Ponnivalavan's bellowing voice belies his modest stature as it reverberates throughout the vehicle he guides across Thiruvallur's rugged countryside. Educated till the eighth standard, Ponni is the gregarious personal assistant to VCK General Secretary D. Ravikumar during his 2014 parliamentary bid. While the candidate campaigns in an open-air jeep flanked by DMK district leaders and a bevy of coalition allies, Ponni tails them as closely as possible. He juggles three cell phones throughout the day while frequently running between vehicles at intermittent stops to ferry water, information, and campaign supplies to the party brass. Initially cheerful, Ponni becomes increasingly riled as the campaign progresses. Despite being Ravikumar's personal assistant, his car is frequently pressed to the tail end of the convoy. He chastises the cavalier demeanor of DMK bigwigs, whose new polished Toyota SUVs blaze past the candidate's aged Mahindra Scorpio, mimicking their penchant for waxing poetic about Ravikumar. One day, Ponni turns to me with a smug grin and states: “Michael, you should ask them: You are always introducing Ravikumar as the ‘DMK coalition candidate’ and declaring publicly: ‘He is [DMK Chairman] Kalaignar's candidate! He is [DMK Treasurer] Stalin's candidate!’ If he really is your candidate, why have you only given [figure redacted] rupees? You should give more [money]!” Visibly entertained by this proposition, Ponni cackles aloud and repeats the joke for emphasis.

When the campaign vehicle's PA system dies just before noon, the convoy stops at a nearby hotel for an early lunch, allowing time for technicians to acquire parts and resolve the glitch. While party workers eat rice meals in the attached restaurant, Ponni leads me to an air-conditioned room where DMK district leaders, eager to make up for lost time, discuss changes to the day's itinerary. Once the logistics were settled, they turned to me to inquire about my impressions of the campaign and underscore the generosity of their party executive for giving two seats to a “small, Dalit party.” Abruptly, an elbow begins to needle my ribs and Ponni mutters under his breath: “Ask them, Michael!” When I fail to act on his cue, Ponni broaches the subject himself.

For a Sunday morning drive sometime in May 2023, the busy Outer Ring Road in Bengaluru seemed much more congested than usual. Vehicles were coming from everywhere and spilling into and out of this main road, and what was surreal was that this congestion was without the usual levels of nudging, shoving, shouting, and scraping on the road. For one, the road was crawling with traffic police, being, I should add, ably assisted by burly Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party workers. For another, it was one among Narendra Modi's several visits to the state as part of his campaigning for the assembly elections, and so it looked like everyone knew the reason behind the congestion and everyone seemed resigned to it, happily or otherwise. Modi was going to go through one of the perpendicular roads as part of his Bengaluru road show.

And as is typical of most Bengaluru drivers, I also took the chance of exiting the main road, into the narrow alleyways, hoping that I could get to another road that I presumed would be out of the vicinity of the road show. At the end of this alleyway maze, I suddenly found myself in the middle of a much wider road, again overflowing with cops and BJP party workers. With no traffic around, strangely, they casually gave me a glance as if my car was intruding upon something. Clearly it looked like I was.

I found myself on the road that Modi's procession had just crossed barely a few minutes ago, and those public officials were possibly breathing a sigh of relief when my car came in as an unwelcome pull back to reality. It was very quiet, with absolutely no traffic on the road.

In the early evening of April 14, 1990, the Dalit Panthers convened a public ceremony in K. Pudur, a large Dalit colony in northeast Madurai, to unveil their new movement flag. Photographs of the event depict activists seated on metal folding chairs behind a wooden table. A portrait of Ambedkar adorns the thatched hut behind them. Beneath the portrait, a hand-drawn banner reads: “Liberation is attained through war. New horizons are borne through blood.” As was typical of DPI events, this was a family affair. Children milled about the speakers’ table as activists explained the design features of their flag. Its background, composed of broad red and blue stripes, symbolized their commitment to revolutionary politics and Ambedkarite principles, while the five-pointed star at its center signified their primary objectives, namely to annihilate caste, dismantle the class structure, attain women's rights, foster Tamil nationalism, and vehemently resist imperialism. To achieve these goals, they pledged to upend “the parliamentary democratic system,” which they insisted had hitherto failed to emancipate Dalits and, instead, reduced their community to “listless puppets that raise their hands and nod their heads” at the time of elections. DPI leaders reaffirmed their commitment to boycott elections and pledged to follow an extra-electoral path to promote Dalit development and realize their democratic rights. As exemplified by the snarling cat at the center of the white star, they vowed to pursue these objectives with “the fury of a panther.”

From the early 1990s, DPI leaders embraced bellicose rhetoric and cultivated a militant public disposition. They saw a revolutionary potential in Dalit politics and sought to transform Dalit into a radical political subjectivity.

