Disgust and untouchability: towards an affective theory of caste

Abstract

ABSTRACT The caste order – like all social hierarchies – structures emotions in particular ways, and in turn depends on emotions, thus structured, for its reproduction over time. In North Indian vernaculars, to ask who feels ghṛṇā (disgust) towards whom is often to trace the boundaries of the touchable body politic. Ghṛṇā karnā – doing disgust – describes a set of practices often identical to those known in a political register as ‘practices of untouchability.’ Thus, ve ham se ghṛṇā karte hain (‘they are disgusted by us,’ or, better, ‘they practice disgust on us’) is among the more common ways that Dalits describe their treatment at the hands of privileged castes. This article tracks usages of ghṛṇā in two vernacular North Indian sources from the early twentieth century in order to throw critical light on the inculcation of disgust as advantaged and disadvantaged caste observers have described it. In Hindi tracts composed by members of the Hindu reformist organization the Arya Samaj, ghṛṇā appears as an impediment to the majoritarian project of Hindu encompassment of its erstwhile ‘untouchable’ other; Arya Samajist polemicists seek to expose Hindu disgust towards Dalits and to redirect it towards new targets. In oral traditions that circulated among Dalit castes engaged in sanitation labour in the late colonial period, parables of encounter between ‘touchable’ and ‘untouchable’ give utterance to a critique of ghṛṇā as antithetical to moral action and as opposed to life. Grounded in historical and ethnographic evidence, the article develops preliminary ideas towards an affective theory of caste and untouchability.