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This chapter further describes the context of the author’s participant-observation fieldwork situation in the towns of Udaipur and Jaipur in the Indian state of Rajasthan. It also presents the scholarly understandings of South Asian society that ground the book’s arguments. It is demonstrated how changes in caste relations in the modern colonial and postcolonial periods, and especially the decline in importance of elite bardic communities, provided the author’s Bhat informants with opportunities to remake their caste identity in the particular manner explored in the pages of this book. This chapter takes pains to demonstrate continuities of experience between the formerly untouchable Bhats and other low status Dalit (“oppressed”) communities. The remainder of the book, however, points to the distinctive manner than Bhats, as low status bards participating in a declining village exchange economy referred to as jajmani, take advantage of changing historical contexts to rework themselves and the institution of caste in ways unique to this community of performers.

This chapter analyzes the complexities of the 1987 film, The Untouchables, one of De Palma's biggest box-office hits. Set in Prohibition-era Chicago, The Untouchables shows Treasury agent Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) and his handpicked band of incorruptible men—veteran cop Malone (Sean Connery), rookie Stone (Andy Garcia), and accountant Wallace (Charles Martin Smith)—pitted against mob kingpin Al Capone (Robert De Niro). But sometimes, as De Palma has indicated, the film may seem less like “a gangster movie” and “more like a Magnificent Seven” (the John Sturges Western). In the film, De Palma once again returns to a subject he often explores in his previous works—the blurred line between the good guys and the bad guys, or the split within the self between good and evil.

Chapter 4 is occupied with the knowledge production within the Dalit movement in India and the Burakumin movement in Japan. It presents a historical overview of these protest movements during the 20th century. The Dalit movement among the so-called Untouchables is a protest movement against caste discrimination; and the Burakumin, the largest minority in Japan, have also experienced discrimination similar to caste discrimination. These traditions of protests differ in some important aspects from those found among Latin American, European, and American activists in the GJM and the Occupy Movement. This chapter thus provides a historical context to understanding the involvement of Dalit activists and Burakumin activists in the GJM and the World Social Forum process during the 2000s. Moreover, it provides a historical context to understanding their day-to-day work in between the large World Social Forums.

Pure cinema is defined in terms of the interrelationship of formal “fragments” that subtend an infinite array of formal systems within the work. In this model, the aesthetic philosophy of the fragment is developed through the seminal work of Raymond Bellour, one of the most astute of the classical Hitchcockian theorists. The fragment structures aesthetic form across mise en scène, montage, sound design, and narrative. The philosophy of the fragment is read in further detail and greater philosophical specificity through the historical tension between Eisenstein’s montage as whole and Deleuze’s attempts to read montage through the itinerary of the part. The resonance or vibration of the part is read as intensity, structuring the “excessive affect” that underpins the aesthetic of the fragment in film form. The aesthetic of the fragment is revealed in close formal analyses in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Argento’s Suspiria, and De Palma’s Union Station sequence in The Untouchables.

For Dalits, or former Untouchables, living at the back of Challaghatta, a village bordering the Karnataka Golf Association (KGA), the club presents an opportunity to earn money and respect apart from their caste identities. The stark contrast between the club and village leaves many caddies from Challaghatta with the sense that merit, discipline, and hard work are really all that matter in improving their position within the club and beyond it. Yet these ideas are also tested when it comes to finding their children better-than-average schools or when they think about moving out of Challaghatta. Caste, in the end, combined with limited material resources, proves a stable and oppressive force in their lives.

Taking out the trash can seem to be a chore so routine and ordinary as not to be worthy of extended or serious attention. But, in fact, as this chapter aims to make clear, how people handle waste may open them up to charges of being psychologically compromised, morally murky, or spiritually polluted. As emerges from close attention to three distinct examples—the portrayal of a major character in an early novel by Iris Murdoch, Italo Calvino’s non-fictional account of his job as caretaker of his household trash, and the situation of the Dalits, formerly called “Untouchables,” in India—there turns out to be a lot at stake in being able to establish the “right” relation to trash and waste.

