Joel Lee’s primary preoccupations in this book are namely; the relation between the trajectory of Hindu majoritarianism and Dalit religions from the early 20th century onwards and the complex history and present of sanitation labor castes who are the focus of this book. The book combines archival work, ethnographic field work, genealogies, family histories in parts of North India and in particular in Central Uttar Pradesh. Lee argues emphatically that the untouchables, sanitation labor castes in particular were not considered as Hindus or Muslims by their co-religionists during the early twentieth century. He alludes to writings of Cynthia Talbot and Vasudha Dalmia to show how in late medieval and early Modern India, the name Hindu either self-description or by others, largely applied to a section of landed upper castes and not Dalits. Scholars like David Lorenzen who don’t believe in the construction of Hinduism in colonial period also provide Brahmins and Banias as his examples in pre-colonial period associating with certain ideas about Hinduism. Lee argues that even centuries after in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, “Hindu census enumerators in the colonial period often refused to record the sanitation labor castes as their co-religionists. The colonial administrative decision to classify untouchables as Hindus by default contradicted prevailing sociological common sense” (11). At the same time, the sanitation labor castes had a cohesive socio-religious community centred around a messenger named Lal Beg and did not consider themselves as Hindus or Muslims.
Lee shows that a number of factors played a role in marking Dalits as Hindus; the politics of numbers stimulated by techniques of colonial governance, the fear of Hindus with regards to conversion by Christians and Muslims and the intervention by Arya Samaj which initiated a program named untouchable upliftment. Arya Samaj which led the initiative grappled with its own feelings of disgust (Ghrna) towards the Dalits and at the same time attempted to divert the disgust of Caste Hindus towards Muslims (Chapter 3).
The Arya Samaj texts played a pivotal role in constructing a genealogical link between sanitation labor castes and the sage Valmiki, initiating a broader project of Hinduization. This process was not merely theological but deeply political, aimed at assimilating Dalit communities into a sanitized Hindu fold. In a significant departure from dominant academic narratives that trace the origins of Hindu majoritarianism to the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha, Lee compellingly implicates the Indian National Congress, Mahatma Gandhi, and the Harijan Sevak Sangh in this ideological consolidation.Lee contends that this confinement of Dalits within the Hindu fold gained widespread traction only in the 1930s, largely due to Gandhi’s mobilization of the Harijan identity and his Poona Pact manipulation where Baba Saheb Ambedkar was coerced to give separate claims of minority identity for Dalits.
This reframing foreclosed alternative religious affiliations and political aspirations among Dalits particularly those inclined toward Islam or Christianity and culminated in the 1950 Presidential Order, which institutionalized religious discrimination by denying Scheduled Caste status to Dalits who converted out of Hinduism. Furthermore, Lee critiques the literary canon particularly figures like Mulk Raj Anand and Rabindranath Tagore for reinforcing a hegemonic Hindu framework. By depicting Dalits as transhistorical Hindus, these writers inadvertently erased Dalit social movements, leadership, and dissenting voices, reducing them to passive subjects within a timeless Hindu narrative.
The Valmiki connection, in particular, was a strategic cultural fabrication. Prior to the early twentieth century, the sage held little to no devotional significance among sanitation labor castes. However, under Congress patronage and with elite sponsorship including from industrialist G.D. Birla Valmiki was elevated to a revered ancestor through state-sponsored symbolic interventions: public holidays, statues, temples, parks, and renamed streets. These acts of symbolic incorporation functioned as instruments of cultural co-optation, cementing Dalits within the Hindu socio-religious order and marginalizing their autonomous identity claims. This process led to transformation of food habits, rituals, ceremonies and relationship with Muslim neighbours. Lee points to a gradual sidelining of Lal Begi as Valmiki gained prominence. It was Congress leaders who consolidated the idea that manual scavenging was brought by Muslim rulers post independent India.