Micro-populism

As part of my dissertation research many summers ago, I lived for a couple of months in a few villages that straddled the borders of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh. I was initiated into the political economy of this region by Mr Krishne Gowda of Bathlahalli village, an elderly patron of the region, who lived with his married sons and their families. Armed with a law degree from decades ago and a towel over the armpit (Manor 2004) now, Mr Gowda was the quintessential mover-and-shaker politician. On one post-lunch afternoon in the early days, he asked me what subject I was studying, and I told him “Political Science.” He looked at me, and then, in his earnestness to educate me, he said what I remember as the following:

We also know how to deal with the government. When they come and ask us how many members there are in my household, I decide the answer according to who is asking. If it is the forest official who asks, I will say one household. If it is for rations, I will say multiple households. If it is for elections, I will say three households. If it is for census, I will say one household and so on … it really depends on what the benefit is.

Prologue

On October 31, 2018, Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, inaugurated a colossal, 598-foot sculpture of Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel (1875–1950), a prominent leader of India's struggle for independence and the first home minister of independent India. Called the Statue of Unity, it was meant to signal the strength of a united Indian nation as a global power. Built on an island close to the Narmada River dam, the statue's advertising compared it to the Statue of Liberty, the Spring Temple Buddha, and Christ the Redeemer, among others. The day before the inauguration, however, close to 300 activists, many of them Adivasi farmers, gathered to voice their opposition to this monument, as the sculpture and the proposed development of a “tourism hot spot” around it would displace them from their lands and reduce access to water. Their voices opposing a new national symbol, and their bodies claiming the space of a national monument in order to challenge the state's exclusionary policies, highlight the tenuousness of the public monument as a signifier of an inclusive, united nation.

On January 26, 2021, India's Republic Day, farmers who had been protesting the controversial farm laws, which they saw as removing key state support for agriculture, marched onto and breached the Lal Qila (also known as the Red Fort), a seventeenth-century Mughal fort-palace in Delhi. A group of Sikh protestors climbed onto the fort's ramparts and affixed the Nishan Sahib and other Sikh religious flags to some domes and a flagstaff, physically claiming the Lal Qila with both their bodies and their flags. Happening, as it did, at a monument from which the prime minister gives the Independence Day speech, on a day of national importance and not very far from the venue of the Republic Day parade, where the nation state showcases its military and cultural prowess, this was an act of resistance that was publicly stated and spatially and materially performed.

One evening against the backdrop of a parliamentary campaign, D. Ravikumar elaborated on an enduring friction between minority representation and electoral reservations, and how they relate to a political constituency. Although electoral reservations were first conceived on the basis of community to ensure the presence of specific groups in elected bodies, elections are conducted on the basis of territory, in a geographically demarcated, socially segregated joint electorate, where Dalit voters are insufficient in number to elect their preferred candidates. As Ravikumar asserts, these representatives are rarely selected by Dalits—the presumed beneficiaries of reservation—but, instead, by an upper caste majority that often prefers Dalit candidates who will, to quote another longtime VCK leader, “take a soft corner on Dalit issues.”2 Ravikumar questions whether electoral reservations produce “genuine” representatives of Dalit communities or, alternatively, if these figures are simply individuals from Dalit communities, emphasizing that these classifications are not always mutually inclusive. Elections in a joint electorate generate contradictory pressures for Dalit politicians, who are expected to champion their community's interests despite their reliance on higher castes that may not share Dalit priorities. Stressing the longevity of this dilemma, Ravikumar guides our conversation to B. R. Ambedkar's well-documented concerns on how the institutional design of electoral reservations would impact the character of minority representation.

In his writings and speeches, Ambedkar grappled with electoral reservation at both theoretical and practical levels, deliberating over how to best ensure democratic institutions support substantive minority representation. Anticipating that caste would shape voting behavior, he predicted that Dalits, a permanent minority, would fail to garner sufficient imperative in joint electorates where representatives are elected by popular vote. Although Dalits, if politically consolidated, may possess the clout to impact election outcomes, they nonetheless lack the capability to select their own representatives. In his view, Dalits elected in a joint electorate would be accountable to a caste majority that selected them and, therefore, only “nominal” representatives of their community. Ambedkar anticipated that the mere presence of Dalits in elected bodies would be insufficient to ameliorate their condition. He argued that a handful of legislative seats would not suffice for India's Dalits because, he cynically asserted, “a legislative Council is not an old curiosity shop” but, instead, an institution that holds “the powers to make or mar the fortunes of society.”

The Calcutta investigative committee established in 1838 was, in many ways, the culmination of questions raised in the Town Hall meeting. Established as part of an empire-wide decision to set up investigative committees in port cities, the Calcutta committee aimed to investigate whether the indenture trade was exploitative and whether labourers were deceived into migrating overseas. As this chapter goes on to show, the Calcutta committee and its report became an important point of reference in indenture regulations, emerging as one of the most detailed official accounts of the early indenture trade. While the Town Hall meeting showcased voices from elite Calcuttans, the investigative committee became one of the first spaces where the voice of the indentured migrant was heard. With committee members local to Calcutta, and with interviews of migrants and those involved directly in the indenture trade, this investigative committee made Calcutta a key decision-making part of the British Empire.

While reports from Bombay, Madras, Mauritius and Sydney – the other sites of investigative committees – were either considered inconclusive, inadequate or never reached the parliament, the Calcutta committee thrived and succeeded in influencing emigration regulations. John Geoghegan's report of 1873 stated of these committees: