What did women's bodies in pre-colonial South Asia have to do with the birth of capitalism? South Asia's pre-colonial integration into a globally emerging, early modern capitalist order reached deep into the hinterland to transform both state and society in eighteenth-century Marwar. Driving the change was an emergent elite, consisting largely of merchants, that channelled its energies towards reshaping caste. Merchants, in alliance with Brahmans, used their influence upon the state to adjudicate the boundary between the ‘illicit’ and the ‘licit,’ generating in the process a typology and an archive of deviant sex. In the legal framework that generated this archive, women were configured as passive recipients of sexual acts, lacking sexual personhood in law. Even as they escaped legal culpability for ‘illicit’ sex, women experienced, through this body of judgments, a strengthening of male proprietary controls over their bodies. Alongside, the criminalization of abortion served as a means of sexual disciplining. These findings suggest that post-Mughal, pre-colonial state formation in South Asia intersected with global economic transformations to generate new sex-caste orders and archival bodies.
Introduction "To put it simply: People who touch things that we do not touch become untouchable. " 1 How significant is the history of untouchability for an understanding of South Asia's early modern past? Studies that approach early modern caste as a whole tend to represent the "untouchable" castes as being at the bottom-most rung of a graded order and untouchability as part of the larger complex of caste practices. But the exclusion and discrimination that those deemed "Untouchable" experienced was not merely a degree removed from the castes just above them. To the contrary, a chasm separated the "untouchable" castes from "caste society, " a chasm that extends into the ritual domain to the present day, with bhaṅgīs and halālkhors-groups associated in the caste imagination with clearing human waste-having their own religious practices that have little or nothing to do with those of "caste" Hindus and Muslims. 2 Nor do they capture how central the specter of the Untouchable was to the operation of caste. There is then a need to pay attention to untouchability in distinction from the larger caste order in early modern South Asia. 3 This book offers a history of the reconstitution of the "Untouchable" in the precolonial, early modern period, a process that I argue was intertwined with the reconfiguration in this same period of the "Hindu. "Aniket Jaaware argues, in contradistinction to sociological and anthropological approaches that privilege marriage and inter-dining in their study of caste, that the practices of touchability and untouchability operate at a deeper, more foundational level to be the markers of caste. 4 Traces of "untouchable" things, Jaaware tells us, carry the potential to be identified with the whole of the persons who touch those "untouchable" things. 5 This is certainly reflected in the eighteenth-century archives on which this book is based. These archives, which among other things record the experience of castes engaged in clearing human waste and working with carcasses and hides, can be observed to have played a unique and constitutive role in the creation and renewal of caste consciousness. At the same time, despite was, it appears, a deeper history to the reading of the bhaṅgī as the emblem of untouchability. This in turn makes clear that among the merchant, brahman, and other elite-caste actors who petitioned the state, concerns with ritual purity and pollution, though certainly not the only and "encompassing" principles ordering caste society and life within it, 11 did guide behavior and priorities. These ideas of purity and pollution were centered on the body, generating particular forms of exclusion in which touch, bodily substances, descent, and other corporeal aspects of personhood were central.
No abstract
No abstract
No abstract
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.