By citing Baba Saheb Ambedkar and Dumont, Lee argues that hierarchy and affective aspects of caste although undermined by contemporary scholarship as a thing of the past holds immense significance in his field in Lucknow where urban spaces are arranged hierarchically and sanitation labor castes embody contempt and disgust for caste Hindus (15). The various sanitation labor castes (Hela, Chuhra, Dhanuk, Dom, Bansphor) in ethnographies and colonial records are referred to as sweeping castes, Bhangis, scavenger castes etc. They share overlapping traditions and myths of origins and Halalkhors have come to have a clear identification as Muslims. Lee uses the term sanitation labor castes being cautious that such associations can naturalize stigma with communities but is aware that the sanitation labor deeply affects the above communities and hence the usage. Lee’s study focuses on one of the clans among the Chuhras who constitute the largest sanitation labor caste transregionally stretching from across Karachi to Lucknow and it is the easternmost swath of the Chuhras.
Urbanization, building of railways, and cantonments from the late nineteenth to the early decades of twentieth century required supply of sanitation labor leading Chuhras to migrate to different cities. Chuhras venerated Lal Begi and even adopted the title Lal Beg. Chuhras are constituted of Qabiles and not Gotras, not by names but numbers, such as Hazara, Baisi, Bara Ghar, Nau so Nawasi, Panch so terasi and they are the largest of the Qabile. They would bury their dead, were part of Qawali, Jagran, did Goat sacrifices and went for pilgrimage to Sufi Shrines. Lee refers to the politics of the Chuhras as Harijan politics and not Dalit politics, a politics of upliftment and not emancipation as imagined by Baba Saheb Ambedkar and he argues that such political mobilisations were a counterweight by Congress to Baba Saheb Ambedkar. Despite the aggressive attempts at politically engineered Hinduization by hardline Hindu nationalists to enlist the sanitation labor castes in mobilizations against Muslims, Lee argues that it is perhaps more astonishing than their success in a handful of cases is their failure everywhere else(25). Joel Lee argues that this aspect of sanitation labor castes where they have resisted invitation into majoritarian projects needs to be paid equal attention and the amity itself is a product of a social labor (25). For Lee another important concept Pahchanna is key to understanding the intersubjectivity of Caste Hindus with Dalits and the semiotic terrain in which Dalits are recognized through signs, smells and embodiments that the Brahminical social ontology projects on them. In his ethnography of census operations in Lucknow in 2011, Lee encounters silences, ellipses, anxieties, retorts among Dalits and how they are identified by Caste Hindus. They are marked as Hindus without even asking who they are and what they claim their religion to be, which is taken to be given in academic scholarships, in NGO reports, in state documents and so on. Lee considers this phenomena as Pahchaan and for him “ Pahchān, then, is a “distinguishing mark,” a sign by which a person or group is recognized by others”. “As a concept, then, pahchān directs attention to the semiotic terrain on which identitarian struggle takes place and the malleability of the signs on which recognition depends.” (29). Lee then argues that Pahchan is different from identity where self-descriptions and inherent qualities attributed are paid attention to. When sanitation labor castes claim to be Valmiki, it does not mean ontology or belonging, Valmiki does not mean inward or essential selfhood. “ Yet scholarship in religious studies has long labored under a misperception of this sort, reading the sanitation labor castes’ traffic in the sign of Valmiki as transparent evidence of a deep, enduring, collective attachment to the Ramayana and to popular Hinduism” (30).
Lee most importantly questions the Hindu-Muslim paradigm through which history and religion is largely understood in South Asia and brings in the discourse and self representation of Dalits that on many occasions runs counter to scholarly assumptions.
Lee most importantly questions the Hindu-Muslim paradigm through which history and religion is largely understood in South Asia and brings in the discourse and self representation of Dalits that on many occasions runs counter to scholarly assumptions.
