In the wake of the establishment of the Portuguese in the region, slavery was fundamentally constitutive of early modern society on the west coast of India. While indigenous hierarchies and existing systems of slavery shaped Portuguese slavery, over time, indigenous society too was transformed by the extensive reliance on enslaved labor facilitated by European trafficking networks. Centering slavery in the study of South Asian history underscores the importance of considering the difference between elite projects of enforcing boundaries, both spatial and social, and the ways in which enslaved people negotiated these projects. Thus, instead of taking for granted the classificatory labels of race, caste, and blackness imposed upon enslaved peoples by elite institutions, a social history of slavery elucidates instead the evolution of these mechanisms for policing identity, and the centrality of the expropriation of labor in identity formation.

In 1833, Rammohun Roy, the so-called “Father of Modern India,” died abruptly while traveling in England. Because cremation was then illegal in Britain, he was buried rather than immolated according to brahminical norms. This article situates the micro-history of his colonial corpse within the genealogy of secularism. I take secularism as a formation of the body in the most morbidly literal of ways—fused to embodied formations of race, caste, class, and gender and entangled with the transcolonial networks of nineteenth-century heterodoxy. Roy’s ritually indeterminate flesh was a site for cultural improvisation around a Victorian-colonial secularity formed in and through the body.

Drawing from publications by Swami Achutanand and the Adi-Hindu Mahasabha press between 1916 and 1940, this article examines the role of this north Indian Dalit organization in creating language and categories of liberalism in the Hindi vernacular. The Mahasabha poet-activists published numerous song-booklets in a variety of Hindi song genres to intervene in ongoing discussions on the subjects of representation and equality which they characterized as mulki-haq and unch-niche. Histories of liberties in late colonial India have typically examined its emergence within dominant Hindu and Muslim middle-class groups. This article uncovers the unique contributions of Dalit poet-activists who recognized the value of liberal ideas and institutions in challenging caste and abolishing “Manu’s Kanun” (lawgiver Manu’s Hindu law codes). It highlights the methodological importance of mohalla (neighborhood) sources usually located in Dalit activists’ houses in untouchable quarters. The chapbooks found in mohalla collections have enabled the writing of a new history of the Mahasabha’s activism and of the initiatives taken by poet-activists in founding a new Dalit politics in northern India. I explore the emergence of a Dalit literate public which sustained the activities of the Mahasabha and which responded with enthusiasm to its articulation of the new social identity of Achut (untouched) and a new political identity of Adi-Hindus—original inhabitants of Hindustan (India). Offering a new methodological approach in using mohalla sources and song-booklets composed in praise of liberal institutions, this essay makes a significant contribution to the recovery of a forgotten Dalit public sphere in early twentieth-century India.

This article explores missionary medical discourses in three Telugu journals published in the early twentieth century, to analyse how caste pivoted denunciations of alcohol, especially toddy and arrack, in the Madras Presidency and the Hyderabad state. It argues that one women’s missionary journal, Vivekavathi, deployed medical knowledge to formulate subtle and occasionally explicit condemnations of toddy and arrack as unclean and unhealthy substances. The journal relied on universal medical and missionary, British and American knowledge frameworks to mark out Dalits and other marginalised castes as consumers of these local beverages. This stigma was conjured through medical narratives of marginalised castes as lacking in the knowledge of alcohol’s relation to digestion, toddy’s role in ruining maternal and child nutrition, the unhygienic environment of arrack shops and their propensity to ‘alcoholism’. However, this article also traces counter-caste voices who too invoked ‘the power of the universal’ to dispel caste stigma against marginalised castes. While both sets of voices deployed medical ‘enslavement’ to alcohol as an interpretive move, they differed in their social imperatives and political imaginaries, defined in caste terms. This article explores a third set of implications of the term ‘universal’ by analysing global medico-missionary narratives of alcohol in two other Telugu journals. On a methodological plane, this article also pushes for a hybrid reading of what counts for ‘scientific instruction’, where hymns, catechisms, parables and allegories are considered alongside conventional scientific experiments. In that sense, it upholds vernacular missionary publications as an invaluable resource for the social history of medicine.

