The Power of the Word: Giving Voices to India s Most 'Untouchable' Population

Broken. Divided. Crushed. These are literal translations of Dalit, the name the lowest social caste in India gave themselves. This meaning reflects not only how Dalits feel; it’s also a description of the society that has suppressed them. 

Throughout history, the Dalits have been oppressed, ignored, discriminated against and the victims of violence. Though Dalits comprise 16 percent of the total Indian population, their access to education, healthcare and other resources is primarily cut off compared to other castes in the social system that operates in India in accordance with Hindu beliefs. Dalits are literally “outcasts” who face complex and multiple struggles: social, political, economic, cultural and religious. 

Shailaja Paik has spent the last 15 years making significant contributions to the emerging field of Dalit Studies. Paik is a University of Cincinnati assistant professor in the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences’ History Department and affiliate faculty in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Asian Studies who teaches classes on South Asian History as well as the impact and role of Mahatma Gandhi in Indian history. She has made it her mission to understand and tell the stories of those millions of Indians considered “untouchable.” 

Her first book, "Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination" (Routledge 2014), explored the challenges Dalit women faced in 20th century India—navigating not only hierarchies of caste and class, but routine gender-based discrimination that limited their access to formal education. 

Now, with a prestigious yearlong senior fellowship from the American Institute for Indian Studies (AIIS), Paik plans to return to India to conduct research for a new book documenting the popular culture of Dalits in 20th century Western India. 

Performance as window into culture

Paik found that Dalits, especially the more than 80 million Dalit women in India, are not only omitted from India’s mainstream culture, but their entire histories are largely undocumented and their lives unexamined. Paik assembles her own “alternative archive,” gathered primarily through oral histories she gathers during interviews, she said.

Her new book will be the first history of professional Dalit performers, and quite possibly the first time these performances have been studied through a scholarly lens.  

Paik cites the vision of B.R. Ambedkar, a renowned social revolutionary and scholar who campaigned for better treatment of Dalits, as inspiration for her work. “Ambedkar found that although social and political problems were being addressed in newspapers and other writings, many illiterate Dalits could not respond and appropriately engage with these issues,” she said. Hence, the “power of the word” was very significant to them.

How can an oppressed community illuminate the multitude of issues they face without the written word? 

As Paik discovered, many Dalits have expressed themselves through performance, a redemptive medium that does not require formal literacy. Though extremely discouraged by higher castes, artistic demonstrations by “untouchables” happen in public spaces so that their messages can penetrate across social strata. 

“Over the past three decades there has been an increasing academic interest in the field of popular culture and cultural studies,” Paik said. “However, in the Indian context there is little study about the popular practices of Dalit women and men. High-caste art and aesthetics has marginalized the performances of Dalits. Performance is a platform they can use for social activism.” 

Performances—which include comedy, farce and poetry—address controversial topics like dowry, AIDS and contraception as well as daily challenges. Many performances reenact the past—scenes from an artist’s life from the 50s, for example—to situate present-day topics in a broader context. 

Paik will focus much of her research on tamasha, a type of Marathi popular performance that mixes dance, song and theater. While one form or another of tamasha has existed for hundreds of years, the style—characterized by loud, comedic excitement and lively dancing—has become a staple to a wider Indian audience. Its influence has even helped define popular Hindi Bollywood and regional Marathi cinema.  

But though this genre of performance can serve as innocent entertainment for some moviegoers and tamasha-lovers, Paik explores how tamasha fashions cultural, political and personal politics between lower and upper castes, classes, genders and sexualities. Unlike any other medium, performance lets Dalits engage within the hierarchy on political and personal level on their own terms. 

“This will be the first time we see how the lives of these performers are shaped by a hierarchical society, not only in terms of caste and class, but gender and sexuality,” Paik said.

The AIIS, founded in 1961 and headquartered at the University of Chicago, is dedicated to furthering knowledge of India in the United States. In addition to the AIIS’s senior fellowship for 2016-17, Paik’s ongoing research has also been partially funded by a grant awarded by the TAFT Research Center, UC’s on-campus resource for supporting interdisciplinary research in the humanities.