Rather than bracketing Dalit religious practices as incoherent, syncretic or part of Hinduism, Lee allows Dalit self-representations including their ambiguities to trace the Lal Begi religious tradition that had a separate autonomous domain. For him autonomy means not unrelatedness or a sovereign subject but having a separate sphere of religious affairs. Post 1947, Lee traces the first generation of Valmiki leaders in Congress and the different initiatives they undertook under Congress upper caste leadership. A continuity that we come across in post independent India is the manner in which sanitation labor castes are asked not to strike but depend on uplift by higher others. In Chapter 5, Lee incisively illustrates how discourses of internal reform manifested through moral regulation, ritual observance, food habits, and the renunciation of Muslim-sounding names overshadowed the need for radical critiques of structural inequality among Dalit sanitation labor castes. The ramifications of the 1950 Presidential Order, which confined Scheduled Caste (SC) status to individuals identifying as Hindu (and subsequently Sikh and Buddhist), are particularly evident in the coerced name changes undertaken by members of these communities to access constitutional protections and affirmative action benefits.
Lee refuses to draw a rigid boundary between religion and politics; instead, he reveals their inextricable entanglement across the socio-political landscape of 20th-century India. Central to his analysis is the instability of religious identity among Dalit sanitation labor castes, where residual elements of Lal Begi traditions persist beneath newly adopted Hindu frameworks. This fluidity is marked by many moments of disidentification where these groups position themselves as the other to Hindus and other instances they assert a Hindu identity, however tenuous. Lee deftly captures these tensions, exposing the precarious and often contradictory ways in which Dalit sanitation labor castes navigate religious affiliation within a society that continually reinforces their marginality.
In Chapter 6, "Victory to Valmiki: Declamatory Religion and the Wages of Inclusion," Lee critically examines the performative religiosity of Valmiki Jayanti, particularly through Jhankis and Karyakram, positioning them as distinct from the politicized commemorations of Ambedkar Jayanti and the ritualistic spectacles of Ram Lila and Holi processions in the 1920s and 1930s. Citing Owen Lynch, Lee underscores that Ambedkar Jayanti emerged as a form of resistance against entrenched structural oppression. Its path to official recognition eventually culminating in its designation as a public holiday in Uttar Pradesh was marked by social hostility, state repression, and violent pushback (235).
Conversely, Valmiki Jayanti received early and consistent state patronage precisely because it abstained from any oppositional rhetoric to Caste Hindu politics. Its acceptance was predicated on political docility and symbolic accommodation, rather than confrontation or structural critique. Lee further delineates the contrast between the Shudra urban poor of the early twentieth century whose participation in Hindu festivals reinforced their religious legitimacy and the Valmiki community, whose involvement in similar public religious displays failed to yield equivalent recognition. Dominant caste groups continue to view them not as normative Hindus, but as Jhaduwalas, with Valmiki cast not as a shared religious figure but as a caste-specific ancestor or Baba (239). Lee’s articulation of alterity is important. He demonstrates that the symbolic exclusion of Dalit sanitation labor castes persists despite their visible public religiosity. This ascribed otherness rooted despite so many changes continues to shape how Valmikis are perceived and positioned within the social hierarchy. Through a rich array of archival, ethnographic, and historical sources, Lee compellingly maps how religious participation does not necessarily translate into social inclusion. Rather, his analysis reveals how declamatory religious practices are often co-opted into a politics of managed inclusion that reproduces caste-based exclusion under the guise of state recognition.
Furthermore, Lee dispels the notion which argues that it is Western modernist thrust with figures like Ambedkar that oppositional practices to Hinduism or untouchables being separate gained currency. He traces the Lal Begi tradition, mentions the Satnami Chamars, the Pariayars to claim that the notion of Dalits being the other and that their religious traditions being separate have existed before the Ambedkarite movement gained prominence. By doing so, Lee opens a conceptual horizon in academia for imagining Dalit history beyond its conventional entanglement by upper caste scholars with the modern Indian state, colonial modernity, or its assumed organic place within the Hindu religious order. His work gestures towards a historiography that foregrounds Dalit epistemologies, enabling an understanding of their pasts not merely as reactive or derivative, but as autonomous and deeply layered.Among the book’s most compelling arguments in the historiography of religion in South Asia is its critical engagement with the representational practices and the normative powers that dictate identity. From the reformist agendas of the Arya Samaj and Gandhi to the classificatory apparatus of the modern census, Lee meticulously traces how Dalit self-understanding has been repeatedly subjugated, overwritten, and negated.
