening in-group identity, as well as portraying Dalits as either victims or a distinct and cohesive community as apart from various others in society. Either of these social positions leave something to be desired for Dalit activists working for social transformation, and, therefore, the retelling of such a story acts to close off potential narrative space to dialogue with others. This is not to suggest that Dalits not tell this, or other, formative injustice stories, but rather that it is the type of story that should be deployed selectively and strategically in tandem with positive identity and awareness education. Though not a strong example of Cobb’s (2013) sense of narrative violence, this narrative does little to challenge the perpetual narrative violence that Dalits face in the proverbial public sphere. It does little to “thicken” 50 the narrative life of Dalits. In fact, due to the ambiguity involved in Dalit listeners hearing such a story coming from Dr. Ambedkar’s own experience, listeners get caught up in what Francesca Polletta calls “narrative ellipsis” 51—a process in which the stories activists tell compel other activists to re-tell the story to better understand the ambiguous meaning of the events described. The story itself has a life all its own. Failure to engage the story as a constantly changing system leaves activists unable to strategically use the story to its full potential. There is certainly a sense of disbelief in such a story—how could this happen to even Dr. Ambedkar himself? This disbelief is followed closely by indignation and fear—if it could happen to Dr. Ambedkar (this great and glorified figure with so much education and attainment), what does this say about the discrimination and marginalization that the everyday Dalit faces? By reproducing the inexplicable inhumanity in such a story, the activist unwittingly reifies the community’s own sense of separated identity and victimization and does little to open the opportunity for dialogue and narrative shift among others in the wider public sphere. In addition, high-caste detractors can, and do, use such a narrative to convince low castes to stay within the Hindu-fold reasoning that caste is not just a Hindu problem (which

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is indeed counter to Ambedkar’s own analysis of the caste system). In short, the narrative space this story opens, as it is currently deployed by Dalits, does little to create social agency and/or even the social justice equation for Dalits or low-caste communities. In the sage words of Arthur Frank (2010), “Stories create the boundaries, yet they also are humans’ companions in living with—though not necessarily within—these boundaries.” 52 So how do anticaste activists fashion stories that will better open the space for thick narrative that engenders authentic dialogue with others? How do anticaste activists deploy stories that work to develop social change toward a justpeace? This has been the perennial challenge for modern anticaste activists. Failure to strategically develop and systematically deploy stories of oppression that devalue separateness of identity and simultaneously value liberty, fraternity, and collective awareness of injustice has fractured and splintered the anticaste movement. Such fracturing among anticaste activists has left them unable to influence the hearts and minds of higher-caste Indians. Stories, as interpretative, set boundary conditions for identity, which in turn set further boundary conditions for developing rights and awareness. While cautionary tales, like Ambedkar’s story of his visit to Daulatabad Fort, are useful for Dalit awareness, they may work to harden identity boundaries between castes. So, how can anticaste movement activists take their stories of injustice and deploy them in ways that develop empathy among other non-Dalits, create identity and awareness among themselves, and enliven revolutionary pressure for immediate rights? The blending of contemporary and historical tropes below presents some, albeit tentative, direction. Story 2: Drawing Water from the Well (Gujarat) While the question of how anticaste activists can best use their stories is one that anticaste activists are eager to understand, there is no single answer to this complex question. Stories have a power to motivate and mobilize, as well as discourage and divide. It is within this tension between mobilization and division that anticaste activists make meaning and press for change. Each case and context represents its own puzzle for storytellers to analyze and understand as they deploy and convey stories of injustice and resistance that aim for prosocial change as opposed to status quos or reified realities. The story retold below is less a story of narrative violence than it is a story of community resilience and resistance. A common trope about the centuriesold discrimination of caste often involves the drawing of water from a well. One particular version of this story that I heard in July 2016 is a story that turns on the brave organizing and rights mobilization of one low-caste teacher new to his school’s surrounding community. While Gujarat state has become a sort of epicenter of caste violence and discrimination in modern India, 53 such discrimination and control of resources is also common in many

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parts of rural India. While each context is different there is a unity in the diversity of stories of outward discrimination. As should already be evident from the discussion in chapter 1, the simplest everyday activities can be the greatest sites of caste contestation in India. With a burgeoning population and limited resources, basic amenities like water become contested spaces for communities, or identities, especially in small villages and close-knit communities less affected by the process of globalization. While versions of the story below play out in many Indian villages, this story provides an alternative to passive resistance to oppression, separateness, and division. Creating positive stories of change, which highlight the structural violence inherent in the Indian system, is a crucial step in the conscientization (i.e., critical consciousness) 54 of low-caste groups. While the outcome of this story further institutionalizes separation between communities, it also provides encouraging evidence of resistance and resilient action against the status quo. In weighing these two dynamic aspects of story as potentially divisive and potentially awareness generating, one has to question the means and ends of telling and retelling a story. No narrative is completely violence free. But, does this mean that some minimal depiction of violence is useful for building identity and awareness, or conveying the pain and suffering of injustice? As someone not directly impacted by this form of oppression, is taking a normative stance against the utilitarian realities of narrative violence useful or desirable? The above questions arise for me not out of the blue, but in shared experience with Dalit activists. In July 2016 I taught a half-day course on conflict transformation at TBMSG’s Nagaloka Training Centre. After a brief introduction to the field of conflict resolution and a short demonstration of the complexities of conflict dynamics, I asked this mixed-gender cohort of new eight-month certificate program students what conflicts they had experienced back in their home areas. These students, Dalits who come from all over India to take the TBM movement’s eight-month introductory course in Buddhism, Ambedkar thought, and social change, were eager to share their experiences and gain a new perspective on their actions. In order to ensure that the many intra-psychic conflicts so common in this crowded, impoverished, and sexually frustrated population of SCs did not become the sole focus of our discussion, the only additional prompt given to the students was to focus on group conflicts instead of intra- or interpersonal ones. Soon the students began telling extraordinary personal stories of marginalization and caste discrimination in their home communities. A slender young man from Gujarat was the first to share, and despite attempts by me and my translator to shorten the very detailed story so that others would have a chance to also share, without simultaneously dampening his eagerness, he passionately described the long history of a protracted village conflict over access to water from the village well. From an SC community (like all others in the room), the story-

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teller was a teacher in the government school in this village. As a leader in the community he was asked by local low-caste families to help with the problems they were having accessing water from their village well. New to the village, this young teacher went to see for himself what the situation was at the well. As he arrived the older low-caste women, who saw him as a village leader for their community, educated and employed, approached him and began explaining how they had been waiting for some time to get water. The younger higher-caste women from the village would not let them draw water themselves. Further, only once the higher castes had drawn water themselves were the low-caste women allowed to ask for water to be drawn for their own use. Finally, only water from the opposite side of the well from where the upper-caste women drew water was permissible for these low-caste women to access (so as not to pollute the higher castes’ side). This had been the practice since anyone could remember, but due to a shrinking water table, and increased village population, the problem had become more acute over time. Overwhelmed by the injustice the teacher immediately approached the village panchayat 55 leaders with the problem. As a low caste himself, he was immediately rebuffed by the high-caste-controlled panchayat. Angry, but determined, this young teacher persisted. Only after a year of complaining and petitioning the local magistrate for redress did the teacher become aware that this fight had a long contentious history. Fifteen years before another local teacher at the government school where he now worked had also tried to mediate this conflict and had been relocated (in effect a civil-service euphemism for being fired) for attempting to do so. This was pointedly conveyed to the young teacher by the local magistrate as a subtle admonishment to desist in his attempts to change this situation. This too did not deter the young teacher now retelling this story to his fellow SC classmates from all over India with all the passion and anger clearly still fresh in his mind. Realizing that neither local nor district leaders would help with the problems at the well, the young teacher gathered the local low-caste community and announced that the best solution would be to organize funds to dig another well! Despite initial resistance from the scheduled castes in the community, soon it was agreed that this was the best means to change the difficult situation. But this was only the first of many hurdles to cross—all along the way there were barriers put in the communities’ way by higher-caste villagers. First gaining official permission to dig a well was a battle, then getting contractors to agree to do the work became a hardship. Eventually, through the use of contractors from outside the village, the well was built. After three years of work by this young teacher, the lower castes in the community had access to their own well for water and the tension over the old well subsided, though social tensions and discrimination in the village certainly remained.

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This retelling is not devoid of narrative violence, but rather assists activists in noticing the ways in which narrative can operate as simultaneously a mobilizing and divisive force. While this story clearly builds on what Cobb (2013) calls a “state of exception” for those from this village’s lower-caste community, it also acts to build what Paulo Freire (1973) calls “conscientização” 56 in Portuguese, or what has been translated as conscientization in English. The telling and retelling of such a story creates multiple effects on the community—further dividing them from other higher-caste communities, but also further bringing them together in a critical consciousness and awareness about their plight and limited power as low castes. While the story might build walls between communities, it also gives agency to the least powerful in the community. Despite the narrative violence inherent in the story—the story clearly sets and reifies low-caste and high-caste communities as diametrically against each other—it also builds a knowing awareness among low-caste communities that strengthens solidarity and confidence to pursue change. The collective memory and resilience that the telling of the story engenders, it could be argued, is more important as a critical expression of marginalized voice and awareness than the community divisiveness the story reifies. Changing the narrative from one of discrimination to one of ownership of the new well gives the village more than a sense of awareness—they claim a sense of both real and metaphorical ownership of the problem. While we cannot downplay the ongoing divisiveness of the story, strategically the story also presents prosocial opportunities. By letting such a story breathe in the air of public discourse it projects a possible future for marginalized Dalits. In the words of Arthur Frank, “stories do not just have plots . . . (they) work to emplot lives.” 57 Despite the sociological separation between communities that the teacher’s story creates, such a story is exemplar of the obvious need for voice, awareness, and identity in scheduled castes’ experience. In order to understand the full social value of the story, the story cannot be separated from the local and global context of its telling and retelling. Devoid of the context of telling, the story and its impact have little meaning. The passion of the teller and the knowing nods of the listeners (approximately sixty other Dalit students new to Nagaloka Institute and just arrived from all over India) are important aspects of the story to observe and acknowledge. That these scheduled caste students from all over India shared knowing glances as the young teacher from Gujarat shared his story underscores the ongoing meaning making process for Dalits across India. With each setback described, knowing glances were shared between students from different villages and states of India. Though the success in the teacher’s resistance may not be as familiar to many of the listeners, the struggle and roadblocks to change are clearly a shared experience. Such observation in the wider group informs the story’s telling and analysis. Context and audience, as critical

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aspects of any storytelling process, shape the strategic deployment of story and help shape its delivery and impact. From the perspective of a written retelling of this story, the strategic and organic nature of the story is largely lost. The nods, knowing glances, and command of the audience this teller deploys are what Scott (1990) would call “hidden transcripts” and “weapons of the weak.” 58 Amongst the marginalized these “infrapolitics” 59 of resistance and resilience act to build identity and rights awareness. But, from the outside they often pass unseen or unnoticed. That in more global contexts outside of Dalit/anticaste activist circles these weapons often go unnoticed should come as little surprise, but the impact of not hearing such stories has harmful consequences for even the powerful. The positive global impacts of such stories, hampered by a lack of shared dialogue space between castes, miss opportunities for shared experience and relationship building. 60 Not only low castes lose in this situation—high castes are also diminished by missing this piece of the Dalit voice and experience. This dialectic between creating identity awareness and space for sharing Dalit voice is an ongoing challenge for the anticaste movement. If India is going to overcome the constraining realities of caste, the shared space and structures for telling stories of caste marginalization must be designed and empowered. Telling stories like this Gujarati teacher’s story, with some access to the telling context, is critical to upending the destructive potentials of narrative violence inherent in such stories. One further example of the competing interpretations of a narrative illustrates well the processes of narrative violence. Story 3: From Ambedkar as Father of the Indian Constitution to Re-authoring History for Social Change Whatever we had to be told was said by Ambedkar. His teachings are finished, his speaking finished, his commands finished. But don’t let your mind be deceived that we are adrift and destroyed. 61

Another consistent narrative that one hears when studying the prolific life and work of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar and Ambedkarite communities worldwide is the nationalist story of him as the source/father of the Indian constitution. Yet, such a dominant narrative has divergent and contested meanings in different social communities and contexts. For Dalit communities, the faith in the rule of law is strong and India’s 1949 constitution is a source of pride as the penultimate legal resource to ensure rights for the marginalized. This is why B. R. Ambedkar memorial statues throughout India show the Indian constitution tucked under his left arm as a steadfast Dr. Ambedkar points toward a desired egalitarian future. As the head of the drafting commission for the constitution, Dr. Ambedkar is seen by Dalits as the author of this important document, despite the more complex negotiated realities of his co-

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authorship. Even the more complicated and revolutionary aspects of Dr. Ambedkar’s long career outside of government seem to be sidelined in nationalist narratives about him. Dalit friends have told me that it is the constitution more than any other document that Ambedkar authored, including the revered Annihilation of Caste, that cements his anticaste legacy. The narrative of Ambedkar as first Law Minister and nationalist hero trumps more complicated historical readings of him both within and outside Dalit communities. Indeed, it is within anticaste activist circles that an acritical reverence for Dr. Ambedkar as father of the nation, as well as the progenitor of a mass move to Buddhism, conspire to narrow the narrative impact of Dr. Ambedkar outside of these mostly Dalit communities. From a privileged higher-caste perspective, understanding of Dr. Ambedkar as simply a nationalist hero is equally narrow. In all strata of Indian society, a shallow collective understanding of Dr. Ambedkar’s legacy and impacts exists today. In heeding Cobb’s call for attention to narrative patterns 62 we must analyze not simply prevailing low-caste narratives of Dr. Ambedkar and his followers, but also the narratives of high castes if we hope to transform future-going narrative violence. As an important father of the nation, Dr. Ambedkar is remembered and memorialized by members of the privileged castes in an even more onedimensional nationalist way than among Dalit communities. For the privileged castes, rather than father of a democratic rule of law, or a social reformer, Ambedkar is one father (among many) of an India that is independent from outside foreign rule. In this perspective of being in the same league with Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, and other nationalist forefathers of the nation, Dr. Ambedkar is a symbol of national unity and has little, or nothing, to do with caste oppression or social reform. Here Ambedkar is a symbol of freedom and independence, but this freedom is nationalistic and amorphous—not tied to any one community, but to India as a unified and predominantly Hindu nation. In turn, Dalit reverence of Dr. Ambedkar as an archetype for the rule of law is understood by privileged castes as simply supporting the nationalist narrative and in no way challenging Hindu privilege. In a sense then, as source or father of the Indian nation, Ambedkar legacy is mollified by both Dalits’ and privileged castes’ nationalistic narrative expressions about him. The reverence for Ambedkar is not lost, but rather transfigured into a call for national unity, as opposed to critique of power. The dominant one-dimensional view of Ambedkar as nationalist father and author of the constitution meld together in ways that work to mask more complicated and revolutionary narratives about him and forestall any constructive dialogue or criticism about his revolutionary ideas for social change. The Babasaheb 63 of most Dalits’ imagination, a Dr. Ambedkar as a revolutionary change agent and public intellect, are secondary narratives for dominant and powerful Indians. The nationalist narrative of Ambedkar as an

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important father of the independent nation has relegated the intellectual and social revolution he spurred to the domain of divided and contested histories. Such divided histories go unnoticed by the dominant castes and the more radical statements of Ambedkar have become sanitized in the public sphere. Dalits’ view of B. R. Ambedkar as revolutionary activist is largely invisible to many privileged higher castes. It is this broader view of Ambedkar, that, devoid of the direct experience of oppression, requires some ability for critical analysis of India’s caste-based pre-modern history. But, while such critical reappraisal of Indian history is rampant in anticaste circles, it goes relatively undiscussed in privileged communities. Perceived as radical, applying a critical lens to Indian history requires an understanding of the need for, and reality of, change. In the words of Dr. Ambedkar himself: Hindus must consider whether the time has come for them to recognize that there is nothing fixed, nothing eternal . . . everything is changing, that change is the law of life for the individual as well as for society. In a changing society there must be a constant revolution of old values. 64

The Dalit conception of Babasaheb, a change agent and radical, is just not a conception most high-caste Hindus ever encounter. Still, beyond the modern historical fact that Dr. Ambedkar was the most important leader of the modern anticaste movement and more a radical revolutionary than a nationalist, the acritical mainstream discourse toward India’s pre-modern history of caste marginalization leaves most Indians unaware of the full context of Ambedkar’s ideology and accomplishments. In arguing for Dr. Ambedkar as a foremost modern revolutionary anticaste leader, one unknowingly invokes particular arguments about India’s pre-modern past. The painful legacy of caste violence works to mask the distant past and this past’s connection to present-day low-caste opportunities. Attempting to unmask such experiences invariably contests prevailing histories and heroic narratives forcing hardened identities to engage and potentially change. As the most recent in a long succession of revolutionary anticaste leaders, the revolutionary portion of Ambedkar’s story remains under-told and under-studied outside the anticaste movement, and even, to some extent, marginalized within the movement itself. Because the story runs up against dominant norms and narrative understandings of India’s pre-modern history, the story of revolutionary Ambedkar itself increasingly occupies a marginal space in prevailing histories. As dominant storylines of nationalist aggrandizement of Ambedkar’s drafting commission role work to unseat storylines of historical caste-ism and present-day resistance, the discursive space for anticaste contention recede further back into history. It is this politically powerful narrative of Ambedkar as the leader of a “Democratic Revolution,” to borrow the title to one of Gail Omvedt’s many

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books on anticaste movement, 65 that develops a future-going narrative and provides better opportunities than stories of Ambedkar’s own injustice experiences to challenge the pervasive influence of narrative violence. A more nuanced story of Ambedkar as bureaucrat and revolutionary, in turn, helps the psycho-social expression of stories, like the second story presented in this chapter, to be publically expressed. While the nationalist narrative of Ambedkar as father of the nation has certainly been co-opted by the Hindu-right, its more complicated and “thick” retelling in anticaste activist circles is critical to the process of creating lasting social change for the marginalized. More than stories of injustice, like the autobiographical account of Ambedkar’s experience in Daulatabad, stories of low-caste critique of the Indian democracy, like the contention over the well retold above, gain increased legitimacy through widening the circle of telling and retelling. Still, the foundation of Indian democracy and the dreams of “incredible !ndia,” 66 which India’s modern democracy inspires, are based on caste. Devoid of such historical awareness and collective understanding of the caste grounding of modern India, little will change. In narrating Dr. Ambedkar as a revolutionary, and not just a nationalist, opportunities are created to re-visit the prevailing, yet contested, history of India. In retelling this history from below, activists have a vital role to play. In much the same way that a figure like Malcom X represents an under-told and revolutionary impetus of the civil rights movement, Ambedkar represents both a mainstream and revolutionary response to historical injustice. Coates (2015), in trying to explain a similar reality about race in America, exposes his young son to a similar hypocrisy in American democracy: America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe they are white, was built on looting and violence. . . . There is nothing extreme in this statement. Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God. But democracy is a forgiving God. 67

How activists tell the story of Ambedkar conditions possible responses and points them toward a desired future. What is as equally important as the telling of the broader version of Ambedkar’s story is the placing of stories of injustice within historical context, thus building some awareness of the contradictions still present in modern society. The young Gujarati teacher above is able to do this amongst a diverse smattering of low castes from across India. Anticaste activists often tell the story of Ambedkar’s key accomplishment as head of the drafting commission for the modern Indian constitution in the same breath as they tell of Dr. Ambedkar’s satyagraha movements against untouchability and for temple entry. Anticaste activists’ intertwining the plot

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lines of committee drafting and anticaste agitation thickens the narrative agency of Dalit and anticaste activists and opens their ability to challenge the “thin” nationalist narrative of Ambedkar as just one of many important founding fathers of the new nation. Such an interwoven narrative of Ambedkar’s life and work allows Ambedkar to be seen as separate from Gandhi, Nehru, and Patel, and other nationalist heroes of India’s independence. Such thick narrative, which raises more questions than answers, opens the potential space for narrative shift. This “thin” nationalist narrative of Ambedkar as simply the head of the drafting commission for the modern Indian constitution, controlled by Hindutva privileged caste rhetoric, paints Ambedkar as pliant member of the Hindu-fold of similar rank and attainment as other Congress Party leaders. In fact, Ambedkar was much more of a radical critic than a government bureaucrat. In Annihilation of Caste (1936) Ambedkar writes: “There are, many Indians whose patriotism does not permit them to admit that Indians are not a nation, that they are only an amorphous mass of people . . . Men do not become a society by living in physical proximity. . . .” 68 Ambedkar’s critique of an Indian nation was conditioned by his personal experience of caste and empowered by an anticaste understanding of pre-modern Indian history. Without such a complicated and multilayered and critical historical narrative of Ambedkar, his relevance and importance to many anticaste activists is undermined and the opportunity space for any narrative shift on caste is severely limited. At the same time contested premodern histories can harden identities and further divide powerful and marginalized communities. Our task as action researchers embedded in the ongoing dynamics of caste contention is to endeavor to understand the narratives of the marginalized as teeming with “hidden transcripts” 69 ripe for creative intervention toward social change. This work involves what John Paul Lederach (1995) has described as the paradoxical value peacemaking. Lederach writes, “Peacemaking embraces the challenges of personal transformation, of pursuing awareness, growth, and commitment to change at a personal level. . . . Peacemaking equally involves the task and priority of systemic transformation, of increased justice and equality in our world.” 70 The paradox often comes from our seeming inability to see these goals of peacemaking as other than either/or realities. Either we achieve personal awareness and growth or systematic transformation of society, but never could we achieve both simultaneously. In fact, these personal and systemic transformations are interconnected. In telling a thick version of Dr. Ambedkar’s story, anticaste activists are overcoming this paradox and working to make change on both the personal as well as the systemic levels. The nationalist story of Dr. Ambedkar must not be retold without reference to his experience and critiques of caste oppression. Ambedkar’s nationalism when narrated as inseparable from his critical anticaste activism, challenges this “thin” narrative of him as a national icon and complicates the

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dialectical realities of the man he was. More than India’s first law minister and patriotic organizer of law and order, in this telling Dr. Ambedkar is change agent both inside and outside the Indian government; he is simultaneously patriot and harsh social critic of India’s flaws. More than a brilliant legal mind and constitutional organizer, Dr. Ambedkar was also an educator on social exclusion and agitator for change. If this complex narrative is lost, his legacy and our potential is diminished. Anticaste activists must not let the full scope or Dr. Ambedkar’s legacy as a social change agent and an organizer of government policy be forgotten or denied by those in power. In thickening the narrative of Ambedkar as nationalist and revolutionary anticaste activist, modern anticaste activists consistently live out Dr. Ambedkar’s constant refrain to “Organize, Educate, Agitate.” Still, the fact remains that Ambedkar’s revolutionary voice often gets overlooked in mainstream Indian society, even by well-meaning liberals and progressive activists. 71 In discussing the Indian constitution and its birth post-partition, Arundhati Roy writes: “It was extraordinary that, through all the chaos and prejudice, the first law ministers of both India and Pakistan were Dalits. Mandal was eventually disillusioned with Pakistan and returned to India. Ambedkar was disillusioned too, but he really had nowhere to go.” 72 Ambedkar’s disillusion found voice in organizing, agitating, and educating as forms of social uplift for his community. To say that Ambedkar’s disillusion had “nowhere” to go is misleading. Despite dominant India’s simplified nationalist narrative about Ambedkar, low-caste groups have long struggled to maintain a counter narrative of Ambedkar as revolutionary and visionary. Unidimensional retellings of Dr. Ambedkar’s story not only draw into question the underlying intentions and implicit biases of the teller, 73 but also shed light on the subtle ways that narratives can work to make resistance invisible. The narrative of Dr. Ambedkar as the drafter of the Indian constitution without reference to his hard work related to agitation and emancipatory pedagogy leaves followers of Babasaheb with a flattened narrative and relatively little agency to push for social change. Conversely, if activists decide to tell the nationalist narrative in tandem with narratives of Ambedkar pursuing emancipatory change, an important critical eye is created and empowered. While the social space for this critical eye is narrow, it absolutely plays an important part in the narrative shift required for a sense of democratic revolution to take hold. This more complicated narrative of Ambedkar’s life and work expands the narrative opportunities for Dalits and allows activists to invite others to take what Joseph Montville calls a “walk through history” 74 with them. Such an interwoven narrative of Dr. Ambedkar can open space for developing a better understanding of privilege among the most privileged. Despite the fact that the narrative space for Dalit voice is limited in the Indian public sphere, the work to complicate the narrative about Dr. Ambedkar’s life and work is

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extremely important for the growth and development of the anticaste movement and its emergence into the wider Indian public sphere. This process of taking a walk through history is important for anticaste activists to inclusively model and invite others to participate in as it is works to educate the oppressors, while simultaneously developing a liberatory consciousness 75 and identity among the oppressed. In India, an oral culture, history is extremely contested terrain. As history itself has become the grounds for contestation it represents the ideal staging ground for strengthening and contesting identity. Thick narratives, such as Ambedkar as both nationalist leader and anticaste revolutionary, represent opportunities to educate, build critical consciousness, and create a paradigm shift in India’s thinking about history. While such thick narratives have difficulty spreading into more privileged segments of society, this spread is critical to the peaceful transformation of narrative violence. As we will explore in further chapters of this book, the simple re-creation of either a religious or historical identity can be at odds with the need to emplot thick descriptive and complicated narratives. In the case of both Buddhist and more secular Mulnivasi Bahujan (indigenous majority) identity, historical argument becomes a tool to build identity and awareness, but it is more unclear if it helps in attaining rights. CONCLUSION Organize, educate, agitate! This is how Dr. B. R. Ambedkar began and ended most of his public speeches. I believe that how we live out his bequest is through the telling of stories. We as human beings are storytellers and Dr. Ambedkar’s story is one full of plot twists, unearthly attainments, and great opportunity. Student of John Dewey, prolific author, India’s First Law Minister, first Dalit to graduate high school, agitator for separate electorates, the list could go on and on. Ambedkar was an archetype in many ways—he was revolutionary in the sense that he was radically new and innovative for his time. If activists aim to keep him new and innovative, even today, sixty-plus years after his death, the stories they tell about him matter greatly. Unless activists work to complicate the story of his life and work, his legacy and full impact are done a grave injustice. Ensuring his revolutionary legacy requires more than memorialization through the thousands of statues erected in lowcaste communities across India. How activists make Babasaheb new and innovative for this time hinges on how they tell his story, how much they complicate and interrogate it. As Dalit communities move into the future—as each existent present moment is always new and pregnant with possibility—they must learn how to strategically tell stories about the past. Much of this strategy is developed

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through the historic process of social learning. 76 In being attentive to the collective implications of telling stories, activists can lean on their collective social learning as a resource. This is where the work of Vamik Volkan (1997) can be extremely helpful for building positive identity and collective resilience. Volkan (1997), in writing about the post-war Balkans, writes about collective trauma and the way it is passed through collectivities and generations by leaders and speakers telling stories about “chosen traumas” or “chosen glories.” 77 A chosen trauma for Volkan “reflects a large group’s unconsciously defining its identity by the transgenerational transmission of injured selves infused with the memory of ancestors’ trauma.” 78 Chosen glories on the other hand are “the mental representations of a historical event that induces feelings of success and triumph.” 79 The stories of Babasaheb act as chosen traumas and chosen glories for anticaste activists, but how do past traumas and glories of the Dalit rights movement inform the modern-day work for social change among anticaste and marginalized community groups? Returning to Cobb once again we learn that narrative violence, in contexts of either weak institutions or lack of vigilance in realizing our full narrative agency, will persist and develop what she calls “path dependency” (Cobb, 32). Narrative violence, like other types of violence, operates as a reciprocal system. Unless social actors are aware of the cycles of harm and retaliation that they are caught up in, they are destined to repeat the cycles of contention. The fact is narrative in conflict is an agent in itself, not just the data that researchers like me may choose to make the focus of study. Being vigilant about the narratives we use, and critically reflective of those we hear and retell, requires active engagement, consistent reflection, and analytical attention. While centuries of social learning have developed an “infrapolitics” 80 of resistance in low-caste communities, a similar social learning must be fostered in more privileged communities by the strategic selection and deployment of narrative storytelling. What we know of conflict and past trauma is that if you fail to address it, it will not go away. Its legacy will reemerge in collectives and engender structural and cultural violence, and possibly, eventually, direct violence. It is incumbent on anticaste activists to address conflict through critical attention to narrative, thus modeling the social justice vision they desire. Without vigilant critical attention, conflict narratives are allowed to control, as opposed to being controlled. Engaged academics and activists working for change are obliged to critically and reflectively interrogate both chosen traumas and chosen glories. The approach to historical justice advocated by Joseph Montville provides a valuable resource for doing just that. Among anticaste activists exposing atrocities, where the potential for violence is ever-present, there exists a need to develop story in ways that allow for nonDalits to take a walk through history along with Dalit activists. The privileged need to learn about Dalit collective trauma, and while it is not Dalit

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activists’ responsibility to teach this to privileged allies, it is incumbent on Dalit activists to model an awareness of the need for coexistence and allyship in this work. As Montville argues: “the challenge in dealing with victimhood psychology is that of reviving the mourning process, which has been suspended as a result of traumatic experience and helping it move toward completion.” 81 In arguing for a need to take a walk through history, Montville, among others looking at conflict through the trauma lens, has pointed conflict resolution practitioners toward an approach that historically grounds the complexity of both story and social position. Always forward facing, such an approach is not intended to downplay chosen trauma, or for that matter underscore chosen glories, but to explore ways to empower that trauma to create constructive and lasting political and social effects. This is the legacy of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. Through both the structures of law and religion Ambedkar’s goal was always to bring awareness to the plight of the lowest castes, while simultaneously developing a trauma-informed sense of identity and dignity among these broken people. While Valarian Rodriguez has argued that “appropriation of Ambedkar is more symbolic than ideological,” 82 it is clear that anticaste activists’ struggling to counter the narrow nationalist narratives and ideology of the Hindu majority have much more work to do. The need still exists to re-story and re-appropriate Ambedkar’s history and ideology—to make Ambedkar’s appropriation more ideological than symbolic. Anticaste activists do this by strategically re-telling the Ambedkar narrative. The remainder of this book highlights the work of three broad-based social movement organizations that are approaching this retelling in divergent, yet creative ways. Each creative retelling of the Ambedkar narrative necessarily begins and ends with the radical call to “organize, educate, agitate!” NOTES 1. See Charles Tilly, Social Movements, 1768–2004 (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2004). 2. Arthur Frank, Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 25. 3. Arthur Frank, Letting Stories Breathe, 1. See also Polletta, 2006 and Cobb, 2013 for detailed descriptions of the social and political importance of narrative. 4. Vivian Jabri, Discourses on Violence: Conflict Analysis Reconsidered (London: Manchester University Press, 1996), 95. 5. Sara Cobb, Speaking of Violence: The Politics and Poetics of Narrative Dynamics in Conflict Resolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 159. 6. By narrative analysis I am referring to a constellation of qualitative social scientific methods that Riessman (1993) argues “has to do with ‘how protagonists interpret things’ (Bruner, 1990, 51).” Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) quoted in Catherine Kohler Riessman, Narrative Analysis (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1993), 5.

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7. This is a prosocial re-storying of what Edward Azar called “protracted social conflict.” Edward Azar and John Burton, International Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1986). 8. I have in the past called these “injustice narratives.” Jeremy Rinker, “Justpeace Prospects for Peace-building and Worldview Tolerance: A South Asian Movement’s Social Construction of Justice” (George Mason University, Ph.D. Dissertation, 2009). Injustice narratives are here understood as the stories that people tell about lack of fairness, equality, and justice. They are distinguished from justice narratives not simply by being the opposite, but also by their retrospective as opposed to projective quality. 9. To talk of an “anticaste movement” is somewhat problematic due to the fact that there are multiple factions within what I would term the broad-based anticaste movement. Some religious, some secular, others political, the anticaste movement is a complicated amalgam of diverse interests and sociological interpretations. As Hardtmann writes: “There has been a tendency among researchers to dub the protests against the caste system under the common labels of ‘social reform movements,’ ‘protest movements,’ ‘anticaste movements,’ or something similar . . . I shall distinguish between two traditions of protest . . . on the one hand, the Hindu caste reform tradition and, on the other, autonomous anticaste tradition. This is more than a matter of subtle distinctions” [Eva-Maria Hardtmann, The Dalit Movement in India: Local Practices, Global Connections (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 46]. In drawing this critical distinction between those that want to stay in the Hindu fold and those that do not, I believe Hardtmann brings clarity to this complicated movement. When I use the term anticaste movements I am referring to what Hardtmann calls the autonomous anticaste tradition—those that, rather than integrative, “find Hinduism to be the base of the caste system and consequently want to separate the ‘untouchable’ from the Hindu religion and the Hindu community” (Hardtmann, The Dalit Movement in India, 46). 10. James Booth, “The Unforgotten: Memories of Justice,” The American Political Science Review, 95, no. 4 (2001), 788. 11. Jeremy Rinker, “Narrative Reconciliation as Rights-Based Praxis,” Peace Research, 46, no.1 (2016). 12. Francesca Polletta, It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 58. 13. For detailed discussion of the position theory, see Ram Harré and Luk Van Langenhove, Positioning Theory: Moral Contexts of Intentional Action (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999). 14. See Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984). 15. For more on the symbolic dimension of conflict transformations, see Lisa Schirch, “Ritual Reconciliation: Transforming Identity/Reframing Conflict,” in M. Abu Nimer, ed., Reconciliation, Justice, and Coexistence: Theory and Practice. New York: Lexington Books, 2001. 16. Elisabeth Porter, Connecting Peace, Justice, and Reconciliation (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2015), 36. 17. Francesca Polletta, It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics, 140. 18. Ernest Stringer, Action Research, 4th edition (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2013). 19. Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research, 6, no. 3 (1969): 167–91. 20. Paul Farmer, “An Anthropology of Structural Violence,” Current Anthropology, 45, no. 3 (June 2004), 305–25; Kathleen Ho, “Structural Violence as a Human Rights Violation,” Essex Human Rights Review, 4, no. 2 (September 2007); M. Caprioli, “Primed for Violence: The Role of Gender Inequality in Predicting Internal Conflict,” International Studies Quarterly, 49, no. 2 (June 2005), 161–78. 21. Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” 168. 22. Elisabeth Porter, Connecting Peace, Justice, and Reconciliation, 47. 23. Johan Galtung, “Cultural Violence,” Journal of Peace Research, 27, no. 3 (1990), 291. 24. As recent examples, see: David Nibert, Animal Oppression and Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism, and Global Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013);

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Mark Pilisuk and Jennifer Roundtree, The Hidden Structure of Violence: Who Benefits from Global Violence and War (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015); and Jeff Lewis, Media, Culture and Human Violence: From Savage Lovers to Violent Complexity (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), among many others. 25. Sara Cobb, Speaking of Violence, 27. 26. Ibid., 27. 27. Ibid., 27. 28. Ibid., 27. 29. Ibid., 27. 30. Vena Das, “The Act of Witnessing: Violence, Poisonous Knowledge, and Subjectivity,” in Violence and Subjectivity, eds. Vena Das et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 220. 31. Sara Cobb, Speaking of Violence, 27. 32. Vena Das, “The Act of Witnessing: Violence, Poisonous Knowledge, and Subjectivity,” 220. 33. Ibid., 220. 34. Bhimrao Ambedkar, “The Annihilation of Caste: A Speech Prepared by B. R. Ambedkar,” in The Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated and Critical Edition, edited by S. Anand (New York: Verso, 2014), 242. 35. James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 183. 36. Leslie Bank concisely expresses this sentiment in her exploration of the anthropologist Monica Hunter Wilson’s East London field notes, when she writes: “In the absence of a clear theoretical model, she was strongly influenced by her methods of recording, which rendered certain kinds of information more visible than others” (99). Leslie Bank, “City Dreams, Country Magic: Re-Reading Monica Hunter’s East London Fieldnotes,” in A. Bank and L. Bank, eds., Inside African Anthropology: Monica Wilson and Her Interpreters (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 37. See Jeremy Rinker, “Why Should We Talk to People Who Do Not Want to Talk to Us? Inter-Caste Dialogue as a Response to Caste-Based Marginalization,” Peace and Change, 38, no. 2 (April 2013), 237–62. See also Polletta, It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics, 2006, 43–45. 38. Quoted in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 187. 39. Sara Cobb, Speaking of Violence, 3. 40. Frank, Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology, 21. 41. Lisa Schirch, The Little Book of Strategic Peace-building (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2004). 42. Sara Cobb, Speaking of Violence, 11. 43. Ibid., 99. 44. The quotation in the subheading refers to: Bimrao Ambedkar, “The Dheds have Polluted the Tank,” in Ambedkar: Autobiographical Notes (Chennai: Navayana Publishing, 2003), 23–25. 45. Ibid., 24. 46. Ibid., 25. 47. Ibid., 25. 48. Ibid., 23. 49. For a good discussion of how processes of “othering” and exclusion relates to protracted conflict, see Marc Gopin, Holy War, Holy Peace: How Religion Can Bring Peace to the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 66–67. 50. For this idea of “thickening” a narrative, I am indebted to both Sara Cobb (2013), op. cit., and Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 29–30. 51. Polletta, It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics, 43–45. 52. Frank, Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology, 70.

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53. From the riots following the destruction of the Barbi Masjid mosque to recent (2016) mass protests again Dalit perceived treatment of cows, the reason for Gujarat as an epicenter of caste violence is complicated. With a relatively low percentage share of India’s SC population (at around 2 percent based on the 2011 Indian Census) and growing middle class, the tensions in Gujarat seem to help set the divisive boundaries of contention between caste across India. See Primary Census Abstract for Total population, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, 2011 Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India (October 2013) for a discussion of each India state’s percentage share of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe populations. For further discussion of the 2016 cow controversy and counterprotests in Gujarat, see http://www.countercurrents.org/2016/07/20/cow-skinning-takes-a-deadly-turn-gujarat-dalit-protest-spreads/—accessed October 25, 2016. For an overview discussion of the Barbi Masjid controversy, see Deepak Mehta and Roma Chatterji, “Boundaries, Names, Alterities: A Case Study of ‘Communal Riot’ in Dharavi, Bombay,” in Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery, edited by Vena das et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 201–49. 54. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1970), 183. 55. The Panchayat system is a decentralized system of government administration at the local level in India, in which five democratically elected villages leaders make decisions for their community. For more information see: Vijandra Singh, Panchayati Raj and Rural Development (New Delhi: Sarup and Sons, 2003), among others. 56. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 183. 57. Frank, Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology, 10. 58. James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 183. 59. Ibid., 183. 60. For broader critique of the lack of inter-caste dialogue space for such stories, see Jeremy Rinker, “Why Should We Talk to People Who Do Not Want to Talk to Us,” op. cit. 61. From a song written by Manohar Nagarle upon Dr. Ambedkar’s death, quoted in Vasant Moon, Growing Up Untouchable in India: A Dalit Autobiography (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). 62. Sara Cobb, Speaking of Violence, 99, op. cit. 63. This is the honorific name and reverent term that most Dalits use to talk about Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. Its derivation signifies a fatherly leader and was used by Dr. Ambedkar’s followers before his death, likely as a response, the hagiographic term “mahatma” used to describe M. K. Gandhi. For more on these honorifics, see Joseph Lelyveld, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India (New York: Knopf, 2011), 211, among other writers on the Ambedkar Buddhist movement. For example, see: Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Fighting the Indian Caste System (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 64. Valerian Rodrigues, ed., The Essential Writings of B. R. Ambedkar (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 304. 65. Gail Omvedt. Dalits and the Democratic Revolution (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1994). 66. A prominent marketing initiative, Incredible !ndia, was conceptualized in 2002 by advertising consultant V Sunil and Amitabh Kant, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Tourism for the Indian government. The “Incredible !ndia” logo, where the exclamation mark formed the “I” of India, was used to generate a 16 percent increase in tourist traffic in the first year of the advertising campaign. See http://incredibleindiacampaign.com/—accessed October 25, 2016. 67. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel and Garu, 2015), 6. 68. B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste: An Annotated Critical Edition, edited by S. Anand (London: Verso, 2014), 243. 69. James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, op. cit. 70. J. P. Lederach, Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation Across Cultures (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 19–20. 71. For an example of this, see the writings of the Ambedkar Age Collective (2015) where the frustration over the appropriation of Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste is argued with little direct reference to his revolutionary voice. Ambedkar Age Collective, Hatred in the Belly:

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Politics Behind the Appropriation of Dr. Ambedkar’s Writings (Hyderabad: The Shared Mirror, 2015). 72. Arundhati Roy, “The Doctor and the Saint,” in B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste: An Annotated Critical Edition, edited by S. Anand (London: Verso, 2014), 138. 73. For more on this in relation to Roy’s accounts of Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste, see the writings of the Ambedkar Age Collective (2015), op. cit. 74. Joseph Montville, “Reconciliation as Realpolitik: Facing the Burdens of History in Political Conflict Resolution,” in Identity, Morality, Threat: Studies in Violent Conflict, ed. D. Rothbart and K. Korostelina (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 367–92, and Montville, “Justice and the Burdens of History,” in Reconciliation, Justice, and Coexistence, ed. M. Abu Nimer (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), 129–44. 75. See Barbara Love, “Developing a Liberatory Consciousness,” in Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (New York: Routledge, 2000), 599–603. 76. See Albert Bendura, Social Learning Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1977). 77. Vamik Volkan, Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 48. 78. Ibid., 48. 79. Ibid., 81. 80. James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 183. 81. Joseph Montville, “Justice and the Burdens of History,” in Reconciliation, Justice, and Coexistence, ed. M. Abu Nimer (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), 133. 82. Valarian Rodriguez, ed., The Essential Writings of B. R. Ambedkar (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 37.

