Politicizing victimhood: the Dalit Panthers' response to caste violence in Uttar Pradesh in the early 1980s

Abstract

In Uttar Pradesh in the early 1980s, the Dalit Panthers' radical intervention in the field of dalit politics took place in a context of anti-dalit violence by the dominant castes. While Gandhi's consensual reformism dominated the public discourse on the untouchable question, a new generation of radicalized dalit youngsters sought their emancipation through the symbolic appropriation of violence. Focusing their politics on the dalit proletariat's revolutionary agency, the Panthers didn’t merely stand against the the Gandhian notion of the harmless and pitiful ‘harijan’ victim. This article argues that their radical politics was more ambiguous than what is generally admitted, by showing that they also relied on previously existing victimology as the relevant moral terrain to recreate the emancipated dalit subject. Concentrating on the predicaments inherent to the political resignification of culturally constituted subjects (as highlighted by Judith Butler), it analyzes photographs taken at the Dalit Panthers' first political meetings in Uttar Pradesh. This empirical material conveys the Panthers' body language of radicality, thus offering insights into their political uses of previously existing nationalist idioms and semiologies when seeking to politicize victimhood.

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