Through both textual analysis and ethnographic encounters, he reveals how terms such as Valmiki, Harijan, and Hindu are not neutral descriptors, but discursive constructs emerging from dialogues where Dalit voices are largely marginalized or silenced. These identities are less the result of self-articulation and more the consequence of hegemonic imposition expecting compliance rather than consent.This dynamic raises urgent epistemological and ethical questions about how we engage with inherited terminologies and categories, particularly when they concern communities like Dalits and Adivasis. Lee’s invocation of Gandhi’s assertion to Ambedkar that Ambedkar is Hindu even if he claims otherwise exemplifies the coercive paternalism embedded within dominant frameworks that presume the authority to define Dalit subjectivities. Furthermore, Lee draws attention to the affective lexicon historically used to describe sanitation labor castes—disgust, repugnance, revulsion, contempt, loathing—coupled with occupational labels such as scavengers, carcass collectors, and drain cleaners. These terms, deployed across literary, academic, and bureaucratic texts, construct a discursive world in which these communities are persistently dehumanized and relegated to the outermost margins of social recognition. Yet, rather than dwelling solely on these tropes, Lee urges a methodological shift: one that privileges life histories, community rituals, oral traditions, and folk practices as epistemic resources. These alternative archives offer a way to access Dalit religious and cultural life on its own terms without reifying the very categories of stigma that have historically defined them. In doing so, Lee compels scholars to reconsider the frameworks through which marginalised communities are studied, narrated, and remembered.
At the same time, it is necessary to think if Dalit religions and Dalit history as a field can be thought of on its own terms rather than only a vantage point to explain something that becomes concerning at a particular moment for example now the prominence of Hindu Nationalism in academia or the obsession with colonial state. Lee rightfully credits Bhagwan Das for his writings who, coming from the Bhangi caste, had argued that they are not Hindus and the name Valmiki was later introduced through fabrication of genealogical connection. Lee was influenced by the work of Bhagwan Das.
Side Notes
Professor Davesh Soneji, a scholar of religious studies, has argued that Dalit religious traditions are frequently relegated to reductive and dismissive academic categories such as “Folk Hinduism” or “Village Hinduism.” These classificatory practices, far from being neutral, effectively deny Dalit religions their epistemic distinctiveness and autonomy. Soneji challenges us to reconceptualize the study of Dalit religiosity not as a derivative or subaltern variant of Hinduism, but as a complex, self-constituted domain that demands its own frameworks of interpretation and naming (Class discussion).
In broader progressive public discourse, however, there persists a troubling tendency to gloss over the hegemonic and ethically problematic incorporation of Dalits into the Hindu fold over the last many decades. This erasure is often legitimized through a desi-Orientalist logic that romanticizes this peripheral inclusion as an instance of cultural syncretism. Ironically, the same ideological strand that celebrates such "syncretism" does not hesitate to chastise Dalits for purportedly “Hinduizing” themselves, thereby holding them responsible for the very forms of religious assimilation which renders them on the periphery. This contradiction reveals a deeply entrenched paternalism within liberal discourse, which does not provide any meaningful future for Dalits but also delegitimizes Dalit radicalism that envisions an emancipatory path no matter how far from perfect it might be. Drawing on a discussion with Rahul Sonpimple, I argue that many within this strand treat religion as an immaterial, apolitical superstructure, an inconsequential realm of belief that lies beyond the scope of materialist critique. Such frameworks abstract religion from its lived realities, ignoring how naming, ritual spaces and affiliation to categories, groups are deeply enmeshed in relations of power, exclusion, and structural inequalities. By refusing to recognize the material consequences of religious identification, these perspectives perpetuate an impasse for a radical future of Dalit discourse.