This article investigates the relationship between caste and Islam in Bengal at a time when they acquired heightened significance as markers of identity for the colonial state and between communities. Scholarship, mainly drawing on North India, has emphasised the contrast between the existence in practice of a hierarchical system of social stratification among Muslims and the ideals and traditions of Islamic egalitarianism. This article, however, shows that caste-based struggles and tensions produced a revolutionary Islam. I suggest that the subversive potential of Islamic egalitarianism, described in early Islam by Louise Marlow, was kept alive by low-caste Bengali Muslims. The social reality of caste enabled multiple understandings of what it meant to be a Muslim, and the more radical among them were subaltern ontologies—different meanings of what it was to be a Muslim in the world. Here, I analyse writings on caste by four unreliable narrators around the turn of the twentieth century—a British colonial ethnographer, an ashrāfī Muslim anthropologist, and two Muslim reformers—to describe the politics and lifeworlds of low-caste Muslim groups in Bengal. The article argues for a more nuanced understanding of this period of Islamic reform and development, one that is conscious of the subaltern currents shaping its course. I show how a reformist politics of ‘rejection’ of elite Islam emerged as a response to the problem of caste inequality. These discourses and practices repudiating elite Muslim titles, centring histories of labour, and emphasising equality as an embodied experience reveal the revolutionary potentialities of a subaltern Islam.

The brief essay is a response to an article by the French sociologist Loïc Wacquant which critiques the concept of “racial capitalism” that has gained much prominence and currency in recent times. It offers a historical analysis of the emergence of “race” as a concept in the Euro-Atlantic sphere and points to the complexities in extending it beyond that space, into the Indian Ocean world for example. As a consequence, the ambitious claims made by some theorists of “racial capitalism” appear difficult to sustain.

This article discusses the Habermasian public sphere as a realm constructed through communication and offers a critique of Jürgen Habermas's concept of an intersubjectively shared lifeworld among the participants as a fundamental prerequisite for communicative rationality in the discursive field. The article contends that the emergence of communicative rationality in the public sphere is unlikely to be facilitated by a singular and unitary modern public whose participants have commensurable languages and worlds. This argument is elaborated through an analysis of a public debate that occurred on August 10, 1888, between the Mahajan (headman) of the Modh Baniya caste council and Mohandas K. Gandhi, a Modh Baniya himself. Even though the discussion involved two people with an intersubjectively shared lifeworld, who were engaged in the deliberation as equals, the dialogue broke down, deepening divides. This article argues that the need to protect the spiritual domain from the polluting touch of the material domain led to the breakdown of communicative rationality.

This article examines the postcolonial Indian state's 20-year-long discretionary passports policy until 1967, often in collaboration with the British government in its efforts to limit growing numbers of Indian immigrants. While a vast scholarship has shown the racialized limits to mobility perpetuated by the passport and visa system against ‘coloured immigrants’, this article considers the Indian state's own restrictions over the emigration of a particular category of its ‘undesirable’ citizens. This passport regime was based on Indian diplomatic notions of the ‘international’ realm as one shaped by the journeys of migrants and imbued with discourses of indenture qua caste. The Indian state sought to prevent the mobility of ‘lower’ caste and class migrants who were deemed to be legatees of the dreaded ‘coolie’ and therefore unworthy of travelling abroad as representatives of India. Such a reading of the postcolonial Indian passport as a document of caste and class privilege goes beyond the existing literature which largely focuses on its use in the context of partition. In so doing, this article posits the histories and afterlives of indenture as a constitutive element in the making of Indian diplomacy, demonstrating that a focus on indenture facilitates a much-needed recovery of the narratives and euphemisms of caste in Indian diplomacy.

The second half of the nineteenth century was marked by regular famines and scarcities in India, and famine public works were one of the chief ways for the colonial state to provide relief. Famine public works involved labourers, including a large number of women, working in the construction of railways, roads, canals, and tanks in return for a subsistence wage. The present article contextualizes the practices of famine public works, especially the segregation of famine public works into large departmental and village works, within the intersecting processes of labour, caste, and gender. Drawing on evidence from North Western Provinces and Punjab, the article makes two arguments. First, it shows that segregation in famine works was driven by a shared understanding of the dominant castes and colonial state regarding labour, property, and caste which ensured that village works were reserved for dominant castes. A relational definition of labour was central to the construction of caste respectability on famine works. Second, by comparing the sex ratio of labourers in the two kinds of famine works, the article argues that women's labour was not merely a marker of caste, but constitutive of it.