2020.11: Nicholas Witkowski, Challenging the Erasure of Low-/Outcaste Agency in South Asian Historiography: Constructing a Guerrilla Hermeneutics of the Dharmaśāstra
The current historical moment poses unique challenges and opportunities for scholars of premodern South Asia. In recent years, scholars and activists have been sounding alarms over contemporary threats to marginalized communities across the subcontinent posed by increasingly powerful ultra-nationalist Hindu forces (Hindutva). The threats that have received the most attention are public calls for violence against marginalized communities, including Muslims, Dalits, Ādivāsi, and LGBTQIA communities, and groups seeking equality and justice for women. Far less visible, but no less significant, is a toxic public discourse generated by historical distortion—the arguments by ultra-nationalist Hindu groups that Brahmins (who constitute the highest of the Indian castes) are the primary agents of historical transformation in Indian history and that subaltern communities are peripheral at best and enemies of Indian civilization at worst. This ultra-nationalist historical model of caste-based colonization ignores the contingent nature of premodern historical conditions and instead presumes the inevitable triumph of Brahmanical imperial hegemony over the diverse regional cultures of premodern South Asia. The process of recovering the subaltern presence in Indian history is particularly difficult because nearly all premodern Indian textual traditions are preserved in the elite (and often specifically Brahmanical) idiom of Sanskrit. The renowned Sanskritist Wendy Doniger has gone as far as to claim that “Brahmins erased much of the low-caste contribution to Indian culture—erased even their presence in it at all.”[1] To recover this subaltern presence in upper-caste textual traditions, I deploy what I call a “guerrilla hermeneutics.”
The goal of this guerrilla hermeneutics is to compel castist premodern Brahmanical narrative discourse to speak about low-/outcaste individuals as historical figures imbued with personhood, agency, and power. I do so through accounts from the castist Brahmanical legal tradition (Dharmaśāstra) of the charnel ground dwellers/laborers—an outcaste community called the Caṇḍāla—in light of the nominally anti-caste Indian Buddhist textual tradition. The Indian Buddhist monastic codes (Vinaya) record the presence of Buddhist monks, who seem to have been born into the caṇḍāla community, and who even after taking the tonsure, continued to practice their ancestral way of life on the charnel ground.
Premodern Indian charnel grounds (śmaśāna) took many forms, but extant accounts of the first millennium CE depict gruesome sites strewn with decaying corpses, many of which were never cremated. In the Brahmanical tradition, the decomposing body is the quintessentially impure object, and thus the Caṇḍāla laborers in the death industry (who are in constant contact with the dead) are profoundly anathema to the Brahmin body. In the Mānava Dharmaśāstra (c. second century CE), the outcaste Caṇḍāla communities are described within a narrative of confinement, which imprisoned their subaltern(ized) bodies in the impure spaces of the charnel grounds. Although the Mānava Dharmaśāstra does not describe where outcastes were permitted to live, the Arthaśāstra is explicit that the “residences of [non-Brahmanical] religious orders and Caṇḍālas are at the edge of the charnel grounds.”[2] Brahmanical prescription dictates that the movements of Caṇḍālas are surveilled and controlled by the king, rendering them passive and inert, a pool of slave labor accessible whenever the upper castes see fit to dispose of their bodies. The only compensation the Caṇḍāla are to receive for their labor is the leftovers of the dead scavenged from the charnel ground.
The Dharmaśāstra represents Brahmins as overseers of the ritual and political economies of premodern South Asia. The representations of the low-/outcaste communities in the Mānava Dharmaśāstra are rooted in a hegemonic Foucauldian rhetoric of spatial confinement. The Dharmaśāstra describes a Brahmanizing society in which each body is continually surveilled, categorized, and, based on ritual and economic standards set by Brahmins, confined. This narrative drive to marginalize and confine low-/outcaste populations that pervades Brahmanical discourse conceptually anchors Caṇḍāla outcaste bodies in the impure social space of the cemetery.
