Dalit autobiography emerged as a category in the 1970s, along with a new kind of protest poetry as well as fiction that was not always removed from writings in an autobiographical mode. Many of these writings foregrounded the vicious history of (vernacular, visible) caste prejudice. They did so through a recitation of the practices of othering – discrimination, exclusion, and humiliation – that have been central to the rural (and urban) performance of caste and, not least, through their depiction of the bodies of suffering, laboring lower-caste men and women, bodies that come to bear the distinct marks of such oppression, discrimination, and exclusion. In their description of the Dalit struggle to overcome the history of this oppression and to inhabit a different kind of body, they also tell us a good deal about the play of a less visible, universal prejudice – the common sense of the age, or of the community that says, casually, that's how it is, and, implicitly, how it is meant to be.

The reminiscences I consider in this chapter belong to the category of what might be described as resistance literature, emerging out of and building on recognized traditions of political and intellectual resistance. The very titles of numerous Dalit life-writings indicate the history of stigmatization, oppression, and poverty against which the Dalit self (individual or collective) is insistently, and perhaps necessarily, articulated: Joothan (the leftovers of the upper castes’ food that we lived on); Apne Apne Pinjre (our own individual cages); Upara (outsider); Uchalya (thief, or pilferer); Akkarmashi (half-caste, or bastard); Baluta (the services traditionally required of the lowest castes in rural Maharashtra); Aaydaan (the weaving of baskets from bamboo, condemned as an Untouchable occupation); Dohra Abhishaap (twice cursed).

When political detainee number 641, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, was struggling in 1973 to survive on the harsh and remote island of Buru – ‘Happy Land’ – he received a letter suggesting that he should reform: ‘For every person a mistake in judgment is common, but that must of course be followed by its logical consequence, that being: “honesty, courage and the ability to rediscover the true and accepted road”.’ The indirect Javanese style of the letter belonged to President Suharto, and showed the remarkable combination of threat and solicitation that was the hallmark of Suharto's rule. Pramoedya replied simply that he would ‘cherish truth, justice and beauty’, that he hoped ‘the strong’ would ‘extend their hand to the weak’ and that he would continue to ‘strive and pray’. The obliqueness of this response was not just characteristic of the Javanese culture he shared with Suharto; it also reflected the fact that his guards were supervising his reply.

During his imprisonment on Buru, Pramoedya wrote his tetralogy, This Earth of Mankind, retelling the story of the origins of Indonesian nationalism based on the endeavours of Tirto Adhi Suryo. Initially, Pramoedya was not allowed pen and paper, and composed his novels orally, recalling his research in the National Library during the early 1960s. He told fellow prisoners the story so that they might find ‘truth, justice and beauty’ in order to survive. The tetralogy made the claim that Indonesia had lost sight of its true national identity and, under Suharto, was drifting back towards the government of the colonial era. The books, together with Pramoedya's letters and published reminiscences of the time, provide a moving insight into the brutality of a regime based on military force.

Indonesia is the fourth-largest country in the world, with a population its government estimates at 240 million. It consists of 19,000 islands strung across the equator, some of these no more than sand spits, others, like Java and Sumatra, large and densely populated. Two of the world's largest islands, Borneo and New Guinea, are partly within Indonesia: Kalimantan is the Indonesian name for its part of Borneo, while Indonesia's half of New Guinea is now called Papua – formerly Irian Jaya. As a country joined by water, Indonesia covers an area as wide as Europe or the United States.

There are more than 200 major cultural and language groups on the islands. Java is the most populous island, with over 130 million people packed together on its 132,000 square kilometres. Jakarta, the national capital with a population of 15 million, is located on the island of Java. Javanese culture dominates the other cultures of Indonesia, but the main language of the nation is a form of Malay called Bahasa Indonesia or Indonesian.

Indonesia is generally featured in the world’s media for its political violence and involvement in international terrorism. It has been rated at the top of international corruption watch lists, and its president between 1967 and 1998, Suharto, was named the head of state who extorted the most personal wealth from his country.

