Awarded the Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences, Ramnarayan Rawat's Reconsidering Untouchability charts a new trajectory for scholarship on Dalits in North India. Rawat engages two scholarly tasks. The first task is to interrogate how the Chamar caste came to be associated almost exclusively with leatherwork. The second task is to reclaim Dalit agency in historical narratives of “untouched” (acchut) identity movements. Ramnarayan Rawat succeeds admirably on both counts.
Rawat provocatively opens the discussion with reference to the murder of five members of the Chamars caste who were stoned to death for purportedly poisoning cattle so that they could profit from tanning the hides. This association between Chamars, leatherwork, and criminality has a long history that Rawat dissects in order to challenge the dominant framework equating caste with hereditary occupation—an “analytic framework” that has only served “to obscure and erase history” (p. 6).
Chapter 1...
