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THE PARIAH PROBLEM: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India. Cultures of History. By Rupa Viswanath. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. xviii, 396 pp. (Maps.) US$60.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-231-16306-4.
Rupa Viswanath's The Pariah Problem is a study of Dalits in the Madras Presidency, south India, between the 1890s and 1920s. It is an outstanding work of historical scholarship, based on innovative, assiduous archival research and a through reading of relevant literature, which carefully examines the data and relevant theoretical problems, and advances original conclusions about the position of Dalits in India today, as well as in the past.
Dalits in south India have been known by various terms, but their miserable condition was first publicly identified as a problem that afflicted "Pariahs," an anglicization of "Paraiyar," the name of the largest Dalit caste in Tamil Nadu (formerly part of Madras). The Pariahs' condition, Viswanath insists, was a function of both class and caste, because they were unfree landless labourers or slaves, and also degraded because they were excluded from society proper, as constituted by the higher castes. In the late nineteenth century, an alliance developed between Pariahs and Protestant missionaries, mainly because Pariahs actively sought out missionaries, rather than the other way around. The alliance gave Pariahs new resources to combat local, village oppressors and the missionaries' interventions eventually forced British officials to recognize the reality of the Pariah problem, an event Viswanath dates to a government report in 1892.
Officials, however, were reluctant to tackle the Pariah problem vigorously, because they did...