Dignity and Dalit Social Imaginaries: Entanglements of Caste, Class, and Space in Mumbai, 1898--1982

The project studies the long history of dalit (former untouchables) engagement with modernity in the city of Mumbai in the late-colonial and postcolonial periods. The work investigates dalit encounters with processes and institutions of modernity. It focuses on the transformative imaginations of dalit social movements created in the crucible of modern urban life and emphasizes the relevance of dignity for these imaginations. It envisages dignity ( svabhiman, svavalamban, pratishtha) as a keyword to examine how dalits navigated life in the city of Mumbai. The project tracks changing notions of dignity in diverse narratives about dalits to understand the historical conjunctures, collective identities, and political cultures that were produced in the city. I argue that dignity is not only an important concept to understand how dalits made sense of their world and strove to transform it, but also that the concept opens a fresh perspective to map how the State, liberal nationalists, political radicals, social reformers, artistes, and intellectuals negotiated the question of "socially marginalized communities" in modern India. To demonstrate the relevance of dignity in understanding the social lives of dalits in the city, the chapters of the dissertation highlight its iterations in the politics and practices of housing and urban space, in the crafting of a dalit public sphere in the colonial period, in dalit engagement with leftist trade unions in the city that focused on solidarities of class and ignored differences of caste, and the efforts of dalit writers to create a literary canon in dialogue with global bodies of emancipatory and radical literatures. The work contributes to our understanding of the webs of power within which marginalized groups were suspended and the acts of imagination through which these groups located themselves in the city and reshaped its institutions, its social life, and its public culture.