Chapter Three

Doing Strategy in Indian Anticaste Activism A Systems Approach to Understanding the Struggle for Identity, Rights, and Awareness

In this chapter, the focus becomes the strategies and tactics of the three anticaste organizations introduced in the earlier chapters of this book. Operating at distinct “leverage points” 1 of Indian anticaste activism, these three movements, when approached as component parts of the wider anticaste movement in India, challenge the existing paradigms of caste-based ideology and exclusion. Chosen as representative of social activism aimed at identity creation, rights achievement, and collective education and awareness, these three movements provide important lenses through which to view the analysis of Indian anticaste movement claims. Further, despite differences in strategy and tactics, these three movements complement each other in important, yet unattended, ways. In the diversity of these movement’s approaches we find both ideological conflict and unity. Collectively these movements were chosen because they represent a set of tactics and social positions that when explored comparatively offer insights that the single exploration of any one movement could not. From center and periphery to relative attention to rights, identity, and awareness these movements provide an important window, though not the only window, into modern anticaste activism. Following the metaphors of lenses and windows these movements’ strategies and tactics, comparatively explored, frame a view of anticaste movement as a system that underscores positive synergies in the struggle to overcome caste injustice. 61

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Headquartered in differing regions of India, the Triratna Bauddha Mahasangha, Sahayak Gana (TBMSG), The People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (PVCHR), and All India Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation (BAMCEF) are all social movement organizations (SMOs) that represent important, yet, at times, divergent, approaches to the transformation of India’s complex caste system. As exemplars of specific forms of anticaste activism, these movements collectively comprise a unique and diffuse system of resistance. Representing religious, secular, political, and non-political ideologies and interests, these three movements jointly embody the broad diversity and potential synergies of anticaste activism. They also highlight the complex and graded aspects of socio-economic class and status within the anticaste movement as a whole. Operating on the belief that “in order to optimize the whole, we must improve relationships among the parts,” 2 the focus on strategies and tactics of TBMSG, PVCHR, and BAMCEF allows for developing an awareness of collective synergies and holistic potentials, as well as underscoring the grounds for differences in ideology and interests. How these three movements do strategy points to anticaste activism as organic, systemic, and potentially collaborative. Following Hardtmann (2009) and Omvedt (1993), these movements are more than reform oriented, they are fighting for democratic revolution in which the complex system of caste is annihilated and equal rights for all are established and maintained. Though scholars of caste have long studied caste as a system of status associations (see chapter 1), they have rarely analyzed anticaste social movements as, themselves, interconnected systems impacting and influencing each other. Though framed in response to injustice, each of these movements has evolved as complex systems—both as individual movements and parts of a larger whole. In working to organize local identity, agitate for international conceptions of rights, and educate for national awareness, these three movements engage in complex narrative-based strategies to affect an unjust caste system. “In evolution there is a progression from multiplicity and chaos to oneness and order.” 3 Seeing anticaste movement as an ever-evolving organic system helps both academics and activists to better understand the purpose, as well as outcomes, of anticaste activism. 4 With the exception of Kumar (2006), Omvedt (1994, 2008), and Hardtmann (2009), few academics have attempted to look beyond the regional, social, and political impacts of anticaste activist social movement organizations (SMOs). Jaffrelot (2003), for example, limits his analysis of the political rise of India’s “silent revolution” 5 to North India and Uttar Pradesh. Pai (2002) also looks at the caste dynamics at play in the political development of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in this same region. 6 Using identity, rights, and awareness frames to varying degrees in their unique programs of anticaste activism, the organizations described and analyzed further in this chapter (and the rest of the book) collectively represent a growing vanguard for anticaste

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activism and whole system change in modern Indian society. Increasingly, movements like the ones studied here are not limiting themselves to caste issues alone, but rather have broadened their scope to address issues of poverty, poor education, and all forms of discrimination. Still, despite the multiplicity of movement tactics, when understood as parts of an anticaste system, these movements hold unique socio-linguistic possibility for broad social and structural change. Given their variegated emphasis on rights, identity, or awareness, these SMOs, and their activist frames of reference, underscore a potential for complimentary movement strategies to transform India’s caste narrative and, thereby, eradicate caste (and with it possibility of many other social ills). Still, despite the potentials, these SMOs do not work intentionally together in any way and are rarely analyzed in comparative light. In fact, at times these movements seem to work at cross-purposes, despite the growing awareness of each other’s work, dense networks of association, and overlapping ideological commitments. The question that engages this chapter is not just why these activist organizations don’t intentionally collaborate to create power in numbers, but, rather, where are the leverage points within the caste system itself, which, despite these organizations’ lack of coordinated response, could be noticed and emphasized to generate true change in caste dynamics. While social movement theorists McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly might call these “political opportunity structures,” 7 I like to think of them as residing within the agentic choices of activists themselves. Rather than assessing what political opportunities exist in social structures, the question becomes in what sense do activists themselves work to create these opportunities both wittingly and unwittingly through the stories they tell? The fact is, a focus on these organizations’ strategies and tactics can underscore what gets missed or goes unnoticed as potential assets for social change. It is the contention here that, despite the lack of an appearance of a coordinated and holistic approach, these three organizations point to complex discursive synergies that hold potentials to leverage lasting caste change in India. These synergies will become even more clear as we analyze specific stories of each of the movements in foregoing chapters, but the strategies and tactics discussed here begin to unveil these synergies. The change tactics and narrative techniques of each of these SMOs, if attended to, can be used to make change despite ideological differences and anticaste movement infighting. Intentional choice and deployment of stories can help to reclaim narrative agency, model dissent, and create change, however incremental. Leverage points, or “places within a complex system where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything,” 8 do not appear magically, but rather are exposed through systems analysis and systematic reflection on actor’s sense and use of their own multifaceted social awareness and agency. How well anticaste activists engage in systematic reflection and

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analysis of their movement speech and tactics is directly proportional to the success of their anticaste interventions for lasting change. Here I proposed that the level of systematic reflective attention can be seen only in the longterm strategies and short-term tactics that movement activists deploy through processes of narrating injustice and framing movement ideology. In exploring activists’ stories and metaphors of their place in a broader system of anticaste movement, potential leverage points for addressing what was explored in chapter 2—“narrative violence” 9—can be unearthed. Following the call in the last chapter for anticaste scholar-practitioners to actively engage in deep analysis of activist narratives, this chapter builds on the works of Cobb (2013), Meadows (1999), and Laszlo (1996) among others to explore the systems-level implications of such a call. Narratives do not just describe things, they themselves act. 10 Within the discursive space of narrative agency, social actors fashion identity, ground the fight for rights, and build awareness. The goal here is to notice the space of narrative agency and show how this space is open and overlapping for the movement activists of TBMSG, PVCHR, and BAMCEF. While this goal is expanded on in later chapters of this book, this chapter aims to notice the comparative opportunities and constraints of each movements’ tactics through initial analysis of the narratives they deploy. The deployment of narratives in a broader public discursive sphere has feedback effects on caste as a complex social system. To change the system, we must recognize and empower these emerging feedback loops. It is in reflexively analyzing the discursive spaces of these activist movements that leverage points can be identified to transform and ultimately destroy the unjust caste system. The analysis of narrative is crucial to not only understanding how identity, rights, and awareness operate among anticaste activists, but also to transforming the unjust systems that narratives construct. While religious, regional, and cultural-linguistic differences act to elide potential cooperation in the mission and aims of these important anticaste SMOs, they also work to thicken the narrative of caste marginalization in the everyday lived experience of the downtrodden. Such differences, despite attempts to overlook them in much of the literature on caste, are important spaces to explore for reflective and creative response to caste injustice. While each of these organizations is comprised of activists working toward a somewhat amorphous sense of social change, their integrated potential lies in taking what could be called a systems approach to narrative change. By noticing the narrative agency of actors, and the systemic, yet local, constructs their narratives create and maintain, a means for anticaste resistance and solidarity can be forged. Although much has been written on the growing modern Dalit assertion and Dalit movement, little has been comparative in nature. Hardtmann (2009), Guru (1993), and Kumar (2006), among others, all do a nice job exploring the local and national practices of what could be

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construed widely as “Dalit movement,” but few studies exist that highlight the differing goals, interests, and objectives within the broad Indian anticaste movement as a strength, not simply a weakness. 11 Though Hardtmann (2009) speaks of the “varied discourses . . . expressed and presented within the same alternative counterpublic,” 12 in general the Dalit movement is understood upon the backdrop of attempting to understand the early 2000s upsurge in global and national Dalit activism following the 2001 Durban, South Africa World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance. 13 Indeed Hardtmann (2009) argues that “Durban became a turning point for the Dalit movement.” 14 Similarly, Omvedt (1994) talks about the historical movement as splintered and uncoordinated, but still frames Dalit assertion within a unifying sense of democratic revolution. 15 This aspirational inclination toward a desired unity among India’s anticaste actors limits the discursive space for expressing real differences within the broader anticaste movement—i.e., it limits activists’ narrative agency. This chapter aims to open the discursive space to think structurally and strategically about difference within anticaste activism at both the center and periphery of anticaste social movement, building on difference to create change. Despite some exploration of the political cracks in the façade of unity, the Dalit movement is often discussed in the literature as one interconnected entity gaining “new horizon” 16 and “constantly in the process of being created and recreated.” 17 While these statements would be true of any complex system, what does this dynamic character of the anticaste movement underscore about the collective means for long-term systems change? For one, it points to the large, and yet unrealized, potential of Dalit forces in India. But, in anticipating this mass resistance’s arrival on the political scene, often clear discussion about national anticaste movement strategy and tactics is given narrower priority. In other words, the largely jubilant approach to emerging modern Dalit resistance leaves both possible interconnections and disjunctions in various movements’ theories of change under-attended and inadequately deliberated. It is in this disjunction that creative “contagious collective epiphany” 18 is possible, yet often goes unrealized. Lack of serious deliberation on difference among anticaste activists leaves creative possibilities for change unrealized. Furthermore, in framing Dalit resistance as an ideal, the intersubjective realities and differences among anticaste activists is made more difficult and precarious to appreciate. Krohn-Hansen’s (1994) conception of the ideal seems relevant here. Attempting to understand the cross-cultural variability of violence as a social construct, Krohn-Hansen writes: “The structure of the physical world is continuous, while the structure of mental maps is discontinuous. Reality flows; the ideal is fixed.” 19 In endeavoring to understand the complex realities of anticaste activists’ resistance, the everyday lived experience of the marginalized must be privileged; the ideal must give way to the

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real. This chapter, continuing the emphasis on activists’ narrative and discursive practices, outlines an integrative systems approach to understanding the, at times disjointed, subaltern tactics and strategies within a centuries-old fight for the social transformation of caste. NARRATIVE CHANGE THROUGH A SYSTEMS LENS An integrated systems approach to narrative change is not as complicated as it at first sounds. It requires us to wear slightly different lenses with which to view the caste problem. It also requires us to be flexible and recursive in our approach to problem solving—not getting too focused on the problems of caste so as to forget the way in which the problems are set both linguistically and pragmatically. Such an approach requires us to forego the dominate positivist epistemology of social science practice and be open to a social constructionist mindset that privileges attention to process and patterns rather absolute truth claims about unjust history and context. The tactics of these three anticaste SMOs, described through my own narrative interactions with them, challenge readers to focus awareness on the epistemological worldview commitments that often limit the collaborative potential of an all-India anticaste movement and, in turn, hinder the potential for eradication of castebased discrimination and marginalization. In one sense, conceptions of relative truth found in the Buddhist philosophical traditions’ of Abhidharma literature provide clear support and connection for such a social constructionist epistemology. 20 But it is the lived experience of narrative itself that presents a leverage point to create systems change in centuries-old caste discrimination. The narratives of activists present their truths and motives for actions; they also provide direction to how we understand these movements’ aims for change. In telling the stories below, the three anticaste movements studied in this book can be envisioned as a system rather than disconnected and divided local responses to caste injustice. Taking a systems approach to narrative change is about listening for and witnessing the process and patterns inherent in activists’ stories. Despite the fact that these SMOs do not intentionally coordinate their organization, agitation, or education activities, seeing these movements as a system allows readers to notice the assets each movement brings to caste transformation and see how these assets can be storied as leverage points for each other. As Dalit communities move into the future—as each existent present moment is always new and pregnant with possibility—they must learn how to strategically tell stories about the past and deploy them with coordinated skill and intentionality. Despite prominent social scientists’ arguments that “the fundamental problem facing the Harijans (i.e., Dalits) is a material one,” 21 here the argument is that rather than “landlessness, poverty,

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and unemployment,” 22 it is strategic and educated storytelling that will ultimately address Dalits’ most fundamental problems. An integrated systems approach to narrative change is needed to notice effective leverage points from which to work toward a generational process of social change. Centuries of caste discrimination will obviously not change overnight, but by seeing these SMO’s tactics as constructing distinct leverage points for collective change, nonmaterial assets can be realized. In seeing the anticaste movement as a complex system, comprised of various religious, regional, and communal identities, the tactics of individual movements can be better understood and seen as problem-setting processes rather deficits in need of problemsolving approaches. In the words of Donald Schon (1983): “The dilemma of rigor or relevance may be dissolved if we can develop an epistemology of practice which places technical problem solving within a broader context of reflective inquiry.” 23 The anticaste movement requires a broader context of reflective inquiry much more than technical problem solving or simple material gain. Close attention to stories assists in developing an epistemology of practice that builds upon these movements’ linguistic social assets as parts of the wider anticaste movement. One activist interviewed during the course of my research on BAMCEF explained the work of Indian anticaste activism as a “loose network” that is “not well lubricated.” 24 This metaphor captures well the sentiment of frustration apparent in the uncoordinated work of many anticaste activist organizations, and it also suggests that something can act as lubricant to overcome this frustration and lack of coordination. This something, I propose, is narrative. Narratives, though at times ambiguous, are how we make meaning. “Although narrative’s ambiguity, or, as I prefer to say, its openness to interpretation, can make for confusion, it can also generate political resources.” 25 Narrative’s ability to generate political resources presents a key leverage point for systems change. Seeing narrative as parts of larger discourse, and understanding that these parts themselves have agency, we can lubricate the systems we are calling the anticaste social movement. In this vein, the stories of TBMSG, PVCHR, and BAMCEF’s tactics are told and critically analyzed. While stories are not reality, they help to map reality by orienting readers/ listeners to the tactics, patterns, values, and shared leverage points necessary for social change. ANTICASTE ACTIVISM THROUGH TURNING ALL-INDIA BUDDHIST: TBMSG’S DHARMA ORGANIZING AND BUDDHIST IDENTITY AWARENESS Invariably, in realizing social justice one must begin with a focus on the pervasiveness of the negative reality of injustice. The problem with such a

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beginning is that, often, focus on the negative reality of numerous experiences of injustice leads to an inability to look past these traumatic experiences to develop a unified vision of a positive identity. Such a reality has plagued the TBMSG movement much like many of the other social movements analyzed here. TBMSG’s response has been to focus squarely on Buddhist identity creation as a primary organizing tool in overcoming caste, sidelining the narratives of injustice so prevalent among their order members. In reasoning that caste structures have conditioned a lack of individual responsibility, which, in turn, have created a collective identity crisis that has positioned social actors in dualistic opposition of either believing or disbelieving in caste’s social importance, or even existence, the TBMSG has focused its work primarily on identity creation among Dalit communities. Though the unique Buddhist identity of the TBMSG has more than a religious meaning, it is nonetheless, religious and communal in character. Organizing around a way of life, TBMSG activists often call for others to follow the Buddha as an example of enlightened social action. At the end of September 2006, I was in Nagpur to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism—the emotionally charged scene at Dikshabhumi (Ambedkar’s site of conversion) on October 2, 2006, was described in this book’s introduction. At Nagaloka, TBMSG’s training campus on the outskirts of Nagpur, academics and foreign Buddhists congregated prior to the Dikshabhumi celebration to strategize during a conference those at the TBMSG had arranged entitled “Dr. Ambedkar and the Modern Buddhist World.” The atmosphere was electric and many people from all over the world who were present for the auspicious fiftieth anniversary of conversion were also there to attend this International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB)–sponsored conference at Nagaloka. The conference was organized into four sessions of papers, with each of these four sessions including three paper presentations on Ambedkar Buddhism’s connection to global networks of socially engaged Buddhism. Of these twelve papers, the papers in the group entitled “The Relevance of Dr. Ambedkar’s Conversion to Buddhism to Modern India” were of particular interest to developing an understanding of TBMSG’s unique social vision. These papers, delivered by TBMSG leadership and supporters, were all designed to argue for the critical importance of Dr. Ambedkar’s Buddhist conversion in realizing a casteless Indian society. The refrain of the lead paper of this international conference was a direct call to “turn all India Buddhist.” While this sounds reasonable as a prelude to Dr. Ambedkar’s famous oratory refrain of “organize, educate, agitate,” the sheer hyperbole of such a statement cannot be overlooked. With a majority (80.5 percent) of the population of India identifying as Hindu and only a very small minority identifying as Buddhist (0.04 percent), this wild rhetoric seems almost laughable. 26 Despite the seeming impossibility of India becom-

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ing even a majority Buddhist country, the call for a Buddhist India resonated with this gathering eager to show their collective identity matters. Among this group of activists, the need for a rational calculation of success mattered little, still the idea of an all-Buddhist India was enough to visualize the end of caste. Religious movements survive, and indeed thrive, on hyperbole and ambiguity, but this was more that an evangelical statement. The embellishment and ambiguity of the speaker’s vision, cheered among the participants, acted as rhetorical political resource to eradicate caste. Rather than telling stories of caste injustice, these activists were instead sharing positive stories of the local Buddhist community and their ability to overcome caste through accepting Buddhism and its doctrine of collective interdependence. In arguing for a Buddhist identity, they were arguing for more than a religious identity, they were arguing for a future social imagination. I have written elsewhere about the inseparability of identity and justice among Ambedkar Buddhists. 27 One example from this conference’s Saturday, September 30, evening cultural events is illustrative of the unique TBMSG framing of their work and strategy as dharma organizing for collective change. LOKAMITRA AND THE RHETORIC OF ORGANIZING IN THE PRESENT WHILE VISIONING THE FUTURE Upon entering the TBMSG girls’ hostel at Gorewada, Nagpur, the electricity blinked and then failed. All that was perceptible was the din of whispering primary school girls and foreign guests attempting to find their way in the near-total darkness. Guests bumped into hastily re-arranged chairs and tripped over crumpled ceremonial carpeting. School officials embarrassingly scrambled to light candles and provide some flashlight-strewn luminosity to the many new arriving dignitaries. The school’s large events room seemed cold, foreign, and unwelcoming. Less than ten minutes after this portentous arrival, electricity restored, I found myself sitting at the front of a makeshift stage with many spiritual dignitaries. Lokamitra, the founder and leader of TBMSG in India, not bothering to explain that this was the front stage for the event, asked if I could sit one row back since he would need to get up at some point to speak. I gladly obliged still not knowing the honorary position I was taking on a makeshift dais, among the foreign bhikkus (monks) in our party. The un-welcoming feel upon entering the dark cement building was extinguished as soon as the lighting was restored and my tardily realized attempts to move to a less-honorary and less-visible position in the audience were quashed by the bhikkus sitting nearby. The program was quickly begun. An informality and inclusiveness filled the air and was evident on the now visible smiling faces of all present. There was really a concerted effort to keep me included despite my anthropological reticence to remain seated front and

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center—inclusiveness and equality are qualities long stressed in this community and this was most evident as the excitement rose as the public ceremony began. After a few song and dance numbers performed by the youngest girls of the school another group of older girls began a short play in Marati. As the narrator and translator intoned that this was a re-enactment of the discrimination and suffering that Dr. Ambedkar faced during his life, my interest was piqued. The young girls first re-enacted a now infamous story of Ambedkar going to the barber, who was cutting the hair of animals, and, yet, refused Ambedkar service because he was an untouchable. Next, they re-played the story of Ambedkar and his siblings going to visit their father in a far-off village (Goregaon), at first having trouble finding a driver to escort them from the rail station, and then arguing with the driver, who refused to stop at a watering hole to allow the passengers to drink for his own fear of highcaste reprisals. The play completed and the audience ready to break for dinner, Lokamitra sprung up on his one good hip (he received hip surgery in late 2006 and was still walking with a limp and cane) and thanked the young actors and performers with a hearty smile and youthful exuberance. Stressing the informal nature of this event he said he wanted to say a few words before requesting everyone move to the adjacent room to share in a communal meal the school had prepared for all the visitors. Thanking the school headmaster he praised the progress of the school which had “been operating for thirteen years without Government of India assistance.” 28 Combining what Labov (1972) would classify as both abstract and orientation, 29 Lokamitra’s narrative continued by paradoxically intoning that even though the school was “inaugurated in the United Nations year of the woman and was promised some small funding from the Indian government, they have, to this day, received no funds from the Indian government.” 30 Juxtaposing this statement with the fact that every one of the TBMSG boys’ schools/hostels (twentythree in total) had received some form of Indian government assistance, Lokamitra’s informal talk began to take on the feel of a political stump speech. With rising anger in his eyes and a constant smile on his face, Lokamitra then quipped, “The Government of India must not want girls to learn. All this would lead one to think there must be some discrimination here. [pause] Sixty to seventy years ago these girls would have had absolutely no chance at any education due to their status as ‘untouchables,’ but look now at what we have done!” 31 This statement seemed to sum up all that Lokamitra wanted to get across to both the visiting foreigners and local TBMSG members in the room through the evening’s program; glorifying the work already done and stressing the injustice evident in a needy girls school’s lack of government support, Lokamitra was highlighting a narrative that he felt needed strengthening—i.e. various types of discrimination are

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alive and well and we (as the TBMSG) are doing something about it; not standing idly by, but making a measurable difference in these children’s lives. But, just as importantly as his retrospective reminder of injustice, a projective sense of justice’s “ought” was conjured up in which girls received equal government assistance and hardships of poverty and caste were replaced by academic success and a fair playing field. This narrative made clear to the foreign donors and supporters from Taiwan, Thailand, Korea, Britain, and the United States that the work was not done, despite the progress that has been made. The narrative context of Lokamitra’s statement acted as a call to the local Dalit community present to continue to both honor past progress and recommit to fight all forms of inequality. It acted as a broad call to action as much as a means to instilling confidence in TBMSG members’ sense of group identity; progress, here, is measured not just by the accomplishments of the group, but also in the sense of the shift in the Ambedkar Buddhist collective identity. As an overt sign of dissatisfaction with local and federal government spending and bureaucratic decision making, Lokamitra’s stinging criticism was, like the conference speakers’ call to make all India Buddhist, full of rhetorical hyperbole which invokes the real anger people have over their lack of power, sense of inferiority, and skepticism in the actualization of futuregoing justice. Remaining positive in his stress of the accomplishment that untouchables had made against structural violence, Lokamitra keenly positioned Dalit Buddhists as both sufferers of social inequality and agents of social change. Never voicing the word injustice, it was implied and, thus, understood by those in the audience through his use of the pejorative untouchable. Most importantly, Lokamitra’s statement was a redefinition of justice; a positioning of followers’ lives within a complex context of class, gender, and caste oppression maintained by the state. His statements, in addition to revealing the assortment of actors to which the movement is continually speaking, points to the TBMSG belief in the crucial role of an Ambedkar Buddhist collective identity in actualizing social justice. On multiple levels the narrative storyline instinctively created by Lokamitra presented a call to identity justice through highlighting the community’s own ability to uplift itself. As a central ideology within the wider Dalit movement, self-help resonates throughout the storylines created by TBMSG leaders. It is such individual and collective agency that animates the anticaste movement as a system, yet often is overlooked by the identity politics of privileging Buddhist, indigenous, or particular secular identities. The above reconstruction of this justice narrative deserves closer analysis because it provides a window into the narrative structure of the anticaste movement generally, and TBMSG strategic organizing specifically. Helpful to breaking down Lokamitra’s justice narrative is the model and definition of narrative proposed by Labov (1972). 32 From Lokamitra’s first words of

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thanks to the hostel we are alerted to the fact that the story to come is about overcoming wrong through hard work and it is this particular abstract of the storyline that alerts listeners to its meaning. The listeners, assumed to be aware of the context of injustice that Dalits across India face, are reintroduced to the context of this school. Beginning with positioning the school/ hostel as successful and revolutionary (“[The Bahujan Hitay Girls Hostel Gorewada has] been operating for thirteen years without Government of India assistance”), Lokamitra is at once praising the school staff and community of supporters and signaling the importance of its innovative work despite outside help. Such an orienting statement simultaneously positions Dalits as self-reliant and victims of injustice. For movement actors this abstract and orientation invokes a repertoire of past examples of community progress with an emphasis that the sole agency for this progress came from the Ambedkar Buddhist community itself. Marking the school’s origins in the “United Nations Year of the Woman” both the human rights legacy of the United Nations, and the lack of international attention to the rights of Dalits is also invoked. This local-to-global orientation of the audience to the beginnings of the hostel in the United Nations’ Year of the Woman provides Lokamitra with the opportunity to use the paradoxical history of the hostel to express a complicating action to his initial abstract and orientation. The complicating action of the school’s success, in spite of government ineffectiveness and lack of support, leads to the all-important evaluative component of the storyline—the implication that there must be some conspiracy or general policy within the government that states that girls should not learn. Unstated, this conspiracy is more than gender discrimination, but driven by caste marginalization. The implication of this statement is that Lokamitra is able to position the Indian government as uncaring and unconcerned about educating girls, while simultaneously positioning Ambedkar Buddhist Dalits associated with the TBMSG as capable and, yet, also victimized. The positioning of the Indian government as uncaring and indifferent about Dalits makes the creation of a group identity as both self-reliant and lacking social justice a much easier sell to the listener. In the context of the evening’s program this evaluative statement is juxtaposed with the unspoken and obvious results of the school’s success. Lokamitra’s judgment brings his audience back to the present reality of the school’s bright and smiling students and the result of the community’s overcoming of impossible odds to develop opportunity where there was none. Finally, in ending the story with what Labov (1972) would call a coda, Lokamitra calls everyone to the dining room adjacent to the hall to share in a meal, an act that upon the backdrop of the legacy of the caste system is radical in itself, since inter-caste meals were a strong taboo in traditional caste-based India. The collective sense of identity justice created via this story empowers the root of TBMSG organizing and develops a “we”

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upon which to build the foundation and self-esteem for a long fight against caste. Lokamitra’s use of “we” to simultaneously foster Dalit and Buddhist solidarity is geared toward empowering an inter-caste sense of collective self. Allowing listeners into prior discussion that he has had with high ranking civil servants in the Indian government, Lokamitra is not only positioning himself as on the side of right, but also re-positioning his followers as newly empowered through his/the movement’s agency. In his telling, he is symbolically giving these Ambedkar Buddhist followers access to the halls of power. Despite their lack of economic resources and education these Dalit listeners are, thus, given respect and hope that positions them as a party to negotiations with the Indian government and as working toward something greater than their own particular predicament. This shared sense of meaning is crucial to developing a more than parochial sense of oppression and injustice response; it represents a foundational aspect of all anticaste movement narratives. In providing a “rhetorical redescription of the event,” 33 Lokamitra is able to choose what portions of discussion with the Indian government he wants to invoke and omit those that contradict the strategy of organizing Ambedkar Buddhist identity. The instrumental nature of Lokamitra’s account and his particular choice of words and phrases, therefore, hold important clues to the meaning and significance of TBMSG movement discourse, especially with respect to both identity, power, and movement organizing. A crucial part of a wider system, similar identity organizing can be found in the other anticaste movements analyzed in this book, but the emphasis of this identity creation and organizing is most clearly visible in the works of TBMSG. If coupled with the emphasis on strategic education and agitation found in the PVCHR and BAMCEF, such organizing represents an effective means to create social change. Still, while Lokamitra’s example of third-order positioning (i.e., positioning that involves “talk about talk” 34) bolsters the groups’ sense of in-group identity, it also limits conversational space through which the conditions of justpeace 35 can be achieved. Creating a storyline in which “we” are on a social justice journey of equality, fraternity, and liberty positions others as discriminators, hostile, uncaring, and unjust. The Indian government in the above narrative storyline is certainly seen in this negative way, and such black-and-white conceptions leave little or no room for in-between. The fact is that the positioning of Dalits as past sufferers of injustice both empowers and encumbers the Dalit community as a whole. Such narrative storylines empower a super-ordinate identity in which self-actualization becomes possible, but also encumbers the community’s ability to engage in authentic dialogue with others that have been positioned as elitist, status quo, and/or belligerent toward low castes. Despite the fact that there are many others in the system of graded inequality which forms the basis of caste, the identity

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position created by Lokamitra’s narrative—one that envisions Dalits as outside that of the others’ system—is revolutionary, liberating, and potentially generative of destructive conflict. Lokamitra’s narrative aims to harness the organizing power of a newly minted Ambedkar Buddhist identity without alienating those who oppose change (or the speed of its dissemination). But, how are his speech acts to overcome the distrust and exclusion that this narrative storyline of self-pride and in-group identity formation engenders in other communities? This is the perennial paradox of identity-based social movements—how to balance marginalized people’s need for a sense of collective identity and self-esteem with an inclusive message and stance that includes potential allies. Despite the fact that TBMSG members do not seem overly concerned with expending time and energy on relations with those outside their community, some means of overcoming this paradox may well come from returning to Lokamitra’s narrative itself. The congratulatory nature of a narrative which is embedded within a justice framework (for example: “look at what we have done for Dalit girls that have the right to learn”) is telling for its projection of a within-group vision of justice which is in contrast with outgroup members’ visions. Celebrating successful action is indicative of much of the movement language of TBMSG. Through empowering a sense of pride and identity, Lokamitra’s leadership narrative draws attention to injustice and names social justice as the movement’s common goal. Yet, movement leaders and their followers, I argue, deploy these narratives devoid of a clear understanding of their full impacts on the diversity of others within their social and political structure. Unaware of the full impact of their narrative agency, TBMSG movement activist unwittingly shorten the conversational space between high and low castes and raise the potential for destructive conflict, despite the positive organizing outcomes born of identity creation. Such a dynamic is probably most clearly seen in TBMSG leaders’ dogmatic insistence on the need for a Buddhist identity to achieve desired social transformation. Such an insistence on creating Buddhist identity at all costs and despite other potential avenues for social change has left higher castes the public space to simply equate Buddhism with low castes and disregard it outright. Framing Dalit Buddhists as neo-Buddhists or new age cults complicates TBMSG’s strategy of Buddhist identity creation. Despite the mobilization and organizational gains that collective identity enlivens, the fact remains that the rhetoric of exclusion flies counter to the movement’s desire for, and in-group practices of, inclusion. Focused on transformation through the dharma and modeling the dharma practice in social life, TBMSG leaders seem to be unfazed by the charge that their rhetoric may appear exclusive to some. It is as if they are in a Dalit Buddhist network or cocoon, unaware that their narratives and narrative structures may have negative consequences as well as positive ones.

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A final example of the TBMSG movement’s inattention to narrative structures in their zeal to organize can be seen in their strict adherence to the original twenty-two vows taken by Dr. Ambedkar upon his conversion to Buddhism. 36 The continued adherence to these vows, over fifty years after conversion, provides further illustration of the TBMSG movement’s primary adherence to Buddhist collective identity and lack of critical re-assessment of adherence. As Christopher Queen has insightfully stated in this regard: These people need to live in a world with Muslims and Hindus and all the rest. Dr. Ambedkar wanted to reconstruct the Buddhist tradition, so it met the needs of his time. But can the Ambedkarites do the same with Ambedkar’s own ideas? Nagaloka (TBMSG’s Training Institute) should be teaching comparative religion and they really need to drop the 22 vows. . . . They need to say what they are for and leave aside what they are against. 37

These vows reinforce a collective identity built on exclusion and othering by arguing that Hindu practices are elitist and superstitious as opposed to Buddhist ones that are egalitarian and pragmatic. Despite the organizing potential of such a collective identity, organizing around Buddhist identity blocks many other potential means of social transformation. The fostering of selfpride and in-group identity present a double-edged sword, TBMSG represents both a pro-social movement of Ambedkar Buddhists with a newfound sense of self-respect and an anti-social movement with a negative exclusive underbelly that breeds resentment and reifies social distance. Ambedkar’s vows, like the movement narrative outlined above, point to TBMSG’s belief in the immediacy of the need for what Taylor, Bougie, and Caouette (2003) call “a stable template against which the individual can articulate a personal identity.” 38 It is a Buddhist identity which is this template and from which a new sense of psychological self-worth is grown. While certainly useful for organizing and mobilizing marginalized Dalits, this strict adherence to the creation of a Buddhist identity as a strategy for social change misses important opportunities to educate and agitate for rights and awareness and create solidarities among other non-Buddhist communities. ANTICASTE ACTIVISM ONE VILLAGE AT A TIME: PVCHR’S NEO-DALIT AGITATING AND RIGHTS AWARENESS While collective identity is also crucial to the work of the PVCHR, it is a secular identity based on rights awareness and focused on the diversity of identities found in any Indian village. Human rights violations and injustices inspire their work more than a desire to organize and mobilize around any collective identity. As a result of this shift in strategic emphasis, the “neodalit” 39 collective identity advocated by the PVCHR is more open and inclu-

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sive so as to draw in a diversity of marginalized actors to agitate for lasting systemic change. Tellingly, Nagvanshi and Kaushik (2016) end their book on Dalit empowerment with a description of neo-Dalit movement as the best means to developing a “model village:” 40 The neo-dalit movement combines Shudras and Ati-Shudras from all regions, where Shudra is used in the literal meaning of downtrodden and not symbolic meaning of a particular caste. It is the best way to fight against a neo-fascist politics of caste and community divisions. It is a movement against Brahmanism and elitism and not against Hindus and upper castes. 41

PVCHR’s secular approach adeptly avoids India’s endemic religious conflicts, even refusing to be critical of Hinduism’s role in the historical legacy of caste oppression. In some sense, the vision and strategy of PVCHR is broader and more inclusive than one would see in a movement like TBMSG; in another sense, they are narrowed by a strict focus on the low end of the socio-economic spectrum. While TBMSG receives much support form middle-class Ambedkar Dalit supporters and BAMCEF relies on employed Indian civil servants, PVCHR casts a net over the poor in search of core supporters that are defined by a lack of not just rights awareness, but also material resources. In the words of Shruti Nagvanshi, co-founder of PVCHR, “by not stressing identity, but rights awareness, this allows us to maintain diversity.” 42 This more secular and democratically inclusive emphasis was evident on a trip to Robertsganj, a small village of about fifty people about a three-hour drive from Banaras city. A tribal community of grass cutters and weavers, this small village is underserved by the nearby district magistrate and health issues abound. Villagers, in addition to having to walk half a kilometer away to illegally retrieve water from the stagnant water of a dam, also experience problems with tuberculosis, extreme malnourishment, and even starvation. Of the roughly fifty families in the village, each has been touched with death by starvation (usually their youngest are the victims). An account of my own interaction with a young fourteen-year-old girl named Moori clearly emphasizes the PVCHR shift to agitation and rights awareness and education over organizing around community or identity. Such interactions also expose the complex relationships between the systems of oppression operating within and upon low-caste and Adavasi (tribal) villages across India. Moori, fourteen years old in May 2013 when I met her, only studied until the fifth form before dropping out of school to try and help her family. Moori’s mother had seven children, three of which died of malnutrition. Her father, an alcoholic rickshaw walla, is rarely at home. Her mother also struggles with alcoholism. When I met her, Moori was carrying her seven-monthold sister, who already showed signs of malnutrition herself. Despite Moori’s

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sad predicament, she smiled often and became completely transfixed by Shruti Nagvanshi’s iphone. Looking around the room of the community center that PVCHR built, she seemed to be the only person in this village capable of a smile. Soon she was eagerly showing us around her village on this scorching-hot summer day. Despite the sun blaring down and temperatures well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, Moori excitedly showed us her mudand-stick-constructed house and asked many questions of us on the way to visit her neighbors. She was clearly hungry for knowledge of the world outside her small village. Beyond the mud and thatched roof huts that comprise this village, she has little knowledge or experience. She wanted to know what I do—I responded that I was a teacher. She then asked not what I teach, but rather “How do you teach?” This is not a mistake in translation. I checked it twice with my interpreter. Out of school for so long, you can sense the ongoing trauma leaving school played on Moori’s psyche. Realizing her sad predicament, she refused to stop smiling. Her question was telling because it not only assumed an innocence in my young interlocutor, but also belied a true belief in her own ability to sap all my knowledge in what she knew would be a brief interaction. Her inquisitive confidence underscores her innate knowledge that our meeting will be a fleeting one and that it must be exploited to full advantage. Obviously driven by the thought of change, Moori represented the energy of her village. She represented the energy and agency in her village that PVCHR aims to tap for human rights activism. Her life and energy are what PVCHR aims to resource as they organize and educate about rights within such communities. PVCHR needs support from people like Moori, as much as Moori needs PVCHR’s support. PVCHR’s strategy is not to create confidence through identity, but rather to create confidence through rights education and agitation. In retelling this brief, yet impactful, interaction with Moori, it is not sympathy, or even empathy, that I hope to elicit from readers. Rather, it is the relative ordinariness of her circumstances and the way these ordinary interactions underscore the secular and rights-based strategic ideology of PVCHR activists. Strategically empowering community members like Moori to become aware of the forces that empower their oppression and educate others as to their rights, PVCHR relies on building relationships with people like Moori. This scene could no doubt be replicated across many small villages in India. But Moori’s smile and interaction with PVCHR’s staff is a clear expression of activists’ desire to work for humanity and build “people friendly villages” 43 rather than ardent identities. PVCHR activists understand their work as “intervention through developing villages into Jan Mitra Gaon (people friendly villages), where every individual is assured of his or her social economic, political, and cultural rights as per the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948. . . .” 44 Despite the fact that these villagers are Adavasi, they are treated no differently than the Dalits or Muslims with whom the

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PVCHR works in other nearby villages. The common connection is to the underserved through a pragmatic focus on their rights. Focus on the basic rights and needs, as opposed to identity, allows PVCHR activists to narrate more than rights abuse, they also narrate rights expression. Empowering people like Moori with an awareness of their marginalization is a first step in a strategic process of creating awareness and modeling an authentic expression of collective rights. In a sense, this awareness and modeling is most easily seen through neo-dalit organizing around villagers’ rights. The PVCHR’s change tactics are, thus, both deep and broad. Its human rights focus is global, but it has connected this global discourse to Indian caste by connecting locally at the level of village conflict dynamics. One final narrative of PVCHR activism further expresses their strategic approach to secular rights activism and village agitation for social change. PVCHR’s use of a process they call testimonial therapy provides a holistic expression of their long-term strategy of organizing and educating around rights; an agitating and educating that does not just involve low-caste and Dalits, but also Muslims. I have written elsewhere of PVCHR’s testimonial therapy project, 45 and, therefore, only describe it briefly below. The testimonial narrative that follows this brief description illustrates well the strategic impact of PVCHR’s testimonial therapy work. The story narrated by Ashiya below shows how narrative truth telling has therapeutic benefits for the teller, as well as those listening in the village. The testimonial therapy process is a replicable process for fostering collective social change in a community by empowering the marginalized, attempting to create equidistance between the marginalized and the powerful, and by building empathy and compassion for the victims of rights abuse. This project is a key anchor for PVCHR’s construction of “people friendly” villages and is operating in Dalit, Muslim, and Adavasi villages across the Northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The testimonial therapy process, first developed in India through collaboration between PVCHR and The Rehabilitation and Research Center for Victims of Torture (RCT-Denmark), 46 is performed over four sessions, which include various stages of sharing and processing the suffering of victims and survivors of torture, police misconduct, and elite exploitation. 47 The culmination of the process is the delivery of a painful testimony in the form of a public ceremony in front of one’s home village. This public culmination where the testimonial narrative is read into a public space, called the honor ceremony, is both emotional and cathartic. While a U.S. Fulbright Fellow in Banaras, Uttar Pradesh, I witnessed firsthand the power of a few honor ceremonies among differing identity groups in villages surrounding Banaras. Most of these villages are populated by subsistence farmers and informal laborers, many of which could be categorized as “bonded laborers” 48 and/or are exploited by elites in various ways as they farm, weave fabric, and work in the many brick kilns that dot the

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rural landscape. The entire village is invited, and most villagers come out in support of their village neighbor whose suffering is being honored. Performances of skits, music, and dance are interspersed with awareness raising about human rights and rights abuse. A community meal is served at the end of the main event—the testimonial reading. This reading, sometimes done by the survivor themselves, but sometimes read by a close friend or family member, is offered in a caring and supportive atmosphere and with the clear intention of educating the village. The cultural and community-building aspects of these ceremonies are as central to PVCHR’s work as the reconstruction of the testimony itself. As the culmination of a months-long process of narrative therapy, writing, re-writing, and finalizing the survivor’s story, the public testimony becomes a central organizing event for the community and a model for trauma sharing, rights activism, and community resilience. Sometimes, those that step forward as testimonial therapy participants are suffering from vicarious trauma—they themselves experienced wounds and distress based on the experiences of others; their loved ones, for example. Ashiya is an example of such a survivor, having experienced the torture and arrest of her husband, she was broken when PVCHR first encountered her. Her husband, a dry goods trolley operator working in India’s large informal economy, was arrested in front of her and her children in Mirashah Takia, a Muslim village, in the Pindra sub-district of Varanasi (aka Banaras) District. As her husband was delivering goods to a neighbor, the police jumped on him, beat him, and arrested him, all while Ashiya looked on helplessly. In 2010, three years after these events, Ashiya gave her testimony to PVCHR and articulated how the experience continues to keep her “shaken from inside” 49 and unstable in her relationship with her children. The uncertainty of her husband’s predicament and the struggles to free him after sixteen days in jail left Ashiya anemic and in the hospital, unable to care for her children and exhibiting many symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Experiencing loss of appetite, uncontrollable crying, and the formation of blisters on her heels from continual movement due to hyper-arousal, Ashiya sought help through her village as her family was too poor to assist. The lasting effects of Ashiya’s vicarious trauma is clear in her written testimonial that PVCHR published in their September 2011 Voice of the Voiceless glossy magazine. 50 The disruption of this police harassment and the corruption needed to free her husband has left an indelible mark on Ashiya’s entire family. After securing a loan from a wealthy and sympathetic higher caste in her village, Ashiya was able to secure the release of her husband, but this was not the end of her suffering. The uncertainty as to whether the police would return for her husband and the fear that she and her children still have for the police affect her daily. One son faints and becomes dizzy upon seeing the police. Ashiya’s loan has postponed her ability to save money for her daughter’s wedding. Despite her fellow villagers’ belief that her hardships were

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over, the legacy of her husband’s arrest still has impacts in her life. Being able to voice this, three years after the stressful event, allows Ashiya to feel some relief and name the real impact of these events on her families’ sense of rights and security. Such a space, created by the testimonial therapy process and honor ceremony, serves many individual and group purposes. At the individual level, an opportunity is created to learn about your neighbors and see traumatic events from their perspective. In addition, survivors, like Ashiya, are able to publically process their past traumagenic events and break the cycles of violence such events can engender. 51 At the group level awareness of past harms and present rights is developed. In hearing the stories of neighbor’s suffering a collective sense of rights, identity, and awareness are strengthened and the space and structure to formulate productive response is created. Such processes, like Ashiya’s narrative testimony, model the strategy of PVCHR’s work by providing a space and a structure to raise rights awareness and organize for agitation at the village level. While identity is certainly an important mediating factor in this work, it is not the focus of this organizing and educating. While recent history is invoked, collective historical trauma forms only a distant backdrop to rights organization in the present. Despite a distinct focus on inclusive right-based activism, PVCHR’s work is anticaste and anti-hierarchy in nature. Rather than organizing around religious identity or historical oppression, PVCHR organizes around rights in the particular case and injustice in the village. Such a strategy, I continue to argue, is not discontinuous with other anticaste movement approaches. In moving to discuss BAMCEF’s strategy of education and awareness among a socially constructed “indigenous majority” category of the oppressed, the similarities and overlapping oppressions of the Indian caste context become further apparent. The last of our three movements’ focus is on education and represents a distinctive reading of Indian history. ANTICASTE ACTIVISM AND THE HISTORICITY OF EXCLUSION: BAMCEF’S INDIGENOUS EDUCATION AND MULNIVASI AWARENESS Missing from this discussion, thus far, has been a detailed discussion of the connections between marginalized awareness and anticaste activists’ construction of history. Identity, rights, and awareness, each a complicated system in and of themselves, form a constellation of strategies and tactics for social movement actors. Narrative represents a means to systematically and strategically approach this constellation in all its complexity. Of all the anticaste movements discussed above, BAMCEF has been the most effective at scaling up their organizing approach from a local to a national stage. Along with middle-class groundings and resource support, the reasons for this na-

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tional reach are many, but it is BAMCEF’s articulation of an indigenous history that appears to drive their appeal. Avoiding religious or political identity, BAMCEF has relied on constructing a particular narrative of ancient Indian history. Like TBMSG and PVCHR, BAMCEF is aiming for the annihilation of caste and caste hierarchy, but their theory of practice for how this casteless state of affairs will be realized is unique from the other movements we have studied. Through educating the oppressed majority on a certain, and contested, construction of Indian history, BAMCEF/Mulnivasi Sangha aims to develop people power and change all of India. Often disparaged by other anticaste activists as too ideological, BAMCEF/Mulnivasi Sangha has strong middle-class roots and professes a non-political, yet moralistic sounding, approach to change in caste power dynamics. Despite their apolitical founding and style of organizing, BAMCEF activists are nothing if not “political.” If by political we mean that movements organize and educate about a particular ideology, then BAMCEF is certainly a political organization. While not directly contesting elections, agitating for particular candidates, or forming political parties, the strategy of BAMCEF is to build awareness and conscientization 52 of oppression through a cadrebased model of organizing and educating. This strategy hinges on a sociohistorical analysis that privileges constructing a contemporary collective identity of a Munivasi Bahujan (indigenous majority). Despite limited primary source evidence of an indigenous pre-Aryan majority on the Indian subcontinent, 53 BAMCEF ideology relies on an understanding of the preHarrapan civilization as original casteless inhabitants. This belief in outside Aryans bringing caste (jati) to the Indian subcontinent along with Hindu scriptures forms the backbone of BAMCEF activists’ argument for change. In discussing the early formation of BAMCEF, Rajivlochan and Rajivlochan (2014) write “BAMCEF sought to educate its members about the importance of a separate identity for them, an identity distinct from the caste-Hindu society that they sought to criticize.” 54 This polemical stance toward Hinduism is both a resource and constraint for BAMCEF activists. Developing a strong cadre network of local activists, this identity serves as critical starting point for liberatory education. If you buy into still prevalent, though deeply contested, theories of the Aryan invasion of the Indian subcontinent then this view of history serves as a platform for developing collective identity aimed at educating an oppressed majority against dominant Brahman culture. Agreeing with Ilaiah (2009) that “Dalitism should encounter Brahmanism and a massive transformative discourse has to be deployed on the India soil,” 55 BAMCEF activists aim to create a secular Mulnivasi Bahujan (indigenous majority) identity. If, like any identity, this view becomes too strident, then exclusion of the other becomes an excepted, and accepted, norm. The two stories that follow, based on interviews with high-level BAMCEF acti-

