3 Review(s)

Often identified as leather workers or characterized as a criminal caste, the charmers of north India have long been stigmatized as untouchables. In this path breaking study, Ramnarayan S. Rawat shows that in fact the majority of charmers have always been agriculturalists and their association with the ritually impure occupation of leather working has largely been constructed through Hindu, colonial and post colonial representations of untouchability. Rawat undertakes a comprehensive reconsideration of the history, identity and politics of this important dalit group. Using dalit vernacular literature, local-level archival sources and interviews in dalit neighborhoods, he reveals a previously unrecognized dalit movement which has flourished in north India from the earliest decades of the twentieth century and which has recently achieved major political successes. About the Author Ramnarayan S. Rawat is assistant professor of history at the university of Delaware. A milestone in the study of caste. Based on a wealth of archival, vernacular and ethnographic sources, Rawat reformulates questions of untouchability, impure occupation and identity and reveals a previously unrecognized history of dalit political mobilization in north India dating back to the 1910s and 1920s. - Gopal Guru, Jawaharlal Nehru university. A wonderfully full and enlightening book which opens up a critical aspect of Indian social history. - C. A. Bayly, Cambridge university. This Book won the Joseph W. Elder prize in the Indian social sciences, American institute of Indian studies.