However, non-Brahmanical sources contemporaneous with the Mānava Dharmaśāstra offer a counter-narrative. Buddhist monastic legal traditions (Vinaya) provide a vast archive of data that challenges Brahmanical representations of low-/outcaste communities in the first millennium CE. The Vinaya must be used carefully as an historical archive, because so much of Buddhist case law is flooded with popular narrative fictions and caste appellations are generally avoided. However, by applying an analytic to the Vinaya adapted from the French theoretician of subaltern space, Michel de Certeau, one can piece together a cartography that departs radically from the Foucauldian/Dharmaśāstric narrative map of confinement.
The Mānava Dharmaśāstra describes caṇḍālas as bodies that have to be confined to cemetery precincts to avoid infecting the Brahmin corporate body with impurity and to operate as a reserve pool of workers in the death industry. What we find in the Vinaya is a set of narratives in which Buddhist monastic authorities are called on to offer rulings regarding a group of “cemetery monks.” There is no mention of their caste background before entering the monastery, but the legal narratives detail a set of practices identical to those of the Caṇḍālas found in the Mānava Dharmaśāstra. These monks lived, or spent much of their time, on the charnel grounds and, like the Caṇḍālas, lived as scavengers. There is extensive case law within the Buddhist monastic codes governing the practices of these scavengers. And, in fact, they scavenged for the same items as the Caṇḍālas - pottery, utensils, and the death shrouds of decomposing corpses. Despite the brevity of this piece, it suffices to indicate that these communities of cemetery monks were perceived by Brahmins as identical in purity and economic status to Caṇḍālas because of their location in the nexus of spatial relations. How then do the Vinaya jurists represent cemetery monks relative to the narrative of bodily confinement that characterizes the Brahmanical legal codes dealing with the Caṇḍāla?
Whereas the Mānava Dharmaśāstra portrays impure and outcaste cemetery laborers of the early first millennium CE as subaltern figures that were excluded, surveilled, and confined by Brahmanical authorities, the Vinaya enshrines in case law several key principles which suggest contemporaneous non-Brahmanical sources did not view Caṇḍāla confinement as a historical reality.[3] The first principle is that cemetery monks were not confined to the charnel grounds. On the contrary, cemetery monks were able to leave the charnel grounds and enter mainstream spaces of everyday activity, including upper-caste spaces. Second, cemetery monks, though classified as Caṇḍālas according to Brahmanical legal standards, were exempt from obligatory labor duties to the king or upper caste communities. Third, and most significantly, the scavenging activities of cemetery monks were not only tolerated but were canonized as ascetic practices that became central to non-Brahmanical monastic identities across first-millennium India. One everyday caṇḍāla practice, scavenging the charnel ground for clothing, eventually was enshrined in the great Buddhist scholastic compendium, the Visuddhimagga, as pāṃśukūlika (stripping corpses of their death shrouds for use as monastic robe material), one of the thirteen great ascetic practices (dhūtaguṇas).
What to conclude from this radical Buddhist reversal of the Dharmaśāstra representations of subaltern confinement? First, it is important to recognize that the Dharmaśāstra tradition treats low-/outcaste communities, and, in particular, cemetery caṇḍālas, as subaltern figures completely deprived of historical agency. Second, a guerrilla reading of Dharmaśāstra accounts of low-/outcaste communities based on non-Brahmanical sources reveals a radically divergent narrative, in which even the groups most despised by Brahmins are portrayed as largely autonomous from Brahmanical control. And finally, we must examine premodern South Asian textual traditions with fresh eyes, beginning with how we read the Brahmanical sources that have taken center stage in scholarship. A guerrilla hermeneutic approach compels us to seriously reevaluate the extent to which Brahmins of the first millennium truly exerted control over the caste relations that receive so much attention in ostensibly hegemonic texts, such as the Dharmaśāstra.
Nicholas Witkowski is an assistant professor of South Asian history and religions at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His current book project critically reimagines premodern South Asian monasticisms from the perspective of the marginalized/subaltern low-/outcaste communities present within these powerful religio-political institutions. His most recent piece articulating the contours of this project was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and can be found here: https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/87/3/824/5533176.
[1] Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin 2010), 39.
[2] Arthaśāstra, 2.4.23.
[3] See my recent article “Living with the Dead as a Way of Life: A Materialist Historiographical Approach to Cemetery Asceticism in Indian Buddhist Monasticisms,” Journal of the American Academy of Religions 87, no. 3 (2019), 824–859.