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vists, illustrate the nature of the potential political resources and constraints to educating for a Mulnivasi Bahujan (indigenous majority). In July 2016, I interviewed over twenty leaders in the BAMCEF/Mulnivasi Sangha who were participating in a BAMCEF national organizing conference at the Rashtrapita Jyotiba Phuley Institute of Social Revolution in Ringnabodhi, Maharashtra (about twenty kilometers outside of Nagpur City). During these interviews, I met activists and longtime leaders of the BAMCEF anticaste movement with unique stories of activism to tell. The story of Harshal and his work in the movement 56 illustrates the potential personal and collective political resources that educating on the Mulnivasi Bahujan can bring. Harshal, an OBC 57 originally from Madhya Pradesh, the neighboring state to Maharashtra, first became politically active as he was in engineering college. Initially becoming interested in the youth organizing of the Hindu right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 58 during their 1977 antireservation movement, Harshal soon realized the inequalities and discrimination within their movement and message. He promptly left RSS’s youth organizing efforts after meeting Kanshi Ram (BAMCEF founder, see chapter 1) in 1980. He became an official BAMCEF member that same year upon joining the government-owned telecom industries. He has now been working with BAMCEF for over thirty-six years and expressed pride in how BAMCEF was able to help educate him. When describing his early cadre organizing work with BAMCEF, Harshal says “Here I got clear concept [of] why there is caste discrimination.” 59 Such awareness of their plight and clarity on their objectives was typical of all the BAMCEF leadership I interviewed. Activists, like Harshal, point to the fact that anticaste identity is dynamic and evolving. The more one can persuade potential recruits of the Mulnivasi Bahujan historical narrative, the more this political resource can be used to build coalitions, or cadres, of activism. Fully believing in this narrative of Dalits and low castes as the original inhabitants of India, Harshal argues that once people are educated about their pre-caste history an awareness of injustice arises. For BAMCEF and Mulnivasi Sangha organizers, this critical education is the key to change in the caste system. “Now we are studying this and we know that in the past our forefathers were one.” 60 Cleaving on the themes of a revivalist-style historical unity and present electoral strength, BAMCEF activists use a story about pre-caste indigenous history to overcome “ignorance and poor education.” 61 Harshal is emblematic of the post-Mandal shift in marginalized awareness. When asked about creating one identity in opposition to a Brahmin elite identity, Harshal cites the Mandal Commission’s decision and social upheaval after the 1980s as key reason for the solidarity between Dalits and OBCs. “Brahmanism is trying to keep OBC people within their clutches. But it may not happen without Mandal, it is due to Mandal agitation also. They are responsible for the insurgency. Without Mandal’s agitation, it is not pos-

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sible.” 62 It is this agitation and awareness that is the direct consequence of BAMCEF’s Mulnivasi Bahujan informed history. The power of this contested historical narrative can and does mobilize resistance and solidarity between SC, ST, and OBC communities, not just Dalits. In Harshal’s own words, “No weapon is needed. The ballot is sufficient for us.” 63 While arguing for this “real history” 64 of India certainly has its political resources, it also harbors political and relational constraints. In modern India, OBCs certainly play the role of the pawn in many political power struggles. Harshal, like other BAMCEF activists I interviewed, responded to questions about exclusiveness of Mulnivasi identity by narrating an ancient unified history. 65 Regardless of the truthfulness of these claims, the exclusion and othering this rhetoric creates represents a constraint in the BAMCEF approach. The question of how you live in the present with your oppressor represents a complicated question for BAMCEF activists. From my field experience, when asked such questions about living with the oppressor, many differing responses were expressed by activists. One final interaction with a BAMCEF/Mulnivasi Sangha activist in Amravati, Maharashtra, in the summer of 2016 underscores this social movement’s drive to educate for an organized and aware identity, as well as the constraints such an identity narrative can generate. I had been staying with Sanjay 66 and his family for about three days, when one evening I was able to stream the recent film Sairat 67 on my tablet. Sairat, the 2016 Marathi film by Nagraj Manjule that took all of India by storm a few months before my arrival, was well known to the activists I had been studying on my summer 2016 trip around Maharashtra. Many of these activists had suggested that I watch this film, and staying with an upper-middle-class Dalit family, with good internet connectivity, had afforded me that possibility after a long day of traveling and interviews. As I lay in bed and watched, I could hear Sanjay and the younger of his two daughters winding down their day. The next morning, over breakfast, I told Sanjay that I had watched Sairat last night. He was happy that I had and after showing his excitement he asked me what I thought about the film. In response, I posed a series of questions to him about his work and his family. The film opened the most authentic and frank conversation about inter-caste marriage I had ever had with an Indian of any caste. The father of two daughters, Sanjay had repeatedly told me over the last three days that his daughters could marry anyone they wanted; that the world was different than when he was a younger man. He talked often about his working with BAMCEF as being for his children and consistently articulated a vision of a future India in which his girls would not be affected in any way by caste or gender discrimination. But in the context of our discussion about the film Sairat—a film about a Dalit boy marrying a higher-caste Maratha girl; a film full of both structural and direct violence—Sanjay seemed to equivocate on his view that any caste should marry any other

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caste. When questioned, it was clear that Sanjay was hesitant to allow his own daughters to marry an upper-caste Brahmin. This was made clear when I directly asked: “So, as far as you are concerned, your daughters can marry into any caste?” His first response was “sure,” but when I pressed “even a Brahmin?” Sanjay conceded: “Well, anyone but a Brahmin.” 68 The shocked expression on my face must have betrayed my surprise to his response. Sanjay’s response had clearly contradicted what he had previously told me about a casteless future for his girls. Quickly and unprompted, Sanjay began justifying his previous statement. “Well,” he said, “Brahmins would bring their culture into our house.” 69 Unsatisfied that this fully explained his position, he continued, again unprompted: “Slowly my daughter would be overtaken by this Brahmin belief . . . she would start cooking Brahmin food . . . and [soon thereafter] she would not be aware of our history and problems as a people.” While this story, and the sentiment it expresses, may not be extraordinary, the raw honesty of Sanjay expressing this openly to an outsider was rare. Though many Indians, of all stripes, may aspire to express a liberal and critical multiculturalism, implicit prejudices and bias are endemic “hidden transcripts” 70 that express marginal resistance, but also belie the power of identity formation to maintain oppression. This story differs from the stories I have told above about TBMSG and PVCHR in that it exposes a real and underlying fear among anticaste activists. Beyond losing identity or rights, forgetting one’s cultural awareness and grounding is paramount to death of the movement and its people. Separating BAMCEF’s sense of cultural awareness from issues of collective social identity are complicated at best, 71 but Sanjay’s equivocation on imagining the potential of his daughters’ marriage to a high caste is indicative of ingroup polarization and deeply held “enemy images.” 72 Despite the BAMCEF rhetoric of political revolution with subsequent inclusion, the reality of inclusion is much more difficult when a movement works so hard to construct an oppositional or counter-normative identity. Mulnivasi identity rethinks India’s ancient history, but it also solidifies a new majoritarian identity in the present. This identity, as we saw with Harshal’s story above, can produce positive benefits, such as improved education, self-esteem, and collective purpose. Mulnivasi identity can also produce negative social benefits such as exclusion and in-group discriminatory responses, such as not allowing your daughter to marry a higher caste or actively punishing former elites once your identity comes into sought-after power. Many of the BAMCEF/Mulnivasi Sangha activists I spoke with, when asked a hypothetical future-oriented question about what would become of Brahmins once the Mulnivasi Bahujan was fully in power of the Indian state, argued that Brahmins would “have to go back to where they came from.” 73 Despite the impossibility of such relocation, Brahmin families have lived in India for thousands of years, many BAMCEF activists expressed a punitive response to hypothetically deposed

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Brahmin elites. This angry and strident dynamic often overtook the interviews I conducted with BAMCEF leadership and, on more than one occasion, when the level of tension had risen to a noticeable level, other listeners would interject a gentler perspective to the effect that Brahmins would not be harmed, but they would have to live like everyone else does. This sort of view—an equal redistribution of wealth—seemed ill-thought out and aimed at placating the tension of previously suggesting Brahman’s return from whence they originated. Here lies the crux of much low-caste contention—a sense of relative deprivation—which signals some potential leverage points for developing systems change narratives. CONCLUSIONS: COMPARATIVE TACTICS, COORDINATED STRATEGIES, AND LEVERAGING INTERSECTIONALITY So, what do the above stories tell us about doing anticaste activism? How do they help us to look at the anticaste movement as itself a system with various parts functioning toward an emergent sense of social change? Despite the collectively uncoordinated strategic approaches of the TBMSG, PVCHR, and BAMCEF movements, if we look at each of their tactics comparatively we see some important similarities to build on to create leverage points and feedback loops for lasting social change. For one, in noticing that most of the stories recounted above are about girls and women, the collective historical traumas of marginalized South Asians take on new emphasis and meaning. While influential writings about South Asian partition have connected partition violence to gendered notions of mother India, 74 writings on caste have only in recent years begun to narrow in on the critical intersection of gender and caste violence. 75 Borrowing from post-colonial feminist literature, commentators of caste have increasingly drawn on gender as an import vector from which to understand the complex social constructions of caste. In developing a sense of intersectionality, the stories discussed here represent potential shared discursive space for the development of identity, rights, and awareness. The intersection of socially constructed gender and caste violence is as critical to understanding the work of anticaste activism as it is to understanding partition violence. The important role of women as controlled by not just caste, but also gender and gendered representations, denotes a crosssectional means of solidarity for anticaste activist movements and signals a needed attention to important connections between trauma and the persistence of conflict. In the words of Paik (2008), “Dalit girls are in ‘quadruple jeopardy.’ They are not only ‘double bound’ (Gay and Tate 1998:169–84), like African-American women, but ‘quadruple bound’ by ‘outsiders’—caste, class, and the education system—and ‘insiders,’ their parents.” 76 Anticaste activists can and should tap into feminist readings of identity, which posit

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both a growing awareness of post-colonial change in gender relations and a focus on rights solidarity with feminist causes to leverage desired change. While this is easier said than done, narrating stories about women’s experience is one means to approach such change. Not leaving aside the gendered oppressions of women and girls but including them in the lexicon and discourse of anticaste activism enriches the anticaste movement and creates potential feedback loops and leverage points for long-term systems change. This is especially true in a patriarchal cultural environment, like India. Unfortunately, in practice, too often, women’s narratives are sidelined and this produces further divisions and choke points within the anticaste movement. Subtler comparisons can also be made in the stories in this chapter. Themes of nationalism and purity continue to infect the broader anticaste movement, much as they infect all social change work in India. Rooting nationalism to conceptions of body purity is complex cultural terrain, but in noticing such common themes in activist stories, much like noticing gendered intersectionality, activists can build an awareness which serves to create leverage points to open dialogue among separate parts of the broader anticaste movement, and eventually to those outside anticaste activism. Such subtle comparison is not simply calling for what Prasad (2001) calls “liberalism of the skin,” 77 or what we in the Western world call multiculturalism, but rather for nuanced understanding of oppression’s “polycultural” 78 layers. Lokamitra’s narration of the struggles of TBMSG girls’ hostel at Gorewada to gain government support plays on nationalist ideals and leitmotifs of purity to press for change. Being aware of the elements of post-colonial discourse inherent in the stories activists tell can be a resource if used strategically. After the partition of India and Pakistan, “caste Hindus began to ‘see’ Dalits. Dalits acquired an identity.” 79 Activists cannot forego this recent history in narrating their strategy of doing activism against a centuries-old caste system. Post-colonial India for all its problems opened new vistas for identity, rights, and awareness and activists must take advantage of these openings to create real systems change. Embracing this post-colonial opening of awareness and identity is important, but not to the exclusion of other newly empowered identities—e.g., of tribal communities, other backward castes (OBCs), or Muslim others. In exuberance to build local identity and self-esteem among low castes, activists can also infuse a healthy dose of international rights discourse. PVCHR’s focus on people friendly villages reminds activists that a diversity of identities, consistently denied their human rights, are the fertile grounds of awareness work for change. In avoiding hardened identities activists can and must take an expansive view of human rights and press for inclusive forms of systems change. One consistent argument in the proceeding chapters of this book is that creating intersectional solidarities may be more effective than developing strident or monolithic identities. While BAMCEF’s work to create a Mulni-

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vasi Bahujan (indigenous majority) creates positive solidarities between OBC and ST/SC communities, it also reifies an exclusivity between the haves and the have-nots; between the more powerful and the less powerful; between the privileged and underprivileged. TBMSG’s creation of an Ambedkar Buddhist identity similarly can, and does, reify class distinctions and religious differences in places like Nagpur and the wider peripheries of anticaste activism. A systems level approach to these complex parts that maintains a focus on human rights and builds polycultural awareness and acceptance of multiple identity differences is required to develop lasting change in the caste system. In the chapters ahead, the aim is to spell this argument out further by exploring each of these three SMOs in greater detail and by exploring their local, national, and international presence, influence, and discourse. How do each of these movement’s narrative emphases on local organizing around identity (TBMSG), national education and awareness of a history of oppression (BAMCEF), and agitation around international conceptions of rights (PVCHR) work to open unique opportunities for systems change in India? In building on the stories each of these movements deploy, the goal is to argue for an approach that focuses not on particular identities with particular needs, but on developing an inclusive collective sense of identity, rights, and awareness that has the potential to make self-reinforcing transformations to entrenched systems of oppression. Focusing on a more general sense of human needs, anticaste activists take fuller advantage of strategic resources. Being mindful of potential negative feedback loops collective identity can empower, the following chapters strive to focus on the potential narrative resources that these social movements can leverage to unify their resistance to injustice. Again, this reference to justice invariably implies identity. “Broad categories of identity can have the effect of erasing structural privilege. Rather than being inclusive, such broad categories can marginalize people with less privilege and lead to neglecting the issues they face.” 80 In agreeing with these potential pitfalls, the argument for collective solidarity and collaboration around narrative frames of identity, rights, and awareness seems critically beneficial to any analysis and praxis of anticaste movement. This argument is the thread upon which the remainder of the book holds together. The remaining chapters strengthen the case through taking a deeper dive into the activist narratives of the three movements under study. NOTES 1. Donella Meadows, “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System” (Vermont: Sustainability Institute, 1999). http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/—accessed February 28, 2017. 2. David Peter Stroh, Systems Thinking for Social Change (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015), 15.

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3. Ervin Laszlo, The Systems View of the World: A Holistic Vision for Our Time (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1996), 44. 4. David Peter Stroh, Systems Thinking for Social Change, 17. 5. Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of Low Castes in Northern Indian Politics (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), 494. 6. Sudha Pai, Dalit Assertion and the Unfinished Democratic Revolution: The Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh (New Delhi: Sage, 2002). 7. Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly. “To Map Contentious Politics,” Mobilization: An International Quarterly: March 1996, Vol. 1, No. 1, 17–34. 8. Ibid., 1. 9. Sara Cobb, Speaking of Violence: The Politics and Poetics of Narrative Dynamics in Conflict Resolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 27. 10. See Cobb, Speaking of Violence, op. cit. and Vivian Jabri, Discourses on Violence: Conflict Analysis Reconsidered (London: Manchester University Press, 1996). 11. See Eva-Maria Hardtmann, The Dalit Movement in India: Local Practices, Global Connections (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Gopal Guru, “Dalit Movement in Mainstream Sociology,” Economic and Political Weekly, No. 14 (April 3, 1993); and Vivek Kumar, India’s Roaring Revolution: Dalit Assertions and New Horizons (New Delhi: Ganandeep Publications, 2006). 12. Eva-Maria Hardtmann, The Dalit Movement in India, 89. 13. See http://www.un.org/WCAR/coverage.htm—accessed March 20, 2017. 14. Eva-Maria Hardtmann, The Dalit Movement in India, 5. 15. Gail Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1994). 16. Vivek Kumar, India’s Roaring Revolution, 32. 17. Eva-Maria Hardtmann, The Dalit Movement in India, 89. 18. Micah White, The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution (Canada: Alfred Knopf, 2016), 43. 19. Christopher Krohn-Hansen, “The Anthropology of Violence,” Journal of Anthropological Research 50:4, 1994, 372. 20. For more on this see Paul Williams, Buddhist Thought: A Complete Introduction to the Indian Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2000), 87–95. 21. Andre Beteille, “The Future of the Backward Classes: The Competing Demands of Status and Power,” in Society and Politics in India: Essays in a Comparative Perspective (London: Anthlone Press, 1991), 188. 22. Ibid., 188. 23. Donald Schon, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 69. 24. Personal interview with BAMCEF organizer, Hermant Tripude, July 29, 2016. 25. Francesca Polletta, It Was Like a Fever, ix. 26. See 2001 Census of India, http://censusindia.gov.in/Census_And_You/religion.aspx— accessed April 13, 2017. 27. See especially Jeremy Rinker, “Justpeace Prospects for Peace-building and Worldview Tolerance: A South Asian Movement’s Social Construction of Justice” (George Mason University: Ph.D. Dissertation, 2009) and Jeremy Rinker, “Nonviolent Action and The Paradoxes of Sustaining Nonviolent Strategic Choice,” Peaceworks: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Banaras Hindu University: Malaviya Center for Peace Research (4:1, 2014), 27–45. 28. Personal field notes, September 30, 2006. 29. William Labov, Language in the Inner City: Studies in Black English Vernacular (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972). 30. Personal field notes, September 30, 2006. 31. Personal field notes, September 30, 2006. 32. William Labov, Language in the Inner City: Studies in Black English Vernacular (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), provides a clear model for the structural analysis of narratives such as Lokamitra’s. Labov provides a minimalist definition of narrative by outlining a simple six-part structure for any fully formed oral narrative. This six-part struc-

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ture includes: (1) an Abstract: What is the story about?; (2) an Orientation: Who, When, Where?; (3) some Complicating Action: What happened and then what happened?; (4) an Evaluation: So what? How or why is this interesting?; (5) a Result or resolution: What finally happened?; and (6) a Coda: That’s it—a signal of end of the narrative in which the speaker brings the listener back to the present situation. For a clear explanation of Labov’s six-part narrative structure and its social implications, see Toolan (1988), chapter 6. Michael Toolan, Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction, second ed. (New York: Routledge, 1988). 33. R. Harre and L. Langenhove, Positioning Theory: Moral Contexts of Intentional Action (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 21. 34. Ibid., 21. 35. Lisa Schirch, The Little Book of Strategic Peace-building (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2004). 36. On October 15, 1956, when Dr. B. R. Ambedkar finally decided upon Buddhism as his new choice of religion, he publicly took twenty-two vows of his own creation. These twentytwo vows, like much of Ambedkar’s thought and writing, are as much social and political as spiritual and religious. In particular vow number nineteen (“I renounce Hinduism, which is harmful for humanity and impedes the advancement and development of humanity because it is based on inequality and adopt Buddhism as my religion”) is stridently exclusive and limiting of one’s narrative agency. For the full twenty-two vows B. R. Ambedkar took upon conversion, see: http://www.angelfire.com/ak/ambedkar/BR22vows.html 37. Vishvapani (2006), http://www.ambedkar2006blogspot.com/—quoting Dr. Christopher Queen of Harvard University on his reaction to Buddhist conversions by TBMSG followers— italics added for emphasis. 38. D. Taylor, E. Bougie, and J. Caouette, “Applying Positioning Principles to a Theory of Collective Identity,” in R. Harre and F. Moghaddam, eds., The Self and Others: Positioning Individuals and Groups in Personal, Political, and Cultural Contexts (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 197. 39. Archana Kaushik & Shruti Nagvanshi, Margins to Centre Stage: Empowering Dalits in India (Kolkata: Frontpage, 2016), 251. 40. Ibid., 253. 41. Ibid., 251. 42. Personal interview with Shruti Nagvanshi—May 4, 2013. 43. PVCHR’s vision of social change is based on the Hindi concept of Jan Mitra (literally people friendly). This humanist vision underlies all PVCHR’s work for democratic society. For more on this democratic human rights vision and how it informs the organization’s mission, see: http://pvchr.asia/vision.php—accessed August 27, 2015. 44. Archana Kaushik and Shruti Nagvanshi, Margins to Centre Stage, 57–58. 45. See Jeremy Rinker, “Narrative Reconciliation as Rights-Based Peace Praxis: Custodial Torture, Testimonial Therapy and Overcoming Marginalization,” Peace Research 46, no. 1 (2016), and Jeremy Rinker, “Engaging Narrative as Rights-Based Peace Praxis: Framing, Naming, and Witnessing in Overcoming Structural Violence and Marginalization,” chapter 18 in Communication and Conflict Transformation through Local, Regional, and Global Engagement, eds. T. Matyok and P. Kellet (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 355–76. 46. In 2012 RCT-Denmark became Dignity: Danish Institute Against Torture. For more information on their work, see: https://www.dignityinstitute.org/. 47. Lenin Raghuvanshi, Shabanna Khan, and Inger Agger, “Giving Voice,” 12–16. 48. With the tenth largest economy in the world, human rights activists estimate that there are nearly ten million people working as bonded laborers in India. A bonded laborer is someone who is forced into servitude to repay a debt, often working in inhumane conditions. See Humphrey Hawksley, “Punished by Ax: Bonded Labor in India’s Brick Kilns,” BBC News Magazine, July 11, 2014—http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27486450—accessed September 21, 2015. 49. PVCHR, Voice of the Voiceless, September 2011, 7. 50. Ibid.

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51. Eastern Mennonite University/Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) Level I Participant Manual, “Cycle of Violence.” Available online at: https://emu.edu/cmslinks/cjp/star/images/cycles-of-violence.jpg. 52. Direct translation of the Portuguese term conscientização, or “critical consciousness” as discussed by Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1970),183. 53. See Michael Witzel, “Indocentrism: Autochthonous Visions of Ancient India,” in Edwin Bryant and Laurie Patton, eds., The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in India History (New York: Routledge, 2005). 54. Meeta Rajivlochan and M. Rajivlochan, “Coping with Exclusions the Non-Political Way,” in P. S. Judge, ed. Mapping Social Exclusion in India: Caste, Religion, and Borderlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 99. 55. Kancha Ilaiah, Post-Hindu-India: A Discourse on Dalit-Bahujan, Socio-Spiritual and Scientific Revolution (New Delhi: Sage, 2009), 209. 56. Personal interview, July 23, 2016. Names have been changed to protect respondent’s identity. 57. See chapter 1, footnote 9 for a discussion of the Mandal Commission and the categories of ST, SC, and OBC. 58. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is the youth organizing wing of the Sangh Parivar, or family of Hindu nationalist–based political parties which includes India’s current ruling party—the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). For more on the RSS and Sangh Parivar, see C. Ram-Prasad, “Being Hindu and/or Governing India? Religion, Social Change and the State,” in G. ter Haar, ed., The Freedom to Do God's Will: Religious Fundamentalism and Social Change (New York: Routledge, 2003), 159–96. 59. Personal interview, July 23, 2016. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Personal interview, July 23, 2016. 64. Ibid. 65. Personal interviews with BAMCEF leadership, July 2016. 66. Personal interview, July 28, 2016. Names have been changed to protect respondent’s identity. 67. Nagraj Manjule, Sairat (Aatpat Productions: Zee Studios and Essel Vision Productions, 2016). 68. Personal interview, July 28, 2016. 69. Ibid. 70. James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 4. 71. See Bernstein’s (1997) notion of the differing roles of identity in social movements as either “identity as strategy,” “identity as critique,” or “identity for education,” each of which can assist in explaining the relationship between BAMCEF’s push for cultural and historical awareness and their unique sense of Mulnivasi collective identity. Mary Bernstein, “Celebration and Suppression: The Strategic Uses of Identity by the Lesbian and Gay Movement,” American Journal of Sociology 103(3), 531–65. 72. Daniel Rothbart and Karina Korostelina, Identity, Morality and Threat: Studies in Violent Conflict (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 49. 73. Personal interviews with BAMCEF leadership, July 2016. 74. See particularly Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 75. See, in particular, Sharmila Rege, Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Narrating Dalit Women’s Testimonies (New Delhi: Zubaan Books, 2013) and Charu Gupta, The Gender of Caste: Representing Dalits in Print (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016). 76. Shailaja Paik, “Bey Eka Bey, Bey Doni Char (Two Times One is Two, Two Times Two is Four): Dalit Women’s Schooling,” in M. Bhagavan and A. Feldhaus, eds., Claiming Power from Below: Dalits and the Subaltern Question in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 115.

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77. Vijay Prasad, Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001), xi. 78. Ibid, xii. 79. Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, 249. 80. Mary Bernstein, “Afterword: The Analytic Dimensions of Identity: A Political Identity Framework,” in J. Reger, D. Meyers, and R. Einwohner, eds., Identity Work in Social Movements (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2008), 293.

Chapter Four

Fostering Dalit Buddhist Identity TBMSG’s Organizing Around Ambedkar Buddhism

Although at first sight the TBMSG movement’s goals do not seem politically radical, with the foundational concern of the evangelistic spread of Buddhist knowledge and practice, their privileging of a “neo-Buddhist” 1 identity betrays an equally primary concern for addressing past injustices and power asymmetries. Such injustices as economic/occupational discrimination, structural inequalities, and social oppression at the hands of ruling Brahmin elite form a ubiquitous grounding for the stories of TBMSG Ambedkar Buddhist activists. It is such injustices, expressed through movement rhetoric, that TBMSG activists rely on to build their Ambedkar Buddhist identity. Some have called this form of Buddhism political, 2 in the sense that it is through conversion and organizing around Buddhist identity that activists, like those in the TBMSG, are exercising political power. Still, leading activists in the movement often contend that TBMSG’s Ambedkar Buddhism is more than political, it is social. “‘There is a social aspect to Ambedkarite Buddhism. . . . It’s not just an emancipatory path for individuals. We think it doesn’t make sense for you to become Buddhist alone when your society is downtrodden,’ said Mangesh Dahiwale,” 3 a veteran leader in TBMSG activism. Through following Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s favorite mantra, which he adapted from his own experience of the 1920s American labor movement, followers of the TBMSG have vowed to “Organize, Agitate, Educate.” The means through which they do this is by developing a local sense of identity and self-esteem as Ambedkar Buddhists. This identity is the primary means by which TBMSG activists pursue justice. Much of TBMSG’s social justice work happens through education and informal relationships, but this is done with continual reference to past injus93

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tice and Ambedkar Buddhist identity. I have written elsewhere about the inseparable nature of identity and justice. 4 TBMSG’s sense of identity cannot be understood as divorced from calls for justice. To attempt to see Ambedkar Buddhist’s identity as separate from their calls for justice is to misunderstand something primary in Dalit Buddhist identity and Ambedkarist ideology. In the words of Christophe Jaffrelot: [Ambedkar] endowed them with a separate, prestigious identity deriving from the special status of Buddhism in India. This creed provided the Untouchables with a strong ideological basis for questioning their subordinate rank in the caste system, all the more so given its egalitarian doctrine. 5

Still, while TBMSG activists collectively understand the need to work within local Dalit communities to empower identity-justice, 6 the stories they deploy are not always inclusive of other social identities. The tension within TBMSG between those that want to educate and those that want to agitate has over the years I have engaged with TBMSG become more pronounced. 7 Whatever the source of the injustice that TBMSG activists face, their goal of its eradication is seen as inseparable from work to spread Buddhist dharma. This chapter delves deeper into the complexities of identity creation within the TBMSG movement and analyzes the opportunities and constraints of Dalit creation of an Ambedkar Buddhist identity to push for social and structural change. To unpack the layers of the Ambedkar Buddhist identity and worldview prevalent in the TBMSG movement, one must examine the justice/injustice narratives routinely produced by movement activists. One comparative lens that unevenly applies to the three movements I am studying in this book is activists’ relative focus on local, national, and international organizing. Such a levels of analysis framework for analyzing the movements under study can help to clarify the missions and aims of movement activists. TBMSG’s primary identity work occurs on the local level, though international registers of financial funding greatly assist these local efforts. In aiming to help the group make better use of the opportunities, limitations, and contradictions of the narratives they choose to deploy, this chapter examines the narratives of TBMSG’s Maharashtrian activists. The intention of the present work is to build upon theories that address the nexus between narrative conflict resolution and social change. In developing an epistemological understanding of this nexus it will be crucial to analyze narratives that local activists use in organizing what they perceive as a new and significant identity as Ambedkar Buddhists. At times I will reconstruct informal conversations while, at other times, I will analyze transcribed narratives taken from formal interviews or members’ writings. The choice of narratives and method of analysis is not random but rather aims to highlight the complexity of both TBMSG dis-

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course and this discourse’s construction of identity. Narratives were chosen as the unit of analysis because, as more manageable constituent parts of wider discourses, narratives provide an ideal means to access movement meaning and to expose actors’ normative commitments and identity concerns. Where necessary, my own positioning vis-à-vis the movement is mentioned in order to provide important context and explore ethnographic affect. FORGING AN AMBEDKAR BUDDHIST IDENTITY ONE INJUSTICE EXPERIENCE AT A TIME Whatever we had to be told was said by Ambedkar. His teachings are finished, his speaking finished, his commands finished. But don’t let your mind be deceived that we are adrift and destroyed—Ambedkar has lifted us up, liberated us. 8

Untouchable assertion of rights can be said to manifest itself in two distinct periods of Indian history: pre- and post-Ambedkar. As such a towering figure in the awakening of Dalit identity of assertion, Ambedkar’s life presents an ideal, or a model, for successive generations of young activists to follow and emulate. In working toward, and for, this ideal, the young Buddhist activists of the TBMSG movement try to not only live a life of learning and selfperfection, but also strive to provide opportunities for others to do the same. 9 The TBMSG activist narratives analyzed in this chapter open a window into TBMSG’s vision of a socially just dharma revolution in India. In being attentive to the structure and significance of these activist narratives, the power of identity creation becomes transparent. The narratives chosen for analysis in this chapter express a Dalit assertion that, though long felt, only became fully expressed in the modern area and upon the backdrop of Ambedkar’s important influence and psychological impact on particularly the Mahar caste community. The limited number of cases presented here provide an ability to engage in a deeper analysis of Ambedkar Buddhist activists’ worldview and activist strategies, thereby setting the stage for further comparison of TBMSG’s scope and range within India’s broader anticaste movement. TBMSG activists’ acute reliance on an Ambedkar Buddhist identity is clearly represented in this chapter’s narratives. This representation is emphasized not to discount other Ambedkarite identities available to researchers of anticaste activism, but rather to privilege the argument that TBMSG’s particular brand of Ambedkar Buddhist identity provides a unique window into the local organizing and narrative framing of TBMSG’s approach to anticaste movement. The activists’ stories below illustrate the deep connection between Ambedkarite and Buddhist identity, as well as their inseparable connection to justice in the minds of TBMSG activists.

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DR. AMITAMATI’S STORY: AN INFORMAL INTERVIEW AT NAGALOKA TRAINING AND CONFERENCE, NAGPUR Exemplar of Ambedkar Buddhist identity, the life story of a TBMSG Dharmacharini named Amitamati 10 is also illustrative of the local organizing work of TBMSG. Having been introduced to Amitamati by some Western women working within the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO) and TBMSG in India, together we found time to talk informally during a lunch break at the second day of TBMSG’s 2006 conference celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism. 11 Standing in line to receive a vegetarian meal of rice, subji, chapatti, and fruit, we began to introduce ourselves to each other. Amitamati, a Dalit medical research doctor from Mumbai, very much identifies herself as a Dalit, a Buddhist, and a woman—a list of overlapping identities that have caused a palpable degree of hardship in her adult life. With an Indian medical degree, which was paid for with the help of the Indian government, Amitamati received a reserved post within one of the best government hospitals in Mumbai. As she spoke of her personal story, she stressed that she really did not meet with discrimination throughout her childhood and schooling, but only encountered it after she began her professional working life. Growing up in an urban setting (Mumbai), Amitamati was in a sense immune to much of the caste discrimination and degradation that pervades her ancestral village. Living in the metropolis of Mumbai, among people from various villages and regions of India, less attention is paid to caste affiliation than to the social, class, and professional networks one has built. While the impersonal nature of modern urban life in India fosters a blending of castes and a breakdown of the traditional caste structures, the urban economy does not completely derail a legacy of caste inequality, as some Dalit activists have contended. 12 While a move from a collectivist village culture to an individualistic urban culture has neutered the sting of caste discrimination in day-to-day life, it does not necessarily transform its degrading and dehumanizing expressions of marginalization in certain professional settings and social networks. This is particularly true within the subculture of the coveted Indian civil service. 13 In such settings, the cultural and structural violence of caste is being pragmatically combated by the reservation system—a sort of affirmative action in the Indian government context that is being used to level the playing field among high castes, low castes, and other backward classes (OBCs) in public-sector jobs. But, this blunt-force approach to transforming centuries of caste-based social conflict is simply one means of transformation and any thought that it holds the key to solving the myriad of caste problems is both idealistic and dangerous. It is a secular policy-based approach, that members of the TBMSG see as additive and not summative to social change. As with affirmative action here in the United

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States, the reservation system has both its share of supporters and detractors, and it is via the organizing around reservations that public contention over caste is often sustained. 14 On becoming a professional research doctor, Amitamati found herself unintentionally thrust into such contention over a reserved civil service position. As the recipient of a prominent Indian civil service position, Amitamati met with contention and jealousy from day one of her new job. Sought after for their financial as well as job security, civil service jobs are seen as lifelong career paths and a fraternal deprivation is engendered when your group is denied the access and security of such posts. Article 311 of the Indian constitution makes it virtually impossible to demote a corrupt or lazy civil servant and next to impossible to fire him/her. 15 This does not hamper the contention over civil service posts, as people can and are transferred with seemingly random vigor. Animosity and anger over decisions on government positions spark riots and clog court systems in every Indian state. The contentious feelings are so deep-rooted that twice during our informal interview Amitamati came to the verge of tears describing her life story and on-going court battle over her civil service position. One could sense the pain in her eyes when she described the feeling of being “left out” 16 at work; the emotion in her voice expressed an authentic response to deeply held values being left unsatisfied. Her sense of professional community and identity was clearly shaken by the experiences she had been consistently living through at work. Without a clear sense of professional collective identity, she turned to her Buddhist community to feed her basic human need for identity. 17 In the course of our interview, Amitamati spoke of many experiences of being excluded—an experience she said she had not had until joining the civil service. 18 On her first day at work she explained how not a single colleague came into her office to greet her. Rather, many of these colleagues stood outside her door gossiping about her and pointing through her office window as if she was “a zoo animal.” 19 Despite this treatment she remains at this job to this day, and only in 2016 finally settled the legal challenges to her tenured position. 20 While she expressed relief that the official court battle was over, during my 2016 interview with her, Amitamati remained frustrated by her treatment at work, which had changed little during over a decade of her tenure in this office. 21 Though many at work exhibit outright animosity toward her, seeing her as a recipient of a system they perceive as unfair and unmeritorious—the reservation system—she feels that she is much more qualified than many with whom she works. From Amitamati’s perspective it is completely unfair that her professionalism should be questioned based on her caste status. When Amitamati’s position as a medical researcher became a reserved position, initially no low-caste applicants appeared. Subsequently it had been filled by a member of a higher-caste community. Her predecessor (a Brahmin

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woman) had held the job on a provisional basis while an ongoing search for a scheduled caste or OBC to fill the reserved position was conducted. Repeatedly reporting “no adequate applicants found,” Amitamati’s predecessor had managed to hang on to the position for many years prior to her application. But, when Amitamati had gotten the job in late 2002 this woman who had held the job provisionally lodged a formal protest in the courts upon her transfer to another medical research location. Amitamati, who was forced to regularly appear in court to defend her position until 2016—i.e., for fourteen years—asked during our interview in 2006, “Do you know how humiliating this is?” 22 Amitamati’s frustration that she has to physically and emotionally confront her oppressor in court seems to fall on deaf ears in the Indian government. Her sardonic style of spoken English underscores her pain and frustration. In our 2006 interview, she rhetorically asks me: “What cost will winning have on my sanity?” 23 Amitimati remained clear-minded in her understanding that the plaintiff in her case was attempting to destroy her selfconfidence as much as she was interested in getting her old post back. Such psychological tactics not only added stress to an already stressful job environment, but it also drove Amitamati further into a process of defining her own identity. It was at this time that Ambedkar Buddhism appeared as an answer to her difficulties. In admiring Amitamati’s strength of character for persevering under this shadow of disrespect and outright discrimination, she responds that it was the TBMSG that “helped her keep a level head.” 24 At face value, Amitamati’s involvement with TBMSG came later in life and seemed more focused on understanding Buddhism than on any moralistic desire to alleviate the injustices either she, or fellow Dalits, continue to face. Still, it was the experiences of discrimination and injustice that she faced that helped push her toward TBMSG’s organizing around Ambedkar Buddhist identity. As a third-generation Ambedkar Buddhist, a major portion of Amitamati’s identity is expressed in her understanding of Buddhist faith as a means to self-cultivation and self-esteem. Her grandparents had converted to Buddhism with Ambedkar but were illiterate and did not have any guidance after Babasaheb’s death. Her parents were brought up Buddhist, in name, but really did not do much in terms of practice besides “sit and be quiet at home.” 25 Only once Amitamati became older did she start to desire to learn more about Buddhist practice. She went to Ambedkar College (founded by Ambedkar before his conversion), a fact of which she is clearly proud. While studying at university she decided that she should learn more about Babasaheb’s teachings on Buddhism. During this time she got introduced to the TBMSG/FWBO and now volunteers for them teaching dharma classes and helping with medical programs for the poor and downtrodden. Going to villages outside of Mumbai and surveying village residents to screen them for serious health indicators, she is helping to collect a historical record of the inadequate health services provided to Dalits in Maharashtra. The disparity

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between the government’s medical services for wealthy Mumbai residents and those provided for low-caste villagers, which she observed in doing this work, has drawn her closer to the work of the TBMSG movement and awakened in her a desire to help others realize their self-worth through Ambedkar Buddhism. As our discussion progressed, Amitamati became more open and really seemed to appreciate the attention given her story. As a Dalit woman she was clearly not used to someone listening to her story, especially a man, and the informal narrative she delivered was unbroken and expressive of authentic emotion. An invaluable example of an activist narrative, Amitamati’s story reveals the power of Ambedkar Buddhist identity creation as a formidable platform for creating both personal and structural change. Religious beliefs, professional ethics, values learned during her upbringing, and her sense of community were all combined in a rich narrative of overcoming discrimination—a narrative that was as unique as the person telling it, yet as ordinary as the numerous people who had undoubtedly experienced like situations of structural violence over thousands of years of caste-ism in India. Dr. B. R. Ambedkar forms the bedrock of Amitamati’s activist narrative as much as Buddhism does. The realization of low caste’s suffering has grown over time and has endured, though building local Ambedkar Buddhist community and identity clearly provides Dr. Amitamati’s professional and passionate motivation for change. Amitamati’s stories of injustice, like other activist’s stories, combine with an awakened sense of Ambedkar Buddhist identity to provide a concrete ideal for change. For Amitamati, her office environment, the other primary source of her identity, provides an important site of public contention over caste. Once asked to contribute to an office kitty for a planned Ganesha puja (i.e., worship of the Hindu God Ganesha—the remover of obstacles) for an upcoming local Hindu festival, Amitamati was forced to express her Ambedkar Buddhist identity. When Amitamati refused, explaining that she was not a Hindu, she was met with angry response. The anger and misunderstanding of her upper-caste colleagues, who undoubtedly saw this as an affront to the nation and their sense of shared values, was dismissive of her chosen identity. Despite her refusal to participate in any way, her colleagues would not accept this and, at every opportunity, tried to force her to participate. Reprisals and discrimination followed this incident as her coworkers argued that as a Buddhist she was still a Hindu and needed to participate. Arguing that not only was the Buddha, in their mind, just an avatar of Vishnu, but also that she was born a Hindu and could not just choose to change her religious identity, they continued to pressure her to show her support for the Hindu God Ganesha. Interactions like these have hardened her desire to continue her dharma study and practice and, thus, brought her closer to the work of the TBMSG. This hardened identity as Ambedkar Buddhist has been a salve for Amitamati

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personally, allowing her to find psychological refuge in dharma practice. But as a collective strategy Ambedkar Buddhist identity also has limits. Reflecting back on this informal interview with Amitamati, there are a number of instances where Amitamati’s sense of identity is inseparable from her sense of justice. In tracing what Labov (1972) calls “evaluative statements” 26 in her narratives a visible tension is apparent in Amitamati’s narrative. Evaluative statements, like “why should my professionalism be questioned based on my caste status,” 27 are expressed as in the words of Toolan (1988) as “something that can permeate the telling.” 28 Amitamati’s story follows the “characteristic two-part structure” 29 of many TBMSG activist narratives. Each element of her story exhibits the push and pull of two identities: Buddhist practitioner and victim of discrimination and oppression. The evaluative statements that emanate through the narrative are engineered to voice the critical connections between these two identities. Amitamati’s point is to illustrate that a particular Buddhist identity, as exhibited in the practice-orientation of TBMSG, is the most appropriate means that she has realized to overcome the constraining victimhood of caste oppression. A Labovian analysis of the structure of Amitamati’s narrative reveals not only her current identity, but her future projection of both identity and justice. The evaluative statements about coworkers or family members that appear throughout this narrative (for example the statement that her parents practiced Buddhism “by just sitting at home” or that her coworkers “left” her out) provide a rich description of what Rothbart (2006) calls “identity justice,” Booth (2001) calls “memory-justice,” and Lind (1995) would call “justice judgments.” 30 It is such evaluative statements that run throughout TBMSG activist narratives, highlighting the important connection between self and society and providing opportunities for movement organizers and activists to reflect on their own critical consciousness. Amitamati’s eagerness to share her personal experience with others exhibited both a genuine curiosity about her own predicament and a gratitude for the opportunity to be heard. As a low-caste woman, what some in the movement refer to as “double dalits,” 31 Amitamati was not accustomed to being the center of attention. The gift of Buddhist practice has given her both a means to approach her encounters with injustice and a quiet strength to be heard. By empowering a new Buddhist identity, Amitamati’s activism with TBMSG provides a new vehicle with which to comprehend her socially created status as low-caste woman. Injustice experiences have opened in her a desire to not only understand the past structures that encouraged such injustice, but the future means to overcome it. In her, as well as many other TBMSG activists’ minds, this future means is inseparable from the TBMSG aspiration to spread their particular form of Buddhist dharma as a social practice. And it is this Buddhist identity that is created and maintained through the telling of past injustice. The inseparability of identity and justice

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is a tool for local organizing and structural change, despite its inherent potential to also reify inclusive representations of community. This is particularly true for Dalit women. As Gopal Guru points out in his reading of The Prisons We Broke (2008): “In the autobiographies written by the dalit male, woman is projected as a sacrificing mother or a mother patiently enduring pain and suffering, but very rarely as the agency for change.” 32 Amitamati, like Baby Kamble, the author of The Prisons We Broke, eagerly share their painful experiences as a way to claim their narrative agency. Still, while narratives like Amitamati’s are an important means of change, they also limit, in important ways, anticaste activists’ ability to organize and mobilize for change. Activist narratives like Amitamati’s create “boundary conditions” 33 between self and other identities. As Benson (2003) has argued, these boundary conditions are what stabilizes or maintains positive self-identity, 34 but they can also enforce an out-group discriminatory response. In the TBMSG movement this negative side of Ambedkar Buddhist identity is subtle, yet important to acknowledge. By positioning herself as a particular type of Ambedkar Buddhist (one whose practices are inseparable from her quest for social change), Amitamati simultaneously draws attention to her fight against oppression and her separateness from the oppressor. Through compassion and dedicated practice of the dharma, Amitamati tells stories that position her as someone who has transcended the ancient structures of caste and all the dichotomies that accompany such an unjust system. At the same time, Amitamati also is positioned by this narrative as distinct from the oppressor community—a fact that would run counter to Buddhist teachings on dependent origination (Pratītyasamutpāda). 35 While Amitamati is a professional medical research doctor, a Buddhist, and an agent of social change, she is also an Ambedkarite, an anticaste activist, and a Buddhist. These identities are simultaneously resource for change and present social and ideological constraints. In telling Amitamati’s story from the more functionalist perspective of positioning theory (Harré and Van Langenhove, 1999), one could inquire as to how this specific storyline fits into the projected future that Amitamati is attempting to create. In self-positioning herself as an ongoing victim of caste discrimination at work, Amitamati insinuates her clear exclusion from other social identities: Hindu, unqualified, under-educated, defeated woman, etc. In assuming this narrative strategy, she engages in first-order positioning of herself as a moral agent in a world of malice and craving. As an Ambedkar follower, and Buddhist, Amitamati positions herself as qualified, educated, empowered in having reached a minimum level of Buddhist attainment. When others at work socially position her as both unworthy of her job and unable to shed her Hindu-birth identity, Amitamati engages in second-order positioning as a victim, dismissing attempts of her coworkers to subsume her identity into theirs (for example in her principled refusal to provide any

