The ‘Righteous Anger’ of the PowerlessInvestigating Dalit Outrage over Caste Violence

Abstract

This contribution brings to our attention a Dalit (‘untouchable’) protest movement against caste violence (the 2006 Khairlanji massacre). Although anger is supposedly an emotion used in an open and demonstrative manner by the powerful as a means to enact their domination, the Dalit movement engaged in acts of ‘emotion work’ that upset such a social mapping of emotions. The paper engages critically with the sterile and biased concept of ‘axiological neutrality’ and advocates instead the heuristic possibilities enabled by the ethnographers’ personal exposure to the emotion work performed by social movements. The protest’s ideological stance illustrates the politically marginalised Dalits’ appropriation of democratic conceptions through the language of injustice and outrage. Two different sets of actors involved in the protest are distinguished: human rights and progressive activists of the peasant NGO movement on the one hand, and the local anti-caste movement of Dalits on the other. The distinct kinds of emotion work each set of actors performed, and the framing of the massacre as an outrage to moral values, highlights how, in the mobilisation for Dalit rights, the popular language of communal outrage and the language of democratic rights articulate with and support one another.

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