Ritual purity was the self-proclaimed foundation of the authority of the Brahmin authors of Dharmaśāstra and the priestly class in general. Observance of purity rules was at the same time a social display of Brahmin exclusivity, a guarantee of meritorious priestly services for the clients, and an internal social-control mechanism. The chapter discusses the historical origins of this theme in the Dharmaśāstra literature and it gives an overview and examples of the fine-tuned vocabulary and systematic typology of these rules. To observe them demanded all-round control of the mental, verbal, bodily, domestic, and social life of a Brahmin but would also serve as a boundary marker protecting the social status and values of the priestly class. Finally, the chapter discusses some of the rich scholarly literature that emerged from the cross-disciplinary interest in this material during the structuralist turn in the humanities from the 1960s and onward.

The notions of class (varṇa) and caste (jāti) run through the Dharmaśāstra literature on all levels. They regulate marriage, economic transactions, work, punishment, penance, entitlement to rituals, identity markers like the sacred thread, and social interaction in general. Although this social structure was ideal in nature and not equally confirmed in other genres of ancient and medieval literature, it has nevertheless had an immense impact on Indian society. The chapter presents an overview of the system with its three privileged classes, the Brahmins, the Kṣatriyas, and the Vaiśyas, the fourth underprivileged class, the Śūdras, and, at the bottom of the society, the lowest so-called untouchable castes. It also discusses the understanding of human differences that lies at the center of the system and the possible economic and political motivations of the Brahmin authors of the texts.

Accompanying Gandhi in Travancore, Pitt received from him a letter dated March 18, disclosing his search for a settlement. The two had discussed removing the bamboo barriers at Vykom, while the satyagraha continued small vigils. The “solution” was shot through with ambiguities. No formal accord was produced; no jubilation greeted the compromise worked out between Gandhi and Pitt. On April 4, retracting its March 1924 prohibitory order, the government dismantled the barricades. Opening the roads on three sides of the temple, the government created a secondary pathway on the fourth side. This diversion for the untouchables allowed temple authorities to retain their exclusive access without being “polluted.” Quietly, Dalits began using temple roads; volunteers maintained a presence. The dubious settlement was the most controversial aspect of the entire struggle, which had consistently asked for all roads to be opened to everyone. On November 23, 1925, the last volunteer departed.

Laxmanshastri practiced what he preached. For him and in his household, Untouchables were treated no differently than brahmins. Although the domestic staff essentially came from the Untouchable community, he and his wife, Satyavati, were sure to encourage their children to study and get formal college education. Throughout his life, he used his scholarship to focus on the heterodoxy of thought within Hinduism, and the wide spectrum of religious beliefs and practices within the Hindu fold. For him, that was the truth and with that, he set personal examples of not adhering to any dogma blindly, of not discriminating against any individual on the basis of his or her hereditary caste. As an ardent humanist, he presented evidence, providing innovative arguments in simple terms, and with courage, encouraged respectful dialog in a bid to transcend convention instead of bowing to it. Like Tagore, he was in every respect one of India’s renaissance men. His writings and thoughts had an enduring quality. He became one of the leading voices in the evolution of a free, secular, modern, and progressive India.

.Over 1897-1902, the Tirah campaign, the South African war and the China expedition made it necessary to re-organise the standing non-combatant units of the Indian Army. The contention was that the combatant and the follower ranks of the Indian Army were recruited from entirely different rural strata. In fact there was a considerable overlap in recruiting pools. This overlap increased in World War one due to the growing importance of the auxiliary services and the need to conserve all labor and use it more ‘efficiently’. The ‘higher’ followers, those organised in distinct departments, such as mule-driver and stretcher-bearer units, benefitted from the unsettling of status hierarchies and wage differences; less so the attached or ‘menial’ followers who provided ‘domestic’ services and included ‘untouchable’ service-providers in their ranks. The chapter engages with the global history of domestic work to examine the production of ‘menial’ status in the institutional context of the Indian Army., The care-giving services of the ‘menial’ follower reproduced both the ‘martial caste’ standing of the Indian soldier and the race standing of the British soldier. The ‘menial follower’ tried to stabilise his situation of institutional precarity but remained vulnerable to a regime of personal and discretionary discipline.