These processes bear profound implications for the terrain of electoral politics, the formulation of counter-hegemonic discourses challenging upper-caste and dominant-caste monopolies over socio-economic life, and the strategic orchestration of emancipatory social movements. Without disregarding the enabling conditions ushered in by urbanization, missionary intervention, new industries and engagements with colonial modernity, one can underscore that Dalit castes who have articulated and claimed a distinct and autonomous identity outside the ideological and ritual confines of Hinduism have, in several instances, navigated more advantageous trajectories than those who remained tethered to the moral economy of dominant Hindu frameworks (Juergensmeyer, 1982 ; Lynch, 1969 ; Zelliot, 1992). This is due to a sense of psychological independence a section of them would have acquired and thus better placed to embrace novel ideas leading to secular demands such as better education, employment opportunities and political representation etc early on compared to others. To assert this is neither to undermine the history of other Dalit communities nor to efface the varying socio-economic and spatial conditions that Dalit castes were placed in. Rather, it arises from a position of fraternal responsibility, a critical, solidaristic intervention aimed at one’s own community to reflect on the past and present.
Those communities who were already marked with extreme subjugated conditions, rigid occupational ties in villages and whose vanguards sought ritual legitimacy within Caste Hindu moral economy—for long, as a way for social mobility—have been in a disadvantaged position. This in no way means that these Dalit communities have not strived for dignity and better living conditions, but that enclosure within a socio-ritual caste Hindu framework has constrained their potential and worked against them.
In response to this, the appeal I make is rooted not in prescriptive certainty but in reflective urgency: to recognize that, historically, disengagement from the framework of Hinduism particularly those grounded in caste-based subordination to dominant and upper-caste norms has yielded tangible political and existential gains for sections of the Dalit population.
This is not a call for uniformity, but an invitation to reimagine. It affirms that the refusal to remain tethered to oppressive religious cosmologies can serve as a catalyst for reconfiguring selfhood, reclaiming dignity, and articulating autonomous futures. It urges communities to envision emancipatory trajectories beyond the confines of inherited hierarchies not only as an act of negation, but as a generative gesture towards liberation on terms defined by the oppressed themselves. This is not to suggest that the mere renunciation of certain rites or ritual practices results in any substantive structural transformation. Nor is it to argue for a rigid demarcation of religious expressions, as borrowing, and cultural intermingling are inherent to the lived experiences of most social groups. The concern, therefore, is not with superficial overlaps in religious form nor in constructing a purified, essentialist, and exclusionary model of Dalit religiosity. Such an approach risks reinforcing the very logic of caste purity it seeks to oppose. Instead, what is being called for is a decisive repudiation of the cosmological, ritual, and political subordination historically imposed by upper-caste and dominant-caste Hindu hegemonies. The subsequent reclamation of symbolic and epistemic space has enabled sections of Dalits to articulate robust political demands, enhance their capacity for negotiation, and interrogate systems of entrenched inequality with greater efficacy. It might not be possible to label each of these religious traditions with distinct names but the distance from ritual and symbolic subordination of upper caste/dominant caste Hindus is necessary. As the caste census gains political and institutional momentum, and as movements such as those led by the Lingayats and Sarna Adivasis intensify their demands for recognition as distinct religious communities, the space for asserting and institutionalizing Dalit religious identities may similarly begin to expand.
Yet, I am also acutely aware of the tensions embedded in these processes. There are cases wherein groups that have renounced Hindu affiliation and claimed a radical rupture nevertheless find themselves ensnared within alternate regimes of theological constraint. A salient example is a segment of Pentecostal Christian Dalits, whose immersion in otherworldly soteriological doctrines promulgated by evangelical preachers circumscribes their ability to engage with questions of material justice and socio-economic mobility. In such instances, religious conversion may offer spiritual refuge but simultaneously foreclose political radicalism, thereby reproducing conditions of passivity under the guise of transcendence. There is also a segment of middle class Buddhists who prioritise self searching over collective community actions while being representatives of a largely marginalized community. These trends too are extremely detrimental to the cause of Dalits and are to be critiqued from a fraternal responsibility.