Openness and the Fall of Suharto

The 1980s was an exceptional period in Indonesia's history. The near monopoly on violence by the government meant that it could maintain an image of quiescence that ensured international support. Western countries built up close relations with Indonesia, particularly with the military, to whom Britain sold arms, the US provided intelligence training and Australia co-sponsored exercises with the Special Forces Command, the elite troops responsible for maintaining control in the rebellious provinces. Inside and outside Indonesia, authoritarianism was seen as the price the country paid for development, a view that served the interests of Western governments keen to support the operations of multinational oil and mineral companies in Indonesia.

The 1990s saw that stability come under question, and finally and belatedly the end of the regime came. The legacy of Suharto's rule has hung over the regimes of his successors. Both the New Order mindset and New Order corruption have continued to pervade Indonesian political culture. The attempts to suppress Islam have also come back to haunt the Indonesian state, as the nation has taken on an increasingly Muslim face.

Prejudice, I have suggested, often parades as difference. The positing of difference works as a means of othering – or otherization. Let me spell out the argument in terms of dominant discourses of social and cultural difference (that is, the common sense of the modern) before turning to an investigation of how subaltern assemblages and constituencies like African Americans and Dalits have, in their turn, deployed ideas of difference (and sameness) in their own political struggles.

A prominent theme in the history of the world since the eighteenth century has been the promise of emancipation, including the emancipation of societies and groups marked out as “backward,” disadvantaged, or simply adrift from the “mainstream” of human history and progress as it has been conceived since the Enlightenment. It is against this background that differences of gender, sexuality, caste, race, and so on were foregrounded by the state (colonial and noncolonial), and by dominant groups and classes, in different parts of the world through most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is important to note the terms of this differentiation. Men are not described as different; it is women who are. Foreign colonizers are not different; the colonized are. Caste Hindus are not different in India; it is Muslims, “tribals,” and Dalits (or ex-Untouchables) who are. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant heterosexual males are not different in the United States; at one time or another, everybody else is. White Australians are not different; Vietnamese boat people, Fijian migrants to Australia, and, astonishingly, Australian Aboriginals are.

What I have attempted to do in this book is to explore some of the circumstances and ways in which the matter of prejudice – “vernacular” and “universal” – has shaped the history of African Americans and Dalits, and by extension the history of the United States and India, over the last century and more. It should be obvious that many of the quandaries and challenges considered here do not apply to these minorities alone, although it will be clear, too, that prejudice and its costs affect different populations, and differently disenfranchised and marginalized groups, in many distinct ways. The proposition is perhaps self-evident. However, its force and its fallout, not always adequately appreciated, may be illustrated simply.

“Hindustan mein rehna hai, to humse milkar rehna hoga/ Hindustan mein rehna hai, to bande mataram kehna hoga,” as Hindu right-wing political forces have it, in a slogan that has appeared over and over again in attacks against the Muslim minority in India, in the mouths of political agitators, and on city walls, especially since the 1980s. “Those who wish to live in Hindustan will have to live like us/ Those who wish to live in Hindustan will have to say ‘Bande Mataram’ [Victory to the Mother; i.e., the mother goddess, who is also Mother India].” In an echo of the “Jewish question” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Muslims can live in India, as long as they stop being Muslims. Samuel Huntington articulates much the same kind of proposition for immigrants from Mexico who have come to live, work, and die in the United States (in quite significant numbers even in military service, to which the American establishment readily welcomes them). “There is no Americano dream,” he writes. “There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English.” Here, the suggestion goes, as in the case of Jews ceasing to be Jews, or Muslims Muslims, is another impossibility.

The last chapter should have shown how Dalits used the idea of conversion out of the dominant religion of India to claim their rights as citizens and to call for an altered social and political arrangement in the country. For people of African descent in the USA, the idea of conversion (or of opting out) has had a rather different history. Physically removed from the African part of their heritage, they were converted to the new religion of Christianity, or various forms of it, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (As we know, different kinds of conversion, not least to a new form of Islamic solidarity, continued strongly in the twentieth century, but these were less pervasive.) Over that time, it became increasingly obvious to African Americans that they were as American as any other immigrants to the country, and they demanded their rights as Americans. To do so, they appropriated the reigning political slogan in the United States, the idea so eloquently and loudly proclaimed in the constitution of 1788 and since, of the common rights of all inhabitants of the land, “We the people…” – not to mention a central proposition of the Bible, “All men are brothers.…” Quite self-consciously, then, and with increasing militancy over the middle decades of the twentieth century, it was for African Americans a matter not of opting out but opting in.