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support for the office kitty for Ganesha). Amitamati’s retelling of this emotional suffering, to me as a researcher, is an example of third-order positioning—a recounting not devoid of attempts at re-positioning her first- and second-order accounts. 36 In the retelling her story, despite the human desire to feel validation, Amitamati is repositioning herself in relation to the Ambedkar movement’s historical legacy of victimhood and the TBMSG movement’s relatively new identity as Buddhist. Her story, like so many of the activist narratives encountered, provides a “thick description” 37 of the context of TBMSG’s approach to anticaste activism. Such narratives also highlight both the structural and functional realities of being both socially engaged Buddhist and victim at the same time. The activist narratives analyzed below will further draw out the substance of the TBMSG movement’s strategic approach to identity and organizing as the primary means of social change. These narratives articulate a local strategy to organizing and educating a new generation of anticaste activists focused on identity as the primary means to achieving justice. DIALOGUE AND INTERVIEWS WITH MANUSKI/JAMBUDIVIPA ACTIVISTS The next set of short narratives (full transcripts of which appear in the text below) highlight the subconscious aspects of caste identity and the need to re-make, or awaken, a sense of self that is outside the traditional, and often subconscious, boundaries imposed in local context of the caste system. In effect, for the TBMSG, victimization provides the problem-setting for envisioning a “best” solution of problem solving to be found in Buddhism. The narratives below paint a particular portrait of the insidious nature of India’s unjust system of status inequality, but it is victimization that grabs people’s imagination and makes a discussion of Buddhism as solution possible. Taken together these stories, as well as Amitamati’s above, provide a context for better understanding movement activists’ motives, and movement leaders’ calls to organize and act. Before laying out these narratives for analysis a few words of methodological explanation are in order. In writing my dissertation, I organized a second data-collection trip to Maharashtra in the summer of 2008 (following on from my 2006 visit to Nagpur). At the request of movement friends, I planned to give a lecture on conflict resolution and the preliminary results of research completed to date. Despite the cultural insistence that I do a lecture or talk, I decided that an interactive dialogue workshop would be more effective for both my research goals and the future-going work of the TBMSG movement. Together with the assistance of the staff at the Manuski Center, I developed a two-day workshop entitled “A Dialogue on Caste:

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What Does a Caste-less and Socially Just Community Look Like?” 38 Fifty to sixty calls were made to announce this workshop to Manuski friends, supporters, and anticaste activists in and around the Pune area. Relying on the Manuski Center to identify and contact the participants for this workshop had both advantages and disadvantages. Manuski staff’s calling and organizing of activists for this workshop gave me legitimacy with local activists that alone, as an outsider to this community, would have been nearly impossible to develop in the short month I was in India. It also allowed me to observe the informal networks of organizing that TBMSG, and its Manuski Center for human rights, used to spread information and build excitement for public events. At the same time, relying on movement activists to decide who to call and notify about the workshop allowed Manuski activists to define who they considered as activists and who they deemed would benefit from their own strategy of identity organizing and tertiary understanding of my own plan for this broad thematic workshop. This could be seen as both an advantage, since it provided me with a pragmatic definition of who Manuski activists themselves defined as activist, and a disadvantage, since Dalit activists outside the Ambedkar Buddhist fold (and possibly TBMSG circles) were not brought into much needed dialogue with Ambedkar Buddhists. 39 Further, since participants were limited to those who spoke English, one additional weakness of the workshop may have been that sampling was skewed toward educated and upwardly mobile Ambedkar Buddhists—this middle-class bias, though, is, in fact, typical of the TBMSG membership in general and anticaste organizing more specifically. In total, nineteen people participated in the full twoday workshop and eagerly shared their personal experiences and ideas. As is typical in India, in addition to the nineteen core participants, a few curious visitors and staff of the center participated for some shorter portions of the workshop. Though participants were predominantly those working within the Manuski Center’s network of activists, also included were some Pune University graduate students and Ambedkar Buddhist pensioners living in and around Pune. The discussion in this two-day workshop was rich and textured, providing a means to collect many narratives in a short time span and draw broad connections between various levels of activists and conflict resolution praxis. The workshop was designed to provide an interactive overview of dialogue processes by first outlining some common models of dialogue and then trying them out as a group. The theoretical structure for the workshop was based on an approach called appreciative inquiry. 40 Participants who were not comfortable sharing their past experiences of injustice were asked to engage in an appreciative inquiry approach to critiquing their own connection to the TBMSG movement. In other words, participants, if they chose not to share personal stories, were asked to describe what adds value to their lives in actively participating in TBMSG organized events. This two-day workshop,

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and particularly the fishbowl discussion on personal experiences of discrimination, was invaluable to the development of my own understanding of TBMSG’s theory of change. In relating some of the stories from this workshop, the intent is to understand the critical role of both Buddhist and justice identity in TBMSG organizing and to broaden the scope and range of narrative agency among anticaste activists and allies of the wider Indian anticaste movement. A DIALOGUE ON CASTE: SELECTED NARRATIVES FROM A FISHBOWL FULL OF SUFFERING The following narratives were all collected in the course of a fishbowl dialogue exercise in which participants were asked to share their personal experiences of discrimination, or, if this was too uncomfortable, then to explain why they had joined, and what they gain, from the TBMSG movement. This workshop, conducted in July 2008, provided a space and structure for collective dialogue and sharing of experiences of caste marginalization and discrimination. Each of the narratives collected during this dialogue workshop is presented in its full transcription and then analyzed with references to specific lines in the text. Each represents a Dalit Buddhist perspective on suffering that exhibits a unique emphasis on the impermanent nature of the oppressive and endemic structures of caste. They also present an activist desire to move beyond simple victimization narration and instead stake claim on the importance of personal responsibility and confident sense of identity. Armed with the belief that one cannot change the world without first changing themselves, TBMSG activists are disputing the commonly held belief that to overcome injustice one must continually name it and label it publicly. When people are asked to describe an incident when they have been wronged, they are likely to go back to a formative experience in their thinking and recast that episode based upon subsequent experiences and beliefs. In this recasting process people remember the episode in a way that presents them in a very kind light, while simultaneously presenting others as immoral. Psychologists call this fundamental attribution error 41 and it is typical for humans to ascribe negative characteristics to others when they ascribe positive ones to themselves for the same types of behaviors. Indeed, Lind (1995) has argued that these “justice judgments affect other types of behaviors, such as obedience to law and performance in work settings, and that justice judgments affect other cognitions, such as self-esteem and loyalty to groups, organizations, and authorities.” 42 Such stories of injustice, circulated as “hidden transcripts,” 43 play an important organizing role among anticaste activists. Beyond sounding cliché these injustice narratives reflect a certain lived

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experience that is often hard to express openly and non-emotionally in public settings. For these, and other, social-psychological reasons, such narratives often just do not get discussed in public settings, since the secure public space necessary for their open discussion is often lacking. The importance of sharing such stories is that they see the light of day among potential allies in more privileged communities. In the words of bell hooks this is “the most important [aspect] of our work—the work of liberation.” 44 The three short narratives analyzed below express not only the suffering of injustice, but the psychological inferiority that such continued injustice creates and perpetuates. While these narrative transcriptions represent only very small sections of an hour and a half fishbowl dialogue transcript, they are representative of activist thinking in the sense that they are narratives that activists told directly to each other in the safe space of facilitated dialogue. From the activist standpoint there is a sort of “reflection-in-action” 45 that occurs in the group telling of such stories, not just resulting in the connective sharing of a diverse set of experiences, but also in providing insight into the foundations of social justice agitation. These activist narratives show that Dalit assertion takes many forms and that the complexity of Dalit experiences leads to a diversity of, at times, conflicting approaches to working to annihilate the caste system. ANURAG ON THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ASSERTIVE AND CONFIDENT ABOUT SCHEDULED CASTE IDENTITY 1. Looking forward from what Mangesh [another TBMSG activist] quoted from Ambedkar, I think being assertive is a very very important tool. 2. When I joined my penning [i.e., studies in university], we were about fifteen professionals. 3. . . . [pause] so there was a discussion going on about reservation and this and that—and . . . ahh . . . my professors were sitting together . . . 4. So then I said that I come from a scheduled caste category and everybody was so visibly stunned 5. . . . and as you said . . . ahh . . . I was not at all disturbed by what I said in that gathering—that I am a scheduled caste . . . 6. But, it is the other people who were disturbed by the very thought that I had . . . I had . . . been so assertive in arguing that I am a scheduled caste. 7. . . . and as long as three, four months later people came and told me that this was the first time in our lives that we found someone who can tell openly in a gathering of about fifteen-odd people that he came from a scheduled caste!

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8. What we have come across is generally people hiding that they are from a scheduled caste [community]. 9. And this was the first time . . . [pause] and people are telling me after four, five months of what I said . . . 10. . . . so they are still stunned by [pause] . . . by [pause] . . . my telling was bothering them and not me actually. 46 Anurag is an Indian civil servant working for the India railway (the world’s largest employer). A model of success in the Ambedkar Buddhist community, Anurag participates in workshops, retreats, and other TBMSG gatherings when time permits in his busy schedule. Having traveled eight hours by train from where he was stationed as a civil servant with the Indian Rail service, Anurag was an eager participant in the fishbowl dialogues. Openly sharing experiences of his school, work, and private life with other participants, Anurag clearly exhibited a leadership and activist zeal that was fairly common in this particular group of middle-class scheduled caste activists. In the narrative excerpt chosen for analysis here, he entered the discussion in an attempt to illustrate his agreement with Dr. Ambedkar’s analysis that the Dalit problem is largely one of self-esteem. Anurag’s narrative, from his university days, tells of his classmates’ surprise when he openly and confidently talks of being a scheduled caste. Such a story is a testament to the fact that the psychological effects of oppression, like the caste system itself, are also impermanent. In Augrag’s story one sees the progression of assertiveness and self-esteem that has grown over successive generations and the importance of Buddhist identity in this progression. In orienting his narrative around other participants’ almost continual reference to Dr. Ambedkar’s counsel on overcoming caste (line 1), Anurag quickly launches into a personal story of assertion from his experiences at university. He explains that during a discussion of the reservation system, people were “visibly stunned” (line 4) when he said that he was from a scheduled caste community. The break with normative convention he described in line four leaves the others in his narrative not only surprised, but visibly uneasy. Such a break, positions Anurag in a new light among these classmates. Employing an evaluative statement embedded within the complicating action of the story, he then says, in the following lines, that “I was not at all disturbed by what I said . . . But, it is other people who were disturbed . . . ” (lines 5 and 6). These evaluative statements validated and reinforced a group dynamic in the fishbowl dialogue that was primarily concerned with feelings of not being heard or respected in modern Indian society. Anurag’s assertion, in the context of his telling in this caste dialogue at TBMSG’s Manuski Center in Pune, among TBMSG activists, is understood to be directly connected to Buddhist identity. Such statements also convey the apprehension among movement activists over how much to portray them-

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selves as victims and how much to show the progress they have made through being assertive. Taylor, Caouette, Usborne, and King (2008) call this the “positioning paradox,” 47 and activists within the TBMSG are engaged in a continual justification of their reasoning for arguing one side or the other of this paradox. The evaluative statements of Anurag highlight the point of his story, but they also reveal an important dialectic within the movement. An internal struggle exists over the question of whether activists should frame their contention from the perspective of a victim or from the perspective of a self-aware Buddhist. Anurag’s story seems to also answer this paradox emphatically by illustrating that his caste identity assertion “was bothering them and not me actually” (line 10). It is Anurag’s evaluative statements 48 that form the core of his story— they illustrate, or model, a confident scheduled caste identity, something that is stunning and “bothering” (line 10) to other higher castes. In making these evaluative statements, Anurag is taking a stance on the victim versus selfaware Buddhist dialectic, placing himself squarely in the court of those emphasizing Buddhist self-awareness and assertiveness as primary to being cast as simply a victim. Anurag’s evaluative statements point to often neglected meanings within elite disadvantaged sub-groups. These evaluative statements represent one illustration of the complex variation of disadvantaged narratives and identity assertiveness within the TBMSG movement. Explaining that others “were disturbed by the very thought that I had . . . I had . . . been so assertive in arguing that I am a scheduled caste” (line 6) is the point in Anurag’s narrative. His frustrated expression emphasizes this main point. This experience is motivational for Anurag. Although he tells the story to illustrate injustice, more importantly his aim is to assert identity and galvanize support. The fact that the narrator stumbles with how he will express his reflection of his past action (of being assertive) is a telling of the deep-rooted psychology of oppression apparent within the Ambedkar Dalit community. How to tell and what to emphasize involves a process of reflection-in-action that is clear in the deliberative pauses of the speaker. Anurag’s narrative is a series of evaluative statements that at times provide a “temporary suspension of the action,” 49 as in line seven. This “temporary suspension” provides the ability to embed an evaluation as coming from another person and, therefore, acts to strengthen the import and legitimacy of the narrative. Anurag’s evaluative statements point to a means to overcoming oppression—being assertive in one’s identity. On a means-ends continuum, assertiveness would be one aspect needed for the creation of a casteless society. 50 By providing corrective to the current unjust reality (“what we have come across is generally people hiding that they are from a scheduled caste”—line 8), assertion and confidence is characteristic of any Dalit community that actualizes social justice. But, what makes Dalit communities assertive? In the contest of the TBMSG movement it is Ambedkar Buddhism

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that forms the root of assertion. The narrative position of victim, though certainly a familiar milieu to these activists, forms a sort of unspoken backdrop to this portion of the fishbowl discussion. Though omnipresent, the victim is overshadowed by assertive Ambedkar Buddhist identity. The tacit knowledge of the communities’ victimization, though ever-present, is secondary to and de-emphasized in relation to a position of assertive self-awareness brought about by Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism and the legacy of that decision. Although implicit, Anurag’s call for assertiveness and confidence is a direct endorsement of TBMSG’s work to build Ambedkar Buddhist identity in India. HARESH’S RESENTMENT OF CASTE AND COMMUNALISM EVEN IN RELIEF AND DEVELOPMENT WORK 1. I have a similar experience of . . . ahh . . . when I was at Gujarat for post-earthquake. 2. A situation . . . I drew a survey . . . ahh . . . a kind of a taking around of damages . . . ahh . . . need assessment of the affected families. 3. And when we were in . . . moving around to villages often . . . ahh . . . at the end of every ahh . . . ahh . . . dialogue we were asking “Have we covered everyone?” 4. And they were saying “Yes, Yes, you have covered the complete village, now you can go to another place.” 5. [pause] ahh . . . after . . . ahh . . . maybe after ten or twelve villages we realized that . . . I realized that there are some people standing outside . . . and . . . ahh . . . they were not taking . . . ahh . . . part, but they were just watching. 6. So . . . ahh . . . I approached them and asked, “Why don’t you want to be involved [inaudible] . . . to issue your complaint?” 7. And they said “no, no they will not allow us.” 8. Then I went back to the same people and asked, “Why not they coming and issue their complaints?” 9. “No, no they are not they are not part of the village”—that was the first stage [i.e., first response] 10. OK—“are they not residing in the same village?” 11. “Yes they are but outskirt of the village, so we don’t consider them as part of the village.” 12. And . . . ahh . . . “OK—But who are they?” 13. “No, no they are not part of the village . . . we don’t know.” 14. And that was very open kind of reaction form this side—“they are not part of the village so it not necessary for you to go to them or ask them. You have completed, or covered, all the village.”

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15. Then . . . ahh . . . the necessary steps were taken to record this in the computer. 16. So . . . but the point is that such can you know they are part of the village, so you can go to the next village . . . [pause] and they were suggesting us and . . . ahh . . . in fact guiding us which part we should go and who . . . and they were organizing meetings already [for the next village] . . . and some people will be coming and we will tell you where to go and not to go . . . 17. So this was realized afterwards, but we missed many villages [i.e., low-caste villages], at least at the beginning. 18. So you are not part of the village . . . you, you’re not part of the country, you are not part of the culture, you are not part of the civilization. You are just out-caste, out-nationed, out-civilized. You are just there for serving, serving, and serving [in rising voice]. 19. So this is the main message they always develop. 51 Haresh’s experiences of discrimination in the midst of natural disaster provide an illustration of the reach and endemic reality of the caste system. Viewed in relation to the need for assertiveness as voiced by Anurag, Haresh’s narrative illustrates the range of real-life impacts caste has on the voiceless villager. As crime creates ripples of impact in a community, we see that caste and caste thinking creates ripples of psychological dependency among neighbors within the village, as well as cycles of neglect and silencing. Haresh’s story, like Anurag’s, points to the basic human need for community and identity and alludes to the significance of maintaining community and identity in the face of discrimination. Community provides a scaffolding that will allow for the actualization of individual instances of assertiveness and distributive justice. Haresh’s resentment of high-caste villagers’ control of earthquake surveyors’ needs assessment processes provides a vision of the caste system’s wide-ranging impacts and the communal nature of effective response to these impacts. While assertiveness presents more individualistic perspectives on the socially just society, Haresh’s narrative balances this with the rural communal realities of Indian village life. The result is a view of anticaste activism that is created and maintained by relational ties and communal realities, not individual psychology or agency alone. Haresh’s narrative in the fishbowl dialogue represents a structural sub-system analysis of how to reach the just, or casteless, society, while Anurag’s narrative presents a more issue-specific approach. 52 Setting the stage by explaining that he was doing needs assessment in Gujarat following the massive earthquake in that state in early 2001, Haresh complicates the action of this humanitarian context by telling the story of slowly figuring out how the damages to untouchables, who have traditionally lived outside of the village, were being systematically obscured and missed

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by his team of surveyors. In line twelve of the narrative, after being given the runaround as to the identity of those not being allowed to participate in the village assessment, Haresh frustratingly asks the higher-caste villagers “OK—But who are they?” Such a question is laden with both frustration and multiple meanings. In Haresh’s question there is both the sense of asking how this community is identified, with community being a euphemism for caste, and a who question, which is really asking a who this community is in relation to the person being questioned. Since, in India, it is both taboo and legally sanctioned to ask directly what a person’s caste is, there have evolved a number of subtler ways to inquire about caste. Asking where are you from?, what is your surname?, or more bluntly who are you?, are all attempts at subtly figuring out where a person or community falls in the caste hierarchy (see chapter 1). Such indirect inquiry about caste affiliation is typical of India’s high-power-avoidant society—a society in which all forms of ascribed status matter greatly. “[Of any world region] South Asia has the greatest power distance, that is, the degree to which the culture’s people are separated by power, authority, and prestige.” 53 The response he receives is that they (this unnamed community of untouchables) are not part of the village and Haresh sums up this chain of events in line sixteen above, by saying: “ . . . but the point is that such can you know they are part of the village, so you can go to the next village . . . and they were suggesting us and . . . ahh . . . in fact guiding us which part we should go and who . . . [i.e., to meet].” This combination of evaluation and continuation of the complicating action is not rare in TBMSG movement injustice narratives and indeed signals that caste calculus is tied up in every village social interaction. Labov calls this type of narrative evaluation “correlative” 54 evaluation, in that multiple actions are described simultaneously, each with implied meaning. As villagers were responding to his inquiry, they were simultaneously suggesting that the survey was complete and guiding the surveyors to move on to the next village. Indeed, throughout Haresh’s narrative we are told on three occasions by the villagers that the survey is complete and the surveyors can move on. That these two actions become correlated implies both an underlying urgency and conspiracy; a sub-system of inequality and structural violence that the narrator is determined to reveal to his listeners. Evaluation, as a key indicator of important facets of the narratives’ meaning, appears throughout Haresh’s narrative. Even within the coda of the story, Haresh manages to insert a very powerful and heartfelt evaluative statement, “So you are not part of the village . . . you, you’re not part of the country, you are not part of the culture, you are not part of the civilization. You are just out-caste, out-nationed, out-civilized. You are just there for serving, serving, and serving” (line 18 above). The rising emotion evident in the taped recording of this statement is evident of the frustration and anger that Haresh still feels years after this encounter. As stated above, evaluation

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“permeates” 55 the telling of narrative; it is as if narrators get their point across by infusing evaluative statements into every other structural component of their narrative. Haresh’s adept ability to do this infuses his narrative with an emotional power and conviction that is an undeniable powerful marker of his own identity as Ambedkar Buddhist. Haresh’s use of correlative evaluation also exposes structural inequality and points to a communal aspect of TBMSG’s movement organizing. Squarely focused on the identity of Dalits as victims, Haresh’s narrative expresses the endemic and structural nature of caste-ism. Even in the midst of natural disaster, powerful stories of discrimination appear and humanity is lost. Haresh’s surprise at the lack of humanity even after a natural disaster is evident and reinforces the metanarrative of the need for Ambedkar Buddhist identity and self-esteem. While some within the movement might argue that it is through Buddhist dharma (teachings) that structural changes will occur, Haresh’s visible anger seems to keep him stuck in an us-versus-them mentality of victimhood. At the same time, his telling of this story, in the context of a fishbowl dialogue in which many other stories of injustice are interspersed with hagiographic stories of Dr. Ambedkar, implies a particular identity position and linked theory of change. From the start, Haresh signals that his story is “a similar experience” (line 1) to what others have shared in the dialogue. Being assertive is a tactic that self-confident individuals can and should pursue, but Haresh seems to be saying that broader strategies are needed to organize for local change. Implicit in this broader strategy is an Ambedkar Buddhist identity that, as voiced by another dialogue participant, engages in “creative forms of social education.” 56 This ideology of local organizing around Ambedkar Buddhist identity is at the root of TBMSG’s anticaste activism. In TBMSG’s Manuski Project we see this voiced in Manuski’s own vision and mission, in which TBMSG activists write: Our vision is for the most marginalized and oppressed to free themselves from material and psychological obstacles and take a lead in creating the foundations of a casteless and classless society imbued with the values of liberty, equality and fraternity as envisioned by Dr. Ambedkar. 57

The work of TBMSG is always framed upon the backdrop of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar and his conversion to Buddhism. Even though Haresh’s story is one that happened to him before joining the TBMSG movement, the memory and retelling of this story is fitted into an Ambedkar Buddhist ideology of local organizing and education of Dalits. Buddhism, and oriental conceptions of perfecting the self, form the core of TBMSG educative approach. While Haresh, similar to Anurag, scarcely references Buddhism and its influence on him in his disaster relief story, such narratives run the gambit of social identity, social positioning, and power asymmetry central to the social con-

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struction of Buddhist and victim narratives so important to TBMSG mobilization. 58 Haresh’s narrative forces one to ask who is the real victim: earthquake survivors or Dalit surveyors? Like other activists’ narratives encountered in researching TBMSG, Haresh’s narrative juggles Dalits’ identity as victims with that of educated and self-confident Buddhists. It is in this juggling that the movement’s social justice potential is either realized or overlooked. Activists’ construction of such justice narratives is simultaneously deliberate and unmindful: deliberate in its forward-looking projection of justice as the absence of indignities and oppressive structures and unmindful in the assumption that Dalits are always already victims. That activist narratives are both calculated and simultaneously strategically haphazard is not completely surprising. From the position of the powerless (or less powerful), when one tactic does not produce the desired change another one must be tried. Strategic interactions are conceived of very differently depending where one sits in relation to power. Haresh’s social position as Dalit Buddhist activist conditions strategies that highlight his experience and stem from a belief that these experiences are not heard or understood by social actors of different social positions. This activist desire to be heard oftentimes outweighs the strategic import of the story itself. As Haresh says, “even the earthquake or natural calamity is not able to clear or clean the mind . . . so this is what is the real grief.” 59 From such a statement we can see that the evaluative import of the story is that no new learning or moral community has been created through the inevitable structural changes brought on by calamity. The restorative potentials of the natural disaster have not been realized, only the diseased structure that already existed are now exposed. Haresh’s narrative is an exemplar of other activists’ accounts in that the storytelling practices and social construction of reality mediates between past victimization and a projective conception of social justice greatly informed by Buddhist identity. For TBMSG activists the development of Ambedkar Buddhist identity seems the best way to create change. CONCLUSIONS: BALANCING THE POWER AND PARADOX OF AMBEDKAR DALIT BUDDHIST IDENTITY Despite the clear community-organizing benefits of developing a local sense of identity and self-esteem as Ambedkar Buddhists, the paradox of exclusive community identity can also obstruct wider movement goals of realizing a casteless society. While the focus on identity and self-esteem is deemed critical in these early phases of movement organization, 60 this single-minded focus does present limitations in organizing non-Buddhist and non-Dalit castes. As we will see in the next chapter, BAMCEF’s arguments for a

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Mulnivasi Bahujan (indigenous majority) identity are an explicit critique of wearing a Buddhist identity too openly on your sleeve. BAMCEF’s goal of building a national identity and awareness of historical injustice sees secular identity as a more neutral starting point for educating low castes and organizing for change. For BAMCEF a broadly inclusive ancient identity is a more pragmatic means to mobilize the oppressed than a narrower Ambedkar Buddhist identity. In response many TBMSG activists see BAMCEF’s Mulnivasi identity as too nationalist, rigid, and fanatic. In describing his unease with BAMCEF cadres, Haresh once asked me “Emancipation from one framework is fine, but is it just leading to another framework?” 61 For TBMSG activists their goal of caste eradication is seen as inseparable from work to spread Buddhist dharma, for it is the Buddhist dharma which emancipated them personally from the caste system and they, therefore, see this as the logical solution for others. As instrumental, the narratives activists tell link fact and moral judgment. TBMSG activists’ worldview is one that sees Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism as the primary connection between his analysis of caste and his morality. Activists like Amitamati, Anurag, and Haresh, in some sense then, exhibit a form of power in their storytelling that often goes unnoticed and unanalyzed. 62 This power, enlivened by what Hoffer calls the “true believer,” 63 mobilizes and educates others to see Buddhism as a means of uplift. Whether TBMSG activists’ stories can be more than local to Maharashtra remains an unanswered question for TBMSG activists. In order to organize on a broader scale and overcome the paradoxes of an inclusive Ambedkar Buddhist identity, it seems that their stories will have to become more than local. Organizing around Ambedkar Buddhism is both powerful and limiting on national and international levels. The follow chapters explore BAMCEF’s attempt at national organizing around a Mulnivasi Bahujan (indigenous majority) identity and PVCHR’s attempt to go international with a right-based focus on pressure and agitation. Each of the sets of stories discussed provides a window into anticaste identity, rights, and awareness. Each of these windows provides a different view of the caste problem. While the intent here is not to make normative assessments of these approaches or strategic aims, it is to empower anticaste collaboration and narrative agency. All three movements struggle to branch out to elite circles of Indian society and mobilize change in the powerful. Through attention to narrative small spaces can be found to construct positive collective identity coupled with an awareness of the potential pitfalls that any hardened social identity creates. TBMSG’s agency is, in certain respects, limited by the ambiguity over a radical redressing of injustice and a more conservative creation of a new identity as Buddhist. The conversion experiences of TBMSG Buddhists act as a way to further ground social justice narratives in the critique of existing power relations, as well as a way to unwittingly reinforce them. In balancing this dialectic relationship, TBMSG

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activists believe a strong sense of identity and self-esteem are critical components for successful anticaste activism. While it is impossible to discount the critical role that Ambedkar Buddhist identity and increased self-esteem play in Dalit uplift, it is also difficult to discern what exactly this identity creation neglects. The contention here is that while strong identity and self-esteem are certainly needed in low-caste communities, other important social psychological and structural components must also be present for the transformation of caste society. NOTES 1. Christopher Queen, “Dr. Ambedkar and the Hermeneutics of Buddhist Liberation,” in Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia, Christopher S. Queen and Sallie B. King, eds. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 45. 2. Timothy Fitzgerald, “Ambedkar, Buddhism, and the Concept of Religion,” in S. M. Michael, ed., Dalits in Modern India: Vision and Values, second ed. (Los Angles: Sage, 2007), 144–45. 3. Krithika Varagur, “Converting to Buddhism as a form of Political Protest,” The Atlantic, April 11, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/04/dalit-buddhismconversion-india-modi/557570/—accessed June 11, 2018. 4. See Rinker (forthcoming), “Collective Trauma and Narrative Harmony: Mapping the Legacy of Trauma and Displacement in Post Conflict Peacebuilding,” in Transformative Harmony, Ed. Ananta Kumar Giri, Madras Institute of Development Studies. 5. Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of Low Castes in North Indian Politics (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), 23. 6. By hyphenating the term “identity-justice,” I am signaling that these terms are imbricated together in complex ways that makes their separation impossible. 7. In fact, in 2014 this internal disagreement forced leadership of the Manuski Center to split and be reconfigured upon the departure of a leading activist from the organization. Various discussion with TBMSG activist, Haresh Dalvi, 2015–2016. 8. The songwriter Manohar Nagarle, from a song written upon Ambedkar’s death, quoted in Vasant Moon, Growing Up Untouchable in India: A Dalit Autobiography, G. Omvedt, trans. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000). 9. This activist striving can come off as religious zeal and often takes the form of programs aimed at socio-economic and educational uplift for low castes. For example, TBMSG activists advocate right livelihood activities with a project called Jambhala Services Pvt. Ltd. (JSPL), which is working in the financial services industry and providing opportunities for low-caste people to move up India’s class hierarchy (Jambhala in Buddhist lore is the wealth-giving incarnation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion). Further, Jambudvipa Trust has embarked on an ambitious partnership with a Pennsylvania company called Temp Solutions, Inc., in which social workers from low-caste backgrounds are given support to come and work in the United States [See Emily Wax, “India's Lower Castes Seek Social Progress in Global Job Market,” Washington Post, (August 20, 2007), A1 & A12. And S. Jha, “US-based Honcho Comes Headhunting for Dalits Again,” Indian Express (May 2, 2008)]. 10. Amitamati is not a name that has been changed to protect identity. In fact, in interviewing Amitamati she requested that this name be used—a symbol of the hardship and injustices she has overcome. This is the name that she prefers to be called as it is the name she was given upon ordination into the TBM (TBMSG’s Buddhist order). As a Dhamacharini (a female dharma farer and ordained member of the movement) she has exited the caste system and shown her full acceptance of Buddhism as the chosen path of change. This requires a change in name, dropping any surnames and taking a single name as your legal identity. Personal interview with Amitamati, October 1, 2006.

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11. For some description of this conference, see the introduction to this book. 12. For example, see Chandra Bhan Prasad, Dalit Diary: 1999–2003; Reflections on Apartheid in India (Chennai: Navayana Publishing, 2004) and D. Kapur and Chandra Bhan Prasad, A Study of Market Forces in Uttar Pradesh, unpublished conference paper, delivered at the Dalit Studies Conference (December 3–5, 2008). 13. Caste after all is an intricate combination of discrimination constructed on a religiously based worldview that privileges both birth grouping (jati) and certain determinates of social and occupational status (varna)—see chapter 1. Despite that in modern impersonal cities ethnic birth becomes harder to discern, public goods—like civil service positions—remain a visible and public identifier, and, thus, are an ideal space for caste contention. 14. Interestingly enough, many TBMSG activists interviewed in 2006 and 2008 stated that the reservations debate has taken away much of their voice. The reservations debate has given upper castes a means to counter injustice with arguments that an unjust corrective measure is being applied to a system that should be merit based. Despite the fact that such arguments mask the social reality that some people start with more access to resources than others, the discursive space that reservations have opened up has, in some sense, reinforced hegemonic control over caste discourse. As a result, the reservations debate almost completely ignores the complexity of the narrative experience of those on the bottom of the system. 15. For a good discussion of the coveted civil service position, see Edward Luce, In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India (New York: Doubleday, 2007). 16. Personal interview with Amitamati, October 1, 2006. 17. See John Burton, Conflict: Resolution and Provention (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). 18. Personal interview with Amitamati, October 1, 2006. 19. Ibid. 20. Personal interview with Amitamati, July 21, 2016. 21. Ibid. 22. Personal interview with Amitamati, October 1, 2006. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. William Labov, Language in the Inner City: Studies in Black English Vernacular (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), 354. 27. Personal interview with Amitamati, October 1, 2006. 28. Michael Toolan, Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction, second ed. (New York: Routledge, 1988), 148. 29. Labov (1972) describes Black English fight narratives in this way. Analyzing the narrative of a Harlem fight between two boys, Labov says that “each part shows a different side of his [the boy telling the story’s] ideal character.” William Labov, Language in the Inner City, 368. Similarly, Amitamati’s story also highlights two crucial parts of her ideal character: Buddhist and victim of discrimination as a means to expressing the desired elements of the ideal society. 30. See Daniel Rothbart and Karina Korostelina, Identity, Morality, and Threat: Studies in Violent Conflict (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books), 2006; James Booth, “The Unforgotten: Memories of Justice,” The American Political Science Review, 2001, 95(4), 777–91; and A. Lind, “Social Conflict and Social Justice: Lessons from the Social psychology of Justice Judgments,” Inaugural Oration for the Leiden University Fund Chair in Social Conflict, The Netherlands, 1995 (1–13). 31. Informal interview with Mangesh Dahiwale, May 2007. “Double dalits” refers to the doubled degree of oppression Dalit women encounter from both higher-caste men and women and their own Dalit husbands and sons. It is a phrase that was prevalent in Dr. Ambedkar’s day as well. 32. Gopal Guru, “Afterword” (M. Pandit, trans.), in B. Kamble, The Prisons We Broke (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2008), 162. 33. C. Benson, “The Unthinkable Boundaries of Self: The Role of Negative Emotional Boundaries for the Formation, Maintenance, and Transformation of Identities,” in R. Harre and

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Fathali Maghaddam (eds.), The Self and Others: Positioning Individuals and Groups in Personal, Political, and Cultural Contexts (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 61. Benson (2003) defines these identity-defining boundaries, which he argues are constituted by negative feelings, as a set of emotions that “maintain any ‘self’ as this sort of self and not that sort of self” (62). 34. C. Benson, “The Unthinkable Boundaries of Self,” 62. 35. See Harvey Peter, An introduction to Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 54. In describing the doctrine Harvey says: “This [doctrine] states the principle of conditionality, that all things, mental and physical, arise and exist due to the presence of certain conditions, and cease once their conditions are removed: nothing (except Nibbana) is independent. The doctrine thus complements the teaching that no permanent, independent self can be found” (54). 36. For a detailed description of first-, second-, and third-order social positioning, see Ram Harré and Luk van Langenhove, Positioning Theory: Moral Contexts of Intentional Action (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999). 37. See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretations of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 38. Cited below as: Caste Dialogue, July 2–3, 2008. This two-day dialogue and workshop included training on basic conflict resolution skills and theory, discussion of appreciative inquiry in organizations, and a chance to facilitate dialogue around caste and caste injustice. 39. Though the Manuski Center is clear that they strive to actively branch out to other nonBuddhist Dalit communities, both in India and the West, this collaboration is weak at best. Much like Dr. Ambedkar, TBMSG has had difficulty organizing non-Mahar (Ambedkar’s own caste) and non-Buddhist communities. This remains a primary impediment to TBMSG’s anticaste agenda. 40. For a detailed description of this organizational development approach, see Jane Watkins and Bernard Mohr, Appreciative Inquiry: Change at the Speed of Imagination (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001). 41. See Edward E. Jones and Victor A. Harris, “The attribution of attitudes,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 3:1(1967): 1–24. doi:10.1016/0022–1031(67)90034–0. 42. A. E. Lind, “Social Conflict and Social Justice: Lessons from the Social psychology of Justice Judgments,” Inaugural Oration for the Leiden University Fund Chair in Social Conflict (The Netherlands, 1995), 3. 43. James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, op. cit. 44. bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminism, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989), 29. 45. Donald Schon, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 21. Schon (1983) juxtaposes the positivist framing of professional knowledge [what he calls “technical rationality” (21)] with what he calls “reflection-in-action” (21), a sort of spontaneous reframing of a problematic situation in which the professional does “not keep means and ends separate” (68). Reflection-in-action involves problem setting as opposed to simply problem solving and, thus, provides the narrative researcher an ideal window into respondents’ construction of normative commitments and framing of reality. Simultaneously, “when a practitioner becomes aware of his frames, he also becomes aware of the possibility of alternative ways of framing the reality of his practice” (310) and this new reflective awareness generates previously unexplored narrative storylines, agency, and structures. 46. Transcribed from Caste Dialogue, July 2–3, 2008. 47. Taylor, Caouette, Usborne, and King (2008), 154. In defining this paradox, the authors’ state: “in order to maximize group advantage, group members may feel compelled to focus on the group’s state of disadvantage” (154). 48. Michael Toolan, Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction, 151. In describing Labov’s six stages of the well-formed story, Toolan writes: “evaluation consists of all the means to establish and sustain the point, the contextual significance and tellability, or reportability, of a story” (151). 49. Michael Toolan, Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction, 153. 50. Caste Dialogue, July 2–3, 2008. 51. Ibid.

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52. See Marie Dugan, “A Nested Theory of Conflict,” A Leadership Journal: Women in Leadership, 1 (1996), 10–19. When one applies Dugan (1996) to analyze these fishbowl dialogue narratives, it becomes clear that Anurag is focused on an issue-specific analysis to the caste problem and Haresh is approaching the problem from a structural sub-systems perspective. Both analytical approaches lead TBMSG movement activists to a focus on the need to do local organizing around identity. 53. Sudhir Kakar and Katharina Kakar, The Indians: Portrait of a People (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2009), 21. See also Geert Hofstede, Culture and Organizations: Software of the Mind (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997). 54. Michael Toolan, Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction, 156. 55. Ibid., 148. 56. Caste Dialogue, July 2–3, 2008. 57. http://manuski.in/—accessed June 12, 2018. For more on TBMSG’s Manuski Project, also see http://www.jambudvipa.org.in/—accessed June 12, 2018. 58. For more on this see Jeremy Rinker, “Justpeace Prospects for Peace-building and Worldview Tolerance: A South Asian Movement’s Social Construction of Justice” (George Mason University: Ph.D. Dissertation, 2009). 59. Formal interview with Haresh Dalvi, June 28, 2008. 60. Personal interview with Dharmachari Lokamitra, TBMSG founder and director, October 2006. 61. Personal communication with Haresh Dalvi, August 28, 2016. 62. See Hoffer (1951) for one of the few psychological studies of the power of leaders and followers. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1951). 63. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, op. cit.

Chapter Five

All-India Rise Up BAMCEF and Educating for a National Identity and Injustice Awareness

If TBMSG’s anticaste focus rests primarily on local organizing around Buddhist identity, BAMCEF’s approach lies in developing a distinct indigenous identity that can build national awareness of the historical evolution of lowcaste oppression on the subcontinent. Advocating the development of this indigenous identity, like TBMSG’s fostering of a Buddhist identity, relies on processes of public education and organizing. BAMCEF’s work on identity creation is an attempt to be inclusive of all belief traditions in a way that is “comprehensive” and “harmonizing.” 1 While a strong focus on identity creation is important to both these social movements’ strategic approaches, BAMCEF’s emphasis on educating for a new national identity as Mulnivasi Bahujan (the indigenous majority) opens unique opportunities for countrywide organizing that an emphasis on Buddhist identity alone cannot hope to realize. Despite the TBMSG movement’s rhetoric to the contrary, Buddhist identity creation presents a set of mobilizing and organizing limitations. BAMCEF hopes a broader national identity as Mulnivasi Bahujan will provide the secular and apolitical means to overcome these limitations. In the words of one BAMCEF activist I spoke with, “the minute you mention Buddhism you lose many OBCs that are proudly and defiantly Hindu.” 2 This category of Other Backward Castes (OBCs), often used as a proxy by highercaste forces in India’s caste conflicts, is understood to be a critical ally in India’s anticaste fight. This attempt to mobilize non-Dalits marks an important difference between the strategic ideology of BAMCEF and TBMSG. Another longtime BAMCEF activist told me that TBM people (i.e., the ordained TBMSG movement members) “want to avoid us” as they are “only 119

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interested in Vipassana.” 3 Such strong critique of Buddhist social movements, like TBMSG, is common in the discourse of BAMCEF cadres, while within TBMSG the critique of BAMCEF as themselves “too evangelical” 4 sounds eerily similar to BAMCEF’s own critiques of Ambedkar Buddhist identity organizers. The tension between movement activists in BAMCEF and TBMSG is evident and clearly overlaps with each movement’s mobilizing aspirations and social vision. Still, more than either social movement coordination or competition, their organization, ideologies, and methodologies are clearly distinct. In forming two divergent historical narratives of the root causes of caste oppression, these movements have different strategic theories of change. BAMCEF’s self-described approach of educating for a “non-political, non-agitational, and non-religious” 5 awareness aims for inclusion of all India’s oppressed under the banner of self-help and a historical secular-based re-education. But, like any morality-based social movement, BAMCEF’s ideological methods can rub others as fervent and fundamentally unbending. Such strident activism and all-India approach most clearly represents a direct response to India’s growing Hindutva 6 nationalism more than any of the other movements studied in this work. BAMCEF’s organizing in cadre youth wings is reminiscent of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 7 Hindutva radicals’ own youth organizing organization. Rather than TBMSG’s local Buddhist identity organizing, or even PVCHR’s more international rights framing and agitation (see chapter 6), BAMCEF’s indigenous organizing and educating of an unheard majority formed as a direct response to dominant hegemony. Although all these movements have in common an indirect discursive contention with the ideology of Hindutva (i.e., Hindu-ness as the key marker of Indian nationalism and powerful hegemony), BAMCEF methods of developing a secular and apolitical national identity most clearly points toward unseating Hindutva’s discursive power and hegemony. How the downtrodden in Indian society define themselves, vis-à-vis dominant citizens, is exceedingly complicated, but BAMCEF’s discourse and rhetoric is uniform and consistent in a way that the Buddhist and neo-Dalit identity rhetoric of TBMSG and PVCHR, respectively, are not. In realizing both the political opportunities in building awareness around a broad national majoritarian identity and the limitations of relying on a minority Buddhist status and identity, BAMCEF’s secular discourse can appear to be “rigid and fanatic” 8 even to some like-minded anticaste activists. But to BAMCEF’s ardent cadres of anticaste activists, the building of a national indigenous majority is the only possible means to achieve real nonviolent systems change.