Furthermore, Caste is also a state of mind, a register marked with logics of differences and exclusions. It is shared across the boundaries of ritualistic and non-ritualistic, believing and non-believing, meat eating and non meat eating, vedic and non vedic, Brahminical and non Brahminical upper caste/ dominant caste Hindus. Tamil Nadu exemplifies this phenomenon, where non-Brahminical religiosities abound. Some might call them expressions of popular hinduism and other might take pride in the non-sanatani aspects of them, but norms of ritual-social spaces that many of these religiosities have come to prescribe are in tandem with reproducing caste dominance, logics of purity and pride over Dalits, extending the dominance to politics and economic relations. Hence, even those seemingly subversive as “popular Hinduism” have tended to subordinate Dalits.
Additionally, in a different setting, for many middle-class Dalits who attempt to inhabit Hindu spaces alongside upper-caste peers, live with daily negotiation marked by social anxiety, performative restraint, and an ongoing need for self-erasure. Within shared private or semi-public environments, they often mask aspects of their identity while simultaneously striving to approximate upper-caste comportment, language, and ritual behavior. This desire for social acceptance frequently results in a kind of mimetic entrapment, wherein cultural assimilation becomes both a strategy for survival and a site of deep alienation. In contrast, metropolitan elites, especially those occupying positions within academia, media, and the arts, often engage across religious and cultural boundaries from within rarefied, insulated spaces.
These cosmopolitan circles are sustained either by a nostalgic memory of a pluralist Hindu-Muslim elite past, or by a Desi-Orientalist fantasy that romanticizes hybridity and syncretism while dismissing the implications that underpin them. From this vantage point, the inclusion of Dalits within broader hegemonic religious or cultural categories is often viewed as natural, inevitable, or harmless, stripped of its political stakes and economic betterment. What such elite imaginaries fail to acknowledge is that Dalits rarely participate in these cultural or religious exchanges as equals. They are instrumentalized subjects called upon to provide the invisible labor that sustains the spectacle of pluralism while being denied its benefits. Their presence is functional, not celebrated. Dalit participation in these exchanges is marked not by reciprocity, but by asymmetry, reinforcing their exclusion even in moments of apparent inclusion. Neither of the above imaginations and understanding provide any pathways for Dalits.
Dalits are objects to be treated with indifference or hostility or as a paternalist subject in the Caste Hindu psyche. It is precisely this psyche that Dalits will have to confront in their path towards emancipation, so why move towards a ritual-social community that would inevitably psychologically subordinate them. It is important to ask: over centuries, has any formulation of Hinduism in retrospect, despite the claim to theological plurality, philosophical schools, or ritual diversity genuinely advanced the project of Dalit liberation? The historical record suggests otherwise. The burden of change has always fallen on Dalits themselves, those who resisted, reimagined, and confronted not just Dominant/upper caste led Hinduism but even in other religious traditions such as Christianity and Sikhism. Meanwhile, those who waited for inclusion merely through ritual elevation, who remained hopeful citing textual equality and those who placed their hopes on new Gurus, preachers and Babas as a way to move ahead, have gotten little to nothing.
Raphaël Voix in her brief overview of a number of scholarships on Hindu Sects and Caste has argued that, despite the claim to equality of all before God and non-birth based community entry, sects have largely reproduced caste norms in positions of influence, marriages, and stress on personal merit, morality, experience with the divine as the answers to structural problems. He further adds that despite radical potentials in its nascent years, many sects ended up becoming castes in themselves (Voix, 2024). If there is to be a project of “redeeming Hinduism” or “Hindus” from within, let that responsibility fall squarely on the shoulders of progressive upper-caste Hindus. Let them lead,not through discourse alone, but through sustained, material, collective action. The centuries of filth, degradation, violence, and exhaustion borne by Dalits cannot be continually offloaded onto the same bodies and communities. The moral and historical burden now belongs to the former…