Dalit Histories

Detailed chapter description

Dalit history in Mithila, Vajji and Anga cannot be written as a footnote to the history of caste. It is a history of labour performed and appropriated, land possessed or denied, neighbourhoods segregated or opened, schools entered late and then used strategically, migration that loosened some village dependencies while creating new urban vulnerabilities, and public cultures through which communities named dignity in their own idioms. The constitutional category “Scheduled Caste” and the political-social term “Dalit” overlap but are not identical. The former is a legal list whose boundaries are defined by constitutional orders; the latter is a language of historical oppression, assertion and solidarity whose use has varied across communities and periods. This chapter therefore keeps legal classification and social self-description analytically distinct. The archive is uneven. Revenue records, censuses, district gazetteers and police or welfare files usually describe Dalit communities through the eyes of officials, landlords, reformers or administrators. They often reduce people to occupation, “custom” or deficit. Oral traditions, songs, village memories, association records, local political histories and post-independence ethnography reveal agency that such documents miss. The task is not to romanticise subaltern testimony or to reject official statistics; it is to read different archives against one another. That method is especially important in a region where Musahar, Ravidas/Chamar, Dusadh/Paswan, Dhobi/Rajak, Dom, Pasi, Chaupal, Nat, Rajwar and other Scheduled-Caste communities followed different demographic, occupational and political trajectories.