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THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF MULNIVASI BAHUJAN ORGANIZING AND THE EVOLUTION OF BAMCEF’S AWARENESS EDUCATION India in the late 1970s was “a fertile period for new organizations among the lower castes, due to the defeat of Congress, so far considered invincible, in the 1977 National elections.” 9 In addition to the national political dynamic at play, the social realities and sense of Dalit assertion was growing with the advent of mass movements like the Dalit Panthers in Maharashtra. 10 In this context, early BAMCEF leaders organized middle-class government employees to reap the untapped social and economic potential of this class to make a difference in Indian society. As discussed in chapter 1, D. K. Kaparde and Kanshi Ram, BAMCEF’s foundational leaders, saw an opening in the growing distrust of politicians both locally and worldwide. Ambedkar’s own party in Maharashtra, the Republican Party of India (RPI), was immobilized by infighting among low-caste supporters, and internationally Watergate, and its ensuing wave of government distrust, was making headlines and growing political apathy. Within this political context, the BAMCEF founders realized the need for non-political organizing around as broad a conception of minority awareness as possible. While certainly influenced by the discourse of rights and identity circling around them in the early 1970s, during this formative time of the BAMCEF movement, leaders defined their contribution as giving back and this giving back was always seen as not just financial, but also social. For early BAMCEF leaders, the economic and social capital they had accumulated through civil service attainment could be put to organized use for the oppressed masses. In this vein, BAMCEF, from the beginning, invested in developing historical awareness as much as it advocated for using its middle-class buying power to economically support struggling low castes. More than what some may label “separatist identities,” 11 BAMCEF’s construction of a Mulnivasi Bahujan is intricately tied up in their sense of socially giving back by re-educating of Indians about their own history and contemporary predicament. The reconstruction of low-caste identity as more than just Dalit or Buddhist, for BAMCEF cadres, represents both a lifecalling and a social necessity. Without a broader majority of the oppressed population aware of their marginalization and how to articulate it, the possibility for major change in the caste system is believed, by BAMCEF activists, to be impossible. Identity based on religion or political identity awareness is seen as too limiting and narrow for BAMCEF activists. Rather, a strong belief in “liberatory consciousness” 12 is believed by BAMCEF activists to be the critical ingredient to mobilize mass support for structural and systems change. Once probed, many of the BAMCEF activists that I interviewed in July of 2016 explained their belief in Mulnivasi identity as an

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evolution in their own thinking about being marginalized. One BAMCEF respondent talked about being called a Harijan and then a Dalit but being frustrated with these limiting public discourses until the concept of Bahujan identity paved the way for her understanding of her ancestor’s past as native to this place. 13 The rhetorical power of indigenous majority identity is seen as liberating to BAMCEF activists, even if this can come off as obsessive, vehement, and too nationalistic to those outside the movement. More inclusive than Buddhist or Dalit identity, an indigenous majority speaks to how “people live culturally dynamic lives,” what Prasad (2001) calls a “polycultural” 14 approach to the diversity we see in the world. At the same time, this indigenous majority hinges on a sense of national pride and sense of homeland that can be limiting of BAMCEF’s inclusivity. While assuming nativity certainly positions others as outsiders, and thus many see BAMCEF’s stance as far from inclusive, from the BAMCEF perspective a super majority of India is indigenous and that super majority develops a much-needed inclusive approach among the marginalized. While BAMCEF cadres argue that 85 percent of the India population is indigenous, they also argue that this majority is relatively powerless to an elite hegemonic majority. This work of educating the majority, and the us/them rhetoric that comes along with it, is justified by BAMCEF cadres by a subtle, but important, normative belief in democratic process, as well as the need to work to organize among those that are materially exploited. Still BAMCEF’s rhetoric of giving back to those economically less fortunate is more than simply empowering a Marxist sense of ideological superstructure. “We regard this as inadequate to explain the complex nature of Indian social and cultural realities and processes, which are not a mere reflection of primary economic activities.” 15 Rather, BAMCEF activists seem bent on articulating a more Gramscian sense of hegemony, and majority resistance to that hegemony, as both socio-cultural analysis and means of social change. “The concept of hegemony refers to an active and continuing process, not a static condition. Gramsci points out that a class sustains its dominance not just by organization of force but with moral and intellectual leadership.” 16 In re-educating Dalits and all low castes about their history, BAMCEF aims to upset the hegemonic realities of Indian society and recreate them in more democratic forms. While BAMCEF’s belief in the power of democratic process belies the middle-class status of BAMCEF activists, it also frames them as democratic Indian citizens and positions them as nationalist rather than separatist or internationalist agitators. This complicated framing of their Mulnivasi Bahujan identity and goals as inclusive, polycultural, and aimed at collective awareness positions them as somewhere between radical revolutionaries and status quo assimilationists. BAMCEF’s strategy and tactics are based on the belief that a critical mass of awareness in the masses must be reached in order to create a “justice

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cascade” 17 of social transformation for (rather than with or by) the powerless. Such a cascade requires a pan-Indian sense of Mulnivasi (indigenous) identity that ideologically explains history from below, as opposed to history from above. An identity based on revivalist claims of past collective greatness and power is understood by BAMCEF to be a more effective mobilizing narrative than claims of lack of rights or newly flourishing religious identity. While Ambedkar Buddhists do argue their religious identity is a revival of traditional and egalitarian Buddhist dominance in India, BAMCEF’s more secular revivalism, being focused on indigeneity, presents more inclusive opportunities for educational organizing around broad ideas of national citizenship and historical knowledge, instead of simply the experience of injustice. Still one activist expressed to me that being a BAMCEF activist, although working with educated employees, actually does nothing directly to uplift those employees. 18 Rather, for many activists it is BAMCEF’s call to “pay back to society” 19 that brings help to the masses of less fortunate victims of Brahmin control and, eventually, will bring the desired social revolution. This giving back comes in the form of a unique sense of national education as Mulnivasi Bahujan, as well as via the resources and trappings of middle-class wealth. Until collective awareness is reached on a mass scale, traditional means of collective identity organizing or rights agitation will only go so far. BAMCEF’s “theory of change” 20 is based on social education about the history of indigenous peoples and their loss of power over time to the powerful forces of hegemony. BAMCEF’s work is not just identity creation but developing and empowering a new curriculum and pedagogy of India’s national history to ground a new sense of identity upon which to organize social resistance and achieve lasting change. BAMCEF’s nationalist and nativist discourse, as well as their employed membership and status, places them in a unique oppositional stance in relation to mainstream nationalist forces. Their unique positionality as low caste, educated, middle class, and mostly civil servants may, in some sense, dampen a radical impulse to radical revolutionary change, but this positionality also simultaneously engenders a paternalistic sense of their ability to drive real structural change. BAMCEF’s organizing strategy and historical ideology are the linchpin of their belief in a future cascade of change. In many senses then BAMCEF’s cadre approach to awareness organizing is unique to anticaste movement activists. No other anticaste organization relies so much on revivalist reconstruction of ancient history and secular (and seemingly Marxist) definitions of life at the bottom of society. This is not to say that other anticaste activists have not used history to make their claims, or even aimed to attract Indian Marxists to their anticaste work, but BAMCEF has framed their entire program on the critical need for reconstructing and re-educating Indians on their true history. In the words of Mani (2011), “domination and resistance often go hand in hand.” 21 BAMCEF’s goal is to

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develop a liberatory consciousness [what Paulo Freire (2006) called “conscientization”] and this, in their minds, only develops via actively educating others about their history of domination and resistance. This re-education on India’s ancient history is contentious and scant of primary source evidence exists. What makes BAMCEF’s Mulnivasi Bahujan educational awareness so unique, though, is the degree to which it forms the bedrock of their organizing or agitating. It is the foundation of their social mantra—“paying back to society.” 22 For BAMCEF, no anticaste action can be taken without grounding it in the ancient narrative of Mulnivasi’s history of being marginalized. From an outsider’s perspective, this continual reliance on developing Mulnivasi identity through history can seem more evangelical than either evidenced or pragmatic. Much like TBMSG’s Buddhist activists’ continual referencing of their archetype, hero, and bodhisattva, Dr. Ambedkar, BAMCEF activists’ constant reference to their particular interpretation of India’s indigenous history is disciplined and methodical. Such disciplined rebuttal of Indian history assumes an almost evangelical educational indoctrination, which leaves BAMECF cadres myopic in their refutation of other identity constructions and potential solidarities. In my interviewing of over thirty BAMCEF leaders and activists in July 2016, the level of consensus and messaging around India’s ancient history and historical evolution was striking. Strident and inclusive rhetoric (“Bringing exploiters and exploited people together is nothing but keeping the lion and the goat in the same cage where at the first available opportunity the lion is bound to kill the goat to meet its hunger” 23) though a boom to mobilization of angry disenfranchised masses, also limits the reach of even BAMCEF’s wide net of low-caste and middle-class activists. Breaking through the seemingly inclusive, yet simultaneously dismissive, BAMCEF party line of the 85 percent Mulnivasi Bahujan versus 15 percent Brahmin invaders can be extremely difficult in much the same way it is difficult to convince TBMSG activists of the problematic nature of the single-minded deification of Dr. Ambedkar or problematic nature of Buddhist identity organizing. Those who disagree with the Mulnivasi account of India’s ancient history cum modern Brahmin elite are believed, and socially positioned, to not yet have a true consciousness of their oppression. This dismissive retort to alternative conceptions of India’s complex history is off-putting to many anticaste activists I spoke with. At the same time, BAMCEF cadres strive to be inclusive in their attempt to rationally debate the complexities of Indian social history. Balancing the confidence in their rational knowledge with a willingness to let others come to their learning as only a true teacher can allow, BAMCEF members are dedicated and painstaking in their persistence and commitment to their historical version of the truth, despite the dearth of historical evidence available in India’s predominantly oral history. Much more can and will be said about their ideology, historical analysis, and social positionality, but, for now, how BAMCEF

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discursively enacts their ideology is first critical to understand. Once the how of BAMCEF activism is explored, the what and why of their actions will come into sharper focus. BORROWING FROM MARXIST LABOR ORGANIZING: THE CADRE STRUCTURE Karl Marx and Frederick Engles argue in the Communist Manifesto that the purpose of a cadre is to radicalize class struggle. 24 Unlike the vanguard, cadres are not supposed to lead, but rather to teach and actualize the radical tendencies that are already existent, but dormant, in capitalist society. BAMCEF’s adoption of a cadre model of anticaste organizing provides an indication of their anticaste ideology and social vision. Endeavoring to change the dominant discourse of society, local BAMCEF cadres use the dominant narratives of Indian history to argue for a subaltern view of this history and radicalize a base of support for historical, but dormant, resistance. Endeavoring to re-educate the masses, BAMCEF challenges the notoriously scant primary sources of the dominant narratives of India’s ancient history. From challenging evidence which debunks stories of the Aryan invasion to privileging the lives of ancient low-caste historical actors, BAMCEF educates for an awareness of what Narayan (2009) call the “saffronisation of the Dalit hero.” 25 Yet, despite being inclusive of a wider oppressed majority than just Dalit, BAMCEF discourse is both polemical and exclusionary of attempts to brand all things as Hindu (i.e., saffron being the color of the Hindu tradition and Hindutva forces). BAMCEF cadres see the problem of caste as more than simply a Hindu problem, but rather a problem of social and historical ignorance. BAMCEF’s cadres are organized as what we in the West might call study circles, each reconstructing, educating, and redeploying local and national narratives that uplift an indigenous majority that has been marginalized and discounted for thousands of years. “Master narratives and dominant ideologies, however, often inhibit and confuse the construction of traditions and ideologies of resistance.” 26 In order to overcome the constrains imposed by such long-held dominant narratives in India society, BAMCEF’s founders foresaw the power of cadres, similar to those found in labor organizing, though they always conceived of cadres as a non-political form of organizing that aims to educate the masses. Like Freire (Freire, 2000) [BAMCEF] founders knew that liberating education cannot be expected from oppressors through formal schooling in government or private sector and therefore education and training of cadres and masses became the most important program of BAMCEF. For this awakening, national-, state-, and district-level conferences became visible features of the organization. 27

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Even though BAMCEF was not the first South Asian revolutionary organization to use cadre organizing, 28 this approach proved effective in mobilizing first educated and socially mobile civil servants and then the broader masses around anticaste issues on a national scale. The cadre camps that BAMCEF became known for in the movement’s later years were one- to two-day training programs that empowered activists to venture out to build and mobilize resistance by educating others within the indigenous majority. These camps became opportunities for selected activists to hone their mobilization techniques and be indoctrinated into Mulnivasi Bahujan ideology. Topics covered in such camps include the social history of the victims of caste, Ambedkar-Pule ideology, and indoctrination into the structure and function of BAMCEF’s cadre educational system. Thus, for BAMCEF, like most social justice movements, organizing and mobilizing goes hand in hand. Cadre camps were a localized means of both organizing and mobilizing low castes and the marginalized around a particular historical awareness. Implementation of an annual national convention further solidified an organizational structure in which there was a decentralized leadership under a central command and state control of activists. If this organizational approach sounds militaristic, BAMCEF members would not object. In their perspective, they are fighting a war against the institution of caste and its social and religious justifications in Hindu-dominated society—if the two can rightly be separated. The Brahmin control of institutions of power, along with the social privilege this centuries-old reality creates and maintains, requires disciplined organization and dedicated mobilization. Regular local camps along with annual national conferences act as networking and strategic development opportunities for the movement. Implicit in BAMCEF’s organizational approach is, therefore, a collective restraint and an honorific respect to self and others within the movement. This is visible in a number of ways among present-day BAMCEF cadre workers. First, in donning the BAMCEF uniform of the blue kakis, blue short-sleeve dress shirt, and shoulder epaulets, cadres model egalitarianism and self-respect to those both within and outside the movement. In addition to a uniform dress code for men and women, decentralized state and local leadership acts to reinforce the idea that all are equal—many in BAMCEF’s leadership made the point of telling me that they were still just a cadre worker despite having attained leadership titles. 29 That these leadership titles are irrelevant to the development and success of the movement is an article of faith among BAMCEF supporters, despite a central executive committee of BAMCEF being considered the “apex body for the functioning of BAMCEF.” 30 The idea of titles and difference is shunned within the BAMCEF movement; in theory all are working for the same cause and equally important in the struggle, although in practice there is a democratic leadership hierarchy.

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BAMCEF activists, in placing the struggle above all else, including self, are not any different than the TBMSG movement activists in their sense of self-sacrifice. But, in BAMCEF’s case, this self-sacrifice relies not on Buddhist doctrines of no-self, but rather on a collectivist and egalitarian sense of “paying back to society.” 31 Still, despite BAMCEF’s egalitarian structure and ethos, the movement is not immune from leadership struggles and generational change of guard. 32 Having said this, such internal struggles seem to revolve around tactics and strategy, rather than ideology per se. The sense of identity with the BAMCEF cause and visible equality in dress has helped to propel BAMCEF to a national stage mobilizing and enforced a militant ideological mindset and laser-focused egalitarian ethos within the movement. Being built to last, with limited control of central leadership, but rather membership in cadres, has allowed BAMCEF, like their nemesis Hindunationalist organization the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 33 to build a national constituency and a diffuse democratic power structure. BAMCEF’s constituency, while discursively apolitical with regards to national policy, are eager grassroots activists for change in social structures at the local level. BAMCEF activists’ organizational style may not be directly political, but activists talk in terms of changing people’s mindset in ways that develop cultural leadership and shift. BAMCEF’s own literature is filled with such language: “Only those who are well informed, caderised, and capable of taking decisions can lead the organization,” 34 “Being a cadre based organization since its birth, none is indispensable in BAMCEF.” 35 While this egalitarian rhetoric on leadership is limited in an extremely hierarchical and power distant society like India, it does instill a sense of belonging and focus on service to others within the movement. The local to national structure and dynamic within the BAMCEF movement has allowed growth and unity in strategic difference between local cadres, while maintaining ideological coherence and ideological focus. BAMCEF’s cadre organizational structure, decentralized yet strictly adhered to, is one important means by which BAMCEF activists mobilize and solidify their ideology on a national scale. The institution of the annual conference programs and organizing that developed in the wake of the radical excitement of the 1970s Dalit Panther movements and the political vacuum the first annual conference arose out of 36 also played an important role in leading a generation of activists to the BAMCEF movement. Raising the visibility of BAMCEF’s social discourse aimed at uplifting the indigenous majority, the historical evolution of BAMCEF as a movement cannot be divorced from its cultural context and Marxist organizational foundations.

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BAMCEF’S EMERGING ON A NATIONAL STAGE THROUGH LOCALIZED AWARENESS Since late 1978 BAMCEF has held an annual national convention each year. These conventions have allowed a space to dialogue, plan strategy, and develop a belief in self-dependency within what BAMCEF has come to call the wider Mulnivasi society. These large conventions provide activists with a sense of both distinct identity and controlled strategic planning sessions to organize the majority segment of the Indian population, a community that has been underprivileged and under-attended by the powerful for millennium. In the context of the history of movements for democratic socialism of India, 37 BAMCEF’s ideological approach to national organizing seems to be not only logical, but effective. As Foucault has argued, “power is ‘always already there’ . . . one is never ‘outside’ it [i.e., power].” 38 Realizing this and using the power of middle-class employed civil servants, BAMCEF saw the need for a national platform and developed one through an annual convention of its employed membership. Rotating the annual convention around India, these events have become the most visible platform for dialogue to create “unity of the victimized castes,” 39 and attract a wide array of others to their cause. Providing national face to the BAMCEF movement allowed regional cadres working year-round to build the local legs for this national platform. Described by BAMCEF activists as “a grand spectacle of organizational reach, performance and strength,” 40 BAMCEF’s annual convention is the pinnacle of its national face and means to coordinate state and local resistance. In reality, the annual convention is primarily an expression of the strength of its true grassroots organizing and reach. Although these national conventions are the site of much decision making and annual planning, it is at the local and state levels that the hard work of BAMCEF gets done. In interviews with activists, while there was clear pride in the national conventions as a time to reconnect with friends in the movement, it was clear that cadre activists brought change to the national leadership, not the other way around. BD BORKAR: REJECTING ASSIGNED IDENTITIES AND THE LOCAL ROOTS OF A MAJORITARIAN NATIONAL LEADERSHIP On July 23, 2016, I had the opportunity to interview BD Borkar, former National President and Chairman of BAMCEF. We met in the headquarters of one of two Dalit-run media channels in Nagpur city. As a satellite channel, this local television station is available across India and focuses on issues that are of relevance to the indigenous majority audience that BAMCEF is keen to embrace. Borkar, a pleasant and animated man in his mid-fifties, was

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well-prepared and eager to meet me. The feeling among BAMCEF activists is that Brahmin-controlled media has silenced the important work that the movement has been doing for over thirty-five years, and Mr. Borkar’s enthusiasm in our interview was clear expression of his frustration over this silencing. His eagerness to speak is representative of a general sense of being silenced that permeates the BAMCEF movement. Based in Mumbai, Borkar is himself a Buddhist, but is adamant that organizing around caste should not be executed on the basis of religion, as religion is seen as too limiting of the identity and awareness he sees as important to organize and mobilize for social change. When I asked him why a Mulnivasi Bahujan identity was necessary for social change, he explained that an identity like “Dalit” is an “assigned identity.” 41 In other words, such identity formation is not an identity that low castes themselves created, but one that was given to them based on their unequal position in society. This pejorative analysis of ascribed identities like Dalit and Harijan lies at the crux of BAMCEF’s work for awareness raising and identity creation. While low castes in Indian society clearly have a separate experience from privileged high castes, they also have little agency in labeling and describing this experience. Pai (2002) in describing BAMCEF as a “shadow organization” of Kanshi Ram’s political Bahujan Samaj Part (BSP) in Uttar Pradesh writes: “The word Bahujan, Dalit, of SC, does not figure in the publications of the organization.” 42 While this is true, BAMCEF has set up parallel organizational structures like the Mulnivasi Sangh, which speaks in the singular discourse of organizing and educating a Mulnivasi Bahujan. The argument for an indigenous majority identity is an argument for low-caste agency, dignity, and respect. Mr. Borkar explained that “all historians agree that Aryans are alien to the Indian subcontinent,” 43 a statement I am sure many historians would find space to argue with. But, for those in the BAMCEF movement, this contested history is a “settled view.” 44 This history is unquestionable and forms the grounding of the BAMCEF platform for change. Labeling themselves as part of the Mulnivasi Bahujan is to express agency in how they identify and broaden the possibilities of polycultural identity formations and understandings of social change. As the original inhabitants of this land, BAMCEF activists make a complex claim for identity, rights, and awareness all rolled into one. For the activists and leaders of BAMCEF, the Mulnivasi identity is adequately broad to include all oppressed people at the center and the periphery of Indian society, and to develop a platform for realizing social revolution. Social identity creation requires others. Therefore, BAMCEF’s indigenous majority, by definition, assume a minority. This minority other is framed as alien, outsider, and self-interested rather than community-oriented. The Mulnivasi Bahujan by contrast is not just framed as indigenous, but as an insider that is interested in taking power for the majority and returning soci-

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ety to a more egalitarian and democratic way (a way that BAMCEF activists argue existed in ancient India). This wrestling power from the Indian minority is in many ways inseparable from the construction of a majoritarian identity as Mulnivasi. When I questioned Mr. Borkar about why the need to create a separate identity, his response was telling: “How can the people who have denied rights and those whose rights have been denied be together in an organization?” 45 This strident “need [for] clear demarcation,” 46 while standard in the discourse of the BAMCEF leadership, may be pragmatically useful in organizing and mobilizing for low-caste education and awareness, but it also reifies and models an exclusionary discourse that limits the national unifying capacity of an organization like BAMCEF. BAMCEF’s longterm strategy does not seem to jive with its shorter-term theory of practice. This raises many questions as to BAMCEF’s desired end game. How do BAMCEF activists see the realization of this social revolution? Will, once power is achieved by the majority, an egalitarian democratic order reign, or will a reign of terror and revenge ensue? Approaching this question from multiple angles and with a diversity of BAMCEF activists and leaders, I received a wide variation of responses. 47 Some activists told me that once the Mulnivasi Bahujan come to power they will “expel,” 48 “send home,” 49 or “throw into the sea” 50 the Brahmin minority. Others told me that “of course we will work with them,” 51 giving them their due based on their fair proportions within society. At the same time, Mr. Borkar argued that “there cannot be reconciliation . . . only organizational strength can build a pressure.” 52 In the minds of many BAMCEF activists, the possibility of violent confrontation is minimal, but such rhetoric dances a fine line between confrontational and violent. Though not example of direct violence, such violent discourse does little to build inter-caste relationship. From BAMCEF activists’ perspective, if the “organizational strength” 53 among the low-caste indigenous majority exists, then social revolution will be bloodless. At this point in the anticaste movement, BAMCEF activists believe that dialogue must “be among the backwards classes [as] they are divided.” 54 But is there a role of higher castes in such discursive formations? MISSED DISCURSIVE OPPORTUNITIES AND RHETORICAL CONSTRAINTS TO THE BAMCEF WAY OF ANTICASTE ORGANIZING TO AFFECT CHANGE BAMCEF’s movement rhetoric is exemplary of narrative violence as defined by Cobb (2013) and described in chapter 2. The collective narratives of BAMCEF, crafted from individual narratives and experience of low-caste activists, while effective in mobilizing low castes, are also “a consequence of the ‘break’ in social relations that is a function of both the intention to

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harm . . . and/or the result of living in a ‘state of exception.’” 55 If narrative violence, as I have claimed in chapter 2, is at the core of all systems of oppression, then exposing narrative violence in activists’ own narrative constructions provides an important and untapped avenue for affecting real social change. The dynamics of this narrative violence are clearly evident in caste-based oppression, as well as within the talk of social movements that are aimed at ending caste oppression. Mr. Borkar’s language exposes some of these dynamics and opens missed opportunities to build resistance and influence change. The limiting of dialogue with those “among the backwards classes” 56 does little to overcome the potentially violent divisions between those with access to resources and those without access to resources in the Indian society. As Mr. Borkar later said in our interview, to “fill your belly is the first thing and then to think.” 57 While, from a position of privilege, it is hard to disagree with this sentiment, such a statement assumes that “thinking” or theorizing about change is somehow separate from either surviving and/or making change. My training in the field of peace and conflict transformation tells me that the thinking and doing of nonviolent systems-level social change cannot be separated. In fact, within the stories we tell we are connected in relationship to not only the marginalized, but also oppressors. In our stories, both our listeners and those we actively select as our audience or common social identity group are implicated in any narrative telling. In the words of Frank (2010): “the power of stories is the problem with stories: they are far too good at doing what they do, which is being the source of all values.” 58 In this regard social actors, and movement activists, cannot chronologically segment a singular theory of change. Movement actors must adapt to the realities of time and social context and be nimble in educating in ways that resonate with a diversity of learners. In other words, feeding our needs before thinking is tantamount to only dialoguing with those with whom we agree. Such rigidity in a single story about any collective identity is too static for the dynamic realities of lasting social change. As John Paul Lederach (2003) puts it: Because the change processes should address both the immediate problems and the broader relational and structural patterns, we need to reflect on multiple levels and types of change rather than focusing on a single operational solution. Change processes must not only promote short-term solutions, but also build platforms capable of promoting long-term social change. 59

The “canonical” 60 narratives of Brahmans that BAMCEF activists consistently deploy seem to take into account a long-term vision of change, but only reify short-term solutions that express a particular form of narrative violence. This is not a criticism that could be levied only against BAMCEF,

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but all anticaste movements studied in this book. On the other hand, it may deserve the most attention from BAMCEF activists since they are primarily concerned with developing a broad-based majority identity that is aimed at national-level awareness raising, education, and democratic inclusion. In this context, the broad identity of Mulnivasi Bahujan remains limiting in some sense, despite the potential power this identity enlivens for uplift and selfdignity. While in the words of Mr. Borkar, “original inhabitants came first [and then] religion came next,” 61 the narrative violence that remains inherent in this historical structuring of low-caste identity does little more than religious identity organizing to overcome the boundaries and differences dividing Indian society. Is a wider frame of analysis, therefore, either necessary or useful? What do shifts in organizing and mobilizing from local to national to international do to the growth and development of anticaste movement identity and awareness? On what level of analysis 62 do stories have the most impact? The remainder of this chapter and the next are aimed at some tentative answers to these reflective and analytical questions. TENSION BETWEEN HISTORICAL NATIVIST IDENTITY AWARENESS AND INTERNATIONAL RIGHTS AGITATION BAMCEF has remained primarily a national social movement organization with pockets of strong local support since its creation in the late 1970s. During this same period, anticaste movement as a whole has not confined itself only to the national stage. Hardtmann (2009) and Bob (2007), among others, have provided detailed discussion of Dalit rights emergence on the international level in both preparation and during the United Nations World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. 63 While BAMCEF secular identity and national reach would seem to position it well for international organizing, and many of its members have participated in international rights work, constraints associated with its apolitical stance as primarily a civil service employees’ federation, as well as an indigenous identity rather than rights focus, has relegated BAMCEF as an organization mostly silent and on the periphery of international rights work. With the election of the nationalist Hindu-right Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014, such international agitation has become even more difficult for national movements like BAMCEF, as well as other regionally based anticaste activists. As a result, BAMCEF’s scope and rhetoric rarely strays from an “all India working area.” 64 In interviews with BAMCEF and other anticaste activists in the summer of 2016 and over e-mail, in 2017, many described a “chill” that has arisen over anticaste activists’ work. 65 One activist I am in touch with via e-mail recently explained: “Post-Modi we don’t see many aggressive anticaste stances. . . . I

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think now people are afraid. . . . Why should people risk their lives anymore for calling out against [the] RSS and Modi? I don’t even know if writing this is safe on e-mail!” 66 Even without taking into account India’s recent political shift to the right, there is an inherent tension between nativist identity creation and internationalist rights discourse that seems particularly important to understanding the different movement tactics and ideological positions of the social movement organizations studied in this book. From a comparative perspective, BAMCEF, TBMSG, and PVCHR are all impacted by local, national, and international political and social dynamics as activist organizations and Indian citizens. As consumers of international discourse about rights and social change, these social movements are not immune from the politics of powerful elites. While I have, in chapters four, five, and six of this book, explored these movements’ strategies along an increasingly internationalist scale from most local (TBMSG) to the most international (PVCHR), frames of identity, rights, and awareness simultaneously operate at both the local and international levels. I would place BAMCEF in the middle of this scale because they are organizing public rallies and speeches locally and nationally to press for change, but outside of a few stray members who have traveled to the United States for doctoral education or work, few BAMCEF cadres have worked to foster any international ties whether through funding or significant mobilization. Furthermore, BAMCEF’s advocacy for an indigenous majority is particularly aimed at the Indian “counterpublic” 67 and political environment. BAMCEF, as primarily a national organization, has its own unique strategy and rhetoric. While defining the publics that each of the social movements studied herein is aiming at is sort of a moving target, the strategic framing of each movement’s narratives does expose a set of commitments that are of primary concern for activists. “Despite the well-established importance of collective identity to social movements, the boundaries of political communities are neither clear nor immutable.” 68 The particular identity formations each movement privileges conditions each movement’s relative emphasis on rights, not to mention methods to achieving social awareness. All the social movements discussed in this book are not only working on identity, rights, and awareness issues, but are also interacting across various local, national, transnational, and international boundaries. Even though the Maharashtrabased movements of TBMSG and BAMCEF are more familiar with each other than they are with Uttar Pradesh–based PVCHR, national human rights circles bring together all these activists under a broad umbrella. Each of these movements are beneficiaries of the work of government institutions like the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) and the coalition of academics and activists that formed the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR). While it is too simplistic to say that TBMSG is a local organization, BAMCEF is a national organization, and PVCHR is an international

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organization, this level or analysis type of categorization does reflect the general framing focus for each movement. “An identity deployment strategy that works with one audience may jeopardize success with another. Activists, then, often juggle multiple strategies as they interact with various audiences.” 69 The messages and discourse of each of these movements plays simultaneously to constituencies based within local, national, and international localities. Each movement’s core base of support is grounded locally, via national networks, and, in the case of both TBMSG and PVCHR, via international registers of funding and support. As such, the narratives and frames of social justice each of these movements deploy expose a bias toward the perceived interests of their key constituencies and sources of both financial and ideological support. These biases, or strategic narrative emphases, can tell us a great deal about movement strategies, goals, and behaviors. For BAMCEF, a national-based narrative framing and sense of obligation through payback and membership dues has meant that movement discourse, focused primarily on national education and organizing, has been caught within the wider national discourse and contention with Hindu nationalist thought in India. Within the all-India milieu of Hindutva nationalism and anti-Muslim patriotism, BAMCEF’s indigenous framing creates an effective storyline to challenge existing ascribed identities and profess a low-caste proscription of identity as indigenous agents within a historical fight for social change. At the same time, BAMCEF’s national nativist discourse makes it difficult for BAMCEF activists to speak out and engage collectively in international human rights discourse and systems of marginalized resistance. In such venues, BAMCEF’s message seems too parochial and internal to India. Hardtmann (2007) calls such anticaste divisions “internal tensions and debates in the Dalit movement” and argues that such tensions “have a major significance in molding, refining, and strengthening a tacit knowledge about Hindu values as well as about Dalit identity.” 70 BAMCEF, in some sense, sees itself as aimed at trying to shed Dalit as an ascribed identity by organizing nationally, around a broader concept of Mulnivasi (indigenous) identity. As a way to overcome these interval anticaste tensions and challenge the Hindu values such tensions often recreate, BAMCEF sees the creation of an identity and conscious raising around this identity, as proscribed by the oppressed majority, as critical to effective change. While it is certainly true as Hartmann (2007) argues that Dalit activists “value conflicts differently and contextually . . . [by distinguishing] between the perspectives of their ‘main opponents’ . . . and their Dalit opponents,” it is also important to realize that identities can, and do, draw emphasis to alternative, and nonhomogenous, “counterpublics.” 71 BAMCEF’s counterpublic is based among employed civil service workers and, thus, tension arises when international rights discourse clashes with the movement’s proscribed ideological understanding of ancient India. For BAMCEF it is clear that “analyzing Brahman-

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ism does not mean hate of Brahmin,” 72 but often their ideological rhetoric leads members in such a rhetorical direction. BAMCEF’s fight is not the demand of civil, cultural, and political rights, but in developing the consciousness within the oppressed community to overcome caste from below. BAMCEF’s tension with international rights discourse is subtle, but can be seen in the offhanded remarks that BAMCEF activists made to me about TBMSG activists’ “foreign ties.” 73 As a Buddhist organization connected closely to British Buddhists from the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO), TBMSG is seen by many BAMCEF activists as “run by the outside,” 74 “elite,” 75 and “upper middle class.” 76 The irony is that the labels of elite and upper middle class could just as easily be levied against BAMCEF. While I explore this complex relationship between BAMCEF and TBMSG more in chapter 7, here it is enough to say that this tension is palpable and an important key to unlocking some of the discursive opportunities that both the identities of Mulnivasi and Buddhist entail. In the Indian context, calling a person or organization “foreign” is often a foil for imputing a continued colonial and imperialist domination. As a country that has a long history of foreign interference in their internal affairs, Indians, in general, are proudly nationalist and remain skeptical of internationalism. BAMCEF’s Mulnivasi Bahujan organizing is palatable in the Indian context and does not strike the majority of Hindus as too radical, and therefore, too dangerous. To high caste elites, BAMCEF’s mission is certainly less palatable, but its recourse to national rhetoric makes it more so. When compared to the internationalist rhetoric of a movement like PVCHR, BAMCEF’s nativist framing of a Mulnivasi Bahujan may seem more exclusive and limiting than the broad frames of “neo-dalit” 77 movement, which PVCHR is organizing around. Nativist claims draw some nationalist borders which limit BAMCEF’s reach outside the subcontinent. Still, as legitimate pretext for change, low-caste employees have a unique and often unheard claim to the national context of caste injustice. The remainder of this chapter focuses on what Avruch (2013) would call “the pretexts for doing this work,” 78 for him associated with conflict resolution, but from a BAMCEF social movement perspective focused more specifically on the work of transforming caste-based imbalances in Indian society. The same realities of national discourse that limit BAMCEF’s reach into the international arena also work to strengthen BAMCEF’s effectiveness as a pan-Indian anticaste movement. The eventual outcomes of this majoritarian organizing are yet unknown, and these unknown unknowns hold both discursive potentials and pitfalls that require closer attention and scrutiny than BAMCEF cadres have been willing to provide.

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PAYING BACK OR PAYING FORWARD? BAMCEF’S EDUCATING FOR INDIGENOUS IDENTITY AND ITS IMPLICATIONS AS A LONG-TERM PEACEBUILDING STRATEGY How does calling for the development and rise of a Mulnivasi Bahujan and the rhetoric of paying back to society lend to the development of a truly casteless society? Does the strategic and discursive emphasis on native conceptions of the original inhabitants mobilize resistance or reify new conceptions of borders, boundaries, and limits? These are questions, that although critical to any assessment and analysis of the BAMCEF movement, seem to go unasked and under-addressed by BAMCEF activists themselves. Breaking though the ideological fervor for creating the Mulnivasi Bahujan in order to open space for critical questions such as these can be extremely difficult, especially among BAMCEF cadre activists. While visiting a BAMCEF activist family in Amravati, Maharashtra, in the summer of 2016, I was surprised at how committed to this ideology activists were. Never having the experience of foreign interest in their movement, my presence was even more a novelty than my presence in either TBMSG or PVCHR activist circles. The belief in their work for the eventual long-term objective of social change in the caste-based system is underpinned by a determination “to strengthen the sense of social responsibility toward . . . [the] Mulnivasi Bahujan Samaj.” 79 The creation of Mulnivasi Bahujan Samaj (indigenous majority society) is the ground upon which change will happen, and, therefore, awareness and education are the first strategic steps needed for this social transformation. BAMCEF’s determination to change the system is grounded on an analytical framework that “has decided to achieve this objective in stages” 80 and this framework has, to many BAMCEF activists, become received knowledge, knowledge that is black and white with no gray areas. 81 The need to question and adapt this analytical framework to specific context is complicated by BAMCEF’s national structure and cadre camp enculturation into the ideology of education and awareness as a critical means of paying back to society. So, in studying BAMCEF, I repeatedly return to the question of how this work of paying back can pay forward in the context of an exclusive identity construction of an indigenous majority at the mercy of a powerful minority? If Mulnivasi identity “doubles [activists’] claim on this country,” 82 then how does BAMCEF’s sense of identity justice move the peaceful transformation of caste-based society forward? In Lederach’s (2003) framing of conflict transformation, he argues that social change requires the building of a platform for long-term and, at times, non-linear change processes to take shape. Lederach (2003) defines conflict transformation as “an analytical framework” that “seeks to understand conflict as it emerges from and produces changes in personal, relational, structural, and cultural dimensions of human experience.” 83 This dynamic concep-

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tion of conflict, and processes that aim to intervene, or transform, in the dynamics of conflict, requires a flexibility and acceptance of ambiguity that BAMCEF activists do not, on the face of it, seem to possess. “Often we look at change through a rear-view mirror, observing the pattern of how something got from one place to another. But, when we are in the middle of change, and when we are looking forward toward what can be done, the process of change never seems clear or neat.” 84 While BAMCEF leadership believes that Mulnivasi ideology creates “platforms for dialogue” 85 among marginalized groups, this seems to conflict with a radical stance that argues BAMCEF is “the only organization that has declared Brahmanism as [the] enemy.” 86 If the objective is to build a sustainable platform for change, I remain unconvinced that BAMCEF’s approach is broadly sustainable. A linear approach that directs our attention backwards to re-contest history, instead of forward in a way that “pushes us to express and test our theories of change that too often lie unexplored and dormant beneath layers of rhetoric” 87 is limiting and more conflict generative than transformative. Further, BAMCEF’s pay back to society maintains too paternalistic and nationalistic a response to change and fails to realize how it reifies and recreates social boundaries and power asymmetries. BAMCEF’s analysis of conflict-in-process 88 is too static to maintain a solid peacebuilding platform. Despite this critical view of BAMCEF’s national identity education and organizing, the consciousness raising and awareness work that BAMCEF does remains a critical grounding for social change. In being “attentive to peoples’ perceptions of how identity is linked to power and to systems and structures which organize and govern their relationships,” 89 BAMCEF’s Mulnivasi Bahujan “harmonizing” 90 represents an important stage in the development of broad-based anticaste resistance. Yet, to pay this consciousness raising forward, it seems there must be a move away from an exclusive indigenous national identity and an attempt to dialogue around past injustice. Rather than empowering a romanticized history of past indigenous harmony, BAMCEF cadres need to figure out how to live in harmony with even Brahmans. The ancient history of India is contested, and, to some extent, unknowable. Further, to present this history as conflict-free before the outside and foreign institution of caste is a form of historical romanticism. Continual focus on India’s ancient history, like single-minded attention to India’s anticolonial nationalist history, creates fanaticism on both the Indian right and left. When historical narrations are framed upon the backdrop of current events they rarely are devoid of political intent. “Narratives are laced with social discourses and power relations, which do not remain constant over time.” 91 While BAMCEF aims to pay back to society, their strident onedimensional framing of the historical marginalization of Mulnivasi Bahujan does little to move forward and re-contextualize the redistribution of power and peaceful co-existence between modern-day haves and have-nots. Simi-

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larly, right-wing radicals, in framing India’s colonial history as juxtaposed to India’s national identity, do little to progress pro-social relations in modern India. Writers such as Malhotra and Neelakandan (2011) continue to operate within a framework of anti-colonial nationalist struggle. In arguing that “British colonialism encouraged sub-national groups to demand separate homelands and thus weaken India’s national movement” 92 and that “separatist voices are once again intensifying and India is facing a new threshold of danger,” 93 hardened identity lines are re-enforced and the possibility of future relationship is further hampered. Either of these one-dimensional conceptions of Indian history fails to celebrate the complexity of India’s long history. As a stage in social revolution, BAMCEF’s educating for a national identity and injustice awareness represents a valuable contribution to social change, but one that is limited in its ability to build future relationships fortified by the value of nonviolence. To develop a nonviolent platform to carry BAMCEF’s contribution to social change forward, space and structures for all levels of the caste systems to interact and build “associational bonds” 94 are needed. Many anticaste activists believe that an international rights focus provides such a platform. The chapter ahead, focused on PVCHR, explores this approach, as well as PVCHR’s unique narrative techniques for building resistance and outright agitation in the Indian national context. NOTES 1. Personal interview with BAMCEF activist at Rashtrapita Jyotiba Phuley Institute of Social Revolution in Ringnabodhi, Maharashtra, July 24, 2016. 2. Personal interview with BAMCEF activist in Amravati, Maharashtra, July 27, 2016. 3. Personal interview with BAMCEF activist at Rashtrapita Jyotiba Phuley Institute of Social Revolution in Ringnabodhi, Maharashtra, July 24, 2016. 4. Personal communication with TBMSG activist at Nagaloka Institute, Nagpur, India, July 31, 2016. 5. Ashok Parmar and W. N. Vaidya, BAMCEF Constitution (New Delhi, 2003), 6. 6. For a well-defined understanding of Hindutva history and ideology, see Chakravarti Ram-Prasad, “Being Hindu and/or Governing India? Religion, Social Change and the State,” in G. ter Haar (ed.), The Freedom to Do God's Will: Religious Fundamentalism and Social Change (New York: Routledge, 2003), 159–96. The term “Hindutva” is derived from the two terms “Hindu Tattva,” which literally mean “Hindu Principles.” Hindutva became an operational ideology via two main sentiments in pre-independence India: the fear of outsiders defaming, destroying, and subsequently bringing about the loss of Hindu identity and the desire to take active political steps in order to insulate Hinduism from foreign rule and oppression (RamPrasad, 2003). Though these manifestations of Hindutva were initially separate responses to the perceived threat of colonialism and modernization, they later melded together under an identity of Hindu nationalism and communalism. 7. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a youth organizing wing of the Sangh Parivar (literally family of organizations), is a well-organized movement of nationalist Hindus. For more on the RSS and Sangh Parivar, see Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, “Being Hindu and/or Governing India? Religion, Social Change and the State.” Also, to see the presence and reach

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of these organizations on the internet, see: http://vhp.org/, accessed June 13, 2018; http://www. sanghparivar.org/, accessed June 13, 2018, and http://rss.org/, accessed June 13, 2018. 8. Personal interview with TBMSG activist Haresh Dalvi, TBMSG movement activist, August 28, 2016. 9. Sudha Pai, Dalit Assertion and the Unfinished Democratic Revolution: The Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh (New Delhi: Sage, 2002), 91. 10. The Dalit Panthers, founded in the spring of 1972 in Bombay (Mumbai), Maharashtra, had a profound impact on the consciousness of revolutionary Dalit activists across India. Aligning themselves with the Black Panthers in the United States, early members of the Dalit Panthers aimed to wage revolution against the forces of caste discrimination and Hindu elitism by writing poetry and literature, as well as leading marches and visits to “atrocity” sites. See: https://dalitnation.com/2015/04/13/dalit-panthers/, Barbara Joshi, ed., Untouchable! Voice of Dalit Liberation (London: Zed Books, 1986), and Vijay Prasad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), among others. 11. Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan, Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines (New Delhi: Amaryllis, 2011), xiii. More will be said about the argument in this book as we move onto the international level of anticaste work, at the end of this chapter and especially in the work of PVCHR described in chapter 6. Suffice it to say, the arguments in the present book contradict the oversimplified, caste-ist, and well-trodden premise of Malhotra and Neelakandan’s recent work. 12. Barbara Love, “Developing a Liberatory Consciousness,” in Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (New York: Routledge, 2000), 599–603. 13. Personal interview with BAMCEF activist at Rashtrapita Jyotiba Phuley Institute of Social Revolution in Ringnabodhi, Maharashtra, July 24, 2016. 14. Vijay Prasad, Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001), xii. 15. S. Selvam, “Sociology of India and Hinduism: Towards a Method,” in S. M. Michael (ed.), Dalits in Modern India: Vision and Values, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 1999), 194. 16. Ibid., 194. See also Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers Co., 1971). 17. I borrow this term from Sikkink (2011), who uses the term to mean “that there has been a shift in the legitimacy of the norm of individual criminal accountability for human rights violation” (5). Kathryn Sikkink, The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics (London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2011), 5. 18. Personal interview with BAMCEF activist at Rashtrapita Jyotiba Phuley Institute of Social Revolution in Ringnabodhi, Maharashtra, July 24, 2016. 19. Ashok Parmar and W. N. Vaidya, BAMCEF Constitution (New Delhi, 2003), 6. 20. A theory of change is “simply an explanation of how and why a set of activities will bring about the changes a project’s designers seek to achieve” [J. P. Lederach, R. Neufield, and H. Culbertson, Reflective Peacebuilding: A Planning, Monitoring, and Learning Toolkit (University of Notre Dame: Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, 2007), 25]. For more on this concept, see also: A. Anderson, The Community Builders Approach to Theory of Change: A Practical Guide to Theory and Development (New York: The Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change, 2005), and http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/ theories-of-change, accessed September 17, 2017. 21. Braj Mani, Debrahmanising History: Dominance and Resistance in India Society (New Delhi: Manohar, 2005), 15. 22. Ashok Parmar and W. N. Vaidya, BAMCEF Constitution, op. cit. 23. Central Executive Committee of BAMCEF, “BAMCEF: An Institution of Social Change” (Ahmedabad, Gujarat: D. K. Khaparde Memorial Trust, 2004), 7. 24. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: International Publishers Co., 2014)—originally published 1848. 25. Badri Narayan, Fascinating Hindutva: Saffron Politics and Dalit Mobilization (New Delhi: Sage, 2009), 158. 26. Braj Mani, Debrahmanising History, 13.