I need to reiterate that opting out and opting in are not polar opposite, irreconcilable options, for there is no clear-cut out or in for most subordinated groups in a society. It is necessary to emphasize that, as with the Dalits, there was no single strategy or platform that African Americans as a body adopted for the amelioration or advancement of their social, political, and economic condition. Through most of the second half of the nineteenth century and all of the twentieth, there were those who worked for integration in order to eradicate racial and caste privileges, and there were black nationalists who spoke of the need for a separate geopolitical space for African Americans – most notably represented, it is said, in the Garveyite call for a return to Africa (although even in Garvey's case what was at stake was the redemption of Africa, and by that means the redemption of people of African descent everywhere).

Not many people have the opportunity of writing a second “first book.” My move to the USA has afforded me this unusual privilege and pleasure by enabling me to embark on a series of inquiries into what is for me an entirely new field. The list of institutions and individuals who have supported and guided me through this unfamiliar field is long, and my debt to them impossible to acknowledge adequately.

Among institutions, foremost is Emory University, which has provided me a home and an extraordinarily supportive and collegial intellectual environment for the last six years. I owe special thanks to Earl Lewis, provost and professor of history; to Bobby Paul and Cris Levenduski, respectively dean and associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences until 2011; the current deans of the College, Robin Forman and Michael Elliott; and Lisa Tedesco, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, for their unfailing support and their personal interest in my work. I also thank the Department of History (my primary home on campus), the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, and the erstwhile Institute of Critical International Studies and its energetic director, Bruce Knauft, for their continuous generosity.

For Indonesians World War Two and their subsequent national revolution started optimistically, kicked off by the enthusiasm of being liberated from the Dutch by the Japanese. Pramoedya Ananta Toer recalled the arrival of the emperor's forces in Blora in 1942. The Japanese had swept rapidly through the Indies early in March, and people came to meet their army, waving flags and shouting their support for their liberators from the Dutch. ‘With the arrival of the Japanese just about everyone in town was full of hope, except for those who had worked in the service of the Dutch.’

But looking back on his experience as a teenager witnessing the arrival of the Japanese, Pramoedya added, with acrimony arising from his subsequent experiences, ‘There was a bad smell about the whole thing, a stench that rose from the bodies of the Japanese soldiers.’ The shouts of ‘Japan is our older brother’ and ‘banzai Dai Nippon’ would soon be replaced by bitterness. Tens of thousands of Indonesians were to starve, work as slave labourers, be forced from their homes or die in brutal hand-to-hand conflict before Indonesian sovereignty could be achieved. It took more than four years after independence was proclaimed in 1945 for the Dutch to transfer sovereignty to the Indonesians, and even then many Indonesians like Pramoedya were not satisfied with the result.

Travelling to cities broadens the mind, or it did in the Netherlands East Indies. One Balinese prince, Anak Agung Made Djelantik, could recall the experience in 1931 of being sent to junior high school in the town of Malang, in East Java, leaving behind his primary school days in Bali's largest town, Denpasar. Djelantik had grown up in East Bali, in a palace that was an extended set of house yards, around which were clustered some of the dwellings of his father's subjects. He spent his early years in a society that was rigidly hierarchical and where life revolved around farming. For his preliminary schooling he had to travel five hours from the family palace to Denpasar, then a town of 15,000 people, just over a hundred of whom were Europeans.

In 1931, after a six-hour drive to Singaraja in North Bali, the young Djelantik caught a KPM steamer en route from Ambon and Makasar, for an exciting journey to Surabaya. From Surabaya he took another car 80 kilometres south to Malang – population 87,000 – where he met not only local Javanese, but people from all over the Indies. He boarded with a Dutch teacher's family, where he learned new kinds of behaviour. He had to learn to wear pyjamas, say wel te resten (sleep well) and turn off the lights at night, to eat breakfast of chocolate granules sprinkled on bread spread with Palm Tree brand margarine, to do the opposite of Balinese politeness and comment on a meal, as well as converse during it, and to like cheese, cauliflower and brussels sprouts.