Journal of Buddhist Ethics
ISSN 1076-9005
http://blogs.dickinson.edu/buddhistethics Volume 27, 2020
Identity, Rights, and Awareness: Anticaste Activism in India and the Awakening of Justice through Discursive Practices
Reviewed by Gajendran Ayyathurai
University of Göttingen
gajendran.ayyathurai@cemis.uni-goettingen.de
This study brings to light the existence of PVCHR in Banaras by highlighting its strategic aspects. Its English language-based functioning, international connections, involvement of non-Dalits, and public exposition of human rights violations are significant factors in PVCHR as an anti-caste movement against rampant casteism in north India. Given the present Indian government’s pooh-poohing of human rights as a Western ideal—while welcoming an unhindered flow of Western food, dress, technology, dollars, and euros—it does not augur well for anti-caste activists and their organizations in India now. Here Rinker’s analysis of PVCHR’s ability to take on casteism through English and global networks as the way forward is significant. However, PVCHR ignoring the regional and linguistic histories of casteless and anti-caste Indian communities and their movements is problematic. This is because it prioritizes English over one’s Indian language in which one has retained one’s memory, culture, knowledge, and history that has come down through the ages. Thereby PVCHR is undercutting marginalized Indians’ wherewithal to counter mythical and existential threats and to challenge the realities of Brahminical exploitation and dehistoricization. Rinker’s admiration of PVCHR’s international networking in English thus undermines the necessity of being grounded in its anti-caste regional, linguistic, cultural, and historical strengths.
Identity, Rights, and Awareness has some limitations that need to be taken seriously if Peace and Conflict Studies wants to remain relevant in its engagement with the problem of caste in India and among the Indian diaspora (who are said to be around 17 million now). The major issue with this book is its reduction of caste to a crisis of rights. Rinker is aware of Clifford Bob’s caution about taking Dalit activists seriously “‘beyond 12 Ayyathurai, Review of Identity, Rights, and Awareness ending abuses and protecting rights’” (Bob 32) and also takes into account Johan Galtung’s threefold notion of direct, structural, and cultural violence. Yet the author prioritizes “rights discourse” of the marginalized over other multiple, additional components of their lives. Thus, his perspectives on the cultural, economic, and historical aspects of oppressed communities are put on the back burner or seen as irrelevant to more pressing civil rights of caste-based victims. Problematically, therefore, PVCHR’s testimonial public therapy assumes more importance in this study.
....................... It is clear that Identity, Rights, and Awareness is a study of an academic with anti-race and anti-caste commitments. Hopefully such studies do not remain as institutionalized sojourns of white American and European graduate students and scholars from diverse disciplines who happily check out caste in India, only to go back to their countries, get tenured jobs, and move on with other pet academic themes—a trend which is also emerging among second generation privileged caste Indian Americans and Europeans. Meanwhile the Adivasis, Dalits, and low castes they studied continue to languish in casteism. As of now, the educated subalterns from such communities are not supposed to enter the white academy as students, faculty, international collaborators, organic intellectuals, and bearers of anti-caste practices and histories. It is only open to Indians with upper caste names who are willing to be postcolonial specialists while brazenly refusing to critique either their own or others’ origins and legitimization of Brahminism/casteism in the academy. Such white-Brahmin collaborations would not welcome a new field of interdisciplinary Critical Caste Studies that would challenge the very basis of prominent caste-related studies so far. In this scenario, Jeremy Rinker has conscientiously elevated TBM, BAMCEF, and PVCHCR organizations, as well as their intellectuals, members, and movements, to take their rightful place in the global academy.
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