Addressing the Jāti: Middle-Caste Publics and Textual Practices in Colonial India (1890–1930)

This dissertation examines the fashioning of new imaginations of caste identity among middle castes in colonial India through rhetorical practices in Hindi print. Recent scholarship on caste under colonialism has emphasized the agency of colonial subjects in processes of identity formation. Far from slotting themselves into categories created by the colonial state, individual caste groups crafted new identities by creatively using both indigenous and colonial discourses and institutions. In scholarly appraisals of these processes, quotidian, extra-literary texts that rhetorically performed, rather than discursively claimed, new caste identities have been overlooked. My research addresses this gap by examining a host of quotidian genres, such as caste journals (jātīya samācār), reports (kārya vivaraṇ), open letters (khulī ciṭṭhī), and hymns (bhajan), through which the first generation of middle-caste spokespersons performed their new identities in the North Indian public sphere.   

The dissertation explores how quotidian genres enabled spokespersons of Ahirs (traditionally cowherds), Kurmis (traditionally cultivators), and Kalwars (traditionally liquor distillers) to repurpose tropes, speaking positions, and affects already circulating in the Hindi/Hindu public sphere in order to construct both respectable caste subjects and modern transregional caste publics. Historians and anthropologists have traditionally regarded middle castes’ upward mobility as a linear journey to higher social status, especially through the emulation of upper-caste ritual practices. Against these prevailing views, I argue that the discursive traffic of the public sphere was a crucial resource in their self-fashioning, as it allowed marginal actors seeking a public voice to navigate both caste-marked and unmarked identities. I focus attention on how affects helped conjure publics by marking belonging and difference in relation to groups both “superior” and “inferior” to middle castes, and on how extra-literary genres afforded particular kinds of respectability vis-à-vis both colonial and modern Hindu norms. As such, this study reframes the relationship between middle-caste and modern Hindu identities as a terrain of active negotiation rather than automatic assimilation. At the same time, by focusing on the rhetorical affordances of quotidian and extra-literary forms, it calls for a broadening of the genres through which the story of caste is told in South Asia. 

Drawing from literary and cultural studies, rhetoric and communication, and social history, this dissertation provides a fresh account of the cultural life of caste in colonial India. Emphasizing the intersections among caste, genre, and publicity, it offers insights for scholars of Critical Caste Studies, vernacular print cultures, and the history of the public sphere.