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27. Tanoj Meshram, “Anticaste Movement in India led by BAMCEF: A Case Study,” Unpublished paper submitted for a course on Social Movements for Emancipatory Development (Boston, MA: Brandeis University Heller School of Social Policy and Management, 2014). 28. Mobilization and organizing in the Nagaland conflict in Northeast India, one of the world longest running and little known conflicts, provides one prime example. See Amarjeet Singh, “Revisiting the Naga conflict: what can India do to resolve this conflict?” Small Wars & Insurgencies, 2013, Vol. 24, No. 5, 794–81. 29. Personal interview with BAMCEF activist at Rashtrapita Jyotiba Phuley Institute of Social Revolution in Ringnabodhi, Maharashtra, July, 2016. 30. Central executive committee of BAMCEF, “BAMCEF: An Institution of Social Change,” 21. 31. Ashok Parmar and W. N. Vaidya, BAMCEF Constitution, op. cit. 32. Just recently a number of my research respondents left BAMCEF due to “the failure of BAMCEF to adapt to changing times” with special respect to “Bahujan youth” (P. D. Satyapal, Tanoj Meshram, Shyam Khobragade, Bankim Samaddar, and B. Chandrashekhar, Why we Left BAMCEF: A Public Statement, July 25, 2017). 33. See note 7 above and chapter 3, note 58 for further reference to the RSS. 34. Central executive committee of BAMCEF, “BAMCEF: An Institution of Social Change,” 23. 35. S. F. Gangawane, Need of Moral Values and Institutional Leadership (Mumbai: D. K. Khaparde Memorial Trust, 2007), 29. 36. See note 10 above, op. cit. 37. See: Gail Omvedt, Reinventing Revolution: New Social Movements and the Socialist Tradition in India (New York: ME Sharp, 1993), and Gail Omvedt, Seeking Begumpura: The Social Vision of Anticaste Intellectuals (New Delhi: Navayana Publishing, 2008). 38. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 141. 39. BAMCEF, “Souvenir on the Occasion of Silver Jubilee National Convention” (New Delhi: BAMCEF National Headquarters, 2004), 11. 40. Ibid., 16. 41. Personal interview with BD Borkar, BAMCEF leader and activist, Nagpur, Maharashtra, July 23, 2016. 42. Sudha Pai, Dalit Assertion and the Unfinished Democratic Revolution, 104–107. 43. Personal interview with BD Borkar, BAMCEF leader and activist, Nagpur, Maharashtra, July 23, 2016. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Personal interviews with BAMCEF activists in and around Nagpur, Maharashtra, July 2016. 48. Personal interview with BAMCEF activist, July 28, 2016. 49. Personal interview with BAMCEF activist, July 27, 2016. 50. Personal interview with BAMCEF activist, July 23, 2016. 51. Personal interview with BD Borkar, BAMCEF leader and activist, Nagpur, Maharashtra, July 23, 2016. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Sara Cobb, Speaking of Violence, 27. 56. Personal interview with BD Borkar, BAMCEF leader and activist, Nagpur, Maharashtra, July 23, 2016. 57. Ibid. 58. Arthur Frank, Letting Stories Breathe, 69. For Frank an important part of stories’ work is “to remind us that we have to live with complicated truths” (5). 59. John Paul Lederach, “Conflict Transformation,” “Beyond Intractability,” eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. Conflict Information Consortium (University of Colorado, Boulder,

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2003)—http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/transformation, accessed September 20, 2017. 60. Francesca Polletta, It Was Like a Fever, 111. 61. Personal interview with BD Borkar, BAMCEF leader and activist, Nagpur, Maharashtra, July 23, 2016. 62. See Jack S. Levy, “Contending Theories of International Conflict: A Levels-of-Analysis Approach,” in Chester A. Crocker et al., eds., Managing Global Crisis: Sources of and Responses to International Conflict (Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 1996), 3–24. 63. See Hardtmann, The Dalit Movement in India, especially chapter 7, and Clifford Bob, “Dalit Rights Are Human Rights: Caste Discrimination, International Activism, and the Construction of a New Human Rights Issue,” Human Rights Quarterly 29 (2007), 167–93. 64. http://www.bamcef.info/profile.php, accessed June 18, 2018. 65. Personal interviews with anticaste activists in and around Nagpur, Maharashtra, July 2016. In discussing the “fear of repression” under Prime Minister Modi and the “chill” this has created, one female anticaste activist explained the shift she has recently noticed in activists’ readiness to voice their frustration. Personal interview with independent anticaste social worker in Nagpur, August 2, 2016. 66. Personal e-mail exchange with Indian anticaste activist, September 25, 2017. 67. Hardtmann, The Dalit Movement in India, 5. 68. Elizabeth Kaminski and Verta Taylor, “‘We’re Not Just Lip-Synching Up Here’: Music and Collective Identity in Drag Performances,” in Reger, Myers, and Einwohner, eds., Identity Work in Social Movements (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 47. 69. Kevin Neuhouser, “I am the Man and Woman in the House: Brazilian Jeito and the Strategic Framing of Motherhood in a Poor, Urban Community,” in Reger, Myers, and Einwohner, eds., Identity Work in Social Movements (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 141. 70. Hardtmann, The Dalit Movement in India, 4. 71. Hardtmann, op. cit., 5. 72. Central executive committee of BAMCEF, “Souvenir on the Occasion of Silver Jubilee National Convention,” 5. 73. Personal interview with BAMCEF activist, July 29, 2016. 74. Personal interview with BAMCEF activist, July 16, 2016. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. Archana Kaushik and Shruti Nagvanshi, Margins to Centre Stage: Empowering Dalits in India (Kolkata: Frontpage, 2016), 251. 78. Kevin Avruch, Context and Pretext in Conflict Resolution: Culture, Identity, Power, and Practice (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2013), 23. 79. Central executive committee of BAMCEF, “Souvenir on the Occasion of Silver Jubilee National Convention,” 5. 80. Ibid. 81. I borrow the concept of received knowledge from the writings of M. F. Belenky, B. M. Clinchy, N. R. Goldberger, and J. M. Tarule, Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind, 10th ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1997). 82. Personal interview with P. D. Satyapal, Nagpur, July 25, 2016. 83. John Paul Lederach, The Little Book of Conflict Transformation (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2003), 26. 84. John Paul Lederach, The Little Book of Conflict Transformation, 41. 85. Personal interview with P. D. Satyapal, Nagpur, July 25, 2016. 86. Ibid. 87. John Paul Lederach, The Little Book of Conflict Transformation, 45. 88. Denis Sandole, “A Comprehensive Mapping of Conflict and Conflict Resolution: A Three Pillar Approach,” Peace and Conflict Studies: 5:2, Article 4 (1998). Available at: http:// nsuworks.nova.edu/pcs/vol5/iss2/4. 89. John Paul Lederach, The Little Book of Conflict Transformation, 60. 90. Personal interview with P. D. Satyapal, Nagpur, July 25, 2016.

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91. Catherine Kohler Riessman, Narrative Analysis (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1993), 65. 92. Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan, Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines (New Delhi: Amaryllis, 2011), 379. 93. Ibid. 94. Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (Boston: Yale University Press, 2003), 11.

Chapter Six

Narrative Testimony as Rights Agitation PVCHR’s International Rights Discourse

Unlike either TBMSG or BAMCEF, PVCHR publically prides itself on being an agent of agitation actively courting publicity for their human rights work and using political advocacy and agitation as a lever for social change. The internet, Facebook, and blogs are an important part of the PVCHR movement work. Such advocacy has no local and state bounds for PVCHR activists. In numerous meetings with Lenin Raguvanshi, the organization’s founder and director, he has explained on-going campaigns in which letters of support from high officials within the Indian political establishment have been obtained and publicized. 1 The organizations’ public-facing descriptions of their work could be described as a mix between grassroots local and international advocacy and agitation. “The goal of our activities is two-fold: First, to have a strong grassroots organization to work for democratic rights of those in marginalized communities and second, to create the structure and dynamics to receive the assistance of national and international institutions.” 2 In outlining PVCHR’s use of what they call “testimonial therapy” to create a “self-suffering story” 3 this chapter explores a drastically different type of anticaste movement on the periphery of anticaste social movement, but in the geographical center of caste-based thinking and discrimination. Based in Banaras, Uttar Pradesh, India PVCHR confronts the complex interconnections between marginalization, narration, and reconciliation through a rights-based discourse that is simultaneously international, trans-local, national, and inclusive. Lenin Raguvanshi, and his team at PVCHR, call this movement neo-Dalit and argue that “the dalit community has been suffering 143

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the most [and] this name is already a synonym of the political struggle envisaged by Baba Saheb Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar.” 4 In privileging local stories and village-level relationship, as a way of knowing and changing the realities of low-caste marginalization, one key focus for PVCHR is the legacy of past emotional and psychological trauma and its impact on the present conditions of the marginalized. While each of the movements studied in this book in some sense address the traumatic legacy of caste oppression and marginalization, PVCHR achieves this in a more explicit way than other movements through a process they have come to call testimonial therapy. Based on the goal of creating “a people friendly society (Jan Mitra Samaj),” 5 PVCHR’s work with traumatized victims of police torture, bonded labor, and religious/caste-based discrimination represents a pragmatic means to use victim’s narratives to build rights-based consciousness and resistance to marginalization and oppression. Rather than empowering an indigenous majority society, like BAMCEF, PVCHR brokers a more humanistic conception of society. PVCHR’s conception of their work as working for a neo-Dalit movement affords a unique expression of anticaste social movement—a conception that is inclusive, humanistic, radical, and international facing. The testimonial therapy process, first developed in India by Lenin Raghuvanshi and Shabana Khan from the PVCHR, 6 in collaboration with Inger Agger of The Rehabilitation and Research Center for Victims of Torture (RCT-Demark), 7 is practiced over four meetings between victims and trained outreach workers from PVCHR. These meetings, which include various stages of sharing and processing suffering on the part of the torture victim, are aimed at helping the victim to develop the space and ability to clearly articulate their story of suffering. The culmination of the process is the delivery of the testimony in the form of a public ceremony, called an honor ceremony, in the village. 8 This public culmination where the testimonial narrative is read into a public space is both emotional and cathartic for the victim and their local community. While a U.S. Fulbright-Nehru Fellow in Banaras I was privileged to be invited to some of these long evening honor ceremonies. The ceremony process is a village event, in which everyone from the village comes out in support of the victim. Performances of skits, music, and dance are interspersed with awareness raising about human rights, civil rights, and rights abuses in the area. A community meal is served at the end of the main event—the testimonial reading itself. This reading, often done by a survivor of torture, police abuse, or high-caste perpetrated violence, can also be read by a close friend or family member if the victim themselves does not feel confident enough to express their story publically. The story is offered in a caring and supportive atmosphere and encourages others to come forward to PVCHR staff with their own experiences of injustice and victimization. The cultural and community building aspects of these ceremonies are as central to PVCHR’s work as the testimony itself. Building

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experience and trust in this process works toward PVCHR’s ultimate vision of building what they call people friendly villages in which there is “no violation of civil rights granted to a citizen by the state.” 9 As the culmination of a months-long process of narrative therapy, writing, re-writing, and finalizing the torture survivor’s story the public testimony becomes a central organizing event for the community. Locally empowered, PVCHR’s approach appears more anti-national than national, yet one might most clearly equate their agitation with examples of local community organizing found in the United States. 10 From the community, social actions and agitation arise organically from PVCHR’s work. As such, the honor ceremony represents a narrative climax in the suffering of not just the individual survivor, but the community itself. This collective climax acts as a springboard for community action and solidarity with other similar communities and marginalized contexts. The link between local and international human rights organizing starts here, and PVCHR, in intuitively sensing this connection, facilitates both rights awareness and concrete agitation for immediate change. Once the public ceremony is over the story does not end there. The life of the story continues in verbal retelling in the community. The celebratory nature of the public ceremony lends to fond memories and acts as a means to memorialize tragedy as something to build on positively for the community. In one village, the caste-based marginalization that led to the malnutrition deaths of eighteen small children over a period of about three months was memorialized on a stone post in the middle of the village, as a way to mark the tragedy and signal that it will not happen again. 11 Some of these stories also live on in the written publication of these honor ceremony stories in PVCHR’s magazine, Voice of Voiceless, if the torture survivor and his/her family so chooses. The power and lasting impact of these stories can have a profound effect on the organization, mobilization and agitation for social change of oppressed peoples. PVCHR’s rights-based focus overshadows many of the identity boundaries that remain problematic for other anticaste movements like TBMSG and BAMCEF. Such secular and progressive organizing belies a missing strength in the other movements that I have outlined in this book. Below is a brief recreation of one public testimonial that can be found in the September 2011 issue of Voice of Voiceless, PVCHR’s own periodical. Here it is followed with a brief case analysis which links the therapeutic relevance and social impact of the narrative transcript to conflict transformation theory and social change practice. To overcome the asymmetric power imbalances between the elite and marginal forces of caste-based society, such narrative analytic interventions, as are represented by this recreated honor ceremony story, are needed on a much larger scale. To address the lingering legacy of the structural, cultural, and direct violence which is reinscribed through caste oppression, the space and structures for narrative

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sharing and dialogue need to be further created. PVCHR, being in a liminal social space between caste and religious identity groups in Banaras, has been able to create spaces and structures that foster such dialogue. Such work is not easy and involves vulnerability on the part of both the victims of past atrocities and human rights abuse, as well as, on the part of PVCHR activists themselves. This work requires not only exposing values but stating values as humanistic fact. Ruth Behar writes that such “efforts at self-revelation flop not because the personal voice has been used, but because it has been poorly used.” 12 While the other anticaste movements studied in this book are also attempting to foster intra- and inter-caste dialogue, the complex positionalities of low-caste groups leading this type of charge have hindered the effectiveness of completely low-caste led movements like TBMSG and BAMCEF. PVCHR, as a secular rights organization managed by an inter-mingled collection of both high and low castes, opens internationalist opportunities to build the space to challenge deeply held values and the structure for these challenges to be heard by those with power. Without such an ability to hear and share authentic and emotional stories of past marginalization and abuse with a broad Indian public, future attempts at peacebuilding and reconciliation will remain forestalled. Ajay’s story below lets other stories and broader discourse about marginalization “breathe.” 13 PVCHR’s work in creating the space for such a story is made possible through accessing international human rights norms as a form of identity itself. Though the dynamics of communal relations are always shifting, reflecting and analyzing particular traumatic stories of injustice is critical to understanding how to marshal these dynamics toward positive outcomes. The mediating potentials and contemplative properties of stories of trauma and injustice are a critical, and often missing piece, of conflict transformation and peaceful reconciliation. In this regard, the approach to historical justice of Joseph Montville 14 provides valuable resources for a place like Banaras and its context of being a symbolic center of Hindu caste oppression. In such a context, in the periphery of anticaste activism, though where the potential for violence is ever-present, the social impacts of hearing and telling about the traumatic and emotional experiences of caste-based oppression is critical to developing nonviolent social change. In the words of Montville: From the perspective of psychologically sensitive conflict resolution interventions, the challenge in dealing with victimhood psychology is that of reviving the mourning process, which has been suspended as a result of traumatic experience and helping it move toward completion. 15

While reviving trauma may seem counter-intuitive, it is just such historical analysis of recent injustice that, if not acknowledged, becomes displaced as future violence. Trauma seeks both sociological and psychological outlet and

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absorption. 16 What Joseph Montville calls a “walk through history” 17 allows those traumatized by past violence to interrogate and acknowledge the historical roots of this trauma, express the emotional stress the experience still enlivens, and open future possibilities for understanding. In such a context identity, rights, and awareness are merged, inseparable in the narrative retelling of emotional pain and suffering. To unpack the strategy and methods of change the traumatic stories of injustice need discursive space. Anti-racism and oppression educators have long realized the need for acknowledgement of past harms and have attempted to address, not suppress, past violence as a means to building not only knowledge of suffering, but privileged allies ready to spread that knowledge. “What makes violence a phenomenon of social injustice, and not merely an individual moral wrong, is its systemic character, its existence as a social practice.” 18 Processes that fail to acknowledge and provide outlet for emotional experiences of injustice to be narrated will fail to transform social conflict. Therefore, attention to narratives as platforms for change remains of critical concern. For PVCHR testimonial narrative becomes just such a platform for broad social change. It is in the persistence of violence as a social practice, exhibited in a phenomenon like this story of Ajay below, that marginality is maintained and constructed. Only through telling and reflecting on these traumatic stories can conflict transformation begin and reconciliation be possible in some distant future. In the words of Arthur Frank “If narrative analysis does not improve the quality of companionship between humans and stories, then it has failed.” 19 PVCHR’s testimonial therapy may, like BAMCEF’s Mulnivasi Bahujan educational awareness, be aimed at building “critical consciousness” 20 among the oppressed, but it has the added aim of educating the privileged to feel injustice, take action, and agitate for change. PVCHR works in the English language and embraces international rights framing as a means to engage not just the oppressed, but also the oppressors. Although the caste calculus remains the “final denominator” 21 for all social interaction in and around Banaras, the stories of the marginalized provide a means to build allies, self-confidence, and community belief in change. When framed within international rights discourse, such organizing work can have deep local to global effects. While narrative accounting is a critical tool for modern day human rights advocacy, the accounting of past trauma remains a too little tapped instrument in attempts at creating lasting social transformation of past injustices and collective resilience. Ajay’s story is indicative of both opportunities and pitfalls in narrative frames. When explored on the backdrop of the other anticaste movements we have followed in this work, PVCHR’s focus on rights narratives over identity creation fills an important opportunity gap in anticaste activism and anticaste movements in India. Such a rights-based focus also underscores a certain international export capability of anticaste

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agitation—an export capability that all the movements studied herein would be deft to embrace. AJAY’S NEED FOR RELIEF Ajay and his family are from a small village in Kandwa district of Uttar Pradesh, only a few miles west of the Banaras Hindu University campus. 22 In 2006, the family began having increased conflict with their neighbor when the neighbor joined the ruling Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). BSP functionaries in Ajay’s village, in control of the State’s Chief Ministerial position, began wielding their “political clout.” 23 Ajay’s family had a long-running dispute with their neighbor over a road that passed between both families’ houses. Initially, in collusion with the local police, the neighbor fabricated false charges against Ajay’s father in order to pressurize him to concede the use of the road. Around this same time a “false encounter” 24 was orchestrated by the police and Ajay’s elder brother was killed. The entire family was harassed by police as his father spent days in jail under suspicion for his own son’s murder. Despite the on-going psychological stress and physical harm these events caused his entire family, Ajay and his family persevered through taking refuge with friends, despite thoughts of suicide, physical illness, and violent revenge. The collectivist impact of such events and the pressures they impart on the oldest male children in the extended household can be debilitating. Many families are never able to overcome such hardship and spiral into further and further debt. Though the conflict with the neighbor remains unresolved and the uneven power dynamic between the families has remained a source of unspoken tension, Ajay’s narrative testimony changed the trajectory of his life—giving meaning where hope was previously lost. The caste status of Ajay, is, of course, a critical underlying cause of this politically motivated harassment, but caste does not get direct mention in Ajay’s impassioned retelling. In fact, it is interesting that from Ajay’s testimonial therapy account we can glean that the alleged perpetrator of these harassments himself is either a low caste, or at least a supporter of the BSP, a low caste led political party quite powerful in Uttar Pradesh state. Ajay, himself a low caste, talks in terms of this neighbors’ political power to “collude with police” 25 rather than any caste based privilege. One may assume that Ajay and his neighbor are of the same caste grouping due to their close living proximity, but this is not necessarily true in modern and casteintegrated urban India. Still, instead of a direct caste angle for these crimes, socio-economics, class, and political power seem to play as important a role in this interaction as does caste or sub-caste. Rather than caste status, it is interest-based political and economic motivation that drives the brutality and injustice perpetrated on the family by powerful police, doctors, and political

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leaders. 26 It is this asymmetrical power dynamic that forms the “so what” 27 of Ajay’s story. The “complex chainings and embeddings of these elements: orientation . . . complicating action . . . evaluation . . . result or resolution . . . and coda” form the narrative structure of what William Labov (1972) calls a “fully formed narrative.” 28 In analyzing this narrative structure, social identity becomes secondary to broader evaluative and normative statements about justice, injustice, and rights. With a humanistic human right lens, caste grouping becomes less prominent in narrative storytelling. At the same time, the realities of both social identity and justice cannot be separated—they are equally important to the story. 29 In PVCHR’s approach injustice and identity are inseparable within a rights framework, but injustice is privileged narrative terrain. Caste may not be the primary driver of interactions like Ajay’s, but they form a social foundation for other claims, whether they are classbased or other types of marginalized grievance. The inherent intersectionality 30 of caste, class, social position underpins all honor ceremony stories. Still, PVCHR’s theory of change is based on more than any ethno-nationalist analysis of minority grievances 31 as the driver for low caste mobilization. More than “identity faultlines” 32 for anti-nationalist forces in India, caste structures other differences like class and political privilege, which are exploited to deny rights. Caste is, therefore, an organizing identity inseparable from injustice claims, but primary and often masked. Unlike BAMCEF or TBMSG, the PVCHR’s work with testimonials, like Ajay’s, provide an important anticaste movement approach that can work in tandem with identity creation and social awareness education. Less concerned with identity than rights, PVCHR’s emphasis on finding justice for victims emphasizes narrative structure and narrative development in such a way that identity can come along for a backseat ride with injustice and rights. In part, such emphasis arises out of specific place and context; a conception of center and periphery quite different than that of activists in BAMCEF or TBMSG . BANARAS: LOST IN TIME AND SPACE Since, at least, Mark Twain’s now famous description of Banaras as “older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend,” 33 the Western imagination has marked Banaras as the center of orientalist wonder and mysticism. Although “death in Banaras is very big business,” 34 Banaras as a place of divine pilgrimage is also the spiritual center of the Hindu world order. As such, it is a place of much division and modern-day caste feudalism. Banaras is a diverse and stratified place; a city that is “cosmopolitan” 35 and at the same time lost in time, under-developed, and “dilapidated.” 36 Though one may assume it is largely Hindu, in fact roughly a quarter of the population of modern Banaras is Muslim. 37 Citing Saraswati (1975), Perry

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(1994) claims that “as much as three-quarters of the city’s population is in one way or another dependent on its pilgrimage industry.” 38 This dependence on Hindu pilgrimage has drawn not just Hindu, but Muslims and castes of all stripes to Banares. The ancient story of Banares often obfuscates the modern multicultural reality. Many Muslims live in metaphorical and real “mini-Pakistans” 39 or Muslim ghettos within the city, while caste divisions can be seen neighborhoodby-neighborhood. Outside the city, low-caste laborers till the land of wealthy landlords in the many small villages that surround Banaras city. Despite the rapid development of the Indian subcontinent, which is coming, ever so slowly, to Banaras city, these ghetto and suburban areas remain pockets of underdevelopment, feudalism, and oppression. Many of these low-caste villages join the workforce as bonded laborers in the many brick kilns that dot the rural landscape outside the city. Within these marginalized areas of the city and its suburbs structural violence is the norm rather than the exception. In such a place, a milieu of ancient lifestyles, poor villagers and rapidly modernizing and liberalizing wealth, human rights abuses represent an intersection of class, caste, and religious-based fear of the other. Challenging elite control and violent use of force in Banaras can be a dangerous activity. As authorities have been unwilling to act, community and non-governmental organizations have stepped bravely into highly contested terrain to force the hand of power and claim rights for the underprivileged. This is the radical realm of Indian social work in the marginalized periphery. With the aim of empowering local human rights workers in and around Banaras, PVCHR uses the power of telling stories like Ajay’s to challenge the elite discourse about caste, class, and privilege in Indian society. PVCHR’s work aims to reconstruct the grammar and self-esteem of the marginalized so as to awaken an awareness of privilege in the powerful. This aim may not sound that different from TBMSG or BAMCEF’s work in Maharashtra, but PVCHR’s close proximity to the pain and suffering of injustice, conditions a novel and radical humanistic response. When working for justice and rights, PVCHR exhibits what Bryan Stevenson would call the “vital lesson” of “proximity.” 40 Whether perpetrated by state agents or corporate landlords, organized violence has a dampening effect on decent, or even political organizing. In being proximate to the local effects of injustice, PVCHR does more than organize and mobilize identity, it fights and agitates for concrete rights. Here local justice and organizing around identity cannot be separated, but PVCHR intentionally frames identity in an internationalist way in retelling injustice narratives as a violation of human rights and building the space for empathy with injustice’s survivors. PVCHR, a member based human right movement, aims for a broad base of support by working with women, children, Dalits (former untouchables), Adavasi (tribal communities), and Muslims. In the city and suburbs of Banaras, this change comes

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slowly, but in using the human rights discourse from below 41 as an instrument of change, rather than simply as a means of building awareness and identity, PVCHR widens the aperture for change. Testimonial therapy brings collective trauma into the public discourse and opens an important space for grievance to be heard and collectively acted upon—this is a critical seedbed for lasting transformative peace and change. Each movement we have studied in this book must take strategic advantage of the narrative roots of social change. The broad psychological effects of these testimonies develop the roots of future collective reconciliation by constructing a space and a structure for change to happen. Such attention to narrative transformation centers “attention on the context of relationship patterns” 42 as individual narratives create and strengthen a “platform” 43 for change. Just as collective punishment acts to silence marginal communities, collective retelling works to unbuckle the dominant discourse of past atrocity and unfetter long-marginalized and overlooked voices within a community. Justice is both solidifying of in-group identities and interlocking of out-group identities. While such narrative accounting is a critical tool for modern day human rights advocacy, the accounting of past injustice and trauma remains a too little tapped instrument in attempts at creating lasting social transformation in unjust systems, especially the Indian caste system. A rights emphasis can refashion and focus activists’ narrative, awaken identity, and create a platform for critical consciousness or awareness. It seems clear that in addition to self-esteem and identity creation, effective social change of caste oppression must involve the collective public negotiation of justice and rights. This process of negotiation happens through narrative, but a movement’s own narrative strategies also open or close the public space for this negotiation. NARRATIVE INJUSTICE VERSUS NARRATING IDENTITY Returning to Ajay’s story outlined above, it is again important to emphasize that caste, religion, or other social identity constructs get little reference in Ajay’s retelling. This is more than a simple omission. The lack of identity focus is telling of PVCHR’s right-based approach to social mobilization and social change. While Ajay’s narrative, as inseparable from conceptions of rights and injustice, is subtly focusing on identity, it is not privileging one identity over others. In fact, in over three years of interacting with PVCHR leaders and activists, social identity seems to be ancillary to the context of social, economic, and cultural injustice. Reading Ajay’s story as a means to understanding PVCHR’s unique work we can see both the possibilities and pitfalls inherent in narrating injustice through the lens of social, economic, and cultural rights. While Banaras, Uttar Pradesh is a very different place

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than Nagpur, Maharashtra, Banaras’ symbolic and actual centrality in India’s modern culture wars produces unique political opportunities and constraints for anticaste activism. Such opportunities and constraints develop the foundation of a rights-based focus on injustice rather than attempts at identity organizing. While the unique context of Banaras does not completely translate to a place like Nagpur, the opportunity “feudal” 44 Banaras opens to get proximate to injustice, does hold lessons for the anticaste center of Nagpur. Of course, as I have stated earlier, identity and justice are imbricated, inseparable, and mutually-reinforcing. Therefore, any primary focus on injustice narratives, assumes at least a secondary connection to identity. Still, this subtle shift toward agitating against injustice marks PVCHR’s approach to social movement as distinct from either TBMSG’s 45 or BAMCEF’s approach. Ajay’s traumatic story voices a need for critical narrative reflection more fully than any attempt at a rational functionalist conflict mapping of identities ever could. Further, such stories unveil some important aspects of the PVCHR’s unique theory of change. First, such an injustice narrative always already involves background knowledge of other similar stories of injustice. Like other narratives we have encountered in this book, this injustice narrative is retrospective, but simultaneously projective. PVCHR is not telling stories to simply re-hash old wounds, but to shift collective awareness and ensure rights for the marginalized. Still, as opposed to the projective character of the justice narratives we regularly encounter in anticaste movements like TBMSG, PVCHR testimonial therapy narratives seem preoccupied with the process of witnessing over in-group identity formation. PVCHR’s testimonial witnessing is a form of social empowerment without the direct link to historical or cultural conceptions of collective identity that we see in a movement like BAMCEF. Certainly, even though PVCHR’s focus on witnessing models an emphasis on international rights awareness over local or national identity awareness, PVCHR’s local context and cultural adaptations of international models of trauma awareness play an important role in the effectiveness of their process of testimonial therapy. Realizing that local culture “permeates the entire stress and coping process” 46 that follows trauma, PVCHR’s use of story is unique to anticaste movement. Adaptable to local cultural contexts, such a use of story could be employed as a strategic resource for other anticaste activists in India. While PVCHR’s use of injustice narratives implies a sense of the Other, that Other is intentionally not clearly delineated or defined. A moving target, the oppressor is surely powerful, but not to be blindly emulated; injustice cannot be overcome with injustice, but rather through the acquisition of rights that are assumed to be universal to oppressors and oppressed alike. It is this adherence to the western notion of the rule of law over the rule of lord that drives the PVCHR approach to system change. 47 This focus on rights

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over simply either identity or awareness allows PVCHR to develop a broadly inclusive sense of awareness that either framings of religious or indigenous identities limit. A rights-based narrative agency, therefore, opens the possibility that various religious, indigenous or, even nationalist, identities can all fit under their mobilizing tent. It is this interplay of identity rights and awareness in anticaste, or anti-oppression, movements that, although difficult to balance, are equally necessary for lasting change. The movements outlined in this book suggest that finding balance between identity, rights, and awareness through strategic attention to the use of narrative’s role in creating public discourse are of critical importance for establishing and maintaining effective anticaste change. Much like context, narrative frames the terrain upon which change can be effective. Narratives, like Ajay’s, operate simultaneously on a collective sociological and an individual emotional level. In order to leverage narrative’s potential to build awareness and promote broadly inclusive identities of change, the public space for telling and hearing narratives must be created and continually fostered. The story above is about Ajay, but it is simultaneously about his family, his village, and a collective legacy of hierarchical oppression in countless villages across India and the world. An individual narrative account, like Ajay’s, brings to the foreground a number of assumptions about both individual instances of oppression and collective attempts at social change. For one, in such narrative, oppression is caused by denial of a universal set of rights that all people are assumed to possess. In the ending coda of Ajay’s narrative testimony, he says: “I have no money to knock the doors of the High Court but I want that the police and politicians involved in my case [to] be punished.” 48 The call for accountability assumes some level of collective agreement on defining justice as fairness, as well as, defining social boundaries in society. Ajay’s story challenges both the collective assumptions about justice as either punitive or distributive, and the assumptions of liberal democratic multiculturalism in Indian society. Justice as accountability clearly does not work equally for everyone in society, but, in calling for accountability, PVCHR is calling out the minimal requirements for justice in society—equal treatment for all. PVCHR’s attempt to create people friendly society requires the telling of stories like Ajay’s and assumes that too much emphasis on identity, whether that be Buddhist, Dalit, Mulnivasi, or some other identity, is problematic to this universalizing narrative endeavor. [W]e should work to bring the communities together by creating some shared public space for Shudras and Dalits, for Hindus and Muslims. . . . Most of the socialization processes seem to happen on the streets—where various communities and castes are together but remain separated in different districts or sidewalks—where ati-Shudras are merely tolerated, not accepted, by the other castes. 49

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PVCHR aims to agitate for this space for what they call a “democratic capitalism based on the rule of law, people’s welfare and pluralism.” 50 In the context of feudal Banaras, and its relative place in an increasingly neo-liberal world, such agitation seems to work. In other parts of India, identity and awareness may be needed in larger dose. Still, PVCHR’s relative emphasis on narrative injustice and rights identity over other forms of identity creation requires a social balancing act. PVCHR’s tight-rope focus on internationalist formation of rights is assisted by PVCHR activists’ own social positionality and social context, as well as, Indian’s national conception of their place in the world. Modeling a staff that is of mixed caste, class, and religion in the feudal, hierarchical, and socially rigid context of Banaras, Uttar Pradesh, PVCHR is able to resist caste-based oppression by modeling new forms of social organization and social solidarities. This subtle, yet impactful, non-governmental modeling works in ways in which low-caste managed social movement organizations like BAMCEF and TBMSG are significantly challenged. While PVCHR’s leadership is often criticized from the left for being high-caste led (Lenin is from a higher cast grouping), this positionality certainly allows them different access to the levers of power than other anticaste movement actors. The role of local testimonial therapy as a conflict intervention and prevention mechanism cannot be understated here—through helping “survivors regain self-esteem and dignity” 51 testimonial therapy also “creates a democratic structure for the voiceless to enable them access to the constitutional guarantees of modern India.” 52 Higher castes actively working for these aims sends a different message to the powerful than low-caste led organizations can by developing unique ally-ship relationships between the powerful and the marginalized. PVCHR’s entire organizational structure exhibits this approach to giving literal voice through power; an extremely democratic and cosmopolitan goal. While some may critique PVCHR as overlooking the long history of structurally violent and unequal systems in India, PVCHR activists’ see themselves as pragmatic actors in both the local and international present. To PVCHR movement activists, PVCHR’s immediate and local response is critical to change the dominant discourse of oppression and begin to challenge the delegitimizing caste-based realities of Indian social life. Arguing for a “huge and strong network among civil society organization who fight separately [and] protest through coordinated actions” 53 PVCHR’s work for neoDalit movement is about building an appreciation of marginalized voice in the present. One source of that appreciation can come from international acceptance if one cannot find it at home. Further, realizing that there is not much one can do about the injustice of the past, PVCHR does not spend the majority of its time educating about the oppressive past, but instead advocating for rights in the present. Being completely absent from the historical record of Banaras, low caste, Muslims, and Adivasi peoples have little voice

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and power in the present. But how to best get them out of this unjust system is not to focus on the distant past (like BAMCEF) or an aspirational Buddhist future (like TBMSG), but the present realities of individual injustice and societal failure to adhere to the rule of law. Testimonial therapy helps these communities regain their psychological place in the present, not through historical or indigenous identity, but, rather, via the witnessing, naming, and framing of rights and present rights abuses. This timely and proximate rightsbased focus provides a sense of self-esteem that has been overtaken by years of neglect and violent control in much the same way that Buddhist identity or Mulnivasi Bahujan awareness develops self-esteem in other anticaste movement contexts. By providing victims the space and structure to express their psychological needs and humanity, the testimonial therapy process creates an opportunity to analytically and emotionally address immediate and long-term grievances. This in-group space and community building is critical to all the anticaste movements described in this book. Without such space and structure, past psychological needs go unmet and internal inter-caste and communal conflicts in India continue and have space to spiral and grow. PVCHR’s focus on rights represents a secular and inclusive articulation of what Dalit Buddhists and Mulnivasi organizers are also trying to accomplish. While the immediate consequences of testimonial therapy are not always evident, the long-term impacts are more apparent and come into view if one takes a view that “conflict is a normal and continuous dynamic within human relationships.” 54 The self-respect and dignity that long-term attempts at testimonial therapy engender, enables engaged citizens to develop voice and build networks of solidarity and agency in numbers. This creation of voice, born out of the awareness of one’s distinct human identity conceived in rights-based terms, itself acts like a narrative coda bringing victims out of their “dream-like” 55 shell and empowering them as survivors instead of victims, as human agents instead of just newly identified others in opposition to powerful identity. How to integrate this rights-based approach with the type of awareness and identity work that BAMCEF and TBMSG are engaged in seems to be a pressing and under-addressed aspect of the wider anticaste movement in India. How do the identities of Ambedkar Buddhists and indigenous majority work together with human rights-based agitation and framing to develop not only awareness, but voice to the marginalized? Though many activists call for the “need to collaborate” 56 across anticaste movements and organizations, this collaboration is rare, and the discussion of how rights approaches best fit into movements aimed at building identity and awareness has, thus far, been inadequate. Despite writers like Rajagopal’s (2003) attempt at understanding global justice movements from below, 57 little research has engaged with the important intersection of rights and identity awareness in social movements in the developing nations of the world. Only lip service has been paid to movement’s need for coordination. The complex-

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ity of such collaboration across hardened identity formations, from the local to the global, is discussed in the next section. RIGHTS DISCOURSE IN THE GLOCAL CONTEXT OF IDENTITY AND AWARENESS In assuming that traumatic experiences of injustice can be a resource and not a constraint in the context of transitional justice and identity movements, movement organizations like PVCHR have to navigate local and international conceptions of social identity and injustice awareness. Such conceptions, which are in some sense inseparable from each other, are generative of unique constraints. How activists navigate social change agitation in local context can be informative of their global worldview perspective and generative of activists’ post-traumatic growth. 58 PVCHR’s creative blending of both local and global conceptions of justice and rights can provide clues to how identity, rights, and awareness can, and must, work in tandem for social change to be lasting. In realizing “that which aims toward the therapeutic cannot necessarily achieve justice, and that which achieves justice may not be therapeutic,” 59 PVCHR displays an ability to “reflect-in-action” 60 in working with survivors of trauma. In accessing possible “leverage points” 61 in the complex glocal 62 system of social marginalization born of caste oppression, PVCHRs’ human rights framing provides the resource of agency to the marginalized. Navigating local and global labeling and framing of marginalization, PVCHR’s testimonial therapy work represents a unique balance on many levels. Far from re-traumatizing, PVCHR’s work with past individual traumas, works to stop the onward march of collective trauma and functions to establish a transformative ideal based on equal relationship and “sameness.” 63 “The ‘wound’ of trauma is less the wound of the past and much more, to paraphrase Derrida, a wound which remains open in our terror of the danger that we imagine lies ahead.” 64 PVCHR taps into the mobilizing force of this present-future terror that is implicit in trauma stories with only subtle reference to identity and clear emphasis on the demand for civil, political, and economic rights. While PVCHR by no means has a lock on the anticaste networking of like-minded institutions and social change agentless, 65 it’ rights-based focus provides pliable opportunity and international visibility that other anticaste movements, and their movement frames, have been less able to achieve. With a rights-based conception of collective trauma in mind, the ideas of social change and social resilience seem less reactive than adaptive and progressive. It is within this creative sense of adaptive change processes that the articulation of past and present trauma can act to propel a lasting change into the future. In other words, telling trauma stories works to build social resilience and this can itself be progressive from both a

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therapeutic and a justice perspective. This is the work of a growing subfield of peace studies that is increasingly know as trauma-informed peacebuilding. 66 PVCHR’s unique approach to story also allows a creative bridge between local and international discourse about rights to form in ways that often halt other local anticaste movements. While much of this has to do with PVCHR’s cultivation of international partners and networks, it also arises out of the unique marginalized rights focus of their work. Agitating around stories of injustice by doing testimonial therapy and pushing legal authorities to investigate community harms, PVCHR compliments the strengths of both educating for awareness and organizing around distinct identity that movements like BAMCEF and TMBSG are pursuing. PVCHR’s unique local approach to human rights agitation and advocacy complements anticaste education and awareness campaigns even if this complementarity is seldom fully realized. Far from instilling perpetual anxiety and radical uncertainty, 67 PVCHR’s testimonial therapy work with survivors of trauma builds a container or platform for both collective trauma and personal healing. The testimonial therapy stories create a space and structure for glocal dialogue. While true that trauma, by definition is always to some degree an open wound pointing conflict parties toward the horizon of both potentially constructive and destructive futures, it is also true that opportunities for healing born of the risk of this open wound are at least as strong as the potential for re-injury. How we engage the leverage points of this complex collective wound as a system is important, and little addressed by either anticaste activists or other movements for social justice around the world. Trauma as a trope in social change stories is seldom addressed as collective trauma, capable of collective response. If addressed at all, trauma typically resides in the individual. PVCHR’s work with testimonial therapy is unique in its collective approach to trauma, but also in its underlying belief that the collective must include the international, not simply the local. While the majority of the anticaste movement have largely shunned international actors as only treating “the diverse symptoms of a single underlying disease, caste discrimination, while failing to address the cause itself,” 68 the local to global solidarities inherent in anticaste activism are embraced by PVCHR. PVCHR’s rights-based approach attempts to frame international actors as more than simply donors, but also beneficiaries of trauma-informed anticaste agitation. Not only does PVCHR cultivate international funding networks and relationships, but they argue these international connections should be further exploited by anticaste activists. In framing their movement’s vision as “we work for you,” PVCHR’s website is outward facing, inclusive, and international, aimed at showcasing the “stirring stories” of “personalities extraordinarie.” 69 Their language is internationalist in flavor and fosters both local and global interests and solidarities.

