Deceptive Majority
Dalits, Hinduism, and Underground Religion

This is an ethnographic history of religious majoritarianism and its sly subversion by one of India's most oppressed minorities.

Joel Lee (Author)

9781108843829, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 10 June 2021

354 pages
23.4 x 15.6 x 2.6 cm, 0.58 kg

The idea that India is a Hindu majority nation rests on the assumption that the vast swath of its population stigmatized as 'untouchable' is, and always has been, in some meaningful sense, Hindu. But is that how such communities understood themselves in the past, or how they understand themselves now? When and under what conditions did this assumption take shape, and what truths does it conceal? In this book, Joel Lee challenges presuppositions at the foundation of the study of caste and religion in South Asia. Drawing on detailed archival and ethnographic research, Lee tracks the career of a Dalit religion and the effort by twentieth-century nationalists to encompass it within a newly imagined Hindu body politic. A chronicle of religious life in north India and an examination of the ethics and semiotics of secrecy, Deceptive Majority throws light on the manoeuvres by which majoritarian projects are both advanced and undermined.

Part I. Untouchability and Alterity, Now and Then: 1. Introduction: Signs, the Census, and the Sanitation Labor Castes
2. Lal Beg N?ma: Dalit Religion before the Hindu Majority
Part II. Making 'Untouchables' Hindu, or, the Great Interpellation: 3. Missionary Majoritarianism: The Arya Samaj and the Struggle with Disgust
4. Trustee Majoritarianism: Gandhi and the Harijan Sevak Sangh
5. Hinduization and its Discontents: Valmiki comes to Lucknow
Part III. Semiotics of the Oppressed: 6. Victory to Valmiki: Declamatory Religion and the Wages of Inclusion
7. Lal Beg Underground: Taqiyya, Ethical Secrecy, and the Pleasure of Dissimulation
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Physical anthropology [JHMP], Sociology & anthropology [JH], Social groups [JFS], Ethical issues & debates [JFM], Social issues & processes [JFF], Society & culture: general [JF], Society & social sciences [J], Religion & politics [HRAM2]