Table of Contents for The Vulgarity of Caste
Introduction: Performing Precarity: Sex-Gender-Caste/Ashlil-Manuski-Assli
The introduction illuminates the sexual caste economy of Tamasha as both stage performance and iterative performativity in twentieth-century Maharashtra. Tamasha is rooted in the sex-gender-caste complex entangled with notions of humanity, identity, and sexuality. The story of Tamasha herein—of the ambivalence and performativity of Tamasha women, of their subjection to the sex-gender-caste complex, of the process of struggle embodied by the tripartite concepts of ashlil, manuski, and assli—maps the transition of Tamasha for different publics from popular, ashlil performance art to, first, foil for a radical Dalit politics of manuski and then assli icon of Marathi identity as mediated by the Marathi film industry and various education programs, mass culture, and changing aesthetics. Contestations about Tamasha expose the discrepancies between high and low, moral and immoral, decent and vulgar, that are central to the history and politics of modernity and morality in India.
1.Policing Dalits and Producing Tamasha in Maharashtra
Tamasha culturized Dalit identity and reproduced Dalit labor for a sexual caste economy. This chapter examines the history of Tamasha and the sex-gender-caste complex up to the early twentieth century. It focuses on the complex ways in which caste operated to marginalize, render invisible, and appropriate Dalit women's bodies and labor. Within the socioeconomics of caste slavery, Untouchables were expected to provide free labor as a form of pastoral servitude. As servants, Untouchables were denied manuski and ordered to perform, on the one hand, menial and agrarian tasks and, on the other, to entertain touchables. These birth-based bondage and forced performances were part of a broader system of caste slavery and reinforced the low and degraded status of Dalits. This chapter also focuses on the significance of the vernacular method in writing histories of Tamasha and Dalit politics.
2.Constructing Caste, Desire, and Danger
The entangled personal and professional lives of Tamasha couple Pavalabai Hivargaokarin and Patthe Bapurao illuminate the stickiness of the ashlil and assli. The Mahar Tamasha woman Pavalabai was already ashlil, dull-witted, and inferior because she was an Untouchable. And because Bapurao was a brahman, he was always already knowledgeable, meritocratic, scholarly, and therefore assli. Pavalabai's life and her emergent Dalitness vis-à-vis the sex-gender-caste complex illustrate the paradox of Tamasha as simultaneously a tool of pleasure, amusement, and caste violence as well as an expression of Dalit culture. Bapurao's ability to transgress caste and appropriate Mahar culture contrasts with Pavalabai's struggles to contest the forms of patriarchy that circumscribed her life. Despite the modernizing pressures of the colonial government, touchables, and elites, the story of Pavalabai demonstrates that the ashlil continued to flourish in early twentieth-century Maharashtra.
3.Ambedkar, Manuski, and Reconstructing Dalit Life-Worlds, 1920-1956
Ambedkar's invention of a new Dalit politics and his contributions to the disciplining of ashlil Dalit women's sexual excesses were part of his agenda to generate the respectable manus and manuski of the Dalit samaj and reconstruct Dalit life-worlds. Ambedkar's movement claimed human rights through a radical anticaste politics of suffering that understood dharmantar and the samaj as engaged in an existential struggle for identity, humanity, and dignity. The taint of being ashlil compounded Dalits' untouchable caste status and threatened their social cohesion and collective identity. In order to generate their manuski, fight the stigma of caste slavery, and belong to the Dalit samaj, Dalits worked to expunge all ashlil elements that had over centuries concretized Dalitness.
4.Singing Resistance and Rehumanizing Poetics-Politics, Post-1930
Following Ambedkar and his anticaste liberatory agenda, Ambedkarite Jalsakars such as Bhimrao Dhondiba Kardak and, later, shahir Bhimsen Barku Gaikwad appropriated Tamasha to shape a new social Jalsa and shahiri, in order to broadly appeal to Dalits. They amply recognized the power of cultural forms, including Tamasha, to communicate with an audience that was mostly nonliterate and to reinforce their pedagogical politics of anticaste liberation. They sanitized the form, reducing the sensual and sexual appeal of Tamasha, which they argued thwarted the emergence of an oppositional consciousness, and redirected its energy toward the generation of Dalit manuski. Pavalabai's improper politics were not assimilable within the radical Dalit politics and samaj that emerged under the leadership of Ambedkar from the 1920s. As a result, not only did Ambedkarite Jalsakars regulate and sanskritize Jalsa, but they also eliminated female actors and characters, hoping to underline propriety and shed Tamasha's potentially ashlil elements.
5.Claiming Authenticity and Becoming Marathi, Post-1960
The new state of Maharashtra and Marathi elites adopted various strategies to both recuperate and regulate Tamasha as part of the politics of Marathikaran, putting Tamasha and its practitioners in the service of a chauvinist regional-linguistic identity and nation-state building. Paradoxically, the regional state further subordinated and stigmatized Tamasha people and also recognized and sustained their labor. Marathi filmmakers and elites capitalized on the rowdy and carnivalesque energy of Tamasha—despite it being banned by the colonial government in the 1940s—to appeal to audiences, increase profits, and constitute Marathi culture and identity and a virile, proud, masculine Marathi manus after the 1960s. In this conjunctural moment, the difference of caste for Tamasha people became a creative impulse for distinction of their art.
6.Forging New Futures and Measures of Humanity
Mangalatai Bansode, a leading Tamasha performer, gradually assumed a somewhat assli status and virtuosity and asserted her power in Tamasha in the end of the twentieth century. For Mangalatai, Tamasha was khandani, a cultural capital and a caste capital, an entrepreneurial endeavor, a profession that had provided and would provide for her family for five generations. She successfully exploited Tamasha, transforming hagandari (fallow lands used for defecation) into vatandari, an inherited right, thereby mocking the system of inheritance in caste-based agrarian slavery. She also drew upon networks with politicians, sympathetic touchables, and Dalits to counter the harmful effects of the moral fault lines that converged on Tamasha women, opening up different possibilities to reclaim her humanity.
Conclusion.: Queering the "Vulgar": Tamasha without Women
Tamasha remained a fraught performance and performativity—it was work, violence, play, and amusement. A Tamasha woman's life was rooted in what I have called the sex-gender-caste complex and the politics of ashlil-manuski-assli that rendered her a vamp, bringing into stark relief the centrality of caste, gender, and sexuality in the formation of political constituency and political rights in twentieth-century India—two central building blocks of modernity. The book has recorded the politics of Tamasha in three phases—pre-Ambedkar, Ambedkar, and post-Ambedkar—to illuminate how ashlil became a key modality of caste by excluding Dalits from the realm of manus and assli.