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The transnational linkages are strong in at least two of the movements studied in this book (TBMSG and PVCHR) for good reason. Both rely of registers of international donor support to run their rights-based programs. But navigating the local and global dynamics of this change is fraught with complexities, not least of which is a deep-seated post-colonial distrust of anything foreign in India. One TBMSG activist told me that despite great facilities many Ambedkar Buddhists are hesitant to work with the Nagaloka Institute because it was built with foreign money. 70 PVCHR faces similar skepticism of its anti-violence and anti-torture work because much of the funds for this work come from the European Union. Still, the reflective awareness of PVCHR caseworkers to help reformulate community activists’ stories or torture and organized violence opens local space to use collective trauma pro-socially as opposed to fear and obfuscate it. This reflective awareness also appears counter-cultural for its embrace of international ideas and partners, which at times seems to fly in the face of nationalist discourse. Although unaddressed collective trauma may not be the root cause of protracted social conflict, lack of understanding about it forces conflict into latent stages. 71 PVCHR’s design and application of the testimonial therapy process represents a glocal combination of local cultural understanding and international networks to leverage concrete action for change. The strict focus on identity creation is an expression, or side effect, of the collective fear of trauma. While as a researcher, I cannot profess to know what specific communities will do with the powerful discursive space of collective trauma, I can still argue for the usefulness of cross-cultural collective dialogue and narrative sharing of trauma. As Montville (2001) argues, we must revive mourning as we move to complete individual and collective traumatic experience and implement change. While scholar-practitioners must always be vigilant about the possibility of re-traumatizing individuals and collectives, the opportunities and rewards inherent in what Montville calls “reviving the morning process” 72 are too great not to take this risk. PVCHR’s rights-based focus on injustice narratives provides a salvo for the pervasive fear of the foreign in the Indian public sphere. Navigating the global discourse on caste opens the raw historical wounds of power-over, not directly from a pre-modern and colonial perspective, but from a globalist one. Despite the popular polemical stance that “certain academic centers of the West control, or at least heavily influence, the socio-political discourse of India” 73 the critical study of caste exposes the important role that both local and global discourse intersects, not only elite systems of power, but systems of oppression too. Just as critical race theory exposes stories of liberalism and meritocracy as coming from the voice of the privileged, a critical caste study approach to rights abuse exposes Western imperialism and neo-colonialism as skewed toward a privileged narrative about helping the oppressed. 74 While all the implications of such a critical caste studies are not fully devel-

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oped here, the need for further developing a critical lens on the anticaste movement’s role in both perpetuating and destroying local systems of oppression should be clear. Carl Jung was reported to have said: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. 75 The attempt in this chapter has been to raise consciousness about the unconscious influences of trauma at the societal level and draw connections between it and effective anticaste resistance at the national and global levels. Such an understanding and collective consciousness about trauma and its impacts on individuals and society is a vital, and oft under-addressed, piece of any peacebuilding puzzle. Contained within the fear of trauma, collective platforms of change cannot act as a “scaffold-trampoline,” 76 giving a base for activists to stand and jump toward future change. The discursive leverage points found in activists’ narratives are often discounted as amorphous and unsystematic, yet they have real impacts on real lives; they make meaning in spaces where meaning is rare; they build solidarity in places where discourse bounds and controls. As Keck and Sakdapolrak (2013) argue: “Catastrophes may be perceived as opportunities for doing new things, for innovation and development.” 77 While telling traumatic narrative may not be a panacea to caste injustice, public telling does lead toward social resilience. Continual retelling also challenges any construction of a post-conflict or transitional conflict setting, drawing attention, instead, to the resilient characteristics of the institution of caste. In some sense all conflict, as driven to a large extent by past traumas, are always on-going, fluid, dynamic, and never able to be categorized as post-conflict or stabilized. Still, to say that caste conflict is always in a process of transition is to admit that the “hydra-headed” 78 specter of caste is transformable, mutable, and able to be influenced by collective movement. The narrating of traumatic experiences as collective expressions of rights is an important step in realizing a collective’s potential for building resilience within the dynamic, systemic, and intersectional realities of caste-ism, classism, and gender oppression. Through trauma awareness and narrative retelling we can begin to immunize collectives to short circuit the cycle of violence brought on by being positioned as either victims or aggressors, or privileged versus oppressed, in a never-ending feedback loop of anger and retaliation. This is a vital piece of any peacebuilding platform that I will elaborate further in the final chapter of this book. THE PARADOX OF PEACEBUILDING AS RIGHTS AGITATION One final note is necessary before I develop an integrated peacebuilding framework for anticaste movement in the book’s final chapter. Based on my years of experience with the movements studied herein, it is necessary to

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return briefly to the above discussion of the paradoxes and perils involved in simultaneously working for global and local rights. The anticaste peacebuilding framework outlined in the concluding chapter, which argues for the central use of discourse to change both local and global systems of oppression, must be attentive to what international relations theorists have referred to as “levels-of-analysis frameworks.” 79 While Bob (2007) reminds us that “many Dalit activists, like those in other aggrieved communities, have political agendas that go beyond ending abuses and protecting rights . . . ,” 80 we must also remain cognizant that rights discourse, while able to mobilize awareness and identity among anticaste activists, also can act to consolidate power within these aggrieved communities. In making the levels of analysis framework more conscious, the unconscious the space for discursive change becomes available. When viewed from the typological perspective of a levels-of-analysis framework, anticaste agitation and advocacy as a rights issue presents many real world paradoxes. For example, how can activists frame caste discrimination in non-cultural terms to an international audience? More specifically, when local anticaste movement and contention has long been based on B.R. Ambedkar’s analysis that Hinduism is at the root of the caste problem, how does one frame this upon an equal rights paradigm without disparaging believers of Hinduism? “For decades within India, one of the primary targets of Untouchable activism has been the Hindu caste system and Hinduism itself.” 81 Adding further paradox to the local-global activism of former untouchables, how can activists gain international support when democratic institutions in the Indian nation have developed their own internal responses to the problems of caste? “When abuses occur within countries like India— democratic states having laws that formally prohibit such abuses—convincing international actors to look beyond the law to the realities of discrimination is difficult.” 82 In short, both external and internal realities mitigate against clear-headed rights-based approaches to the problems of caste. Activists are hampered by cultural and political realities to favor either identity, rights, or awareness as their main strategic approach. Given such constraints how do activists best integrate a strategy of identity, rights, and awareness in their activism? Although PVCHR works hard to embrace these paradoxes and question how anticaste activism has been done in the past, they too remain in some sense constrained by these rights-based paradoxes and inability to coordinate with identity and awareness movements. Still, working in local communities to build people friendly villages and expose the roots of oppression, PVCHR attempts to balance local and international agitation and rhetoric in a creative mix of agitating, educating, and organizing. Despite the many paradoxes of India’s democratic institutions’ embrace of “discrimination based on work and descent,” 83 PVCHR strategically frames resistance as reform not revolution. Unlike BAMCEF, the rhetoric of PVCHR is not bel-

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ligerent or revolutionary, but forceful and honest. “The Indian Police learnt demoralization and community punishment from the practice of the caste system.” 84 Such critical analysis, coupled with international networking, collaborative nationalist rhetoric, and pragmatic resistance underscores a unique blend of anticaste activism. Caste institutional practices work to silence dissent, but PVCHR advocates and agitates within this corrupt system to raise a consistent resistant voice. Filling First Incident Reports (FIRs) with the police and using the rule of law as a key foundation, PVCHR’s work is as much legal advocacy as social movement organizing. PVCHR’s international outreach over social media and the world wide web allows them to amplify this rights-based voice. By operating on at least two distinct levels-of-analysis, the local and the global, PVCHR also creates a sort of balance of power among its potential foes. Operating simultaneously in both global and local, as well as, institutional and community levels, acts to protects PVCHR activists, albeit symbolically, from high-caste reprisals. Although PVCHR activists have been physically attached, their international network of rightsbased activists creates a platforms and relative safety for PVCHR activists to continue their work. The inter-caste make-up of the PVCHR social movement organization surely also provides some protection in modeling egalitarian and internationalist norms, but it is PVCHR distinct choice to act simultaneously at the level of local and international rights, which positions them differently than either the TBMSG or BAMCEF movements. TBMSG’s international work is at the level of fund-raising and rights solidarity, but rarely do TBMSG activists take public stances on internationalist causes like the PVCHR does. Still, “levels-of-analysis frameworks are analytic constructions to help us make sense of the world, and they are best evaluated in terms of their theoretical utility rather than seen as a direct reflection of ‘reality.’” 85 Analyzing PVCHR’s movement on a levels-of-analysis frame, while simply heuristic, is nonetheless telling of the differences inherent in their strategic approach. In viewing PVCHR’s work upon a levels-of-analysis framework one can see the discursive spaces a rights focus opens for activists. Integrating this rights approach with clear and inclusive identity and awareness focused approaches to anticaste activism, though complicated, seems prudent to achieving the “generational perspective” 86 toward which a conflict transformation, or peacebuilding, approach to caste would aspire. This aspirational approach to anticaste network collaboration is taken up in this book’s final chapter. NOTES 1. Personal communications with Lenin Raguvanshi, 2013 and 2016. See also http://www. pvchr.asia/ and http://www.pvchr.net/ for regular updates on PVCHR campaigns for action. 2. http://pvchr.asia/how-we-work.php, accessed August 31, 2017.

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3. PVCHR, Voice of the Voiceless, 1:1, November 2010. 4. Lenin Raghuvanshi, “Can the Neo-Dalit Movement Eradicate Emerging Fascism in India?” Different Truths, November 24, 2015, http://differenttruths.com/governance/politics/ can-the-neo-dalit-movement-eradicate-emerging-facism-in-india/, accessed October 8, 2017. 5. http://pvchr.asia/mission.php, accessed August 31, 2017. 6. See http://pvchr.asia/ for more information on the inter-institutional approach of PVCHR. 7. In 2012 RCT-Denmark became Dignity: Danish Institute Against Torture. For more information on their work, see https://www.dignityinstitute.org/. 8. Lenin Raghuvanshi, Shabanna Khan, and Inger Agger, “Giving Voice,” 12–16. 9. http://pvchr.asia/vision.php, accessed August 27, 2015. 10. As an example see Swarts’s 2008 writing on American movement organizing of groups like ACORN. Heidi Swarts, Organizing Urban America: Secular and Faith-Based Progressive Movements (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 11. See Lenin Raghuvanshi, Justice, Liberty, Equality: Dalits in Independent India (Kolkata: Frontpage, 2012), chapter 5. 12. Ruth Behar, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks your Heart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 13–14. 13. Arthur Frank, Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 14. See Joseph Montville, “Reconciliation as Realpolitik: Facing the Burdens of History in Political Conflict Resolution,” in Jeong, ed., From Conflict Resolution to Peacebuilding (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012) and Joseph Montville, “Justice and the Burdens of History,” in Abu Nimer, ed., Reconciliation, Justice, and Coexistence (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001). 15. Joseph Montville, “Justice and The Burdens of History,” 133. 16. I am thankful for Erik Erikson’s (1969) use of language here. See Erik Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1969). 17. Joseph Montville, “Justice and the Burdens of History,” 323. 18. Iris Young, “Five Faces of Oppression,” in Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 43. 19. Arthur Frank, Letting Stories Breathe, 19. 20. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1970), 183. 21. Lenin Raghuvanshi, Justice, Liberty, Equality, 29. 22. This testimonial therapy narrative can be found in Voice of the Voiceless, Vol. 2: No. 2, 2011, published by PVCHR/Benares under the title “I should get justice so that other people should get relief.” 23. Voice of the Voiceless, Vol. 2: No. 2, 2011, 3. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Part of Ajay’s story involves denial of medical assistance for his dying brother after a false encounter with police. Ibid., Voice of the Voiceless, 3. 27. Michael Toolan, Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1988), 148. 28. William Labov, Language in the Inner City: Studies in Black English Vernacular (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), 366. 29. For more on this see Jeremy Rinker, “Narrative Reconciliation as Rights-Based Peace Praxis: Custodial Torture, Testimonial Therapy and Overcoming Marginalization,” Peace Research: The Canadian Journal of Peace and Conflict Studies 46, no. 1 (2016), 136, as well as further discussion below. 30. See Kimberle Crenshaw, “Why Intersectioanlity Can’t Wait,” Washington Post, September 24, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2015/09/24/whyintersectionality-cant-wait/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.46e7b00bb280. 31. See Ted Gurr, People versus states: Minorities at risk in the new century (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 2000).

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32. Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan, Breaking India, 193. 33. Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, reprinted 2013), 261. Originally published 1897. 34. Jonathan Perry, Death in Banaras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 4. 35. Ibid., 36. 36. Ibid., 37. 37. Ibid., 33. 38. Ibid., 36. Baidyanath Saraswati, Kashi: Myth and Reality of a Classical Cultural Tradition (Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1975). 39. Vasanthi Raman, The Warp and the Weft: Community and Gender Identity among Banaras Weavers (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010), 276. 40. Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (New York: Spiegel & Garu, 2015), 17–18. 41. See Balakrishnan Rajagopal, International Law from Below: Development, Social Movements, and Third World Resistance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 42. John Paul Lederach, Conflict Transformation, 30. 43. Ibid., 45. 44. See chapter 1, note 65, Lenin Raghuvanshi, Justice, Liberty, Equality, op. cit., 5. This sentiment of Banares as “feudal” was also expressed by a respondent during my 2013 Fulbright-Nehru research in June 2013. See Jeremy Rinker, “Buckle in the Hindu Belt: Contemporary Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Legacy of Partition in Banaras, Uttar Pradesh,” in Revisiting Partition: New Essays on Memory, Culture, and Politics, eds. Singh, Iyer, and Gairola (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), note 50. 45. As mentioned elsewhere in this manuscript, TBMSG’s Manuski Center does human rights organizing, networking, and some agitating, but not to the scope and extent that PVCHR does in Banaras and internationally. 46. C. Chun, R. H. Moos, and R. C. Cronkite, “Culture: A Fundamental Context for the Stress and Coping Paradigm,” in Wong and Wong, eds., Handbook of Multicultural Perspectives of Stress and Coping (Dallas, TX: Spring, 2006), 31. 47. See Lenin Raghuvanshi, “Can the Neo-Dalit Movement Eradicate Emerging Fascism in India?” Different Truths, November 24, 2015, http://differenttruths.com/governance/politics/ can-the-neo-dalit-movement-eradicate-emerging-facism-in-india/, accessed October 8, 2017. 48. Voice of the Voiceless, Vol. 2: No. 2, 2011, 4. 49. Lenin Raghuvanshi, “Can the Neo-Dalit Movement Eradicate Emerging Fascism in India?” Different Truths, November 24, 2015, http://differenttruths.com/governance/politics/ can-the-neo-dalit-movement-eradicate-emerging-facism-in-india/, accessed October 8, 2017. 50. Ibid. 51. Lenin Raghuvanshi, Justice, Liberty, Equality, 59. 52. PVCHR, Voice of the Voiceless 1, no. 1: 45. 53. Lenin Raghuvanshi, “Can the Neo-Dalit Movement Eradicate Emerging Fascism in India?” Different Truths, November 24, 2015, http://differenttruths.com/governance/politics/ can-the-neo-dalit-movement-eradicate-emerging-facism-in-india/, accessed October 8, 2017. 54. John Paul Lederach, Conflict Transformation, 15. 55. Michael Toolan, Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction, 148. 56. Personal e-mail exchange with Indian anticaste activist, September 25, 2017. 57. Balakrishnan Rajagopal, International Law from Below: Development, Social Movements, and Third World Resistance (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 58. Lorna Collier, “Growth After Trauma: Why are some people more resilient than others and can it be taught?” Monitor of Psychology, 47:10 (2016), http://www.apa.org/monitor/2016/ 11/growth-trauma.aspx, accessed June 20, 2018. 59. F. Furedi, Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age (London: Routledge, 2004) quoted in L. Kirmayer, J. Gone, and J. Moses, “Rethinking Historical Trauma,” Transcultural Psychiatry, 51:3 (2014), 299–319. 60. Donald Schon, The Reflective Practitioner, 49–54.

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61. Donella Meadows, “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System” (Vermont: Sustainability Institute, 1999), accessed February 28, 2017, http://donellameadows.org/archives/ leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/. 62. In using the word glocal, I intentionally draw reference to what Ritzer (2011) calls the processes of glocalization, “defined as the interpenetration of the global and the local, resulting in unique outcomes in different geographical areas” (159). Such processes inevitably draw us to critical role of local activists as creative agents of change over and above the role of just global processes in shifting flows of knowledge and other material commodities. George Ritzner, Globalization: The Essentials (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2011), 159–60. 63. Lenin Raghuvanshi, “Can the Neo-Dalit Movement Eradicate Emerging Fascism in India?” Different Truths, November 24, 2015, http://differenttruths.com/governance/politics/ can-the-neo-dalit-movement-eradicate-emerging-facism-in-india/, accessed October 8, 2017. 64. Mark Neocleous, “‘Don't Be Scared, Be Prepared’: Trauma-Anxiety-Resilience,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 37:3 (2012), 195. 65. For example, TBMSG’s Manuski Center in Pune, Maharashtra, has itself taken a human rights frame in developing an Atrocity News blog to raise awareness among activists following the Khairlanji Massacre in 2006. But Manuski’s work has remained largely national and has been little recognized internationally. See http://www.manuski.org.in/?page_id=564. For the little international attention Manuski has received, see also: Emily Wax, “India’s Lower Castes Seek Social Progress in Job Market, The Washington Post, August 20, 2007, A1 and A12. 66. For more on trauma-informed peacebuilding, see Carolyn Yoder, Little Book of Trauma Healing: When Violence Strikes and Community Security Is Threatened (Intercourse, Pa.: Good Books, 2005); Jeremy Rinker and Jerry Lawler, “Trauma as a Collective Disease and Root Cause of Protracted Social Conflict,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 24:2 (2018), 150–164. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pac0000311; and Mary Jo Harwood and Janice Almond, “On Trauma-Informed Peacebuilding & Development Assistance,” Mediators Beyond Boarders, https://medium.com/@MBBconsulting_22368/on-trauma-informedpeacebuilding-development-assistance-e8a4162df82c, accessed June 20 2018. 67. Mark Neocleous, “‘Don't Be Scared, Be Prepared’: Trauma-Anxiety-Resilience,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 37:3 (2010), 188–98. 68. Clifford Bob, “Dalit Rights are Human Rights: Caste Discrimination, International Activism, and the Construction of a New Human Rights Issue,” Human Rights Quarterly, 29 (2007), 174. 69. See http://pvchr.asia/vision.php, accessed October 22, 2017. 70. Personal interview with Dharmarchai Vivekaratna, July 16, 2016. During this interview Vivekaratna lamented that despite the funds for Nagaloka’s infrastructure coming primarily from England and China, the day-to-day operation of the institute’s work comes completely from local donations from the Ambedkar Buddhist community and families of past and present institute students. 71. See Jeremy Rinker and Jerry Lawler, “Trauma as a Collective Disease and Root Cause of Protracted Social Conflict,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 24:2 (2018), 150–164, http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pac0000311. 72. Joseph Montville, “Justice and the Burdens of History,” in Reconciliation, Justice, and Coexistence, ed. M. Abu Nimer (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), 133. 73. Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan, Breaking India: Western Interventions, 2. 74. For more on the problems of a helping mentality, see Thomas Matyok and Cathryne Schmitz, “The Violence in Helping: Resisting the Neo-Colonialism of Humanitarian Action,” Unpublished paper (Department of Peace and Conflict Studies, University of North Carolina Greensboro, 2013). 75. Secondat. Of those who do not toil in darkness, [Blog post—2011], Retrieved from: http://secondat.blogspot.com/2011/05/of-those-who-do-not-toil-in-blindness.html 76. John Paul Lederach, Conflict Transformation, 45. 77. Mark Keck and Patrick Sakdapolrak, “What is Social Resilience? Lessons Learned and Ways Forward,” Erdkunde, 67:1(2013), 9.

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78. Lenin Raghuvanshi, “Can the Neo-Dalit Movement Eradicate Emerging Fascism in India?” Different Truths, November 24, 2015, http://differenttruths.com/governance/politics/ can-the-neo-dalit-movement-eradicate-emerging-facism-in-india/, accessed October 8, 2017. 79. Jack Levy and William Thompson, Causes of War (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 15. 80. Clifford Bob (2007), “Dalit Rights are Human Rights: Caste Discrimination, International Activism, and the Construction of a New Human Rights Issue,” Human Rights Quarterly, 29, 170–71. 81. Clifford Bob, “Dalit Rights are Human Rights,” 191. 82. Ibid., 193. 83. Ibid. 84. Lenin Raghuvanshi, Justice, Liberty, Equality, 29. 85. Jack Levy and William Thompson, Causes of War (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 15. 86. John Paul Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (Washington, DC: Unites States Institute of Peace, 1997), 81.

Conclusion Identity, Rights, and Awareness: The Power of Discourse to Change Entrenched Systems of Oppression

From the vantage point of the segmented chapters of a book it might look as if the public space for India’s anticaste social movement is filled with a superfluity of distinct social movement organizations, led by discrete social actors and armed with competing and often contradictory ideologies. More than a “blooming, buzzing confusion,” 1 the diverse expressions of Indian anticaste calls for social justice open opportunity for comparative critical reflection and social justice coordination. As any observer of social justice movements would agree, the competition and collaboration among social change movements are much more complicated and multifaceted than is visible to the casual observer. Internally, movement activists vie for control of message and means to mobilize. Through exploring this complexity, it becomes critical to understand activists’ meaning-making processes. The what, why, who, and how of anticaste social movement organization, mobilization, and ideological education is constructed by personal experience, collective marginalization, and a myriad of contextual factors, including the social and political dynamics internal to particular social movement organizations. In struggling through these factors and dynamics, the three movements I have studied represent only a fraction of the vast diversity within Indian anticaste work. They were chosen as representative of this diversity and important models of identity creation, rights awareness, and re-education. Within this diversity TBMSG, PVCHR, and BAMCEF are representative of the ideological, geographical, and organizational diversity within the wider anticaste movement as a whole. These movements are representative of the center and periphery of anticaste discursive mobilization. In this repre167

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sentative sample of the vast diversity, some unity can be found. But, more than simply drawing connections only between political opportunity structures, mobilization, or social movements frames, 2 this work has endeavored to develop anticaste unity and collaborative space through attention to narrative deployment of identity, rights, and awareness in these three distinct, but interconnected, anticaste social movements. Even though the complicated overlap and interconnections between Indian anticaste movements’ ideological pedigrees and democratic leadership is well established in the literature (see, in particular, Omvedt 1994, 2008 for clear discussion of this), the focus on individual activist’s motivations, narratives, and ideological commitments are much less studied and transparent. Caste, as a social institution, certainly establishes the grounds for social conflict, but do all activists see these grounds in similar ways? Perception and positionality influence the reactions and discursive frames of activists. In turn, positionality and perception impact activists’ narrative agency. Assumed to be outward expressions of frustration, activists’ work is rarely seen outside a discursive frame of frustration-aggression theory. 3 As a result, anticaste activists’ own narrative agency and ideologies are rarely deeply probed. Further, more than simply focusing on a social movement framing analysis as “necessary corrective to [sic] broader structural theories,” 4 this book’s focus on identity, rights, and awareness has endeavored to draw needed attention to both internal and external opportunities for developing both anticaste movement consensus and narrative agency. While processes of movement framing rarely occur without internal and external conflict, 5 and anticaste movement provides no exception to this rule, attention to activists’ narrative is not just about movement success through strategic framing. More than focusing on the importance of strategic framing, activists’ stories also underscore the process of being heard and giving voice. As Cobb (2013) reminds us, “the critical issue in conflict resolution is the evolution of meaning, such that speaking and being heard is possible.” 6 In understanding that, as marginalized peoples, low-caste social actors have “damaged narratives,” 7 anticaste activists, as members of anticaste movement writ large, can develop a sense of self which undergirds a collective moral and narrative agency. In order to do this, Dalits and low castes must both tell and reflectively analyze their stories. Awareness and identity are critical for developing this moral and narrative agency, but when even defining what constitutes anticaste social movement and agency is, itself, up for ongoing debate, 8 coordinated action for social change becomes constrained and contested. Developing narrative agency is Dalit’s way out of caste conflict. The stories outlined in this book have attempted to foreground the critical importance of activists’ discursive practices in the evolving achievement of change in the caste system through equally empowering identity and awareness as foundations for rights claims. Not only is it important for scholars of caste to focus on the

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stories narrated by social movement activists, but anticaste activists also need to pay attention to their own use of story and its’ connection to a desired future. Despite shared knowledge about movement’s ideological commitments and desires for strategic allegiances, the use of language and story represent an under-scrutinized area for both social movement activists and those who study them. As Polletta (2006) has argued, “we can draw on [narratives] to develop the micro foundations of collective action that we still lack.” 9 It is activists’ narrating of unjust histories, both ancient and more contemporary, that Foucault would say reveals a “genealogy” which can “account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses [and] domains of objects.” 10 Fully aware that many “think of Foucault and his ilk as steering radical critique too heavily toward a fussy preoccupation with language,” 11 my intent in this book has been to privilege language as a form of concrete active resistance for those that are marginalized with little sense of their own agency and self-worth. Often overlooked, how social actors speak to each other, their discursive devices and norms, and their deployment of particular narratives about justice are critical arenas for coordinated empowerment. Speech and storytelling are forms of direct action and the basis for anticaste activists’ vision of social change. Identity, rights, and awareness are created in the “friction between” 12 narrative construction of meaning and material collective action; between the extreme relativism of stories as subjective and rights as human universals. To be clear, this discursively focused work must be done by the activists who themselves are at the center of caste contention, not academics and theorists, like myself, who sit on the periphery. Social actors must themselves define their empowerment through the development of their own voice (what Lederach (1995) calls the “elicitive model” 13 of peacebuilding). Activists’ own attention to discourse, and its transformative power, unlocks the fuller prosocial potentials of a narrative focus on identity, rights, and awareness. Of course, narratives are both performative and controlling. Simultaneously exertive of control over the manner in which social actors tell, hear, and listen to stories and constitutive of shifts in social actor’s sense of self and meaning, narratives pattern discursive power. And as Foucault’s genealogical work reminds us, discourse just is power. 14 We must, therefore, understand narratives (the smaller parts of larger discourse) as texts that do not simply benignly describe, but also act. 15 Attention to narratives structure and patterned deployment is an often overlooked aspect of not just social movement organization, but also conflict analysis and conflict transformation. Conflict is often the result of repetition of destructive patterns of communication. Narrative patterns, as directly tied to both conflict escalation and processes of marginalization, must be closely attended to if true social transformation is to be achieved. The narrative politics of caste conflict are complex “because not only are there multiple narratives at play, each struggling

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for elaboration and legitimacy, but there are also local, national, and international actors, and the narratives at play are variously, even predictably, advanced and defended by speakers and their affiliated groups.” 16 This exploration of the patterns and structure of activists’ narrative does not sideline important movement constructions of identity, even though strident social identity creation can pose problems for nonviolent social transformation. Rather attention to narrative patterns and structure opens critical space for empathetic dialogue about who activist see themselves as and how these identities can work to organize collaborative joint action for change. Identity, rights, and awareness are equally important means of activists’ efforts of mobilization, education, and organization. The stories of resistance and injustice told about each of the three movements studied in these pages provide windows into strategies for resistance and structural change. How movements deploy these strategies and simultaneously maintain an adherence to nonviolence is thorny. “Banished narratives or ‘hidden transcripts’ are the foundation for resistance (Scott, 1990) if not violence.” 17 Looking at these narratives through a comparative lens, it has been argued, is a critical and missing aspect of reflective scholarship on anticaste social movement. Narrative patterns give definition to identity, rights, and awareness, providing a comparative analytical lens for both developing understanding of oppression and strategically coordinating and improving resistance through the development of voice. But whether this resistance can be effective in voicing frustration over injustice while simultaneously maintaining a nonviolent stance is far from clear. This chapter aims to connect discussion in the, at times, disparate chapters of this book by privileging the power of story as a means to developing collaborative and nonviolent anticaste response to hegemonic control and marginalization in Indian society. Turning Cobb’s (2013) admonition of the field of conflict resolution into a question, can we (as researchers and activists) “imagine how narrative transformation functions so that we might design and/or participate in the evolution of narrative and the identities that accompany them”? 18 SITUATING THE WORK OF COMPARATIVE MOVEMENT ANALYSIS If we want to participate in the evolution of “flattened” 19 or unreflective narratives of social change, comparative analysis of social movement organizations and activists’ stories represent the critical grounds for such work. TBMSG, BAMCEF, and PVCHR are representative of a complex system arrayed in resistance to caste-based norms in contemporary India society. This system is in a constant dialogue with nationalist forces, historical constructions, and changing religious-political dynamics in India and abroad.

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Although complex, these movements, as individual anticaste systems, represent a window into the wider structure of activism toward caste annihilation. Critical comparative analysis develops mindful awareness of the many inputs and outputs of a complex anticaste movement as system. The narrative agency of these distinct social movement organizations is open and overlapping in ways that can and must be better understood for effective feedback loops of change to germinate and grow. As the growth of “identity politics” 20 worldwide over the first couple of decades of the twenty-first century has opened new vistas for the research and practice of social change activism, comparative social movement analysis is sorely needed to understand the “emergence of shared interpretation” 21 of social conflict. It is this growth of identity politics, as both a reality and an active metaphor, that is imperative to understanding anticaste resistance in India. As stated earlier, even though much has been written on the growing modern Dalit assertion and Dalit movement, little has been comparative in nature. The use of the term Dalit itself has a “metaphoric usage, still as a verb, [that] is evident in descriptions of warfare and the vanquishing of enemies.” 22 Anticaste movement operates within such complex narrative and discursive systems. The language of identity is complicated, and simultaneously, telling. A comparison of who anticaste activists’ many enemies are reveals that like the marginalized, the enemies have many names and forms. Brahmins, elites, caste-ists, neoliberals, Aryans, foreigners—the enemies of anticaste activists have as many ascribed identities as do anticaste activists themselves. These multiple ascribed identities are evidence of a lack of public dialogue, and authentic shared discourse, about caste oppression and social difference. The lack of shared space and structure to share stories between identity groups makes change in awareness and rights agitation difficult. In endeavoring to change the lack of comparative analysis of anticaste activism by comparing three prominent social movement organizations with important ideological differences, this book has viewed anticaste resistance as a system with a center and a periphery, as well as a narrative coherence around issues of identity, rights, and awareness. Realizing this narrative coherence (or patterns) is the first step in developing potential organizing and educating solidarities, as well as platforms for public dialogue about caste. Thinking of these movements in this way represents a pragmatic step toward a future social justice ideal. More than simply seeing social movements as agitators of “politics in the streets,” 23 comparatively analyzing these anticaste movements allows us to see them as both organizers of “boundary definitions” 24 and educators on “narrative politics.” 25 Comparatively analyzing these movements is part and parcel of a process of developing the narrative agency of the wider anticaste movement and moving away from understanding anticaste movement “as mindless eruptions lacking either coherence or continuity with organized social life.” 26

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Writers like Kumar (2006) talk about the “vast terrain” 27 of growing Dalit assertion, but when it comes to explaining this growth on a national level such accounts rely primarily on the electoral progress as evidence of increasing Dalit aspirations. This feeds a narrative of anticaste movement as episodic eruptions of low-caste political frustration and aggression. Comparative case studies like Kumar’s (2006) also remain confined to particular local context (i.e., the state of Uttar Pradesh) and miss opportunities for wider mobilization and creation of activists’ narrative agency. The stories in this book illustrate, among other things, that anticaste activists’ goals and aspirations find voice outside just the all-important local ballot box. This voice, certainly affected by local context, is inseparable from the national and global movements for emancipation of oppressed peoples worldwide. Political, economic, social, cultural, and international contexts all intersect to adapt and maintain caste. Anticaste voice, at the center and periphery of caste injustice, are stifled by powerful forces that are driven by complex social, economic, cultural, and symbolic dynamics. Such dynamics, like narrative dynamics, are often hidden. Attacking only one level (social, economic, political, cultural, symbolic, or international) of caste conflicts’ “nested paradigm” 28 ensures that caste hegemony will adapt and emerge in new spheres and spaces. Evolving more durable form, caste thrives on division and bifurcation. The varied ideological discourses within the anticaste movement, thus, represent both a strength and a weakness in the fight to annihilate caste. These strengths and weaknesses require sustained attention to culture, symbol, and discourse. Of course, while focus on only certain levels of the caste system risks castes’ adaptation and/or reification, one social movement cannot possibly address all the levels of conflict associated with caste. Likewise, “[t]o the degree that culture becomes the exclusive realm for deriving the solutions to social and political problems, Dalit politics can become subject to the dominant social and political institutions that reproduce untouchability and the hierarchies of the social order.” 29 Not to belabor the point, but detailed focus on any one of these levels and movements, at the expense of the other levels or movements, could limit the anticaste movement’s capacity for effecting real and lasting change. By giving voice to varied social movement ideologies, similarities and differences become more transparent and potential solidarities become more possible. The terrain of anticaste social movement must agitate for rule of law while also building awareness and selfesteem among the marginalized. While ideological and strategic differences cannot be overlooked, they must not be feared, but embraced as critical analysis of divergent movement’s narratives are engaged and levels of intervention equally legitimized. Collaboration, not competition, and dialogue rather than debate, though lacking in anticaste circles, is needed if the “hydra-headed” 30 specter of caste is to be effectively transformed. The extent to which the work for economic

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identity becomes coordinated with the work of social, historical, political, and cultural/symbolic awareness will determine whether anticaste activists have a fighting chance to shift the discourse about caste toward unmet needs and rights and, in turn, change the structure of Indian society and model the change they desire. A few final narrative reconstructions from my research field notes further help to illustrate both the interconnection and dynamic tension between simultaneously working for identity, rights, and awareness among the wide-ranging anticaste movements and activists described in this book. ON FIRST MEETING A YOUNG BAMCEF CADRE The complexities of bridging the many levels and dynamics of anticaste movement often become visible in mundane interactions between anticaste activists constrained by movement identities and narratives of awareness. Epiphanies come at the beginning, middle, and ends of research work. On July 16, 2016, the second day of my 2016 research trip to India, I made my first on-the-ground contact with the BAMCEF social movement. It was almost a decade since I had first visited Nagaloka Institute and it was just turning dark at this center of TBMSG Dalit activism in Nagpur, Maharashtra. Over a decade I had only begun to understand the many fissures within anticaste activist circles. Sachin, a young BAMCEF cadre and contact, arrived right as the last rays of the sun disappeared behind the trees of TBMSG’s vast Ambedkar Buddhist training institute. Dapper and welldressed, he confidently strolled into TBMSG’s open-air cafeteria with his motorcycle helmet tucked under his arm. I had just finished an informal interview and discussion over dinner with Dharmachari Vivekaratna, the managing director of TBMSG’s Nagaloka Institute. When Sachin entered, though never having met me, he immediately approached me, his obvious interlocutor, as the only non-native Westerner on Nagaloka’s campus that evening. When I explained to Vivekaratna, who himself is in his sixties, that this young man was an acquaintance from BAMCEF, the unease on Vivekaratna’s face became palpable. A tension was suddenly in the air that was reminiscent of my experience almost ten years earlier on first visiting Dikshabhumi (discussed in this book’s introduction). Amorphous and hazy, this tension was subtle yet clearly noticeable. After mutual acknowledgment with the Indian trademark slight bob of the head, quickly Vivekaratna took his leave and I was sitting with Sachin and one of his young friends whom he brought along for the experience, both of whom I had just met. Clearly Sachin was the elder of this two-person local BAMCEF cadre and traveling training unit.

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Sachin, as both elder and senior within the movement, did all the talking during this first evening interaction. Part hierarchy and part personality, Sachin’s confidence was discombobulating and somewhat disconcerting. Despite my attempts to explain my research goals and decade-long history in India among anticaste activists, Sachin had already socially positioned me as an outsider incapable of truly understanding caste injustice and its effects. His demeanor also seemed to skirt the power distance typically created by age (I was clearly at least two decades older than him and noted as much in my description of my past trips to India). Repeatedly beginning his own statements with “you are not from here, so,” 31 it was extremely difficult to build any type of rapport or relationship with Sachin. I wondered what had caused the ground to shift so perceptibly in this unique interaction with an anticaste activist. Rapport was not something I had ever had this much difficulty creating with any other anticaste activist. TMBSG and PVCHR activists had always seemed eager to share their stories with an outsider and hear my impression of their social difficulties. So why was this interaction with Sachin so much more strained than others I had previously had with other activists? Was it his youth, my feeling of rapidly advancing age, the context of meeting at Nagaloka, or something else that was constraining our connection? Maybe it was his militant and unbending belief in the work of BAMCEF and/or his unassailable construction of a, until now, silent indigenous majority in Indian society? It was as if we were talking past each other. For a long time afterwards I reflected on whether our labored fist conversation was due to an interpersonal friction, his youth, strident movement ideology, or something else entirely. Over time I have come to realize that issues of ally-ship and social positioning, though subtle in most intercultural interactions with anticaste activists, was front and center during this initial interaction with Sachin, the first BAMCEF interlocutor I had met with in person in India. I, as a white Western male, obviously could never understand the oppression that a low-caste Indian daily experiences. “Only those who have suffered this anguish [caste-based oppression and marginalization] know its sting.” 32 But how could I adequately explain to him that such understanding was not what I was looking for? My goal has always been not to simply understand the experience of oppression or develop empathy for the victims of marginalization, but rather to find ways and means, working as an ally, to transform systems and structures that make such oppression and social marginalization possible and resistant to change. Always cognizant of the relational complexities of conflict intervention praxis, I pride myself on being vigilant about attempts at such change being as much internal to social movements as external to them. As an educator my desire has always been to empower others through theory and knowledge. The logic by which people mobilize to resist marginalization by the elites matters greatly, and I have long argued that this logic is largely constituted

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through narrative storytelling. 33 As a social constructionist, I rely on the power of stories to influence the dynamics of social and structural change, for truth is to some important degree always relative. Of course, this does not mean that we cannot build knowledge of collective’s lived experience or use this knowledge to change structures that are perceived as unjust. “[M]arginality isn’t incidental—the very means of coming together, of constituting a new public, is an attack on how the center is constituted.” 34 But narrative naming, framing, and shaming is more than just outward attack on others, it is inward definition of movement meaning and goals. Sachin’s attempts at the “first-order positioning” 35 of me as someone unable, yet desiring, to understand his victimhood represents a social position that I was unwilling to inhabit, thereby conditioning my own attempts at “second-order positioning.” 36 Knowing that such social positioning reifies and strengthens the caste system, my resistance to Sachin’s positioning, in turn, strengthened his insistence upon it. This escalatory cycle of ego-centered positioning is an important dynamic in why the privileged and oppressed often speak past each other and fail to build dialogic public space between the center and periphery of culture and society. Again, quoting Cobb, “we know that positions are socially constructed. And we know how the positions, as described, are constructed . . . we know that negative positions contribute to the creation of conflict. What we do not know is how delegitimate positions are transformed, in and through the evolution of narrative.” 37 Part of the how-to of transforming illegitimate positions seems to rest squarely on dialogue and storytelling. If we do not have the public space to collectively explore and dialogue the evolution of meaning about long delegitimized social positions, then how can true social transformation occur? My interaction with Sachin on this first meeting is illustrative of even anticaste activist’s ability, wittingly or unwittingly, to close off narrative possibilities for change. This is not a critique of Sachin or BAMCEF ideology per se, but of unreflective and uncritical attempts to explore the diverse and intersecting worldviews embedded within anticaste narratives. While distrust, ideology, and methodological differences exist between anticaste movements, the stories activists tell are often similar. They express similar grievances and project similar possible solutions to the problems of social injustice. Emphasis may be placed on different aspects of the lowcaste experience, but the shared symbols, heroes, archetypes, and rituals 38 of low-caste culture and worldview resonate across the social movements studied in this book. The nonverbal dynamics of the interaction between BAMCEF’s Sachin and TBMSG’s Vivekaratna are a rare public example of the discursive and ideological tension between anticaste movement activists, despite their shared cultural and discursive terrain. These interactions are not often publically visible, and when they are, conflict avoidance is the typical activists’ conflict style 39 of choice to maintain social harmony within anti-

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caste resistance generally and in the face of caste-ist forces. The need for a public face of unity masks underlying ideological competition among anticaste movements. This dynamic is evident both in the large group vignettes that I describe in the introduction of the book, as well as in micro interactions like those between me, Sachin, and Vivekaratna, described above. “It is the actual conversations which have already occurred that are the archetypes of current conversations.” 40 Rarely is there public opportunity to discuss and dialogue about differences within the anticaste fold of Indian society, and the subtle patterns which create and recreate them. Despite the fact that differences in strategy, tactics, and ideology obviously exist, the potentials in anticaste narrative patterns are, therefore, missed. Often the need for mobilizing opposition to injustice outweighs the need to process strategic difference and contrasts in ideological emphasis. “Social movements comprise people with immensely diverse beliefs and persuasions. Volume in numbers is often linked to success, hence the importance of including as broad a spectrum of population as possible.” 41 In social justice movements, this need for mobilization, or volume in numbers, often clashes with the need for open and honest dialogue about disagreements and the possibilities of taking different tact in addressing new challenges and emerging political opportunities. In anti-racist circles in the United States, this dynamic is often expressed in movements’ fears of airing their dirty laundry. Still, the strategic use of movement storytelling can fill the space created by a vacuum in inter-movement dialogue. Stories as meaning-making convey movement differences in subtle ways and underscore the important need for collaborative emphasis on identity, rights, and awareness. Given the inherent need in social change movements to consistently present a strong public face of the movement, any appearance of disagreement is often perceived as weakness and is assumed to hurt the movement. In fact, disagreement could bred strength in opposition if done in coordinated and transparent ways. Although a particular movement’s public face often leads to distrust and lack of anticaste movement coordination, activists’ stories can both mediate and complicate this distrustful and uncoordinated dynamic. Of course, stories do not act to change discourse overnight, but rather over time. Overcoming old beliefs and habits in social justice movements can take time, and narratives need consistent reinforcement to hold. Some have even linked this need for movements’ unified message as much to institutionalized funding as to an innate belief in uniformity for mass mobilization. For example, in linking the growth of the “Nonprofit Industrial Complex” in the 1990s and early 2000s to the “institutionalizing of dissent,” Meckfessel (2107) argues “the demands of institutional survival are often quite different than those of forcing social change, or even just helping people.” 42 The fact that each of the social movements organizations studied in this book are organized as nonprofit trusts, institutionalizes certain limits on their ability to

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speak with a collective voice and operate outside the institutionalized, and institutionalizing, systems of the state. Still, the public stories that movements tell rarely place their movement members in vulnerable positions, even if it is those vulnerable positions that may act to build solidarity and mobilize support from diverse corners of Indian society. This dialectic reality of social movements, by no mean endemic to anticaste social movements in India, conditions the stories activists tell and maintains hardened boundaries between anticaste activists with seemingly similar grievances and goals. The desire to grow the movement by constructing shared symbols, heroes, archetypes, and rituals, therefore, has a sort of norming effect on the types of narratives individual social movements tell and proliferate. While much of the differences between anticaste movements stems from ideological and strategic disagreement, as much as from institutional and organizational arrangements, the stories that activists privilege sustain the differences among anticaste activists and maintain hidden boundaries, or borders, between them. These boundaries, both real and yet largely invisible, elide easy notice, or critical attention, by many activists and social movement scholars alike. Sachin’s insistence on building a secular Sangha—the Mulnivasi Sangha—is evangelical in similar ways that TBMSG’s rhetorical calls for a pan-Indian Buddhist Sangha assumes a future tipping point for mass mobilization and revolutionary change. Still, the ideological overlap seems to be outweighed by hidden borders embedded in these movements’ discursive choices. Just as PVCHR’s insistence on a neo-Dalit movement is tinged with Marxist class analysis, BAMCEF’s call for the Mulnivasi Bahujan (indigenous majority) incites similar class-based grievance to arise. While the broad goals of the mass organizing may be relatively congruent, the ideological starting points, identity positions, and narrative choices activists make help to maintain separate but equal in-groups among anticaste activists. Unable, and/ or unwilling, to listen to others, even if their social identity, economically marginalized social position, and level of awareness of oppression may be relatively congruent, activists get stuck in their social positions and reinforce them with dominant movement narratives. Similar to how I was socially positioned by Sachin in our first meeting, anticaste activists are positioned by competing anticaste activists and discursively constrained by this positioning. 43 An internal and external divide and rule conditions the world of anticaste activism. The stories anticaste activists currently tell, therefore, sift and sort resistance identities into bounded and conditioned responses to injustice; responses that socially position activists as more or less willing to overturn the entire political and economic structure of the system. In the democratic free market of ideas, public dialogue among ideologically distinct anticaste activists becomes fraught and labored and these bounded categories of anticaste resistance get solidified and calcified upon a narrowed spectrum of

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dissent. None of this benefits the goals of the wider anticaste movement and limits its reach and potential. To be clear, the discursive processes describe above are not the fault of anticaste activists, but they are reified and recreated by them (as well as by elite interests in maintaining an unequal status quo). Important connections to the current neoliberal era of international globalization should not be lost here. Social movement activists seemingly on the periphery of global processes are, in fact, embedded and imbricated in them in complex ways. The creation of open and deregulated economic free markets, mass consumerism, and ever-growing gaps between rich and poor at the international level have profound impacts on anticaste activists’ ability to mount coordinated resistance based on identity, rights, and awareness. “By shutting down whatever limited sphere of deliberation that might once have been available for working out conflicts before they explode, neoliberalism offers the poor and disenfranchised a dismal choice: silence or violence.” 44 Neoliberal political and economic order shifts dissent in a militant direction and widens previously unimportant, or unnoticed, boundaries among social justice movement activists. Anticaste movements are not immune from these global dynamic processes. Like social movements in other national contexts, many activists’ discursive stances and expressions come from the anger and frustration born of many years within an oppressive status quo. Increasingly limited space to voice this frustration, due to both class compression and proliferation of a “nonprofit industrial complex,” 45 leaves the potential for aggression alive and the outlets for sharing of stories and coordinating nonviolent approaches to dissent almost non-existent. In leaving little room for non-aggressive reform, 46 movements are divided and frustrated in their approaches to change. Within this context, previously unimportant or unnoticed distinctions between social movement activists become increasingly important and easily reproduced and reinforced through activists’ stories. Endeavoring to understand stories’ power to impact social processes, I, of course, must listen to emotional stories of caste injustice and attempt to develop a familiarity and proximity with this unique form of suffering. But this familiarity and proximity is not the end goal—it cannot be my main mechanism for fostering true transformation of the caste system. Such consciousness, empathy, and identity may be an initial step for the marginalized in creating social change, but this work must be connected to a strategic platform, a platform that develops the space and structure for narrative agency among anticaste communities, for social change to occur. Through insisting on being consistently vigilant about intentionally placing the agency for change among the people who have experienced, and in turn, tell (and retell) such stories of suffering, an anticaste peacebuilding platform must facilitate opportunities for difficult stories to be shared between anticaste activists from different movement backgrounds and ideologies. My belief has always

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been that in providing the space and structure for those affected by caste-ism to retell their stories, their own agency will be underscored in ways that allow for coordinated approaches to systemic change. Beyond the elliptical character of such injustice stories and their ability to mobilize social activism, 47 stories, as raw expression of others’ experiences, are more than research data, they are the primary instruments for coordinated pro-social change. In the right hands, such stories are platforms for social transformation in the war against oppression. Coupled with generational cleavages and interpersonal rivalries, anticaste activists’ discursive differences help to reinforce both symbolic and actual differences between anticaste social movements. Although, increasingly these differences may have little discursive space to fully develop and mature, creating such space for difference is critical for achieving the anticaste activist goals of annihilating caste. As I argued early in this book, activists armed with discursive awareness become more effective agents of structural change from below. The stories that anticaste activists tell are both opening and constraining of structural change. The failure of activists to develop the rhetorical devices to look critically at their own stories is limiting of anticaste collaboration and mass mobilization for structural change. In short, while the internal differences among anticaste movement activists are a result of individual movement’s relative foci on identity, rights, and awareness, anticaste activists awareness of narrative’s role in developing and maintaining these foci can build unified direction and coordination among these movements. Though this role for narrative is often under-appreciated, the more activists’ come to appreciate the power of their language formations to simultaneously frame, name, and shame, the more likely coordinated and effective change will come. How rights, identity, and awareness are narratively framed and controlled across various movements’ activists, in turn conditions the strategic space for collaborative systems change. It is not the difference in ideological focus that constrains anticaste social movements, it is the lack of critical attention and embrace of this difference that hampers the realization of longterm structural change. Realizing that difference is resource, not just a constraint or limitation, and can have powerful impact on the anticaste fight should activists move past their preconceived conceptions and positioning of the motives of other anticaste activists. Sachin and Vivekaratna, representative of two distinct anticaste movements, share a narrative agency, that if given the space and structure to develop, could lead to collaborative action for change.

