Inter-Caste Marriage and the Liberal Imagination Vijay Tendulkar's KANYADAAN

Racism and Casteism

The Dalit Panther Manifesto, released in 1973, offered a new, quasi-Marxist analysis of untouchability, 'the most violent form of exploitation on the surface of the earth', even as it indicted Indian left parties for being unable to understand or challenge it. Frantz Fanon famously wrote that 'Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem.'²⁴ But no matter how much Marxism in India was stretched to address colonialism, it could not address caste until dalit activists and ideologues attempted such a conversation. As Ambedkar pointed out, caste is not simply class.²⁵ Significantly, the Manifesto asked dalits to stretch their consciousness of caste, rather than asking Marxists to expand their understanding of class. Dalits, in this manifesto, are understood to include: 'Members of Scheduled Castes and Tribes, Neo Buddhists, the working people, the landless and poor peasants, women and all those who are being exploited politically, economically and in the name of religion.' (Such expansion of the term 'dalit' was regarded by some within the group as too close to a Marxist notion of class.)

But there is a further complication: whereas for Fanon, the specificity of colonialism would force Marxists to engage with the question of race, the colonial question in India could be, and was, raised in such a way as to elide the specificity of caste. All Indians may have been racialised, but if all are understood as analogous to blacks, then the hierarchies within them are necessarily obscured, a subject that has been bril- liantly explored by Daniel Immerwahr.²⁶ The Dalit Panther also shattered the possibility of that simplistic identification by explicitly claiming an affinity with the Black Panthers in the United States.²⁷ The Manifesto of the Black Panthers, released in 1966, had announced

WE BELIEVE that this racist government has robbed us and now we are
demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres
and two mules were promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave
labour and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment
in currency which will be distributed to our many communities.