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EMBRACING DIFFERENCE: THE ROLE OF HEROES AND SYMBOLS IN DEVELOPING COLLABORATIVE SOCIAL ACTION AND AGENCY Of course, the distrust between anticaste movements is itself tied up in castebased social constructions. Anticaste movements themselves are obviously not immune from caste-based consciousness and jealousy. The insider/outsider constructions that all the social movements studied in this book are trying to annihilate within Indian society are, of course, in some sense, reified through the institutional and discursive practices of these movements themselves. Failed awareness of these dynamics, I have argued, represents the greatest threat to coordinated and successful anticaste social transformation. More than lip service to difference, the social space to comparatively analyze this difference is desperately needed within Indian society. The identity creation of TBMSG while developing Buddhist’s self-esteem is also discursively juxtaposing them with a Hindu majority Other. The educational awareness and identity of the Mulnivasi Bahujan, advocated by BAMCEF activists, while doing much to build inter-caste linkages among the marginalized, still maintains a seemingly insurmountable boundary between the powerful and the weak. Finally, while the rights frame of a movement like PVCHR is attempting to rethink the insider/outsider dichotomy as not caste or religious based but human-centered, the movement assumes an international set of cosmopolitan values that many in Indian society are not in a place to fully appreciate or accept. Rights-based agitation, therefore, often labels a movement like PVCHR as anti-national reifying its own set of unique boundaries. Put in the words of the former director of the Indian Institute for Dalit Studies, “The notion of ‘human rights’ under the Hindu social system takes a specific meaning. It becomes clear that unlike other human societies, the Hindu social order in its classical form does not recognize the individual and his distinctiveness as the center of social purpose.” 48 The nation and community, in the Indian collectivist context, assumes a more privileged position than the individual. The rights-based focus, and its link with neoliberal economic progress and individualism, can be seen to fly in the face of Indian cultural norms of collectivism and historical power relationships. The failure of each of these movements to work to annihilate caste without reifying social boundaries points not to out right failure, but rather, to the need for the anticaste movement’s coordination, collaboration, and dialogue. All the movements studied herein operate within a collectivist and pro-nationalist Indian context. Distrust, competition, and ideological perceptions stop anticaste activists from coming together and dialoging about their differences, sharing stories about their similarities, and, thereby, building potential solidarities. The status quo of the Indian state is the only winner in such a reality. Put another way, the “multiple ways of being either an insider

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or an outsider” 49 in these communities complicates an already complicated straight caste-centric analysis of the constraints to creating enduring social and structural change. Nation, caste, class, and country all provide the grounds for both stasis and change. These social constructions, like caste, position activists and condition their narrative voice. Heroes and symbols represent an important means to build this anticaste movement dialogue and future solidarity, but heroes and symbols are rarely discussed critically between activists from different anticaste movements. TBMSG’s narrative organizing around newly converted Ambedkar Buddhist identity provides untapped opportunities to understand the movement’s future-going justice ideal and engage a diversity of others to make that ideal real. But many Ambedkar Buddhists I have encountered rely on Dr. B. R Ambedkar as the sole possible archetype for change, thereby excluding other heroes and archetypes. BAMCEF’s mobilization around historical re-education presents space to engage in dialogue about not just who the marginalized are, but also how they became who they are. Still, the heroes of the past, especially Jyotirao Phule and Bhim Rao Ambedkar, seem to be over-relied on, as opposed to present-day leaders, in foreshadowing this change. And PVCHR’s rights-based agitation can create space for diverse identity positions to share their past trauma, but where are the spaces and structures in India society for these traumas to be heard outside these marginalized communities? In short, who are the modern leaders that will facilitate broad anticaste collaboration? Among these movements there seems to remain a need for institution building and leadership. This is the paradox that I continue to return to in my decade long study of anticaste movement in India. How can the encouragement of the formation of a strong Buddhist identity (or indigenous identity) include those who feel disenfranchised (or more minimally unmotivated) by this new identity? And how can a new generation of anticaste leaders develop the legitimacy among the marginalized to develop this inclusive identity of rights-based awareness, as well as the institutions to sustain it? It seems that outside of creating awareness or establishing democratic rights, the creation of nonviolent transition to a casteless society will be difficult. Such nonviolent revolution will require dedicated leaders who are fully aware of the power of their narrative agency and identity as anticaste leaders. It will require broad-based acceptance of these leaders as not from any one community, but from the nation or world. Ambedkar and Phule had such awareness and acceptance, but they are gone. In retelling yet another story from one of my earliest research trips, I hope to further illustrate one suggestion of what anticaste movement coordination and future decentralized and coordinated leadership could look like.

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THE MANUSKI GANG: THE MAKING OF NEW AND DECENTRALIZED ARCHETYPES OF SOCIAL CHANGE Social actors’ narrative constructions are inseparable from their deeper value commitments. Although there is a dearth of anticaste coordination between the movements I have presented, some of the initiatives developed by younger activists do seem to realize this gap and challenge in the work of a broader anticaste movement. Through recourse and dedicated attention to actors’ own narrative constructions, I have argued, social movement activists in all these movements can mediate multiple identities, navigate complex power asymmetries, and realize a collective re-positioning of a better coordinated anticaste movement. Despite this argument, how such a peacebuilding platform can be created remains abstract and fuzzy. The “young guns” 50 at TBMSG’s Manuski Center in Pune, Maharashtra, illustrate an ongoing process of developing new heroes and archetypes within anticaste movement that may provide a clue to more decentralized forms of nonviolent change. When I first began studying Dalit social movement, I was put in touch with Dharmachari Lokamitra, the head of the TBMSG movement, by my master’s degree advisor and mentor, Dr. David Chappell, then teaching at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. David had spent years studying BuddhistChristian dialogue and the many connections between institutionalized religion and cultures of peace. He believed that Dharmachari Lokamitra was visionary in his approach to Buddhist Peaceworks, describing him as “[p]erhaps the leader who best embodies the mosaic of diversity and commonality, of the old and the new” 51 in his book with the aforementioned title. In selflessly opening both the perceptive and material doors for me to connect with Lokamitra and the world of the TBMSG movement, David facilitated my initial interest in, and connection to, Lokamitra and the many questions about anticaste leadership that continue to swirl in my head to this day. David, as an archetype and hero for me, facilitated a relational connection to the engaged Buddhism of the TBMSG movement and a clear bridge between religious values and peace. Upon hearing about my doctoral research interests, Lokamitra immediately suggested that I talk to the group of “twenty somethings” 52 he had just recently hired to build what he saw as the most important project of the Jambudvipa Trust, the Manuski Center. The Jambudvipa Trust was founded by Lokamitra in 1999 to act as a more flexible arm for anticaste work and international funding acquisition than either the TBMSG movement or its ordinal parent organization, the TBM Trust. Jambudvipa runs a number of inter-related programs that are aimed at two areas of societal transformation: the support of “disadvantaged sections” of Indian society and “bringing people together through spiritual practice to transcend barriers.” 53 These two rather broad aims find their life in the work of the Manuski Center, the Pune-

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based home of Jambudvipa’s largest and fullest staffed project. As “one of the most significant words used by Dr. Ambedkar, [Manuski] has connotations of humanity, compassion, and respect.” 54 Run by local members from various scheduled caste backgrounds, the Manuski Center embodies Dr. Ambedkar’s call to organize, educate, and agitate. In developing a network of activists, the Manuski Center has, since 1999, been instrumental in organizing activism in response to atrocities against Dalits, developing TBMSG’s Ambedkar Buddhist training center at Nagaloka, organizing inter-caste hostels and education programs, and responding to natural disasters across India, among much else. The Manuski Center is best understood as part of a family of organizations and projects all operated and supported by members of the TBMSG movement. Given my own age and interests, I was quickly flung into the orbit of the Manuski Center and its network of young activists. This network approach to creating change is critically important and Manuski’s network development as a platform for change is similar to work I have earlier described in both the PVCHR’s inter-caste-managed office and BAMCEF cadre-based movement. By far the largest personality at the Manuski Center is that of Mangesh Dahiwale. A former civil servant in India’s Commerce Ministry, Mangesh had been part of the Indian delegation negotiating the Doha Round of World Trade Organization talks for the Indian government and has a larger-than-life confidence and personality that quickly infects others. From the start, Mangesh and I became friends, and I was drawn in by his charismatic orbit, leadership, and mentorship of a small group of young activists. The Manuski Center in 2008 when I first visited was a close-knit family of “young guns” 55—mostly male and middle class—that had an energy and creativity that was infectious. They lived and worked together, like a modern Sangha, with the young men living in a rented apartment literally right next door to the Manuski Center in Pune. Around the clock, life and work were intermingled with meals, recreation, and joking. The Manuski Center’s rights work flowing seamlessly together with the familiarity born of living together developed the energy and impact of this small group of activists and created impressive synergies and creativity. Mangesh, the leader of the clique, a bachelor as were all the others then employed at Manuski, worked at building relationship and networks. In an ideal season of their lives where their dedication to the cause was inseparable from their lives, these activists were not only forming networks across India, but also modeling their own local network of identity support and rights awareness. Such local networks form the core of what could become wider platforms for social change. In the case of the Manuski Center’s young guns, a platform was built for a season, but as change in the lives of this group happened this organic platform was reconstituted, adapted, and changed.

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Participant observation with these activists over three and a half weeks in 2008 forms what I now understand is the foundation of my own views on understanding of modern caste resistance. Immediately included into this activist network, though I was about five years older than its oldest members, I was able to see how this group’s diverse experiences of marginalization shaped their worldview as activists and informed the life choices they already made in their young lives. Mangesh had resigned from a coveted civil service position, a taboo act in Indian society, and, to this day, garners a level of legitimacy among young activists for this single unselfish act. One of the young students that helped translate for me in 2008 often spoke with reverence about Mangesh’s history, 56 though Mangesh personally preferred not to speak directly about it. Instead, Mangesh promoted a sense of lifelong learning, critical thinking, and humble Buddhist philosophical outlook among this local network of activists. Every context was related to caste issues and every context was shared and reflected on as it impacted the work of Manuski. No context, be it family, friends, or personal finances, in this communal society is ever far from work, but in the case of Manuski this communal relationship was even more pronounced. In this network of activists, all roads literally lead back to the common denominator of caste. One evening I was invited over to the young guns apartment, which was next door to the Manuski Center, for a movie. I was staying in a guest room at Manuski Center and spending my entire day with Manuski activists. Though I was tired from a long day of interviews and participant observation, after dinner I headed over to the two-bedroom apartment of the young Manuski staff (at this time the staff was all male). Once there the group (or Mangesh?) decided to watch the movie Glory, which was projected on one wall of the larger bedroom with six activists and myself sitting on the unrolled bedding on the floor. In some sense Mangesh had strategically chosen the 1989 movie Glory, 57 the story of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (played by Matthew Broderick) and his role as leader of the U.S. Civil War’s first African-American regiment. The nonfictional storyline was inspirational and uplifting for these activists, and immediately following the movie an impromptu discussion followed. Mangesh assumed the role of de facto facilitator and began asking me questions about the accuracy of the film. The most interesting thing about this exchange was the desire on the part of Manuski activists to draw connections between America’s long history of racial injustice and Indian caste. By expanding their own repertoire and knowledge about leadership and resistance to race, Manuski activists were building a platform for their own role as leaders of caste change. Despite the reliance on historical heroes, like Colonel Shaw and Dr. Martin Luther King, or Phule and Ambedkar, these activists were aware of the implications these stories had on the present.

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The difference between the story told in the film Glory and the stories of many Ambedkar Buddhists is that Shaw’s story is a story of ally-ship. Sure, TBMSG is founded out of British Buddhist desire for ally-ship with Ambedkar Buddhists, but within the Indian context of caste, the story of allyship is seldom told. High-caste allies in the movements I have studied is rare at best. While Manuski Center activists realized the need to share such stories and develop platforms for change in their context, their own stories rarely reach high castes in Indian society. Film is an important medium to share this story, and they hoped that in the future films about Dalit leaders would be made. While their coming together in a tight network, or Sangha, is the start of developing a long-term peacebuilding platform, Manuski, like other movements, has struggled to sustain such a platform and widen the platform’s circle over time. How to sustain a transformative approach to anticaste work that increasingly widens the circle of activists to include the privileged higher castes is briefly explored in the epilogue of this book. While not intended to represent a comprehensive strategy to developing identity, rights, and awareness, ending the book as it started is aimed at pointing future activists and researchers toward the narrative competency and agency required for strategic change of an entrenched caste system. Anticaste activists must learn to strategically deploy narratives that broaden the experience of non-Dalits and discursively engage even those that exhibit power-over. A movie like Glory was effective in doing that in an American context—what are the cultural reference points to anchor narrative change about caste? By no means aimed at simplifying the complexities of power and privilege inherent in caste dialogue and contact, developing a peacebuilding platform that assumes epilogue as simply prologue and one step forward may require two steps backward is required. This has been the goal of this book—to move both the marginalized and the privileged to think creatively to use discourse to change entrenched systems of oppression. The stories I have told are not meant to elicit sympathy, but rather thoughtful action toward peace. CONCLUSIONS: LEADERSHIP AND CAPACITY BUILDING TOWARD DISCURSIVE CHANGE In each of the three anticaste social movements organizations studied one can see the early phases of development of modern anticaste solidarity and collaboration. Some have called for a Post-Hindu India in which the “antiproduction and anti-scientific ethic” of “Brahmanical Hinduism” 58 are overcome by Dalit-Bahujan community. But in order to achieve the leadership and capacity for such a collaborative approach to be more than polemical, Dalits and the marginalized have to develop shared leaders and strategic narratives. Slowly the Dalit masses are gaining education and expertise—the

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capacity they need to lead their movements into a new dawn of change and collaboration. If these new Dalit professionals can resist the lure of neoliberal capitalism and socio-economic advancement enough to devote their life’s work to educating, agitating, and organizing all their fellow Indian citizens, regardless of social status, then change in the caste system could rapidly evolve. But all this remains speculative without platforms for narrative agency and social transformation. What follows is epilogue as hopeful prologue to this collaborative leadership and capacity. NOTES 1. Richard Rubenstein and Frank Blechman, “Introduction: Conflict Resolution and Social Justice,” Journal of Peace and Conflict Studies, 6: 1 and 2, 1999, 2. 2. See Doug McAdam, John McCarthy, and Mayer Zald, eds., Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 3. John Dollard, Neal E. Miller, Leonard W. Doob, O. H. Mowrer, and Robert R. Sears, Frustration and Aggression (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1939). 4. Doug McAdam, “The Framing of Movement Tactics: Strategic Dramaturgy in the American Civil Rights Movement,” in McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald (eds.), Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 339. 5. John McCarthy, “Constraints and Opportunities in Adopting, Adapting, and Inventing,” in McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald (eds.), Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 141–51. 6. Sara Cobb, Speaking of Violence, 155. 7. Hilde Lindemann Nelson, Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), quoted in Sara Cobb, Speaking of Violence, 157–58. 8. Many scholars argue that Dalit literature and writing is a form of social movement itself, an argument that closely supports the argument for developing strategic narrative agency that I have been making in this book. See, in particular, Omprakash Valmiki, Joothan: An Untouchable’s Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Valmiki argues that Dalit writing “is not just a school of writing but sees itself as part of a social movement for equality and justice” (Valmiki, Joothan, x). See also Vivek Kumar, India’s Roaring Revolution: Dalit Assertions and New Horizons (New Delhi: Ganandeep Publications, 2006). 9. Francesca Polletta, It Was Like a Fever, 7. 10. Michel Foucault, quoted in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), 59. 11. Shon Meckfessel, Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used To Be: Unarmed Insurrection and the Rhetoric of Resistance (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 5. 12. Ibid., 5. 13. John Paul Lederach, Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation Across Cultures (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 55. 14. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990). 15. Vivian Jabri, Discourses on Violence: Conflict Analysis Reconsidered, 95. 16. Sara Cobb, Speaking of Violence, 5. 17. Ibid., 5. 18. Ibid., 107. 19. Ibid., 81. Cobb discusses the process of what she calls “narrative compression” (266–67), a process in which dominant storylines close off other possible storylines, thereby

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flattening characters (social actors) into prescribed and controlled roles. She cogently argues that the work of realizing these processes and developing the “flattened” stories of the marginalized has been under-attended, for a host of reasons, in the work of conflict transformation and reconciliation. 20. Linda Alcoff and Satya Mohanty, “Reconsidering Identity Politics: An Introduction,” in Alcoff, Hames-Garcia, Mohanty, and Moya, eds., Identity Politics Reconsidered (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 3. 21. Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction, second edition (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 7. 22. Omprakash Valmiki, Joothan, xviii. Valmiki explores the etymological roots of the term “Dalit” through reference to the cracking or breaking of Dal (lentils) in Indian cooking. 23. Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani, Social Movements, 29. 24. Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani, Social Movements, 21. 25. Sara Cobb, Speaking of Violence, 5. 26. Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, “Collective Protests: A Critique of Resource Mobilization Theory,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 4:4 (summer 1991), 435. Quoted in Paul Engler and Mark Engler, This is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt is Shaping the Twenty-first Century (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 44. 27. Vivek Kumar, India’s Roaring Revolution, 32. 28. Marie Dugan, “A Nested Theory of Conflict,” op. cit. 29. Bali Sahota, “The Paradoxes of Dalit Cultural Politics,” in Manu Bhagavan and Anne Feldhaus, eds., Claiming Power from Below: Dalits and the Subaltern Question in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), 204. 30. Lenin Raghuvanshi, “Can the Neo-Dalit Movement Eradicate Emerging Fascism in India?” Different Truths, November 24, 2015, http://differenttruths.com/governance/politics/ can-the-neo-dalit-movement-eradicate-emerging-facism-in-india/—accessed October 8, 2017. 31. Personal communication with Sachin Shende, July 16, 2016. 32. Omprakash Valmiki, Joothan, xiv. 33. See in particular Jeremy Rinker, “Why Should We Talk to People Who Do Not Want to Talk to Us? Inter-Caste Dialogue As A Response To Caste-Based Marginalization,” Peace and Change, 38:2 (April 2013): 237–62; and, “Narrative Reconciliation as Rights-Based Peace Praxis: Custodial Torture, Testimonial Therapy and Overcoming Marginalization,” Peace Research: The Canadian Journal of Peace and Conflict Studies 46:1 (2016), 121–43. 34. Shon Meckfessel, Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used To Be, 48. 35. Ram Harré and Luk Van Langenhove, Positioning Theory: Moral Contexts of Intentional Action (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 20. 36. Ibid., 20. 37. Sara Cobb, Speaking of Violence, 614. 38. I am reliant on Geert Hofstede’s defining of national dimensions of culture here and his metaphor of culture as an onion. See Geert Hofstede, Culture and Organizations: Software of the Mind (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2010), 7–9. 39. Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilman, Thomas-Kilman Conflict Mode Instrument (Mountain View, CA: CPP, Inc., 1974). 40. Ram Harré and Luk Van Langenhove, Positioning Theory, 33. 41. Mary Elizabeth King, Gandhian Nonviolent Struggle and Untouchability in South India: The 1924–25 Vykom Satyagraha and Mechanisms of Change (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015), 265. 42. Shon Meckfessel, Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used To Be, 26–27. 43. See Harré and Langenhove (1999), op. cit. 44. Shon Meckfessel, Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used To Be, 18. 45. Ibid., 26. 46. See John Dollard, Neal E. Miller, Leonard W. Doob, O. H. Mowrer, and Robert R. Sears, Frustration and Aggression (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1939). 47. See Jeremy Rinker, “Why Should We Talk to People Who Do Not Want to Talk to Us? Inter-Caste Dialogue as a Response to Caste-Based Marginalization,” Peace and Change, 38,

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no. 2 (April 2013), 237–62. See also Polletta, It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics, 43–45. 48. Sukhadeo Thorat, “Ambedkar's Interpretation of the Caste System, its Economic Consequences and Suggested Remedies,” in S. M. Michael (ed.), Dalits in Modern India: Vision and Values, second ed. (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2007), 288. 49. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, second edition (New York: Zed Books, 2012), 138. 50. Personal interview with Dharmachari Lokamitra, October 2006. 51. David Chappell, ed., Buddhist Peacework: Creating Cultures of Change (Sommerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1999), 19. 52. E-mail communication with Dharmachari Lokamitra, September 2005. 53. From Padmapani, the annual review of the Jambudvipa Trust, 2007–2008, 3. 54. Manuski (Informational Brochure) (2008), front cover. 55. Personal interview with Dharmachari Lokamitra, October 2006. 56. Informal discussions with Prashant Niswade, June 2008. 57. Edward Zwick, Glory (Hollywood, CA: Sony Pictures, 1989). 58. Kancha Ilaiah, Post-Hindu-India: A Discourse on Dalit-Bahujan, Socio-Spiritual and Scientific Revolution (New Delhi: Sage, 2009), ix.

Epilogue The Making of Discursive Change Platforms and Writing from the Periphery as a Form of Resistance toward the Dominant Center

At the end of this project, as I reflect on writing from the periphery of these movements for the annihilation of caste, I remain in awe of the transformative power of words. Despite both the achievements of so many marginalized Dalits, and the daunting nature of the work that lies ahead of them, I remain convinced that stories matter greatly. From the transformational view, developing a process to provide a solution to these immediate conflicts or problems is important, but not the key. More important in the long run is generating processes that: (1) provide adaptive responses to the immediate and future repetition of conflict episodes; and (2) address deeper and longer-term relational and systemic patterns that produce violent, destructive expressions of conflict. 1

When I think about my own role in this work, as a scholar-practitioner that sees my work in the light of a future socially just world, I am both excited and pessimistic. Far away from India, in North Carolina, what kind of an impact can I really have on the lives of Dalits half a world away? Will anyone read this account of my anticaste movement field notes and conflict analysis? From my social position these may be the wrong questions to ask. In a sense there is no such thing as a periphery. To stay woke, 2 artificial divisions must be continually addressed and any sense that others’ experiences of injustice do not impact me must be put to rest. We are all interconnected—your trauma and pain have impacts, even if subtle, on me and my 189

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life. This fills me with excitement to be alive and in movement, whether in the periphery or the center. The stories outlined in the proceeding pages are at times nostalgic and at others depressing. The all-powerful force of caste marginalization and oppression presents a complex array of problems to solve. But more than solving problems, a lens of transformation must be applied to help set the problems and narratively frame them. Following John Paul Lederach’s (1997) idea that frameworks provide “the general parameters, the boundary outline that helps create meaning and focus,” 3 I have attempted to use activists’ narratives as lenses upon which to help activists strategically build and situate a justpeace. As we have seen, situating caste conflict in Indian society can be extremely complicated. I have argued through the proceeding pages that, through the critical lens of activists’ narratives, developing a comparative analytical framework for transforming caste conflict through social movement is possible. Having read the stories and reasoning in the proceeding pages, readers may still feel this framework is ambiguous or too theoretical. This ambiguity is in some sense intentional, as effective stories require a degree of ambiguity, 4 leaving readers with this sense I hope to inspire more research and creative thinking. This ambiguity must be analyzed and filled in, as failure to do so misses the fact that this openness to interpretation “can also generate political resources” 5 for activists. To the charge of too theoretical, I confess I am energized by interconnections in social theory and I would argue that theory is a critical informant for any practice. The veneer of social conflict and tension that eclipses all anticaste movement in India is in need of frameworks or platforms to integrate strategic storytelling about caste injustice and transformation with a unified message of identity, rights, and awareness. This platform is at once theoretical and practical. Still the question from my prologue remains: how do we tell the stories to make meaning of who we are, while simultaneously transforming conflict, as opposed to simply managing it? Peace in terms of caste conflict can by no means indicate the development of a status quo. The following thoughts, by way of epilogue, return to the introduction to ground answers to the question of developing transformative justice in the process of resolving who we are. Returning to my initial experiences at Dikshabhumi in Nagpur, the center of Indian anticaste hero Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s most radical act—Buddhist conversion, it is clear that any peacebuilding platform rests on challenging peoples most deeply held convictions. Ambedkar’s conversion away from Hinduism is a watershed moment in the history of resistance to caste. It awakens a multitude of low castes to their oppression and forms the base of a platform for their nonviolent agency and resistance. “Whatever we had to be told was said by Ambedkar. His teachings are finished, his speaking finished, his commands finished. But don’t let your mind be deceived that we are adrift and destroyed—Ambedkar has lifted us up, liberated us.” 6 Beyond this

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narrative of conversion as the culmination of a radical lifework lies a deeper call to squarely focus on inclusive identity, equal rights, and liberated awareness. Ambedkar’s conversion was political message and radical social experiment. How activists heed this call and attempt to transform the idiom of conversion to an idiom of global justice continues to vex anticaste activists. In the words of Vivek Kumar, professor of sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, “caste is practical, not theoretical.” 7 As a practical reality, caste requires practical and ongoing response, but not simply movement organizing around exclusive or hardened identities. Dr. Ambedkar’s conversion experience should be commemorated as it was at his fiftieth, and more recently his sixty-first, anniversary of conversion. At the same time, low caste must not slumber in the past, but organize, educate, and agitate for a desired future. The outlines of that future, whether at the center or periphery of anticaste activism, or the center or periphery of caste hegemony, are the same and must be strategically approached. Finding that unified future requires the telling and listening to both low-caste injustice narratives and marginalized transformative justice narratives. It requires creating shared discursive space with the privileged, while simultaneously establishing narrative agency among the marginalized. Through hearing the stories of trauma and marginalization, listeners place themselves in the marginal periphery, but also at the center of social transformation. “It is by constructing cultural traumas that social groups, national societies, and sometimes even entire civilizations not only cognitively identify the existence and source of human suffering but may also take on board some significant responsibility for it.” 8 Here I am not arguing that low castes are responsible for their own suffering, but rather that they are responsible for the narrative retelling of that suffering in such a way that calls all humans to action, shares their identity as human, and establishes Dalit leadership on the national and global stage. Ambiguous stories as a platform of change move away from blame and toward responsibility, calling listeners to take the responsibility to understand both the meaning and social impact of the stories. The problem is that too often activists’ stories empower rhetorical boundaries instead of rhetorical bridges. Even many ardent anticaste activists I spoke to admitted that in their youth that they were drawn to the rhetoric of the Hindu-right youth movement, the RSS. 9 Clearly, the line social movements must cross to overcoming the free-rider problems implicit in rational choice theories of collective action 10 is dependent on many factors, including the important norms of speech and storytelling. This work is in agreement with Polletta (2006), when she states: “the ability to use [linguistic] forms effectively is stratified not only because people have different levels of competence, but also because doubts about the form’s credibility and value are more likely to be triggered by some users and on some occasions than others.” 11 My arguments in this book do not suppose the work of anticaste

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change is simple, but, rather, that it is impossible without changing the norms, strategies, and acceptance of storytelling as a tool for social change. Transformational platforms for peace and justice in the context of the caste system will require new forms of democratic leadership in anticaste movements and new stories of present-day leadership in the face of historic and ongoing injustice. Whether Manuski’s young guns, BAMCEF’s trained cadres, or PVCHR human rights outreach workers’ collecting testimonial therapy, in addition to new and novel forms of social movement organization and leadership, the collective means of deploying anticaste narratives must also be watered and cultivated. Only via being armed with a framework for strategic narrative agency will anticaste activists be able to develop a generational peacebuilding approach capable of changing the entrenched caste system over time. I hope the stories told and analyzed in this book provide a road map to designing such a framework and begin to write the epilogue to caste discrimination itself. Though, like many of the activists I encountered, I do not feel as if the work of social justice is ever truly complete, there is a sense of accomplishment on coming to an end of this project. I have not only a sense of gratitude and accomplishment, but a sense that this work may impact or influence others. On speaking to both the center of anticaste activism in India and educating the U.S. periphery about the complexities of modern caste marginalization and oppression, I believe that this work adds to a deep and vital literature on human flourishing and peace. While both peace and flourishing are active verbs—never complete and never ending—the ending of this book represents a turning of the page on one chapter of my own life. For over a decade I have been traveling, researching, and taking students to attempt to understand better India, and, particularly, the Indian social dynamics of caste marginalization. While questions and doubts about my own understanding still occasionally surface, my engagement with India has undoubtedly enriched my own life likely much more than I have impacted my Indian interlocutors. In gratitude I give this book back to the anticaste activists I have studied in hopes that all of you may gain even one small part of what I myself have gained. Writing from the periphery of the United States, I can only hope that my own narrative thread has resonance to your ongoing work and the change possibilities within it. As Indian Dalits, and other oppressed peoples, attempt to define their agency, tell their own stories, and create empowerment, the stories in this book are intended to guide and raise a critical lens as well as educate those less familiar with the hardships of being in a marginalized “state of exception.” 12 Despite my mistakes and foibles in the writing of this book, I trust the comparative analysis of anticaste social movements is an inspiration to future scholar-practitioners of social justice movement. We are all capable of

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being in the periphery and at the center of change. May this epilogue be the prologue to your work to create a more socially just world. NOTES 1. John Paul Lederach, The Little Book of Conflict Transformation, 46. 2. The African-American slang language of “stay woke” connotes the idea of maintaining awareness of social justice conditions and became especially popular after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. See https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordsat-play/woke-meaning-origin. 3. John Paul Lederach, Building Peace, 21. 4. Francesca Polletta, It Was Like a Fever, viii. 5. Ibid., ix. 6. The songwriter Manohar Nagarle quoted in Moon (2000) from a song written upon Ambedkar’s death. Vasant Moon, Growing Up Untouchable In India: A Dalit Autobiography, translation by Gail Omvedt (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000). 7. Vivek Kumar, presentation for DePauw University students at Jawaharlal Nehru University, January 12, 2011. 8. Jeffrey Alexander, Trauma: A Social History (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012), 6. 9. Personal interviews with multiple BAMCEF activists, July 2016. 10. Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). 11. Francesca Polletta, It Was Like a Fever, 26. 12. Sara Cobb, Speaking of Violence, 27.

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Index

All India Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation (BAMCEF), xx–xxi, xxiii, xxvn12, xxvin24, 13, 19, 22–25, 31n87, 31n88, 31n90, 31n93, 31n95–31n98, 31n100, 62, 64, 67, 73, 76, 79–85, 86, 88n24, 90n65, 90n71, 90n73, 112–113, 119–138, 138n1–138n3, 138n5, 139n13, 139n18–139n19, 139n22–139n23, 140n27, 140n29–140n32, 140n34, 140n39–140n41, 140n43–140n54, 140n56–140n57, 141n61, 141n64, 141n72–141n76, 141n80, 143, 145, 147, 148, 150, 151–152, 154–157, 160, 167, 170, 173–175, 177, 180–181, 182, 192, 193n9 Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji, xi, xii, xiv, 3, 11–12, 13, 15, 16, 17–18, 19, 22–23, 26n7, 27n24, 28n47, 28n48, 29n58, 31n88, 36, 38, 39–41, 42–43, 45, 48–55, 58n34, 58n44, 59n61, 59n63, 59n68, 59n71–60n73, 60n82, 68, 70, 71–75, 76, 86, 89n36, 93–96, 97–99, 101, 102, 105, 106–107, 114n1–114n2, 114n8, 115n31, 116n39, 119–121, 122–123, 126, 143, 155, 158, 160, 164n70, 181, 182, 184, 188n48, 190, 193n6; conversion to Buddhism, 13, 15, 16, 68, 75, 89n36, 89n37, 96, 98, 107, 111, 112, 190

Ambedkar Buddhist, xiii, xv–xvi, xxii–xxiii, 18, 29n58, 59n63, 68, 70–71, 75, 86, 93–96, 98–100, 101, 102, 106, 107, 110–113, 119, 122, 155, 158, 164n70, 173, 181, 182, 185 anthropological center, xi–xiii, xv, xvii–xxiii, xxivn2, 2, 36, 61, 65, 129, 143, 146, 148, 149, 151, 158, 167–169, 171–172, 173, 174, 189–192 anthropological periphery, xi, xiii, xv, xvii, xviii, xix, xx–xxiii, xxivn2, 1, 34, 36, 61, 65, 129, 132, 143, 146, 148, 150, 167–169, 171–172, 174, 178, 189–192 anticaste movement, ix, xi–xiii, xvi, xxi, xxvn12, 10, 11, 20, 22, 24, 25, 31n87, 31n90, 34, 36, 40, 41, 43, 47, 50, 53, 57n9, 61–66, 71–73, 79–82, 85–86, 95, 103, 123, 129, 131–132, 135, 140n27, 143–145, 147, 148, 152, 154–158, 159–160, 167–168, 170–173, 175–182, 189–190, 192 Aryan-Dravidian controversy, 6–7 BAMCEF. See All India Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation Banaras, xvii–xviii, xix, xxii–xxiii, xxvn16, xxvn17, 18, 21, 76, 78–79, 143–146, 147, 148–151, 154, 163n34–163n37, 163n39, 163n44

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Index

bonded labor, xviii–xix, xxvin22, 20, 78, 89n48, 143, 150 Buddhist practice, xiv, 17, 98, 100 Buddhist teaching, xiii, 16, 21, 94, 100–101, 111, 112, 127 caste, xi, xiii, xvi, xx–xxii, xxvn19, 1–13, 18, 19–20, 26, 26n4, 26n7, 27n12, 27n16–27n23, 28n32–28n35, 33–34, 39, 40, 43, 51–52, 64, 71, 85, 168, 171–172, 180, 184–185, 190; dialogue, xvi, 13, 29n54, 58n37, 59n60, 106, 116n38, 116n46, 116n50–116n51, 117n56, 145, 185, 187n33, 187n47; discrimination, 3, 11, 13, 28n34, 28n42, 45, 66, 82, 96, 101, 139n10, 141n62, 157, 160, 164n68, 165n80, 192; narrative, 3, 26, 48, 62, 174–175, 192; system, xxi, xxivn4, xxivn7, xxvin20, 1–8, 10, 13, 19, 21, 24, 26, 42–43, 57n9, 62–63, 64, 71, 82, 86, 94, 102, 104, 106, 109, 112, 114n10, 121, 137, 151, 160, 168, 172, 174, 178, 185, 188n48, 192; transformation of, xviii, xxiii, 4, 17, 29n53, 62, 65, 66, 96, 113, 178, 180, 190, 192; trope, as, 26, 43–44, 48, 62, 157, 174–175 center. See anthropological center Chaturvarna system, 5, 8, 9 Dalit, xi–xv, xvi, xviii, xx, xxii–xxiii, xxivn1, xxivn4, xxivn7, xxvn19, 17, 19, 22, 28n43, 28n48, 38, 42, 47–50, 53, 54, 64, 67–70, 81–82, 93–95, 104, 106, 112, 121, 125, 129, 150, 152, 171–172, 185, 189; Buddhist, xi–xii, xvi, 13, 15, 18, 71, 74, 93, 104, 112, 155; Panthers, 121, 127, 139n10; women, 90n75, 90n76, 100, 115n31 Dikshabhumi, xi–xii, xiv–xvii, xviii, xx, 190 discourse, xiii–xiv, xvi, xviii, xxii–xxiii, xxivn3, xxvn14, 4, 10, 16, 22, 26, 34, 39, 40–41, 47, 50, 56n4, 67, 73, 77, 81, 85–80, 88n10, 94, 115n14, 119–125, 127, 129, 132–135, 137, 143, 145, 147, 150–151, 152, 154, 156–159, 169, 171–172, 176, 185

Gandhi, M. K., xv, xxivn1, xxvn11, 30n69, 49, 51, 59n63, 162n16, 187n41 graded inequality, xvi, xxi, xxvin20, 5, 73 Hindu nationalism. See Hindutva Hindutva, xxii–xxiii, xxvn19, xxvin29, 30n68, 30n71, 51, 120–125, 134, 138n6, 139n25 human rights, xviii–xix, xxviin32, 10, 13, 15, 18, 28n42, 30n82, 57n20, 71, 75, 76–78, 86, 89n43, 89n48, 102, 133–134, 139n17, 141n63, 143–145, 147, 150–151, 155, 156, 163n45, 164n68, 165n80–165n83, 180, 192 identity justice, 6, 34, 41, 57n11, 68, 71, 88n27, 94, 100, 114n6, 136 inter-caste dialogue, xvi, 13, 29n54, 58n37, 59n60, 145, 187n33, 187n47 intersectionality, 85–86, 100–101, 148, 162n30 jati, xvi, 5–6, 8, 25, 81, 115n13 Mandal Commission, 3, 26n9, 53, 82, 90n57 Nagpur, xi–xii, xvii–xviii, xix–xxiii, 13, 16, 17, 68, 69, 86, 96, 102, 107, 128, 151, 173, 190 narrative, definition of, xi–xv, xix, xxi, xxvin21, 4, 67, 71, 88n32; agency, xiii, xix, xxi, xxiii, 4, 13, 33–36, 51, 54, 56n5, 63, 64–65, 74, 89n36, 100, 103, 113, 152, 168, 170–172, 178–179, 181, 185, 186n8, 191–192; analysis, of, xviii, xxii–xxiii, 4, 26, 33, 35, 40, 56n6, 142n91, 147, 148, 162n19; historical, 6, 13; identity, and, xi, 41, 83; social change, as, xv, 25, 33, 34, 151, 169; testimony, as, xxiii, 79, 143, 148, 152; violence, 27n10, 36, 38–39, 40, 42, 44–45, 47, 48, 50, 54, 63, 88n9, 130, 131 neo-Dalit, 19–20, 25, 30n75, 75–76, 77, 120, 135, 141n77, 143, 154, 162n4, 163n47, 163n49–163n50, 163n53, 164n63, 165n78, 177, 187n30, 188n49

Index nested conflict, xv, xxvn9, xxvn10, 109, 117n52, 172, 187n28 peacebuilding, 30n81, 114n4, 136, 139n20, 145, 156, 159–160, 164n66, 169, 178, 182, 185, 190, 192 People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights, xviii–xix, xxi–xxiii, xxviin32, 13, 18–21, 23, 25, 30n69–30n72, 30n78, 31n85, 62, 64, 67, 73, 75–79, 80, 84, 85–86, 89n43, 89n49–89n50, 113, 120, 132–133, 135, 136, 137, 139n11, 143–147, 148, 150, 151–158, 160, 161n1–162n6, 162n22, 163n45, 168, 170, 174, 177, 180–181, 182, 192 periphery. See anthropological periphery Phule(y), Jotirao (Jyotiba) Govindrao, xx, xxivn1, 22–23, 27n28, 31n88, 82, 138n1, 138n3, 139n13, 139n18, 140n29, 181, 184 PVCHR. See People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights race, 7, 30n69, 50, 158, 184 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Singh (RSS), xi, xxii, xxvin29, xxvin31, 82, 90n58, 120, 127, 132, 138n7, 140n33, 191 RSS. See Rashtriya Swayamsevak Singh scheduled caste (SC), xx, xxvn19, 8, 17, 26n9, 46–47, 59n53, 97, 105–107, 182 social conflict, xv, xvi–xvii, xxvn12, xxvn13, 28n33, 57n7, 96, 115n30, 116n42, 147, 158, 164n66, 164n71, 168, 170, 190 social identity, 1, 10–13, 13, 19, 35, 84, 111, 113, 129, 131, 148, 151, 156, 169, 177; Buddhist, xiii, xvi, xxii, 15, 18, 67–68, 73–74, 75, 86, 93–107, 111, 112–113, 119–120, 154, 190; high caste, xviii, xxvn19, 6, 10, 20, 47, 48, 129, 154, 185 social movement organization (SMO), 1, 9, 12–13, 14, 18, 22, 24, 25, 34, 55, 62, 64, 66, 86, 132, 154, 160, 167, 169, 170–171, 192

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social stratification, 6 structural violence, 10–12, 29n55, 36–38, 45, 57n20, 71, 89n45, 96, 99, 109, 150, 197, 198, 203 subaltern, 65, 90n76, 125, 187n29 sub-caste, 8, 28n33, 148 systems theory, xv, xxvin30, 3–4, 6, 7, 12, 21, 27n28, 36, 39, 61–62, 63–67, 76, 84, 85–86, 87n1–88n4, 117n52, 121, 130–131, 133, 137, 158, 171, 179 TBMSG. See Trailokya (Triratna) Bauddha Mahasangha Sahayaka Gana testimonial therapy, xxviin32, 13, 29n55, 78–79, 89n45, 89n46, 143–144, 147, 148, 151–152, 154–155, 156–158, 162n22, 162n29, 187n33, 192 Trailokya (Triratna) Bauddha Mahasangha Sahayaka Gana (TBMSG), xi–xvii, xxi, xxiii, xxvn13, 13–19, 21–23, 25, 27n30, 29n57, 30n65, 30n68, 45, 62, 64, 67–75, 76, 80, 84, 85–86, 89n47, 93–96, 98–113, 114n7, 114n9, 114n10, 115n14, 116n39, 117n57, 119–120, 123, 127, 132–135, 143–145, 148, 150, 151, 154–155, 158, 163n45, 164n65, 167, 170, 173, 175, 180–181, 182, 185 trauma, xv, xvi, xix, xx, xxiii, xxvn18, xxvin21, 2, 67, 76, 78–79, 90n51, 114n4, 143–146, 151–152, 156–159, 163n54, 163n58, 163n59, 164n66–164n67, 164n71, 181, 189, 191, 193n8; collective cultural, 54–55, 85, 114n4, 143–146, 147, 151, 157; transgenerational, 54, 79 untouchable, 7, 8, 27n28, 57n9, 59n61, 70–71, 94, 95, 109, 114n8, 139n10, 150, 160, 186n8, 193n6 varna, xvi, 5–6, 8, 9, 10, 25, 115n13 World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, Durban, South Africa, 65, 88n13–88n14, 132

About the Author

Jeremy A. Rinker, PhD, is assistant professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he researches the intersections between narrative and nonviolent social change. Rinker’s research interests revolve around the centrality of justice discourse, trauma awareness, and collective resilience in movements aimed at transforming social conflict, historical injustices, and structural violence. Working with marginalized communities to create the spaces and structures to address all types of violence (structural, cultural, and direct), resist injustice, and develop platforms for social resilience to blossom and grow, Jeremy has previously been published in Peace and Change, The Journal of Peace Education; Peace Research: The Canadian Journal of Peace and Conflict Studies; and Peace and Conflict: The Journal of Peace Psychology. A former Peace Corps volunteer (Kazakhstan, 1995–1997) and Nehru-Fulbright Grant Awardee (2013–2014), Rinker currently lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Stephanie, and two sons, Kylor and Tarin. Author Contact Information Jeremy A. Rinker, PhD Assistant Professor Peace and Conflict Studies Department University of North Carolina at Greensboro 1510 Walker, R408 Greensboro, NC 27412 Mobile: (703) 850-0765 E-mail: [email protected]

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